CITY,LANDSCAPE, & ECOLOGY

City, Landscape, Ecology is a thematically driven course that centers on issues and polemics related to landscape, land settlement and ecology over the past two centuries. The class looks at changing attitudes to the natural world from the eighteenth century to the present, tracing important historical shifts in the consideration of nature across the ecological sciences, conservation practices, landscape design, and environmental activism, law and policy. Lectures focus on the critical role that artists and architects have played, and are to play, in making visible the sources of environmental degradation and in developing new means of mitigating anthropogenic ecological change.

City, Landscape, Ecology is divided into three parts. Part I explores important episodes in the history of landscape: picturesque garden theory, notions of “wilderness” as epitomized in national and state parks in the United States, Modern and Postmodern garden practices, and place of landscape in the work of artists from the 1960s to the present. The purpose here is to better understand the role that territorial organization plays in the construction of social practices, human subjectivities, and technologies of power. Lectures in this part are shaped around a dialectical pair of historical episodes–– for example, the picturesque garden is paired with the enclosure of the commons, and American national parks are discussed in relation to the systematic removal of native peoples.

We then turn to ecology and related issues of climate, urbanization and sustainability in Part II. Here we will look at the rise of ecological thinking in the 1960s; approaches to the environment that were based on the systems-thinking approach of the era. In the session “Capitalism, Race and Population Growth” we examine the history of the “crisis” of scarcity from Thomas Robert Malthus, to Paul R. Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, 1968) to today and look at questions of environmental racism, violence and equity. 

The course concludes with Part III on Environmental Repair. At this important juncture in the course, we will ask what is to be done today. We’ll examine the work of contemporary theorists, architects, landscape architects, policy makers and environmentalists who have channeled some of the lessons