Brownbag seminar: African Landscape Architectures_Alternative futures for the field

EGS Library, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Based on landscape fieldwork across 11 African nations during 2022–23, this talk speculates on the future of landscape architecture in Africa and the Global South. While visiting educational programs, designed landscapes, and meeting practitioners across African nations, Gareth Doherty saw and registered various landscape practices as they exist on the ground, whether professionally designed or not. Some forms of “grassroots” practice are more deeply engaged with solving the problems of our age—including climate change and social inequalities— than their more formalized and institutionalized counterparts. Details: Date: Thursday, 15 August 2024 Time: 13h00 –14h00 Venue: EGS Library, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT About the presenter: Gareth Doherty is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and principal of the Critical Landscapes Design Lab. Doherty takes a human-centered approach to landscape architecture, applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory methodologies to design and theory. His work critically reassesses 20th-century approaches to the observed landscape to advance new pedagogy, tools, and techniques that address contemporary design issues of equity, identity, cultural space, and the human impacts of climate change. Doherty addresses these issues through research on designed landscapes across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds. Through what he terms “landscape fieldwork,” Doherty unravels diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented as evidenced through his books, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017), Landscape Fieldwork: How the Engaging the World Changes Design (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming), and his recent fieldwork on African landscape architecture. Doherty was a Visiting Scholar at the African Centre for Cities in 2022–23.

Info Session: MPhil Urban Studies – Southern Urbanism

Virtual Event Virtual Event

The MPhil Southern Urbanism is designed to cultivate the next generation of urban thinkers from the South, who are rooted in the realities, theories and practise of cities of the Global South. Drawing together a diverse cohort of scholar and practitioners, the programme uses a combination of guided learning in small-group seminars, experimentation in various spaces of urban practice and independent thesis research to ground students in Urban Studies theory, and new research methodologies. This info session, hosted by programme convenor, Dr Anna Selmeczi will provide a brief overview of the pedagogical approach, programme structure and entry requirements, as well as discussion time to answer all your questions. APPLICATIONS DEADLINE FOR SOUTH AFRICAN AND INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: 31 October 2024 REGISTER HERE