Amy Whitesides

Amy is a design critic in landscape architecture at the GSD. Her courses include Climate By Design, Core III Design Studio, and a field-based seminar course on tree crops and the role of design in resilient regional food systems. She is a registered landscape architect with over 10 years of practice-based experience transforming urban landscapes for increased resilience and adaptation to environmental risks. Amy’s research centers on landscapes of historic extraction, constructed narratives of value, and the creation of new relationships and models for collective action that support alternatives to extracting and commodifying lands and livelihoods. Her current research explores these ideas through the lens of agroforestry, a practice of intentional integration of agriculture and tree crops into a productive system with economic, social, and ecological benefits. Her work seeks to define a role for design in support of these layered interactions between people, plants, animals, and fungi that create multi-scalar reciprocities and profitability alongside environmental stewardship. Her research and consulting practice support adaptation to environmental risks through long-term landscape and social change.

Before joining the GSD full-time, she spent 10 years in the Boston office of Stoss Landscape Urbanism, where she was most recently the Director of Resilience. At Stoss, she led planning and design projects throughout the US, with a focus on waterfront design and planning efforts for resilient public open space, including Climate Ready East Boston and Charlestown, the Blueway concept for the New England Aquarium, the Moakley Park Resilience Plan, Boston’s Urban Forest Plan, and Master Planning and Design efforts for Suffolk Downs and the Edison Power Plant in South Boston. Her projects at Stoss have been recognized with numerous awards, including an ASLA Honor Award, World Landscape Architecture Award of Excellence, APA Sustainability & Resiliency Award, and multiple BSLA awards of Merit.

Amy holds a Masters in Landscape Architecture from Harvard GSD, a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies, Magna Cum Laude, and a graduate certificate in Scientific Illustration from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has held teaching positions at numerous universities, including the University of Toronto and Northeastern University. Amy is grateful to have received numerous awards and honors in support of her research including the Tsao Family and Harvard University Graduate School of Design Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, the Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership, as well as an ASLA Award of Merit and ASLA honor award for her work as a graduate student.

Outside of the academy, Amy promotes waterfront access and healthy waterways as a Board Member of the Charles River Swimming Club.