Alison Hirsch
Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism, USC School of Architecture
Alison Hirsch, PhD, FAAR, is Associate Professor and Director of both the Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture+Urbanism and the Landscape Justice Initiative As a landscape historian and designer, her writing and design-research is most focused on landscape and cultural meaning with particular emphasis on communities historically marginalized, displaced, dispossessed, as well as seeking environmental and spatial justice. As an educator and academic, she strives to maximize opportunities for applied research, service-learning and forms of community-student co-creation. Alison is currently deeply immersed in research on the working landscapes of the San Joaquin Valley as a landscape of extreme inequality and risk. She writes prolifically and her authored and edited books include City Choreographer (University of Minnesota) and The Landscape Imagination (Princeton Architectural Press). She is co-founder and Research Director of foreground design agency, a critical landscape practice.