faculty

Bjørn Sletto

Assistant Professor

bjornsletto@mail.utexas.edu

SUT 3.124B | office
+1 512 471 5153 | phone

The University of Texas at Austin
School of Architecture
1 University Station B7500
Austin, TX 78712

areas of interest

Geographic Information Systems, Latin American planning and development, participatory planning, environmental and social justice, social theory.

Bjørn Sletto received his doctorate in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. He has a master's degree in Geography from the University of Kansas and a BA in Journalism from the University of Minnesota. A native of Ål, Norway, Bjørn has more than 20 years' experience living and working in Latin America and the Caribbean. His research focuses on indigenous resource management, sustainable development, and environmental planning in Latin America. He is particularly interested in the dichotomies and tensions between local knowledge and traditional environmental management systems, and formal planning and management approaches. During the past few years, he lived in indigenous villages and border cities in Venezuela, investigating conflicts associated with fire management and leading a participatory mapping project to assist with the demarcation of the land of the indigenous Pemon.

His current research focuses on indigenous land rights and environmental conflict in the Perija mountains on the Colombia-Venezuela border, and the ways in which these issues articulate with environmental planning and environmental justice in the Lake Maracaibo region. Bjørn founded the conference series, Indigenous Cartographies and Representational Politics, and remains actively engaged with participatory mapping, both as a fieldworker and theorist. His domestic projects include participatory research with the environmental justice organization PODER in East Austin, focusing on children's perceptions and knowledge of environmental hazards and the planning implications of environmental justice activism in Austin.

Bjørn teaches Geographic Information Systems, environmental planning, environmental justice, and Latin American planning and development in the Program in Community and Regional Planning. Last spring, his students in CRP 386: Applied GIS and Environmental Justice, were awarded a MYCOE grant from the Association of American Geographers and presented their research at the annual meeting of the AAG in San Francisco. The class produced a Community Information System to document, represent and address environmental justice issues in East Austin. His students in CRP 383: Urban Environmental Analysis developed an urban forestry project with the Hyde Park Neighborhood Organization, working closely with community members to assess the perceptions and planning priorities associated with urban tree management. He has most recently published in Cultural Geographies, Environment and Planning D and Geoforum, is currently editing a special issue of Cultural Geographies, and is awaiting the publication of articles in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, World Development and Current Anthropology.

Bjørn is an associated faculty member in the Department of Geography and the Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS), University of Texas.

COURSES

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  • Producing Space(s), Representing Landscapes: A Lefebvrian Approach to Resource Conflicts. Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 389-420. (Cult_Geogr_article.pdf, 1658KB)
  • A Swamp and Its Subjects: Conservation Politics, Surveillance and Resistance in Trinidad, the West Indies. Geoforum 36 (January 2005): 77-93. (Geoforum_Article.pdf, 342KB)
  • Autodemarcación del Sector Kavanayen: Informe Final. Proyecto Etnocartográfico Inna Kowantok. Kumarakapay, Venezuela 2004. (Informe_Final_Sector5.pdf, 3197KB)
  • Mapping the Gran Sabana. Americas Magazine 57, Organization of American States (November 2005). (Americas_GranSabana.pdf, 1460KB).

VIDEOS