CUDC Fall Lecture Series - Jill Desimini, Cyclical City: Stories of Urban Transformation
28 October 2022 from noon-1pm
In person event at the CUDC, 1309 Euclid Avenue, Suite 200, Cleveland.
Free and open to the public. A light lunch will be served. This event will also be livestreamed over Zoom
Co-sponsored with the Ohio Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (OCASLA). Landscape Architecture Continuing Education System (LA CES) credit pending.
As cities evolve and resources shift with time, spaces within those cities are often left fallow and abandoned. Cyclical City tells the stories behind these sites, from Philadelphia’s Liberty Lands park to Lisbon’s Green Plan, and it looks at the ways in which these narratives can be leveraged toward future engagement and use.
Jill Desimini posits a fundamental role for spatial design practice to transform abandoned urban landscapes through time. She argues for approaches that promote the specific affordances of the land itself (hydrology, vegetation, topography, geology, infrastructural capacity, occupation potential); the importance of cyclical change; and the particularities of the cultural, political, and physical context.
In her lecture, she will explore these themes in five cities—Philadelphia, Berlin, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and Saint Louis—and across centuries, from periods of great upheaval to ones of relative stability and even economic growth. She considers what landscape-driven design can bring to cities losing people and economic resources, how design practice can be more inclusive in a context of market failure, and the ways in which abandoned landscapes can become our commons.
Jill Desimini is a landscape architect and associate professor at the University of Connecticut. She is trained as an architect and landscape architect and has practiced in both fields. Her current research investigates potential futures for abandoned landscapes, with an emphasis on climate and justice.
She is author of Cyclical City: Five Stories of Urban Transformation (University of Virginia Press, 2022), From Fallow: 100 Ideas for Abandoned Urban Landscapes (ORO Editions, 2019) , and co-author of Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). Her work has also appeared in Manifest Journal, Bracket [Takes Action], JAE Online, A Public Space, LA Frontiers, New Geographies 10: Fallow, Journal of Urban History, Landscape Journal, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Scenario Journal, The Journal of Chinese Landscape Architecture, Places, as well as in book chapters on fallowness, urban wilds, land banks, and other related topics.
She holds a Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies from Brown University. Prior to joining UConn, she was Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a designer at Stoss Landscape Urbanism, Atkin Olshin Schade Architects, Wallace, Roberts and Todd, and KieranTimberlake.
Jill Desimini, Cyclical City: Stories of Urban Transformation is the third program in the CUDC’s Fall lecture series, organized around the theme of Cities and Material Landscapes.
