This piece was published in the 12th International Biennial of Landscape Architecture Barcelona Catalogue, and I will certainly be developing these themes and giving them the larger consideration they deserve in future.  Poetics is the theory of the structure and form of poetry. As a study, it is concerned with how poetry is made and […]

Here is a list of resources I worked to compile with the help of colleagues at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and which I have continued to update for the benefit of our landscape architecture students. There’s so much good information here I think it’s worthwhile to share here too! I’ve removed the Bartlett- and […]

This is an odd (well, queer) little piece I wrote a couple of years ago. I’m not sure if it stands alone, but I’m not sure what else to do with it, so I’ll just leave it here. It begins with an attempt to imagine myself as an Indigenous ancestor in a part of the […]

Mojo Nixon has just died, aged 66, on 7 February 2024. I can’t help but imagine him, if an afterlife were possible, ‘down by the power lines’ as he found his imaginary self in the song ‘Jesus at McDonald’s’ (find it here) from his 1985 debut album (with Skid Roper), Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper. […]

This is a short commissioned piece I wrote for the Design Council’s ‘Design for Planet 2022’ zine, which was edited by the whip-smart, redoubtable Will Jennings. For seasoned utopian scholars this will be pretty basic stuff, but I aimed for this piece to make utopian methodology accessible to a broad range of designers. Utopias commonly […]

This short extract is from the final chapter of The Landscape of Utopia, which is published by Routledge in February 2022. The food philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer speaks of taste as good judgment, however it must be assumed that if taste as a sensation can be unpleasant, then taste as a judgment can also be perceived […]

This list was originally created thanks to a call to Twitter (RIP) to identify great resources for studying London landscape, architecture, and urbanism. Please let me know if you see anything significant that’s missing, and do let me know why it’s significant and what part of London it references. I have tried, wherever possible, not […]

Today is the anniversary of the Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout on 24 April 1932. To celebrate the continuing legacy of this momentous event, I reproduce here an excerpt from my book chapter “Democracy and Trespass: Political Dimensions of Landscape Access”, published in Defining Landscape Democracy: A Path to Spatial Justice, edited by Shelley Egoz, […]

Kenneth R. Olwig’s essay ‘Are Islands Insular?’ appears in his insightful new book The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice (Routledge, 2019). I reviewed this essay as part of a series of reviews of his book, which included reviews by Kent Mathewson, Tom Mels, Theano S. Terkenli, and Claudio Minca, and […]

This piece first appeared on the ‘Feasts for the Future’ website of the University of Plymouth’s Imagining Alternatives here. It appeared alongside other short pieces from such luminaries as Ruth Levitas, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Susan Parham, and I’m grateful to be in their company. It seems appropriate to post it here just in time […]