Gareth Doherty (Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design)
8 Dec 2019
Lecture: Critical Landscapes
Abstract: One of the most critical issues facing the design of urban settlements is engagement with people. Considering landscape as “the mutual shaping of people and place,” and drawing from anthropology, this lecture will ask two primary questions: First, how can theoretical, educational, and design possibilities be expanded and diversified through working in societies where there is no formal design discipline? Second, how through a comparative understanding of hybrid landscape practices, can designers more sensitively work outside of their own cultural contexts with respect and deference for others’ values and ways of life? The lecture will reference four ‘critical landscapes,’ located in the Arabian Peninsula, The Bahamas, Brazil and West Africa: regions that are in various stages of postcolonialism. Each of the cases illustrate different forms of participatory processes, and each reveal alternative conceptions of landscape. These four processes build upon anthropology to suggest a more human and design-centered approach to landscape and cities.
Bio: Dr Gareth Doherty is an assistant professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he is also Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture program and the recently established Critical Landscapes Design Lab. Doherty’s books include: Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017); Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism (Lars Müller Publishers, 2018); and Is Landscape…? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, edited with Charles Waldheim (Routledge, 2015, and China Architecture and Building Press, 2019). Doherty was a founding editor of the New Geographies journal and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color (2011). Doherty also edited Ecological Urbanism (Lars Müller Publishers, 2010, revised 2016) with Mohsen Mostafavi.