About the talk: Drawing from her recently published book entitled “Periurban Cartographies: Kolkata’s urban ecologies and settled ruralities”(2024) which explore periurban through the lens of the household and landscape. In this talk, Dr. Victoria Jane Marshall will focus on the narratives of water and jungle/jangala. Periurban Cartographies looks through the prism of the “almost urban” to consider what a “city” is or could be. Drawing on thick description of everyday life and diffuse power in periurban Gangetic West Bengal/Kolkata, Dr. Marshall challenges assumptions and reconsiders design practices. It does so in the hope of enriching understanding of incremental modes of political empowerment and the futures they make. The intention is to not just communicate the transformations at work in creating a particular “kind of urban”, but also to point to connections to enable us to rethink the ways in which change happens

Speaker:

Dr Victoria Jane Marshall holds a PhD in Geography from National University of Singapore (NUS). Currently, she is a Senior Lecturer at the NUS and director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program in the Department of Architecture. Prior to teaching at NUS, Marshall taught at Yale-NUS College, Singapore and at many highly regarded design schools in the northeast United States and Canada including The New School, Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Pratt Institute, and University of Toronto. She has been affiliated with the ETH Singapore, Future Cities Laboratory, Urban-Rural Systems and Agropolitan Territories of Monsoon Asia labs since 2016. Her research is focused on the future of urban-rural hybridity in Monsoon Asia. She is also interested in how critical environmental research approaches can productively overlap with urban/architecture/landscape design representation and practice. Her works include Periurban Cartographies: Kolkata’s Urban Ecologies and settled ruralities (2024) published by ORO Editions and a co-authored book Patch Atlas: Integrating Design Practices and ecological knowledge for cities as Complex Systems (2019) published by Yale University Press.