This website was designed to meet the requirements of a course offered by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. The course, Urban Nature and City Design, is a semester-long seminar taught by Professor Anne Whiston Spirn. Class participants range from MIT and Harvard graduate students and fellows with backgrounds in architecture, art history, city design, environmental planning, resource management, graphic design, and more. Readings explore underlying assumptions about urban nature, planning and landscape architecture case studies, and the natural cycles of earth, air, and water.
Throughout the course of this semester, many of our discussions included the following topics:
- natural hazards;
- understanding nature as a process;
- scale; and
- the role of planners and designers.
My decision to explore wildfire as a final project topic stems from my desire to delve deeper into the points above, as well as the timeliness of the recent wildfires in Southern California, and a general interest in climate change and hazard mitigation. Additionally, my years spent living in Colorado, which overlapped with the fire season of 2002, tied in a personal interest on this subject.
There are already a plethora of resources and publications that discuss wildfire policy, fire history, mitigation and prevention strategies, wildfire community protection plans, and other fire management tools. My goal in creating this website is to provide a helpful overview for planning and design students who might otherwise not have any familiarity with wildfire policy or see this as a natural hazard that sits alongside floods and geologic activity. The subject can be overwhelming in the amount of information available but the basics need not be too intimidating.
I would be happy to hear your comments. Please send me an email: momomagic7[at]gmail.com