Decolonizing the Language of Landscape Architecture

THE POWER OF LANGUAGE

For centuries philosophers, linguists, psychologists and others have noted the power of words to influence people’s thoughts and actions and vice versa. A principle called linguistic relativity holds that language affects the very ways in which its respective speakers conceptualize their entire world, in short, their cognitive processes which often inform their actions. (Quante & Escott, 2014, p. 1)

The discipline of landscape architecture—alongside many of the disciplines and institutions of Western society—has failed to address a broad range of socio-ecological challenges facing our current moment, as evidenced by the persistent social and racial inequalities that have been exacerbated by the lingering global pandemic and the ever-accelerating climate crisis. These inequalities are embedded in the fabric of our landscapes and visible in the layout of infrastructures and green spaces in cities (Jenerette et al., 2011), housing patterns and their response to disaster warnings (Fothergill et al., 2002), neighborhood park quality (Hughey et al., 2016), and even design features and layout characteristics within park settings (Huang & Napawan, 2021). More significantly, the same inequalities are often perpetrated through design (Rothstein, 2017), with or without the designer’s intentional participation. A striking example of this is the infamous removal of Seneca Village, an integrated community with some of the first landowning formerly enslaved people, to make way for Central Park, an American icon of landscape architecture (Central Park Conservancy, 2018). As Carlson and Collard-Arias (2021) state in their critique of the discipline’s predominantly Western historical narrative: “Landscape architecture practice perpetuates claims to neutrality as it draws on this history largely blind to injustice, patriarchy, colonialism, disenfranchisement, and violence” (p. 2).

The authors argue for the discipline to abandon its apolitical stance and embrace changes within the profession that support greater diversity, equity, and inclusion (Carlson and Collard-Arias, 2021). Thus, a change in the profession is necessary to address landscape architecture’s role in perpetuating these inequalities and to adequately confront our current, critical socio-ecological moment. Central to this effort is the need to confront the language of our discipline—the words and their implied values that are too often taken for granted.

Words are cultural signifiers that demonstrate values; they evolve over time, as knowledge and stories do, reflecting the values of the people that use them. The death of George Floyd in May 2020 at the hands of police sparked a social awakening, transforming the nation’s sense of its own humanity and identity and bringing attention to the perpetuation of racist and colonialist practices in our culture (Samayeen et al., 2020). In response to this event and the awakening that followed, landscape architecture students across the country have demanded a reassessment of their curricula, requesting that the “stories” told through landscape architecture be broadened to include non-Western perspectives (ASLA, 2020b). Specific language from various landscape architecture programs includes the following: “Ensure that the curriculum adequately foregrounds the harm that all design disciplines have had on BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] and Latinx people,” from the students of University of Virginia (p. 1); “Restructure all courses at the GSD [Graduate School of Design] to include Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) voices,” from students at Harvard University (p. 2); “Reflect on the ways in which white-centering has created a loss of creativity, quality, and credibility in landscape architecture,” from students at University of Pennsylvania (p. 7); and “Decolonize design education. Commit our department to challenging white supremacy and the role that design has played in settler colonialism,” from students at Louisiana State University (p. 11).

In 2018 the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), the professional organization that represents the discipline within the United States, had committed to doing just that, stating: “For the profession of landscape architecture to remain relevant and responsive, it must better represent the communities and people it serves. Greater diversity brings new perspectives and thought leadership, strengthens professional/community connections and supports social equity” (ASLA, 2018, n.p.). This statement calls for the changes young and emerging professionals continue to demand two years later and reinforces the urgent need to diversify the profession since George Floyd’s death. A follow-up response was issued in June 2020 by the ASLA and the Landscape Architecture Accreditation Board (LAAB), a partner organization that maintains standards of higher education institutions offering accredited degrees: “In May 2020, LAAB was completing the standards revisions process when the murder of George Floyd and the racial justice protests that followed pushed every institution to look deep within themselves. … In light of recent and continuing efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion … LAAB believed it was imperative to continue additional changes to the standards” (ASLA, 2020a, n.p.). ASLA and LAAB committed to an additional year to revise curriculum standards, holding five town hall meetings throughout fall 2020 and forming a diversity subcommittee to address curricular standards. LAAB revisions were completed in September 2021 and formally presented at the annual conference held in November 2022. The relevant revisions are as follows (LAAB, 2021): the inclusion of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as Core Values of the LAAB on the first page of its new standards; addition of “cultural competence” within key definitions (p. 3); the establishment of a Standard 1(C) entitled “Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (p. 8); inclusion of learning outcomes related to cultural competency in coursework related to history and theory (p. 12); and articulation of various Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion goals related to student experience (p. 17), faculty development (p. 19), and outreach (p. 21). Despite these revisions, the authors have noted that important terms, such as “antiracist,” “BIPOC perspectives,” and “decolonization” are all absent from the document. Just as words have power, so too does their absence.

The authors of this article represent scholars, educators, and practicing professionals within the discipline who have committed to urging increased efforts by the ASLA and LAAB and to addressing the demands made by our students and young practitioners of landscape architecture. The authors argue that to embrace inclusive stories within the discipline, landscape architecture scholars must also examine the role that words, and their varied meanings, play in identifying the values that the profession seeks to uphold. This article explores the role language plays in constructing and deconstructing the narratives in landscape architecture, looking specifically at how words limit or expand the possibilities of change within the discipline. Applying linguistic, colonial, and decolonial theory, the authors consider the origins of the term landscape in light of its Indigenous alternatives and interrogate the prevalent dualistic positioning in the lexicon of landscape architecture. This includes the dichotomy of terms such as culture and nature as previously challenged by feminist scholars; however, the authors attempt to deepen existing analysis of the Western colonial bias present in this and other binaries by drawing from traditions in American Indigenous and Afro Descendent epistemologies, including those of the Amazonian, Anishinaabe, Rarámuri, and Salish peoples, as well as non-Western worldviews of Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and South Asian cultures. Finally, this article argues for the continued exploration of language and its use within the discipline, its hidden ideologies—including epistemological and theoretical underpinnings—and its implications for educating the next generation of landscape architects. Diversifying the narrative is necessary for the discipline to remain relevant in the current socio-ecological moment, and decolonizing the language of landscape architecture is a necessary step in that process.

OUR CURRENT STORIES

We are readily drawn to a story of origins, especially if those stories concern famous designers or patrons. (Hunt, 2004, p. 11)

In their 2022 article “Trajectories of Practice across Time,” the authors Carlson and Collard-Arias provide a powerful critique of the discipline’s historical narratives, including the omission of significant “landscape-makers” that fall outside the Western tradition. They reference Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe’s Landscape of Man (1964) and Christophe Girot’s The Course of Landscape Architecture (2016) as the basis for their critique, noting that “the traditional history of landscape architecture elevates and continually reiterates canonical figures—most of them white men—and their projects in an original pristine state” (p. 3). In contrast, the authors propose a new methodology for the study of landscape architecture’s history that replaces chronological modes of study with thematic approaches using the concepts “fire” and “farm” to illustrate alternative historical narratives. In this approach, the challenge of where and when to start the discourse is avoided, and the limitations of any narrative are positioned up front.

Similarly, the feminist art historian Heath Massey Schenker (1994) provides critique of Norman T. Newton’s canonical history text Design on the Land to illustrate the marginalization of women’s contributions to the field of landscape architecture. Using methods in social history and feminist theory, she argues not for an “archaeological” exercise to uncover a “female Olmsted,” but rather for the “need to look critically at the dominant paradigms for writing the history of landscape design” (p. 108). In essence, Schenker (1994) argues that the dearth of female landscape architects within the profession’s history is the result of exclusionary systems and practices that have prevented acknowledgment of female contributions to the field, not merely an omission of individuals on the basis of gender; in other words, the criteria by which greatness is defined in the field have been limited to characteristics that are historically male-dominated (Schenker, 1994).

Schenker’s and Carlson & Collard-Arias’s critiques of our limited narratives gain significance by reviewing the authors of seminal texts identified within the profession. A list of the bestselling introductory texts in landscape architecture and the top five texts as recommended by the American Society of Landscape Architecture’s Professional Practice Network include fourteen distinct books (two books occur on both lists); these books all have white men as their sole authors or editors, with one exception only: Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of the Great American City (see Table 1). Two of the texts included on the bestseller list are edited texts with multiple contributing authors; even in these two texts, only 13 out of the 50 total authors are women, and only one identifies as a person of color. If the authors of our discipline’s literature remain limited in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity, so too will our stories. While this article focuses specifically on decolonization of our language within the profession, the process of decolonization will also require addressing the underrepresentation in the authorship of landscape architecture texts.¹

DECOLONIZATION AND LANDSCAPE

Whose lands are you on? Which territorial treaties are they part of? Who are you accountable to? Whose stories and histories are privileged? Who are your collaborators? Are waters, rivers, estuaries, streams, seedlings, beavers, and other beings part of that change? (Bélanger et al., 2020, p. 127)

The demands by landscape architecture students to “decolonize” their professional education, as noted above, require an investigation into key terms and theories within the North American context, such as colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism. The authors rely specifically on the seminal work of Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006), and Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012), for these definitions. Tuck and Yang define settlement and extractive colonialism as the practice of displacing peoples or resources to allow settlers to occupy Indigenous-managed landscapes, as was the case in the Americas following the so-called discovery of the New World by Europeans in the late 15th century. Settlement is distinct from immigration: immigrants are subject to the laws and epistemologies of the Indigenous society, whereas settlers supplant them. Tuck and Yang (2012) refer to the significance of land itself within the definition of colonialism as follows: “Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land. … Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence” (p. 5). Describing this disruption of a relationship to land as violence is not hyperbole; it is an accurate depiction of harm that has been done both to Indigenous peoples and to the landscape itself. Or, as Wolfe (2006) states, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace” (p. 388).

Tuck and Yang argue that an effort at decolonization requires “unsettling,” or re-centering Indigenous knowledge, practices, and worldviews. Included in that effort must be the abandonment of our settler colonial language. Of most concern to Tuck and Yang, ironically, is the misuse of the word “decolonize” itself:

Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. … Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym. (2012, p. 3)

The act of decolonization requires careful and intentional use of language and specificity with regard to characterizations of Indigenous epistemology. Otherwise, we run the risk of “asterisk-ing” Indigenous people, or reducing them to the agglomeration of “underrepresented minority” and homogenizing a myriad of complex, nuanced, and diverse worldviews into one (Tuck & Yang, 2012). “Settler colonialism” and “decolonization” are distinct from “postcolonialism.” In his 2006 piece in the Journal of Genocide Research, Patrick Wolfe states, “settler colonialism is a structure and not an event,” articulating the key difference between the terms “decolonization” and “postcolonialism” (p. 390). If colonialism is understood as a system that is still pervasive in today’s society and decolonization as the effort to undo this system, postcolonialism references specifically the historic period following colonization (in the Americas or beyond). Postcolonial periods may vary in temporality, depending on the context of the site and the particularities of its history of colonization, but as is implied in Wolf’s quote, the terms “decolonization” and “postcolonialism” are not interchangeable.

More recently, the specialist in human geography Tiffany Kaewen Dang (2021) explores decolonization specifically in reference to the disciplines related to landscape, such as cultural geography and environmental design. Using the Wet’suwet’en land back efforts in British Columbia as a case study, she argues that landscape architecture, urban design, planning, and geography are all colonizing disciplines, stating, “specific to the context of settler-colonial nations, landscape representations serve to sustain settler hegemonies, by framing the land as belonging to the illegitimate, yet largely naturalized, settler state rather than Indigenous societies” (p. 1009). Thus, any effort at decolonization requires fundamental interrogation of the representations and conceptualizations of landscape.

DECOLONIZING LANGUAGE

Why did eurocentered epistemology conceal its own geo-historical and bio-graphical locations and succeed in creating the idea of universal knowledge as if the knowing subjects were also universal? This illusion is pervasive today in the social sciences, the humanities, the natural sciences and the professional schools. (Mignolo, 2009, p. 160)

Language is embedded with meaning, and meaning is sourced from embodied experience and collective worldviews. To assume a neutral worldview/experience and embed universal meaning is what Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez refers to as the “zero-point hubris,” a consequence of the epistemic violence that occurred alongside the physical and economic violence of European colonialism (Castro-Gómez, 2021). More specifically, Castro-Gómez references the 18th-century Enlightenment’s classification of “many forms of knowing” into a chronological hierarchy that situated scientific-Enlightenment knowledge at the highest point of the cognitive scale and all other forms of knowledge, perceived as archaic, at the lowest point on the scale. Most notable in this hubris is the devaluation and subsequent erasure of Black, Indigenous, and mestizo epistemologies, not to mention—the authors argue—feminist epistemologies.

The Argentine semiotician and theorist Walter Mignolo (2022) has written extensively on this topic, describing a “modern/colonial world system and imaginary” built upon a Eurocentric epistemology that claims a false notion of universality that he denounces as “a machine that generates and maintains un-justices” (p. 160). In Mignolo’s assertion, the modern/colonial imaginary originates and is sustained precisely by the invention of the Human/Humanity and the invention of Nature through the act of naming. In this imaginary, Nature is separate from Humanity and subjugated by it. The terms race and gender are similarly constructed, giving rise to the systemic racism, sexism, and anthropocentrism that persists to this day. To counter these injustices, Mignolo calls for a kind of “epistemic disobedience,” a delinking from imaginaries of separation and subjugation in order to explore decolonial ways of thinking, imagining, and constructing worlds free from inherited biases and assumptions. These include epistemic biases such as first world knowledge, third world culture, Native American wisdom, and Anglo-American science (Mignolo, 2009). Mignolo (2009) refers to this as “the colonial wound, the fact that regions and people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally. Racism not only affects people but also regions” (pp. 160–161). This “colonial matrix of power,” he asserts, is based in “a racial system of social classification that invented Occidentalism (e.g., Indias Occidentales), that created the conditions for Orientalism; distinguished the South of Europe from its center (Hegel) and, on that long history, remapped the world as first, second and third during the Cold War” (Mignolo, 2009, p. 161). Delinking ourselves from this system/imaginary, then, becomes a moral imperative if we are to denounce the injustice, racism, sexism, and ableism embedded in these constructs.

The cultural geographers Edward Said and Tariq Jazeel identify similar challenges to the Eurocentric framework when analyzing landscapes of the Middle East and South Asia, respectively. Jazeel (along with Friess) makes reference to “the EuroAmerican well-springs of landscape theory” and “the EuroAmerican conceptual heartland” of landscape thought to illustrate the ubiquity of Eurocentrism within the field (2017, p. 15). In his 1970 text Orientalism, Said argues that the conceptualization of the “Orient” as a foil to the West has been grossly overgeneralized, particularly in American understandings that narrowly ascribe it to the Far East. Instead, Said (1970) positions the definition of the Orient as follows: “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other” (p. 9). The source of the Orient’s exoticism comes directly from its othering from Western Civilization, to the extent that it is applied to cultures of the Far East, such as Japan, China, and Korea, while leaping over regions that feel slightly less “other,” such as Slavic and Russian territories. Jazeel (2012) exposes similar challenges through his study of the Lunuganga region in Sri Lanka: “As valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape” (p. 63). Developed, Underdeveloped, Occidental, Oriental, Global South, Global North, First, Second and Third World—these terms (and more) are employed to boldly underscore notions of other, hierarchy and power. Decolonizing language, then, enables epistemic liberation.

DECOLONIZING WAYS OF THINKING

Where does that leave landscape? If the discipline of landscape architecture is to position itself as valuable and relevant outside of Euro- and Anglo-centered epistemologies and experiences, we must question the assumptions embedded in our language and practice. It is ironic that a discipline that prides itself on understanding contextual relationships and the “genius of the place” fails to do so in its very own disciplinary epistemology. We all look through the lens of landscape as if it were singular and universal, but it is not.

The Indian physicist, philosopher, and environmental activist Vandana Shiva refers to this kind of vision as a “monoculture of the mind” that forcibly excludes other cultures of the mind, thereby impoverishing our world in favor of a single, limited perspective. In contrast, Shiva asserts, diversity expands this perspective and provides an opportunity to undo various colonizations—the colonization of nature, of women, and of non-white peoples and non-Western cultures (Shiva, 1993). Moreover, Shiva (1993) writes, “monocultures of the mind generate models of production which destroy diversity and legitimise that destruction as progress, growth, and improvement.” These “impoverished systems” are also unsustainable as “‘improvement’ and ‘growth,’ in a monocultural paradigm, blocks our thinking about enoughness, about balance, and about appropriateness” (p. 239). The imperative for diversity and its reintegration into our consciousness is the “most significant breakthrough of our time,” she asserts (p. 239). Diversity produces alternatives—and a broader perspective—in what Indian systems of knowledge are known as “vrihad—the wide perspective” (p. 239). “Shifting to diversity as a mode of thought, a context of action, allows multiple choices to emerge,” and thus, richer possibilities, futures, and outcomes (p. 237).

DECOLONIZING WAYS OF BEING

Likewise, the sociologist John Law (2015) interrogates the notion of a “one world world” in contrast to its alternative, in which multiple worlds exist in a “fractiverse” (p. 127). If the former is true, Law asserts, then what is at stake are solely questions of epistemology. If the latter holds, then serious ontological questions arise. These notions have far-reaching political implications in that the former can be used to exert hegemony and the latter to exert autonomy. Furthermore, the epistemic and ontological consequences embedded in these paradigms threaten autonomy, quality of life, and existence.

In Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), the Colombian-American anthropologist and political ecologist Arturo Escobar writes at length about this alternative conception, which he refers to as the pluriverse, a reference to the Zapatista ideal of constructing “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” (a world where many worlds fit; p. xvi). For Escobar (2018), the crises we face are a consequence of the one-world-world ontology; they are modern problems for which there are no modern solutions. It follows, then, that addressing them requires transitioning to the pluriverse (pp. 67–68). Hence, Escobar makes a case for the ontological potential of design. Citing Winograd and Flores (1986), he writes, “‘We encounter the deep question of design when we recognize that in designing tools we are designing ways of being.’… Understood as the ‘interaction between understanding and creation,’ design is ontological in that it is a conversation about possibilities” (p. 110). Moreover, “in designing tools, we (humans) design the conditions of our existence and, in turn, the conditions of our designing. We design tools, and these tools design us back. … Design thus inevitably generates humans’ (and other Earth beings’) structures of possibility” (pp. 110–111). To illustrate this point, Escobar (1986) contrasts the example of the Amazonian Indigenous maloca (longhouse) with the North American single-family suburban house. The former, with its potential to house several dozen people under a single roof, enables relationship-building between humans and other living beings; in contrast, the latter disables that kind of relationality, fomenting instead a kind of individualism that is cut off from the natural world. For Escobar, design is ontological in that it plays an essential part in shaping what it means to be human. “Designs for the pluriverse,” then, constitute a methodology for reimagining and reconstructing hyperlocalized autonomous worlds.

THE LANDSCAPE IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Landscape is a slippery word. (Stilgoe, 1980, p. 3)

The term landscape originates from the German Landschaft and the Dutch landschap and signifies a managed plot of land, like a homestead or settlement (Stilgoe, 1980). The definition implies ownership of the land, and as Friess and Jazeel (2017) posit: “Landscape is a strictly delineated space that is physically, or more likely culturally, shaped and defined by those who own it, physically or conceptually. In material, managerial, imaginative, and not least conceptual terms, however, who does own, shape, and claim landscape?” (p. 16). Westernized notions of land and landscape are thus centered on ownership and power, as demonstrated in the feudal systems of Europe’s past (Wolfe, 2006). As the term evolved, it came to imply a picturesque scene to be viewed, and the scenes which constitute an ideal “landscape” continue to be defined predominantly by Western European standards (Carlson and Collard-Arias, 2021). With its roots in both land management and the pastoral scene, the Western landscape ideal is associated with one that is human-managed and separates place from viewer. This limited conceptualization of the term is problematic. It prioritizes the viewer of land (landowner) over the occupier of land (laborer) in a way that upholds inequitable systems of social hierarchy. In addition, it associates an ideal landscape with one that is “shaped by man,” one that is evidently “cultivated” (Stilgoe, 1980). Thus, landscape itself reinforces socio-ecological relationships that separate haves from have-nots and humans from their environments. Moreover, these conceptualizations of landscape are extensions of the system of settler colonialism as described above (Jazeel, 2012; Friess & Jazeel, 2017). Dang (2021) argues that the landscape discipline “not only reflects social and political power relations as a symbolic aesthetic medium; it is itself an instrument and agent of power” and “has played a crucial role in European colonialism” (p. 1008). Thus, new conceptualizations of landscape beyond those embedded in Western colonization are needed, as is a change to “our working definitions of landscape from a purely spatial and static concept to a multidimensional one that requires some sort of temporal axis, a theory of landscape change” (Friess & Jazeel, 2017, p.15).

The cultural geographer D. W. Meinig has also explored the varied conceptualizations of landscape. In his essay “The Beholding Eye,” Meinig (1979) argues that “any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads” (p. 1). He continues with ten different interpretations of a theoretical landscape, revealing the cultural values associated with each conceptualization: landscape as Nature, Habitat, Artifact, System, Problem, Wealth, Ideology, History, Place, or Aesthetic. Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim (2015) argue similarly for a diversity of meanings within the term, and in turn within the practice of landscape architecture, in their edited volume Is Landscape … ?. In the text, contributing authors explore conceptualizations of Landscape as … Literature, Painting, Photography, Ecology, Gardening, Planning, Urbanism, Infrastructure, Technology, History, Theory, Philosophy, Life, a Discipline, a Profession, or Architecture. Each chapter positions the practice of landscape architecture through the lens of complementary practices. In both Meinig’s text and Doherty and Waldheim’s volume, the range of meanings for landscape are varied but still limited to Western Eurocentric frameworks. Missing from these alternative readings is landscape as it relates to Kin, the Sacred, the Ancestral, or Home; these are concepts derived from American Indigenous epistemologies that provide new lenses for exploring the relationships between people and place.

OTHER WORDS FOR LANDSCAPE

El territorio es la vida y la vida no se vende, se ama y se defiende.

The territory is our life, and life is not sold—it is loved and defended. (Márquez-Mina, 2018)

In a 2018 lecture delivered at the University of Oregon Humanities Center, the plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer—who is of both European and Anishinaabe² ancestry—highlights the distinction between a Western conception of land and one seen through an Indigenous lens. In the Western worldview, land is primarily understood as a source of ecosystem services and natural resources, defined as property and a source of capital, protected by rights assigned by humans largely in service to humans. This is reinforced by the conceptualizations outlined above. In the Anishinaabe worldview, however, land is understood much more broadly—as identity, sustainer, ancestral connection, home, and residence not only to humans but also to other living beings such as plants and animals. Land is understood as the source of knowledge and healing, with whom humans enact their moral responsibility to all living beings. Therefore, she concludes, land is sacred (Kimmerer, 2017). The Anishinaabe worldview stands in contrast to the dominant Western framework that informs much of our discipline. Kimmerer and other scholars of Indigenous science concur that the exclusion and marginalization of Indigenous knowledge in Western educational systems is the root cause of Indigenous underrepresentation in the sciences and constitutes “cognitive imperialism” (Kimmerer, 2013). The implications of these distinctions are profound and present challenges to the normative approaches to how landscape architecture is taught and practiced; these challenges must in turn be addressed by scholars and practitioners alike in order to maintain relevance in a rapidly changing world.

While landscape is rooted in a Western understanding of human relationships with the land, from a Latin American (non-Western) perspective, an understanding and relationship with Tierra is ancient, multifaceted, and rooted in a different set of values. While land and landscapes can be owned, framed, or limited by boundaries, Tierra suggests something more expansive—living, breathing, and interconnected. The Spanish word for landscape is paisaje, derived from the French, páysage, and denotes a view, scenery, or spectacle. In contrast, the term tierra can be used simply to describe the tangible ground upon which we stand—an area dedicated to cultivation—or to evoke more abstract ideas of homeland, often used in a deeply felt and relational way, as in mi Tierra. The Hispanos of the southwestern United States also reference a deep connection to their lands with the word querencia, which means “the place which holds my heart,” and the Navajo call their homeland diné’tah, which means “it is among us.” There are other words within American Indigenous languages that speak of reciprocal relationships and kinship, such as the Rarámuri word gawi wachi (the place of nurturing; to describe the Sierra Madres), the Yoeme word huya ania (nurturing life; referring to the natural areas outside their villages), and the Rarámuri concept iwí’gara, which communicates total interconnectedness and integration of all life in the Sierra Madres, physical and spiritual (Salmón, 2017). In an article by the same name, Enrique Salmón uses the term “kincentric ecology” to approximate a translation of iwí’gara, yet he acknowledges the insufficiency of the language (and its accompanying epistemology) to encompass the full meaning. These examples are evidence of socio-ecological relationships that suggest a more expansive vision than what is contained in the Western notion of landscape as we understand it today. Most importantly, they are contextual and specific, suggesting an unbounded cosmological vision in relationship with people and place.

In his recent essay “A Little More than Kin,” the North American author Richard Powers (2021) contends that our current planetary emergency is in fact a “family emergency” that demands (of humans) a kind of radical kinship. Drawing on the symbolic and creative possibilities inherent in language and storytelling, he writes, “Only stories will help us to rejoin human to humility to humus, through their shared root. (The root that we’re looking for here is dhghem: Earth)” (n.p.).

LANDSCAPE BINARIES

Why do landscape architects so frequently describe the world and their work in pairs of terms? Either-or. This or that. One or the other. Perhaps this tendency to rely on pairs, on binary terms, reflects an essential attribute of the activities of the landscape architect who is involved in shaping and forming the land—“nature”—to accommodate human use and to embody cultural values. Or is this trait an attribute of a larger societal norm? What does it mean to structure the world into binaries? (Meyer, 1997, p. 45)

The Western colonized conceptualizations of landscape stand in stark contrast to the Anishinaabe and Rarámuri cultures, as described above, particularly as they relate to relationships between people and place. The prevailing dichotomies in Western conceptualizations of landscape neglect opportunities for more nuanced understandings of relationships between humans and their environments in favor of either/or conditions that the feminist landscape architect Elizabeth Meyer firmly rejects in her critique “Landscape Architecture in the Expanded Field” (1997). She identifies the use of binaries as a means of soliciting power and control, arguing that each of these pairs is really representative of the ultimate binary: us/them. This is similar to Said’s argument on the othering that is present in the duality of Occidental versus Oriental (1978). Meyers argues for the hybridization of ideas to overcome these dualities but never acknowledges the role of Eurocentrism or settler colonialism in fomenting these concepts in the discipline.

These dualities are further deconstructed by the decolonial feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (2012) in her conception of Borderlands. Drawing from her experience as a Chicana inhabiting the Texas/Mexico border, Anzaldúa reconceptualizes the idea of a geopolitical borderland as a metaphysical Borderland (with a capital B) encompassing psychic, sexual, and spiritual realms (Anzaldúa, 2012). Both conceptions—the physical and the metaphoric—engender deeply traumatic yet potentially transformational spaces (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2009). For Anzaldúa, the B/borderland is an open wound where cultures converge, conflict, and eventually transform to become a kind of “third country.”

Site and Sight

Another problematic duality is uncovered in Tariq Jazeel’s (2012) work on South Asian conceptualizations of landscape—namely, the site (that which is occupied) and the sight (that which is viewed): “The troubling couplet sight/site captures well the concern that foregrounding the visuality of landscape masks more mundane human immersions in spaces that, instead of being conceived textually, are better understood through the affective dimensions of landscape experience” (p. 63). Carlson and Collard-Arias (2021) reinforce this sentiment with the following statement: “Much of the disciplinary history examined in the academy remains rooted in definitions of landscape inherited from landscape painting which associate reason to vision and privilege the external gaze” (p. 2). This is particularly evident in the classic work of Humphrey Repton’s Redbooks (see Figure 1). Often cited for his novel use of “before” and “after” illustrations of landscape design, Repton’s Redbooks also illustrate the tradition within the English picturesque of intentionally obscuring laborers of the landscape (site) and privileging desirable pastoral views (sight). This also illustrates the power dynamics between the occupier of a landscape (laborer) and the viewer of a landscape (owner), as discussed above.

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Figure 1

Humphrey Repton’s Redbooks illustrate the problematic dichotomy of site/sight.

Wild and Cultivated

Rather than idealizing a scene of perceptible human management of land, the Indigenous concepts of land and landscapes of the Americas, Orient, South and Southeast Asia described above represent relationships between people, places, and resources—a relationship described by the Tarahumara⁵ scholar Enrique Salmón as “kincentric ecology.” Kincentric ecology describes a worldview in which all life on Earth is relative, and there is no room or need for a category such as “wild” or “wilderness” because both imply a world that is largely separate from humans (Salmón, 2000). “There is no word for the concept wild in my native language of Rarámuri,” writes Salmón (2017, p. 24). To construct a set of words, and by extension, worldviews, that sets humans above and apart from everything else allows people to be satisfied with—and therefore justify—actions that harm the ecosystems that sustain them, keeping them in a state of disconnection. This is evidenced in the mythology and romanticization of US National Parks, wilderness areas, and “back to the wild” movements.

In his 2007 article, the archaeologist and ethnobotanist Jeff Oliver describes the contrasting conceptualizations of landscape between early European colonists and the Salish peoples⁶ of the Pacific Northwest; when Europeans first arrived in the Pacific Northwest, they did not recognize the rich, biodiverse forests as cultivated landscapes. Instead, the forests were misconstrued as “wilderness,” and the Europeans felt they could lay claim to its resources. As Oliver (2007) describes it:

Landscapes are not simply outcomes of human impact, but rather lenses through which social worlds are both constructed and contested, particularly at the scale of routine lives. … Commentators on the [Pacific Northwest] coast frequently thought the landscape to be “more a backdrop for Native life than a focus of it”… [but] the so-called “wilderness” was often under some form of “low intensity cultivation” by aboriginal peoples. (pp. 31–32)

The settler colonists’ idealized view of cultivated landscapes was inconsistent with Native practices of landscape cultivation. Similarly, in The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492, the North American geographer William Denevan (1992) writes:

The myth persists that in 1492 the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness,—a world of barely perceptible human disturbance. There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created, wildlife disrupted, and erosion was severe in places. Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous. (p. 369)

Thus, it could be argued that colonization of the “New World” was very much tied to misconceptions about what a managed landscape should and should not look like. Moreover, this misconceptualization perpetuates the dichotomy between wilderness and cultivation and rejects more nuanced relationships between human management of land.

The North American journalist Charles Mann popularized this idea in his 2006 book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Summarizing the evidence of multiple Indigenous groups within Amazonia, he writes, “Amazonians typically do not make the distinction between cultivated and wild landscapes as they do in the west. Instead, they simply classify landscapes into scores of varieties depending on the type of species in each” (Mann, 2005, p. 342). The romanticized (and politicized) notion of a pristine Amazon wilderness is incorrect, and more accurately evidence of a cultivated anthropogenic landscape that is “directly or indirectly created by humans” (Mann, 2005, p. 342–343) over millennia through agricultural activity. “Amazonians literally created the ground beneath their feet” (Mann, 2005 pp. 344–346), he asserts, citing the example of Terra preta do Indio (Indian dark earth), an intensively fertile charcoal-based soil found in scattered deposits across the region that anthropologists believe was made by human beings through fire-based land management techniques in settlements located on notoriously infertile tropical soils. Terra preta is evidence of ancient, highly productive land-management techniques that remain unreplicated by Western science to this day. This explains in large part the rich biodiversity that the Amazon basin is known for (Mann, 2005). The Kayapó of central Amazonia are among the Indigenous groups that still practice this technique today: “‘According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, ‘lots’ of researchers believe that ‘what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia’” (Mann, 2005, p. 346). The phrase “built environment,” according to a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist by the name of Erickson, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes” (Mann, 2005, p. 344).

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Figure 2

Romanticization of the concept of wilderness as depicted in US National Parks Service promotional materials.

Other Binaries

There are other words within the profession that operate with a problematic either/or positioning, including Art and Science, Public and Private, Male and Female, Opportunities and Constraints, and Problems and Solutions, to name a few. The binary pairs of words already discussed are meant to spark an initial discussion and inspire new possibilities when moving beyond Western colonized definitions of landscape. The Indigenous terms provided by the Rarámuri, Salish, and Amazonian cultures to describe people, places, plants, animals, resources, and their interconnected relationships demonstrate the opportunities for multiplicities to be concurrently true and allow for an embrace of a spectrum of possibilities when defining landscapes and their relationship to people. Outside the field of landscape, queer and nonbinary theories and methods have also sought to challenge problematic dichotomies. Of particular interest to landscape architects is a growing effort to “queer public space” and blur distinctions of private and public; the movement strives to be more inclusive of LGBTQIA+ communities who have experienced discomfort (and threat) in traditionally designed public spaces (Hubbard, 2001; Suganuma, 2011). Similarly, the emergent notion of queer ecology, as observed by the authors in the worlds of art and environmental studies, is informed by queer theory and rejects the dualities inherent within normative (heterosexist) views of nature (Sandilands, n.d.).

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Figure 3

Humanized Landscapes, 1491 A.D. (Mann, 2005, p. 361).

NON-CONCLUSION

[We must] change our working definitions of landscape from a purely spatial and static concept to a multidimensional one that requires some sort of temporal axis, a theory of landscape change. (Friess & Jazeel, 2017, p.15).

Naming creates mental associations that blend cultural concepts with concrete reality (Salmón, 2000). If our profession can mentally create ideas such as wild and nature, then perhaps we can also alter, reclaim, or reinvent their meanings. By focusing on place-based norms, this discussion seeks to highlight the relevance of social justice ideas that Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “abolition geography” (2022). Place-based conversations are local and specific, where solidarity is made and remade over time. Shared language and experiences inform the ways that “people come to consciousness through fomenting liberation struggle” (Gilmore, 2022, p. 53), and it requires evolving or alternative words to describe the relationships between places and people. The exploration of evolved, alternative, or brand-new terms provides a model for ways public engagement processes can be designed to explore definitions as part of standard practice, supporting recognition and acknowledgment of different worldviews, ways of knowing, and interpretations. Developing these norms in scholarship, cultivating the habit of critical thinking in classrooms, and adopting culturally relevant words in community engagement processes will prepare the next generation of practitioners and scholars to work in ways that support decolonization. As Tuck and Yang (2016) state: “Settler perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how these perspectives—repackaged as data and findings—are activated in order to rationalize and maintain unfair social structures” (p. 45). Any effort at decolonization within the profession of landscape architecture will require an openness to different worldviews that language and meaning fundamentally support.

In an effort to be conscientious of terms, the authors decline to fully conclude this discussion. Instead, they offer these final musings as an invitation for continued critical discussion on the role of language within the profession, its impact on efforts to diversify narratives in the field, and most importantly, its contribution (or hindrance) to a process of decolonization. We hope we have demonstrated through this critique that language is more than words: language is political, language signals value, and language imagines. In other words, language is power.