failures of 20th-century urban policies and development, resulting in an economically depressed, racially-segregated community plagued with vacant land, subsiding ground, and flooded basements on the buried floodplain of the creek. Anne Whiston Spirn, lauded by the Boston Globe as an “urban visionary” will focus on the story of Mill Creek’s restoration as a model for uniting science, design, and community engagement to address social and environmental problems. Spirn will stress how “landscape literacy” is just as critical to those solutions as verbal literacy was to the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.