In the Forests: Cities and the Future of Design in Collaboration with the More-Than-Human World with Christina Shivers & Andrew Todd
Talk
Atlanta Design Festival, Fourth Ward Offices Atlanta
405 N Angier Ave NE
Atlanta, GA, 30308
October 14, 2023 | 10:40-11:20 am
This event will discuss the past, present, and future of ecology in cities today. With a specific focus on forests and wild urban spaces, speakers Andrew Todd and Christina Shivers will investigate the political implications possible within emergent urban ecologies, while exploring the potential for design to develop interconnections between nature and society.
This talk is presented by Villa Albertine, as part of City/Cité – Towards Earthly Cities, Creative Futures Conference 2023 / Atlanta Design Festival and France-Atlanta.
Creative Futures Conference is a 2-day conference (October 14-15, 2023) at the new Fourth Ward Offices along the Beltline. Registration required for entry.
Christina Shivers is an academic, architect, and musician whose research broadly focuses on the intersection of environmental and economic thought specifically within the design disciplines. Her PhD dissertation investigated the interconnection of design and resource extraction in Canada and the United States through researching the history of surface mining and land reclamation. This work developed an analysis of the ways in which the architectural, landscape, and planning professions influenced environmental policy at the national and international scales. Christina is also a visual artist and electronic musician. She holds a B.A. in Music with a concentration in Music Theory and Performance from Florida State University, a Masters of Architecture degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a PhD in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is currently the 2023 Ventulett NEXT Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture.
Andrew Todd is an architect, winner of the WAN Award for the best wooden building in the world for the Hardelot Elizabethan Theatre. Anchored by his own roots making plant-based buildings, and by the example of his forest manager father, he takes us on a journey which looks at trees and forests from a kaleidoscopic range of viewpoints: as solid matter for building shelter, as ongoing habitat for timeless tribes, as the seat of Western origin myths. His latest book, The Clearing (Nybrogade Press, 2023, Denmark) takes us to the contested, multi-layered forests of Old and New England, to the tropical rain forest (a scene of our civilisational endgame), to ultra-modern (yet animist) Japan, to harmonious and innovative wooden villages in Austria, and to the terraformed, zombie-forested Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic.
About City/Cité – Towards Earthly Cities – Atlanta, Oct 11-22, 2023
City/Cité – Towards Earthly Cities (Atlanta, Oct 11-22, 2023) is a program inviting professionals from Atlanta and Marseille and the public to learn together about urban ecology and the future of our cities. Associate curator: Alexandre Field (Marseille).
