Cultural landscapes bear the imprint of human interaction with the physical environment, and when interrogated deeply, they reveal our evolving relationships with the natural world. How can cultural landscapes inform and shape our shared public memory?

How do our collective planning, design, education, interpretation, advocacy, and public engagement decisions affect how we make visible, assign value and promote holistic stewardship and sympathetic change?

Once a project is built, is our work done? How does an activist landscape practice ensure faithful and imaginative stewardship during the management of change in built projects?
What about those cultural landscapes that have been forgotten, malnourished, subject to neglect or worse, purposefully erased, whose histories and cultural lifeways are waiting to be made visible?

Do we stand by while these cultural landscapes lay dormant, decline further, and accept that perhaps they were even the targets of a palimpsest of abuse and disregard?

Students and practitioners must prepare themselves and develop advocacy tools to assume leadership positions to effectively prescribe change in the public realm, address historical (and purposeful) erasure, past memorialization, and the rigidity of antiquated and historic government standards that are building- and object-oriented. For activists and advocates this is essential when commemorating the past in our shared public realm and in authentically engaging, empowering, and amplifying community voices.  These core values are necessary to foster trust with the goal of cultural landscapes helping us to collectively come together to find ways to heal.

In addressing these challenges, what role can — and should — landscape architecture (as well as allied disciplines in history, planning, design and conservation), play as collaborative participants in advocating for this legacy as part of our collective national reckoning?

Speakers throughout the semester, including advocate and social entrepreneur Angela Kyle, will represent a diversity of disciplines, sectors, and perspectives including: from non-profits with missions focused on public education and advocacy; cultural resource consultants who adopted tireless and research-driven advocacy and design positions; landscape architects, planners, and architects who built advocacy into their public engagement efforts to inform form giving, design, and placemaking; community activists who through their tenacity and doggedness have affected or driven the conversation in charting a collective way forward; and urban strategists who inform their development approaches through authentic community engagement and design when promoting lost and forgotten histories.

Taken together, this seminar will examine the planning, design, and stewardship opportunities — and constraints — frequently encountered when advocating for cultural landscapes and their lost or forgotten histories. This seminar will also address how we may develop a personal ethic when bridging the artificial, often segmented divides between design and historic preservation as well as nature and culture.

Given the scale of contemporary challenges, from climate change and biodiversity loss to racial and social equity, the need for activist approaches to inform planning and design decisions is greater than ever. This seminar will showcase those perspectives where advocacy leadership has been essential to guiding change and future stewardship of the often invisible and forgotten cultural landscape legacy.