This fall, the Center for Cultural Landscapes welcomed Dr. Simona Salvo (2024 Hansbury Lecturer in Historic Preservation) and Dr. Rina Priyani (Mellon Place, Race, and Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate in Architectural History) for informal lunchtime conversations about their work. We also hosted Dr. Joseph Heathcott, winner of a 2023 David R. Coffin Publication Grant for his book Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic.

We held our first CCL Conversation in September, with Professor Simona Salvo, the 2024 Hansbury Lecturer in Historic Preservation. Simona Salvo, PhD, is an architect and specialist in the conservation of architectural heritage, and an associate professor at Sapienza University of Rome. Her work focuses on the theoretical and technical issues of the conservation of modern architecture and on the dynamics by which the principles of conservation spread around the world, with specific attention to the trajectories of Italian restoration culture.

Her talk, "World Heritage and the Cultural Landscape of Rome," focused on preservation work in the Roman neighborhood of Esquilino. Esquilino, which includes the main train station, Termini, has a diverse population including many immigrants from Africa and Asia and the unhoused and desperate, and Professor Salvo described it as a failure, with no gentrification and “ little violence, little racism, little beauty.” However, it is also a place of artists and intellectuals, a place of freedom that people love. Professor Salvo discussed the project of shaping Esquilino as an official “heritage community,”  with an official organization that brought together experts, official, and members of the community. One of  their projects is an app, MusEQ, which connects objects in local museums to the places where they were found. Their physical restoration project focuses on the porticos of Piazza Vittorio, particularly repairs to the terrazzo flooring, making the space more accessible to all and demonstrating care and attention to this central public place for the neighborhood.

Our second CCL Conversation was held in November with Dr. Rina Priyani, Mellon Place, Race, and Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate in Architectural History. Dr. Priyani, who recently completed her PhD at UC Berkeley, focuses on the racialization of urban space and landscape in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia, particularly the city of Bandung, Indonesia, during the African-Asian movement in the 1950s.

Dr. Priyani’s talk, “Vernacular Builders and Racialization of Urban Space in Postcolonial Indonesia,” looked closely at two Chinese-Indonesian builders/contractors (aanneners) in the city of Bandung and how Indonesian racial structures, intermarriage, the structure of the building trade, and political alliances interwove with their practices. Her talk also explored multiple approaches to the heritage of colonial buildings that tied them into the narrative of freedom in independent Indonesia.

The CCL hosted Professor Joseph Heathcott for a talk October 30 on his book, Global Queens. Heathcott is an interdisciplinary urbanist, professor of urban studies at the New School in New York City, and director of the Laboratory for Urban Spatial and Landscape Research. Global Queens is his exploration, through photography and social science, of Queens, New York, one of the most socially diverse places on the planet.

In his talk, Dr. Heathcott argued for the importance of diverse urban places for tolerance, which is core for democracy. Global Queens is part of a larger project on hyperdiverse neighborhoods across the world. Through these hyperdiverse places, we can explore human togetherness, encounters across difference, the importance of public space, and how we can negotiate differences to create a collective cosmopolis. Dr. Heathcott shared his documentary photos of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in Queens and Belleville and Goute d’Or in Paris, putting them into the context of the history of each place and the ways that waves of immigrants and other residents make space for themselves and share the city with each other.

— Dr. Jessica Sewell, CCL Co-Director