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Film Screening and Lecture: Buried River, Opened Lives: Reflections on the West Philadelphia Landscape Project

Wednesday, April 13, 2016
6:00 pm

Meyerson Hall, B3, 210 South 34th Street, Philadelphia

Presented By

About

Free and open to the public

PennDesign welcomes Anne Whiston Spirn, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for a screening of short films and Q&A about the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP), an inner-city community near the University of Pennsylvania. Cited as a "Model of Best Practice" at a White House summit in 1999 for forty leading "Scholars and Artists in Public life," the WPLP links landscape design, community development, and urban stormwater management through an action research program integrating research, teaching and community service. Its goals include development of strategic landscape plans to enhance environmental quality, implementation of landscape improvements to stimulate economic development, and mutual strengthening of public school curricula and undergraduate and professional education. The WPLP films tell the story of a variety of people engaged with the project over the past three decades, in their own words and include stories of community residents, Spirn's students, and students and teachers at Sulzberger Middle School. 

Says Spirn, "Human survival depends upon adapting ourselves and our landscapes – cities, buildings, roadways, rivers, fields, forests – in new, life-sustaining ways, shaping places that are functional, sustainable, meaningful, and artful, places that help us feel and understand the relationship of the natural and the built. My career as an author, photographer, landscape architect, and teacher has been dedicated to this goal."

Director of WPLP since 1987, PennDesign alumna and former faculty member Anne Spirn has an international reputation as the preeminent scholar working at the intersection of landscape architecture and environmental planning. Her first book, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, won the President's Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in 1984, has been translated into two other languages, and remains a standard university text. Her new book, The Language of Landscape, sets out a theory of landscape and aesthetics that takes account of both human interpretive frameworks and natural process. She is credited with playing a seminal role in applying theories and principles of ecological landscape design to urban areas. Her path-breaking scholarly research and writing applies ecological principles to urban settings. Spirn received a B.A. from Radcliffe College and MLA from Penn.  Sprin was previously the chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn (succeeding Ian McHarg) from 1986-1993 and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning from 1986-2000. She was also Co-Director of Urban Studies from 1996-2000. 

The film screening and lecture is being presented by PennPraxis, the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at Penn, and Penn Urban Studies.  The Netter Center was a project sponsor from 1995-2000.