The Environment Forum with Sonja Dümpelmann | Trees and the City: A History of Public Health
Date and Time
Photo Credit: Eric Sucar
THE ENVIRONMENT FORUM
Speaker: Sonja Dümpelmann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich)
Moderator: Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University
About the Event
Why do we plant and often protect trees in cities? Throughout history, humans have attributed healthy urban forests with a role in fostering a healthy citizenry. But how has this claim been substantiated, and why and how exactly did trees become integral to the Western idea of what constitutes a healthy city and planet? The presentation shows how trees were incidental and intentional vehicles for better understanding human-environment relationships. Knowledge about trees and their effects on human health and wellbeing was related to urbanization and by extension to colonial expansion and geopolitics. Regardless of the phenomenological, mythical, and therefore often hypothetical, and proto-scientific nature of much early tree knowledge, it had significant impact upon how early design professionals conceived of and shaped the built environment.
About the Speakers
Sonja Dümpelmann is a historian of landscapes and the built environment. She is professor and chair of Environmental Humanities at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Her research and writing focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban environments, especially in Europe and the United States. Of special importance to her work are the relationships between the inside and the outside, i.e. the relationships between architecture and landscape, center and periphery, theory and practice; those in power and those subjected to that power; intent and contingency; and the relationships between social and political processes and landscape transformation.
Dümpelmann is the author of Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin, Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design, and of a book on the Italian landscape architect Maria Teresa Parpagliolo Shephard (VDG Weimar, 2004). Her edited volumes include Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise and Health, Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age (together with Charles Waldheim), Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture (together with John Beardsley), A Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire, Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (together with Dorothee Brantz), and Pückler and America. Dümpelmann has guest-edited special journal issues and has published numerous book chapters, and articles in scholarly and professional journals, including Journal of Urban History, Landscape Journal, Landscape Research, Planning Perspectives, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Stadtbauwelt, Stadt und Grün, Die Gartenkunst, Journal of Landscape Architecture, and Landscript.
Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History in the Department of History at Harvard University, where she teaches the histories of science, climate, colonialism, and environment. She is also an Affiliated Faculty Member in Harvard’s Department of the History of Science, an affiliate of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a Faculty Member of Harvard’s American Studies Program, and is on the Faculty Steering Committee for the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. She serves on the Faculty Executive Board of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and is a Trustee of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first historical society in the United States (1791). A former Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, she has taught at six different institutions on two continents, an island, and a peninsula, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. Back on dry land, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and of the American Philosophical Society in 2020.
About the Series: The Environment Forum
The Environment Forum at the Mahindra Center is convened by Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard University, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, John Cowles Professor of Art and Anthropology at Harvard University. The series is dedicated to exploring new work in the arts and humanities that reframes or reimagines the relationship of humanity to the rest of nature.