A Pedagogy of Critical Landscape Planning

Abstract

This chapter, A Pedagogy of critical landscape planning, outlines a form of critical research and practice in landscape architecture that actively engages the global development community. We frame critical landscape planning as produced through three primary struggles: holding cultural-technological positions; ensuring transdisciplinary approaches through culturing and immersion; and maintaining momentum via process-oriented approaches to development. We cover critical landscape planning’s definition as an applied critical research practice, address its primary challenges institutionally, academically, and practically, and describe the aspects of the landscape architecture design discipline that enable it. This is conveyed through reflection on our approaches to project case study selection and design exercises, stakeholder relationships, approaches to fieldwork, capacity for intervention, and association with parallel research efforts. Much of the contents, although supported academically, are structured as suggestions that are equally important as methods for design research and professional practice. These suggestions include replacing “site analysis” with a process of site-specific interdisciplinary socialization and replacing design and planning “concepts” with generative (even if often incommensurable) cultural-technological positions.

1 Introduction

Outside the design disciplines, the conservation of “landscapes” is now a dominant agenda, narrative and rhetoric that binds together the scientific study, planning, finance, and development of the project of conservation globally. Today, “landscape” displaces and “consumes” both the older strict national park paradigm and newer community-based conservation approaches of the last three decades (Goldman, 2009, p. 336).

Very different disciplines dominate development in these landscapes. In urban Vientiane, the capital of Lao PDR, familiarity with urban design and planning and real estate institutions, even for the urban periphery, necessitates an urban awareness. However, in rural Laos, both the impacts and academic insights come from either the global development machinery (e.g., the environmental impact assessment process) or critical reactions to it.

Landscape architecture, as is much of planning and architecture, is highly imbricated in development. Landscape architects and planners create masterplans for building resettlement camps, development enclaves, and special economic zones; they offer (and sell) their expertise and impose their authority. Plainly put, these disciplines, both in praxis and academia, are largely complicit in neocolonialist practices and the destruction of the natural world. The role of “landscape” in the planning and design disciplines (i.e., landscape architecture, architecture, urban planning) is at its best and most critical when deploying the complexity of human-oriented ecology to champion normative sustainable agendas. Such deployment is rare in landscape architecture’s academia and professional practice, which are dominated by client-consultant relationships, due to the compromised nature of those relationships, poor familiarization with conventional scientific material in ecology, and scant engagement with contemporary critical environmental literature. “Landscape,” in this case, gives no effective resistance to the broader neoliberalization of environmental science and its practice. Critical geographer Lave (2012) suggests three characteristics of the neoliberalization since the 1990s of the science of environmental management in policy, in practice, and in part, the academy, including: privatized knowledge claims, applied research that targets market or agency demands, and new metrics enabling market-based environmental management. These are all present to various degrees in the academic science and professional practice of the landscape disciplines.

A pedagogy and practice of critical landscape planning is important for both the design disciplines’ and conservation fields’ framings of “landscape,” especially given the increasing territorial expansion of the planning and design professions from their historical urban centers into nature, the countryside, or the rural.

Rural development is an outlier for most urban planners and designers, as well as a place and discourse most academics and practitioners of landscape architecture may never encounter. These different development contexts and foci necessitate a varied range of teaching approaches, which in turn require instructors to have significant interdisciplinary backgrounds outside the design disciplines and a significant expense of academic institutional capital in transdisciplinary teaching and research (Perz et al., 2010). The development contexts we claim and the discourses of sustainability we conjure are used in service of teaching rather than teaching a better way for a discipline (not necessarily landscape architecture) to engage development.

Weller (2014), chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, affirms “there is a significant disconnection between landscape architecture and the global conservation effort and community, who are otherwise extremely active and well organized” (p. 94). He continues by relaying a conversation with Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, in which de Souza “indicated that he was unfamiliar with the capabilities of landscape architects and had never heard of Ian McHarg. This is our problem, not his” (emphasis in original) (p. 94). While Ian McHarg is a central figure in both landscape architecture and, for his theoretical and methodological contributions to suitability planning, a foundational figure in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (Chrisman, 2006), this is unsurprising. Landscape architecture turned away from large-scale planning towards the end of the twentieth century, just as the global development machinery, headed by the World Bank, was beginning to reshape the global physical, political and epistemological natures of the developing world and their most attendant disciplines (Goldman, 2005). The design and planning disciplines’ involvement, including landscape architecture, is either nascent or, when it exists in regional or master planning, disciplinarily siloed. Accordingly, addressing these issues both in the academy and in the field requires greater disciplinary awareness and innovative approaches to learning and practice.

Contemporary landscape (or ecological) planning, a waning subfield of landscape architecture, comes from the generally positivist approaches promoted by landscape architect Ian McHarg in his 1969 canon “Design with Nature” (Young, 1974). However, neither planning nor landscape architecture exists within a constellation of disciplines able to offer critical interdisciplinary research (e.g., anthropology and geography’s political ecology, land change science, sustainability science). A potential “critical” repositioning of landscape planning is as follows: To combat the design disciplines’ reproduction of disciplinary and organizational inequalities and injustices in problem framing and approach requires (or is always requiring) sensitivity to postcolonial, post-development, and gendered approaches to science and planning. Such a sensitivity may only be possible if landscape architecture can turn beyond the design disciplines and hold an outward valence to both natural science, as McHarg had argued, and critical development theory.

This chapter introduces, primarily using insights from critical and applied anthropology and geography, a pedagogy of critical landscape planning run for six years at the University of Hong Kong that rapidly builds landscape designers’ abilities to wield global development and sustainability discourses in landscapes undergoing transformation in the biodiverse frontiers of mainland Southeast Asia. In design education, design “studio” courses are the dominant taught pedagogy for disciplinary training, at least in terms of time and effort. These courses are often taken for granted as the most effective means of learning how to design and plan (They are often a pedagogical leap of faith). They are problem-based, with the scope usually set by a defined “program,” i.e., the required components of a building, landscape, urban design, or urban plan. In our studio courses on strategic landscape planning, which were focused on northern Laos each year from 2018–2020, instead of program, we provide students with a loose assemblage of non-design case-based literature, working theses, and constellation of ongoing development projects disbursed along the 400 km China-Laos Railway corridor.

In this chapter, we first define the “critical” in critical landscape planning, followed by three key struggles that both define and sustain a pedagogy and practice of critical landscape planning. We describe the ways that landscape architecture, when holding cultural-technological positions, is similar to and distinct from various critical approaches to the environment in geography and other social sciences. Thereafter, drawing from these same disciplines, we propose a method of interdisciplinary socialization by which a landscape architect simultaneously assembles the discourses of a site of engagement and enhances their awareness of various actors’ capacities and positions. We explore the utility and limitations of critical approaches for “making plans” and describe how critical geography and anthropology have informed students’ planning proposals’ scopes and narratives, particularly in the ways these fields converge on cultural-technological and sustainability themes.

The sequence for our design studio courses on landscape planning includes multi-sited and multi-scale research, cross-disciplinary case studies, direct and diverse cross-sector stakeholder engagement, and student-led scoping of strategic landscape planning proposals. The organization of the components (i.e., how the pedagogy is “run”) of this design studio course on landscape planning are relatively straightforward (Fig. 1) and are described in the following paragraphs. However, that structure largely obscures why pedagogical decisions were made, as well as limits its translation into and implication for a critical practice. For these reasons, we structure this chapter and frame critical landscape planning as engaged in three primary struggles:

Fig. 1

Four-phase organizational schedule of 15-week landscape planning course showing individual learning paths for 22 students as they assemble knowledge across diverse research areas, drivers of landscape change, and cross-disciplinary case studies in development

• holding cultural-technological positions;

• ensuring transdisciplinary approaches; and

• maintaining momentum, especially via process-oriented approaches to development.

Students spend the first half of the term, approximately eight hours in class each week for six weeks, actively coupling a process of landscape transformation with critical texts on Laos and other regions in Southeast Asia. Such processes of landscape transformation are highly physical and technical, including: agricultural cycles, conversions, and transitions; highway planning, material sourcing, construction, and operation; and mining prospecting, extraction, and remediation. The selected critical texts, which form the basis for Chapter Four: Locating discourses and narratives for intervention, are situated case-based literature that challenge the mainstream narratives of scientific land-use planning, alternative development models, the decentralization of environmental governance, and technical scopes of various infrastructure and development programs. Students use their landscape architecture design backgrounds in visual arts, supported by generalist technical knowledge in ecology, site engineering, and participatory planning, to re-represent these critical texts. This reflective and translational process often involves drawing and modelling the geographical and anthropological field sites described in that literature while foregrounding the role of each student’s assigned process of landscape transformation. Students struggle with questions of information and data (e.g., stakeholder transparency; abstraction and contingency; partiality or scope; integration or incompatibility) and environmental determinism (and the very real struggle to resist deterministic representations). This process is an exercise in imagining, constructing, manipulating and holding, however momentary and brittle, a cultural-technological position. It is also an intensive immersion or socialization in critical studies.

Following the preceding exercise, the group of approximately 20 students and two instructors travelled to northern Laos for ten days. Figure 2 shows the travel route, projects, China-Laos Railway corridor, and other important context. This fieldwork component to these courses, while not structured around social sciences methods, also does not follow planning methods that stress on-the-ground documentation of landscape or physical systems; it is not a “site visit.” Instead, focus is on stakeholder interaction with a purposefully wide spectrum of agents, from domestic civil society groups to international NGOs, and visiting upwards of 20 development programs or projects selected purposely for their contrasting ideological approaches to conservation and development. No partner organization manages or oversees the entire field visit, and the class typically only stays with a single stakeholder from a few hours to two days. The diversity of sites and diversity of stakeholders are crucially important for students to recognize the nuances of stakeholder positions, specifically both in how these agents present themselves and their projects and in how they react to the students’ own presentation of “desktop research” done prior to the field visit. These experiential learning activities have engaged students directly with no less than 12 major international NGOs and more than 16 domestic civil society organizations focused on development and environmental conservation. Most of these organizations had never before spoken to a landscape architect or anyone from the design disciplines. Although substantial work is required to create and sustain these expansive non-academic, non-design-related, and often conflicting networks and associated campaigns, they are invaluable for research and pedagogy. Indeed, when navigating complex stakeholder relationships, Perz et al. (2010) recommend choosing partnerships “assuming pre-existing conflicts … which reduces time spent on downstream courtships” (p. 428). Daily debriefing sessions are held for one to two hours each evening for the students and instructors to discuss the complexity of interactions and observations from the day and how these compare with previous days. Together with students’ immersion in development literature, the aforementioned stakeholder meetings provide students with invaluable awareness of the professional and disciplinary positions of a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Maintaining access to these stakeholder networks requires dealing with dominant “institutional fields” (p. 425).

Fig. 2

Twenty-two development projects, all located in landscapes impacted by development of the China-Laos Railway, and the route along which they were visited by University of Hong Kong landscape planning students in 2018 and 2019; these projects are categorized by sector, subsector, or broad development approach

For the second half of the term, for another approximately six weeks for eight hours in class each week, students each developed strategic planning proposals for engaging in or mitigating a wide range of development sites and contexts. A selection of these proposals is presented in Part Two of this book, and they are grouped by the primary ideological friction used to generate each strategy: (1) Infrastructural connectivity and difference; (2) Western alternative development and Chinese development; (3) Chinese mass nature tourism and ecotourism; and (4) Northern scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge. To start the brainstorming process, the approximately 20 development programs or projects visited were paired in different combinations generally following these contrasting approaches to development (Fig. 3). Students reflected on their field visits by drawing and modelling those sites, using similar skills and approaches as the first half of the course where they were re-presenting or elucidating on the critical texts and processes of landscape transformation. Student speculations have included such diverse topics as: Resilience strategies for China-Laos Railway temporary access roads; Remediation strategies for agricultural concessions based on a highly heterogenous land genealogy; Negotiation between ecosystem science research and community forest initiatives; and Landscape-oriented knowledge toolkits to help communities argue for international compensation standards. At the end of the term, students present their strategies to a cross-disciplinary panel juried largely by non-designers: academics including political ecologists, landscape ecologists, sociologists, and environmental managers; agencies and international NGOs engaged in development, including NGO directors of conservation, philanthropy, and green economy; and domestic NGOs and civil society organizations’ field biologists.

Fig. 3

To begin brainstorming potential landscape interventions, students studied contrasting development approaches between two projects or programs they visited; these contrasts included frictions in development ideology, scale, speed and scope

Frameworks, especially more aspirational ones, are often academically tenuous. Admittedly, we are careful in how we define the “struggles” necessary, as both means and ends, to achieve a pedagogy and practice of critical landscape planning. Although certainly not a panacea for addressing the deficiencies in the training of planners and the institution of land planning in development, as an isolated component of a landscape architecture curriculum, this framework is manageable and facilitates a basic disciplinary awareness necessary for more critical, reflective engagement with development. Ideally, such training could indeed be multidisciplinary, but after decades of calls for planning curricula to diversify—to have staff compositions that reflect their interdisciplinary mandates—few (if any) universities have achieved that diversity. The academic capital necessary to start is significant (Rasmussen & Arler, 2010).

2 Critical Approaches to Landscape Planning

As with most “critical” disciplinary turns, being critical of landscape planning requires more reflexivity about the impacts of our practices. Periodic critical turns across academia have occurred since the linguistic and deconstructivist turn of the 1980s. More recent turns in nature-society studies, which focus predominantly on the forms of development studied in this book, include critical political ecology and critical physical geography (Forsyth, 2003; Lave et al., 2018).

Landscape architecture holds separate origins in geography and town planning and has historical synergies with human ecology (Young, 1974). However, as a practiced profession, its mainstream town planning and environmental management legacies are distinctly dominant in academia and praxis. Environmental theorists from political ecology and science and technology studies, along with other various subfields of geography and anthropology, have been ardent in their critiques of expertise, authority, and scientific practice institutionally, in the lab, in the field, and in consultancy (Forsyth, 2015). Introduced earlier in this chapter, Weller’s discontent with opportunities for landscape architecture in the “conservation community” are well-founded, if not overly aspirational. A critical practice and pedagogy of landscape planning in the design disciplines requires recognizing at times uncomfortable but instructive bridges between design and approaches in critical and physical geography. Although calls for synergy between physical and critical geography occur periodically, a recent debate over political ecology and land change science is useful to summarize, particularly given these fields’ approaches to problem framing.

Although political ecology and land change science diverge respectively into constructivist and post-positivist perspectives, both trace their origins to the emergence of environmental studies in the 1960s when human ecology was reinvented as an interdisciplinary “subversive science” with strong problem-oriented and ethically driven approaches (Rasmussen & Arler, 2010, p. 39). Both of these subfields of geography are case-based and share topics covering “land degradation, desertification, deforestation, conservation, institutions and governance, ecological impacts of economic development, and equity and environmental trade-offs,” as well as shared spatial themes, such as “the efficacy of park or reserve boundaries, the role of spatial connectedness to understand human–environment relationships (e.g., access, isolation, and distance), and the use of spatial knowledge and information” (Turner & Robbins, 2008, p. 299).

While political ecology and land change science share interests and similar conclusions, they differ in base research questions, explanatory frameworks, problem framing, analytical approaches, and institutional positioning. Land change science employs and refines methods of geospatial and statistical science to relate environmental change to human decision making and engages policy through formalized institutional arrangements (Turner & Robbins, 2008). In contrast, political ecology stresses the divergent needs of stakeholders and deploys a wider set of skills, including “archival analysis, ethnography, discourse analysis, historical narrative construction, interviews, as well as tools and theories from environmental sciences” (Kull, 2013, p. 79). While greatly inspirational for a landscape architect considering a practice of regional landscape planning, a planner (or planning team of any size, for similar and additional reasons) would not accomplish such groundwork, especially in the course of professional practice. Before we address what is useful here, it is important to describe the expertise of an individual holding both physical and critical geographical positions.

Although early political ecologists, circa 1980s, conducted their own natural science research, political ecology today has largely moved away from natural science as an object of analysis (Lave et al., 2018; Walker, 2005). Political ecology “expresses concern about simplifications of concepts borrowed from ecological science for policy and development applications” (Turner & Robbins, 2008, p. 304). Early political ecology focused on disproving dominant explanatory frameworks; this disproval methodologically often replaced one form of data with another and often via mixed methods (Lane et al., 2018, p. 37). This approach led to very particular types of projects that often did not require (although they should have) an acute fluency with those sciences’ methods.

Lave et al.’s (2018) recent framework for a “critical physical geography” proposes training geographers in both critical theory (e.g., political ecology, science and technology studies) and a specific natural science niche, either biophysical or technological, such as field biology. They argue that because such geographers can “speak a forest ecologist’s language,” these geographers’ “arguments (hopefully) gain more traction in those fields” (parentheses in original) (Law, 2018, p. 100). This training is effectively a horizontal knowledge base in critical studies with a vertical natural science knowledge base. Such a construction in many ways mirrors actual silos of training in these fields and, if strategic and mentored, might be achievable with only minor transgression of academic institutional structures. Lave et al.’s framework can be extended to suggest a model whereby landscape planners can be “critical” negotiators of complex development programs and projects, but only by becoming more proficient (i.e., vertical) at the science and more horizontal in critical development knowledge.

Although an attractive model, there are distinct if not insurmountable differences in most landscape architects’ training (not to mention again the heavy orientation towards professional practice) and their weak exposure to science and engineering curricula. Landscape architects are educated with a diffuse combination of civil engineering, physical geography, human geography, ecology, and design histories, theories, and applications. They are taught predominantly by landscape architects in a field far more homogenous and with far fewer academic centers than geography. Design often speaks in a collective “we” (and we are culpable of that in this book). A landscape architect’s expertise is largely interactional, meaning it exists on a continuum somewhere between minimal or no expertise to the ability to contribute to a field of knowledge (Collins et al., 2007). Interactional expertise primarily enables one to see connections, to understand and to communicate across fields but rarely deepens an individual field’s disciplinary knowledge.

For the aforementioned reasons, our pedagogy for critical landscape planning requires practitioners to draw primarily from secondary studies and data. However, such methods do require advanced expertise in data integration and a working knowledge of these fields. Importantly, this is not an approach to academic research; it is an approach to a critical practice of landscape planning that draws heavily on the axioms and problem frameworks of various critical academic fields and draws heavily on secondary sources, both academic and gray literature. We have no intention to debate academic research against applied research or forms of practice. There are many volumes on this divide, and indeed, such debate can often be productive for interdisciplinary practices (See, for example, Perz, 2019). For our purposes, the central epistemological questions of research, i.e., what should be studied and how, are less important unless they are reframed as—in order to intervene—what should be studied and how.

Arguably, a critical landscape planner shares more affinities with political ecology than Lave et al.’s critical physical geography. Over its approximately four decades, political ecology has rarely collected its own physical and social data (Walker, 2005). Political ecology emphasizes the environment’s “immediate resource implications,” does not document the “full array of ecosystem provisional services,” and includes the “flow of values of that ecosystem beyond its immediate ecological context” (Turner & Robbins, 2008, p. 300). Political ecology primarily focuses on how nature is represented and not on its materiality. This is a highly relational and partial perspective of the environment. However, landscape planners must be very careful in their use of political ecology as a “conceptual driver” for design or research for design, particularly given that political ecology does not offer a substantive theoretical base for practice and application. However, geography’s theorization of its select subfields’ cultural-technological dissonance provides a useful, directed rearticulation of landscape architecture’s art-science debate, which we cover in the next section.

3 Holding Cultural-Technological Positions in Landscape Planning

Design has a disciplinary mandate to intervene (i.e., to practice), and although ethically and epistemologically perilous in most disciplines, “applied,” “action,” “advocacy” or “activist” positions can yield intense understanding of the primary issues and tensions of a site, landscape or region (Hale, 2006). This understanding results from the knowledge built from moving, with necessary hesitation and self-reflection, towards a solution but resulting in scenarios or futures construction in order to change the present situation. Critical theory, because it is normative, helps one understand how to apply knowledge. In practice, this amounts to synthesizing, or better put holding in contradiction, lessons from environmental studies and environmental management. Although not necessarily activist in nature, Hale’s definition of a politically engaged anthropology, i.e., “activist research,” summarizes this position well. For Hale (2006), activist research is to align with political struggle, “to occupy a space of profoundly generative scholarly understanding” that provides “an often-unacknowledged basis for analytical understanding and theoretical innovation” (p. 98). Hale aptly calls this space the “cognitive dissonance” between political and academic commitments in critical applied research (p. 113). Salisbury et al. (2013) extend this dissonance to describe applied research holding cultural-technological positions.

Numerous critical nature-society scholars have deployed Tsing’s (2005) concept of “friction” since she used it to describe her ethnographic work in Indonesia’s forests: Friction is “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (p. 3). This concept can be conceived of as both the friction arising from epistemological pluralism when (truly) multidisciplinary teams are brought together (Perz et al., 2010), as well as the generative dissonance created when critical theory and applied sciences are brought together. This dissonance and pluralism, in essence the questions of sustainability that preoccupy and define critical nature-society disciplines, as it does for critical theory, is also generative conceptually for landscape planning. The example strategic planning proposals constituting the entire Part Two of this book each hold such dissonance: (1) Infrastructural connectivity and difference; (2) Western alternative development and Chinese development; (3) Chinese mass nature tourism and ecotourism; and (4) Northern scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge.

However, many question the coherence, at least academically, of cultural-technological positions in the development disciplines (Hale, 2006). Critiques of ethics and objectivity of researchers holding cultural-technological positions similarly come from both mainstream and critical discourses and from questioning alliances to large institutions, NGOs and civil society (Baird, 2014; Goldman, 2005; Simpson, 2014). Periodic calls within geography for a synthesis of cultural and technological subdisciplines are met with a mix of aspiration and pessimism (Turner & Robbins, 2008). Indeed, objective science (e.g., wildlife and landscape connectivity modelling) is often in empirical conflict with following an overt advocacy agenda; conversely, post-structural political ecologists do not easily align with the “pragmatic short-term decision-making” of local groups or cannot risk deconstructing them (Salisbury et al., 2013, p. 131). Yet, as Wainwright et al. (2013) assert, “we crave technical research with a political edge” (p. 185), which is a reflection on the failure of technical research to create positive impact for development. Hale (2006) reflected that critical applied research must recognize “that political mobilization must always be re-created anew and according to articulations of the moment” (p. 112). Accordingly, averting essentialist positions of art versus science (cultural-technological) of any transdisciplinary construction requires an acute awareness of expertise, as well as a “tall order” of knowledge in the relevant fields. To understand the unique ways landscape architects currently hold cultural-technological positions, we consider here landscape-specific articulations of space, scale and the integration of social and natural sciences.

Landscape architects’ cache of technical knowledge includes basic terrestrial ecology (generally focused on urban forestry, arboriculture, and horticulture), civil engineering (concentrated primarily at the scale of site engineering), and geographic information science. This technical knowledge is usually complemented by a substantial focus on representation, both theoretically as “to represent” and technically as graphic communication and visual arts. Together with design-oriented architecture and planning fields, landscape architecture frequently claims “space,” in theory (spatial theories) and praxis (spatial approaches), as one of its expertise or distinguishing characteristics in problem framing and methods. Note that this focus on ecology and space does not translate into the academic field of spatial ecology, which has extended landscape ecology since the 1990s into modelling landscape patterns and processes with species’ population dynamics (Cushman et al., 2010). For comparison, anthropologists have taken a “spatial turn” within the last two decades, leading to sub-fields of spatially integrated social science, such as geo-ethnography and geo-narrative.

Distinct from spatial practices in architecture or planning, the spatial focus in landscape architecture often translates to a predisposition toward complex landscape forms, patterns and processes. The planning and architectural fields may work with such phenomena, but they do not impose such spatial description, often rooted in ecology, as fundamental to the scope and concepts of design projects. From geography’s land change science subfield, Roy Chowdhury (2013) notes the “privilege” precise models of land change give to “detail, nuance, and finely scaled differences in characterization or quantification, rather than characterizing components, patterns, or process in the aggregate” (p. 226). Landscape architecture as planning frequently makes this agenda and privileging explicit, almost obdurately, whether the problem being defined necessitates it or not. In general, the design disciplines are characterized by a focus on precision and realism and are weak at generalization or transferability.

Lestrelin et al. (2013), through considering an integration of land change science and political ecology, argue for more nuanced and “aware” definitions of land use and economy that recognize a “genealogy of land cover classification,” such as anthropocentric definitions of “degraded” forest types, in service of revealing knowledge and power constructions (p. 61). While Swaffield and Deming (2011) may consider such reclassification as a landscape architect’s practice of “interpretation” (p. 39), as well as having roots in critical regionalism or place-based drivers of sustainability, the critical reflection on power and knowledge in development discourse is essential, as is the critical reflection on technical data and its use. This practice can be paralleled to the detailed site- or ethno-specific land use classifications used in counter-mapping strategies (see, for example, Harris & Hazen, 2006).

With this predisposition to the local, however, one must not fall into geography’s “local trap,” where one may “assume that organization, policies, and action at the local scale are inherently more likely to have desired social and ecological effects than activities at other scales” (Brown & Purcell, 2005, p. 607). In other words, considering the political as “wider” and conflating the “local” with culture and ecology may lead to structural adjustment at the local scale (p. 613). Furthermore, environmental research requires multiple scales and different spatial and temporal units, thereby making “standardization of sampling and measurement crucial but difficult” for interdisciplinary work (Perz et al., 2010, p. 423). Such multipurpose “standardization” relies heavily on moving across scales and upscaling and downscaling information.

Rosa et al. (2014), while acknowledging the benefits of multi-scale studies, assert that data availability and computational power often drive the scale of study and not “research choice.” This assertion is typical of more positivist approaches to environmental research. Pedagogically, exercises in our landscape planning studio courses are constructed to resist the “scalar trap,” “territorial trap,” or “local trap” (p. 607), especially since Brenner’s (2001) “singular connotations” of scale (p. 599) are prevalent across most of the planning and design disciplines. Space can be an expertise of the landscape architect, addressing “plural connotations” (p. 604) without using scale as an organizing driver. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography in the 1990s has enabled anthropology to “follow webs of power” and, through cultural critique, produce emancipatory knowledge (Hale, 2006, p. 102). In our landscape planning design studio courses, detail, in the form of physical data and case studies, is often proxied from comparative sites with more information.

In order to hold cultural-technological positions, Lave et al. (2018) argue that their critical physical geographers must work iteratively between their “biophysical and social findings” and ensure that their research questions require both physical and social analyses (p. 9). This ensuring or requiring is important and, in most cases, must be forced and constantly fought for, less one risks “slipping” into a “multi-disciplinary framework in which results from different parts of a study are simply juxtaposed at the end or in which ties between the different parts disintegrate altogether rather than informing each other in any way” (p. 9). Iterative research and design are a core tenet of design methodologies, and critical landscape planning focuses on the iterative, reflexive and critical creation of detailed sites, often in contexts lacking otherwise rudimentary spatial data. In the process of iteratively scoping, deepening, and refining their strategic planning proposals, students are required to create and manipulate geospatial data (i.e., not the mere borrowing of datasets), generate landscape patterns using basic computer programming, and fabricate highly complex 3D landscape surface models that combine otherwise irreconcilable environmental and social parameters.

Perz et al. (2019) argue that a major barrier to interdisciplinary work is the division between those who collect and manipulate data and understand a region locally (i.e., data specialists) and modelers who focus on data integration. The former focuses on retaining variations in data, whereas the latter concentrates on processes and generalization. Even if only operating at the level of critic, the designer’s translations of natural science and social science research begins to break down, or at minimum foreground, such divisions.

Holding cultural-technological positions is primarily about engaging science (i.e., the technology) from within, about having effective ways to reflexively channel that dissonance. Critical landscape planners, to be effective, must be acutely aware of the neoliberalization of science, particularly the privatization of knowledge claims in professional practice; the standards, metrics and indices enabling market-based environmental management; and shifts towards “applied” research that meets market and government demands (Lave, 2012, p. 376). Although critical studies provide explanatory frameworks for deconstructing seemingly neutral science, a critical landscape planner holding (i.e., maintaining, sustaining) cultural-technological positions requires both science’s deconstruction and its subsequent empowering or championing—its dismantling and reconstitution—into a principled authority.

4 Ensuring Transdisciplinarity Through Culturing and Socialization

At the beginning of this chapter, we asserted that compromised professional positions, poor familiarization with conventional scientific material in ecology, and seldom (or at least noncommittal) engagement with contemporary critical environmental studies were root deficiencies in landscape architects’ training for landscape planning. This is also true whether landscape architecture follows the design traditions of its architectural lineages or the applied scientific traditions of its landscape ecology and human ecology lineages. In this section, we propose a method of immersion in interdisciplinary critical and scientific literature that can both inform the making of plans and introduce or enhance a landscape planner’s awareness of local discourses to inform their strategic positioning, planning and collaborations.

Interdisciplinarity requires that individuals train in epistemology and methodology “beyond what is typically considered relevant to the discipline in which they are socialized” (Rasmussen & Arler, 2010, p. 44). For the development arena, the critical landscape planner must be able to embrace and appropriate (not reproduce) geography’s interdisciplinary constructions focused on nature-society relationships, particularly those engaged in land-related debates. Note that this embrace and appropriation requires planners to actively recognize that they are not intellectually “trespassing” (Portes, 1995) in or borrowing from other disciplines. Each of these interdisciplinary subfields sit more-or-less uncomfortably at the art-science nexus.

Anthropologists Harvey and Knox (2015) in their work on road-building in the Peruvian Amazon argue that civil engineers do not practice in modernist stereotypes but are instead “recombinant scientists” who are reflexively aware of their expertise and post-positivist positions (p. 198). Such professional expertise “lies in their ability to produce resilient structures out of the dynamic relational properties of the material and social worlds in which they find themselves” (p. 197). Landscape architects may argue, for instance, that site engineering or constructing buildings engender a similar process; however, the critical landscape planner, as is necessary in transdisciplinary geography, must be “immersed” (Lave, 2014) in a wider range of development literature, both critical and scientific. From the design disciplines, South African architect Kurgan’s (2013) concept of “para-empiricism” calls for similar kinds of immersion, albeit in geospatial technology, to reveal the politics of cartography and remote sensing.

Instead of case studies, which are a dominant mode of knowledge accrual and transmission in the planning and design disciplines (i.e., landscape architecture, architecture, urban planning), we promote a practice of transdisciplinary immersion. Students are immersed (i.e., socialized, cultured) in both highly technical and positivist literature (e.g., conservation biology) and critical literature (e.g., political ecology, science and technology studies) specific to these geographies. Students are tasked, using their landscape design and training in the representation of biophysical systems and other creative visual communications, to narrate, problematize, and appropriate scientific research on conservation in service of more situated, contingent, and site-specific sustainable development objectives. This process has enabled these students’ rapid introduction into and awareness of both place-specific narratives and the dominant non-design disciplines operating there. Because of the compromise in selecting location-specific over canonical development studies literature, a second exercise in this design studio course requires students to focus on a set of international case studies, which have included rich anthropological writings on highway development in Peru (Harvey & Knox, 2015), mining in Papua New Guinea (Kirsch, 2006), and logging in Indonesia (Nevins & Peluso, 2008).

Importantly, this culturing is not for reproduction or to conduct basic research but instead: (1) to gain rapid introduction to very foreign geographies; (2) to become keenly aware of those disciplines’ projects, axioms, ethics, problem framing, knowledge sources, and vocabularies; and (3) to deploy those disciplines’ own critical reflections in strategic planning proposals (e.g., mitigating the industrialization of indigenous botanical knowledge). This pedagogy of critical landscape planning, largely because most design pedagogy (and practice) is Socratic, assumes that students (and practitioners) have a weak liberal arts foundation. Indeed, transdisciplinarity requires creating something that transcends the disciplines involved and is often a very conscious struggle constructed by individuals.

Many academics and practitioners within the planning and design disciplines (i.e., architecture, planning, landscape architecture) would consider the education and practice of their fields as unarguably interdisciplinary. Their claim often refers to some practice of interdisciplinarity, which is usually articulated through teams of architects, planners, and landscape architects collaborating on projects; engineers and ecologists are often part of subcontracted expertise. Biermann et al. (2018), in a pun on business as usual, call this “interdisciplinarity as usual” (p. 563). It is useful here then, in contradistinction to interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary, to introduce the concept of transdisciplinarity.

We challenge the imperative for interdisciplinary “integration,” which is often dominant in problem-led science and in the gray literature and professional projects of the planning disciplines. The integration of theory, methods, and data is itself the question of integration, not a matter of cross-disciplinary problem-solving. For Lave et al.’s critical physical geography, integrated research “is not an intellectual advance if it simply brings a wider range of tools to answer the same old questions, or if it fails to question the concepts and theories that limit current understanding, not to mention the political commitments that undergird them” (Biermann et al., 2018, p. 562). Trandisciplinarity is a struggle that is “a gesture out of the ordinary, which is subject to questioning due to suspicion” (Perz, 2019, p. 2). To achieve this in multidisciplinary teams, members must undergo a process of “collaborative deconstruction,” whereby team members actively deconstruct one another’s disciplinary perspective (Yarime et al., 2012; Smithwick et al., 2019, p. 155). Similar to the concept of friction or dissonance involved in holding cultural-technological positions, Laborde et al. (2019) consider actively embracing epistemological friction as necessary for effective interdisciplinary collaboration, in which their team’s “[p]rogress was certainly not smooth or linear, and at times the team experienced inertia, blockages, and frustration” (p. 107).

Much that is required of a transdisciplinary practice is necessary in a correlative pedagogy, including requiring academics, instructors, and team leaders to have significant interdisciplinary backgrounds, significant academic capital to pursue transdisciplinary teaching and research, and conducting such work outside normative institutional frameworks (Perz et al., 2010). Perz et al. argue that academic reward systems are “not readily compatible with problem-driven science;” thus, “disciplinary boundary-crossing becomes a political act” (p. 423). Most of these challenges will not change in the near term, including the extra costs of grappling with multiple disciplines, traditional academic reward systems (Rasmussen & Arler, 2010), the academy’s reluctance to validate results (Salisbury et al., 2013), and incompatible temporal frameworks among the academy, NGO donor cycles, and development timelines (e.g., the wet-dry season cycles of infrastructure-building). These are dominant institutional fields which must be negotiated. We now argue that such a strategic position requires process-oriented approaches to development and its planning.

5 Process-Oriented Development and Planning “Projects”

In The Will to Improve, anthropologist Li (2007) reflects on her inability to offer development and planning agencies suggestions on what to do or how to intervene in the “world of projects, which they inhabit” (p. 3). Landscape architecture and planning are almost unescapably within this “world of projects,” especially as professionally oriented disciplines in close alignment with real estate development interests and the development apparatus. Li describes development projects and programs as “pulled together from an existing repertoire, a matter of habit, accretion, and bricolage” (p. 6). After Foucault, she further describes “failed” plans as “not ‘abortive schemas for the creation of a reality. They are fragments of reality’…. [P]rograms, and the messy consequences of programs, are equally real” (p. 28).

If such plans are indeed “real” and have impact regardless of whether they are implemented, plans are also frequently erased during the process of development. Controversial and risky development often progresses slowly, outlasting political transitions, investors and design scopes. For these and other reasons, anthropologists Harvey and Knox (2015) suggest that one should focus on the “when” rather than “what” of infrastructural formation (p. 5). Feasibility studies, environmental and social impact assessments, plans and designs are often shelved in reaction both to political instability and to breaks in team composition and expertise, as plans are handed-off between consultants at various stages. Harvey and Knox consider this process a form of systematic “amnesia” in the development process, especially in areas of weak environmental governance (p. 87). To be critical in landscape planning, one must treat it as relational—as an assemblage. Li (2007) describes a process by which experts (e.g., planners) effectively “render technical” their development programs and projects (p. 11). She wants to understand “the conditions under which expert discourse is punctured by a challenge it cannot contain; moments when the targets of expert schemes reveal, in word or deed, their own critical analysis of the problems that confront them” (p. 11). Landscape architects have a unique capacity, in their understanding of land-use planning, civil engineering, and ecology and strong capacities for data integration introduced in the previous section on holding cultural-technological positions, to synthesize development plans and retrace and narrate their impacts.

Understanding development as an assemblage requires redefinition of what a development “project” or program is in critical landscape planning, and, as we argue in this section, such understanding is closely related to critically recognizing and approaching development as process-oriented. Although there is a long and diffuse lineage of understanding design as a “process,” the focus here is on process-oriented development and its implications for pedagogy, research, design, and practice, i.e., for studying and intervening.

From the environmental scenario literature, Biggs et al. (2007) argues that the actual storylines and narratives are often less important than the process of knowledge sharing and empowerment from developing scenarios. Similarly, in his writing on the Thai and Myanmar border regions, political scientist Simpson (2014) argues that environmental governance should be understood not by outcomes but by a process of “trust-building activities” and that the success of any environmental campaign should be measured “in terms of the development of emancipatory processes” emphasizing “democracy, social justice, ecological sustainability, and nonviolence” (p. 24).

Academically, outcomes and outputs are actively debated in applied research in development, particularly surrounding the institutional, ethical and practical considerations presented in this chapter. For instance, for Perz et al. (2010) in their counter-mapping efforts along the borders of Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, production of material for stakeholders (largely civil society) is prioritized before scholarly output in order to keep stakeholders invested and informed and minimize political damage. Even within mainstream institutions, impact assessment consultancy is unfortunately often a form of subjective “rapid appraisal” (Goldman, 2005, p. 164) or “rapid ethnography” (Fisher, 2008, p. 235). These are arenas that require iterative and negotiated approaches and are where the critical landscape planner may excel. Further, these complex networks and the politics of applied research, as opposed to cultural critique, often lead to “forced analytical closure” and research that is “simplistic, unproblematized, and undertheorized” in the near-term, straining its claims to scholarship (Hale, 2006, p. 101). Critical applied research in anthropology often tends toward oversimplified “‘how to’ manuals,” i.e., scholarship on praxis that is undercut by both the politics of the research and the traditions of the academy (p. 108).

Although the design disciplines, including landscape architecture and urban and regional planning, often champion their methods as “problem-based” approaches, they are typically more solution-based rather than how critical theory might describe (and celebrate) problem-based approaches. In Turner and Robbers (2008) comparison of geography’s subfields of political ecology and land change science, they surmise that political ecology investigates “case-based outcomes or socioenvironmental events as informed by theory that stresses the role of distal or exogenous processes that usually operate to disadvantage local land managers and are often captured in social conflict and land or resource degradation” (p. 303).

To sustain access to networks and field sites, instructors led parallel research with global environmental NGOs and institutions that allow for “in-action” reflection directly in the classroom on the potential for landscape architects’ participation in the global development community. Such research has included objective science (e.g., ecosystem services and predictive wildlife modelling), technical studies (e.g., species-specific highway mitigation guidelines), and activist research (e.g., automated 3D-printed stakeholder engagement models, political-economic investigations into the impact assessment process) (Helsingen et al., 2019; Kelly et al., 2016, 2018). As a practice, this work often requires “mid-course corrections” (Perz et al., 2010, p. 427) and managing vested interests, which are complex and cross-sectoral, especially surrounding large development programs and projects. Importantly, because of developments’ strong “institutional fields” (Perz et al., 2010, p. 425), substantial amounts of the teaching and parallel research are realized outside normative institutional frameworks, including lacking formal research agreements and significantly reduced advantages or impossibility of university-to-university collaboration. Further, in development consultancy, academic work is often manipulated or influenced to legitimate economic and political agendas (Goldman, 2005). Baird (2014) encourages “principled” academic engagement, lamenting that “restrictive contracts have become the norm, whether coming from private companies, the World Bank, United Nations agencies, bilateral donors and even NGOs such as WWF and Conservation International” (p. 502). Unsurprisingly, developers and multilateral banks often prefer to deal with NGOs (to meet their international obligations) and local communities separately (Harvey & Knox, 2015). Perz et al. (2010), from their work on the transboundary region of Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, assert that governments and large international NGOs maintain “dominant institutional fields [that] obstruct collaborative advantages” (p. 425).

In the aforementioned context, a “project” may be better articulated as a more nimble, process-oriented assemblage or “campaign.” In complex development circumstances, such a campaign requires sustained momentum and rapid course correction. For the design disciplines, including landscape architecture, the conceptualization of projects as assemblages may also aid the chronic scholarly weakness whereby the “project” rather than the scholarship or praxis is dominant. Although the examples given are from a distinctly North American context, landscape architects Thering and Chanse (2011) propose a science of “transdisciplinary action research” that “investigates the similarities, differences, and outcomes of discrete [case-by-case, project-by-project] research initiatives with the intention of developing innovative ways to address the complexities and multiplicity of scales of sustainability” (p. 9; see also, Stokols, 2011). Since the late 1980s, landscape architecture academics have theorized pedagogical approaches to engagement, such as “action research,” which is usually realized directly through or in close synergy with design studio courses (Deming & Swaffield, 2011, p. 193). For instance, Deming and Swaffield reference Forsyth, Lu and McGirr’s 1999 “Service Learning Studio in Urban Design” run at the University of Massachusetts, which recognizes multiple publics, champions disadvantaged communities, and challenges mainstream definitions of poverty and illiteracy (p. 198). However, even when such efforts have more emancipatory aims, they are aligned with very Northern struggles and situated in discourse entirely foreign to the global development and conservation community. Given the professional orientation of most landscape architecture teaching programs, extreme care must be taken to ensure critical engagement. Otherwise, these efforts may tend toward educational discourse surrounding service learning and global citizenship, which are often naively neocolonial (Martin & Pirbhai-Illich, 2015).

Although engaged research is at times a difficult form of scholarship, it is necessary as an emancipatory knowledge-building process. For these design studio courses, outputs targeted to stakeholders must be distinct from high-level educational outcomes for students. The long-term impact from the students’ strategic proposals is not about creating solutions to be implemented in the field. Instead, they are used to create conversations about how development should move forward. For landscape architecture’s “ecological urbanism” movement, postcolonial theorist Bhabha (2010) suggests that “[t]he crucial task of the ecological agent then is to maintain a ‘momentary equilibrium’ between these various practices of sustainability and their diverse definitions of what constitutes the ‘future’” (p. 80). As with any successful sustainability practice, design for the development community offers momentary solutions.

6 Conclusion

Although critical human geography often academically defines itself in opposition to realist ontologies and research approaches, a critical practice of landscape planning must not be defined in opposition to practice. For those encountering the plans of experts, as anthropologist Li (2007) writes, “the will to improve can be taken at its word” (p. 9). Such a practice must also recognize its compromised position, both academically and professionally.

This chapter summarized a pedagogy of critical landscape planning and identified three defining struggles within that pedagogy that have implication for how we study and plan development, including holding cultural-technological positions, interdisciplinary socialization, and engaging in process-oriented development. We offer ways for landscape architects engaging in development to recognize both the compromise and the potential of holding cultural-technological positions. In a design studio engaged in landscape planning, this cultural-technological pluralism or dissonance can act as conceptual generators for planning and design. Indeed, as anthropologist Bateson (1972) argued in his 1941 essay “Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material,” “advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science” (p. 73).

Moreover, this chapter offers a series of constructive bridges between applied critical geography and anthropology and a practice of landscape planning. One might term these as “trespassing” or “borrowing” from geography; however, true transdisciplinary work overcomes “incommensurate perspectives,” does not imply the erasure of disciplinary boundaries, and requires a willingness to “delineate the limitation of [one’s] home discipline as a motivation to learn more from others” (Perz et al., 2008, pp. 420–421).

Hirsch (2014), founder of the Mekong Research Group (formerly the 1997 Australian Mekong Resource Centre, AMRC) at the University of Sydney’s Geosciences program, reflects on the “potentials of an applied critical social science of environment” (p. 516). Hirsch affirms that “the response is clear—if we were to conceive of ourselves as an activist entity rather than a research—and teaching-based one, we would immediately diminish our value to those NGOs with whom we work closely” (p. 522). He further declares that after nearly two decades of operation, the continued engagement of governments, agencies and NGOs with AMRC in research, dialogues and initiatives is a “testament to the niche for critical engaged analysis, and its substantive emphasis lies squarely within the realm of an engaged political ecology” (p. 522).

If we hold that the practice of design is our expertise, then we must actively seek the knowledge of disciplines “where” we practice. For a practice of design in the development arena, we propose that both critical and technical culturing and immersion in geography is necessary. If landscape architecture and planning wish to participate in principled ways in the global development community, in what is often termed “the rural,” then we must overcome the wide chasm between urban sustainability and sustainable development. This is true both “in the field” and in cities where these landscape architects are educated. Our use of “urban” and “rural” in this book refer, rather than to regions, respectively to the disciplinary familiar and disciplinarily foreign institutions and actors in development.

To work in these geographies requires sustained momentum and diverse forms of practice and expertise, from construction knowledge for sustainable road engineering to geographic information science for wildlife habitat modelling. Landscape architecture here provides fertile ground for bridging, not only between the professional built environment disciplines of planning and natural science, as Ian McHarg had suggested in 1960s, but also between planning and critical development approaches in geography and anthropology. This bridge is admittedly tenuous and disciplinary diffuse. For the built environment disciplines, landscape architecture has in many respects been a sort of free-wheeling form of semi-critical physical geography. Although such work is at times a difficult form of pedagogy and scholarship, it is necessary as an emancipatory knowledge-building process that offers sustained momentum through momentary solutions.

The next chapter builds a biography of Laos through its many large-scale infrastructural projects and plans, real and unrealized. Redefining how planning and landscape architecture conceptualize “projects” is an important first step in training individuals to be critical of development and to be effective in creating more principled plans. For our most biologically and culturally sensitive landscapes, landscape architecture here may be rearticulated as a highly impactful “subversive science” for the twenty-first century.