LAN3016Y F
Instructor(s): Sheila Boudreau
Meeting Section: L9102
Synchronous
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

“…As landscape architects, we vow to create places that serve the higher purpose of social and ecological justice for all peoples and all species. We vow to create places that nourish our deepest needs for communion with the natural world and with one another. We vow to serve the health and well-being of all communities….”

The New Landscape Declaration: A Call to Action for the Twenty-First Century Landscape Architecture Foundation, 2016

This Declaration is a call to action for the landscape architecture profession to respond to the ever-growing ecological crisis of the Anthropocene. But landscape architecture cannot make the seismic shift required to minimize our collective impact on the natural world without changing our ways of thinking about it, as well as the approaches we use. The academy teaches us to respect materials for their qualities (aesthetic and tactile), related to the experiences they help create, also viewed through the lens of human as ‘subject’, and nature as ‘object’. Planting design, selecting plants from catalogues with attractive pictures showing physical form and seasonal characteristics, has its origins in searching for garden elements that will delight us. This botanical information is also organized according to a Eurocentric naming convention that evolved from a deductive approach to understanding: isolating, simplifying, collecting, and observing. And the expanding green infrastructure sector evaluates plants for their ecological and social services, based on cost-benefit evaluations that fail to look deeply into this valuation.

This course proposes to study Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge in appreciating plant relations, as a means of advancing landscape architecture that is not currently being explored in planting design. Key research questions include: How can we relate to plants as kin, with empathy and understanding?; What can plants teach us?; and, What does decolonized planting design look like? We will begin by listening deeply to Indigenous guest speakers, and a close study of ancient teachings about the natural world. This work will also involve taking personal action to cultivate and reflect on a deeper relationship with a single native plant, searching to understand the relationships (soil, water, microorganisms, and other creatures) involved with it’s survival. Building on the foundation of Indigenous content and experiences shared in previous Daniel’s curriculum, this course intends to help guide us through experiential learning to consider how landscape architects can be in right relations with plant beings. We will learn about and discuss the many ways that plants are our teachers and helpers, and though this understanding, appreciate the critical importance of honour, respect, gratitude, ceremony, and responsibility – where plants are no longer merely objects in a garden.