- Wednesday 7th February, 6:30 – 8:00pm
- University of Greenwich, 10-11 Stockwell Street, Lecture Theatre 11_0004
Launch:
Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays (Routledge 2017) will be launched at the University of Greenwich on Wednesday 7 February. The editors (Ed Wall and Tim Waterman) and several contributors (Peg Rawes, Douglas Spencer and Paul Cureton) will discuss the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice. The event will be followed by a drinks reception at University of Greenwich, Stockwell Street.
Book:
Landscape and Agency explores how landscape, as an idea, a visual medium and a design practice, is organized, appropriated and framed in the transformation of places, from the local to the global. It seeks to show how the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice can fundamentally change our engagement with future landscapes. The book’s international contributors are concerned with the many ways in which the relationship between the ideas and practices of landscape, and social and subjective formations and material processes, are invested with agency. They critically examine the role of landscape in processes of contemporary urban development, environmental debate and political agendas and they explore how these relations can be analysed and rethought through dialogue between theory and practice.
Speakers:
Tim Waterman is senior lecturer and landscape architecture theory coordinator at the University of Greenwich and a tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He writes for a wide range of professional and academic publications on the subjects of power, democracy, taste, foodways, and everyday life.
Ed Wall is the Academic Leader Landscape at the University of Greenwich, London, Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Milano (DiAP) and City of Vienna Visiting Professor for urban culture, public space and the future – urban equity and the global agenda (TU Wien/SKuOR). His research and design practice focuses on landscape, public space and cities. He is the founding editor of the design research journal Testing-Ground (2015). In 2007 Ed established Project Studio. Award winning projects have been published and exhibited widely, including at the Architecture Foundation, Royal Academy, Biennale of Landscape Urbanism, London Festival of Architecture and the Van Alen Institute.
Douglas Spencer teaches history and theory of architecture at the Architectural Association and University of Westminster. His recently published The Architecture of Neoliberalism reflects on how the production and experience of contemporary architecture can be understood socially and politically. He has contributed essays for numerous publications including The Journal of Architecture, Radical Philosophy, Architectural Design, e-flux, AA Files, New Geographies, and Volume, contributed chapters for collections such as Architecture and Feminisms; Landscape and Agency; This Thing Called Theory; and Architecture Against the Post-Political.
Peg Rawes is Professor in Architecture and Philosophy and Programme Director of the Masters in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Recent publications include: Equal By Design (co-authored with Beth Lord, in collaboration with Lone Star Productions, 2016); ‘Housing Biopolitics and Care’ in Critical and Clinical Cartographies, ed. A. Radman and Heidi Sohn (2017); ‘Humane and Inhumane Ratios’ in The Architecture Lobby’s Aysmmetric Labors (2016); Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts (co-ed., 2016); Relational Architectural Ecologies (ed., 2013).
Paul Cureton is a Senior Lecturer in Design (People, Products, Places) ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University. Paul is also a Senior Research Fellow in Landscape & Infrastructure, CATiD Research Centre, led by Kathryn Moore, Birmingham City University, UK. He holds a PhD in Landscape Representation from Manchester School of Architecture. Primary research interests include Future Cities, GIS, UAVs, mapping, modelling and digital fabrication. Recent publications include a monograph; ‘Strategies for Landscape Representation: Digital and Analogue Techniques’ (Routledge 2016) and the co-authored governmental working paper with Nick Dunn ‘A Visual History of the Future’ (Foresight, BIS 2014). Cureton & Dunn are due to release a new work, ‘Future Cities: A Visual History’ (Bloomsbury 2019).