[Hauling earth during the expansion of the Panama Canal; AP Photo]
A quick and rather late notice, of particular relevance to readers in NYC: I’ll be on a panel this Friday, September 26, for The Five Thousand Pound Life’s “Land” symposium, which is co-sponsored by the Architectural League of New York and the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design.
[“Land”] addresses the need to consider settlement patterns and competing land uses in new ways given the reality of climate change. The value assigned to various forms of land use, and various attitudes towards land as a resource, must be understood in terms of ecological services and impacts, rather than narrowly-defined economic imperatives.
In sessions on “Nature and the City,” “Spatial Logistics,” and “Density,” speakers will consider American approaches to development, attitudes toward nature, and whether the current dominant narrative of the environmental superiority of concentrated high density development might be challenged by a counter-narrative of lower density land-use that takes advantage of distributed energy production and localized treatment of waste.
There are some great participants including Rebecca Solnit, Charles Waldheim, Eric Sanderson, Jesse LeCavalier, and more.
I’ll be a part of “Spatial Logistics”, talking about the expansion of the Panama Canal, dredging (Mud Dump Site!), and the limits of logistics.
The symposium will be in the afternoon (2:00-6:30 pm) in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union (7 East 7th Street). Tickets are free for students and members of the Architectural League; non-members will need to pay $20. Click here for more details.
