Landscape Fieldwork - by Gareth Doherty

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

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.