African Landscape Architecture: Alternative Futures for the Field

Dr. Gareth Doherty is an Associate Professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and affiliate faculty in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Doherty takes a human-centered approach to design and theory that aspires to shape environmentally and socially just landscapes. Doherty contributes to core knowledge in landscape architecture through applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory design methodologies to design and theory. This work critically reassesses twentieth-century approaches to the observed landscape to advance new pedagogy, tools, and techniques that address contemporary design issues of equity, identity, cultural space, and the human impacts of climate change. Through what he terms landscape fieldwork, Doherty unravels diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented as evidenced through his books, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017) and Landscape Fieldwork: How the World Can Change Landscape Architecture (University of Virginia Press, 2024), and his recent fieldwork and forthcoming publications on African landscape architecture. Doherty teaches core and option studios, as well as lecture courses and seminars that have been listed across five Harvard departments. Doherty has held leadership positions in the Department of Landscape Architecture as Master in Landscape Architecture (MLA) Program Director and currently serves as principal of the Critical Landscapes Design Lab.