12-1PM, Room 066

David Fletcher is the principal of FletcherStudio, a landscape architecture & urban design office based in San Francisco. He is currently a faculty in the Architecture Program at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and in the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI_Arc). His work addresses process, ecology, infrastructure, and post-industrial landscapes. He is a contributor to the forthcoming ACTAR publication on Los Angeles Infrastructure. His work on the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan recently won an AIA award for Regional and Urban Planning, and his research and mapping was exhibited at the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture.

Contemporary cities contain infrastructural void networks: urbanized watersheds, no-man's zones, powerline rights of way, and derelict rail systems. Many of these networks have latent and, as of yet, unrealized potentials for radical urban transformation. The lecture will discuss these networks, with particular emphasis on urbanized river systems. No longer a "natural" phenomena, urbanized watersheds are often man-made webs of vascular networks, which channel water, freeways, streets, bridges, railways, power lines, cell towers, wildlife corridors, as well as sewage infrastructures. Embedded within the fabric of a watershed are political structures and bureaucracies, jurisdictions, environmental conditions, economic organizations, and cultural relations. These fluid systems are more evident in their political and social operations than physical form: rivers of energy, streams of revenue and resources, movement of goods and services. It will also expand on recent writing and mappings on the Los Angeles River, which offers an extreme example of a once "natural" system, which has now a vital infrastructural freakology. The lecture will discuss how time-based strategic planning can illuminate the latent potentials of void networks for alternative transportation, ecological restoration, revitalization, and environmental justice.

Topics covered will include: jurisdiction and power, environmental and social justice, ecology and process, open space networks. Projects discussed will include the Los Angeles River Master Plan, the Atlanta Beltline (Georgia), the Cheonggyecheon (Seoul), the Rio Besos (Barcelona), the Compton Creek Master Plan, the Highline (NYC), and more...