"Body Conscious Design for Cities" - Professor Galen Cranz
Organized by Centre for the Future of Places, the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson foundation
The second part of our Athena Lecture Series is "Body Conscious Design for Cities" by professor Galen Cranz.
Galen Cranz is Professor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, a Ph.D. sociologist from the University of Chicago, and a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique. She teaches social and cultural approaches to architecture and urban design. Emphasizing ethnography as a research method, she brings users' as well as creators' perspectives to our understanding of built environments. Currently, she is publishing a new text on the use of ethnography for designers, Ethnography and Space.
Her teaching includes the point of view of different American cultures, as part of Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement. In 2011 she received the Career Award, the highest award of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). Her creative work includes research and writing about urban parks, sustainability, body conscious design, housing for the elderly, and the sociology of taste in environmental design.
She is the author of The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (MIT 1982) and has since published a major article, “Defining the Sustainable Park: A Fifth Model of Urban Parks” in Landscape Journal (2004). She is a frequent lecturer about urban parks and juror for park design competitions. Her latest book is "Ethnography for Designers", (Routledge, 2016).
This Talk is part of the “Urban Disclosures and Cities for All” biennial theme series of Athena Talks in The Centre for the Future of Places (CFP) at KTH.