Landscape Architecture Magazine July 2022

CONTRIBUTORS SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA, (“Estate of the Art,” page 108) is a landscape architecture photographer whose work emphasizes the relationship between place, power, and personhood. You can follow her on Instagram @saharchphoto. “I was surprised by the individual character of each room in the garden, and how each room communicated in unison, articulating the grandeur and subtleties of the design.” ERIN KELLY, ASLA, (“Banking on Borrowed Land,” page 68) is a Detroit-based landscape architect and a recipient of the 2022–2023 Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership. You can contact her at contact.erin.kelly@gmail.com. “I wish I could have included more of the frontline efforts of land trust leaders in smaller communities: Athens, Georgia; Kingston, New York; the Black Family Land Trust in North Carolina.” ENRIQUE RAMIREZ (“Land Art’s Fragile State,” page 124) is…

I am peripherally involved in our local mutual aid network. I drive around with a car full of diapers and drop them off at various households in our area. I use Google Translate to communicate that I am on my way and hand over the boxes shyly, because my Spanish is nonexistent, and I am embarrassed by this. A close friend volunteers through her church, and a few weeks ago, she unexpectedly hosted a group of Venezuelan immigrant women and their children in her basement, bused to our area by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, in what I am sure was meant to be a publicity stunt but just made him look stingy and mean. Instead, volunteers and nonprofits scrambled food, clothing, cooking space, job leads, social services, childcare, and school…

Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas, Mexico—known colloquially as Los Dos Laredos—were a single city divided by the Rio Grande River until 1848, when a treaty established the international border in the river, leaving one half in the United States and the other in Mexico. But the cities remain entwined. The port there is a major trade route and crossing point between the countries. Families have members on both sides, with some who live in Nuevo Laredo working or attending school in Laredo. And, of course, ecological systems know no international boundaries. Biodiverse creeks feed into the Rio Grande, and the region is an important migratory route for birds, butterflies, and other wildlife. Plans are now underway for a binational park that would reunite the cities along a 6.3-mile stretch of…

The pressures of an increasingly water-scarce West have collided with the movements of Indigenous peoples toward greater self-determination and made water planning an increasing priority for tribal governments. Although a 1908 U.S. Supreme Court case established that tribes have an implied right to the waters of their reservations, many tribes have had to rely upon outside governing bodies to adjudicate those rights and regulate usage. As the availability of water resources grows less and less certain, past policies and practices are coming under increased scrutiny—and finding a newly receptive ear in Washington, D.C. One such policy is a Department of the Interior directive that has stymied tribes from developing comprehensive rules and regulations for water resources since it was put into place in 1975. Issued by then-Interior Secretary Rogers C. B.…

Since the start of the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia at the end of February, landscape architecture firms in the United States and Europe have been issuing statements announcing that they are withdrawing from ongoing work in Russia. They include the Dutch firm Karres en Brands, which designed several parks and natural spaces in the past six years, and LDA Design, a British firm that has completed a restoration project in Gorky Park and nine other parks in Moscow, as well as Oktyabrsky Island in Kaliningrad. “It was the only possible decision to make, to stop,” says Darius Reznek, a partner at Karres en Brands. “In a way, our form of protest, for what it’s worth.” In the past decade, dozens of parks and public spaces had been redesigned in Moscow…

Water, power, and public rightso f-way are among the basic services that most cities provide their residents. Gaylan Williams, ASLA, an arborist and landscape architect, thinks there ought to be one more: trees. In an essay published on Planetizen earlier this year, Williams, who works as an urban designer at the Houston office of Design Workshop, argued that urban forests should be thought of as a form of infrastructure and maintained as a public utility. “We’re finding room in the public right-of-way to place all of these utilities,” Williams says. “Now that we know more about trees, we should be finding room to have that same [level of] service. Because we can actually measure the quality that a tree brings, in terms of shade and heat reduction and carbon sequestration.” Right now, urban…