Black Landscapes Matter - by Walter Hood & Grace Mitchell Tada (Paperback)

About the Book

"Black Landscapes Matter probes the very timely issue of how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. The book provides examples of how African American landscapes are rejected and erased in a variety of places across the US--from Charlotte, NC, to New Orleans, LA, Detroit, MI, and Milwaukee, WI--along with calls to action"--

Book Synopsis

The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation's landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape.

Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places--ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit--exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America's past and future cannot be understood.

Review Quotes

An extremely important book that thoughtfully tackles questions central to today's social discourse on heritage, memory, and race.

--Mario Gooden, Columbia University, author of Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity

The summer of 2020 marked yet another moment in US history where the ongoing injustice against black bodies in the public realm was lifted up by thousands of protests in cities spaces across the country. Black Landscapes Matter enters at a time when a critical conversation about the centering of Blackness, Black spaces, and making Blackness visible is urgently needed to inform and construct a new, inclusive design canon that properly educates both designers and the public about our legitimacy in the making of American landscapes and our demands to feel free within them. The longer we keep these spaces and narratives invisible and neglected, the longer our journey towards reckoning, healing, acceptance and true freedom.

--Toni L. Griffin, Harvard Graduate School of Design, editor of The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity

About the Author

Walter Hood is a MacArthur Fellow and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and Urban Design at the University of California, Berkeley.

Grace Mitchell Tada is an independent scholar, writer, and journalist.