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 […]

The following is an excerpt from my essay, ‘Making Meaning: Utopian Method for Minds, Bodies, and Media in Architectural Design’ published by the Open Library of Humanities. The full essay is available to all, delightfully, as a completely free and open access publication here: https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/10.16995/olh.109/ The imaginative ‘play’ that we call design has a special space—the […]

This October 10th, the London office of WATG released this image of a ‘greener future’ for London’s Fleet Street in support of the ongoing proposal to make London a ‘National Park City’. Dan Raven-Ellison, the proposal’s key protagonist, has a flair for PR and has effectively repackaged the worthy, but duller-sounding project to improve London’s […]

This is an excerpt from my chapter in Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays, due out this October, which I co-edited with Ed Wall. My writing is in superb company in our book: Ross Exo Adams, Camillo Boano, Paul Cureton, Jill Desimini, Murray Fraser, Maria Guidici, William Hunter, Jane Hutton, Katya Larina, Don Mitchell, Peg Rawes, […]

“I really want to make the whole city like this,” says Martí Franch of Estudi Martí Franch (EMF), speaking of his vision of designing the green infrastructure of Girona, Spain, through a process of enlightened and engaged landscape management. We are sitting in his office, among shelves full of models and a table full of […]