Silvic Stewardship: Incentivizing Environmental Care
Julia Smachylo (Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture, UConn)
with a response by Jennifer Cazenave (French and Cinema & Media Studies, Boston University)
Virtual, with automated captioning.
This talk examines how environmental incentive programs, with a focus on those shaping private land management in forested landscapes, function as powerful spatial and political tools. By reframing these programs under the framework of incentivized landscapes, the presentation highlights how legal and fiscal policies actively produce socio‑ecological space, shaping both environmental outcomes and design possibilities. I explore how these landscapes operate as state spatial strategies, how they influence patterns and processes across ecosystems, and why their design consequences matter for planning in the Anthropocene. The talk introduces a conceptual framework for understanding incentivized landscapes as hybrid socio-political and socio-ecological systems, and discusses emerging perspectives that reveal new directions for landscape planning and design practice in this context.
Dr. Smachylo’s research and practice are situated at the intersection of critical urban theory, political ecology and landscape design, and focus on making visible largely unseen processes that shape both our interactions with, and physical form of, our environment. Working across disciplines, her research connects landscapes with multi-scalar processes of environmental stewardship, with the goal of contributing to ongoing efforts to develop more holistic and socially responsible approaches to design intervention.
Jennifer Cazenave is an Associate Professor of French and Cinema & Media Studies at Boston University. Her first book, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ (SUNY Press, 2019), offers a chronicle of overlooked aspects of the film’s making, while also framing broader questions about trauma and mediation, audiovisual testimonies, gendered memories, and digital archives. An Archive of the Catastrophe received an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. A French translation is forthcoming in 2026.
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.
