Wolfram Höfer
Associate Professor, Director of the Center for Urban Environmental and Sustainability
Rutgers University, Department of Landscape Architecture
Biography
Dr. Wolfram Höfer is an Associate Professor at the Rutgers of Department of Landscape Architecture and serves as Director of the Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability (CUES). CUES is a collaboration between the Rutgers departments of Landscape Architecture, Ecology, and Environmental Sciences, providing an opportunity to combine the best science, engineering, and design expertise to address urban environmental issues.
He holds a doctoral degree from Technische Universtät München 2000 and is a licensed landscape architect in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany.
Dr. Höfer developed numerous community outreach projects in the field of adaptive re-use of brownfields, urban resiliency, and infrastructure. His research and teaching focus is the cultural interpretation of brownfields as potential elements of the public realm. Further he is investigating the different cultural interpretations of landscapes by the general public in North America and Europe and how they influence public participation processes as well as professional approaches towards planning and design solutions for adaptive re-use of brownfields. This research informs Dr. Höfer’s approaches of developing and applying innovative environmental planning and design approaches for New Jersey through the Center of Urban Environmental Sustainability.
Rutgers Climate Bridge Opening Remarks
Overview of the session for the conference.
Rutgers Climate Bridge Conference Overview
A critical comparison between the Ruhr Region and the Northern New Jersey metropolitan area provides a baseline to discuss climate adaptation strategies. Both regions were shaped by rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century and several waves of economic transformations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Similar infrastructure and settlement patterns result in parallel climate change vulnerabilities while political culture and decision-making processes are significantly different.
Moderator
Rutgers Climate Bridge Panel 9: Vision for Policy
Abstract
Developing an Integrated Landscape and Ecosystem Services Plan (L-Plan) for Middlesex County applies landscape urbanist approaches toward an environmental decision-making framework. A comprehensive ecological assessment is combined with an analysis of County’s cultural landscape embraces the interrelationships between human-wellbeing and landscape. The outcome is an environmental decision-making framework that induces a collaborative process for municipal, county, and state level stakeholders, agencies and departments.