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A Garden in the Street with Anne Beamish
March 31, 2021 @ 9:00 am - 10:00 am PDT
Free
About this Event
When James Stuart declared in 1771 that “a garden in a street is not less absurd than a street in a garden,” he was right. It did seem like a ridiculous idea. Tree roots broke up pavements and sewers, falling leaves clogged an already inadequate drainage system, and worst of all, they were fire hazards. But within thirty years this attitude had completely reversed in America. Because of new ideas about urban beauty and ornamentation; new medical theories about how trees could help prevent disease and epidemics; and the introduction of fire insurance, street trees became an urban necessity, not an absurdity.
This event is part of a special eight-session event series hosted by professor Julian Agyeman and Cities@Tufts and sponsored by Tufts University and The Kresge Foundation with media partner Shareable.net.
2021 Spring Cities@Tufts Colloquium Series
Feb 3 – Isabelle Anguelovski: Green Privilege to Green Supremacy
Feb 10 – Jayne Engle: Sacred Civics
Feb 17 – Greg Watson: Organizing for Food Sovereignty
March 3 – Setha Low: From Spatializing Culture to Social Justice
March 10 – Jay Pitter: Exploring the Invisible Woman
March 31 – Anne Beamish: The Garden in the Street
April 7 – Sheila Foster: Co-Cities
April 14 – SPA presents Kurt Kohlstedt (99% Invisible Podcast): The Past, Present, and Future State of Cities
More information can be found here: www.citiesattufts.com/colloquium-series-2021
Limited space is available. Pre-registration is highly encouraged.
The speaker:
Jay Pitter, MES, is an award-winning placemaker whose practice mitigates growing divides in cities across North America. She spearheads institutional city-building projects specializing in public space design and policy, forgotten densities, mobility equity, gender-responsive design, inclusive public engagement, and healing fraught sites. What distinguishes Jay is her multidisciplinary approach, located at the nexus of urban design and social equity, which translates community insights and aspirations into the built environment. Ms. Pitter also makes significant contributions to urbanism theory and discourse. She has developed an equitable planning certificate course with the University of Detroit Mercy’s School of Architecture and taught a graduate-level urban planning course at Ryerson University, among others. Jay also delivers keynote addresses for entities such as the United Nations Women and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the co-editor of Subdivided: City-Building in an Age of Hyper-Diversity, and her forthcoming book, Where We Live, will be published in 2021. Ms. Pitter is currently the John Bousfield Distinguished Visitor in Planning at the University of Toronto.
The Series Hosts:
Cities@Tufts is a cross-disciplinary academic initiative that recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning, and sustainability issues. Anchored by the department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, it aims to highlight our impressive contributions in community strategy, civic democracy, ethnographic research, urban and community health, food justice and security, urban politics and economics, social inequalities, and GIS. Cities@Tufts works with students, academics, policymakers and planners, businesses, and community stakeholders to develop cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborative and community-based research. We aim to develop solutions to today’s urban challenges and opportunities based not on presupposed notions but on being critical: first asking the right questions.
Shareable is an award-winning nonprofit media outlet, action network, and consultancy. Our mission is to empower communities to share for a more resilient, equitable, and joyful world. We inspire social change by publishing solutions-based journalism, running campaigns, and helping our consulting clients achieve their goals through sharing. For more information visit shareable.net.
The Kresge Foundation was founded in 1924 to promote human progress. Today, Kresge fulfills that mission by building and strengthening pathways to opportunity for low-income people in America’s cities, seeking to dismantle structural and systemic barriers to equality and justice. Using a full array of grant, loan, and other investment tools, Kresge invests more than $160 million annually to foster economic and social change. For more information visit kresge.org.
