Terraforming in the Eastern Forest: Spatial Practices for and Against Planetary Regeneration

Geoengineering has been put forward as a necessary and inevitable response to climate change; however, many critics have argued that this proposal for planetary action is merely an extension of the same logics of modernity and capitalism that have produced the climate crisis in the first place. This dissertation identifies an alternative approach to climate manipulation, dubbed planetary gardening — encompassing practices such as regenerative agriculture, permaculture, afforestation and other acts of multispecies care with carbon sequestration benefits — which arise from or are compatible with counter-modern and relational philosophies. Collectively, these modern and counter-modern practices compose a broader, contested field of terraforming activities at work in shaping the planetary landscape. The relational philosophical tradition extends from the Romantic era forward to pragmatism and contemporary STS and multispecies discourses and is allied with tactics of knowing such as nature writing and nature connection, which aid in cultivating a relational sensibility.

This project proposes that these philosophical premises and knowledge-generating tactics can aid in identifying, appreciating, and synthesizing regenerative and other carbon sequestration efforts into a more substantial agenda for alternative climate action. Central to this alternative approach is a shift away from a reductionist global perspective as the primary venue for climate knowledge and toward an embrace of more localized perspectives that can narrate situated metabolisms, affective relations, and capabilities for action among a range of actors. The radically qualitative modes of knowing offered by environmental writers provide a prime tool for uncovering these possibilities. To draw these various threads together and emphasize their material consequences, the concept of spatial practice is employed to describe as the ways a particular cultural or (sub)cultural form of life imagines and acts in the world. In the case of dominant forms of modernity, their spatial practices are fractured and specialized into specialized subcultures, a fracturing that contributes to the current planetary crises. Meanwhile, the counter-modern spatial practices synthesized here tend toward a greater accessibility and generality useful for producing metabolically sound ways of life from a carbon perspective. Further, their heterogeneity is useful for imagining an adaptive and pluralistic "ecology" of practices tuned toward local environmental and cultural contexts but with a greater potential for carbon balance. To explore the links between the local and planetary that this investigation posits are central to more efficacious climate action, the dissertation focuses on the deciduous forest in the Eastern United States, a region that facilitates deep reading of intersecting landscape conditions and practices, and speculative imagining of what more comprehensive application of regenerative multispecies spatial practices might afford environmentally and culturally. Case studies of several of these multispecies practices applicable to the landscape of Virginia, are developed through analysis of interviews with farmers, foresters, conservationists, and community members.

Cybernetic Environment: Uncontrollability and non-communication for a future of coexistence

This research constructs a field of inquiry – the cybernetic environment – between sciences, engineering, arts, and design. It interrogates and investigates the underlying mode of thought in emerging environmental practices revolving around cybernetic technologies – that is, environmental sensing, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics – in light of contemporary posthumanism cognition and more-than-human ontological concerns across disciplines. Emerging cybernetic practices across fields pose challenges which have been largely understudied, and may transform the ways in which we understand cybernetics, a 70-year-old concept.

In his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), Norbert Wiener first publicly used the term “cybernetics” to refer to recursive and self-regulating mechanisms across biological and mechanical systems. Cybernetics positions communication – the exchange of information – at the center of control. This study offers an alternative interpretation of cybernetics – recursive and self-regulating mechanisms – in a non-communicative framework suggested by contemporary posthumanist thought.

This research argues that many concepts in contemporary environmental discourse, such as adaptive management, responsive landscapes, and smart cities, operate within the paradigm of the cybernetic system, but not in the paradigm of the cybernetic environment. They imagine the environment as systems and apply cybernetic thinking to optimize and control them. In contrast, the cybernetic environment paradigm emphasizes that the environment outside a system is not a homogeneous space, but a mesh of objects, assemblages, and mental processes that are withdrawn and reserved from human access. In this framework, which emphasizes the inability to communicate and wield control between objects, cybernetic thinking is no longer about control, but is instead a logic of coexistence with and attuning to more-than-human objects around us. In addition, cybernetic environments become reserves of great open-endedness and futures we cannot now imagine.

Life in the New Town: The Planning and Social Implications of Morocco’s New Towns Experiment

Fatmah Behbehani is a graduate of the Ph.D. in the Constructed Environment program, housed in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning. Her dissertation examined the return of the new town planning model as a solution to urban and informal growth in Morocco.

Since the early 20th century, the new town model has been persistently offered up by planners and policy makers as the panacea for all urban ills from rapid population growth to environmental degradation. As a result, new town developments continue to affect the lives and livelihoods of millions around the world. Yet scholarship on planning and developing new towns is predominantly approached from a technical perspective, dominated by the view point of elite professionals, program evaluators and political actors involved. The lived experiences and the voices of those inhabiting a newly built environment are seldom considered. 

Utilizing Morocco’s 2004 New Towns Program as a case study, Fatmah’s dissertation examines the new town as an urbanization strategy by focusing on how new town dwellers adapt and contribute to a newly constructed environment. She suggests that an understanding of the lived experiences of new town residents in two Moroccan new towns (Tamesna and Tamansourt) can provide valuable data for understanding the effects of rational planning on everyday life. A central question to her work asks: what constitutes a new town (medina jadida) in contemporary Morocco based on the perspectives of its everyday residents?

The dissertation identifies a clear mismatch between what elite professionals and local residents expect from a contemporary new town in the Moroccan context—a phenomenon that has led to significant challenges in the planning, development and occupation of new towns Tamesna and Tamansourt. Moreover, the dissertation highlights how personal and collective adaptations and the emergence of an effective informal economy have contributed to the progress and development of the two studied new towns. Finally, in relation to policy, the work offers five key principles and strategies for effectively planning and managing contemporary new towns in Morocco now and in the future. 

Committee

Primary Advisor and Chair: Ellen M. Bassett, Ph.D.

Committee Members: Hassan Radoine, Ph.D. and Sheila Crane, Ph.D.

Former Education 

University of Virginia, Masters of Urban and Environmental Planning (2015)

Kuwait University; Bachelors in Architecture (2013)

Entangled histories for indeterminate futures: racial capitalisms, resistances, and space in central Virginia

This project aims to illuminate present conditions in Charlottesville through the lens of sedimented and spatialized racial histories, with the intent to destabilize currently dominant founding narratives. I use a varied set of research approaches, including archival, genealogical, field observational, and activist research methods to probe the relational histories of Central Virginia and beyond. I engage framing theories that draw out relationships across scales and through time, including fractal logics and figure/ground based readings of social and spatial dynamics to structure this work.  Through this approach, I aspire to engender real shifts in perception and action in the lived, embodied world; opening up windows for surprise and the ongoing politicization of perception.  I hope this work will open doors to rethinking spatial practice, restructuring landscape-related pedagogies, exploring parallel presents and dreaming fantastical futures for the everyday by exploring spatial-social-racial relations in the Charlottesville area and beyond.

I am a woman who has spent most of my life in Virginia. I came to the field of landscape architecture via undergraduate studies in architecture, and stayed in Charlottesville to practice at Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape architects. My current work comes from a lifetime of accumulating questions.  In my education and in design practice, if racism was discussed at all, it was often in term of a Black/white binary. I found myself afloat in narratives of founding fathers, “beautiful” places, celebratory turnings from controversy, and ongoing dissonances between what was said about American exceptionalism against the disparities I saw in every corner.  In part this work is a personal grounding- using a relational approach across multiple spatial and temporal scales to write myself into my own existence.  What does it mean to be a person who intervenes in the landscape, with particular historical groundings, and how should I define my commitments and responsibilities to the places where I work?  At a larger scale, I seek to connect across multiple disciplines for both teaching and research: to bridge urban history (which tends toward the modern and the urban), and landscape history (which tends toward the antebellum and the rural); to connect spatial, the enacted, creative and the everyday to the historical, the structural, and the illusory. 

GOVERNANCE FROM WITHIN IN SÃO PAULO’S FAVELAS

Favela is a term used to categorize self-built urban communities in Brazilian cities that are widely considered precarious, disordered, chaotic, and illegal. These characterizations have contributed to the stigmatization and criminalization of favelas and their residents, totaling over 11 million people in Brazil today. Drawing from six months of ethnographic fieldwork in two favelas in the city of São Paulo, this project provides a detailed understanding of favela residents’ efforts towards a process of self-governance through the production and maintenance of space, through everyday practices and collective mobilization. The analyzed cases offer insights into residents’ modes and levels of grouping and action, including the family as the most fundamental unit of self-governance efforts in these two communities. While grasping with favelas’ logic of spatial formation and organization, this dissertation contributes to the conceptualization of favelas as sites of resistance and political claims for the materialization of favela residents’ fundamental rights as Brazilian citizens.

Regulating Wildness: Planning Discourses of Weeds and Wildlife in Washington, D.C.

Plants and animals appearing in great numbers where humans do not want them complicate and challenge discourses of order and the singularity of human intentionality embedded in urban planning theory and practice. What do these heterotopic shadow species that are outwardly reviled yet intimately connected to humans provide in opposition and as complements to more formal, ordered, and controlled aspects of cities, both ecologically and experientially? My approach to studying this topic includes an explication of theoretical positions towards urban “natures” evident in contemporary planning scholarship, and textual and visual analyses of how weeds and wildlife appear in Washington, D.C. planning and regulatory discourses at particular moments in the city’s history. The District of Columbia plays a significant role in shaping American planning history via the exemplary McMillan Plan, and also has intrinsically interesting historical and contemporary regulations and plans responding directly to heterotopic plants and animals, among them the 1899 Weed Removal Act and the 2010 Wildlife Protection Act. Through these cases, this dissertation argues the need to plan for urban plants and animals in relational ways that acknowledge both social construction of “natures” and immediacy and importance of nonhuman materiality as part of urban life.

'The City and its Image' — the relationship between architecture and visual culture in 1930s Shanghai

Kelly’s dissertation specifically focusing on how skyscrapers, shikumen/lilong, and hutments were actively shaped by the popular pictorial 时代漫画 or Modern Sketch.

This investigation of 1930s Shanghai is structured by three overlapping threads of analysis. First, as a concomitant relationship between the city as built (architecture) and images of the built environment from Shanghai pictorials (visual culture). Second, as embedded within and indebted to myriad local political discourses, social relations, and cultural practices. Third, as a constellation of linked ideas, images, and concepts. Considered together these three threads of analysis operate as part of a system of meanings grounded in interrelated structures. Based on this theoretical scaffolding this research uncovers new historical information found in the connections, relations, and fissures in this system of meaning. Chapters mobilize these threads to examine three case studies to explore 1930s Shanghai: Shanghai slums, the lilong and shikumen, and notorious views of the Shanghai skyline.

Based on archival research and field work completed in Shanghai, her dissertation demonstrates how, in representations of political, ethical, and intellectual struggles, artworks strategically referenced Shanghai’s urban landscape and built forms. These images, a locus of cultural and historical change, represent a rich archive of city spaces. Through such an analysis her research shows how cities are produced both as built and through visual culture.

Planning Liminalities: Mapping Black Trans Spaces in Washington, D.C., - An Ethnographic Study

Shahab Albahar is a scholar and practitioner with a critical, intersectional approach that spans urban policy, environmental design, ecological restoration, and social advocacy. His doctoral research at UVA, titled "Planning Liminalities: Mapping Black Trans Spaces in Washington, D.C.," provides a nuanced examination of urban spaces through the lens of queer ethnography. The dissertation focuses on the lived experiences of Black transgender women in Washington, D.C., particularly around a significant locale known as the Stroll, where community formation and sexual labor intersect. Albahar's work explores how these liminal spaces are constructed, negotiated, and reclaimed within stringent urban planning paradigms, emphasizing the multifaceted experiences of these marginalized communities often overlooked in urban studies. His study advocates for more inclusive and intersectional approaches in future planning practices, aiming to bridge the gap between urban theory and practical interventions.

Since earning his Ph.D. in Urban and Environmental Planning, Albahar has shifted his focus toward educational outreach and design. He consults with the National Weather Service's Office of Water Prediction, supporting its mission to disseminate flood inundation mapping services for a climate-resilient nation. Additionally, as an associate landscape designer with Rock Design Associates, he engages in critical rehabilitative ecological projects, including the design of wildlife crossings. His multifaceted approach combines theory with practice, aiming to advance sustainable urbanism and environmental restoration in an increasingly complex world.

Committee:

Primary Advisor: Jessica E. Sewell, Ph.D. (2021-present) Chair member since 2019.

Former Primary Advisor (now external chair member): Ellen M. Bassett, Ph.D. (2017-2021)

Chair: Fiona R. Greenland, Ph.D. (2019-present)

Chair: Kwame E. Out, Ph.D. (2019-present)

Former Education:

Harvard University; Master of Landscape Architecture (2015)

Rhode Island School of Design; Bachelor of Architecture (2012)

Rhode Island School of Design; Bachelor of Fine Arts (2012)

Infrastructures of the Marvelous: Black Social Transformation in the Southern US

Matthew Slaats is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Constructed Environment, housed in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning. Over the last 5 years he has developed a partnership with Public Housing Association of Residents, a Charlottesville based public housing advocacy organization, to share the missing, 40 year history of Black female led community organizing efforts to assert the right to affordable housing. Using a participatory action research methodology, the project is training public housing residents to listen and tell their history via oral histories and exploring a trove of archival documents. The project brings to light the important physical and social infrastructures that these communities use to envision a paradigm shift for public housing in the US.

The project follows a trajectory of destruction, discrimination, and re-emergence. This begins by recognizing the trauma that urban renewal inflicted on the Black communities, efforts to re-assert self-determination in the face of racism and ongoing bureaucracy, and ultimately how public housing residents have defined redevelopment of public housing. The partnership queries the spatial logics, the importance of relationships, and the organizing processes that have been used to seek and realize this social transformation.

Beyond his research work, Matthew is an active leader in state, national, and global initiatives to build a more resilient and democratic world. This includes involvement in the Community Economies Research Network, the US Solidarity Economy Network, and the VA Solidarity Economy Network. He is a consultant for participatory budgeting and supporting worker cooperative development in the South. His teaching explores the intersection of social movements and urban spaces.

Committee:

Primary Advisor and Chair: Suzanne Moomaw, Ph.D (2019-presents)

Committee: Kwame E. Out, Ph.D. (2019-present)

Committee: Anne Garland Mahler, Ph.D. (2019-present)

Committee: Richard Schragger, J.D. (2019-present)

Former Education:

University of Wisconsin-Madison; Master of Fine Arts (2006)

University of Wisconsin-Madison; Master of Arts (2005)

University of Evansville; Bachelor of Arts (1999)

Steering Water: Incorporating Environmental Behavior in Decision-making

My dissertation investigates how decision-makers can better intervene in complex urban ecosystems through incremental human-centric approaches, particularly those that go beyond large-scale designs and hard-engineering solutions. Such as incentivizing positive behavior of communities, businesses, or institutions; establishing a social support network to reinforce pro-environmental behavior; recruiting change agents or role models within our communities. If recognized and scaled appropriately, these approaches could be instrumental in crafting environmental policies, programs, and significant infrastructure projects. In addressing strained urban ecosystems, the dissertation aims to examine the multifaceted urban water management issues, practices, and projects by integrating a behavioral framework with urban planning. Investigating decision-making primarily at the collective level, while analyzing implications at the individual and organizational levels.

The urban water condition of rapidly developing cities forms this dissertation's context by broadly exploring the urban rivers of New Delhi that drain into the Yamuna River, Mumbai’s that drain into the Arabian Sea and Chennai’s that drain into the Indian Ocean. Their peculiar urban water challenges are defined by their characteristic coastal and riverine settings. The research ultimately deep-dives into one case-study by directly engaging an identified subset of decision-makers to rethink their urban water management practices, investigated through a policy-delphi study.