Tim Waterman

Landscape Studies, Food Studies, Utopian Studies

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Approaching Queer Island: Worlding and Imagining the Other

by Tim-Waterman on March 9, 2024, no comments

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 […]

Utopia as Method for Planetary Landscapes

by Tim-Waterman on May 4, 2023, no comments

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 […]

The Tasty City (from The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design)

by Tim-Waterman on January 30, 2022, no comments

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 […]

London Plays Itself: Our City in Film

by Tim-Waterman on October 21, 2021, no comments

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. First off, I must make special […]

Trespass is Necessary to the Defence of Democracy

by Tim-Waterman on April 24, 2020, no comments

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, […]

The Islecentrality of Philology: a review of Kenneth Olwig’s ‘Are Islands Insular?’

by Tim-Waterman on April 4, 2020, no comments

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 […]

Feasting is a Project

by Tim-Waterman on November 27, 2019, no comments

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 […]

Landscape and Citizenship

by Tim-Waterman on July 18, 2019, no comments

This is an article I wrote for Garden Design Journal last year to promote our symposium ‘Landscape Citizenships’. I’m now in the process, with Jane Wolff and Ed Wall, of working the whole thing up into a book. A dozen years ago I added British citizenship to my US citizenship, trading up from a work […]

Flows off the Tongue: Charting climate change futures in ancient place names

by Tim-Waterman on August 4, 2018, no comments

This article first appeared in Landscape Architecture Magazine in August 2017. One of the joys of travel, even of armchair travel, is the discovery of euphonious place names. I’ve driven through both Humptulips, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, and Quonochontaug, in Rhode Island. Both of these are names that flow off the tongue (well, with a […]