Instructor: Gareth Doherty
This lecture course views landscape through social and cultural practices. Through people, we will explore landscape’s critical, ethical, and political power to shape the world. The course will provide students with fieldwork skills to understand human interactions with the land, and to apply this knowledge to design practice and theory. We will see that that a socio-cultural focus ultimately leads to more successful design practice, processes, and projects. A central premise is that experiential knowledge—gained from the embodied engagement of landscape fieldwork—can help to decenter western canons of landscape knowledge and offer new possibilities for the design imagination.
The course is structured in five parts— 1) Cross-societal Engagement; 2) Experiential Knowledge; 3) Walking and Talking; 4) Collective Endeavour; and 5) Operational Fields. Using the landscape fieldworker’s diverse skills, we will focus on designed landscapes, design processes, and landscape practices worldwide. Sites that will be examined include smaller-scale public spaces, border landscapes, sacred groves, archipelagos, and regions. We will concentrate mostly in the postcolonial and Islamic worlds, in the Arabian Peninsula, the Caribbean, Brazil and West Africa, as well as Western Europe. We will draw from diverse literature, ethnographies, and interviews, using and critiquing established landscape ethnographic methods. In doing so, we will apply the descriptive, participatory, and reflective aspects of ethnography to design, and the imaginative, projective, and prescriptive capacities of design to ethnography.
Final grades are based on participation, completion of weekly assignments, a remote fieldwork project, and a final design proposal. Recognizing the limitations imposed by COVID-19, the fieldwork assignment will be completed remotely. Working collaboratively, the final design proposal will focus on the Osun Sacred Grove and several other sites in Osun State, Nigeria using remote fieldwork techniques presented in class. The final project will be based on the collective fieldwork. Classes will alternate between asynchronous lectures, synchronous and class discussions, and pre-recorded lectures will be posted on Canvas.
This course provides students with training in ethnographic fieldwork methods that can be applied in other academic and professional projects and it will prepare students to conduct their own landscape fieldwork projects, either alone or collectively. This course is cross-listed between the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of Anthropology. It was previously offered as “Design Anthropology: Objects, Landscapes, Cities.” No background in landscape architecture, or anthropology, is required.