| Fall 2007 Colloquium |
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Each semester the Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning Colloquium (LD ARCH 253) brings together distinguished speakers (professionals, academics, practitioners, and graduate students) to present projects relevant to the landscape architecture and environmental planning professions. The colloquium attracts a diverse group of students from the College of Environmental Design, and the entire Berkeley community is invited to attend. "Everyday Spaces and the Spatial Bodies That Move Through Them" G. Mathias Kondolf, Associate Professor Wednesdays 1–2 p.m. This semester's lecture series focuses on how people with agency use everyday spaces in unintended ways. Another dimension to designed spaces, people inscribe and create their own places by inhabiting and shaping them to fit their needs and desires. These everyday practices accumulate in small ways that mark particular ways of life across different cultures. Schedule September 5, 2007 — Paul Groth Paul Groth Bodies and Storefronts: Orchestrating Dances of Desire Berkeley geography and architecture professor Paul Groth will explore one hundred years of change in everyday shop fronts—the kind you might find in almost any Bay Area neighborhood or downtown retail area—and what those changes reveal about retail investment, sales strategies, and American consumerism. Our individual "dances of desire" in front of store windows are very carefully planned. Todd Gilens Endangered Species San Francisco landscape architect and artist Todd Gilens will look at several clusters of urban activity: corporate and individual expressions, contrasts of nature and culture, and everyday theatricality. Each of these experiences is animated, in urban life, by its adjacency to dissimilar values. Mr. Gilens will discuss his current projects and those of others within the framework of these issues. Everyday Urbanism Harvard Graduate School of Design urban planning professor Margaret Crawford will discuss both the theory and practice of Everyday Urbanism, using examples from the new edition of the book. Although the ideas of the French urbanist Henri Lefebvre served as our point of departure, after 10 years of development Everyday Urbanism functions more as an attitude about interpreting and re-imagining urban space. Based on a sympathetic understanding of the way people live in existing urban conditions, Everyday Urbanists try to transform and improve their experiences. James Holston The Necessity of Aesthetics and Incivility: Two Dimensions of Democratization in São Paulo Newly arrived from UC San Diego, Professor Holston will speak about his current work on the worldwide insurgence of democratic citizenships in the context of global urbanization. His current and past publications include Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil and The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Clare Cooper Marcus Healing Gardens and Restorative Landscapes: The Links to Physical Health and Psychological Wholeness Professor Emerita Clare Cooper Marcus will speak about the movement to create healing gardens in healthcare facilities, and the emerging (re)discovery of the links between public health and access to urban green spaces. Stephen J. Sheppard GLobal Warming in Everyday Places: Localizing, Spatializing, and Visualizing Climate Change The Local Climate Change Visioning Project is working to bridge the gap between global climate science and local landscapes, bringing the science down to the ground and relating it to urban form and landscape. We have been trying to find ways to personalize climate change (and possible responses to it) at the neighbourhood and individual level, using realistic visualisation imagery. The project has downscaled global climate models and socioeconomic scenarios to a scale that matters to local decision-makers and people—their communities and backyards. The project integrates local and expert participation, GIS-based modelling and simulation techniques to paint pictures of four alternative climate futures for communities and neighbourhoods in the Metro Vancouver area. These worlds extend out to 2100 and assume different combinations and intensities of climate change adaptation and mitigation, from a *Do Nothing* world where no effective action on climate change is taken, to a *Deep Sustainability* world where significant emissions reductions are made early in the century. Visualizations and supporting information have been tested with community members and municipal practitioners, and this lecture will provide some early results suggesting increased awareness of climate change impacts, response options which offer constructive solutions, and experiential effects on everyday spaces. Note: This is an evening lecture (time to be announced). There will be no 1–2 p.m. lecture on this date. Thomas H. Hahn Landscapes of Ritual—China and the Performative Body As community rituals have become important regulators of an entire social body in China, a vast array of supporting architectural and landscape designs have been created to provide the platform for these performances. As they continue into the present day outside an imperial or political agenda, exterior spaces are shaped in conjunction with and as a reflection of an interior, physiological landscape. Cornell visiting scholar Thomas H. Hahn will demonstrate this connection between the exterior and the interior as well as between past practices and present-day manifestations in the land. Jason Corburn Environmental Health Caroline Chen Dancing in the Streets of Contemporary Beijing: Improvised Uses of Space by Niu Yangge Fan-Dancers within the Urban System Underneath freeway overpasses, in parking lots, outside the gates of parks, on sidewalks near subway stops, elderly Chinese women occupy flat, available, left-over urban spaces to fan-dance for health. Ms. Chen will talk about her current doctoral research on improvised uses of space in urban Beijing for dance. Galen Cranz Body-Conscious Design Let's design environments from the point of view of how they interact with the human body. Because they are immediate, tools, clothing, and furniture may have greater impact on us than fixed features like walls, openings, and volume. Yet Scott's Architecture of Humanism roots architectural theory in proprioception, the body's sense of mass, pressure, volume and orientation in space. Kinesthetics shaped Olmsted's approach toward landscape design. Reformers and therapists from prison authorities to birthing center planners believe in communicating their ideas through and into the bodily experiences of their inmates and participants. Aspects of building science pertaining to perception of comfort ultimately rest on culturally modified ideas about the body. The environment shapes and directs the body—and the accompanying psyche—without ever having to say a word. Through somatic education designers today can help redefine new attitudes towards supporting, respecting, and liberating the human body. Amir H. Gohar Balancing Tourism Development and Cultural Site Preservation Along the Red Sea Coast Mass tourism expansion is becoming a threat to all the environmental resources in the Egyptian southern Red Sea region, including cultural assets and biodiversity. There are relatively few numbers of defenders of biodiversity, but not much attention is given to other cultural resources that are not less important, and on the other hand, these cultural attributes construct multi layers of decades that tell the story of this area starting from the gold mines during the Pharaohs through the Romans' mining and trade, followed by the Islamic shrines on the pilgrimage route to the recent British occupation. Land use planner Amir H. Gohar will speak about introducing a scientific approach that complements the existing environmental preservation sciences and provides sustainable planning to generate the same revenue (or more) while sufficiently maintaining and preserving existing cultural assets. Wednesday, November 21, 2007 No Lecture (Thanksgiving Holiday) Ruth Tringham Cultural Heritage Interpretive Videowalks: Moving Through Present Past Places, Physically and Virtually Archaeologist Ruth Tringham will speak about two of her projects which focus on a multi-sensorial experience of place. Using the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük as their point of departure, these projects aim to develop methods of sharing experiences that could be scaled up or transcend time. The Remediated Places Project examines walking across and around space, thinking, sensing and remembering on the way. Okapi Island on Second Life explores the past and present aspects of life at Çatalhöyük. This LAEP Colloquium will be broadcast live into Okapi Island's LiveVideo screen. Naomi Leite Bodies, Spaces, Memories: Historical Tourism, Imagination, and the Materialization of Absence This presentation draws on the anthropology of space and place to explore how emotion, imagination, and cultural memory shape our experience of our physical surroundings. Historical tourism offers a productive context for exploring this topic, as tourists must rely on narrative and experiential reframing of present-day spaces to visit the past. Berkeley Anthropology Ph.D. Candidate Naomi Leite will discuss the case of "Jewish Portugal" -- a tourist destination defined by the Inquisition's decimation of the Jewish population -- to analyze the complex role of the built environment when the tourist attraction is itself an absence. How is that absence made material? Of particular interest are the bodily and imaginative practices through which visitors engage with the physical spaces of their destination, using their own presence to bring a vanished past into the present. |