Thursday, April 11
6:30–8:00pm at
Buzzards Bay Coalition
Wheeler Learning Center
114 Front Street
New Bedford, MA
Many attempts to re-invent abandoned urban landscapes rely on temporary initiatives. While these offer the benefits of flexibility and fast realization, they can too often fail because they cannot be maintained socially, ecologically or economically. It is precisely these landscapes that are later co-opted, with their potential as productive landscapes disregarded. Presenting projects and initiatives to develop abandoned land and cope with disinvestment in a variety of European and American contexts from the 1970s to the present, we will discuss the temporality of revitalization, and argue for the benefits of longer-term landscape strategies that can restructure the urban condition.
Jill Desimini is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Prior to joining the full-time faculty, she was a Senior Associate at Stoss Landscape Urbanism in Boston. She holds Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Architecture degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies from Brown University. Her research focuses on productive landscape strategies for abandoned urban lands.
Meredith TenHoor is Associate Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture. Her research examines how architecture, urbanism and landscape design participate in the distribution of resources. She is the co-author of ‘Street Value: Shopping, Planning and Politics at Fulton Mall,’ a dissertation about the design of food markets in Postwar France, as well as articles and book chapters about markets, biopolitics, and urbanism, and is the chair of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative.
Urban Renewal and Creative Economy in Massachusetts Gateway Cities, Creative Economy Lecture Series (2012–2013) sponsored by UMass President’s Creative Economy Initiatives Fund, granted to College of Visual and Performing Arts.