Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design

Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design

Speaker: Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University

Landscape fieldwork combines landscape architects’ projective skills and tools for site analysis (drawing, measuring, photographing, remote sensing) with the ethnographic methods of anthropologists (participant observation, unstructured interviews, and writing reflexive fieldnotes), all as an integral part of a design process. When we do thick description, it leads us to thick prescription. 

Gareth Doherty, ASLA, is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His work takes a human-centered approach that connects design, theory, and ethnographic fieldwork to questions of cultural identity, equity, and environmental justice. His research reassesses twentieth-century landscape traditions and advances new tools and methods that respond to the spatial and social complexities of climate change. Doherty is the author of Paradoxes of Green (University of California Press, 2017) and Landscape Fieldwork (University of Virginia Press, 2025). His current work includes field studies of African landscape architecture. He has published widely and edited influential volumes such as Roberto Burle Marx Lectures and Ecological Urbanism. He co-founded the journal New Geographies and served as editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color. Doherty received the Doctor of Design from Harvard GSD, his Master of Landscape Architecture and Certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania, and masters and undergraduate degrees from University College Dublin. He has several built projects, and is a member of professional associations in Nigeria, the United States, and the United Kingdom.