Critical Landscapes: A Fieldwork Approach to Climate Change Adaptation

Date: 9 Oct 2024

Time: 2:30 PM –3:30 PM

Venue: SDE3 Level 4 LT 423

Critical Landscapes: A Fieldwork Approach to Climate Change Adaptation

This research seminar will focus on a landscape fieldwork-based approach to landscape architectural design. The critical challenges of our cities, including adapting to changing climates and achieving social and racial equity, demand an in-depth understanding of human aspirations and limitations. The skills of the landscape architect, developed through fieldwork, position us well to design strategies that meet these challenges. Using examples from postcolonial societies in the Arabian Peninsula, the Caribbean, Ireland, Afro-Brazil, and West Africa, the talk will demonstrate how landscape fieldwork can generate new concepts to enrich our canon. By unraveling these conceptual approaches, we can enhance professional practice and move from thick description to thick prescription, providing innovative solutions to pressing global issues.

Gareth Doherty, an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, takes a human-centered approach to landscape architecture, applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory methodologies to design and theory. His 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. Doherty addresses these issues through research on designed landscapes across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds. Through what he terms “landscape fieldwork,” Doherty unravels diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented as evidenced through his books, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017), Landscape Fieldwork: How the World Can Change Landscape Architecture (University of Virginia Press, 2025), and his recent fieldwork on African landscape architecture.