Spotlighting Celebrando Guests

Celebrando las Acequias always brings together an amazing crew for music, food, poetry, scholarship, politics, and field work.  This year is no exception. Some of the scholars joining us this year include:

William E. Doolittle, PhD is the Erich W. Zimmermann Regents’ Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography and the Environment at University of Texas, Austin.  Doolittle is a leading scholar of the history of cultivated landscapes in North America, with a focus on agricultural technologies as agent of landscape transformation in arid lands.

Doolittle’s keynote presentation at Celebrando V will explore the roots of  landscape technologies, including the acequias of New Mexico, by distinguishing threads of invention, diffusion, and  everyday farming practices.  His observations on the nature of indigeneity draw on more than 35 years of inspecting irrigation canals and landscapes in the arid lands of the American Southwest, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Kenya and Tanzania.

Doolittle received the Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Association of American Geographers, and the Robert McC. Netting Award for Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research between geography and anthropology from the Cultural Ecology Specialty Group of the AAG.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

James L. Wescoat, Jr. is Aga Khan Professor of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Wescoat’s research concentrates on water systems in South Asia and the US from the site to river basin scales.  It includes studies of Mughal garden waterworks in Agra, Delhi, and Lahore.  At the larger scale, Wescoat has contributed to water policy studies in the Colorado, Indus, Ganges, and Great Lakes basins.   His publications include edited volumes on Mughal Gardens; Water for Life: Water Management and Environmental Policy with geographer Gilbert F. White; and an edited book on Political Economies of Landscape Change: Places of Integrative Power.

Wescoat’s presentation at Celebrando V, “The Duties of Water Reconsidered,” explores competing frameworks for water’s highest and best use—ranging  from Indo-Islamic to British colonial and 20th C. American conceptions of the “duties of water”— and seeks to expand and integrate 21st-century water ethics.

Wescoat earned a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture degree from Louisiana State University and practiced in the U.S. and Middle East before returning to graduate study in geography at the University of Chicago with an emphasis on water resources.   He taught water resources courses at the University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining MIT.

Jorge Ricardo Ponte, PhD. interweaves urbanism and the history of the Latin American city; urban sociology; and the restoration of architectural monuments. He is the author of The Fragility of Memory: Representations, Press and Power in a Latin American City during Modern Times; Mendoza 1885-1910, as well as such case studies of micro-history as El Carmen: A Hospital for Philanthropy and From the Indian Chiefs of Water to a Canalized City: Five Centuries of History of Water Canals and Windmills.

At Celebrando V, Dr. Ponte will present “Mendoza’s acequias and the caciques of water.” The talk places a wide range of historical irrigation settlements in the context of water traditions throughout the Americas.  Dr. Ponte’s research explores the historical processes of encounter and enculturation between aboriginal and imperial irrigation processes:  the appropriation, rejection, breakdown, alterations, and adaptations of water systems as shapers of North American territories.

Dr. Ponte received his graduate education in architecture at the University of Mendoza in Argentina and his Ph.D. at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de Paris (EHESS). A 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, he is currently a full-time researcher at CONICET (National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina).

Severin Fowles, PhD is an archaeological anthropologist from Barnard College with a long-term research commitment to the landscape, material culture, and local communities of northern New Mexico.  Since 2007, he has had a particular focus on the rift valley of the Rio Grande Gorge, filled with 10,000 years of rock art, trails, and shrines. His presentation explores “aqua-sociology” or, “How Water Built Society in Pre-Columbian New Mexico.”

Fowles’ book, An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion (in press, SAR Press) brings together a decade’s worth of fieldwork designed to investigate the changing religious life of Pueblo communities in northern New Mexico from the eleventh century to the present.

Fowles coordinates the archaeological concentration in anthropology at Barnard College and teaches a variety of introductory and upper-level courses including “Origins of Human Society,” “Pre-Columbian Histories of Native America,” “Archaeology of Idols,” and “Thing Theory.”   He directs a Columbia/Barnard summer field program, based out of Dixon, New Mexico.

Jan-Willem Jansens is a landscape planner and owner/principal of Ecotone in Santa Fe, with a focus on conservation planning for landscapes in transition.

Jan-Willem holds a Master of Agricultural Science degree from the Wageningen University in The Netherlands with a specialization in Landscape Architecture.  He was worked on international landscape planning and rural development projects in Kenya and Niger before arriving in New Mexico in 1993, where he served as Executive Director of EarthWorks for ten years.

His current initiatives include a wetlands action plan for Santa Fe County, forest and watershed restoration, wildlife conservation planning, and trail design and maintenance projects in various locations throughout northern New Mexico.

Manuel Montoya, PhD is a professor and interdisciplinary scholar of global political economy at UNM’s Anderson School of Management, where he has taught a broad array of coursework from global culture and the history of economic thought to international management.

He is the CEO of his own global consulting firm, In Medias Res Consulting, providing support to global NGOs and INGOs including the United Nations and UNESCO.   He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,  a Rhodes Scholar, and a Truman Scholar.  A native of Mora, New Mexico, he has returned to UNM because of his interest in New Mexico as a global emerging economy.  His presentation explores “Finding Global Heritage in Indigenous Agricultural Land Usage.”

Kurt F. Anschuetz, Ph.D. has focused for two decades on the identification and evaluation of Ancestral and early Historic Period Puebloan agricultural systems and cultural landscapes in north-central and west-central New Mexico.  His Celebrando talk is entitled, “History to Live By: Puebloan Peoples Farming on the Edge.”

Dr. Anschuetz is engaged in long-term projects documenting the history of occupation by Pueblo populations and their agricultural water management in the Tewa Basin north of Santa Fe, in the Acoma Culture Province west of Albuquerque, and at the Pueblo of Taos in the upper Rio Grande Valley for the time between A.D. 1200 and 1700. He is also providing technical assistance to the Pueblo of Acoma in its efforts to protect traditional cultural relationships with Mount Taylor, which is the community’s Mountain of the North, in advance of a renewed cycle of uranium exploration and mining.

Additionally, Dr. Anschuetz is working in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, in a study of the relationships that people from Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo-American communities maintain with the Jemez Mountains as part of a fire and fire fuels management study. In recent years, Dr. Anschuetz served as the Principal Investigator in cultural landscape studies of the Petroglyph National Monument, the Valles Caldera National Preserve, and El Rancho de las Golondrinas Living History Museum in Santa Fe.

Thomas Glick, PhD, is a scholar of medieval Spain, science and technology; the history of modern science; and gastronomy at Boston University.  He wrote Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (2nd ed., 2005); From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (1995); Irrigation and Hydraulic Technology: Medieval Spain and its Legacy (1996).

Glick was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Valencia in 2010; has held Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanites, National Science Foundation, and Fulbright fellowships; and is a fellow of the Reial Academia de Bones Lltetres de Barcelona and the Linnean Society of London.

Juan Estevan Arellano is a farmer, writer, researcher, advocate, and acequia commissioner.  His most recent publication is Ancient Agriculture: Roots and Application of Sustaniable Farming (Santa Fe, 2006), a compilation and first English translation of the Obra de Agricultura by Gabriel Alonso de Herrera, the first book in the Spanish language about agriculture written in 1513.

Arellano’s picaresque novel, Inocencio: Ni pica ni escarda pero siempre se come el mejor elote (Mexico City, 1994) won the prestigious Premio Nacional de Literatura José Fuentes Mares.  He also was awarded the Premio del Río Grande from the Río Grande Institute in 1984 for his collection of poetry and photographs, Palabras de la vista, Retratos de la Pluma.

Arellano has served as mayordomo of the Acequia Junta y Ciénaga and Concilio member of the New Mexico Acequia Association.  He is a scholar and advocate of traditional agriculture and acequias, involved in preserving the genetic diversity of the fruit trees and food traditions transmitted along the Camino Real from the Middle East, via the Iberian Peninsula and Mexico.

He is a graduate of New Mexico State University, a Fellow of the Washington Journalism Center, and a 1998 Ford Foundation fellow.  His work has been supported by the Christensen Fund and recognized by the New Mexico State Legislature.

ALI is grateful to Estevan for mentoring ten years of Dry Studio/Summer Field Station students and faculty.  Seminars under his magnificent apricot tree blossomed into a vision for the Celebrando.

5th Annual Celebrando Las Acequias

Celebrando 2012:   Ingenious Landscapes

Indigenous Infrastructures and Sustainable Design for Drylands

Please join us for the 5th Annual Celebrando las Acequias_2012, June 14-16, 2012, in Dixon, New Mexico.  The Arid Lands Institute [ALI] at Woodbury University is pleased to sponsor this important public education and outreach event, supported in large part by our funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of University Partnerships.

The Celebrando was envisioned and brought into being five years ago by the imagination, hard work, and inspired commitment of our friend and teacher, Estevan Arellano. Each year it has grown, bringing together a rich array of farmers, musicians, scholars, designers, and thinkers from a variety of disciplines.  Last year, 250 people attended the events, taking away a renewed appreciation of the dynamic systems that make acequia communities so vital, and of the environmental, cultural, and economic challenges faced by traditional societies in New Mexico and elsewhere.

We are grateful for Estevan’s thoughtful leadership; for the hospitality of the people of Embudo/Dixon, the commitment of the co-sponsors, and for the creative contribution of all our invited participants.

Theme

This year’s speakers will explore Ingenious Landscapes from the Americas and beyond. In the face of pressing water challenges facing the US West and many parts of the globe, low-cost, low-carbon design strategies that are high on ingenuity and low on fossil-fuel dependency point the way to a resilient future.

•  What do traditional societies have to teach the industrialized world about low-carbon water management strategies?

•  What does the archeological record offer the contemporary water systems designer?

•  How have gravity-fed water systems shaped great public space, intelligent infrastructure, and durable societies?

•  How are these ancient systems still contemporary?

•  How have indigenous water infrastructure systems been designed to adapt, or fail, in the face of change?

•  As we collectively enter into the Anthropocene and face increasing uncertainty as to the magnitude of hydrologic change, what strategies do living, adaptive traditional societies offer contemporary drylands design?

Organization and Format

All events are free and open to the public, and take place at the Mission Embudo, Dixon, New Mexico.

Thursday evening, June 14th, offers presentations addressing newly adopted community planning and policy measures as well as a workshop on acequia management.

Friday evening, June 15th, opens the formal session examining the archeological record featuring the keynote presentation by Dr. William Doolittle of the Geography Department at UT Austin.

Saturday, June 16th, an all-day affair beginning with a light breakfast at 8am, features national and international participants, an artisanally made lunch, an afternoon panel discussion, and an evening program celebrating the food, wine, music, art, and farmers of the Lower Embudo Valley.

Sunday, June 17th is reserved for field trips to local archeological sites.

For the detailed program, zoom in on the pdf below.

Last Call at the Oasis: The Book

We are grateful to Participant Media, Takepart.com, and Public Affairs Press for the opportunity to contribute a chapter, “Drawing Water,” to Last Call at the Oasis, edited by Karl Weber. The book is a companion to Jessica Yu’s film of the same title.

From Public Affairs Press:

Less than 1 percent of the world’s water is fresh and potable—and no more will ever be available. Thanks to pollution, global warming, and population growth, water access is poised to become today’s most explosive global issue. This book, based on the film Last Call at the Oasis by Academy Award®–winning director Jessica Yu, offers insights into the coming water crisis from visionary scientists, policymakers, activists, and environmentalists, including:

· ROBERT MORAN on how oil and mineral development pollute and divert water supplies—often beyond public scrutiny
· PETER H. GLEICK on discovering the “soft path” to global water security
· ROBERT GLENNON on how the power of markets can help protect the world’s water
· LYNN HENNING on how a family farmer became a passionate “water activist”
· ALEX PRUD’HOMME on how the water crisis affects us all
· GARY WHITE on how innovative social and economic strategies can make clean water available even for the world’s poorest people
· HADLEY ARNOLD AND PETER ARNOLD on how arid regions like America’s Southwest can wisely husband water supplies for cities and farmers alike
· ROBYN BEAVERS on how today’s smartest businesses are making sustainable water management a competitive advantage
· ZEM JOAQUIN on nine “ecofabulous” ways of saving water at home—and doing it with style
· BILL McDONOUGH on how smart design can preserve water’s “Endless Resourcefulness” for generations to come

No resource on earth is more precious—or more endangered—than water. Last Call at the Oasis is a powerful tool for learning about the water challenges we face as well as the remarkable solutions available to us—if we have the will to use them.

The book is available through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, and Powells.com.

Last Call at the Oasis: The Book

Drylands Design Exhibit closes at A+D Museum Los Angeles.

We are grateful to A+D Architecture + Design Museum of Los Angeles for hosting the Drylands Design Exhibition, March 23-May 15, 2012. The exhibit showcased critical work from universities and firms from all over the world grappling with a complex issue. Thank you to A+D for serving as the launch for this traveling exhibit, and bringing new audiences to the challenges ahead.

Woodbury graduate and ALI Dry Studio alumnus Brandon Cohen photographed the installation for us —see his photos here.

Thank you to competition partners, California Architectural Foundation; supporters, Woodbury University and Woodbury School of Architecture; and exhibition funders: Bernard Friedman, ALI Advisory Board Chair; Desert Initiative:  Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University; and the Maxine Frankel Foundation.

For research funding leading up to the Drylands Design Initiative, we are grateful to HUD’s Office of University Partnerships; The Graham Foundation for the Visual Arts; the LEF Foundation; and the Bogliasco Foundation.

The exhibition’s travel itinerary is in development. Stay tuned.

Last Call at the Oasis

You may have seen clips as part of Drylands Design Exhibition at A+D Museum > Los Angeles.

On Friday May 4, Last Call at the Oasis opens in theaters.

Find a theater here: www.lastcallattheoasis.com

ARID: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology seeks submissions for Fall 2012 launch issue

ARID: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology is a peer-reviewed bi-annual journal focusing on cross-disciplinary explorations of desert arts, design, culture, and the environment for both scholarly and new audiences. ARID seeks submissions of scholarly articles, curriculum, visual essays, and other media including sound and video that investigate diverse aesthetic, social, cultural, historical, ecological, and political subjects related to desert regions of the American Southwest and beyond. ARID emphasizes the convergence of art, design, and culture with science, ecology, geography, and other related disciplines to create a unique snapshot of and dialog about desert environs and cultures with a vested and active interest in the desert as a point of creative investigation. ARID is an interdisciplinary online project jointly published by multiple institutions launching in fall 2012.

ARID seeks written submissions from independent scholars, writers, researchers, and journalists that showcase innovative, compelling, and intellectually rigorous storytelling. We also encourage visual, film, and audio submissions including photo essays, illustrations, cinema, soundscapes, music, and other forms of cultural production. We encourage both scholarly articles and papers as well shorter, more informal essays.

Authors are encouraged to submit related art and photography with their written pieces. Artists and photographers may submit stand-alone visual essays. Articles and essays must be original and unpublished and not under consideration by other journals at the time of submission. We will consider previously published media works on a case-by-case basis.

Submissions will be accepted for our first issue beginning April 1st through June 1st, 2012. For more information and media submission guidelines please visit: www.aridjournal.org.

We will consider submissions for the following categories:

Pedagogies
A place to publish hypotheses, experiments, and results for those attempting to redefine an education in art, media, and design along environmental and social practice lines. We are particularly interested in field-based pedagogy with an emphasis on desert geographies.

Practices
Practices, projects, and ideas referencing art, design, media, and other works related to ARID’s mission.

Policies
A place for discussion of the frameworks, rules, regulations and other structures that govern and legislate place, a vehicle to converse with our co-inhabitants, and a means to link to other desert communities.

Perspectives
An ongoing archive of dialogues, fictions, and freeform ideas concerning desert geographies from an array stakeholders, viewpoints, and positions. This section includes book and exhibit reviews.

For general editorial submission questions and concerns or to be added to ARID’s mailing list, please email editors@aridjournal.org.

ARID Journal

Extended to May 15: Drylands Design Exhibition at A+D

The Architecture + Design Museum > Los Angeles (A+D Museum) has extended the DRYLANDS DESIGN exhibition, now on view through May 15, 2012. A+D is located at 6032 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, directly across the street from LA County Museum of Art.

Opening night, March 22, 2012

DRYLANDS DESIGN features work by architects, landscape architects, engineers, and urban designers responding to the challenges of water scarcity in the face of climate change. With a focus on the US West, the exhibition presents a portfolio of adaptive strategies large and small, rural and urban, high tech and low-carbon. Since no single solution will meet the complex needs of the US West, the exhibition explores a range of approaches for how buildings and parks, houses and streets, industry and agriculture, cities and neighborhoods might be adapted to face a drought-prone future. DRYLANDS DESIGN recognizes water scarcity as an issue of global concern, and challenges the industrialized world to take a leadership position with water-conserving, low-carbon design innovation for its own backyard.

The exhibition features sixty-four projects selected from hundreds of submissions to the William Turnbull International Drylands Design Competition (www.drylandscompetition.org), hosted by the California Architectural Foundation and Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University. Proposals range in scale from water-smart building systems to regional plans, and focus on both agricultural and urban economies. Geographically, proposals range from Albuquerque to Yuma, Lubbock to Fresno, San Diego to Salt Lake City, Reno to Los Angeles.

Exhibition designed by Annie Chu of Chu + Gooding Architects with April Greiman of Made In Space.

Through drawings, models, graphics, and film clips drawn from Participant Media’s forthcoming documentary, Last Call at the Oasis, the exhibition frames the challenges facing 30 million people in the US West, and how those challenges are shared throughout the arid regions of the world. The exhibition introduces a wide swatch of the public to the possibilities for envisioning a new, adaptive West through design possibilities both practical and poetic. The exhibition speculates on how solutions for the US West might be adapted to meet the urgent needs of drylands cultures worldwide.

An intergenerational and interactive educational installation created by architect and grey water specialist Leigh Jerrard and landscape artist Jane Tsong, entitled Water Lab, accompanies the exhibit in the Stephen Kanner Education Center for Architecture + Design. Water Lab offers children and adults an opportunity to design and implement their own variation on efficient water systems in an artful, user-friendly and inspiring environment.

DRYLANDS DESIGN is an initiative of the Arid Lands Institute (ALI), a design-based education and outreach center based at Woodbury University that recognizes water scarcity and hydrologic variability as the defining challenge facing the West. Woodbury School of Architecture is a proud supporter of the ALI’s mission and activities. The exhibition advisory board includes Michael Lehrer, Lehrer Architects and Mia Lehrer, Mia Lehrer + Associates; Peggy Weil, HeadsUp!; Jonathan Katz, Cinnabar; Alicia Sams, filmmaker; Louis Molina, Woodbury School of Architecture; Greg Esser of Desert Initiative: Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University; and Cliff Garten, Cliff Garten Studio.

Principal Sponsors of the Drylands Design Initiative include:
US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of University Partnerships, HSIAC Grant 09-CA-39
A+D Architecture + Design Museum > Los Angeles
ARC Riot Creative Imaging
California Architectural Foundation
Desert Initiative:  Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University
Bernard Friedman
Maxine Frankel Foundation
Metropolitan Water District
Olson Visual
Participant Media
Production Resource Group Los Angeles
Takepart.com
UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Woodbury University
Woodbury University, School of Architecture

Research support leading to the Drylands Design Initiative:
Graham Foundation
LEF Foundation
Bogliasco Foundation
ALI students, past and present, teachers all.

Big Thank You

The Drylands Design Conference—a month ago!–yikes!—-was quite a wonderful milestone in the public conversation around water scarcity and design of the built environment.  One hundred seventy people attended.  The feedback has been very positive, and we will be harvesting its fruits, from design proposals to pedagogy and policy recommendations, for some considerable time to come.  

In the meantime, ALI sends a big (if belated) thank you to the behind-the-scenes teams —–

The logistics teams led by Yvonne Correa at Woodbury and Laura Thompson and Ellen Robinson at Your Great Event produced an event that was impressive in its hospitality and polish for its guests. Mathew Stanley and James Ly of IT;  Erin Malleus of Bon Apetit; and Mimi Zeiger of Architecture/Communications provided great support to that team, from live streaming, to yummy food, to photography and press.  

Jeremy Delgado, Woodbury alum, Dry Studio Veteran, and Principal at Friendly Office, provided amazing digital/social media support.

Woodbury School of Architecture—esp. Jeanine, Anthony, Linda, Nick, Debbie, Clark, John, and Jennifer—-Thank you for joining in with us this fall to generate so much thoughtful studio work. Louis Molina and Thurman Grant, great job with year-long Aquifer series in the Wedge Gallery.

We think Anne Swett Predock of Swett Shop Graphic Design is amazing, and we hope you enjoyed the look of the conference, in print, on the web, and around campus.  

Our beloved family members, Jerri, Hedi, and Josie Arnold, gave deeply of their time to make the conference a success for us in many hidden ways, and in one very big way:  documenting every talk (all of which will be posted in ALI’s rich digital archive the coming weeks).

To our Woodbury, CAF and AIA collaborators, thank you for working with us to bring participants, audience, funders, and new friends to this fantastic, complicated, and challenging discussion.  We were delighted to have the financial support of old friends—Burbank Water and Power; Metropolitan Water District; and Bernard Friedman—and new:  AC Martin and Concrete Masonry Association of CA and NV; and the production assistance of ARC Riot. One new friend, Kelly Duke of Valley Crest, blogs about the conference here; enjoy!  

To our friends at CAF, who came to us a few years ago and said, let’s play together…. Thank you!  The WIlliam Turnbull Competition was a huge opportunity for both organizations to create culture shift, and the conference and exhibition are an extension of that.  We appreciate your joining with us, and we think we might just be seeing the shift both organizations set out to create.    

(+ Let’s not forget:  Neither organization could have pulled off such a successful competition, and the programs that followed, without the deeply-hands-on volunteerism of competition maestro Bill Liskamm.  We all owe him a big one.)

UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability: We loved working with you all. The input into the evolving competition entries was invaluable, and we learned a lot from putting our heads together with yours.

To Madlyn Wohlman-Rodriguez and HUD’s Office of University Partnerships: We are grateful for HUD’s generous support of ALI’s partnerships with the City of Burbank and with Rio Arriba County, NM.

REGISTER NOW

Seating at the Drylands Design Conference is limited.

To register, click here.

AIA Continuing Education credits are available.

DRYLANDS DESIGN CONFERENCE MARCH 22-24

ALI, in partnership with the California Architectural Foundation (CAF), hosts the Drylands Design Conference from March 22–24, 2012 on the Woodbury University campus in Burbank. Retrofitting the West: Adaptation by Design brings together architects, landscape architects, artists and engineers with leading environmental thinkers, scientists, and renowned conservationists to debate a range of design strategies for a water-stressed future. More than 225 educators, design professionals and students are expected at the conference where the arid and semi-arid west will be re-examined as a vast field of opportunities for water-smart design innovation at a range of scales, from building systems to infrastructure and landscape spaces.

The Drylands Design Conference kicks off with an opening reception at the Architecture + Design Museum (A+D) in Los Angeles on Thursday, March 22. On view at the museum is Drylands Design, featuring selected work from CAF’s William Turnbull Drylands Design Competition (www.drylandscompetition.org). The exhibition showcases work by architects, landscape architects, engineers, artists, and urban designers responding to the challenges of water scarcity in the face of climate change. With a focus on the US West, the exhibition presents a portfolio of adaptive strategies large and small, rural and urban, high tech and low-carbon. Since no single solution will meet the complex needs of the US West, the exhibition explores a range of approaches for how buildings and parks, houses and streets, industry and agriculture, cities and neighborhoods might adapt to a water-stressed future. Following its run from March 22-April 26, 2012, the exhibition is scheduled to travel in the US and abroad.

In an innovative cross-disciplinary collaboration, ALI and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability provided technical and policy advising to five research award winners chosen from the CAF William Turnbull Drylands Design Competition. At the conference on Friday, March 23, the five award-winning teams will present their design proposals and discuss the policy implications they suggest. Research award winners include:

Meghan Storm, University of Pennsylvania; Ellen Neises, advisor
Off the Reservation: A Seed for Change

Gini Lee, with Brooke Madill, University of Melbourne
Reinvesting the Line:
Small infrastructures, micro-communities, and communication ecologies

Robert Lamb, AIA; Los Angeles
Silver Lake Microshed

Laurel McSherry, Virginia Tech; and Robert Holmes, architectural designer
Drylands Design: The Commonwealth Approach

Ye Hua, USC; Alex Robinson, advisor
A Colorful Walk: Salt Pool Exploration, Owens Valley

These design case studies and the panel discussions they inform raise important questions about de-coupling energy and water, localizing resources, restructuring watershed governance, the scaleability of small systems, the relationship between water infrastructure and public architectures, and the role of the arts and design in shaping a working public landscape.

The conference puts both young and established design leaders in dialog with thinkers from an array of disciplines, including Wiliam DeBuys, Ph.D., writer and conservationist, author of seven books, the most recent A Great Aridness; Paul Bunje, Ph.D., Managing Director, Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability, supported by the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability; Stephanie Pincetl, Director, Center for Sustainable Urban Systems, UCLA; James Workman, award-winning journalist and author of Heart of Dryness; and Barry Taylor, Ph.D., Professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

On Saturday March 24th, design educators are invited to a workshop on interdisciplinary methods for advancing Drylands Design regionally and globally.

Schools, NGOs, and design firms are encouraged to engage the conference from remote locations by subscribing to live-streaming. For a complete program, including registration and live streaming details, see: drylandsconference.org