DocTalks is a series dedicated to ongoing investigations conducted by doctoral, postdoctoral, or early-career researchers about the expansive entanglement of architecture with the natural environment. These sessions are meant to create an intercollegiate cohort of scholars that workshop writing, share research findings, and experiment with methodological tools while engaging with the vision and investigations of the Ambasz Institute.
These Doc Talk sessions are intended for scholars or architecture history and theory, but scholars in related fields and the general public are welcome to attend.
Rice Weeders’ Landscapes: Female Work, Songs, and Protests in Northern Italy between the 20th and 21st Centuries
Speaker
Chiara Toscani, Architectural Association
1957, an unusual silence prevailed in the Mantua rice fields.1 Modine no longer sang along with the birds. Since 1952, when herbicides largely replaced manual labor by making rice cultivation more efficient, these groups of seasonal female agricultural workers became less valuable and were deemed unnecessary. Such a breakthrough was undoubtedly an outstanding achievement in the modern agricultural-chemical industry, as it relieved them of such exhausting labor. Before this, they worked for more than eight hours daily without resting, bent over the ground with their eyes fixed on it and their feet in the water. They were responsible, once or twice a year during spring and summer, for removing weeds and useless plants from rice fields. This process was essential for preparing the fields for sowing or planting young rice plants.
However, this investigation questions whether their role and contribution has been underestimated and forgotten too rapidly and whether a different story2 can be told by considering the matter of care, as raised within the ecological discourse of contemporary female thinkers.3
The songs that punctuated their monotonous labour echoed this matter. They were passed down from mother to daughter, narrating their lost loves, nostalgia for their native country, rural life gestures, and work fatigue. In addition to cheering them up, these songs consolidated their bonds of solidarity, and contributed to shaping their political voices in the first feminist and worker demands in Italy starting in 1883. Hence, this research aims to read back their stories, their soil-care practices, and their material culture. It does so by unlocking the links between their status as female workers, their environment, and their ability to assert their rights. This can become an important legacy for contemporary ecological thought.
Chiara Toscani is an architect, educator and researcher based in London. In 2023, she completed her second PhD in history and critical thinking in architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, with a thesis entitled “Intertwined Histories and Ecologies: Early architectural and hydraulic treatises and practices in the Venetian region” (Director of Studies Dr. Marina Lathouri, second supervisor Dr. Fabrizio Gallanti). Upon graduation from the Politecnico di Milano in 2002, she earned her first PhD in architectural and urban design there, and in 2010, she was appointed as a postdoctoral research fellow. She has written several essays and books. Besides teaching urban and architectural design at the Politecnico di Milan, she worked for more than a decade as a senior architect at Cino Zucchi Architetti. Her most recent teaching experience was at the AA Summer School in 2022 and Ravensbourne University the following year. Currently, she is a teaching fellow at Coventry University.
Respondent
TBA
Long Beach Is…? Articulating Place-Based Scenario Planning for the Climate Emergency
Speaker
Kira Clingen, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Long Beach is a seasonal community of 145 oceanfront cottages in Rockport, Massachusetts. The cottages were built over a sandy spit beach dune system in the early 1900s with a split ownership structure: the cottages are owned by private owners, while the land underneath the cottages belongs to the Town of Rockport. In the climate emergency, the question of what to do at Long Beach (do nothing, armor, or retreat) is a super wicked problem. Addressing the complexity of the entangled ecological, social, and economic problems at Long Beach requires residents and stakeholders to make a decision in the present, long before the potential worst consequences of the problem (a category 5 hurricane, financial litigation against the town, loss of life) manifest.
This presentation uses place-based scenario planning, a form of long-term strategic planning specific to the design disciplines, to visualize the plausible coastal adaptation strategies that the community at Long Beach may choose. Place-based scenario planning addresses the climate communication crisis by visualizing how communities are already changing and will continue to change, using multidisciplinary sources including historic maps, archival photographs, probabilistic data, and municipal reports. These changes are described using design storytelling in short, open-ended plausible futures that open debate on how to adapt justly in the climate emergency.
Kira Clingen is the Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is a climate design researcher whose research focuses on place-based scenario planning and visualizing climate futures through speculative fiction. She is also a research affiliate at the Office for Urbanization at Harvard, where she was the project lead on Compound Vulnerabilities: The Case of Cape Ann, a multiyear scenario planning project looking at regional climate adaptation in coastal Massachusetts. Kira holds a BS in ecology and evolutionary biology and BA in environmental policy studies from Rice University. She was a 2016 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, a 2021 Planet Reimagined New Futures Fellow, and a 2023 Aspen Institute Climate Future Leader, and is a founding member of the design collaborative APOCATOPIA. Her work has been published in Yale Paprika!, LUNCH Journal, The Plan Journal, and the Plant Humanities Lab at Dumbarton Oaks, among others. She was born, raised, and works on the Gulf of Maine.
Respondent
TBA
- One of Mondine’s most popular songs was “Se otto ore vi sembrano poche. Andate voi a lavorare.” (“If you find that eight hours are not enough, then you can try going to work.” Translated by the author).
[return] - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota, 2019).
[return] - María de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
[return]
This series was made possible through a generous gift from Emilio Ambasz. The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment is a platform for fostering dialogue, promoting conversation, and facilitating research about the relationship between the built and natural environment, with the aim of making the interaction between architecture and ecology visible and accessible to the wider public while highlighting the urgent need for an ecological recalibration.