LAN3900H S
Instructor: Georges Farhat
Meeting Section: L0101
Wednesday, 3:00pm - 6:00pm

In the face of climate change, energy crisis, waste production, and ecological fragmentation, 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 tackle. Instead, historical and local understandings of NELs are overlooked and lost, while international standards and policies impose Western science-based constructs of NELs onto foreign or past contexts.

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 types of lines can be drawn between culture and nature, humans and non-humans, animate and inanimate entities. In other words, we will not assume that humans adapt to one singular Nature. Instead, we will investigate how NELs are actually shaped by cultures and politics (including design and planning), which implies as many ‘natures’.

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

LAN3900HS is not open to students who took LAN2903HS.