News

Main Content

Doing field research in Hungary, Austria, and Germany, Wolfram Hoefer was invited to the Austrian Public Radio Ö1 Program: “Im Gespräch” (in conversation) with radio host Renata Schmidtkunz. The conversation touches on the relationship between religion and nature. Another aspect of the conversion are the diverse understandings of the term cultural landscape in North America and Europe and how those impact approaches on land use, planning, and landscape architecture.

Listen to the interview:

Main Content

Today, the Biden administration announced that landscape architecture has been designated a STEM discipline!

Specifically, Landscape Architecture (04.0601) was added to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) STEM-designated degree program list. Along with landscape architecture, seven additional disciplines were added to the list, including: Institutional Research (13.0608); Mechatronics, Robotics, and Automation Engineering Technology/Technician (15.0407); Composite Materials Technology/Technician (15.0617); Linguistics and Computer Science (30.4801); Developmental and Adolescent Psychology (42.2710); Geospatial Intelligence (43.0407); and Demography and Population Studies (45.0501).

This new designation rightfully places landscape architecture alongside other STEM disciplines. Landscape architecture universities will be able to recruit from a broader talent pool.  And, as a STEM discipline more young people will now be introduced to the profession.

Main Content

This pilot garden advances AIR Collaborative’s aim to create a series of Universally Accessible Gardens on Rutgers land to foster spatial justice for people with disabilities. 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 the site of 178 Jones Avenue in New Brunswick, where the new garden joins existing community gardens and the weekly Community Farmers Market.

This pilot was designed and built by landscape architecture students and will be programmed for and undertaken by people with disabilities. Interns from the Douglass Discovery Program accompanied the project from the concept to the opening and documented the process on social media.

See our pamphlet to learn more about the therapeutic benefits of gardening and the main principles of universal design.

Download the Rutgers Universal Access Garden Pamphlet (PDF)

Watch the process

Main Content

Wednesday, April 26th, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Rutgers Art Library, Voorhees Hall, 71 Hamilton Street

The Exhibition will be running until May 24th.

View the topics.

Main Content

Written in collaboration with the Ramapough Lunaape Nation Turtle Clan, Our Land, Our Stories tells the intertwined story of racial and environmental injustice at the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site. We document contested narratives around the site’s contamination by Ford Motor Company in the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading to its listing as a Superfund site in subsequent decades. We unearth the histories and stories that have been buried alongside the dangerous chemicals that remain deep in the soil, just miles from a major drinking water reservoir, and counter the processes of erasure that have made the continuing presence of Indigenous peoples invisible to many.

Main Content

Dieter Kienast (1945–1998) is a key Swiss figure in European landscape architecture. Amidst a striking change in societal understandings of nature, he sought a synthesis between design and ecology in the 1970s. He designed spaces to make the dissolving opposition between city and countryside legible and to enable aesthetic experience to help cope with increasingly complex everyday life. As a designer, planner, researcher and university lecturer, Kienast introduced new challenges into the discussion of those fields. Critique of urban planning, processes of participation and the significance of spontaneous urban vegetation played just as much a role in these discussions as did art, literature, architecture and the popularity of postmodernism.

Main Content

“The Ramapough and the Ringwood Mines Superfund Site – History, Culture, Education, and Environmental Justice,” is a New Jersey Council for the Humanities (NJCH) funded project that our faculty member Anita Banshi directs. It focuses on illustrating the connections between scientific data, environmental remediation reports, and personal narratives of the cultural and spiritual traditions of the Ramapough community living in what is now the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site. Our Land, Our Stories, the book and the exhibition that resulted from the project, includes visualizations of traditional Lenape stories and imaginative design proposals for memorials that mark environmental losses.

Main Content

Through his work at the Geohealth Lab at CRSSA, Dr. David Tulloch integrates the geographic information sciences and human health research into landscape architecture. In 2010 Dr. Tulloch was an invited participant at the inaugural Geodesign Summit, at which the overlap between landscape architecture, planning, GIS, geography, and computer science, were reconceptualized as a single field of work. As an early leader in this emerging area of geodesign, he is widely published on the subject (Tulloch 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2019). He organized and led a geodesign panel for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).

The same advances in geospatial technologies that have empowered the geodesign community (e.g., interactive mapping, improved user interfaces, cloud computing, mobile mapping on personal devices, open source tools) also create new opportunities for integrating public participation in planning and design processes. Seeking to contribute to the conversation about such platforms, he served on the Organizing Committee for the first three Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) Conferences (2002, 2003, 2004), including the inaugural meeting hosted at Rutgers. His pioneering role in both PPGIS and VGI were recognized with my successful applications for funded participation in their respective specialist meetings (1998 and 2007).

Human health has become a primary area of application for these topics. With funding from NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, he has spent over a decade as part of a multidisciplinary team examining linkages between the food and physical activity environment and patterns of childhood obesity. Collaborating with a team at Rutgers’ Center for State Health Policy and Arizona State University, he has inventoried the changing urban landscapes of 5 New Jersey cities across nearly a decade, mapping changes in the food environment and activity environments available to children and then comparing those with the obesity measures and locations of over 1,500 young residents. This “team science” approach was essential to prove the positive impact for children living within a half mile of parks or the detrimental impact for children within ¼ mile of corner stores (DeWeese et al. 2013; Ohri-Vachaspati et al. 2013; Tang et al. 2014; Lorts et al. 2019; Ohri-Vachaspati et al. 2019).

Helping expand and formalize that geospatial health research, he developed a structured research team called the Geohealth Lab group within the larger (and quite supportive) setting of the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis. Not only does the lab support research, but it also hosted workshops and engaged community groups in New Jersey. Today the lab group has “alumni” that include a professional community planner and a Ph.D. student studying citizen science GIS at UNC-Chapel Hill and a current undergraduate whose experiences at the lab helped her spend the summer of 2019 in Columbia University’s Biostatistics Epidemiology Summer Training (BEST) Diversity Program.