Elizabeth Dean Hermann

Lecturer
(Visting Faculty Spring 2015)

Biography
Elizabeth Hermann is Professor of Landscape Architecture and teaches courses in Urban Design/Landscape Urbanism, Design and International Development, and Islamic Architectural and Urban History. She is the founder of the DESINE-lab @ RISD which brings design thinking, practices and outcomes together with innovation and entrepreneurship to address issues of global poverty and social and environmental injustice. Lab initiatives focus on three scales of collaboration and capacity building: Propel which develops programs with local leaders that use design thinking and processes to help create a climate for innovation and entrepreneurship in underserved communities; Alternative Livelihoods which, in collaboration with underserved communities, develops cooperative locally-driven economic strategies focusing on design and environmental stewardship; and Resilient City which strategizes how to aggregate and integrate these programs so as to address environmental degradation, natural disaster management, and persistent poverty at the scale of the city and region.
Hermann received her Ph.D. from Harvard in the history of Islamic urbanism where her work focused on medieval Muslim cities, contagion theory, and designed responses to outbreaks of epidemic disease (Black Death) during prolonged periods of environmental and political upheaval. Hermann has been visiting faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. She was a SPURS Fellow in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Hermann has served as a senior advisor for master planning of the new Asian University for Women being built in Chittagong, Bangladesh, an outgrowth of the Task Force on Higher Education in Developing Countries (World Bank/UNESCO 2000). For the past decade she has worked in the megacities of South Asia on issues related to poverty alleviation, women’s rights and empowerment, education, resource management and environmental disasters, sustainable land-use practices within low-income inner-city neighborhoods, livelihood alternatives and enterprise development. She is co-founder of the Institute for Sustainable Urban Societies/ISUS, an international not-for-profit research, education, advocacy and design alliance located in Kolkata, Dhaka and Boston.
Hermann is a contributing author to the Encyclopedia on Women in Muslim Cultures (EWIC) and author of the in-progress book Cities of Silt and Sand: Urbanization, Environment and Cultural Identity in the Bengal Delta and Cooperative Resilience: Community-Driven Development Strategies in South Asia. She is adjunct faculty at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and Social Innovator-in-Residence at the Social Innovation Lab at Babson College.

Spring 2015 course

4.625J / 11.378J Water Planning, Policy and Design
Woven Waters: Islam and The Bay of Bengal
This seminar situates the Bay of Bengal, within the larger body of the Indian Ocean, as a center of globalization dating from ancient times to today. This eastern half of what has been referred to as “an Islamic Sea” is the meeting point of South Asian cultures and China, two regional superpowers of the past posed to regain their global supremacy going forward.
The seminar will create a visual and written record – an atlas of sorts – of the web of cultures, languages, religions, migrations, resources, trade, architectures, and power structures that have bound this bay together over human history. It will examine this within regional environmental conditions, both seasonal and long-term change, and local through international policies and agreements that have framed the trajectories of occupation and land use. Throughout, the seminar will highlight the role that Islam has played it forming the unique character of what today, once again, is being seen as a center of dialogue, exchange and identity, rather than as a dividing line between distinct peoples, nations and regions. Readings will range from historic traveler’s accounts to modern scholarship and contemporary literature.
“Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the summer rains. Picture it in two dimensions on a map, overlaid with a web of shipping channels and telegraph cables and inscribed with lines of distance. Now imagine the sea as a mental map: as a family tree of cousins, uncles, sisters, sons, connected by letters and journeys and stories. Think of it as a sea of debt, bound by advances and loans and obligations. Picture the Bay….even where it is absent… Today one in four of the world’s people lives in a country that borders the Bay of Bengal. More than half a billion people live directly on the coastal rim that surrounds it. This is a region that has long been central to the history of globalization: shaped by migration, as culturally mixed as any place on earth, and at the forefront of the commodification of nature… The coastal frontiers of the Bay are among the most vulnerable in the world to climate change; they are densely populated, ecologically fragile, and at the fault lines of new dreams of empire.”
Sunil S. Amrith Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013)