Gareth Doherty, "Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design" (U Virginia Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Gareth Doherty, "Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design" (U Virginia Press, 2025)
Host: Kelvin | Guest: Dr. Gareth Doherty
Release Date: June 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into Dr. Gareth Doherty’s influential new book, "Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design," which explores the evolving role of ethnographic and fieldwork methods in landscape architecture. Doherty, a prominent figure in the discipline, discusses his journey through different scales and approaches to fieldwork—from individual immersion to collective experiments—and reflects on how these engagements reshape both the practice and understanding of landscape design.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Essence of Landscape Fieldwork

(02:42–04:57)

• Doherty frames landscape as mutual shaping between people and place:
  • "We shape landscapes, landscapes shape us...we inhabit landscapes, and in a way, landscapes inhabit us." (Dr. Gareth Doherty, 02:50)
• The book aims to thicken the description of landscape and foreground complexity over simplification.
• Pedagogical intention: The book is structured as five distinctive case studies, each requiring different approaches and underpinned by four foundational essentials for fieldwork.

2. Use of the First Person in Fieldwork

(05:03–08:26)

• Doherty explains his choice to write in the first person, viewing personal immersion and subjectivity as ethical and inseparable from honest landscape research.
  • "The reason [for using 'I'] is simply because the book relies on embodied engagement...if we are to describe that place, we have to acknowledge our own centrality to that experience." (05:36)
• He distances from the façade of "scientific neutrality," advocating for a blend of experiential narrative and rigor.

3. Defining "Landscape Fieldwork"

(09:23–15:38)

• Doherty introduces landscape fieldwork as distinct from traditional anthropology’s ethnography, tailored for landscape architects working at pace and scale.
  • "Ethnography takes time...the world moves much more quickly than ethnography allows." (11:11)
• Landscape fieldwork encompasses people and all ecological, material, and temporal elements.

4. Case Studies: Fieldwork in Practice

a) Undergraduate Project in Ireland

(16:57–22:48)

• Doherty’s first major project involved redesigning his hometown square, embodying the roles of local, designer, contractor, and client.
  • "That project was a great introduction to me to how one might go about doing fieldwork. It was...purely intuitive." (18:22)
• The experience seeded his curiosity about understanding other landscapes with the same intimacy.

b) Bean Sites at CoRA Design Firm

(22:48–29:56)

• CoRA introduced a systematized, randomized fieldwork method: throwing "beans" on a map and visiting those spots, mitigating personal bias.
  • "Fieldwork opens us up to the unexpected...to understand things that we might not otherwise see." (23:35)
• They followed with "scenario games" using these observations, cultivating collaborative design through play and flattening hierarchies.
  • "Games can be a great flattener of hierarchies. They invite people to the process." (29:56)

c) Ethnographic Research in Bahrain

(29:56–38:36)

• A year-long immersion revealed the local understanding of landscape as "al-hudra" (the green).
  • "After a year of taking intensive Arabic classes, I realized there was no word for landscape in Arabic." (31:26)
• Doherty published "Paradoxes of Green," reflecting on the tension between cultural ideals and environmental realities.
• Emphasizes fieldwork as a method to produce literature where it is lacking, especially in contexts outside the Western canon.

d) Collective Fieldwork Experiment in the Bahamas

(39:11–46:45)

• Doherty led an experiment with 52 researchers, each spending one week in different communities, testing if distributed immersion could match a single researcher’s year-long study.
  • "Can 52 researchers spending one week each in the field add up to something equivalent of one person spending a year?" (39:49)
• Collective fieldwork proved fruitful but placed a greater burden on curation and interpretation.
• Serendipity: Despite systematization, the team deliberately "budgeted time for chance."

e) Transformative Fieldwork in Salvador, Brazil

(46:45–55:29)

• While researching sacred Afro-Brazilian groves (terreiros), Doherty experienced a transformative shift—becoming a novice in the community.
  • "I was very publicly entranced in the Tehiru...I was informed that I was a novice and had been chosen to be part of the community." (54:10)
• These spaces, designed for ritual and ecology, challenged Western conceptions of landscape materials and energies (e.g., "the energy of love, the energy of chance").
  • "Imagine we visited landscapes in which we are actively engaged in their conservation, in their production, instead of being simply consumers of landscape." (55:32)

5. Four Fundamentals of Landscape Fieldwork

(57:37–59:09) Doherty concludes with four key principles:

1. Mixed Measures – Blending quantitative and qualitative approaches
2. Immerse Your Body – Total, embodied presence and participation
3. Contrast Media – Using varied documentation and creative techniques
4. Critically Imagine – Both reimagining landscape futures and reimagining oneself as a researcher/designer
   • "We do fieldwork in order to have the knowledge that we need to imagine better futures...But also we all carry landscapes inside of ourselves." (59:09)

6. The Politics and Ethics of Landscape Knowledge

(61:37–63:09)

• Doherty's current work centers on African landscape architecture, arguing for the importance of understanding situated, non-Western approaches.
  • "There's often the perception that landscape architecture is a discipline founded in the west...the empirical evidence is that this does not work if we don't account for the social and cultural dimensions." (61:37)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the depth and risk of fieldwork:
  • "The more we understand how others perceive the world, then the less strange that will seem to us." (59:09)
• On trance and transformation in fieldwork:
  • "There was a very particular moment of turning that I describe in the book...I was very publicly entranced in the Tehiru." (54:10)
• On collective fieldwork limitations and curation:
  • "Collective fieldwork can yield even more interesting results. But it puts a lot of responsibility on the curator." (39:49)
• On changing the landscape canon:
  • "I think a big problem in the world today is a fear of difference. The more we can be exposed to difference...the better the world will be." (59:09)
• On the humility of participatory landscape work:
  • "Sweeping the floor is a great way of getting to know the materiality of a Tejero...you get to know every stone in a way." (54:00)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Doherty introduces his philosophy of landscape fieldwork: 02:42–05:03
• Discussion on embodied first-person research: 05:03–08:26
• Defining "landscape fieldwork" versus ethnography: 09:23–15:38
• Undergraduate project as formative fieldwork: 18:22–22:48
• Bean mapping at CoRA: 23:35–29:56
• Ethnographic fieldwork in Bahrain: 31:08–38:36
• Collective fieldwork in the Bahamas: 39:49–46:45
• Transformative work in Brazil, landscape as self: 47:44–55:32
• Four essentials of landscape fieldwork: 57:37–59:09
• Final reflections, future work, and reading recommendations: 61:37–63:09

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Concluding Thoughts

Dr. Gareth Doherty’s "Landscape Fieldwork" advocates for a human-centered, complex, and ethically engaged approach to landscape architecture, insisting on the necessity for professionals to immerse themselves—individually and collectively—in the full material, social, and cultural reality of landscapes. Fieldwork, in his view, is a transformative practice, not just to produce knowledge, but to profoundly alter both designer and discipline.

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Transcript

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[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

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New Books Network

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Kelvin and I'm a designer and dancer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Gareth Doherty, author of Landscape How Engaging the World Can Change Design, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2025. Gareth is a landscape architect, educator, and researcher whose work foregrounds a human centered approach to landscape architecture through ethnographic fieldwork and participatory design methods. He was recently appointed Associate professor at the National University of Singapore and Visiting Associate professor at the University of Johannesburg. Previously, he taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he served as Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program and founded the Critical Landscapes Design Lab. Welcome to the New Books Network, Gareth, and thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing today?

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

I'm doing well, Kelvin. Thank you so much for having me.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

It was lovely to read the book. Thank you so much for sharing it with me and I'm excited to share it with our audiences. For people who are not familiar with your work, how does landscape field work fit into your background and your set of interests? And who are you trying to reach with this book?

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Well, the book is written for people with an interest in landscape In a very broad sense, they might not necessarily be landscape architects, but, you know, if we think about landscape as the mutual shaping of people and place, we shape landscapes, landscapes shape us. As Anne Winston Spurn tells us, then, you know, landscape is something that is all pervasive. We inhabit landscapes, and in a way, landscapes inhabit us. There's an anthropologist, and I have a lot of interest in anthropology, Paolo Filippucci, who says that people not only live in landscapes, but through them. And in the book I also quote the French filmmaker Agnes Varda, who tells us that if we open people up, we would find landscapes. So I set about writing this book as a way of both being able to describe landscapes in a thicker way than we normally maybe do, but also as a way of helping others to understand landscapes, too. So there's a pedagogical agenda to the book in the sense that the book has five chapters. I hesitate what to call them. And chapters are a case, case studies. But each is a very different landscape and each requires a very different approach. But I do, in the book, trace four essentials for doing fieldwork that I think that I offer to guide the reader in better understanding the world that. The complicated world that we live in. I mean, I think there's often a tendency in landscape to try to simplify the world. And I think one thing I try to do in this book is to work with complexity, and we have to understand the world and all of its complexities and to try to make sense of them spatially and so forth.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

Yeah. Which is a really hard task to do. And something I appreciated about the book is that you preface it with a section, a short section, titled this is a Door, A note on the use of the first person. So I think acknowledging both the complexity of landscape, but the complexity of the researcher or field worker or individual. So can you talk more about how and why you use the first person as part of ethnographic research and as a rhetorical device in the book?

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

That's a great question. Yes. The preface is actually the eye is a door. So the me is a door. And it's inspired by Anne Winston Spurn, who I've already mentioned, who has a book, the eye is a Door. And it's a book about which she shows us how photography can be a door into landscapes. And I use the eye, the perspective of the first person, in a similar way, as a door, as an entryway into the landscapes that we describe in the landscapes that we inhabit. The reason is simply because the book relies on embodied engagement on the immersive experience of being in a place. And if we are to describe that place, we have to acknowledge our own centrality to that experience. Otherwise it becomes, I think, unfairly abstract, or it becomes removed from the person, which is not a really fair or ethical way of describing that landscape. So I use the first person

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[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

I think it's the ethical way of writing about landscapes. I mean, there's a long tradition in anthropology and in ethnography of writing in the first person. And there is a long tradition in landscape architecture of an ethnographic approach. It might not be ethnography, but it's ethnographic in its approach to doing fieldwork. And there's a long tradition in landscape architecture of doing fieldwork. And when you do do fieldwork, it requires the first person. And there is a long tradition in landscape architecture of doing that, although I think that tradition has been somehow forgotten as we've become more focused on the sort of supposed neutrality of a scientific description.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

There's, I think, in the push for landscape architecture to assume more legitimacy or maybe more authority in the realms in which it tries to bring about change. I think there's a push for objectivity or kind of a scientific rigor, which I think people often see at odds with the first person, but I think rightly so. You bring the subjectivity of the researcher as both a design and research tool, not as something that fights against objectivity, but something that implements it. That's actually part of a much more complete or complex view of what fieldwork is.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

That's true. And the fieldwork is both qualitative and quantitative. It is both descriptive, and, as I make the point in the book, it's projective in the sense that we're doing fieldwork to imagine how things can be different in the future. So while one writes in the first person, the first person is still supported through scientific evidence, through citations, through other forms of rigor. So it's not just what I make up in my mind. It's based on a deep, immersive experience. There's another reason, too, which is the narcissist. In a way, I'm trying to lead the reader through these landscapes by taking them, in a way, by the hand and walking them through a particular landscape. And again, you can only do that when you acknowledge yourself.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I would love to reflect a bit on the title itself, Landscape Fieldwork. And, you know, I think it's a very intentional titling of it. You. You also pinpoint a moment in the book, I think in the Bahamas, when you switched or when you decided to call a process landscape fieldwork as opposed to ethnography, or I guess, what other people might consider community engagement. But can you talk about your choice of terminology here, of landscape fieldwork and what that means to you?

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

So you mentioned ethnography. And ethnography is something that is often associated with anthropologists, but it's not the sole domain of anthropologists. I consider myself an ethnographer. I work with ethnography. Ethnography is the writing about what people tell you in a sense, that, you know, it's too. I think our field is too dominated by the, you know, geography or the geographical. And I try to introduce the ethnographical as a way to complement that. I think we've too much. We've forgotten that people are integral components of landscape. And if people are integral to the landscape, then we have to understand people as much as we understand the physicality of the land. So in my work, I have engaged with ethnographic fieldwork and ethnographic methods. But ethnography takes time. And I mean, that's a great thing if we have the time to do ethnography. Typically, anthropologists will spend at least a year in the field. They learn local language, patterns of behavior, and so on and so forth. They keep very, very detailed notes for every hour you spend in the field. It takes about four hours to interpret that. So if you spend one year in the field, just imagine the amount of time you have to then spend to analyze everything that you observe. And while this is really, really useful, I believe, to design and planning and to imagining the future, I'm aware and conscious that the world moves much more quickly than ethnography allows us to do. And so I've been trying to develop ethnographic methods that are more useful to landscape architects and with the pace of which we have to work because of just the way the world is set up right now. And I also use the term landscape fieldwork because when we work with landscapes, it requires a certain form of ethnographic engagement that is different to traditional ethnography in any case, because landscape is itself so complicated. Landscape includes people, but, you know, it also includes trees and grass and shrubs and plants and flowers and colors and textures and soil and rocks and water and environmental processes, time, and then people. And then there's so many people. We are all different. And a landscape fieldworker has to engage with all of these elements and somehow make sense of them. So I use the term landscape fieldwork to, on one hand, complement ethnographic methods, but not claim to be ethnographic itself, but secondly to, and maybe more importantly to outline a form of practice for those who are interested in the spatiality and the environmentality and the social life, one might say, of landscapes which extend over a large terrain. I mean, one definition of landscape is the view that you see from an airplane window. I think that was Richard Foreman defined landscape as you're in an airplane, you're looking out, and what you see below is the landscape. So it's dealing with a large territory and trying to make sense of that large territory. And I think another reason why I use the term is simply because landscape architects do do fieldwork. We just don't conceptualize it like other fields do. And I'm not entirely sure why, but there's a long tradition in anthropology of thinking very deeply about fieldwork and thinking very deeply about how anthropologists go about fieldwork. I'm always struck at how central fieldwork is to landscape architecture, and yet it's something that we just do. For example, I have a colleague who told me that fieldwork to a landscape architect is like breathing. Why do I even talk about it? And I said, well, I'm not so sure. I don't think it is quite like it should be like breathing, but I think of it more like riding a bicycle. Ride a bicycle. You could probably read a book on how to ride a bicycle, but it's probably not going to help you. You have to sit on the bicycle and you have to, you know, fall off a few times until you learn how to balance and how to move from A to B. But when you do learn to ride the bicycle, it takes you from one reality to another. And that's what I think field work is about. It's about learning how others see the world, trying to understand the world from others points of view and from the people whose points of view of the landscapes in which we are trying to either to design, to plan, or simply to inhabit.

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[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

There's something that feels very intuitive about fieldwork for landscape architects, as you mentioned, but it is, it is really interesting that it feels under theorized or underwritten about when it is such an important part of the field, especially when there are, as you outline in the book, by kind of chronicling other disciplines and their use of fieldwork, many other fields and disciplines have a long tradition about writing about the process of fieldwork itself, which is an interesting part of landscape architecture that is not as discussed or as theorized or perhaps even codified. Maybe that's not the right word, but at least discussed in a rigorous way. So I'd love to get into the meat of the book. In the book, use five case studies, or as you said, kind of five chapters from your career to explore landscape fieldwork, starting from your first design project in your hometown while you were a university student. This project expanded my initial conception of what you were going to talk about with fieldwork, because through that process you engaged with local politics, bureaucracies, institutions, and different publics. At various points you say that you played the roles of resident designer, contractor, and client. Maybe less role playing, but kind of like role fulfilling. So how did this project sow the seeds of kind of the development and your conceptions of landscape fieldwork?

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Well, this is a project that I did when I was an undergraduate student in Ireland. I studied landscape horticulture at University College, Dublin, and I think it was probably the first design project I ever did, or if it wasn't the first, it was the second. I convinced my tutors to allow me to do an independent study redesigning the square in my hometown. It's a small village in the north of Ireland, and I redesigned the plaza. But as you put it through a Very complicated process of politics and. And so forth, but politics at multiple levels within the community itself, dealing with the local authority and then also working with the national government. And I did it in a very, as you put it, in a way, intuitive way. But when I look back at this project, I see it was a deep form of fieldwork, or what I would term landscape fieldwork. Because in that process, I consulted, I talked to, you know, many, many people in the community, if not everyone, most of them. I talked to politicians with people who are decision makers over it. And through this process of engagement, the project got built. But it came and it created and left me with a question which has stayed with me ever since. And this project was built almost 30 years ago, if not 30 years. It was built 30 years ago. I can't believe it. And. But the question it left me with is, how can I understand other landscapes like they were? Like they are? How can I understand other landscapes like they are? My home, because in this project in my hometown, I was the designer. I was a local resident, and then I got hired by the local government to oversee the construction of the project. So I was also the client. So I had a very unique perspective of being client, resident, and the contractor, because the local government were actually building it themselves and being the designer. So designer, contractor, client. It was an amazing experience in terms of seeing the project from multiple different dimensions. And again, that's what the field worker tries to do. The fieldworker tries to understand the world from, you know, from multiple different dimensions. And that project was a great introduction to me to how one might go about doing fieldwork. It was. But it was purely intuitive. The design itself is something I would do differently today. But the process it set up was something that has stayed with me and that I, in retrospect, would call landscape fieldwork. Because at first, that project in my hometown was also my introduction to landscape architecture. And what I think was so powerful for me about that introduction was building the project, but being. Not being bogged down with a.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

With.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Because I designed the project before I took formal classes in landscape architecture. So I wasn't bogged down with landscape architecture history. I wasn't bogged down with precedents. Although I did base the project. The project was inspired by the work of Roberto Burimarques, the Brazilian landscape architect. And also I write about Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, the English landscape architect who helped me with the project. And both Jellicoe and Bernie Marks were field workers, and they both engaged in deep field work. And this led them both to become landscape architects. So, in a sense, there is this. For me, that project led to a discovery, in a sense, of the importance of going out into the world. And it led me then further to study the work of Bernie Marx and Jellicoe by doing fieldwork on their projects.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

I like that you bring in these other figures and highlighting the fieldwork that they do and how they inspired you and how the work that they do is landscape fieldwork. Transitioning to the next chapter. This is postgraduate school, so you had learned more about landscape history, some precedence, landscape theory. But in this case, there is a very specific way of going about landscape fieldwork through the firm, the design firm, cora. So I'm wondering if you can talk about the fieldwork process there and how it was both kind of codified or systematized, but then part of that system was also chance and serendipity. So can you talk a little bit more about that experience?

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Yes, of course. So after I designed the project in my hometown, I went to study at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was introduced more formally to anthropology and to field work, because there's a long tradition at Penn, as you know, of field work. And while I was a student at Penn, we read the work of Raoul Bunchkoten, a Dutch landscape architect who lives and works in London and Berlin and all over the world. And when I graduated, I went to work in his office in London. And as you point out, you know, one of the critical things in fieldwork is that it opens us up to the unexpected because we're trying to find unexpected relationships. We're trying to find. Well, we're trying to understand things that we might not otherwise see or think about when we think about our landscape. And Quora has a method that they. They call bean sites. That's where they throw beans on a map and they go to the points on which the beans fall. And this is a way of. It's a way of random sampling of sorts. We've done it where, you know, you get a map of a city, and you'll throw 4,000 beans on that map of the city. And the point is that the beans bring you to places that we would otherwise probably not go to because of certain biases that we have and. Or because of certain limitations that we have, or because of, you know, because we might not feel comfortable going to certain places. And this form of random sampling confronts us with city in a. In a very unedited way. And the challenge is to go to each of these points. So you throw 4,000 or you throw beans On a map, beans are chosen because they're symbolic of new life. I mean, you could use coffee beans or jelly beans, but we prefer a bean that has the potential to grow like a runner beam. And we mark that point on the map and we'll go to the epicenter of each of these beams. One of the downsides of this method is that sometimes you miss the obvious. So there are landscapes that, there are sites you might want to go to that would seem obvious and maybe have a disagreement with my friend Roald Bunsfeld on this, because he says we should just go to the points where they fall. And I think we can also sometimes move the means and go to the obvious points too. But I find it an incredibly. An incredibly rich way of going about understanding a landscape because it doesn't distinguish between materials, it doesn't distinguish between spatial conditions. When the beam falls on the map, we don't even know if it fell on the ground or if it fell in the air or if it was on the roof of a building or if it went actually down into the soil. And these are questions we can only really answer when we go to the epicenter of the bean site. But then when we go to the bean site, there is a series of questions that we ask. And those questions, there are four questions. I like to limit them one minute per question because otherwise you will think forever. And the object of these questions is to. On Earth, what are the processes, what are the landscape processes that are happening in this point in space, at this moment in time? And by building up a catalog of these processes, we can begin to understand more thickly the processes that are taking place in a landscape. That's the, that's the basic. I mean, that's the, the basic method, but the object is that it is. It leads to new projects.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

There's an opening of the researchers kind of preconceptions or maybe a canceling of the preconceptions. I think is really rich in that process. As you mentioned, the random sampling kind of forces the researcher to pay attention to things that they may have overlooked or they. From the beginning, given a certain set of biases, as you say, or a certain set of precedents in mind, or certain sort of preconceived hierarchy of what's important. So I think that's a really. It's also a very. Sounds like a very fun way to kind of open up the possibilities by this kind of a geographical distribution of what you're kind of attuning to.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

That's true. It is a fun way and, you know, it leads. The next stage of the process is what's called scenario games, in which we develop a series of scenarios based on these minis. So when we go, the questions we ask are called mini scenarios. And from them we build up a series of processes that are then combined to imagine new possibilities for those sites. Then we test them through a series of games. The games, you know, when. When we do engage in games. And it was a great way to bring mayors together with residents. And it's a. Games can be a great flattener of hierarchies. And I think they can be incredibly productive because of that, because of that

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

flattening hierarchy and because they invite people to a process. I think there's something really powerful about that. I'd love to kind of switch to the next chapter, a case study, which I think you take a really different approach. And there's more of, if I may, a more traditional sense of ethnographic research that you did in Bahrain. And I remember a professor once describing some approaches to ethnography and ethnographic research as kind of deep hanging out. And I think your year in Bahrain really, you really explore this process from, you know, the moments when you were really unsure about what you were doing there, or even the weeks, especially the beginning, where it felt like nothing was happening. But I think it similar, but different from the process at Quora. It opens you up to new possibilities and things to attune to from the everyday and from the standpoint of being in a place for a long time. So I'm wondering if you can talk about how this concept of field work was different in your work in Bahrain and maybe what shifted over an extended period of time there.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Well, the Bahrain project was based on one year of fieldwork. I went to Bahrain because I was frustrated with my landscape architecture education in the sense that the books we were reading, not here, this is my doctoral studies that Harvard Graduate School of Design, but most of the. I realized that many of the books that we were reading were based in Western Europe and North America. And I was frustrated at the lack of engagement with most of the world. And so I went to do fieldwork in Bahrain. I chose it because it's a very extreme landscape. It's extremely small, an entire country in one walkable area, 10 miles wide and 30 miles long or so. And I spent a year walking through the landscape. It was also extremely hot, or it can be extremely hot and dry. And I was interested in the Bahraini concept of landscape. And after a year of taking intensive Arabic classes, I realized there was no word for landscape in Arabic. And how do you practice landscape architecture in a society where there is no word for landscape? And in fact, as I came to understand that this is actually most of the world, then how to write about landscape in a society where there is no literature on landscape in that society? And I realized I had to do field work because there was no other way I could understand that landscape. And so I was based in Bahrain, and I would walk everywhere I would need to go. I had a job in the Ministry of Municipalities or a desk. I had a desk at the Ministry of Municipalities. My position was only confirmed after I actually left Bahrain. But I would walk there everywhere I would go. I would try to observe. I would. I would observe green every time I met it. And the reason. And I'm sorry, I've forgotten something important here, which is that having realized that there was no word for landscape in Arabic, I noticed a strange pattern, because when I would talk to people about landscape, they would often answer me with using the word al hudra, or the green, the greenery. And I came to the conclusion that Bahrainis understand landscape as the biggest contrast you can make to the indigenous beige desert environment. So there's an obsession with creating lush green landscapes and a very arid, dry desert environment. And, of course, this definition, this understanding of landscape, is actually quite foreign to me because I see landscape as the view from an airplane window, which could be desert, it could be urban, it could be. It could be temperate, could be filled with rivers, it could have no rivers. But for Bahrainis, it had to be green. And I wrote a book, Paradoxes of Green, and it's about the paradox that to create green space in a very arid environment like Bahrain is not very green from an environmental point of view, because of water and the other resources that are required to maintain it. And so in the book, I reflect on this one year of fieldwork, and I ask, was it worth it? Was it worth investing a year in that? And I think my conclusion is that, yes, it was worth it. I think I have some. There are some limitations, but overall, in that chapter, I tried to show the importance of fieldwork and how field work can help us to understand the world

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

differently, especially when there's not a, as you said, even a term for the thing that you're trying to explore, you know, or a term for the profession in which you're arriving from.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

But it also helps us to create the literature that we need to diversify our field as well. And so this was also part of the objective in this chapter Study and play come together on a Windows 11

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

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[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

I like that. I like that you frame landscape fieldwork as a way of producing knowledge. And you talked a little bit about this just now. How you know in the when there's not as much literature about a certain topic in a certain place, fieldwork is a way to produce that literature or produce at least some touch points in which we can put together kind of a constellation of a deeper understanding of what a landscape or what green means to a certain people in a certain place.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think in Bahrain I met a lot of poets and we tried to. And then it's through them. I mean, it was a great way to it was a great way to understand better the Bahaini perspective on memory, on history, and on how central ideas of landscape, although they don't call it landscape, but ideas of landscape are so central to the entire state. I think one of the conclusions I reached was that landscape is central to the politics of the whole nation. And yet it's not really acknowledged. Its power and its efficacy is not fully acknowledged. And so I hope that, you know, the work has done some good in trying to show that.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

Yeah, I love that chapter. I really appreciated the reflections in it. I appreciated also just the amount of time that you spent there, which you say is also one of the limitations of landscape fieldwork in this sense that Not a lot of people have the opportunity or the time or the capacity to spend a year in a place. But then, as you say, also the fourfold kind of time it takes to interpret all of that knowledge production and the data gathering and all of the media that you're kind of producing in this time.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

So.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

And then you go on to say that you kind of as. As an experiment, you tried a different approach in the Bahamas, where the. Instead of one researcher spending a lot of time in one place, you bring a lot of researchers to each spend a shorter amount of time, which you say places more responsibility on curation and interpretation. So I'm wondering if you can describe that experiment in the Bahamas and then also how you see the stage or the process of curation and interpretation, perhaps taking on a bigger role in that case.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Well, in Bahrain, I spent a lot of time in daeg palm groves. And in the 10 years that it took between doing my fieldwork and eventually publishing, which I'm told is perfectly fine, it's not. Not. It's not slow, it's not fast, it's perfectly normal. But in that 10 years, many of the growths were lost, and I was devastated about those. And I thought, well, how can I, as a landscape architect, think about doing fieldwork in a way that has the same depth, but one can do or has similar depth, but one can do it more quickly? And the only way I can think of doing that is to remove it from the single author and to share fieldwork among collective. So the next chapter is dealing with an experiment that we conducted on collective fieldwork where we had 52. We actually had 54, just in case. But the question was, can 52 researchers spending one each, spending one week each in the field add up to something equivalent of one person spending a year? And this question has certain advantages when you're dealing with a large landscape, because you're sharing the, you know, the collective, the 52 people over a larger area where one person couldn't achieve. So we. I did this experiment over three years. It led me to the conclusion that, in fact, collective fieldwork can yield even more interesting results. But it puts a lot of responsibility on the curator because it still needs a curator. I tried to delegate the curation to a smaller team, but even that requires a large amount of oversight. But this idea of collective fieldwork is something that I'm still trying to work at, and I think it's something that has a lot of promise in different forms in different parts of the world ever since. But one of the Challenges in doing fieldwork is that it takes time for people to open up, and it takes time for people to maybe to learn to trust you. And what we found in the Bahamas was that when people knew that our researchers only had a week, it actually sped things up a little bit. So I was quite impressed by what students would do. So this was both a project and a lab that I run or that I founded, the Critical Landscapes Design Lab. But it was also a course that I taught between the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Landscape Architecture, and the College of the Bahamas. And there was half. We had. A third of the students were landscape architects or other designers, a third were anthropologists, and a third were Bahamians. And so they would typically work in groups of three. A designer, an anthropologist, and then a Bahamian. And the Bahamian were very important

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

in

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

the sense of acting as the interlocutors, in a sense. But it had some unanticipated outcomes as well. Because we asked students to keep detailed field notes when they're talking with someone. They would record the color of their eyes, their age, their appearance. And then I realized that many of the field workers were observing each other. So it led to some interesting and challenging motivations. But that project ultimately was informing a land use plan. And fieldwork was so important because it was the only way that we could understand these communities in which we were working. We were working in small island communities of maybe 60, 100, 200 people. We had to. We had to do field work, and we went and lived in the communities and engaged in everyday life as much as possible. So in the chapter, I talk about the, you know, the more traditional ways of. In which one would do community engagement through public meetings, and how these public meetings became challenging, not necessarily reflecting the views of the. Of the public. And that by engaging in everyday life, we had a very useful complement to the more statutory means of community engagement.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

I think this chapter stood out to me because of the aims of the fieldwork itself. As you say, it was going into a land use plan. But it also struck me in the sense that when there's that many people involved, there's so much more to coordinate and communicate ahead of time so that people know what they're doing. It's a little bit more systematized. And I think for the individual researcher, moments of chance or serendipity can shift the fieldwork trajectory in a way that I think for a larger collective, that can be harder for chance and serendipity to have that sort of role in the process. But There is something that I found really powerful about both the geographical spread that you can have with that many people, and also this idea that sometimes the shorter time period can actually expedite the process by which people make connections.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Yes. But I would also say in terms of chance and serendipity, I realized during my fieldwork in Bahrain that. That, you know, these moments of chance were sometimes the richest part of my fieldwork and that I had to budget time for chance to happen. So in the Bahamas, it's true that we did have a lot of logistical challenges and we had to plan certain things, but we always insisted on having time for a chance to happen. And there's a. We had to set time aside, unprogrammed time to allow for the unexpected. And things always turned up.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

Yeah, I love that. Budgeting time for chance, or budgeting space and time for chance. Shifting to the very. To the final case study or the final chapter of the book, you go back to being more of an individual researcher. So it's going away from the collective and back to the kind of singular experience. And this chapter is really special. It kind of flipped the projective thrust of design on its head. And you describe a much more kind of what I would call an introjective process in which the landscape actually changes you on the inside. And I'm wondering if you can describe that process, because it's a really powerful chapter, and it sounds like an incredibly powerful experience. So I'm wondering how. If you can describe that experience and how that's kind of affecting your research. Because as I understand, you're still within this process and still within this particular research project.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Well, I love your term interjective. I will definitely keep this in mind. Well, having done this collective fieldwork, I, around the same time, began doing field work in Salvador de Bahia in Brazil. And it was driven mainly by intuition. So I'm working, and I'm. As you point out, I'm continuing to work, and I'm based. Right now, I'm in Salvador da Bahia in the northeast of Brazil. And Salvador is punctuated with a whole series of sacred groves called tejiros. And tejeros literally translates as a yard in Portuguese. But really, these are sacred groves that are a legacy of the slave trade. So Salvador was the center of the slave trade in Brazil. Nobody knows quite how many people were brought across the Atlantic. Between 3 and 5 million people maybe were. And Salvador is commonly referred to as the Black Rome, partly because it's the most African of Brazilian cities, partly because of the topography, which is a Bit like Rome, but also because it's eccentric for Afro Brazilian spirituality where elements, where African, West African. Typically spirituality is mixed with elements of Christianity, but in particular Catholicism. So it's a strong link in Yoruba concepts of nature and Catholicism. It was illegal to practice any form of Afro descendant spirituality in Brazil until about 50 years ago. And people practiced in secret in the countryside. But as cities have expanded these spaces, it's become surrounded by the city. And Salvador has officially over 1,300 of these afro Brazilian spaces. I'm told the number, the real numbers, probably over 2,000. And many of them have trees and shrubs which are so central to the practice of Afro Brazilian religions. One of the things that I find so profound is that in Brazil there are 16 basic energies. So I've been doing fieldwork in a Kantomblay Tehiru Kantamblade, and this will interest you. It literally means dancing with the gods. Dance is an important part of Kantambui rituals. But these spaces are heavily designed spaces. They're just not designed with the logic that we normally teach in design schools. An Afro Brazilian space will typically consist of. Within the sacred grove, the community will cultivate different energies of nature. So there's the energy of the rainbow, for example, or the energy of the air, the energy of time, the energy of metal, the energy of leaves, the energy of love, the energy of chance. But the idea that nature can include love and chance is, I think, very profound. Because as landscape architects, we often, you know, we consider our materials, the materials we work with, to be trees, grass, concrete, maybe some stone, a little bit of wood. But from an Afro Brazilian perspective, these all have energy. And the combination of different materials creates different energies. And from an Afro Brazilian perspective, you know, we have to think about issues of justice, love, chance and so on, as well as all being part of nature. So when I get some time to spare, I come to Salvador and I spend it in the Afro Brazilian space. And I didn't really think of this as a project. I didn't think of this as a long term, as a serious research project. I initially went to the Tejero just out of curiosity and I gradually came to see that, well, actually this is really, really fascinating. And. And then the community decided that I was novice. It wasn't a choice that I made, but there was a very particular moment of, of turning that I describe in, in the book. And so an important part of these Afro Brazilian spaces is trance. And trance is induced by certain material and spatial conditions. And I never thought it would Happen me. But one day in my field work, I was very publicly entranced in the Tehiru. And afterwards I was informed that I was a novice and that I had been chosen to be part of the community. And being a novice is quite interesting because when I go there, I have to work. But through that process of working, whether I'm sweeping floor or washing dishes, one is getting to know that space better. I mean, sweeping the floor is a great way of getting to know the materiality of a tejero, because you begin inside and then once you swap the inside of the buildings, you then have to go outside and you go all through the. The whole space. So you get to know every stone in a way. But I find the life of the novice to be a very deep form of fieldwork, because there is no text to learn from, one has to work. And in that process of working, you gather leaves is what. How they is the term that they use. And a leaf is a piece of knowledge that community give you. And the elders decide when you have enough leaves to move to the next level. So the final chapter in the book, or the final or the fifth chapter, because the stolen conclusion describes this Afro Brazilian space and the process of gathering leaves. But it also speculates on how this can change our perceptions of landscape architecture and public space. Because these Tijeros, being a legacy of the slave trade, they function almost like secret parks within the city of Salvador. I mean, they offer great ecosystem services to the city. The temperatures are lower. They're the last remaining green spaces in an increasingly dense city. They're increasingly pressured for development. And. And yet, when you visit a Teheru, when you enter that space, you have to undergo a process of cleansing.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

You.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

You take a. You take a.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

A bath.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

You wash away the energies from the negative energies of the world outside. And when you're in the Teheru, you have to work and imagine we had a landscape. Imagine we visited landscapes in which we are actively engaged in their conservation, in their production, instead of being simply consumers of landscape. And I think too often landscapes are set up as commodities for consumers to come and to observe, rather than necessarily to inhabit those spaces.

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[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

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[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

This the experience that you describe in this chapter and I'm going to bring in some a few of the topics from the next chapter because in the final conclusion you lay out fundamentals of landscape fieldwork and the last one, I want to connect that to this chapter. You just described the last fundamental out of the four. So the four are mixed measures. Immerse your body, contrast media and critically imagine. And some one connection I'm making just now is that this aspect of critically imagining in a lot of ways for design, we think of that as like a future looking process of seeing what could be different in a space or in a landscape. And something I'm thinking about just now is that there's also this aspect of being able to critically imagine ourselves. And I think that this chapter is really the chapter you just described is really powerful because it's a way of being able to see that we ourselves can change or that there's another, another set of knowledge or another way of being in the world or just another way of existing that's possible for the individual or the researcher or the designer themselves. And I think that's actually, that's, that's a really beautiful way of describing critical imagination kind of in a collective all encompassing way. I don't know if that's putting words in your mouth that you didn't write, but I'm wondering. Yeah, if you can kind of. If we can just wrap up with this idea of critical imagination and what that looks like for you now.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

I would love to hear you speak more about it because you speak so well about it. But I, as a designer, I believe we do field work in order to have the knowledge that we need to imagine better futures or alternative futures. And the more we understand the ecologies that are taking place in the landscape in which we're inhabiting, the more, the better we can design for them. But then also going back to what we said at the beginning, we all carry landscapes inside of ourselves. So if you're studying a landscape, then there is always the risk that you'll become entranced by that landscape. I think that, you know, the critical imagination has multiple dimensions to it. And on a very practical level, you know, here in Brazil, there's a recent recommendation from the Brazilian government that every school of architecture teaches about Afro Brazilian tradition. Because this is not part of a formal curriculum. This is one responsibility I believe that landscape architects have, which is to diversify the canon that we teach with and through which we understand the world. I think, you know, a big problem in the world today is a fear of difference. And the more that we can be exposed to difference and all the risks that come with it, but the more we can be exposed to difference, the better the world will be. Because the more we understand how others perceive the world, then the less strange that will seem to us.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

Yeah, that does make sense. I think that's a beautiful note to kind of wrap up on. And I think in the book you talked about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. And I think that's kind of bringing it full circle to both ourselves as designers and researchers and to the discipline in a broader sense. Very final last question is your choice either what is something that you're excited to be working on next, or what is one book that you might recommend to readers who connected with this one?

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Well, what I'm currently working on is African landscape architecture. So this experience in the Afro Brazilian sacred groves led me to Nigeria and back to the source in West Africa. And. And then that led me to a wider research on the practice of landscape architecture in the African continent. And when we look at a map of the world and the countries that have landscape architects, we see that most of the world still doesn't have a profession at landscape architects, but the world is. But landscapes, let me put it like this. Landscapes are architected all over the world. Let me put it another way. There's often the perception that landscape architecture is a discipline that was founded in the west and that brings techniques and skills to other parts of the world. And yet the empirical evidence is that this does not work if we don't account for the social and the cultural dimensions of those landscapes in which we are working. And this is why I think there is such need and an urgency for landscape architects and others to engage more deeply in understanding the situatedness of landscapes. Because landscapes are different everywhere we go and we cannot use the same ways, we cannot apply, we cannot treat them in the same way.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

Yeah, it's a beautiful note to end on. Gareth. I just want to say thank you so much for talking with me today and congratulations to you on the publication of the book and on your very thought provoking work. It's been great to have you on.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Thank you, Kelvin. Thank you very much for reaching out and for the great questions and discussion.

[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

All right, and finally, thank you to the New Books Network and to all of our listeners. Until next time, take care and enjoy reading.

[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network.

[Announcer]

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[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

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[Kelvin (Interviewer)]

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[Dr. Gareth Doherty]

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