Student Lecture Series | Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: Manoeuvring Boundaries

Thursday, March 3, 2022, 6:30 - 8:30pm

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Image Credit: "Scales of Extraction after Morphosis," courtesy of Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. 

Image Credit: "Scales of Extraction after Morphosis," courtesy of Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. 

This presentation will be conducted through Zoom. Advanced registration is required, please register here

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Architect, urban designer, and scholar, Malterre-Barthes’ interests are related to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization, material extraction and climate emergency, and how struggling communities can gain greater access to resources, the mainstream economy, better governance, and ecological/social justice—a strategic practice of urban design. Recently she started the initiative ‘A Global Moratorium on New Construction’ with B+ interrogating current protocols of development. While directing the MAS Urban Design at the Chair of Marc Angélil, Malterre-Barthes has earned her doctoral degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich on the political economy of commodities on the built environment. She is the coauthor of prize-winning books Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity (2020), Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (2018), and Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (2016), among others. Malterre-Barthes is a founding member of the Parity Group and of the Parity Front, activist networks dedicated to improving gender equality and diversity in architecture. 

This event is free and accessible to the public through Zoom. 


  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.