The lecture situates sets of littoral narratives, as a moving constellation of relational networks revealed within the constructive processes of makingground. Amsterdam, in its seeming 'fixity' of land, reinforced through its architectures set within the continuums of the delta landscape acts as a model of capitalism.  The lecture attempts to reveal the underlying structures of capitalism -- investment and speculation -- developed through two cases within the development of Amsterdam’s urban and architectural history. It used Amsterdam as an example of our entanglement – as collective actions, intersecting across social, economic, and environmental systems and scales of territory – encompassing the Earth.

About the lecturer:
Catherine Ann Somerville Venart, Associate Professor, Dalhousie University, Faculty of Architecture+Planning.
Catherine's interest lies in understanding, representing, and conceptualizing the evolving dynamic relationship between environmental and cultural processes. Educated as an artist, BFA; Engineer, Cert. Eng; and architect MArch from SCI.Arch(94). Catherine is a registered Architekten in Germany NRW (97), and founder of iip for architecture and urban design as an international + interdisciplinary practice. She has lectured, led workshops, exhibited, and practiced widely.

Currently Visiting Researcher at TU Delft Urbanism’s Research Group Transitional Territories

Research:
Her research interrogates understandings of the embedded dynamics and processes that inform and underlie the Dutch Delta. A landscape that is not fixed, but continually shifting, in-formed by natural (ecological, geological, and hydrological) processes and human interventions. In connecting the ideological and technological modes of history used to name, represent, or construct land we uncover different grounds, for that horizontal necessity of civitas and its architectures. Through an overlay and expansion, intersecting time, and space we travel across scales of territories making us complicit and revealing our entanglement with Earth.