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. First off, I must make special […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Here is a little piece on landscape, technology, and nationhood (or the lack thereof) I wrote for the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Unit Eleven publication for 2018. It’s part of the thinking I’m doing towards our upcoming ‘Landscape Citizenships’ symposium. https://landscapecitizenships.wordpress.com Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we going? How will we get […]

Ed Wall and I, along with the amazing Jane Wolff from the University of Toronto, are organising and hosting a conference this autumn that seeks to explore interrelations with landscapes as the foundation to citizenships. Please see details here: https://landscapecitizenships.wordpress.com …and follow on Twitter @Citizen_Land We have an amazing advisory group that includes: Jill Desimini, Harvard […]