African Landscape Architecture: Alternative Futures for the Field

A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate the impacts of changing climates and social injustice now and in the future. Africa is a continent rich in landscape projects and practices but only eight out of fifty-four African nations have professional associations of landscape architects. The course is framed around three central questions: 1.) How is landscape architecture currently practiced in African countries? (2.) What lessons can we learn from landscape practices in various African societies that can help mitigate the impacts of climate change and social inequities? (3.) As landscape architecture unfolds across the continent in the next 50–200 years, how can it continue assert its agency in the fight against changing climates and social inequity and claim a central space in the shaping of African cities of the future? Each week we will focus on a different country including South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria. In collaboration with several landscape architecture university programs across Africa and including practitioners and academics from across the continent, this seminar will explore what it means to practice and teach landscape architecture in societies in which the profession is nascent or non-existent and speculate on the future of the shaping of landscapes in the Global South.

This GSD course is jointly listed with FAS as AFRAMER 143Y.