All are welcome to join the “From Land Grab to Landback” online symposium on Saturday, Dec. 2!

“From Land Grab to Landback” is a transdisciplinary symposium and multimedia platform that investigates and offers critical perspectives that tie architecture across different scales to urgent questions about land, territory, property, sovereignty, ecology, and life. Through a series of talks, film screenings, roundtable discussions, and workshops hosted by College of Design faculty and special guests, “From Land Grab to Landback” engages with many temporalities while looking at the past and present of critical questions on land and architecture. The symposium offers a platform for the presentation and dissemination of critical imaginaries operating in the immediate and distant future.

Register to receive the Zoom link.

Schedule

9:00 a.m. CT 
Opening and welcome 
Douglas Spencer 
9:10 a.m. Perspectives from Puerto Rico, Johannesburg and Iowa Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia with Alexandra Pagan, Simphiwe Mlambo, Samiha Meem, Post-Novis 
 
10:00 a.m. 
Panel 1 
Chair: Douglas Spencer 
“Hard Labour/Soft Space” Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee, Bard College 
“On Moon, Comradeship, and Possibilities of Landback Beyond Earth” Marija Marić, University of Luxembourg 
“From Land to Power: Strengthening Community Resilience” Venesa Alicea-Chuqui, Kean University 
 
12:00 p.m. 
Panel 2 
Chair: Peter Zuroweste 
“The Field Station: From Dispossession to Decolonization” Brittany Utting, Rice University and Daniel Jacobs, University of Houston, 
“Unceded: a Long History of Land in Rural Southern California” Juliana Maxi, University of San Diego 
“Inland Empire: On Legal and Architectural Orders” Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió 
 
2:00 p.m. 
Panel 3 
Chair: Nathalie Frankowski 
“Landscape Architecture, Extractive Entanglements, and the Settler State in 20th Century British Columbia” Sara Jacobs, University of British Columbia 
“Pathologies and Production: Capital, Land, and Landscape” Douglas Spencer, Iowa State University. 
“Landback Is Not a Metaphor” Jae Shin and Damon Rich, HECTOR urban design 
Alfonso Espino, Globeville Elyria Swansea Coalition 
 
3:30 p.m. 
Discussion and closing remarks

Co-organized by the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University with support from the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, the School of Architecture of the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, Graduate School of Architecture at Johannesburg, and Loudreaders with support from the Mellon Foundation and re:arc institute, the symposium is part of a series of events, exhibitions, roundtables, and publications to be celebrated in Ames (USA), Rio Piedras (Puerto Rico), and Johannesburg (South Africa).