The Global Planner who Created Modern Erie: Maurice Rotival
The French urbanist Maurice Rotival (1892-1980) is the paradigm of an early global planner who brought his French inspired urban design ideas via Africa to South and North America and back to Europe. Rotival inspired urban transformations in numerous cities and major capitals, such as Paris and Caracas, and smaller cities including New Haven, CT and Erie. In this lecture, Dr. Hein will discuss Rotival's work in Erie in the late 1950s and the Rotival Plan, which had a great impact on creating the Erie we know today.
Carola Hein is Professor at Bryn Mawr College (Pennsylvania) in the Growth and Structure of Cities Program. She trained in Hamburg (Diplom-Ingenieurin) and Brussels (Architect) and earned her doctorate at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in 1995. She has published and lectured widely on topics in contemporary and historical architectural and urban planning – notably in Europe and Japan – and has authored several articles and books on capital city issues in Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Berlin, and Tokyo. From 1995 to 1999 she was a Visiting Researcher at Tokyo Metropolitan University and Kogakuin University, focusing on the reconstruction of Japanese cities after World War II and the Western influence on Japanese urban planning. Among other major grants, in 2004 she held a grant by the Brussels-Capital Region Government to investigate the urban location and architectural expression of the European capital function. In 2005-06 she has been working with a grant form the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy for research on Regional integration and land policies affecting the future development of Tallinn, Warsaw, and Budapest. In 2007 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue research on The Global Architecture of Oil. She is currently conducting research on the transformation of Hamburg’s waterfront between 1842 and 2008 with a Humboldt Fellowship.
Carola Hein has authored The Capital of Europe: Architecture and Urban Planning for the European Union (Praeger, 2004), and has edited Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (Routledge 2011) (with Pierre Laconte, eds) Brussels: Perspectives on a European Capital. Bruseels: Publication of the Foundation for the Urban Environment, 2007. Bruxelles l’Européene: Capitale de qui? Ville de qui?/ European Brussels. Whose capital? Whose city? Brussels: Cahiers de la Cambre-Architecture n 5, Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 2006; (with Philippe Pelletier, eds). Cities, Autonomy and Decentralization in Japan. London: Routledge, 2006: (with Jeffry Diefendorf, and Yorifusa Ishida, eds), Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. She has also published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, books, and magazines.
