Landscape Fieldwork - by Gareth Doherty (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book draws on anthropological and ethnographic research methods to demonstrate how fieldwork can inspire and inform landscape architecture and planning"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

The book thus stands not only as an essential text for Landscape Architecture, but also as a methodological and ethical guide for practitioners seeking grounding in an unstable world: only through the honesty of stepping barefoot onto the land and the patience of listening to all forms of life can we design communities, ways of living, and futures that do not impose themselves upon the earth, but grow from within it.

--Landscape Architecture Frontiers

Doherty's framework for landscape fieldwork is articulated around four fundamental principles: mixing measures, immersing the body, contrasting media, and imagining critically. Salient milestones in the history of landscape architecture were built for the elite, a factor Doherty deems troubling. As an antidote, fieldwork is proposed as a means to engage the world and its complex diversity in the design process. Beyond suggesting a panoply of tools for landscape practitioners, this work's cultural and meticulously scholarly underpinning is enriching for all readers with an interest in landscape.

--CHOICE

Landscape Fieldwork makes a timely contribution. In an era of climate crisis and civic unraveling, Doherty's invitation to linger feels urgent. To linger in the field is not an indulgence but a politics: what we choose to notice -- weeds, rust, butterflies, bottles -- shapes the worlds we imagine into being, and the futures we are willing to fight for.

--Places

This book is truly a valuable resource, one I wish I had had access to when I studied Landscape Architecture years ago . . . Landscape Fieldwork is a thought-provoking and insightful read that challenges landscape architects to rethink their approach to fieldwork. It underscores the importance of understanding landscapes in their full complexity and advocates for a more collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to design. . . The book offers practical tools and real-life examples for landscape architects to engage more deeply with diverse landscapes and the communities that create and use them.

--African Journal of Landscape Architecture

For Doherty, the thick description that comes thorough field observations can yield thick prescription: conceptually rich, careful design propositions. The capacity to critically describe what is enables one to better imagine what could be.

--Journal of Landscape Architecture

Champions the science of first-hand encounters, and thereby eschews our discipline's reliance on reducted and interpreted secondary source mapping in the representation of landscape. Ethnographic fieldwork, Doherty suggests, is anthropology and landscape architecture working together, which explains the intertwined socio-ecological narrative. . . Work in the field of landscape architecture may be more expansive than it has ever been, but the ethnographic socio-ecological work in the field for landscape architecture still offers rich, novel and inspiring outcomes.--Landscape Review

Proposes a valuable theoretical and operational tool that illustrates the essential role of fieldwork in landscape architecture . . . Landscape Fieldwork describes a vital poetic-practice that allows us to develop new understandings, new theories and can help us to find out unconventional solutions to accompany the transformations of places and landscapes.--Architettura del Paesaggio

About the Author

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.