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.
