3800000: Alan Berger: Systemic Design and MIT Center Advanced Urbanism

Beschreibung

We have entered into a new era or urban growth and shrinkage whereby the rules have changed and paradigms of urbanism desperately need recalibration to meet today's global challenges. Pressing cultural and environmental concerns are demanding new levels of accountability as we measure ecological performance, energy use, mobility and density relationships, and the deployment of dwindling resources. System Design, a term coined by Alan Berger, will be elucidated as a general framework to assist with the reintegration of disvalued landscapes within our urbanized territories and regional ecologies. Several other systemic concepts will be illustrated through projects by his design lab P-REX at MIT and recent projects from MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism where he is Research Director.

Alan Berger is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he teaches courses open to the entire student body. He is founding director of P-REX lab, at MIT, a research lab focused on environmental problems caused by urbanization, including the design, remediation, and reuse of waste landscapes worldwide.

He is currently Head of the famed City Design and Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He is also Research Director of CAU, MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism.

All of his research and work emphasizes the link between our consumption of natural resources, and the waste and destruction of landscape, to help us better understand how to proceed with redesigning around our wasteful lifestyles for more intelligent outcomes. Unlike conventional practice, there are no scalar limits in his outlook or pedagogy: projects are defined by the extent of the environmental problems being addressed. He coined the term "Systemic Design" to describe the reintegration of disvalued landscapes into our urbanized territories and regional ecologies.

In addition to his award winning books Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America, and Reclaiming the American West, his other books include Designing the Reclaimed Landscape, Nansha Coastal City: Landscape and Urbanism in the Pearl River Delta(with Margaret Crawford). His most recently published books are Systemic Design Can Change the World and Landscape + Urbanism Around the Bay of Mumbai (with Rahul Mehrotra).

He has also established, (in collaboration with USEPA Superfund Region 8 and Tiffany & Company Foundation) the world's first web portal for community-based reclamation design advocacy at waste2place.mit.edu.

Prior to MIT he was Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard-GSD, 2002-2008. He is a Prince Charitable Trusts Fellow of The American Academy in Rome.