Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design

Refocusing on human inhabitants in landscape architecture

Landscape architecture is at a crossroads. The ability to draw upon interdisciplinary perspectives and generate insights from the combined vantage points of design, environmental studies, and the social sciences puts it in a prime position to address the most pressing issues of our time, such as climate change and social inequality. Its current reliance on digital and technological solutions, however, has increasingly caused landscape architects to lose sight of the ways in which humans actually use spaces. And while landscapes are designed all over the world, the discipline remains inordinately centered on the Global North. Landscape Fieldwork alters that long-standing paradigm through real-life examples that provide tools for practitioners to engage more deeply with multidimensional, diverse landscapes and the communities that create, live in, and use them.

Gareth Doherty is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of African and African American Studies. He is the author of Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State.