Professor Ron Henderson FASLA, Director of the MLA+U Program and Senior Fellow of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, will moderate a panel, "Urban Forest," at the "Landscapes of Pre-Industrial Cities" Symposium held May 5-6 at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC.
The symposium investigates "features associated with contemporary urban landscapes—most notably the forms of human adaptation to and reshaping of the sites where cities develop and expand— (that) can also be found in pre-industrial contexts in different time periods and across the globe. Pre-industrial urban settlements generally occupied land that had been used for other, mostly productive, purposes, and their development involved complex and dynamic relationships with the management of natural resources, especially food and water. While ancient cities are traditionally studied as the centers of commerce, trade, and artisan production as well as the seats of secular and religious authorities, questions of how the original clusters of agrarian communities evolved into urban formations, how they were spatially organized, and what their specific landscape characteristics were deserve further analysis and discussion. Another closely related question concerns the role of environmental factors and the presence or lack of particular natural resources in enabling this process of urbanization."
Additional information on the symposium can be found on the symposium webpage.