CCNY: Everyday Ecologies: design within many natures.

Everyday Ecologies has been organized by faculty in the Master of Landscape Architecture Program at the City College of New York. The event is sponsored by the City College of New York, the NYC Urban Field Station’s Science of the Living City Program, and Gowanus Canal Conservancy.

The future of the human species is bound up in how we design, plan, and live within emergent extremes in ecosystems further stressed by polarized relationships. Paralysis in the face of contentious issues, uncritical acceptance of traditional roles, sectors, and hierarchies, and unquestioned long-held truths inhibit development of new ideas and approaches to design effectively. To instigate new approaches, we have invited designers, planners, historians, and social scientists to talk about Everyday Ecosystems: the boundless communities we are part of—a cocktail of cultures crossing economic and class strata with overlapping gender, racial, and spiritual identities—that complement but also compete with each other and conflict internally for rights and means to perpetuate their cultural identities, social relations, and environmental resource needs and desires.

Speakers will present the idea or theory that one of their projects is contested through design, planning, or projective research and analysis. Together, we aim to develop principles that will establish a foothold from which to launch new approaches and ideas for changing the complex world future generations will inherit.

Speakers

Thaisa Way, Tim Maly, Kate Orff, Heather McMillen, Elizabeth Hénaff, Lindsay Campbell, Kristina Hill, Justin Garrett Moore, Andrew Bauer, Liz Barry, Andrea Parker, Sean Weiss, Julia Czerniak, Maria Villalobos, Sierra Bainbridge, Joy Bailey Bryant, Erika Svendsen, Denise Hoffman Brandt.