Gareth Doherty
Gareth Doherty takes a human-centered approach to design that aspires to shape environmentally and socially just landscapes. Doherty contributes to core knowledge in landscape architecture through applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory design methodologies to design and theory. This work critically reassesses 20th-century approaches to the observed landscape to advance new pedagogy, tools, and techniques that address contemporary design issues of equity, identity, cultural space, and the human impacts of climate change.
Through what he terms “landscape fieldwork,” Doherty unravels diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented. In addition to his recent fieldwork and forthcoming publications on African landscape architecture, Doherty is author of Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design (University of Virginia Press, 2025) and Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017). In Paradoxes of Green, Doherty analyzed a Bahraini category for landscape—green. He spent a year walking through Bahrain, learning local language, talking with people, and recording his encounters with green, as color, space and as an environmental movement.
Doherty’s edited books include: Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism, Landscape Is…! Essays on the Meaning of Landscape and Is Landscape…? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, edited with Charles Waldheim. Doherty is a founding editor of the New Geographies journal and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color. Doherty edited Ecological Urbanism with Mohsen Mostafavi, which has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Doherty's recent research projects have centered on landscape-related practices at various sites across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds, specifically in the Arabian Peninsula, West Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean.