Strategies of Coexistence

You are cordially invited to attend the guest lecture by Bianca Maria Rinaldi:

Date: Friday, March 15th 2024
Time: 6:00 PM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4 LT427 Design Forum

The rapid loss of global biodiversity and the concentration of high ecological diversity in cities have directed current theoretical debate and practice in landscape architecture toward explorations of the role of open space design in fostering and enhancing the presence of animal and plant species in urban settings. The goal is to make cities more open and inclusive by defining modes and spaces of coexistence between humans and more-than-humans. The construction of urban landscapes in which all living species can exist in mutual respect results in a widespread presence of wild and apparently uncultivated areas in which biodiversity can thrive undisturbed. The urban public, however, do not always perceive the ecological value of such spaces, considering them abandoned and disordered and thus unsuitable for the urban environment.

Referring to the positions of theorists such as Elizabeth Meyer, Marc Treib and Martin Prominski and through a critical reading of recent landscape architectural projects, the lecture will highlight the role of landscape architectural projects in fostering a shift of perspective in the perception of spaces for more-than-humans. By orchestrating spaces that respond to the needs of all species while, at the same time, constructing an emotional and aesthetic experience for visitors who traverse them, landscape architectural projects can contribute to solicit an aesthetic sensibility for the wild areas preferred by more-than-humans, fostering a widespread and shared awareness for the need to protect and promote biological diversity, and the urgency of doing so.

Bianca Rinaldi is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Politecnico di Torino. Before joining Politecnico, Bianca has held teaching positions at the University of Camerino, Italy, at the University of Technology in Graz and at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna. She has held visiting positions at the National University of Singapore and at the Leibniz University Hanover. Bianca’s work has been supported with fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Trustees for Harvard University, and the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation.

Her research interests revolve around four main topics: cross-cultural interactions in landscape architecture history and, particularly, the role of China in the evolution of Western garden art in the 17th-19th century; twentieth-century landscape architecture and transnational histories, with a focus on the Global South; the relationship between history and contemporary landscape architecture; urban natures and urban transformations. On these topics, she published and lectured widely. In 2012, her book The Chinese Garden: Garden Types for Contemporary Landscape Architecture (2011) was awarded a J.B. Jackson Prize by the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Bianca serves as a member of the editorial board of JoLA-Journal of Landscape Architecture, as a member of the Advisory Board of the Society of Architecture Historians Landscape Chapter, and as a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Garden Art and Landscape Architecture of the Leibniz University of Hanover. For her global knowledge of landscape architecture, she was selected as a nominator for the first two editions of the biennial Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize.