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Exploring Cultural Landscapes around Budapest, Vienna, and the Ruhr Region.

Landscapes are shaped by people; local cultural narratives have an impact on how we see the spaces around us. At the same time, enjoying landscapes is an individual aesthetic experience. I will share my impressions from four months traveling across Europe, using the bicycle for lengthy excursion through the metropolitan regions of Vienna/Austria, Budapest /Hungary, and the Ruhr Region in Germany. Further, I spoke to educators, planning and design professionals, and to members of public administration. Those interview partners explained planning and policy backgrounds, helping me to place my observations into the context of suburban development. The focus of the presentation will be on underlying cultural narratives that shape planning and design approaches to cultural landscapes within the suburban context.

Bio

Dr. Wolfram Höfer is a Professor at the Rutgers of Department of Landscape Architecture and serves as Director of the Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability (CUES). Dr. Höfer developed numerous community outreach projects in the field of adaptive re-use of brownfields, urban resiliency, and infrastructure. His current research explores underlying cultural narratives that shape planning and design approaches to cultural landscapes within the suburban context. With climate change, that discussion gains more relevance because open space must meet the competing demands of producing renewable energy, providing food, recreation, and the need for housing.

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Date of lecture: January 24, 2024

Abstract

In 1518, a severe smallpox epidemic swept the Caribbean and American coasts. Subsequently, in the 1520s, enslaved Africans, predominantly Senegambians, waged the first slave revolt in the Americas. Drawing on early modern European (predominantly Portuguese) chronicles about West Africans’ holistic community healing strategies, this paper argues that revolt and marronage were geopolitical, ecological, social, material, and spiritual responses to the smallpox epidemic and other community health threats that Iberian colonialism posed in the sixteenth-century Caribbean. Africanists have long observed that health crises were pretexts for political and social transformation. West and West Central Africans associated epidemic diseases, especially smallpox epidemics, with geopolitical upheavals and transformations. Deities and sacred forces who controlled geopolitical claims and governed community ecologies, notably forests and groves, were also capable of inflicting or relieving smallpox and other contagious flesh disorders in many African cosmologies. Africanists have also observed the centrality of healers and healing guilds in early modern and pre-colonial African geopolitics and sovereignty claims. This paper reappraises early modern European chronicles for evidence of West and West Central African community health management strategies. I argue that Africans migrated these praxes to the Caribbean. They are evident in the sixteenth-century slave revolts and burgeoning maroon societies. This paper resituates revolt and marronage as public healing and community health strategies that countered the health consequences of European slavery and colonialism. Furthermore, this work expands our concept of the Black radical tradition to account for the role of healers and community health in the process of geopolitical claims-making.

Short Bio

Dr. Elise A. Mitchell is an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton University. She has published her research in The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of the Early Republic, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, and various edited volumes. Her essays have appeared in Black Perspectives, The Funambulist, Slate, and The Atlantic. She is working on a book manuscript, titled Morbid Geographies: Enslavement, Epidemics, and Embodiment in the Early Modern Atlantic World, about how enslaved Africans contended with smallpox epidemics between roughly 1500 and 1800. 

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Date of lecture: February 21, 2024

Abstract

The goals of historic preservation are often at odds with efforts to protect properties from climate change. While preservation encourages maintaining a property’s historic appearance, climate change adaptation often requires change, sometimes radical change, to maintain the safety of a building and its occupants.

As the impacts of flooding and intense storms are increasing in prevalence, property owners and communities are trying to balance their desire to increase resiliency in their communities, while maintaining their historic character and sense of place. Property owners seek options to improve resilience in response to parcel vulnerability.  At a community level, municipalities are developing policies, programs, and requirements to address vulnerability on a larger scale, often without considering the impacts on historic resources.  To specifically address the impacts of severe storms on the state’s historic resources, Florida’s Division of Historical Resources, the SHPO, sought to prepare three guidance documents to address the impacts of severe storms.

Going beyond a regulatory review, the guidance relied heavily on information gained through site visits in in-person interviews with eighteen small to mid-sized communities across the state. The site visits provided a first-hand opportunity to document prior storm damage, recovery efforts, and vulnerability as well as the implementation of community-wide and property specific resiliency measures. The information gained during the site visits was compiled to serve as a reference for similar communities. The resulting guidance documents provide a wholistic approach for three separate audiences: property owners, municipalities, and state agencies. They described flood and wind mitigation vulnerability and resiliency measures for historic buildings and archaeological sites, and include an analysis of severe storms on tourism, a key state industry.

The presentation will review the challenges of addressing flood and wind vulnerability across a wide geographic area. It will include a breakdown of the roles, responsibilities, and regulatory requirements of the owner, federal, state, and local governments when addressing mitigation of historic properties.

BIO

Dominique M. Hawkins,
FAIA, NCARB, LEED AP
Managing Principal, Preservation Design Partnership

In 1995, Dominique established PDP as a planning and design practice focusing exclusively on offering high-quality professional services for clients with nationally significant historic sites and buildings.  Her work is at the forefront of addressing change at historic buildings and settings whether through design, the regulatory process, or the impacts of climate change and flooding at historic properties.  From small projects to multi-million-dollar undertakings, Dominique’s work has maintained the highest standards of planning, design, and preservation, resulting in long-lasting relationships, some of which span over a decade of continuous involvement and service.  Her work has been recognized with several awards.

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Abstract

Coastal cities historically built in floodplains have adapted through time to the challenges that arise from settling in a landscape shaped by water. Climate change has exacerbated the natural events that these communities face. St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in the United States, is grappling with vulnerability posed by floods and aging infrastructure. This presentation summarizes the history of St. Augustine through the current day and highlights the ways flooding is projected to impact the region. It will also touch on the projects being implemented by the city, University of Florida and other entities with the intent of creating a network of resilient infrastructure that will ensure America’s “oldest” city carries on its rich cultural and historic legacy.

Bio

Isabella Guttuso is the Urban Green Infrastructure Coordinator for the University of Florida’s Center for Landscape Conservation Planning. She is a graduate of UF’s Master of Landscape Architecture program, an Olmsted Scholar, and a photographer with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Isabella works across Florida, conducting applied research on green infrastructure as a resiliency strategy for the state’s diverse communities and ecosystems within the rural-urban interface. Isabella has also published multiple articles and photographs about Florida’s native plants through the Florida Association of Native Nurseries’ “Guide for Reach Florida Gardeners.”