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Research ArticlePeer-Reviewed Articles

Invisible Labor: Precarity, Ethnic Division, and Transformative Representation in Landscape Architecture Work

Michelle Arevalos Franco
Landscape Journal, January 2022, 41 (1) 95-111; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/lj.41.1.95
Michelle Arevalos Franco
Michelle Arevalos Franco is an assistant professor in landscape architecture at The Ohio State University. Her research commits interdisciplinary design practice to the intersecting projects of justice, anti-colonial relations, and post-capitalist futures. Her most recent landscape designs were for Oehme, van Sweden & Associates in Washington, DC. She holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she received the Peter Walker Partners Fellowship. Prior to that, Franco was program director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York and studied photography in the Sonoran Desert, receiving a bachelor’s of fine art (magna cum laude) from the University of Arizona.
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Abstract

For designers concerned with social and spatial justice, it is necessary to expand the context of landscape work beyond a site’s physical and historic narratives to include the context and conditions of the people laboring at the site itself. This involves considering the devaluation of manual labor and the ethnic division of labor evident in the production of landscape architecture and naturalized through capitalism. Attention is drawn to the embeddedness of undocumented, migrant labor in the construction and maintenance of landscapes and the discipline’s role in the construction and maintenance of unsustainable, precarious labor regimes. Visual representation, as a major component of professional jurisdiction, plays a critical role in either propagating or grappling with these ethical dilemmas.

Landscape architectural representations function both practically and discursively, ordering the construction of the physical environment and building the philosophical space for design. This essay suggests that the transformative power of representation can be operationalized to foment a broad social representation of the many Latinx, immigrant workers who contribute to the creation and maintenance of landscape architecture. This would allow landscape architects to work toward repositioning and revaluing the contributions of these workers by reaffirming the social connection between design and labor, affirming a disciplinary ethic of process and sustainability, and influencing the governing structures and everyday practice of the discipline.

KEYWORDS
  • Immigration
  • construction and maintenance
  • erasure
  • social justice
  • racial capitalism
  • process and sustainability
  • Latinx
  • © 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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Landscape Journal: 41 (1)
Landscape Journal
Vol. 41, Issue 1
1 Jan 2022
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Invisible Labor: Precarity, Ethnic Division, and Transformative Representation in Landscape Architecture Work
Michelle Arevalos Franco
Landscape Journal Jan 2022, 41 (1) 95-111; DOI: 10.3368/lj.41.1.95

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Invisible Labor: Precarity, Ethnic Division, and Transformative Representation in Landscape Architecture Work
Michelle Arevalos Franco
Landscape Journal Jan 2022, 41 (1) 95-111; DOI: 10.3368/lj.41.1.95
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Keywords

  • Immigration
  • construction and maintenance
  • erasure
  • social justice
  • racial capitalism
  • process and sustainability
  • Latinx
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