30 landscape architects around the world offer personal stories and histories about their favorite tree in this book edited by Ron Henderson, FASLA, a professor of landscape architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The designers explain what the trees evoke and how they were used in a project. Henderson also provides botanical descriptions. Contributors include Shannon Nichol, FASLA, Laurie Olin, FASLA, Mario Schjetnan, FASLA, Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, Elizabeth Mossop, FASLA, and many others.
The African Ancestors Garden: History and Memory at the International African American Museum / The Monacelli Press, 2024
Landscape designer and artist Walter Hood explains how his firm’s powerful landscape at the International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina came to be in this beautifully illustrated book. The museum is located at Gadsden’s Wharf, where nearly half of all enslaved Africans arrived in North America. With its African ethnobotanical gardens and infinity pool, the landscape shows “how different worlds can be held in the same space,” Hood says. It unearths and honors the past while providing a space for new dialogue and even celebration.
Brooklyn Bridge Park: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates / The Monacelli Press, 2024
In plain language, Michael Van Valkenburgh, FASLA, tells the story of how six abandoned shipping piers on the Brooklyn waterfront became a dynamic 85-acre park, the largest addition to NYC’s public space in a generation. Brooklyn Bridge Park was designed to be inclusive — it’s home to barbeques, sports fields, and playgrounds. But it’s also a model of ecological planting and climate resilience. This generous coffee table book offers 250 immersive images and includes a forward by landscape designer Julie Bargmann. It’s the next best thing to going to Brooklyn.
Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation, and Retreat in the Pyrocene / Routledge, 2024
“Feral wildlands and the wildland-urban interface are places where design can make a profound impact,” write Emily Schlickman, ASLA, and Brett Milligan, ASLA, in this timely book that offers 27 strategies for designing with fire. The co-authors focus on five fire-prone zones around the world that share a Mediterranean climate, including western North America, the Mediterranean basin, the Cape of South Africa, central Chile, and parts of Australia. Many scientists no longer view wildfires in these zones as isolated events but rather as connected in a larger system.
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth / Harper, 2024
“It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival,” writes Zoë Schlanger, an evironmental and science reporter for The Atlantic. She weaves together the latest plant science, explaining how plants communicate, sense, learn, and adapt.
Field Sketching for Environmental Designers / Routledge
“To learn to really ‘see’ what you draw is to go beyond merely copying what you observe; the ultimate goal is to find the soul and meaning of the landscape,” writes Chip Sullivan, FASLA, professor of landscape architecture at University of California at Berkeley, in this charming how-to guide. A welcome companion for both beginning and advanced drawers, this book’s wealth of inspiration and practical tips will improve the ability of any sketcher. Take it with you on your next walk.
Noguchi’s Gardens: Landscape as Sculpture / ORO Editions, 2024
Japanese modern artist Isamu Noguchi is famous for his akari light sculptures and public art. But he also crafted landscapes like sculpture, with “space as their primary vehicle,” writes Marc Trieb, Hon. ASLA, a prolific author, landscape historian, and professor emeritus at University of California Berkeley. This book covers Noguchi’s unrealized and built parks, gardens, and playgrounds around the world, offering some rare photographs.
Silt Sand Slurry: Dredging, Sediment, and the World We Are Making / Applied Research + Design, 2024
“We are manipulating sediments at a tectonic scale,” write the members of the Dredge Research Collaborative — Rob Holmes, ASLA, Brett Milligan, ASLA, and Gena Wirth, FASLA — who have co-authored a compelling call to action to “design with sediment– intelligently, democratically, and equitably.” Sediment is often ignored but is vitally important because it shapes the “current and future conditions of life.” Other key members of the collaborative — Sean Burkholder, Brian Davis, ASLA, and Justine Holzman — contributed essays.
Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-Create the Cities We Need / North Atlantic Books, 2024
Artist and urbanist Johanna Hoffman, who studied landscape architecture at University of California at Berkeley, calls for partnering with communities to visualize “new and potential worlds.” This world-making can help us “move us beyond what currently exists into what could one day be.” She is inspired by the creative fields of “art, film, fiction, and industrial design” and how they use “speculation to provoke, imagine, and dream into what lies ahead.” The book outlines novel engagement approaches that enable communities to dream big and make vision reality.
What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures / One Books, 2024
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the keynote speaker for the ASLA 2022 Conference on Landscape Architecture, has written a follow-up to her bestseller: All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. Her new book guides readers through “solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice.” She brings together visionaries, such as landscape architect Kate Off, FASLA; climate leader Bill McKibben; and MoMA curator Paola Antonelli in a conversation about what a healthier, more equitable future could look like.
Buying these books through THE DIRT or ASLA’s online bookstore benefits ASLA educational programs.
Bison in Yellowstone National Park / Fokusiert, istockphoto.com
“Indigenous Peoples were the first landscape architects of this continent,” said Lyla June Johnston, during the opening general session of the ASLA 2024 Conference on Landscape Architecture in Washington, D.C. “We have been stewards of this land and made it beautiful and edible. We fed the Earth instead of just letting it feed us.”
Chestnut forests once spanned the east coast from Maine to Georgia, before a blight decimated the trees. “These were not wild forests, but planted by Indigenous Peoples. And Native land stewards evolved those landscapes over time.” Scientists know this from studying soil core samples and fossilized charcoal going back 10,000 years. The data shows that chestnut and hickory trees dramatically spiked 3,000 years ago, and black walnut 2,000 years ago.
Chestnut Grove, Virginia / AidanWarren, istockphoto.com
In the Pacific Northwest, there were once vast, cultivated clam gardens. “You can see them from ancient clam garden walls that augmented natural clam habitat.” These gardens were co-designed with clams because “they are equal to us and have their own nationhood status.”
In the Illinois region, Indigenous People burned prairies for thousands of years to “maximize productivity and regain nutrients,” Johnston said. “Fire brings new life to the prairie. Flowers emerge in the spring.” Ash from fires also nourished soils and created nutrient-rich grasses that made habitat for bison and deer. “Indigenous Peoples passed on this great heirloom for thousands of years to their children— a living soil system.”
In the Washington, D.C. area, Indigenous Peoples cultivated oyster fisheries for more than 3,000 years. Oyster populations of the Chesapeake Bay are less than 1 percent of what once was.
Johnston is an Indigenous Artist, Musician, Scholar, and Community Organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne), and European lineages. She argues that land stewardship should be restored to Indigenous Peoples given they are far better at creating and restoring habitat than Western people.
“People can be a gift, not a virus. We can be creators and a keystone species. We can be in service to the land. We can create edible landscapes that support the well-being of all,” she said.
But to become a keystone species and support global regeneration once again, people need to “first landscape their inner world before they landscape the outer world.” Our global society needs to shift its mindset. Instead of exploiting nature, we need to be its guardian. “Think of a bird bath — it’s not for us, but lets birds rest, drink, and bathe.”
Johnston argued that communities could give more land back to Indigenous Peoples because their guardian mindset is so crucial to protecting biodiverse places and restoring them. “Worldwide, Indigenous Peoples are 5 percent of the population but we manage 80 percent of global biodiversity. Give us more land to manage. We are good at this.”
After many years of working with Indigenous communities and designers, “I came to understand this knowledge is relational and shaped by time and place. It’s different from Western science; Indigenous knowledge is interconnected.”
“There are vast networks of knowledge developed over long periods of time. These networks of knowledge enabled ancestral people to survive and adapt to climate change over thousands of years. You can’t separate their technologies from the people; they are co-evolutionary.”
Watson offered an example: the sea fishing techniques of the Yap people of Micronesia. They created artificial reefs and weirs that catch fish in the outgoing tides. “The technology is 1,000 years old.”
Aech Fish Weirs of the Yap People of Micronesia / Bill Jeffrey, courtesy of Julia WatsonAech Fish Weirs of the Yap People of Micronesia / Bill Jeffrey, courtesy of Julia Watson
With the colonization of the region, this Indigenous technology was no longer used for fishing. But even after falling into disrepair, the legacy of the infrastructure forms breakwaters that protect these communities today.
Watson said these systems can be brought back along with other traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) systems created by Indigenous communities around the world.
After the success of her book Lo-TEK, Watson has written a follow-up – Lo-TEK: Water, which focuses on ancestral aquatic technologies. It will be released in the spring of next year. The new book includes 22 case studies of traditional infrastructure and 22 contemporary projects infused with TEK that “rebuild ancient knowledge and highlight Indigenous traditions of adapting to climate change.” She organized these technologies in multiple categories: living, co-evolutionary, sovereign, symbiotic, and cyclical.
Watson’s goal is to bring ancestral technologies back into the global discussion about solutions to the biodiversity and climate crises. “Ancestral infrastructure has been deliberately excluded from these conversations. There has been an unlearning of these histories, even though Indigenous People have created the oldest man-made structures on Earth.”
Books are just one way she advocates for the inclusion of Indigenous design knowledge. The Lo-TEK Institute also offers a Living Earth curriculum for high-school and college level students, featuring 10 Indigenous, nature-based innovations.
And she’s working with firms like Buro Happold to “co-create hybrid technologies of the future” and with attorneys like Comar Molle to protect the intellectual property of Indigenous Peoples. “We can co-create infrastructure with Indigenous knowledge,” protecting their intellectual property at the same time.
Symbiocene exhibition / Dezeen, courtesy of Julia WatsonSymbiocene exhibition / Tim P. Whitby, courtesy of Julia Watson
Help build an Indigenous landscape architects’ network of ASLA members and work in collaboration with groups like ISAPD
During a follow-up conversation with Watson and Johnston, José de Jesús Leal, ASLA, Principal and Director, Native Nation Building Studio, MIG, and member of the ASLA Biodiversity and Climate Action Committee, kicked-off the discussion by asking: “Can Indigenous knowledge outpace our current problems?”
Paul Fragua, a Tribal Elder and architect at MIG, said that while landscape architects and ASLA are celebrating 125 years of American practice this year, Indigenous Peoples have 3,000 years of experience stewarding landscapes. “We need to get started on the next 3,000 years. There is an urgency not for me, but for future generations.”
Johnston sees the landback movement, which has grown in the past five years, as a key way to address our current challenges.
While Native communities are buying land themselves, it’s usually less than 100 acres at a time. “The U.S. government, churches, and private landowners in the U.S. have hundreds of thousands of acres that could be returned to Native stewardship.”
In a few instances, public parks are now being co-managed by the National Park Service and Native Nations. “Having Native Americans in positions of leadership in the Department of Interior and National Park Service enabled that,” she said.
“There are two barriers — getting land back plus a lack of resources,” Leal said. “Native Nations have to be able to take care of the land they get back. It’s not just the actual property, but deep collaboration with the land.”
One approach may help increase resources. In the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s a voluntary land tax people can pay to support local tribal communities. “You can pay it whether you rent or own,” Johnston explained. The funds enable Native communities to buy back more land. Johnston wants to see more of those kinds of funds go directly to grassroots Native community leaders and non-profits that are “revitalizing land and culture.”
To outpace our problems, Watson thinks the “software” that runs our societies needs to change. “A value system is a compass of how to live. These value systems are rooted in a cultural worldview.”
In New Zealand, the Maori have a “software that guides how they take care of the land.” That software shapes their language, which is place based. In effect, their beliefs and worldview and how they communicate are tied to places. “So when we design systems in these places, we need to build the cultural framework of the communities. The belief system is the core.”
Fragua noted that in New Mexico, Pueblo peoples view some mountain peaks as sacred. They are places that transcend this world and connect us to the spiritual world. That is another example of a belief system rooted to a place.
Landscape architects asked the group questions about how to implement these ideas in contemporary projects.
Johnston and Watson said it’s important to hire Indigenous designers. And Leal added that it’s important to set those relationships in truth. “We need to start fresh relationships and beat stereotypes.” When reaching out to Indigenous designers and communities, “reach out and ask for their voice, but respectfully.”
They also noted that Indigenous design doesn’t necessarily mean creating room for nature at the expense of people. “Indigenous people designed some of the most densely populated cities in South America,” Johnston said. And it’s also not about rewilding landscapes. “American landscapes were never wild to begin with. They were always managed.”
Non-Indigenous designers can also work to “interrupt the harm,” Watson said. “You can document what has been erased and ensure Indigenous landscapes aren’t forgotten.”
Fragua said that many Indigenous communities follow the “great law of peace because there has been so much war. Resilience comes now from resistance [against inequality]. The creator wants us to live as equals.”
And for too long, there has been a separation between people and nature. “We need an integrated approach, a unity where we are part of the world,” Johnston said. Communities need to return to an ancient Indigenous philosophy: “We live in Earth and are born of the Earth. Landscape is a part of ourselves.”
Kenwood Gardens, Chicago / Ryan Stefan, courtesy of Rebuild Foundation
Artist and builder Theaster Gates‘ projects on the Southside of Chicago are art pieces. But they are also “social services, community outreach initiatives, libraries, archives, business and human resource incubators, and historic preservation projects,” explained author and critic Paul Goldberger.
Goldberger tried to define Gates’ complex, multi-faceted building and landscape projects while introducing him at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, where Gates was honored with the Vincent Scully Prize.
Gates’ built projects total more than 60 buildings and landscapes saved from abandonment, preserved, and reimagined over the last two decades. They show the “power of preservation” — of using the “past as a liberating force to embolden the present,” Goldberger said.
Gates aims to redeem what has been left behind. “But he’s not saving good pieces of architecture to turn them into condos. This is not gentrification,” Goldberger said.
Theaster Gates’ archive and listening house / Sarah Pooley, courtesy of Rebuild Foundation
He is really more interested in “the people left behind” in places like the Southside. He wants to empower them by returning control of their spaces to them.
For Gates, revitalizing buildings and landscapes is a tool to achieve broader goals — to restore community pride and create sustainable local livelihoods.
His work shows that “past and present must come together to create a meaningful future.”
Gates then took to the stage, showing the deed to the first building he purchased in Chicago. He explained how his built projects started small, with just one abandoned building.
He then purchased another dilapidated building and then more, enough to shape the Grand Crossing neighborhood of the Southside. Together, the community and Gates’ team have imbued these spaces with new meaning.
While he started with buildings, Gates eventually shifted into landscapes, creating Kenwood Gardens out of 13 abandoned lots, with landscape architecture firm site design group.
Kenwood Gardens, Chicago. Landscape architect: site design group / Lucy Hewett, courtesy of Rebuild FoundationKenwood Gardens, Chicago. Lamdscape architect: site design group / Lucy Hewett, courtesy of Rebuild Foundation
“It’s the Versaille of the Southside,” Gates said. Neighborhood parties with house music are “integenerational, intergender, and interracial.”
Kenwood Gardens, Chicago. Landscape architect: site design group / Chris Strong, courtesy of Rebuild Foundation
Gates half-joked that outsiders should stay away from these projects in Chicago.
“The community needs more time to recognize beauty. After years of generational trauma, they are finally thriving. But they are still afraid to build for each other, because something bad might happen,” Gates said.
Yoga with April Falcon at Rebuild Foundation / Charles Bouril
Together with the Grand Crossing community, Gates wants to transform more abandoned buildings and landscapes.
“It’s an experiment. Buildings are not empty vessels. Can the building be the art work? Can the building be the monument?”
Rebuild Foundation’s Stony Island Arts Bank / Tom Harris, courtesy of Rebuild Foundation
Gates thinks the answers are yes. “We can grow stories and cities and create spaces that are slightly more sacred.”
In a Q&A discussion, Germane Barnes, principal and founder of Studio Barnes, and Jessica Bell Brown, curator and department head for contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, discussed how “building projects are a way to take back what spacialized racism has taken from us.”
Soul Healing Yoga with Stacy Patrice at Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative / Rebuild Foundation
“There is a power to redefining space — it’s an act of resistance,” Gates said.
And to redefine a neighborhood, Gates has challenged existing building code and zoning regimes.
“In Chicago, I have had to break some rules. Building codes and zoning laws are 50 years out of date. I want to expedite change and live in the truth of the needs of neighborhoods.”
To further reconnect the community, he sees the need for “new zoning types and land uses.”
In this regard, Gates takes inspiration from Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of the profession of landscape architecture, who reshaped Chicago by imagining new land uses.
“Olmsted created a commons. He knew cities need great parks. This was pre-air conditioning and when the classes didn’t mix. He saw that parks could be places that are adjacent and different. His idea of a commons proved true. These parks changed outcomes.”
Gates’ goal is to create a new commons on the Southside. “Being next to each other leads to new relationships. We can build with social relationships in mind.”
Happy Hour at Rebuild Foundation’s Retreat at Currency Exchange Cafe / Charles Bouril, courtesy of Rebuild Foundation
“The truth is people don’t want to work, sing, pray, or succeed by themselves.”
At the same time, Gates is determined that the Grand Crossing neighborhood benefit from the new commons he envisions. He wants them to take part in the rehabilitation and construction of projects, develop new skills, and earn fair wages.
His team salvaged bricks from a Catholic church. Instead of the usual quick demolition, Gates hired community members for two and a half years to take the church apart brick by brick.
Over the course of the deconstruction, “an informal team became a skilled labor force. From day and month workers, they became skilled laborers,” Gates said. And those bricks were used in many projects over a span of eight years.
He thinks there are still inequalities in access to built environment jobs, but he hopes to use larger projects to build a pipeline for plumbers, drywall and wood workers. “We can create opportunities for people. We need Black people on job sites.”
Sara Zewde, ASLA, is founder of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. She is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Over the past few years, you have led the reinterpretation of Frederick Law Olmsted as part of Olmsted 200. You just signed a contract for a new book on Olmsted and his journeys through the South, which he documented in The Cotton Kingdom. Your book is tentatively entitled Finding Olmsted and will be published by Simon & Schuster. Can you tell us about your interest in him?
To be honest with you, I did not pursue landscape architecture because of Olmsted, nor did I have a burning desire to work on Olmsted after learning about him. What happened was that I learned about Olmsted’s time in the South, writing about the conditions of slavery as a correspondent for The New York Times, in passing. I grew up in the South, and while I studied urban sociology, city planning, and landscape architecture, the South wasn’t very present in the curriculum formation. And yet, “the South got something to say,” to quote Andre 3000, if I may.
From there, I started to investigate Olmsted’s travels through the South, finding that he returned from his travels just prior to embarking on his career in landscape architecture. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there must be a connection between what he saw in the South and his conception of landscape architecture, so I tried to figure what that connection might be.
Retracing Olmsted’s journey through the South / Sara Zewde
I would go on to learn that Olmsted’s travels south pulled many of his interests in land, political economy, and civic society together for him, propelling him towards a practice of landscape architecture. He returned from the South with a clarified conviction in the significance of public space in a postbellum society. He translated that conviction into a landscape design for Central Park together with Calvert Vaux, which consequently, would go onto influence the larger American public park project. There’s a chain of influence that stems from the South.
At the ASLA 2022 Conference on Landscape Architecture, you guided landscape architects through the history of Seneca Village, the predominantly black community that was displaced by the New York City government to make way for Central Park. Then, you said “communities and their histories aren’t erased; they exist in plain sight, if you look.” How can landscape architects partner with communities to better show what exists but may be unseen?
I revisited the places Olmsted visited when he traveled to the South 165 years ago. Among the things that I found across these sites were the ways landscape architecture has been used to obscure the presence of slavery. So, in an ironic twist of fate, Olmsted’s profession has become the tool for untelling the stories about America that Olmsted wanted to tell in his writing. So it occurred to me: Can Olmsted’s landscape architecture also be the tool to tell those stories?
Seneca Village, in a sense, has not been erased. The landscape doesn’t lie. Remnants of people’s daily lives are still present in the park, and moreover their descendants walk among us. It’s up to us to acknowledge that. I believe landscape architecture can be a tool for heightening the presence of what is already there.
Map of Seneca Village / NYC Municipal Archives, via NY1
Your work seems largely focused on strengthening communities’ connection to their own histories, thereby empowering them and increasing their resilience to future challenges. Instead of taking a design-first approach, you take a community-first approach. In a video with PBS, you said your goal is to ensure your body of work, in totality, doesn’t say anything. Why take this approach?
There are so many cultures underrepresented in design pedagogy and practice. Part of the insistence on my part about not having a design signature so to speak is that our office really tap into the particular place, people, ecology, and cultural context. It helps us challenge some of the quiet constraints we’ve inherited about space and design.
There is a latent genius expressed in the spatial patterns of their daily lives. I find a lot of creative inspiration from people and place, and I challenge myself in my practice to tap into that more than anything else. It unravels creative approaches to designing landscapes that are unique, that support ecological systems, and are affirming for people.
This is important particularly for groups who have not been served by the design professions historically. It is of critical value to have your presence honored, and your way of life supported by the environment around you. Many of us live in a society that wasn’t designed for us to flourish in. What does it look like if it is?
In Philadelphia, you have been working with community groups and graffiti artists to protect Graffiti Pier from climate change. You purposefully framed your planning and design work with the community using that language. How did you overcome community fears that you would alter the character of a beloved community arts space? How is Graffiti Pier a model for other urban climate justice and adaptation work?
Graffiti Pier is feeling pressure from all sides. From the land, it’s coming from intense development pressure and land value appreciation. From the sea, it’s sea level rise and increasingly severe storm events. On the pier itself, the structure is decaying.
We communicated early with folks: “This project is your chance to save Graffiti Pier. If you do nothing, all of these pressures are going to collapse on this thing.”
We have been having one-on-one conversations with graffiti writers, or in small groups, and fielding anonymous emails, phone calls, and representatives, wanting to respect the fact that many graffiti writers and street artists have been criminalized for their use of the site.
In the Graffiti Pier context, there was an opportunity to introduce this intertidal landscape, remove the bulkheads, and allow the shift of the park upland as the tides continue to rise. That really offers the artists an opportunity, with new sea walls, to engage the rising tides while expanding available surfaces for art.
But that idea’s very specific to this context, and that’s the takeaway for me. I wouldn’t go into any situation and say “here’s how to do it.” I go into every situation working to tailor an approach that feels appropriate to its place.
For other communities facing managed retreat from climate impacts, we need to understand the specific conditions, complexities, and nuances of each place. Within those places, we need to learn what’s important and what’s not important and understand the ways in which a community already lives dynamically and adaptively and design for that.
In addition to your design work with Studio Zewde, you’re an assistant professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design. There, you are the first-ever Black voting faculty member in landscape architecture. And as of 2020, you are one of 19 Black landscape architecture professors at accredited programs in the U.S. Since the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, how have you seen landscape architecture academia evolve? And what do you think still needs to happen?
Conversations about race and politics didn’t have as much room to breathe in the landscape architecture discipline before 2020. Students have become more politicized in their work, curricula have also evolved to some degree, the discourse around practice and engaging community is more present. But no meaningful change can happen in three years. This is a long struggle, and it didn’t start in 2020.
One of the ways I hope to see the profession grow is in our ability to work with policymakers and think about the impact of our work at various scales. Some of Olmsted’s work can be seen as an example of this. His book, The Cotton Kingdom, represents a model of seeing the landscape at many different scales, smaller and larger, politically and ecologically, and he often was an advocate for his projects.
Design is parallel to other major forms of change. Landscape architecture cannot be inward looking in this regard. We can’t design our way out of climate change or wealth inequity. It’s not just about design as an end, but it’s about design as a tool for change.
We need the language and tools to understand the relationship between power and what we do as landscape architects. We should really be thinking about ourselves in relationship to the outside world.
You grew up in Louisiana, the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants. Ethiopia has thousands of years of rich landscape architectural and architectural history. How do you think your New Orleans upbringing and Ethiopian heritage is reflected in your work?
I grew up in Slidell mostly. I lived in New Orleans as an adult. I saw life on my street and on my block. We closed down the block to have crawfish boils. I grew up seeing the parades, the festivals, the Second Lines. We had parks. We had yards. We had canals. We had levees. We had neutral grounds. That’s my understanding of landscape. This system of pieces of urban landscapes. I saw the ways in which these pieces can come together to form a theater for civic life and culture.
While I didn’t grow up in Ethiopia, my parents often would share stories about Ethiopia. I think absorbing the fact that Black people have thousands of years of history from those stories, coupled with the fact that I was living in a place so celebratory about its own Black culture, inspired a deep well of pride, a sense of self, in me as a kid.
I think there’s probably somewhat of a straight line from what my upbringing offered me in that regard and how I see the world and therefore practice landscape architecture today.
The institution of slavery shaped landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. And in turn enslaved and free Africans and their descendants created new landscapes in the United States, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. African people had their own intimate relationships with the land, which enabled them to carve out their own agency and culture.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, slaves brought from Sub-Saharan Africa were central to the production of many U.S. and Caribbean commodities, including cotton, tobacco, rice, rum, and sugar, and the industrialization and financial markets that resulted from them. The success of the Domino Sugar Company and its refinery on the waterfront of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was a direct result of enslaved labor. As such, “Brooklyn is a part of the Black Atlantic,” said Emily Holloway, a PhD student at Clark University. “Slavery in the south and Caribbean underwrote industrialization in the North.”
Holloway uses multiple academic disciplines to disentangle the “messy reality of racial capitalism,” which runs from Africa to Haiti, Cuba to the Northeast. This economic system relied on slaves and the accumulation of capital, which took the form of buildings and infrastructure.
The success of the Domino Sugar Company can also be understood as a result of a slave rebellion, which drove major changes in the sugar cane economy of the Caribbean. “The beginnings of the Domino Sugar Company leads back to the Haitian revolution,” Holloway said.
Self-liberated Haitians rose up and defeated the French colonial army, which caused sugar plantation owners on the island to flee to eastern Cuba. There, they clear-cut the land and reinstalled their slave-based sugar cane economy. This sugar was then sent to New York City for processing as the granular table sugar consumers bought in stores.
William Havemeyer, the founder of a company that later grew into Domino Sugar Company and later Domino Foods, Inc., formed a sugar refinery in lower Manhattan in 1807. Fifty years later, his firm moved to Williamsburg, where they built a larger refinery.
After that burnt down, the company built a colossal building in 1883 that could produce a million pounds of sugar a day. The company took up four city blocks and created a “densely populated industrial ecosystem.” Today, the building is being redeveloped as an office building, and the Domino waterfront has become “gentrified” and transformed into a park.
This industrialization process was mirrored in the sugar cane plantation landscapes of Cuba. Small farms multiplied and grew in size. Enslaved and then free laborers were still needed to harvest the cane but the processing at the farms became increasingly mechanized. “This history has been largely erased in the archives,” Holloway said, and a “more creative approach to research is needed.”
Holloway said the artist Kara Walker spoke of these relationships with her monumental, 75-foot-tall sculpture, A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, created in 2014 for then derelict Domino sugar factory space. “This was the Black Atlantic answering back in defiance.”
Justin Dunnavant, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, approaches the history of the Caribbean through multiple academic lenses as well.
He said there are researchers exploring the ideas of Black ecology, which examines the unique ways Black people interact with nature and how they are also erased from the environment. And there are also researchers focused on historical ecology, looking at how relationships between societies and environments have changed over time.
His goal is to synthesize these approaches into the new study of Black historical ecology, which can explore how ecological relations changed because of the slave trade. This will involve weaving together multiple narratives to examine the plantation system’s impact on both terrestrial and marine ecosystems. His hope is it can result in “a call to action to redress.”
Dunnavant has focused on the island of St. Croix, which was part of the Danish West Indies and is now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. As part of an archeological research collective, he and his team are investigating the ecological impacts of slavery and plantations, including the deforestation that occurred to clear lands for sugar cane; the soils that were degraded by agriculture and development; and the coral mined for buildings. His work is also a part of the Estate Little Princess Maritime and Terrestrial Archaeology Field School, which trains Crucian high-school students in archaeology while investigating the remnants of Danish slavery.
At the same time, he is also uncovering the little known legacy of the maroons that claimed isolated areas of the island. Maroons were Black slaves who freed themselves by escaping, and some were their descendants. They formed self-sufficient communities throughout the Caribbean and southern United States. They often mixed with Indigenous peoples, forming new creole communities. In St. Croix, they led a slave rebellion that ended slavery in 1848.
The part of the island where the maroons found sanctuary was “unmapped” in Danish historical records, but it was actually a “rich area of Black freedom.” Using Lidar data and other archeological tools, Dunnavant’s team is uncovering the remnants of what he calls a “Black geography.” He is interested in how the maroons terraced the land for agriculture and created fortifications and leveraged the dense landscape to protect themselves. “Uncovering their stories is a form of redress.”
Maroon Ridge, St. Croix / Building a Better Fishtrap, WordPress site
Matthew Francis Rarey, a professor at Oberlin College, then took the audience to Brazil to focus on the Portuguese colonial empire and its deadly campaign against maroons.
Approximately 80 fugitive slaves had made a home at Buraco do Tatu, on the coast of Bahia in Northeast Brazil. Their quilombo, or fugitive community, was destroyed by colonial forces. And that destruction was documented in a unique map that accompanied a letter to the viceroy.
Map of Quilombo at Buraco do Tatu / Capoeira Online
The map was meant to provide evidence of the colonial power’s success in suppressing maroons, but it has become an “icon of scholarship,” as it is one of the few comprehensive aerial perspectives on how maroons organized themselves.
The map depicts a community nestled in sand dunes and blended into surrounding trees and shrubs. At its outer perimeter are fields of surrounding wood spikes. There are spiked trap holes. And there’s also a single path to the sea. The inner sanctum, the community itself, is organized on a grid, with homes arranged by streets. And there are food gardens and a trellis for growing passion fruit. “It shows a rebellion landscape,” Rarey said.
The maroons would use the path to reach roads where they would rob wayfarers. “They were fighting against inequality and capitalism.” The maroons would also target enslaved Black people going to market in an attempt to strike a blow at the plantation economy. “Their goal was to dismantle plantations from the inside” by “weaponizing blackness” and making plantation owners “look foolish,” Rarey said. They also participated in informal exchanges to build their supply of guns and gunpowder.
The map includes a legend that explains how the maroon community were killed in the onslaught by Portuguese colonial forces. One maroon woman was labeled a sorceress and “defamed after her death.” Many others killed themselves instead of risking re-enslavement. In the map, the corpses become “part of the subjugated landscape.”
Map of Quilombo at Buraco do Tatu / Matthew Francis Rarey
The Portuguese process of mapping the community is an attempt to reinstate colonial order on a free Black landscape. Rarey said you can sense the “anxiety of the cartographer” as they had “no reference point.”
Le Masurier (documenté en 1769-1775). Esclaves noirs à la Martinique, 1775. Huile sur toile – 125 x 106 cm. Paris, ministère des Outre-mer / Archives nationales
The institution of slavery shaped landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. And in turn enslaved and free Africans and their descendants created new landscapes in the United States, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. African people had their own intimate relationships with the land, which enabled them to carve out their own agency and culture.
Thaisa Way, FASLA, director of the garden and landscape studies department at Dumbarton Oaks, said the symposium was the fourth in a series meant to “curate a people’s history of landscape.”
African slaves in the United States’ Southern states and the Caribbean were forced to work in their owners’ plantations. They were seen as cogs in an industrial farming system driven by a trans-Atlantic capitalist market economy. But many owners also set aside land slaves could use to grow, trade, and sell food. “This was advantageous for the slave owner,” said C.C. McKee, a professor at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Copenhagen, as it meant having to spend less on feeding them.
McKee is intrigued by a painting by the artist simply known as Le Masurier, created in the French colony of Martinique in the 1770s (see image above). It clearly shows slave children eating sugar cane, the result of the plantation monoculture, but also the “Afro-Caribbean ecologies,” the many African and native trees and plants slaves planted at the edges of plantations, including cashew and tamarind, pea, and starfruit.
According to historical accounts of plantation life during that time, slaves also planted potatoes, yams, cabbages, herbs, and melons. They blended native Caribbean and African plants, taking a “creolized approach to food production.”
The edges of plantations were places where African social structures could be asserted. In these remnant spaces, slaves could decide how to parcel and cultivate the land. And while slave ownership of these areas was impossible, in some communities, hereditary claims were made on parcels, and kinship structures could play a role. In some communities, they functioned as a slave commons. They were “sites of resistance” to the slave owner’s world.
What isn’t seen in the painting McKee highlights is a depiction of the important role indigenous Caribbean peoples played in cultivating trees and plants, and on many islands, their role in teaching Africans how to harvest and prepare food from them. “The indigenous people have been ghosted because they were completely expelled by the 18th century. They were exterminated and exported; it was genocide.”
Slave children also had a complex relationship with the landscapes of the American South, explained Mikayla Janee Harden, a PhD student at the University of Delaware. They were put at greater risk by a dangerous landscape but also “knowingly imprinted on that landscape,” she said.
Children were left on their own or in the care of an elder while their parents worked the fields. Depending on their age, many were also tasked with clean-up and other responsibilities.
On plantations, slaves lived near untamed landscapes. Children who worked and played in these places without shoes were at great risk from snake bites. The few references to slave children in historical records relate to the medical knowledge gleaned from these bites. Children’s lack of “experience, wisdom, and judgement increased their risk of environmental harm.”
But children could also benefit from their “tacit knowledge” of the landscape. While still enslaved, some apprenticed at a young age to learn important trades. Harden highlights the example of Edmond Albius. Enslaved as a child on the French island colony of Reunion, he discovered a highly efficient way to cultivate vanilla that is still used today.
Landscape was a source of “pain and pleasure” for enslaved children. Untended by their working parents, they could be bitten by snakes or have accidents but could also learn, play, and imagine. Harden is next exploring the material culture — the corn-husk dolls and games enslaved children created — and how these objects transmitted African folklore and culture to the next generation.
The conversation then shifted to the other side of the Atlantic. The landscapes of the Falémé Valley in western Sub-Saharan Africa are a source of deep interest for Jacques Aymeric-Nsangou, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The valley provides insights into how African people avoided the process of enslavement and commodification.
Aymeric-Nsangou decided to research the hinterlands because most Africans captured and enslaved came from the interior, not the coasts. “Many had never seen the ocean before” when they were loaded into slave ships at coastal ports.
The Falémé River spans approximately 250 miles and flows south to north — from northern Guinea, through Mali and Senegal. It flows through mountains, forests, and deserts, and experiences dramatic seasonal changes. It is a tributary of the Senegal River, which flows east to west, so it could be used by slavers to carry captured people to ports on the western coast.
The landscape of the valley included both independent kingdoms and villages of the varied Madinka (otherwise known as the Manlinke or Mandingo) people, who are of similar ethnic origins. They were targeted by the Muslim Fulani (or Fulu) kingdom for capture as part of jihad (holy war). Enslavement had a long history in this part of the world. For centuries, captives were taken as a product of war. People could also be enslaved if, after a trial, they were deemed criminal or for other reasons.
Aymeric-Nsangou explored the few remnants of Tatas, the fortified defensive homes and landscapes of the region, with a team of archeologists. “The Tatas didn’t appear before the 18th century; they increased because of the slave trade,” Aymeric-Nsangou said.
There are no remaining, intact Tatas in the region, because the French colonial government largely destroyed them. But historic photographs show they were made with raw mud cement and stone.
The interiors of the Tatas were labyrinthine and had multiple layers of walls. Noble families occupied the innermost Tata, which also had the strongest walls. Outside, wood palisades, which are still seen in many communities today, provided an extra layer of security against slavers. And these communities also sometimes “weaponized African bees.” These insects are famously aggressive. And “there are stories that villagers could command them to attack.”
While the Tatas could offer defense, they could also be a trap. Another strategy villagers in the region took was to keep their community small so they could quickly relocate.
According to the producers, the film “underscores the profound inequality that persisted for decades in the number, size, and quality of state park spaces provided for Black visitors across the South. Even though it has largely faded from public awareness, the imprint of segregated design remains visible in many state parks.”
In his review of the Landscapes of Exclusion book, Glenn LaRue Smith, FASLA, cofounder and principal of PUSH studio in Washington, D.C., and founder and former president of the Black Landscape Architects Network (BlackLAN) writes: “it presents a mirror with which we can look back and see the profound changes in America, which is greatly needed in our divisive social media age of disinformation and historical erasure.”
A group photo at the bathhouse on Butler Beach in the 1950s, prior to the site’s development as a state park. / Courtesy State Archives of Florida, Library of American Landscape History
“O’Brien’s balanced research on Black self-help to achieve some measure of recreational access in the face of Jim Crow is one of the book’s crowning successes,” LaRue Smith writes. “There are many other well researched elements relating to the history of the ‘Negro Problem,’ park planning and politics, post-World War II ‘separate but equal’ policies, and court battles primarily brought by the NAACP to dismantle park segregation. Together, these research areas build a much-needed historical record of Jim Crow and the exclusion of African Americans in southern state parks.”
The film features commentary by O’Brien, who is a professor of environmental studies at Florida Atlantic University, and architect Arthur J. Clement, who attended a segregated state parks as a child. “Dramatic images and live footage bring this painful history into contemporary focus,” the film producers write.
In collaboration with the National Building Museum, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) is presenting this event free of charge. The Olmsted Network and Library of American Landscape History are co-sponsors. And the program is supported by the Darwina L. Neal Cultural Landscape Fund for adult programs focusing on cultural landscapes.
May 22:
5:30 pm – Doors open
6:00 pm – Film screening
6:30pm – 7:15pm – Panel discussion with William E. O’Brien, Arthur J. Clement, and Wairimũ Ngaruiya Njambi, moderated by ASLA CEO Torey Carter-Conneen.
7.15 – 7.30 pm – Remarks by Bronwyn Nichols Lodato, president of the Midway Plaisance Advisory Council, on behalf of the Olmsted Network
7.30 – 8.30 pm – Reception
The event is free but registration is required. Register today.
Deb Guenther, FASLA, LEED AP, SITES AP, is a partner and landscape architect at Mithun, based in Seattle, Washington. She was a Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Leadership and Innovation Fellow from 2021-2022 and awarded the President’s Medal by the American Society of Landscape Architect in 2010.
Equity is increasingly being seen as central to landscape architects’ climate action work. How do you define equity in your planning and design work? And what about terms like climate equity and climate justice?
We spend time discussing equity for each project, even if the project doesn’t explicitly have equity goals. It’s different for each community.
We focus on understanding the historical injustices that have happened over time and how those show up in day-to-day lives today. Disproportionate underinvestments in communities have impacts. We try to understand how those show up in power dynamics of not only race and gender but also income and class. We want to be able to understand the power dynamics before we come in the room.
Climate injustices have disproportionately affected communities of color. Often these communities have been redlined, are lower lying, and experience more flooding, or have less trees and experience more intense summer heat. These communities often don’t have the infrastructure to prevent flooding.
Your Landscape Architecture Foundation Leadership and Innovation Fellowship focused on how to build trust with communities, specifically how to establish a greater sense of kinship between landscape architects and community leaders. What were your key findings? And why is trust so central to making climate action work effective?
We need to build trust with communities to be able to do effective work and learn with community members. I think the big takeaway for me from the fellowship was that I was just catching up to a lot of the things that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have known for a long time.
People with the lived experience in the community are the greatest resource for finding the solutions. We can’t do work that is meaningful to communities without first investing time. So all of that comes back to: how can we build a design process that is more relational and less transactional? How do we do the pre-design work that leads to greater trust?
Community design centers are ready to do this long-term, place-based work. Partnering with a community over time is a different exercise with different results than coming in and out of a community. Staying with a community builds understanding.
I have also heard about flood control districts and park districts that are starting to band together regionally because they know they can’t address all the climate adaptation needs individually as agencies. So we need to take a broader or regional view, and at the same time, look at what community leaders know about their specific neighborhoods. It’s a back and forth, regional and local.
We can’t move climate justice work forward and do our best work without building trust first. Climate work is so urgent that we have to go slow to go fast. We have to take the time to build the trust in order to be able to move quickly enough to respond to climate in effective way.
You’re a partner at Mithun, a mission-driven integrated design firm that began in Seattle, Washington, and later expanded to offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In Washington State and elsewhere, Mithun is partnering with tribes on a range of planning and design projects. What have you learned working with tribes and their approaches to long-term sustainability and resilience? And what are some examples of how their ethos has been translated into landscape architecture projects with your firm?
We are so grateful for the relationships we have with First Nations. Twenty years ago we were learning about co-design and co-creation through our engagements with First Nations.
We were going to their events. We were having meals with the elders. We were getting to know sites together by sleeping overnight in the sagebrush steppe in eastern Washington while working with the Wanapum on their Heritage Center. We were invited to share in some very special ceremonies. We were getting to know each other and each other’s culture in a deeper way.
We also learned about holding the capacity for difficult conversations. As facilitators of these conversations, we’ve learned a lot over the years about how to allow those uncomfortable conversations to happen, how we can have those together in a room and still walk out together at the end and be better for it. That’s a big lesson learned over the years.
The importance of investing in youth is another area where we’ve learned so much from First Nations. The canoe journey is a multi-tribal event that happens every other year among many of the tribes in the Pacific Northwest. Youth are reclaiming their connection to traditional lifeways through a canoe journey where they travel to a hosting tribe. They come together for a major gathering at the end. Preparing for these journeys influences many youth.
And it had a direct result creating the House of Awakened Culture that we designed with the Suquamish tribe. They built that project in anticipation of hosting a canoe journey. Now they can also host future canoe journeys and larger gatherings as a tribe.
House of Awakened Culture, Suquamish, WA / MithunHouse of Awakened Culture, Suquamish, WA / Mithun
The Sea2City Design Challenge in Vancouver, Canada led to an exciting re-imagining of False Creek, a central inlet in the city. Mithun worked with representatives and cultural advisors from Host Nations, including the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, and the community to envision a decolonized approach to coastal climate adaptation planning. What do decolonized landscapes look like? And how did you leverage traditional tribal communications forms, including spoken word and storytelling, to envision this decolonization process?
We went directly to the Host Nation cultural advisors, Tsleil-Waututh Nation knowledge keeper Charlene (Char) Aleck, and Squamish artist Cory Douglas and asked: what does a decolonized landscape look like to you? They wanted to imagine a place where they feel like they belonged. Right now, the way the False Creek area is set up, there aren’t many places where they feel they belong.
One of the places on seawall promenade that resonated with Cory was this cluster of cedar trees peeking out of the asphalt. So we built on the idea of the cedars, harvesting plants and food for cultural uses, and being able to be in a place where land and water is nourishing. Those are the ways of belonging they were speaking to.
A significant moment in this project is when went on a boat ride up and down False Creek with Char and Cory and the team. During that boat ride, we heard from Char about reciprocity and exchange, what is given and what is taken, and how that all influences their cultural outlook on what it means to have a place they belong in.
Afterwards, we threw out all of our design work and started again with this idea of going back to the historic natural shoreline. We have to go back to where things were taken. Not only does that make sense from a sea level rise protections, flooding, contamination standpoint, but it also makes sense from a reciprocity standpoint. Decolonized landscapes are about finding the ways to ensure people feel like they belong.
False Creek in 2023. Sea2City Design Challenge, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada / MithunFalse Creek in 2100. Sea2City Design Challenge, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada / Mithun
It is interesting to think that our next experiences as landscape architects may be about deconstruction rather than construction. The return to the historic shoreline is predicated on buildings that are aging out. Instead of replacing buildings that have aged out, we can rezone upland areas that can take more development and not displace people or businesses. We can plan for the gradual movement of people and businesses and housing up slope. This is a way of building in protections against sea level rise and allowing for marine life to flourish. It’s also a way to clean a contaminated waterway over time.
Sea2City Design Challenge, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada / Plomp for MithunSea2City Design Challenge, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada / Plomp for Mithun
As part of Bay Area Resilient by Design Challenge, Mithun led an interdisciplinary team of ecological, design, planning, economic, and social justice organizations to create ouR-HOME, a comprehensive planning effort in Richmond, California, a low-income community that has experienced a range of environmental injustices and is facing significant sea level rise and flooding impacts. The Resilient by Design effort sought to envision what structural equity looks like, how to protect the community from gentrification and displacement, and create new wealth, while also using nature to increase resilience to future climate impacts. It’s a great example of equity-based climate adaptation work. How did those ideas came together and how they are being pursued in projects that have evolved from the planning effort?
This is a very special project and place with a lot of wonderful people. There’s such a strong environmental justice history in North Richmond. This community has had to build their sense of self-determination because they were ignored, redlined, and subject to disinvestment.
So there are multiple generations of community leaders, like Whitney Dotson, Cynthia Jordan, Dr. Henry Clark, Annie King-Meredith, Princess Robinson who have led and are leading significant change. They are working in so many ways to advance locally-driven solutions.
The Bay Area tends to approach things regionally. A lot of Resilient by Design was happening at the regional level. But that wasn’t going create change in North Richmond because of its history.
As part of the shoreline collaboration plan, we’re now working on what the governance strategy can be with the community. The goal is to evaluate how to connect immediate benefits from the work they’re doing on nature-based solutions. We’re designing a living levee there that will allow marine life to transition and protect the wastewater district facility that serves the entire West Contra Costa County. We’ve also co-designed with a community advisory group a five-mile strategy of collaboration between property owners that would protect a much larger swath of the neighborhood and other infrastructure.
Some of those direct benefits are building up community knowledge through a co-design process, workforce development, and land trusts that guard against gentrification. And there are projects that will provide more access to the shoreline through trails and destinations, like interpretive centers and overlooks.
A lot of the residents that were involved in the co-design process during Resilient by Design have remained involved as champions of various projects. Folks really grabbed on to the pieces they were interested in and shepherded those forward.
Bay Area Resilient by Design Challenge. ouR-HOME, North Richmond, CA / Mithun
In the co-design process as part of Resilient by Design, we had public agency folks in the room with community residents, business leaders, various nonprofit organizations. They all knew each other before Resilient by Design. But they knew each other in the context of presenting information to each other, not really working shoulder to shoulder. During the process we conducted, they were working shoulder to shoulder to solve issues, having more casual dialogue. This is the main thing we heard at the end of the process — that resident advisors wanted this kind of work to continue.
What we noticed is that there is cyclical process with funding, right? There wasn’t a convener that could keep the group going until West Contra Costa County Wastewater District stepped up to do their work on the levee. They were able to bring a similar group together again.
As designers, we need to think about how we keep shoulder-to-shoulder dialogue going with communities, even when there isn’t a project driving it. So many relevant projects come out of those kinds of processes.
Mithun states that it uses affordable housing developments to create “active social hubs,” and it leverages its “integrated design approach” as a vehicle for social equity. Your firm’s landscape architects are often involved in these projects, weaving in green spaces, play areas, rooftop gardens, pedestrian bicycle access, and public art. A few projects — the Liberty Bank Building in Seattle, Washington, and Casa Adelante at 2060 Folsom in San Francisco — seems to highlight the value of landscape architects in these projects. Can you talk about how landscape architects on your team are shaping these projects?
Common space in affordable housing projects is such highly valued space. You can imagine when the goal is to house people, every square foot is going to be carefully scrutinized.
At the beginning of these projects, the landscape architect’s role at Mithun is to do that massaging, that working back and forth between the indoor and the outdoor space, to not only program the shared spaces outside but also the spaces inside.
We look at those adjacencies where people can run into each other naturally, where are they going to get their mail, where are they going to for daily life experiences. Running into each other causes people to know their neighbors and builds a stronger sense of community.
Those are the two areas where we’re shaping these projects the most. The first is being present at the beginning to do that shaping of how the common space is tied to the lifeways of the residents. And the second is figuring out how those adjacencies are built into the framework of the design. All the other stuff is gravy if you get the adjacencies right.
Mithun has invested in being a responsible design firm. It has offset all its emissions since 2004, offers bike parking at its offices, and finances employees’ home energy efficiency retrofits. It donates pro-bono design services, raises funds for local community groups, and its leaders are involved in the boards of civic organizations. How does Mithun plan to further evolve to address the climate crisis?
We are looking at the North Richmond work and thinking about how we can work geographically like that in other areas and build long-term relationships. We’ve been there now for seven years continuously and built a more relational way of working. Ultimately, we feel that is the most equitable way to work, because we have that deeper understanding and a shared sense of reciprocity.
We’re participating in conversations happening in communities that we’re a part of. And then we bring those ideas to our projects. We’re tying ideas together and building momentum. This is just how we live as a community, right?
We never want to underestimate the value of social resilience. The greatest predictor of survival in a crisis is how well you know your neighbors, your community. In a climate justice context, we want to model what we think is valuable for all communities. We want to design places where people can get to know each other, where they can practice adaptation together, and therefore be better prepared to work together when they need to respond to climate impacts.
American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life / Island Press
Over the holidays, delve into new books on history, design, and the environment that inform and inspire. Whether you are looking for the perfect gift for your favorite designer or something to read yourself, explore THE DIRT’s 12 bestbooks of 2022:
Richard K. Rein, a reporter and founder of the weekly newsletter U.S. 1, delves into the life and ideas of William H. Whyte, the urbanist, sociologist, journalist, and famously close observer of people in public spaces. Whyte’s articles and books, including The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and City: Rediscovering the Center, led to a renewed focus on human-centered design, a greater understanding of the value of public space, and influenced generations of landscape architects around the world.
Beatrix Farrand: Garden Artist, Landscape Architect / The Monacelli PressGarden as Art: Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks / Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
With Beatrix Farrand: Garden Artist, Landscape Architect, Judith Tankard, a landscape historian, has provided the definitive biography of Farrand, filled with gorgeous photography. And in Garden as Art: Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks, Thaïsa Way, FASLA, director of landscape and garden studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., has revealed the magic of Farrand’s masterpiece, with an essay from Thomas Woltz, FASLA, and evocative images from photographer Sahar Coston-Hardy.
Beyond the Garden: Designing Home Landscapes with Natural Systems / Princeton Architectural Press
Dana Davidsen, a landscape designer at Surface Design in San Francisco and former ASLA intern, has curated a beautiful collection of 18 urban, suburban, and rural residential landscapes in U.S. and U.K. that advance ecological design. In an introduction, Timothy A. Schuler, a contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine, explains how deeply sustainable residential projects can help re-set our relationship with the land.
The Comprehensive Plan: Sustainable, Resilient, and Equitable Communities for the 21st Century / Routledge
“The planning practices of the past are inadequate for today’s challenges,” explains David Rouse, ASLA, a landscape architect and planner, who co-authored this book with Rocky Piro, executive director of the Colorado Center for Sustainable Urbanism and former planning director of Denver. After reviewing hundreds of comprehensive plans, they offer a new model for 21st century planning rooted in sustainability, resilience, and equity. Read more.
Experiencing Olmsted: The Enduring Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted’s North American Landscapes / Timber Press
For the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF); Arleyn A. Levee, Hon. ASLA, a landscape historian; and Dena Tasse-Winter, a historic preservationist, have created a welcome overview of more than 200 public, educational, and private landscapes by Olmsted, his firm, and his successors. Well-curated images, including stunning full-page plans and drawings by Olmsted, show the remarkable work behind his vision of democratic public spaces.
From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities / Island Press
In her review, Grace Mitchell Tada, ASLA, writes: “From activists and community organizers, landscape architects and city planners, policy makers and city officials, Sant’s cast of characters demonstrate the complexity and nuance that go into creating urban change. It’s the details from her interviews that make this book a valuable tool. Seeing how change is made allows readers to understand how, in their own communities, they too might be able to forge fruitful relationships to dismantle racist histories in favor of equity while equipping their city to handle climate change.” Read the full review.
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America / Liverlight
Galen Newman, ASLA, professor and head of the department of landscape architecture and urban planning at Texas A&M University, and Zixu Qiao, a master’s of landscape architecture candidate there, have edited a fascinating look at global landscape architecture-based solutions to sea level rise, with practically-minded case studies from Kate Orff, FASLA, Alex Felson, ASLA, Haley Blakeman, FASLA, Kongjian Yu, FASLA, Amy Whitesides, ASLA, and many others. Smart diagrams in the final chapter transform the book into a toolkit that can help landscape architects sort through the pluses and minuses of natural and hard design elements for different ecological, economic, and social conditions.
Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South / Library of American Landscape History
Reviewing the new edition of this book by William E. O’Brien, a professor of environmental studies at Florida Atlantic University, Glenn LaRue Smith, FASLA, states “anyone exploring landscape, planning, and public space history will find the book interesting. O’Brien has crafted an intensively researched history of the political, social, racial, and environmental implications of Jim Crow practices and the unfair distribution of parks in the southern United States.” Read the full review.
Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Well-Being, Equity, and Sustainability (2nd Edition) / Island Press
This fully-updated book will help any landscape architect, planner, or community leader make a stronger case that public green spaces and streets really are part of our healthcare system. The latest research on health and community design has been woven into this new edition, which was edited by Howard Frumkin, senior vice president at the Trust for Public Land; Andrew L. Dannenberg, a professor at the University of Washington; and Nisha Botchwey, dean of the school of public affairs at the University of Minnesota; and also includes a chapter on designing for mental health and well-being by William C. Sullivan, ASLA, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and an essay from Mitchell Silver, Hon. ASLA, former NYC Parks Commissioner.
Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening / HarperCollins, via DouglasBrinkley.com
Douglas Brinkley, one of the country’s leading historians, explores the history of the modern American environmental movement and activists like Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, and Rachel Carson, who laid the groundwork for the Environmental Protection Agency, Wilderness Act, the Clean Air Acts, the Endangered Species Acts, and Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. In the “long decade” of the 1960s and early 70s, these leaders made significant change happen, and their successes can inspire designer-activists pushing for systemic climate action today.
Buying these books through THE DIRT or ASLA’s online bookstore benefits ASLA educational programs.
The 225 residents of Seneca Village were displaced by the New York City government in the mid 1800s to make way for Central Park, which is considered one of the masterpieces of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux.
Today, the history of the community, which once existed near Tanner Spring on the west edge of the park, is being reinterpreted. Efforts are underway by the Central Park Conservancy to commemorate the community and its evicted African American landowners.
Central Park takes up more than 800 acres in the midst of Manhattan. As Zewde and others have explained through the Conversations with Olmsted series as part of Olmsted 200, Olmsted saw Central Park as a way to realize his ideals about democratic urban parks.
The park was designed to provide broad access to the healing benefits of nature. It was also meant to show what free Northern cities could accomplish through transformative public infrastructure, and how slave-owning Southern communities, with their lack of shared spaces, could evolve.
Central Park, New York City / Orbon Alija, istockphoto.com
And while the decision to move Seneca Village predated Olmsted’s involvement, “how do we square this with his legacy? One has to wonder how Olmsted felt about Seneca,” Zewde said.
According to Christopher Nolan, FASLA, chief landscape architect at the Central Park Conservancy, a primarily Black community took root in Seneca Village in the early 1800s because it was not only an escape from the bustle of downtown but also next to a reservoir.
There are no remaining photos of the community, but plans and birds-eye views show a “cohesive property,” with two-story wood homes, an AME Zion Church, and other central buildings.
The community navigated an early Manhattan landscape filled with schist hills. The landscape they experienced largely remains, including Summit Rock, which is one of the dominant features in the park at 140 feet above sea level.
Summit Rock, Central Park, New York City / Central Park Conservancy
While planning Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux examined the geological layers and “didn’t modify the existing landscape that much,” Nolan argued, only adding roads, a reservoir, and lake. Outside of their park, Manhattan’s landscape had been flattened to make way for the relentless grid of the contemporary city.
Apparently Olmsted wasn’t overly fond of the site chosen by NYC government for the park. The long rectangle hemmed him in and “didn’t fit with his idealized landscape,” Nolan said. His goals were later perhaps better realized through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which provided more opportunities for a naturalistic landscape.
As Central Park evolved since the late 1800s, more than 20 playgrounds were added, including one at the heart of what was once Seneca Village.
A restoration management plan was created in 1995 that emphasized Olmsted’s original vision. A few years later, the New York Historical Society held the first exhibition on Seneca Village.
Since then, the Conservancy has grappled with how to process new information about Seneca Village and continue its restoration program. The goal is for these efforts to converge in a new commemoration of Seneca Village rooted in deep community engagement and a restored natural landscape.
For John T. Reddick, director of community engagement projects at the Conservancy, there are a range of nearby precedents for this commemoration work, including a memorial to Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, in Riverside Park; a memorial to Duke Ellington on Riverside Drive; and the Frederick Douglass Circle in Harlem, at the northwestern edge of Central Park.
Ralph Ellison Memorial, New York City / Riverside Park ConservancyDuke Ellington Memorial, New York City / NYC Department of Design and Construction, via TwitterFrederick Douglass Circle, New York City / NYC Parks
Reddick also pointed to Strawberry Fields, the memorial to John Lennon, who was murdered outside the Dakota building along Central Park. The simple ground-level mosaic with the word “Imagine,” referring to Lennon’s song, became the center of a broader landscape restoration effort funded in part by Yoko Ono. “The landscape became Strawberry Fields. Before, it was a run-down place. It took a major effort to transform that into something special.”
In 2001, the Conservancy added a sign about Seneca Village but that was really “just the beginning of research.” Recent efforts have included inviting artists, historians, and musicians to “animate stories” of Seneca Village for the public. “They have helped us understand what life there may have been like.”
Reddick said the goal for the future is to represent the displaced community in Central Park not through a plaque or statue but an interpretation of the landscape. “We want to use the land to tell their stories.”
This mission to tell a more holistic story about the park and its history is line with “a broader definition of stewardship,” Nolan added. Olmsted was a social reformer, and this approach is part of the DNA of landscape architecture.
Learning about Seneca Village has also opened Zewde’s eyes to the possibilities of reinterpretation. “Communities and their histories aren’t erased; they are hiding in plain sight. Seneca Village is not history. We can use our narrative lens now. Through engagement, we can educate and amplify.”
“Parks are vehicles. The existence of a park doesn’t mean we have a functioning society and democracy. We have to use the space, navigate it as people.”
