The Culture of Cultivation

Recovering the Roots of Landscape Architecture

Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000098457
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

By seeking to rediscover the profession's agricultural roots, this volume proposes a 21st-century shift in thinking about landscape architecture that is no longer driven by binary oppositions, such as urban and rural; past and present; aesthetics and ecology; beautiful and productive, but rather prioritizes a holistic and cross-disciplinary framing.

The illustrated collection of essays written by academics, researchers and experts in the field seeks to balance and redirect a current approach to landscape architecture that prioritizes a narrow definition of the regional in an effort to tackle questions of continuous urban growth and its impact on the environment. It argues that an emphasis on conurbation, which occurs at the expense of the rural, often ignores the reality that certain cultivation and management practices taking place on land set aside for production can be as harmful to the environment as is unchecked urbanization, contributing to loss of biodiverstiy, soil erosion and climate change. By contrast, the book argues that by expanding the expertise of design professionals to include the productive, food systems, soil conservation and the preservation of cultural landscapes, landscape architects would be better equipped to participate in the stewardship of our planet.

Written primarily for landscape practitioners and academics, cultural and environmental historians and conservationists, The Culture of Cultivation will appeal to anyone interested in a thorough rethinking of the role and agency of landscape architecture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: the culture of cultivation: designing and writing the landscape
• Part I Contemporary practices and conservation
• Part II Design and urban agriculture
• Part III Histories of productive landscapes
• Part IV Preserving the cultural landscape
• Index