Victoria Marshall is PhD researcher in the Urban-Rural Systems Group at the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) of the Singapore-ETH Centre. She is also a President's Graduate Fellow at the National University of Singapore, where she is pursuing a PhD in Geography.

Victoria is currently teaching at Yale-NUS and has previously taught at The New School, Cornell University, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, University of Toronto, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the University of New South Wales. 

In 2010, she was awarded an India China Institute Fellowship. Victoria has been a member of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study Urban Design Working Group since 2006. She founded the landscape architecture practice Till Design in 2002 (tilldesign.com) and is a licensed landscape architect, a member of the American Institute of Landscape Architects, and American Association of Geographers. 

Victoria received her Masters of Landscape Architecture and Certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania, USA and Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of New South Wales, Australia.

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Research

Victoria's research seeks to understand the social, ecological, and political transformations shaping the landscape in peri-urban Kolkata, and specifically in areas she is provisionally describing as 'settled forests'. She sees this research as an extension of the long landscape tradition in geography.

A settled forest is a wide spread Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna mega delta condition that has roads, shops, temples, housing, and domestic scale gardening interspersed with heavily wooded areas. Are the 'settled forests' merely a snapshot in a journey between rural and urban, or are they a moving urban-rural mix and a heterogeneous shifting mosaic?

Although the geographical focus the research is, at first glance, a peri-urban condition, her interest is in this as political landscape ecology. It is necessary to understand settled forests not only for better appreciation of the nuance of urban-rural environments, but also for better political instruments such as practices of commoning and design for the public realm.

Selected Publication

Marshall, Victoria. 2017. “Designing Mega Delta Interactions.” In Environmental Sustainability from the Himalayas to the Oceans : Struggles and Innovations in China and India, edited by Shikui Dong, Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, and Sanjay Chaturvedi, 205–39. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.