Segregation and Resistance in America’s Urban Landscapes Symposium

Building on the Dumbarton Oaks Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies, particularly, the 2019 Colloquium on “Landscapes of Enslavement,” our GLS 2020 symposium “Segregation and Resistance in America’s Urban Landscapes” brings scholars together to engage with the urban landscape and environment in the Americas. This year, due to the COVID19 regulations, we have re-imagined the two-day symposium as a series of monthly virtual events to be shared over the summer months. This allows us to share the collective scholarship broadly and most significantly, more amenable to the virtual environment that we find ourselves in at this moment. The legacies of segregation, apartheid, and colonialism as they construct inequitable land use in cities are essential domains of study for landscape historians. Our scholars interrogate the means by which inequities, displacement, and spatial violence have informed the creation, development, and use of spaces and sites in the public realm of American cities. This scholarship contributes to a broader effort to expand landscape and garden history to actively engage in the scholarship of race, identity, and difference, within the frameworks of democracy and the urban public realm.

The 2020 GLS Symposium Summer Series will be comprised of three virtual events held monthly in July, August, and September. Each month, three pre-recorded papers will available for listening via Dumbarton Oaks’ YouTube collection. At the close of each month, we will host a facilitated discussion on the papers. A facilitator will lead the discussion with the authors and an invited discussant. The discussion will be offered in the format of a Zoom Webinar allowing the audience to ask questions via a chat format. We invite you to participate by listening to the pre-recorded papers and joining our facilitated discussions each month.

Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium Virtual Summer Series Schedule

Session 2: “Counternarratives and Resistance”Papers available online: July 25, 2020Discussion: Monday, August 17; 4:00-5:30 pm EST Discussion Facilitator: Elizabeth Meyer (University of Virginia)

• Vyta Baselice (George Washington University), “Following the Concrete Supply Chain: Quarries, and Environmental Racism in the Lehigh Valley”

• Alison Hirsch (University of Southern California), “Urban Markets/Rural Slums”

• David Torres-Rouff (UC, Merced) and Verenize Arceo (UW-Madison), “Communal Gardens, Defensive Design, and Urban Apartheid in Chinatown: Merced, CA, 1870–1910”

Session 3: “Segregation as Discursive Practice”Papers available online: August 21Discussion: Monday, September 14; 4:00-5:30 pm ESTDiscussion Facilitator: Nathan Connolly (Johns Hopkins University)

• Heather Dorries (University of Toronto), “The Uses of Stories on Algonquin Territory”

• Zannah Matson (University of Toronto), “Landscape Hierarchies and Spatial Inequality in the Recursive Fold of Coloniality”

• Sharone Tomer (Virginia Tech), “A Landscape of Dissonance: Erasing Blackness in Suburban Appalachia”