Urban Conversations | Climate Resilience and Urban Recovery in Newark's Green Spaces

URBAN CONVERSATIONS

Speaker: Kessie Alexandre, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University

in conversation with Danielle Choi, Harvard GSD

Across the US, cities face the immediate challenges of aging and inadequate water systems due to decades of disinvestment. Given the fragilities of water systems today, cities have turned to urban greening and other nature-based water management strategies to manage the effects of flooding and adapt to a changing climate. In this seminar, Kessie Alexandre will discuss urban greening as a climate resilience strategy in the city of Newark, New Jersey and examine how municipal greening projects naturalize the city’s progression from a landscape of risk and ruin to one of economic redevelopment. She will also consider how urban gardens, which become a part of municipal water plans through greening initiatives, also become spaces through which residents and environmental justice activists articulate memories of and uncertainties about toxic exposure, urban revitalization, and displacement.

Registration is required for this event. Lunch will be provided

About the Speakers

Kessie Alexandre is a 2022-23 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center and an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research organizes around questions of risk and ethics; environmental racism; climate justice and the social implications of climate change adaptation; Black geographies and diaspora; and the politics and ethics of infrastructure.

Danielle Choi is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She teaches in the MLA core studio sequence and leads design research seminars.

About the Series

As our planet becomes increasingly urban, this series seeks to expand our understanding of cities and urbanization across sites and scales. The Urban Conversations aim in particular to link humanistic approaches with spatial investigations. We host public talks, and provide a venue for researchers to share works-in-progress with an interdisciplinary community, in a conversational format.

Urban Conversations is chaired by Bruno Carvalho and Daniel Agbiboa.

This event is co-sponsored with Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative.