Lecture - Science & Art

Professor, Robert Fisher
Physics Department
Monday, April 8, 2013
5:00 p.m.
CVPA, RM 156

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.

Thursday, March 14
6:30–8:00pm at
New Bedford Whaling Museum
18 Johnny Cake Hill
New Bedford, MA

Marc Norman – Underwriting Icicles and Leveraging Sidewalks
For solutions to problems of disinvestment and decline we need to develop models that rely less on subsidies and that instead engage private-sector players and market motivations. Energy retrofits and smart growth are two examples of how finance in partnership with design can be used to address these problems and use leverage to bring capital to struggling cities. There are many more models being formulated and tested in Rust Belt cities, including initiatives for fresh food, business incubators, and educational facilities. The talk will discuss nascent and established initiatives bringing hope to long-neglected communities. Tying the right datasets and financial models to scalable and replicable initiatives we can tap into investment dollars to harness that capital for the revitalization of our communities.

Marc Norman is trained as an urban planner and has worked in the field of community development and finance for over 15 years. With degrees in Political Economics (UC Berkeley, B.A. 1989) and Urban Planning (UCLA, M.A. 1992) he has developed and financed over 2,000 units totaling more than $400 million in total development costs. He has worked for for-profit and non-profit organizations, committed to community development and affordable housing. He has taught courses on real estate and housing policy at the Syracuse School of Architecture. As Director of UPSTATE, he implements initiatives in collaboration with City, State and University partners.

Brent Ryan – Rebuilding Shrinking Cities: Top Down or Ad Hoc?
Almost fifty years ago, America’s industrial cities began shedding people and jobs, and the future of neighborhoods in these places is precarious. How we will rebuild shrinking cities and what urban design vision will guide their future remain contentious and unknown. With communities fearful of top-down planning, much hope today lies in small-scale, ‘tactical’ strategies. Is informal urbanism the key to these places’ future, or will planners have to revisit the ‘bad old days’ of top-down Modernism to save shrinking cities?

Brent D. Ryan is Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His research focuses on emerging urban design paradigms, particularly in postindustrial cities. His book ‘Design After Decline: How America rebuilds shrinking cities,’ was published in 2012. He has worked as an urban designer in New York City, Boston, and Chicago, and has previously taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was also Co-Director of the City Design Center. Ryan holds degrees from Yale University (1991), Columbia University (1994), and MIT (2002).

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.

Thursday, February 7
6:30–8:00pm at
UMass Dartmouth
Star Store Campus
715 Purchase Street
New Bedford, MA

Justin Hollander

In the face of substantial economic decline over the last eight decades, New Bedford has changed in many ways. The most astounding is how the physical form of the city has shifted in the wake of population loss: factories have been converted to apartment buildings, vacant lots turned into gardens. How has the physical DNA of the city been recoded, who led this process, what worked and what did not? Through detailed analyses of the history, politics, environment, and planning strategies of the city, Dr. Hollander is writing a book to answer these very questions. In this presentation, he offers early findings from his research.

Justin Hollander, PhD, AICP, is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and a Research Scientist at the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University. He is the author of ‘Sunburnt Cities: The Great Recession, Depopulation and Urban Planning in the American Sunbelt’ (Routledge, 2011) and two other books examining the challenges of planning for post-industrial, shrinking cities.

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.

Tuesday, December 18
5:00–7:00pm at
UMass Dartmouth – Star Store Campus
715 Purchase Street
New Bedford, MA

Susanne Freidberg – Heartland of Cold: A Regional History of Far-flung Freshness
Freidberg will discuss how the advent of cold storage in the late 19th century transformed the landscape of fresh food supply in New England and beyond.

Susanne Freidberg is a Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College, and the author of ‘Fresh: A Perishable History’ (Harvard, 2009) and ‘French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age’ (Oxford, 2004).

Michael Osman – Cold Storage in New England and Beyond, 1890–1920
Osman will provide an analysis of late nineteenth-century cooling technology and the design of cold storage warehouses. He will relate the preservation of food to the regulation of the national economy while elaborating the changing role played by architects in the development of the cold storage system.

Michael Osman teaches courses in the history and theory of modern architecture. His scholarship focuses on the technological, environmental and economic aspects of architectural history in the twentieth century. He has received numerous grants and fellowships including the University of California Humanities Research Fellowship (2011), a National Science Foundation Doctoral Research Grant (2006) and a Fulbright Fellowship (2002). Among his recent published writings are an exploration of Reyner Banham’s writings on environmental control in the edited volume ‘Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern’ (Yale University Press, 2010) as well as some thoughts on Hegel’s theory of architectural origins in ‘Log 22: The Absurd’ (Spring/Summer 2011). An essay on the managerial transformation of concrete in ‘Perspecta 45: Agency’ (2012) and an analysis of nineteenth century cooling technology in ‘Aggregate: Governing by Design’ (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).

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.

Thursday, November 8, 2012
6:30–8:00pm at
New Bedford Whaling Museum
18 Johnny Cake Hill
New Bedford, MA

John Gallagher will suggest ways for American post-industrial cities to become smaller, but better cities in the twenty first century and proposes productive uses for vacant spaces in these cities.

John Gallagher is a veteran journalist and author whose latest book, ‘Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City,’ was named by the Huffington Post as among the best social and political books of 2010. John is a native of New York City. He joined the Detroit Free Press in 1987 to cover urban and economic redevelopment efforts in Detroit and Michigan, a post which he still holds. His other books include ‘Great Architecture of Michigan’ and, as co-author, ‘AIA Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture.’ John and his wife, Sheu-Jane, live along Detroit’s east riverfront.

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.