UVA in the Veneto — Water Challenges and the Natural Infrastructure in Vicenza: Program Overview
J TERM 2027
DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED
APPLICATION DEADLINE: OCTOBER 1, 2026
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Information Session
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COMING SOON
Vicenza’s water challenges mirror those around the world related to climate change and the negative effects of flooding and droughts but also aging water infrastructure that often results in water pollution, demands by agricultural and industrial systems, and increasing shortages. Students will learn methods and interventions that all regional and global communities need to balance the challenges of climate change with the historic preservation and the natural infrastructure in the United States and across the world. These solutions intersect urban planning and design, landscape architecture, architectural history, architecture, environmental sciences, and public policy—present and future—as the world becomes more urbanized. Accessing and integrating the region’s natural infrastructure from wetlands, forests, to permeable soils can address a myriad of environmental impacts.
This program is open to 3rd and 4th year students and graduate students from across the University with a strong interest in water challenges, urban and environmental planning, and environmental policy.
This program is based in Vicenza, in the Veneto region of Italy. With a population just over 100,000, Vicenza is home to the Villa La Rotunda and numerous other buildings by Palladio. It is located approximately 30 minutes by train from the city of Venice.
PLAN 5500
3 credits
Learning Goals and Objectives:
- To understand the challenges that water presents to the world’s well being and to the Veneto from drought to flooding to water quality.
- To identify the stressors to the environment in the region and the potential for natural solutions.
- To assess opportunities for scaling up best practices already used in the region.
- To catalog and visualize the natural infrastructure in the Veneto.
- To develop an assessment rubric for the interventions (MOSE project, etc) already underway in the region.
Associate Professor, Urban & Environmental Planning
Suzanne Morse Moomaw has spent the last four decades observing communities through social, design, and political lens at local, regional, national, and international scales. Before coming to UVA, she worked in higher education senior administration, philanthropy, and, most recently, as president of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, a national urban research and re-granting organization. Moomaw’s teaching in community economic development challenges students to consider possibilities and create transdisciplinary solutions to the “wicked” problems facing civilization. She involves students—both in and out of the classroom—in wrestling with the systemic causes of issues such as poverty, racial inequities, economic restructuring, human settlements, and lack of affordable housing through historical and cultural frames.
Tim Beatley | tb6d@virginia.edu
Professor of Sustainable Communities, Urban & Environmental Planning
Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for the last twenty-five years. Much of Beatley’s work focuses on the subject of sustainable communities, and creative strategies by which cities and towns can fundamentally reduce their ecological footprints, while at the same time becoming more livable and equitable places. Beatley believes that sustainable and resilient cities represent our best hope for addressing today’s environmental challenges.