Dr Kristina Hill Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture Kristina's PhD is in landscape architecture, and her past urban ecological research work (before "the lab" existed) applied fuzzy logic to landscape mapping and bird habitat models. She taught urban design and planning at MIT before coming out to Seattle in 1997. Kristina is from the city of Worcester, Massachusetts (the cultural "nerve center" of North America), and knows an enormous amount of what the uninitiated might call "trivia" about that city. She runs the graduate program in landscape architecture, and has just finished editing a book on teaching ecology in design education (Design and Ecology: Frameworks for Learning, Island Press, 2001) Kristina studies the patterns of urban areas from the viewpoints of landscape planning, urban design, and landscape ecology. She's especially interested in how water flows through urban landscapes, and how those flows affect cultural and biological processes. Kristina sees these patterns of water flow and their biological consequences as one of the richest intellectual challenges for urban ecological research and urban design. She also considers landscape classification from a multi-disciplinary perspective, studying the way that language, logic, and cognitive categories affect what and how we map as "landscape pattern." Kristina's work with the Urban Ecology lab has included developing classification and analysis techniques for LANDSAT images. These are being used to create maps of land cover for urban hydrological and ecological research, and to study the relationships among land cover and land use in the Puget Sound region. She's also working on the representation of urban drainage patterns at the landscape scale. |