Landscape regions are conventionally defined through a set of interrelated logics: deterministic (geology, biogeography, climate), administrative (governance, policy), functional (markets, logistics), and projective (planning, development, colonization). Together, these logics stabilize landscapes into discipline specific, coherent, and generally contiguous–if contested–regions. This seminar examines a more elusive register: the ways modern landscape regions are defined through a constellation of distributed material practices–including the instruments of monitoring and forecasting, the technical operations of cultivation, building, and maintenance, and the labor that underwrites physical intervention–and, in turn, how these definitions circulate through the globalized industries of design, construction, and engineering.

From Jersey barriers to Cape Cod berms, Arizona crossings to the Rikers (Island) soil series, Chicago caissons to Portland cement, Stockholm tree pits to the Missouri gravel bed method–place names in material practices and techniques proliferate throughout the making of the built environment. However, how and why these techniques emerged from (or refer to) specific cultural and climatic conditions–and how they circulate to new geographies through social and professional networks, rather than through marketing–is relatively underexamined. Countless other techniques and materials–gootee propagation, barbed wire, tile drainage–arose from highly specific environmental contexts before they were disseminated or appropriated globally. In tracing these operative practices–and deliberately bracketing off narrow economic explanations of market segmentation–the seminar investigates alternative modes of landscape regionalism that have emerged between standardization and craft, between a globalized industry and the situated particularities of matter, ecology, and culture.

The course is organized into three units. The first unit will survey key scholarship from the design fields and labor geography that theorizes how place influences what people intentionally make (e.g., critical regionalism and its critiques). In parallel, we will draw on frameworks from science and technology studies and material culture studies to think about how to examine specific things in relation to the wider worlds they inhabit. Lectures and in-class discussions will be the primary activities.  

In the second unit, we will develop a collective index/atlas that documents the political ecology of place-based instruments, operations, and labor. In this unit, students will identify a preliminary research topic, starting with a geographic region or a specific practice/technology. A list of possible topics will be provided; however, students are also welcome to propose their own. In-class workshops and guest lectures will offer methods and resources for contemporary and historical research. A guided set of prompts for writing and diagramming will guide our work; we will focus on the work of the seminar as a collective, comparative effort, learning from differences and deviations in practices that originate from various places.  

In the third unit, we will assemble a new “chorography” of landscape practices–a systematic, qualitative description of a region–through a shared format for developing and disseminating research, culminating in a collective exhibition or publication. In-class peer-to-peer workshops and presentations will facilitate the development of the chorographic study.