Water Related Resilience
LARCH 297 | Fall 2021 | Monday-Wednesday-Friday (reading day) - 1:15-2:25 pm
Course Description:
The water you drink and bath in is a thread that ties people to communities, ecologies, and the physics of the planet. It is a medium through which heat moves in the atmosphere and the ocean and thus plays a significant role in the dynamics of our changing climate. Its characteristics, temperature, PH, salinity, and nutrient loads determine the viability of ecosystems and food systems. It is the stuff of flood, drought and other disasters impacting ecologies, societies, and economies. The prevalence of pollution, scarcity of clean water, and vulnerability to water related hazards often signal social and economic imbalances, racism, and other human failings.
This interdisciplinary seminar provides students a foundation in water related resilience. Water related resilience re-imagines the human relationship to water to foster the continued function of ecologies on which life and society depend, to ensure equitable access to clean water, and to ensure human systems, cultures, and economies can maintain their essential functions in the face of evolving water related hazards. Achieving this requires the collaboration of persons in all disciplines, from science, design, and engineering to business, communications, and arts.
This course combines aspects of physical and social science with ecology and design to provide students in all disciplines functional knowledge of water related resilience and skills that can be applied to their work and making a difference in our world. The cross-disciplinary knowledge and experience this course provides will enhance students’ ability to be effective interdisciplinary collaborators regardless of their disciplinary workspace, and to assist in making our world more water resilient. This course will supplement readings with online materials (videos, study guides) to maximize time for discussion in the classroom. One of the three course days will be dedicated as a reading day to allow for this work and for office hours.
Poster for LARCH 297
Flyer Text:
The summer of 2021 has seen drought, flood, wildfire, crop failures and countless other water related calamities. Water related resilience re-imagines the human relationship to water to foster the continued function of ecologies on which life and society depend, to ensure equitable access to clean water, and to ensure human systems, cultures, and economies can maintain their essential functions in the face of evolving water related hazards. This interdisciplinary seminar will ground you in the physical and social science of water related resilience and give students in all disciplines the foundation to engage and apply their own disciplinary knowledge to build equitable, ecologically sound, and resilient futures.
Coastal Adaptation
LARCH 414
Coming Spring 2021
Penn State is selected as one of five competing teams!
Course Blurb:
This studio will develop Penn State’s entry into the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) 2021 Design Competition focused on Hampton, Virginia, USA. Penn State is one of five cometitively selected teams. CERF is engaged with the City of Hampton and community partners, and anticipates winning entries having a real-world impact on coastal adaptation decision making. Our proposed project development process combines social history, ecology, design, and engineering, and will expose students to social science research methods. We will attend to the complex intersection of human, physical, and biological factors that shape design for coastal adaptation. Penn State faculty Andy Cole (PSU Landscape Architecture) and Caitlin Grady (PSU Civil Engineering) will support the studio in this work, and a series of presentations will be used to provide a primer on coastal processes.
We will examine how the regions complex social and racial history shapes decision making. Hampton is now remembered as the first place Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619. With the assistance of historians Michael Thurston (Salve Regina University) and Alanna Casey (California Coastal Commission) we will explore how successive generations of selective histories combined with housing and other policies shaped the contemporary landscape and our perceptions of it. We will critically analyze and seek to address the ways in which conventional stakeholder processes used for coastal adaptation may perpetuate structural racism. We will contemplate the expansion of the definition of stakeholder to include the regions wider significance to now dispersed and dislocated populations.
Preliminary work with CERF and CERFs community partners will take place prior to the studio, with preparations for an anticipated community visualization survey. This survey will build on visualization methods previously applied in Portsmouth Rhode Island, USA. Students will have access to and the opportunity to learn skills associated with a LiDAR based city model (examples from the Portsmouth project can be seen at www.peterstempel.com, additional information and updates regarding the studio will also be posted).
Students taking the studio will all complete CITI research ethics training so that they may participate in analysis of qualitative data that will be used to inform our project. We will develop and elaborate possible adaptation strategies using a series of short low stakes projects that allow a wide berth for imagination prior to formation of design teams. The studio will be remote and online. Conditions permitting, Peter Stempel will create opportunities for optional socially distanced face to face social interaction. Some funding will be available to allow students to attend the CERF conference in 2021 as representatives of the studio.
Defusing Doomsday
LARCH 424/510
Course Blurb:
Landscape Architects, Graphic Designers, And Environmental Scientists are engaged in complex societal questions regarding natural and technological risks and the effects of infrastructural and environmental racism. This course is designed to support the creation of non-traditional forms of real-world science communication addressing these topics. Students will create a semester-long project that leverages their unique social and cultural perspectives, concerns, and expertise with readings and seminar discussions that ground their work in social science research and criticism. This combination of practice and theory is designed to help students navigate Effects of cultural values and other factors that alter perceptions of scientific communication. Students will engage with real ethical dilemmas of scientific rhetoric, create persuasive communications, and make a difference in our world.
Video introduction for Defusing Doomsday, Fall 2020