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About this Event

This panel discussion brings together disciplinary experts, practitioners, and students from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design to address structural hurdles and potentials embedded in ethical 21st-century design practice.

The conversation, moderated by Practice Forum Chair Elizabeth Christoforetti, begins with a pragmatic acknowledgement of the conditions within which contemporary design practice is situated: Buildings alone are responsible for over 40% of global carbon emissions, and the exponential growth of our urban world presents an ethical imperative for practices of the built environment with respect to climate impact. Physical growth is inextricably linked to increased carbon demand and waste generation. At the same time, political pressures and professional ethics demand rapid expansion to improve life for the many through a significant increase in the provision of low-cost housing units and supportive social infrastructure. The increasing capacity of technology to scale growth and development amplifies both the risk and opportunity of these seemingly contradictory conditions. Adding to this is a long-growing conflict between our fiduciary responsibility to our clients, often translated into the generation of financial returns, and our dedication to disciplinary knowledge, which is rooted in cultural (rather than capital) production.

With an action-oriented mindset, we ask how design practice may respond. Must we recalibrate our understanding of “growth”? Can a recalibration of professional limitations (and thus the professions themselves), such as the essential disciplinary and legal division between designing and building our world, contribute to a renewed form of ethical practice for the 21st century? What is the role of the public vs. private sectors in a practice that serves the public good? Is it possible to run an ethical practice rooted in a value system of infinite growth in a finite world?

Speakers

Jane Amidon is a professor of Landscape Architecture and the founding director of the Urban Landscape Program at Northeastern University. Jane’s work in urban landscape is an extension of two areas of interest: modernism as a critical stance in mid-century landscape practice, and modernization as the remaking of the American landscape at increasingly monumental scales. Current projects include a new book examining influences that shaped the work of American landscape modernist Dan Kiley, as well as writings on entrepreneurial environments. As cities evolve in response to diverse forces, the urban landscape is moving to a proactive rather than reactive stance. This shifts the paradigm of public space toward multi-functional ecologies and living systems that harness the output of one process as the input for others. As our cities increasingly gear toward a fusion of economic, social, and environmental agendas, new forms and functions of public space will fuel communities at local, regional, and global scales. Her books include Radical Landscapes: Reinventing Outdoor Space and monographs on Kathryn Gustafson and Dan Kiley. Her essays and chapters have been published in Topos, Design Ecologies: Essays on the Nature of Design, PRAXIS Journal, and elsewhere. 

Neeraj Bhatia is a licensed architect and urban designer from Toronto, Canada. His work resides at the intersection of politics, infrastructure, housing, and urbanism. He is a full professor at the California College of the Arts, where he also co-directs the urbanism research lab, The Urban Works Agency . Neeraj is the founder of THE OPEN WORKSHOP , a transcalar design-research office examining the negotiation between architecture and its territorial environment.  THE OPEN WORKSHOP’s design-research has been commissioned by the Seoul Biennale, Venice Biennale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among other venues. Select distinctions include the Emerging Voices Award (2024), Canadian Professional Prix de Rome (2019), the Architectural League Young Architects Prize (2016), and the Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence (2016). Neeraj is co-editor of books Architecture Beyond Extraction (JAE, Issue 79:1), Bracket [Takes Action], The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Bracket [Goes Soft], Arium: Weather + Architecture, and co-author ofNew Investigations in Collective Form and Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling—Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.

Dr. Dana Cuff, a leader in urban innovation, is a professor at UCLA who engages spatial justice and cultural studies of architecture as a teacher, scholar, practitioner, and activist. In 2006, Cuff founded cityLAB, a research and design center that initiates experimental projects to explore metropolitan possibilities. Starting in 2019, cityLAB expanded its social and political engagement by creating long term partnerships with community organizations in the region, first in the Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and after the devastating fires of 2025, in Altadena. cityLAB has developed sustainable, high-performance, low-cost housing prototypes for infill sites ranging from backyards to schoolyards. In 2017, after a decade of research that included a full-scale demonstration house built on the UCLA campus, Cuff co-authored the first of her several pieces of California State legislation, effectively opening 8.1M single-family lots for secondary rental units. In 2024, she launched “Small Lots, Big Impacts”, a design-development initiative to build a new generation of dense, compact starter homes on publicly-held land. Cuff has authored numerous books, including Architectures of Spatial Justice (MIT Press, 2023), Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press, 2020), Architects’ People (with W.R. Ellis; 1989), and Architecture: The Story of Practice (1989). 

Mathias Risse is Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs and Philosophy and Director of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights  at Harvard University. His research is primarily in political philosophy and philosophy of technology, and he is currently at work on a book about Indigenous philosophies. In political philosophy, his work has addressed questions of global justice, ranging from human rights, inequality, taxation, trade, and immigration to climate change and obligations to future generations. In the philosophy of technology, Risse has recently offered a comprehensive account of the political theory of the digital age. He has also worked on questions in ethics, decision theory, and 19th-century German philosophy, especially Nietzsche. He is the author or co-author of six books, including the 2012 On Global Justice and most recently the 2023 Political Theory of the Digital Age: Where Artificial Intelligence Might Take Us. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti’s teaching and research focus on emerging modes of design practice in the built environment. Her work at the GSD explores design methods, theories, and the technological building blocks that enable design practice to better confront the imperatives of our time, such as artificial intelligence and market-driven urbanism. Her research group within the Laboratory for Design Technologies aims to uncover the potentials for scalable systems of design by daylighting, operating upon, and designing new socio-technical systems—design that is dependent upon a combination of social and technological processes, and collaboration between them. Elizabeth directs Supernormal , a design studio based in Cambridge, MA, which she founded to create meaningful and practical change through the intersection of architecture, urbanism, technology, and contemporary culture. Elizabeth directs Supernormal as an engaged design practice that meets the world exactly as it is, and with a glass that is half full. Her design practice, research, and teaching explore the cultural implications of large data sets, human-machine collaboration, and scalable systems of design. Elizabeth’s work joins a perspective of radical pragmatism with a deep value for the potential of design imagination.

Harvard University welcomes individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you would like to request accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact the Public Programs Office at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected] in advance of your participation or visit. Requests for American Sign Language interpreters and/or CART providers should be made at least two weeks in advance. Please note that the University will make every effort to secure services, but that services are subject to availability.

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