As a professor teaching in RISD’s Landscape Architecture and Architecture departments, Elizabeth Dean Hermann has continued the research she began at Harvard. Her PhD work focused on how pre-modern cities in the Muslim world responded through their built environment to prolonged periods of environmental, social and political upheaval; in her current work, she has tapped into her understanding of history to address contemporary problems in the megacities of South and Southeast Asia.
The specific focus of Hermann’s current concern is water — a simple substance with incredibly complex connotations. In vulnerable regions, water represents both a valuable resource and a significant danger: “The impoverished are the most affected by issues related to water,” she explains. The flip side of the persistent need for clean water is the threat that global warming poses to coastal communities. An accelerating rise in sea levels places many of the planet’s most densely populated cities at risk for regular devastating flooding, and since half of the world’s urban population lives along endangered coastlines, flooding will likely lead to mass migrations away from the coast. “The full implications of displaced populations on settled populations elsewhere are not well understood,” she notes.
In 2004, Hermann and colleagues in Bangladesh and India founded the Institute for Sustainable Urban Societies (ISUS), an international coalition of educators, urban designers, landscape architects, scientists and engineers that addresses the complex environmental, social and economic issues facing cities, particularly the dense metropolises in endangered coastal zones. At conferences in the US and Bangladesh, experts have begun to discuss concrete strategies for flood management in urban areas. And in 2006, acting on the conviction that “academic institutions have a fundamental responsibility to prepare the next generation to understand the situation before us,” Hermann launched ISUS’s Sarasvati Environment + Design Education Initiative — a focused education-based response to critical issues at the juncture of culture, economic development and environmental change in the South Asian/Southeast Asian region.
Hermann has introduced many RISD students to these important concerns through ISUS initiatives and academic courses. In summer 2007 she led a group of students and faculty from several departments on a trip to India, where she continued her study of pre-modern water management systems Ð structures and strategies important not just for the access to water that they offered centuries ago, but also for their historic architectural, spiritual and social meanings and contemporary applications. Students balanced their time between drawing and studying the natural and built landscape and “wandering and discovering,” Hermann says. For some, the visual records and memory of the trip will become material for their final thesis projects at RISD; for others, the experience may well inspire long-term involvement in this crucial area of research, education and advocacy.
