Research
The advocacy for nature and heritage preservation is as old as its industrial destruction. Already in the early 20th century, heritage advocates, nature educators, and architects fought the ruination and pollution of cities, villages and landscapes in the Netherlands. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation followed in the footsteps of these older nature writers and heritage protectors. During her fellowship, Soscha Monteiro delves into the literary collections of the Allard Pierson, to investigate the role of literature in bringing sustainable concerns into public debate and politics. She studies the collection of the biologist, poet and writer, Dick Hillenius (1927-1987) and contemporaries, to uncover potential relations between nature writing, social criticism and spatial politics. She positions this literary work in relation to architecture and urban design history by studying their dissemination and related professional networks.
Fellow
Soscha Monteiro is a doctoral researcher in the Building Ideologies Group at Delft University of Technology. In her research she investigates histories of sustainability in urban design in the last three decades of the 20th century, using Amsterdam as a lens. Recently she participated in the doctoral research residency programme at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Soscha is member of the steering board of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA), a non-profit academic organisation for supporting researchers in architectural humanities.