Events

Anne Whiston Spirn, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at MIT will speak as part of the Critical Conservation Colloquia 2018 that accompanies the course Power & Place: Culture & Conflict in the Built Environment.

Mill Creek is shaped by all the processes at work in inner-city America. It was laid waste by the flow of water and capital, and by the violence of redevelopment and neglect. Known locally as “The Bottom,” Mill Creek is one of many such “Black Bottoms” in the US. They are at the bottom, both economically and in terms of their low-lying position in the landscape. Here, harsh socio-economic conditions are exacerbated by health and safety hazards posed by a high water table and unstable ground. Landscape literacy is a means for recognizing and redressing those injustices through urban planning and design and community development, just as verbal literacy was a cornerstone of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s