IATH NEWS

Towards a Charlottesville Cultural Landscape Atlas

September 9, 2019

UVA's Center for Cultural Landscapes is hosting the opening event in a series of community collaborations in 2019-2020. The Sara Shallenberger Brown Colloquium + Workshops: Towards a Charlottesville Cultural Landscape Atlas will be held this Friday and Saturday, September 13-14, at the UVA School of Architecture, as the first in a series of events. Participants include scholars, students, and community members. See here for a full schedule and list of speakers.

The focus for these collaborations are: Could a community atlas be a prompt for new conversations amongst neighbors and fellow city residents? How might an atlas become a source of discovery, revealing new socio-cultural insights about the people, events and places that constitute our town, Charlottesville? Is there value in connecting events and stories to the spatial patterns and experiences of the physical urban landscape?

The colloquiem begins at 5pm on Friday, September 13, in Campbell Hall 158, with keynote speaker Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, co-editor of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. He will discuss "Urban cultural landscape atlases as storytelling." The following day, September 14, begins at 10am in Campbell 158, with two panel discussions and conversations about how digital atlases can support communities in the documentation, interpretation and re-imagination of their cultural landscapes. Saturday’s events are moderated by Elizabeth Meyer, Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture and Garnette Cadogan, editor-at-large of Nonstop Metropolis, with Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.

The series will explore methods, perspectives, and best practices for a Charlottesville Cultural Landscape Atlas, and participants will try to conceptualize an atlas that is multi-media, accessible and useful to the community that many call home. Through the medium of an atlas, the Center for Cultural Landscapes looks to create a tool that can amplify existing research, support critical interpretation and pro-active research of sites, and reveal the relational nature of spatial practices, biophysical systems, and cultural history. The first Listening Session will be held on Saturday, November 2 (details will be publicized in the near future).

All events are free and open to the public, and are funded by the Sara Shallenberger Brown Cultural Landscapes Endowment.