LAN2903H S
Instructor: Georges Farhat
Meeting Section: L0101
Thursday, 9:00 - 12:00pm

In the face of climate change, energy crisis, waste production, ecological fragmentation, and biodiversity loss, the design and planning disciplines have long initiated their transition towards sustainability. Yet, rarely do designers and planners get the chance to question the worldviews — or compound notions of nature(s), environment(s), and landscape(s) [NELs] — that undergird the issues they are expected to tackle. Instead, historical, traditional, and local understandings and appropriations of NELs are either overlooked or lost, while compliance with international norms, policies, and regulations can extend current, western science-based conceptions of NELs to foreign or past contexts worldwide without useful exchange of perspectives.

Moving beyond self-referential processing, this seminar engages with various ways of defining NELs across place and time. With an eye to design, we will survey how different people draw different types of lines between culture and nature, humans and non-humans, animate and inanimate entities, or in other such dualities that inform NELs. In other words, we will not assume that humans adapt to one singular Nature with its various environments and landscapes. Instead, we will investigate how NELs are actually shaped by multiple cultures and politics (including design and planning techniques), which implies as many different ‘natures’.

This seminar should allow students to develop an inquiry in connection with one of their current or future site-related research: studio project, design/written thesis, or dissertation. Critical reading of scholarly literature and analysis of visual material will form the core of their work. Individual research and group presentations will aim at investigating and experimenting with site- and time-specific means used to define and represent NELs, from written and oral narratives to visualization. We will tap into a wide range of disciplinary fields: including environmental history, political ecology, indigenous studies, and anthropology, through to landscape archaeology as well as history of science, technology, and medicine.