Contacts: Brad Cullen, (505) 277-5041 Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821

October 10, 2002 ‘THE ECOLOGICAL CITY’ TOPIC OF SEVENTH LECTURE IN VISIONS OF AMERICAN WEST SERIES The interdisciplinary lecture series, “Visions for the American West,” continues its fall lecture schedule featuring Rutherford Platt on Sunday, Oct. 20. The lecture, “The Ecological City,” will be held in room 163 in the Anthropology Building at the University of New Mexico beginning at 4:30 p.m. The series is organized by the Department of Geography at UNM. The hour-long lecture, which is free and open to the public, will discuss ways on how to preserve and restore biodiversity at the metropolitan scale as a means to mitigate and control sprawl and other excesses of urban development in terms of changing perceptions of nature in cities, multiple uses of natural spaces, alternative scales of intervention, institutional flexibility and innovation and the role of science in urban design. Formerly a staff attorney for the Open Lands Project in Chicago, Platt is a professor of geography at the University of Massachusetts and a member of the Illinois bar. He recently organized a national symposium on the work of William H. Whyte, held at New York University in June 2002. He has served on a number of committees for the National Academy of Sciences and is the author of several monographs, including “Land Use Control: Geography, Law, and Public Policy” (Prentice-Hall), and is editor of “The Ecological City: Preserving and Restoring Urban Biodiversity” (Massachusetts). # # #

The University of New Mexico
Public Affairs Department
Hodgin Hall, 2nd floor
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0011
Telephone: (505) 277-5813
Fax: (505) 277-1981