CONTESTED Landscapes + COUNTER Narratives
Land is not a stage on which history takes place, it is not a neutral site for becoming human or building community. Imperial histories are not intended to understand place but to legitimate the taking of place. No place holds one, singular story. Every place, every site is contested, complex, layered, and full of both histories and futures. Our purpose in this seminar will be to interrogate how we might frame and define practices of place-making including landscape architecture, and in turn, how might re-imagine potential futures of design as a practice and as a way of thinking.
We will explore how a critical place-based inquiry shapes readings of complex landscape histories. Places hold contested narratives and histories, from lands of deep meaning to that of quick extraction, from sites of enslaved labor to mining operations, from reservations to internment camps, from places of violence to those of resistance, among others. We will study critical place theories in the context of land/place-based sources, methods, and tools (including archives, walking, drawing, thick sections, texts, maps, oral histories, poetry…) for identifying, revealing, interpreting, and sharing narratives that may collide, upturn, deny or erase one another.
Drawing from a selection of places primarily in the United States including the Harvard campus, we will consider how narratives of identity, race, gender, and indigenous sovereignty have shaped place; the approaches designers might employ when taking on the responsibility of design and making; and the sources from which historians might draw in curating histories of place.
We frame this seminar as an inquiry, grounded in an interrogation of ways of knowing in order to build alternative bodies of knowledge. Our readings will engage with studies of the constructions of identity, race, and gender as embedded in and emanating from land and place, and in particular through the practice of designing landscapes. We will center on how communities have made place in order to survive and thrive. We will interrogate resistance in the landscape. Our work will draw from George Lipsitz’s essay on the racialization of space and spatialization of race to consider counter narratives of place and community. As we extend our discussion through the work of Tiffany Lethabo King, Lisa Prosper, Andrea Roberts, Anna Tamura, Ken Lustbader, and a richness of other scholars of land, landscape, and place. Our purpose will be to interrogate how we engage with history, to question how we have come to frame and define practices of place-making, including landscape architecture, and in turn, how might re-imagine potential futures of design and our community places.