LACS Weekly Seminar

The environmental crisis accentuates inequality. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the most vulnerable populations often reside in informal, precarious, or popular settlements, which are more exposed to climate events and generally have less access to infrastructure and ecosystem services. In recent years, designers and urbanists have offered important insights into rethinking informal settlements and developing strategies to improve their inhabitants' quality of life, safety, and opportunities. Today, it is essential to incorporate climate criteria into urban interventions effectively. The presentation will focus on the potential of landscape design and public space as media to restore and improve, adapt and connect, and mitigate and anticipate the transformation of the most vulnerable settlements in the Americas.

About the Speaker

Jeannette Sordi is an architect and urban planner based in New York City. She currently teaches at the New York Institute of Technology and collaborates with the Inter-American Development Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean. Until 2018 she was an Associate Professor of Landscape and Urbanism at Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago de Chile. She holds a Ph.D. in urban planning and design from the University of Genoa (2014) and was a Ph.D. Visiting Student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2011- 2012). Her Ph.D. focused on the genealogy of landscape urbanism and was published as Beyond Urbanism (List, 2014; Sacabana, 2017, Spanish edition). She co-founded Landscape as Urbanism in the Americas in 2015 and was one of the curators of the Chilean XX Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in Valparaiso in 2017.

Publications

Her main publications include the books Andrea Branzi. From Radical Design to Post-Environmentalism (ARQ, 2015), The Camp and the City. Territories of Extraction (List, 2017), Part-time Cities (ARQ, 2019), Ness.doc.2 Landscape as Urbanism in the Americas (Lots, 2020, co-edited with F. Rodriguez and P. Peralta) and Ecological Design. Strategies for the Vulnerable City (IaDB, 2021, 2022, with F. Vera).

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Presented by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program and cosponsored by the Department of Landscape Architecture.