Logan Littlefield, who will graduate from the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program this June, has received a Mellon Symposium Travel Award from the Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. The award allows students to attend the River Cities: Historical and Contemporary Symposium, which was held at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC on May 8th-9th.

The symposium brings together both scholars and practitioners to discuss "the dynamic relationships between cities and their rivers." Participants will explore the role that rivers have played in urban landscapes in the past and how they may contribute to city-building in the future. Littlefield says the topic is a natural extension of work he did as a MLA student at the Daniels Faculty.

“The symposium offers a diverse set of lectures dealing with society's relationship to urban and peri-urban rivers in both environmental, spatial, and social ways, and in a variety of contexts," says Littlefield. "The conflation of human and natural histories in these spaces offers a great opportunity to understand and project new ideas concerning the relationship between urban and rural, city and suburb."

Only three awards were given out to applicants from across North America. For more information about the symposium, visit http://www.doaks.org/research/garden-landscape/scholarly-activities/river-cities/river-cities-historical-and-contemporary

Image: Los Angeles River, 2013 by Alexander Robinson