Fermenting Urban Ecologies: Tending Landscapes of Collective Autonomy and Care

You are cordially invited to attend the lecture event by Yoshiki Mishima:

Date: 23 October 2025

Time: 18:00 – 20:00

Location: SDE4-05-Forum

SILA CPD Points: 3
SIP CPD Points: 2

Please register your interest here.

Fermenting Urban Ecologies: Tending Landscapes of Collective Autonomy and Care

In the context of accelerating demographic change and deepening ecological challenges, landscape architecture must expand its role—from designing and building space to the cultivation of ecologies, social relationships, and shared cultural values.

This lecture introduces a series of interdisciplinary projects across Japan, ranging from high-density neighborhoods in Tokyo to aging, depopulating towns in rural regions. These projects position landscape not only as a spatial design product, but as an evolving medium for local autonomy, environmental stewardship, and collective care.

Case studies include participatory horticulture, community-led greening initiatives, and the creative reuse of pre-modern civil engineering and water management systems rooted in regional knowledge. Rather than relying on prescriptive masterplans, these projects embrace slow, adaptive processes shaped by everyday life, civic collaboration, and localized skills and knowledge.

By reflecting on these practices, the talk opens up broader questions about how the built environment might emerge—not only through spatial design, but through ongoing social processes and ecological interdependencies that unfold over time.

Rather than imposing solutions, these efforts are characterized by slow, improvisational processes that respond to each place’s unique context. The lecture ultimately proposes landscape architecture as a field that not only adapts to a post-growth future—but helps shape it.

Yoshiki Mishima is a landscape architect and founding director of FOLK, Inc., based in Tokyo. His research and practice investigate how landscapes can serve as platforms for collective care, cultural continuity, and local autonomy. Engaging with both contemporary ecological challenges and vernacular civil engineering knowledge, he works across diverse contexts—from urban Tokyo to shrinking rural towns.

Mishima holds an MLA from Harvard GSD, previously practiced at MVVA in New York, and taught at the University of Tokyo. His work has been recognized with awards including the Green City Award Prime Minister’s Award and the Japanese Institute of Landscape Architecture Award.