LA News Editor

Main Content

Panel discussion at IFNH 101 followed by a visit to the Rutgers Universal Access Garden Pilot at 178 Jones Avenue. 

Photos by Robert Acklen, Anette Freytag, and Julia M. Ritter

This vibrant panel on gardening, nutrition, and disabilities will include our partners in academia, the community, as well as individuals with disabilities who have perfected gardening through innovation and determination.  This presentation is part of the Rutgers University Second Annual Disability Awareness Month program. 

For over 40 years, the Cook Organic Garden and the garden community at Jones Avenue at Rutgers have provided faculty, staff, students, alumni, and members of surrounding communities with opportunities to garden in over 86,000 square feet of cultivated space on the New Brunswick campus. Historically, none of the spaces has been designated or designed specifically as universally accessible for people with disabilities. The establishment of a Rutgers Universal Access Garden Pilot at 178 Jones Avenue in New Brunswick serves as a space to afford people with disabilities health and social benefits and as a site for socioenvironmental research. A Rutgers Research Council Social and Racial Justice Grant and the passionate involvement of students, staff, and faculty realized the construction of a small pilot garden on this site, where the new garden joins existing community gardens and the weekly Community Farmers Market. This is part of an ongoing initiative of the Rutgers Departments of Landscape Architecture, Human Ecology, Kinesiology and Health, Art and Design, and the cross-school AIR Collaborative to establish Universally Accessible Gardens on campus. During the event, the various initiatives are presented and discussed, followed by a visit of the garden. 

Photos by Robert Acklen, Anette Freytag, and Julia M. Ritter

4pm-5:15pm, IFNH, Room 101 
Short presentations by Richard Alomar, Anette Freytag, Yan Han & Rose Greenblatt 
Panel: 

• Richard Alomar (Rutgers, Landscape Architecture)
• Javier Robles, Rutgers (Rutgers, Kinesiology and Health)
• Laura Latorre (Rutgers, University Ethics and Compliance)
• Craig Kennedy (Open Doors Organization)
• Rose Greenblatt (Occupational Therapist)
• The discussion is animated by Anette Freytag (Rutgers, Landscape Architecture and AIR Collaborative)  

5:30pm-6:30pm  
Come visit the Rutgers Universal Access Garden Pilot at 178 Jones Avenue, New Brunswick 

• Welcome by Meredith Taylor (Rutgers, Human Ecology) and Jackie Thaw (Rutgers Art&Design and AIR Collaborative) 

Hot Cider and Cookies will be served. 

Event Flyer

Main Content

Abstract

If a radical redistribution of space and materials is already here, how will landscape architecture participate? Increasingly, neoliberal cities like New York enact the long-term project of coastal resilience through the private sector. In contrast, “Direct Action Landscape” calls for designers to look to the new, often informal, practices of care that emerge in disaster areas and the insurgent “rebuilding of infrastructure within [our] means and ways” we find in the Queer Liberation March, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, and other survival programs operating outside of the settler state and its markets. Landscape architecture theory, pedagogy, and practice in the US continue to embrace their role as intermediary of the state, producing large-scale “resilient” landscapes that further the aims of settler colonialism under the guise of protecting public space and minimizing risk. In contrast, mutual aid—sharing resources horizontally and freely— offers a decentralized practice of care and repair. Mutual aid is a structure for survival work in real time and space, distinct from the long timeframe and large scales of public policy. Can mutual aid and direct action inform a landscape practice, one that involves itself in the emergent redistribution of space and materials that has accompanied twenty-first century crises of climate change and displacement?

Bio

Ben Barsotti Scott (he/him) is a landscape architect and independent curator in Brooklyn, NY. He is a co-founding member of the design and research outfit Bad Little Brother and has worked as a designer and project manager at Ken Smith Workshop and SCAPE Landscape Architecture. He is a frequent contributor at the New York Review of Architecture and has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and currently at the Pratt Institute. He is a member of the Architecture Lobby.

Main Content

World GIS Day

Abstract

This lecture will discuss the interplay between cartography, spatial datasets, and the conceptual underpinnings of citizenship at a global scale through two intertwined projects—In Plain Sight (2018) and my current book project, High Contrast.

“In Plain Sight” is a data documentary originally commissioned for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, exploring geospatial narratives by juxtaposing the ‘Black Marble’—NASA’s nighttime earth imagery—with the CEISEN’s gridded population of the world (GPW) dataset. The installation explored the assumptions underpinning demographic models and offers an alternative lens to view global citizenship.

Building on this exploration, “High Contrast” scrutinizes the prehistory of spatial datasets, particularly the evolution of false color aerial photography during the Cold War. By employing archival research and novel data analysis methods, this work provides a designer’s perspective on spatial data’s role in shaping current understandings of landscapes and geopolitical territories. Emphasizing the military’s use of vegetation as a form of geospatial intelligence, the lecture will discuss how early Cold War ecologists and botanists employed ‘PhotoBotany’ to infer terrain conditions for strategic military purposes, setting a foundation for the development of remote sensing and data science.

Through these projects, the lecture argues for a design-driven historical understanding of data science, asserting that the techniques and materials inherent to the landscape discipline have been instrumental in shaping contemporary technologies. By articulating the design history embedded within spatial datasets and visualization techniques, this talk seeks to position designers not just as users, but as contributors to the critical discourse on data’s cultural and spatial dimensions.

BIO

Robert Gerard Pietrusko is a cartographer and composer based in Brooklyn, NY. His research focuses on the history and speculative design potential of environmental media. His design work is part of the permanent collection of the Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and has been exhibited in more than 15 countries at venues such The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Centre Pompidou, ZKM Center for Art & Media, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, among others. Recently, Pietrusko was awarded the 2021 Rome Prize for landscape architecture, and was the 2019 Wilder Green Architecture Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Pietrusko is currently an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

Main Content

Strom Lecture

Abstract

This talk uses a literary and cultural archive to explain how urban and environmental change have shaped the core questions of queer and trans studies in the U.S. since the 1950s. In the talk I argue that an urban environmental history of queer and trans studies is useful for explaining the tools that queer and trans critique offers to an analysis of how ideas of race, gender, sexuality, and kinship shape advocacy for environmental justice amid climate emergency. To illustrate this argument, I focus on trans and Two-Spirit poet Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s 2011 collection gowanus atropolis in the context of the Superfund remediation of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a project ongoing in the 2020s. I set Brolaski’s collection in conversation with the history of the Superfund program to argue that Superfund has been integral to shaping how remediation projects in the U.S. have equated environmental repair with racialized and gendered social normativity. I use a queer and trans approach to reframe how designers, urbanists, and environmental advocates might approach remediation projects that seek to sustain a narrative of normative growth compatible neither with the lives of marginalized residents nor with adaptation in the face of climate change. 

Event Poster

Bio

Davy Knittle (he/they) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware. In 2022, he was HMEI/Princeton Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Environment at Princeton University. Davy works at the intersection of urban studies, queer and trans studies, and the environmental humanities. He is at work on a book project entitled “Urbanist Desire and the Ecology of Queer and Trans Survival.” Davy’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Perspecta, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Planning Perspectives,

Main Content

• Avery Kaplan: Filling A Hole
• Lain Lomery: Saving Two Birds with One Facade
• Katharine Schumacher: Two miles to School
• Bronson D. Gallagher: Weaving Green Infrastructure into Adaptive Reuse Development
• Jay G: Abolitionist NYC 2050
• Jordan Upadhyay: Green Streets for People
• Kathleen Hammerdahl: Beyond Boring: How Artist’s Books Can Be Used by Landscape Architects
• Asia Wright: Redesign white spaces as a culturally inclusive space using black feminism
• Dani Daboll: Preparing the Forest: The Intersection of Montessori and Nature Based Education
• Jacob Oberwanowicz: Toxic Floods: Analyzing the Preparedness of Contaminated Sites in New Jersey for Climate Change