Conversations in Cultural Landscape Preservation: Paradoxes of Cultural Landscape Preservation

Join the Urban Heritage Project from the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design for Conversations in Cultural Landscape Preservation, a series of three virtual conversations (May 1 + May 28 + June 25) setting the stage for an in-person symposium (November 14-15, 2024) at the University of Pennsylvania. These talks will be recorded and posted on the UHP website: www.cultural-landscapes.org.

For this first event, independent author and photographer Laura Alice Watt will be in conversation with Randy Mason of the Urban Heritage Project.

The practice of cultural landscape preservation presents big opportunities to expand the reach of preservation. Cultural landscape thinking reckons with the complexity of places continuing to evolve through time and space, and challenges professionals to bring historical, scientific, social, and design intelligence to bear on the future of these places. As both an established idea and as a critical means of reform, cultural landscape ideas and practices deserve deeper exploration. This series of virtual events – and the symposium that follows in November – convenes a range of practitioners, scholars, and policy makers to examine the impact and the potential of cultural landscape work. We invite you to join these ongoing conversations about realizing the potential of cultural landscape as a preservation, creative, and social practice.

Our May 1 conversation with scholar Laura Alice Watt explores her book, The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore, to understand the potentials and limits of cultural landscape concepts and applications. This case raises questions about a range of preservation, design, and policy issues actively contested in managed landscapes everywhere.

Laura Alice Watt was a professor of environmental history and policy at Sonoma State University (SSU), in Northern California, from 2006-21. She received a Fulbright-NSF Arctic Scholars grant in 2020-21 to conduct historical search in the Westfjords of Iceland, hosted by the University Centre of the Westfjords in Ísafjörður. In June 2021, she took early retirement from SSU and established Aspara Consulting ehf. to continue doing historical and environmental research, teaching, and advising, and resettled on the shores of Dýrafjörður near Þingeyri. Her long-term research agenda is to continue to explore the history of protected landscapes to bolster their long-term sustainability in terms of both natural and cultural systems. With a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, she uses landscape as a tool for understanding the complex interactions between people and their environments, tracking historical changes in protected areas as indicators of shifting social dynamics and structures.

Randy Mason is a Professor in the Departments of Historic Preservation and City & Regional Planning. His courses focus on historic preservation planning, urban conservation, history, and cultural landscape studies. Mason's research interests include history and theory of preservation, preservation planning, the economics of preservation, historic site management, and the history and design of memorials. He served as Program Chair from 2009-2017 and Executive Director of PennPraxis from 2014-2017.

The Zoom link will be distributed in advance of the event.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.