Danika Cooper is a landscape designer, urbanist, and researcher whose teaching and research centers around the geopolitics of scarcity, alternative water ontologies, and designing for resiliency in the world’s arid regions. Cooper will give a presentation as part of the Department of Design’s Research in Design Speaker Series. Her talk is Thursday, Oct. 9, 12- p.m. in Cruess Hall Room 1105. The event is free and open to the public.

Cooper is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where the core of her research centers on the geopolitics of scarcity, alternative water ontologies, and designs for resiliency in the global aridlands. Aridlands have largely been underexplored in landscape architecture—her work offers multiple ways of knowing, being, and engaging with desert landscapes to better inform current environmental and landscape architecture discourse and practice. This is especially important as populations in these regions increase and as the climate becomes drier and hotter. Through her scholarship, Cooper traces the ways that nineteenth-century, Euro-Western environmental theories and ideologies continue to influence cultural perceptions, policy frameworks, and management practices within US desert landscapes today.

Cooper’s research and creative output has been published and exhibited across the world, and she has practiced architecture and landscape architecture both in the United States and in India. Prior to joining Berkeley, she was the 2015–2016 designer-in-residence teaching fellow at the University of Illinois, Department of Landscape Architecture.

The Department of Design is part of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.