Sara Hadavi, a Landscape Architecture doctoral student at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, and fellow U-M team members won the top $50,000 prize this week for a redevelopment plan for a Seattle neighborhood. More than 153 teams from 60 universities competed in the 2011 Urban Land Institute Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition. This year, the competition addressed Seattle's traffic congestion and network of auto-oriented neighborhoods and infrastructure.

Landscape Architecture students at SNRE present their portfolios for review by outside experts Tuesday during annual Portfolio Day activities. The day also includes a lecture by SNRE alumna Trish Beckjord, a landscape architect, who is giving a talk from 5-6 p.m. in Room 1028 titled "LEED and Green Design of Health Care Environments." Seven employers, including five represented by SNRE Landscape Architecture alumni, will be conducting one-on-one reviews with students in the Dana Building.

On Nov. 9, M. Elen Deming will deliver the Clarence Roy/JJR lecture, also part of the Dean's Speaker Series. "This talk is for anyone who is struggling with a thesis," she said. A few years ago, M. Elen Deming and Simon Swaffield, both professors of landscape architecture, found themselves editing two of only four English-language scholarly peer-reviewed journals in the field of landscape architecture. The two found themselves playing the role of gatekeeper for the discipline and, in working with a range of peer reviewers, found widely varying standards for evaluating research. Some reviewers championed deductive investigations, others inductive; some only accepted objective work, while others favored subjective artistic work.