During these dynamic and turbulent times the urban landscape has become the proscenium for the critic of daily life...the backdrop for our actions and passivity towards poverty, race, and class. Of particular focus and under threat are landscapes that African Americans have inhabited during most of the 20th century...These are "black landscapes"; the built and cultural detritus that remains from a 20th century of progress that transformed black lives from rural to urban and from working class to middle class. Cities that where once cultural meccas lay fallow and undernourished during the last 35 to 40 years as we have seen an assault on social and environmental equity, public advocacy and an increase in the incarceration of young African Americans. The four cities that we will discuss include New Orleans (11 years post Katrina), Charlotte NC, Milwaukee WI and Detroit MI. These case studies will be discussed through the lens of landscape, examining the deficiencies and the normative portrayals of the language of landscape. SPEAKERS: Sara Daleiden, Kofi Boone and Austin Allen (see bios below). RESPONDENTS: Malo Hutson, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning and Alma Du Solier, Landscape Designer, Hood Design MODERATOR: Walter Hood, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design SPEAKER BIOS: Sara Daleiden, Founding Director of MKE<->LAX Through directing MKE<->LAX and other related agencies, Sara Daleiden focuses on cultural production and exchange through creating social interactions in developing landscapes. With bases in Los Angeles and Milwaukee, she offers support for empathetic, structural development of identity embracing various scales of experimentation, connection and production. Initiatives and platforms encourage active interpretation and embodied exploration of local places valuing public space, civic participation, economic sustainability, pedestrian awareness and celebration of difference. Currently, Sara focuses with the Greater Milwaukee Committee on the development of The Milwaukee Method of Creative Placemaking and Creational Trails with support from ArtPlace America and the Kresge Foundation. Additionally, she is working with the Los Angeles County Arts Commission's Civic Art Program with the Open Space Creative Graffiti Abatement Program in South Los Angeles. Collaboration has been project-based or ongoing with America's Black Holocaust Museum, Being Pedestrian, Cliff Garten Studio, Community Arts Resources, A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project, Freewaves, Friends of Blue Dress Park, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, Los Angeles Urban Rangers, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Milwaukee Artist Resource Network, Outpost@Armory, Suzanne Lacy, Watts House Project, and West of Rome. She received her Master of Public Art Studies degree at the University of Southern California (USC). She currently serves as a senior lecturer and program consultant with Otis College of Art and Design's Graduate Public Practice Program. Sara has additionally taught at the University of Southern California, Woodbury University and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. Kofi Boone, Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture, North Carolina State University College of Design Professor Boone focuses on the changing nature of communities, and developing tools for enhanced community engagement and design. Through scholarship, teaching, and extension service, Professor Boone works in the landscape context of environmental justice, and his research includes the use of new media as a means of increasing community input in design and planning processes. Professor Boone is the recipient of several awards including the Opal Mann Green Engagement Scholarship Award, the Department of Landscape Architecture Professor of the Year, and the Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher. Boone's published articles appear in journals including Prism, Intensions and Journal of Tourism Analysis. His work is featured in the Journal of Planning Literature, and the recently published book, Becoming a Landscape Architect. Professor Boone is an active member of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), serving as the past state liaison to the Historic American Landscape Survey (HALS). He served as a presenter at the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA), the Environmental Design and Research Association (EDRA) the American Society of Landscape Architecture National Meeting and Expo, and at numerous Colleges and Universities. He received his Master of Landscape Architecture and Bachelor of Science in Natural Resources from The University of Michigan. Focus Area - Urban design, design of public spaces, environmental justice, visual communication Austin Allen, Associate Professor Landscape Architecture, Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture. Austin Allen has extensive experience in planning and design strategies through his recovery work of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina and post-earthquake Haiti, where he took LSU students on a service-learning project in the fall of 2010. In 2009, Allen was the inaugural Bickham Chair in the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture and has since joined LSU as a tenured faculty member. He is also an independent filmmaker and editor. His work includes Claiming Open Spaces, a feature-length documentary. Allen's interests lie in resilience, recovery, and regeneration of landscapes and place; urbanism; public space; and public media, including film studies. He has taught courses that integrate communication and film with planning, landscape, and urban design theory and practice. He received a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master of Art and PhD in Mass Communication from Ohio University.