Copenhagen Landscape Lecture by Sonja Dümpelmann

Greening Public Space: Collaboration, Cooperation, and Co-production

What role has collaboration, cooperation, and co-production played in their greening of cities? This lecture presents three twentieth-century urban greening initiatives in Berlin and Philadelphia that shed light on the various relationships between design professionals, activists, government officials, and urban plants that have been central in creating greener and healthier urban environments.

Sonja Dümpelmann is a historian of landscapes and the built environment. She is professor and chair of Environmental Humanities at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich where she co-directs the Rachel Carson Center.

Her research and writing focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban environments, especially in Europe and the United States. Of special importance to her work are the relationships between the inside and the outside, i.e. the relationships between architecture and landscape, center and periphery, theory and practice; those in power and those subjected to that power; intent and contingency; and the relationships between social and political processes and landscape transformation.

Dümpelmann’s most recent books are Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (Yale University Press, 2019; 2022 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award; 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize), Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design (University of Virginia Press, 2014; 2015 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize), and of a book on the Italian landscape architect Maria Teresa Parpagliolo Shephard (VDG Weimar, 2004).

The lecture is public and will be followed by an informal reception. Welcome!