Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the longest occupied and least studied landscapes on earth. While scholarship has been attentive to images of nature made by the region’s explorers and settlers and to landscapes of the colonial era—public parks and game preserves, botanical gardens and urban plans—surprisingly little attention has been paid to spaces created by and for Africans themselves, from the precolonial era to the present.
This book is a contribution to a small but growing effort to address this oversight. Its essays present a range of landscapes: pathways and cairns used by nomadic peoples to navigate through and mark significant places; anthropogenic or managed forests consecrated to ritual purposes of various kinds; tombs or palaces with significant landscape orientations and components; even monumental ceremonial and urban spaces, as at Great Zimbabwe or Djenne. They explore what we know of precolonial and later indigenous designed landscapes, how these landscapes were understood in the colonial era, and how they are being recuperated today for nation building, identity formation, and cultural affirmation. Contributors engage with the most critical issues in preservation today, from the conflicts between cultural heritage and biodiversity protection to the competition between local and international heritage agendas.
The vision of a garden shared peacefully by humans and animals is a familiar, but elusive, landscape trope. Whether threatened by habitat destruction or climate change, displaced by urbanization or invasive species, poisoned by industrial toxins, or hunted to extinction, many wild animals have failed to thrive in the company of people. There is growing scientific consensus that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction in earth history—and the first caused by human activities.
What agency can landscape architects and garden designers have in conserving or restoring wildlife diversity? Designing Wildlife Habitats gathers essays by designers, scientists, and historians to explore how they might better collaborate to promote zoological biodiversity and how scientific ambitions might be expressed in culturally significant and historically informed design. Established conservation practices within ecology have begun to shape landscape architecture, and current initiatives in ecosystem services, restoration ecology, and designer-generated ecological experiments provide an enlarged role for landscape architects in the creation of productive habitats. Design has become increasingly instrumental to both the appearance and the ecological function of landscapes.
Universities are custodians of some of the most significant designed landscapes in the world.
The planning of the academic campus has historically underscored the relationship between an institution’s faculty and its students. The campus creates spaces for sharing traditions and reinforces the aspirations of a community of learning that stewards knowledge, provokes reflection, and shapes citizenship. Landscape and the Academy complements the growing body of literature in architectural history, cultural geography, and education by examining the role of landscape in creating academic communities.
The volume looks beyond the central campus, to the gardens, arboreta, farms, forests, biotic reserves, and far-flung environmental research stations managed by universities. In these landscapes, the university’s project of fostering research and exploration is made explicit; these spaces reflect the broader research and scholarly mission of the university, its striving for understanding and enlightenment. The essays examine how and why universities have come to be responsible for so many different kinds of landscapes, as well as the role these landscapes play in academic life, pedagogy, and cultural politics today.
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