Nallah to Nadi, Sewer to Stream: Transforming Urban Riverscapes in South Asia and the U.S.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to present

James Wescoat
Aga Khan Professor, Department of Architecture, MIT

In cities around the world, societies seek to transform degraded urban drains into healthy streams. This paper explores catalysts and constraints on riverscape transformation in South Asia and the U.S.  It begins with a brief historical perspective on urban stream restoration, featuring Olmsted’s work in the Boston Fens, and proceeds to a series of recent design workshops that strive to link urban watershed research with river channel restoration and landscape heritage conservation. Each case involves experiments with and arguments for comparative methods in water and landscape design inquiry.

James Wescoat is an Aga Khan Professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT. His research concentrates on water issues in South Asia and the US, from the site to the international river basin scales. At the site scale, he has studied historical waterworks of Indo-Islamic gardens and cities in India and Pakistan. At the regional scale, his work has addressed water policy issues in the Indus, Colorado, Ganges, and Great Lakes basins. He has contributed to recent international studies of Himalayan glaciers, climate change in the Indus basin, and is currently chairing a U.S. National Research Council study on Strategic Research for Integrated Water Resources Management in large deltaic regions.

This talk is the keynote lecture in the academic workshop, Challenges of Water Sustainability in Historical and Ethnographic Perspective, organized by Professor Steven C. Caton. Please note that the other portions of this workshop are by invitation only.

Contact: Elizabeth Flanagan
Sponsors: The Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship Program of the Social Science Resource Council; the Center for Middle Eastern Studies

As a Title VI National Resource Center, CMES is partially funding this program with U.S. Department of Education grant funds. The content of this program does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Education.