Boston Flora

Tag: Graduate School of Design

  • Tuesday, October 26, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Daniela Bleichmar, Online

    Daniela Bleichmar is Professor of Art History and History at the University of Southern California, where she also serves as the founding director of the Levan Institute for the Humanities and director of the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Her research and teaching address the history of images, objects, and texts in colonial Latin America and early modern Europe, focusing on the histories of science and knowledge production, cultural encounters and exchanges, collecting, and books. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the ACLS. Her publications include the books Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (Yale University Press, 2017).  She is currently writing a cultural biography of the Codex Mendoza, an Indigenous illustrated manuscript produced in early colonial Mexico, which traces the extraordinary life of this transcultural object from Mexico City in the 1540s to London in the 1830s.

    Daniela will speak on October 26 at 6:30 pm in a Harvard Graduate School of Design virtual lecture.

    Click here to register for the Public Lecture with Daniela Bleichmar. The event will also be live streamed to the Harvard GSD YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Live captioning will be provided during this event. 

  • Thursday, September 10, 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm – Green Infrastructure Beyond Flood Risk Reduction, Online

    The Graduate School of Design at Harvard University is pleased to present a series of talks and webinars broadcast to our audiences via Zoom. This lecture will be ONLINE ONLY. For security reasons, virtual attendees must register. Scroll down to find complete instructions for how to register.

    Event Description

    This lecture explores whether it is possible to achieve both social justice and environmental sustainability in efforts to mitigate urban flood risk. The expanding scale of urban flooding under climate change has renewed interest in large-scale restoration projects that make room for water in metro centers. However, ecologically functioning green infrastructure – unleashed rivers, sprawling wetlands – is inconsistent with the current governance landscape of fragmented local governments seeking to maximize local land values and minimize affordable housing. Moreover, even smaller-scale urban greening projects have resulted in gentrification, suggesting that larger-scale green infrastructure projects will produce still more racist, classist, and exclusionary development. The design imagination for new ecological landscapes has far outpaced a reimagination of the institutional and governance arrangements needed to enable nature-based solutions that advance social justice and ecological sustainability under climate change. This lecture provides an introduction to U.S. development practices implicated by these transitional landscapes, suggests future directions such as urban food production and regional governance, and invites conversation about ways to bridge traditional disciplinary silos in creating racially just, ecologically sustainable, and fiscally functioning cities.

    Linda Shi, MUP ’08, is Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Her research concerns how to plan for urban climate adaptation in ways that improve environmental sustainability and social justice. She assesses how aspects of urban land governance – including the fiscalization of land use, property rights regimes, and metropolitan regional institutions – shape climate vulnerability and adaptation responses. An urban environmental planner by training, Shi has worked for AECOM, the Institute for International Urban Development, and the Rocky Mountain Institute, and consulted for the World Bank and American Institute of Architects on projects and research in the U.S., Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Shi received a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, a master’s in urban planning from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a bachelor’s and master’s in environmental management from Yale / Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

    Register to attend the lecture here. Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.

    The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. Live captioning will be provided during this event. After the event has ended, a transcript will be available upon request.

  • Thursday, September 12, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Global Ecology: The History of Humans on the Land

    Erle C. Ellis, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Visiting Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, will speak on Global Ecology: The History of Humans on the Land at the Arnold Arboretum’s Hunnewell Building on Thursday, September 12 beginning at 7 pm. Erle Ellis maps “anthropogenic landscapes” or areas of Earth’s terrestrial surface where humans have directly altered ecological patterns and processes. Such transformations to the land, whether for food, shelter, or otherwise serving the needs of human populations, are primary drivers of global changes in climate, biodiversity and biogeochemistry. Erle will speak of human-induced ecological changes to the Earth System over many millennia and the novel ecosystems thus created, challenging long-held ideas about native ecosystems and what is wild.  Free for Arboretum members, $10 nonmember (Students: call 617-384-5277 to register free). Register on line at https://my.arboretum.harvard.edu/Info.aspx?DayPlanner=1245&DayPlannerDate=9/12/20131186&DayPlannerDate=4/29/2013&utm_source=September-October+2013+Lectures+and+Classes&utm_campaign=Fall+2013+Classes&utm_medium=email.

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  • Saturday, April 20, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm – Ginkgo Fest: A Symposium About Ginkgo biloba

    On April 20, three prominent biologists will join forces to share all they know about the unique tree species, Ginkgo biloba.  Ginkgo is a plant species that has existed since the Jurassic period with few evolutionary changes and continues to thrive today. This special symposium includes a series of lectures, a tour of the Arboretum’s Ginkgo biloba collection, and lunch with a tasting of ginkgo nuts. Ginkgo artifacts and illustrations from the Harvard Libraries and collected paraphernalia will also be on display. So don your best ginkgo outfit (we know you have at least one article of clothing with a ginkgo leaf on it) and immerse yourself in the history and biology of this relict species.

    Peter Crane, Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Professor of Botany, Yale University, and co- author of the just published book, Ginkgo: The Tree that Time Forgot, Yale University Press,  William “Ned” Friedman, Director, Arnold Arboretum and Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, and expert in the reproductive biology of early seed plants, including Ginkgo biloba, and Peter Del Tredici, Senior Research Scientist, Arnold Arboretum and Adjunct Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, a botanist who has studied ginkgo for more than 20 years and searched for and located remnant wild stands of ginkgo on the slopes of mountains in southwest China, will be the three luminaries speaking at the symposium.

    WHEN: Saturday, April 20, 2013, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. View details and registration at https://my.arboretum.harvard.edu/Info.aspx?DayPlanner=1165&DayPlannerDate=4/20/2013

    WHERE: The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, Weld Hill Research Building, 1300 Centre Street, Roslindale, MA. http://arboretum.harvard.edu/visit/weld-hill-directions/

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