The Arnold Arboretum's sesquicentennial Director's Series traces the Arnold’s significance in the landscape architecture movement, value for the people of Boston, and leadership in creating global connections between plants and people.

Panelists include:

• Dr. Michelle Kondo, Research Social Scientist, UDSA-Forest Service

• Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, Chief of Environment, Energy, and Open Space, City of Boston

• Laurence Cotton, Consulting Producer, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing...

Media and video art practice of the last twenty years coincided with the harrowing expansion of climate degradation. While the effects of climate change had been anticipated before 2000, they took shape ubiquitously and lethally post-2000, bringing new challenges about whether and how to imagine a future for shared life on the planet. These effects coincided also with a deeper historical understanding of how we got here, tracking the history of extractive economies and their imbrication with the forces of gender, race, colonialism, and a human-centered anthropocentricism.

This...

The upcoming national investment in infrastructure is most welcomed; it will add jobs and stimulate the economy. However, it is imperative for the infrastructure to be sustainable, resilient, and mitigate climate change. How can that be ensured?

Since its founding in 2008, the research at the Zofnass Program has focused on providing tools for designers and planners to measure the sustainability and resilience of infrastructure. Recently, the focus is on expanding the tools for mitigating climate change. Today, the outcome of the Zofnass Program empowers both sides: the design...

Design Impact – Following the Sun: Design Futures at the Intersection of Health, Equity and Climate Change is a global virtual summit sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Design Alumni Council. Launching Thursday, September 23, the summit brings together an outstanding roster of global leaders to share their work and vision at the intersection of health, climate change and equity. This inspiring, two-day virtual summit transcends regional and national boundaries to unite our global community of practice, challenging us to use design as a tool for actionable,...

As the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow, Leslie M. Harris is completing “Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History.” She uses memoir and family, urban, and environmental histories to explore the multiple meanings of New Orleans in the nation, from its founding through its uncertain future amid climate change.

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Almost 200,000 acres of land in the fertile Mezquital Valley are irrigated with the untreated sewage of Mexico City. Every drop of rain, urban runoff, industrial effluent, and sewage in Mexico City is sent to the Mezquital Valley through a 60 kilometer pipe. Soils in this valley have been continuously irrigated with urban wastewater since 1901, longer than any other soil in the world. The capacity of these soils to produce conditions in which agriculture can be practiced safely and produce healthy crops depends on a complex negotiation between soil...

This lecture explores whether it is possible to achieve both social justice and environmental sustainability in efforts to mitigate urban flood risk. The expanding scale of urban flooding under climate change has renewed interest in large-scale restoration projects that make room for water in metro centers. However, ecologically functioning green infrastructure – unleashed rivers, sprawling wetlands – is inconsistent with the current governance landscape of fragmented local governments seeking to maximize local land values and minimize affordable housing. Moreover, even...

Today, public discussion and policy focuses on “aging in place” as a way to improve quality of life and reduce costs. However, in part because of socioeconomic differences and structural inequalities, not all older adults can live in or move to age-supportive communities, neighborhoods, or homes that match their values and needs. Differences in access to places to age well can take the form of spatial inequalities, such as inadequate market rate housing for older adults on fixed incomes.

'Co-sponsored by the Harvard Joint Center for...

In this workshop, participants will work in groups to creatively respond to climate change with discussion and prompting from Susan Israel, architect, artist, climate communicator, and social entrepreneur. Their efforts will result in a collaborative commitment to change, a talisman of sorts, represented in three dimensions.

Cost: $30 for members; $40 for nonmembers; $20 for students.

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Separating land and water is not just an act of division; it is also an act of creation. It creates land and water from ubiquitous wetness, defining them on either side of a line. It is one of the first acts of design, setting out a ground of habitation with a line that has largely been naturalized in features such as the coastline, the riverbank, and the water’s edge. These features are subjected to artistic representations, scientific inquiry, infrastructural engineering, and landscape design with little awareness of the act that brought them...

In conjunction with the 2017 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design, a panel discussion with some of those most closely involved with realizing the High Line will allow a deeper understanding of its value as an urban design prototype being disseminated and adopted worldwide.

The panel will feature John Alschuler (Chairman, HR&A), ...

“The vision behind, and motivation for my work is to explore and use architecture as a medium to strengthen cultural and individual confidence, to support local economies and to foster the ecological balance. Joyful living is a creative and active process and I am deeply interested in the sustainable development of our society and our built environment. For me, sustainability is a synonym for beauty: a building that is harmonious in its design, structure, technique and use of materials, as well as with the location, the environment, the user, the socio-...

Public parks are a source of civic identity for the communities they serve – inclusivity and authenticity are crucial. Similarly, memorials are bastions of democratic exchange and act as repositories of our cultural past and evolution. Thomas Woltz will present projects from the portfolio of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW) that demonstrate the power of the firm’s research-based design to reframe our relationship with civic, ecological, and cultural systems within the public realm. Lastly, Thomas will present NBW projects that...

Dr. Yvonne Cagle is a NASA Astronaut and Family Physician. In 2008, Dr. Cagle retired as a Colonel in the USAF where she served as a Senior... Read more about Dr. Yvonne Cagle

What can be done to reduce the cost of housing, particularly in the United States? To help answer this question, we will bring together a diverse mix of people... Read more about Housing Symposium, “Reframing Housing Development: How Changes in Design, Construction, and Regulation Could Reduce the Cost of Housing”

The Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) retrofitted its headquarters, a pre-1940s house in Cambridge, MA, into a first-of-its-kind test case to demonstrate unprecedented levels of building efficiency and promote substantial shifts in the design and operation of existing buildings. Dubbed “HouseZero,” the project aims to prove that ultra-efficient retrofits can, indeed, be achieved...

Drawing on their work examining the costs and consequences of racial segregation and the concentration of poverty and affluence as well as the... Read more about Mark Joseph and Amy Khare, "Succeeding Where Mixed-Income Transformation Falls Short: A Path to Equity and Inclusion in Our Cities

Danielle Choi is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She teaches in the Masters of Landscape Architecture core... Read more about Kiley Fellow Lecture: Danielle Choi

What if your host truly didn’t want you to visit? Found you intolerable, in fact, and didn’t want you to stay? You’d think that you’d be kicked out, but... Read more about Of Monarchs and Milkweed: A Story of Coevolution, Cultural History, and Conservation

Join Manager of Plant Production Tiffany Enzenbacher to learn how to propagate woody plants from fall cuttings. Students will collect and stick... Read more about Growing Woody Plants from Hardwood Cuttings