| Spring Program: Visualizing the Future of Environmental Design |
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On Saturday, February 6, 2010, the series was brought to a conclusion with a lecture by Manuel Castells, University Professor and Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communications & Society at the University of Southern California, entitled “Reinventing Urbanism in a Time of Economic Crisis.” Dean Jennifer Wolch then led a panel of young faculty, alumni, and students, including Allegra Bukojemsky, John Cary, Susanne Cowan, Bill Eisenstein, Malo André Hutson, Ron Rael, and Renee Roy, in a discussion of the future of environmental design education at CED. Rapporteur’s remarks were given by Dana Cuff, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. If you missed any of these lectures and discussions, you can view them on YouTube.
CED's 50th Anniversary Spring Program was co-sponsored by International House and the California Alumni Association. Promotional sponsors are the Climate Energy Policy Institute (CEPI) of the Berkeley School of Law, the Haas School of Business, and the Goldman School of Public Policy.
Janine Benyus is a natural sciences writer, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including her latest, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. In Biomimicry, she names an emerging discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's designs and processes (e.g., solar cells that mimic leaves, agriculture that models a prairie, businesses that run like redwood forests). In addition to her biomimicry work, Ms. Benyus teaches interpretive writing, lectures at the University of Montana, and works towards restoring and protecting wild lands. She serves on a number of land use committees in her rural county. She has received several awards including the 2009 Champion of the Earth Award in Science & Innovation from the United Nations Environmental Programme, the Rachel Carson Environmental Ethics Award, the Lud Browman Award for Science Writing, the Science Writing in Society Journalism Award, the Barrows and Heinz Distinguished Lectureships, and has been honored as one of TIME International's Heroes of the Environment. An educator at heart, Ms. Benyus believes that the more people learn from nature’s mentors, the more they’ll want to protect them. This is why she writes, speaks, and revels in describing the wild teachers in our midst.
Allegra Bukojemsky is a landscape architect and the leader of the San Francisco Bay Bioregion office of Biohabitats, an ecological restoration, conservation planning, and regenerative design firm. Prior to joining Biohabitats she worked with R. David Scheer (CED M.Arch.) in Alaska as partner and co-founder of DnA Design; as a restoration designer for Wildlands, Inc., a mitigation banking company; and as a landscape designer at April Philips Design Works, Inc., in Sausalito, California. Ms. Bukojemsky has become an active participant in a number of organizations advocating for more sustainable design methods and is currently co-chair of the Sustainable Design and Development Professional Practice Network of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
John Cary has served as Executive Director of Public Architecture since graduating from CED in 2003. A national nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, Public Architecture mobilizes architects and designers to undertake pro bono and public-interest design projects in underserved communities. Public Architecture’s work has been the subject of a National Geographic Channel documentary, honored with numerous national and international design awards, and exhibited and published around the world. The 1% program of Public Architecture has recruited over 650 design firms to pledge one percent of their billable hours to pro bono service, leveraging an estimated $25 million in services annually. Mr. Cary is a recipient of the Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the 2009 Designer of the Year Award from Contract Magazine, and he is the youngest-ever Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. His forthcoming book, Pro Bono: Architecture as a Social Act (Metropolis Books / Distributed Art Publishers) is due out this fall and made possible through the generous support of the Driehaus Foundation, Gerbode Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Mr. Cary earned his bachelor of arts in architecture, summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota, and Master of Architecture from CED.
Manuel Castells is University Professor and Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. He is Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School of Communication, and holds joint appointments as Professor of Sociology in the USC Sociology Department, Professor of Planning in the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development, and Professor of International Relations in the USC School of International Relations. He is, as well, Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley, where he was Professor of City and Regional Planning and Professor of Sociology from 1979 to 2003 before joining USC.
Paul Collier is author of the award-winning book The Bottom Billion. Mr. Collier is a professor of economics at Oxford University. He is also director of the Centre for the Study of African Economics, a professorial fellow at St. Anthony’s College, a professor associate at CERDI (Centre for Studies and Research in International Development) at l’Université d'Auvergne; and a Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London. Mr. Collier’s research focuses on a wide range of macroeconomic, microeconomic, and political economy topics concerned with Africa. Specifically, he researches the causes and consequences of civil war; the effects of aid; and the problems of democracy in low income and natural resource-rich societies. Mr. Collier has served as senior advisor to Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa. He also completed the first-ever external review of International Monetary Fund (IMF) operations for the board of the IMF. From 1998 to 2003 he was director of the development research group at the World Bank. He holds a distinction award from Oxford University and is a past winner of the Edgar Graham Book Prize, which is awarded every two years for published work of original scholarship concerning agriculture or industrial development in Africa or Asia.
Susanne Cowan is a Ph.D candidate at UC Berkeley studying the history of architecture and urbanism. She received her B.A. from Cal in landscape architecture. While studying for her Ph.D., Ms. Cowan has worked as a Graduate Student Instructor for several classes across all the departments in CED, including Environmental Design 1: “Introduction to Environmental Design,” Architecture 170: “A Survey of the History of Architecture and Urbanism,” and City Planning 111, “Housing: An International Survey.” Ms. Cowan’s research focuses on the relationship between planning professionals and the public, looking at issues of professionalization, public outreach, and participatory democracy. Her dissertation, entitled “Planning to the People,” looks at how town planners in the U.K. in the 1940s tried to create a public forum for discussing new planning policies. Ms. Cowan has recently been presenting papers from her dissertation at conferences including the Society for Architectural Historians (SAH), the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH), and the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE). She has also published an article in Built Environment entitled "The Gendered Architecture of the Home in Cinematic Space."
Dana Cuff's work focuses on affordable housing, modernism, and the politics of place. Recent research on urbanism was published in a book titled The Provisional City (MIT 2000), a project supported by both the Getty and the National Endowment for the Arts. She continues these studies through research on neighborhood politics. Professor Cuff teaches various courses related to the profession of architecture as well as special seminars on cultural issues, suburban studies, and urbanism. Current work concerns the relationship between emerging digital technologies and their social implications in physical space.
Bill Eisenstein is the executive director of the Center for Resource Efficient Communities at UC Berkeley, which is devoted to researching the links between community design and resource efficiency, especially energy efficiency. He received his Ph.D. in environmental planning in 2005, and a Master of City Planning in 2000, both from UC Berkeley. He recently served as a key consultant to the Governor’s Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force, which made recommendations that led to the passage of a comprehensive water and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta management reform bill by the California Legislature in 2009. He has published and taught in the areas of sustainable urbanism, ecological design, land use planning, delta management, statewide water management, flood control policy, and ecosystem restoration.
Malo André Hutson is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on community development, regional planning, urban sustainability, and population health. In addition, Professor Hutson focuses on urban policy and politics and the role of institutions in influencing urban and regional development. His current research includes an analysis of metropolitan fragmentation and racial residential segregation and their relationship to health. Specifically, he is investigating how multiple political jurisdictions within a metropolitan region affect the distribution of resources across racial and class lines. Professor Hutson just completed a national research study that examined the relationship between the built environment and health disparities. Professor Hutson is a co-principal investigator with his colleagues Karen Chapple (principal investigator) and AnnaLee Saxenian (co-principal investigator) on a study funded by the Economic Development Administration of the U.S Department of Commerce; this study is analyzing innovation within California’s green economy. Professor Hutson is also writing a book on urban sustainability and community development in which he is focusing on four areas: economic development, equity, environment, and health. The California Endowment and the Mitchell Kapor Foundation are jointly sponsoring his spring 2010 Community Development Studio (City Planning 268) in East Oakland. The focus of the studio is to help create a sustainable and healthy community within East Oakland.
Ronald Rael is an architect, author, and assistant professor at UC Berkeley. Prior to joining the faculty at Berkeley he was the co-director of Clemson University's Charles E. Daniel Center for Building Research and Urban Studies in Genova, Italy, and coordinator of Clemson's Core Digital Foundation Architecture Studios. He has been a member of the design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and a senior instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He earned his Master of Architecture degree at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he was the recipient of the William Kinne Memorial Fellowship. He holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Renee Roy is a first-year Ph.D student in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. She received her Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Urban Design from Carnegie Mellon and her M.S. in Human Geography from University of Oxford, England. Ms. Roy comes to Berkeley from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she worked as an architect and community development consultant focusing on participatory design and issues of food access in inner cities. She also spent two years working as a research associate and university instructor at Carnegie Mellon University, where she developed original research initiatives and courses on urban agriculture and relevant issues of urban design and planning. Ms. Roy’s current research interests include collaborative governance in food systems planning and immigrant populations involved in urban agriculture in the U.S.
Barbara Maria Stafford's work has consistently explored the intersections of the visual arts and the physical and biological sciences from the early modern to the contemporary era. Her current research charts the revolutionary ways that the neurosciences are changing our views of the human and animal sensorium, shaping our fundamental assumptions about perception, sensation, emotion, mental imagery, and subjectivity. Her most recent book is Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (University of Chicago Press). |
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Focusing on global dynamics and sustainability challenges, this colloquium series addressed the concerns that could have not been foreseen when CED was founded in 1959. On Wednesday, February 3, 2010, Paul Collier, Professor of Economics at Oxford University, kicked off the series with the first of three keynote lectures from major national and international thinkers from outside the CED disciplinary fields. The series then continued with keynote lectures by Janine Benyus, President and Founder of Biomimicry Institute, on Thursday, February 4, 2010, and Barbara Maria Stafford, Department of Art William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita, at the University of Chicago, on Friday, February 5, 2010.
Janine Benyus
Allegra Bukojemsky
Manuel Castells
Paul Collier
Susanne Cowan
Dana Cuff
Bill Eisenstein
Malo André Hutson
Ron Rael
Renee Roy
Barbara Maria Stafford