Seminar 2: Reframing Cultural Landscapes: Nature, Pluriverse and Reciprocity

This module explores contemporary methodological approaches and design research focused on cultural landscapes through three interpretive lenses: Nature-Cultures, which examines the entanglements between natural processes and cultural expressions, with particular attention to how landscapes are framed, curated, or controlled; Theories of the Pluriverse, which engage with non-Western and anti-colonial worldviews in order to understand diverse systems of value, meaning, and being; and Reciprocal Landscapes, which investigate relationships of mutual influence and exchange between people and environments, emphasizing care, responsibility, and regeneration. Through these lenses, examples of rural landscapes will be presented in order to encourage students to engage critically with cultural landscapes as complex, dynamic, and contested spaces of meaning-making and design. Drawing on research developed over the past twenty-five years, including case studies of “ordinary” landscapes across Spain and the United States, the course seeks to reframe cultural landscapes as complex systems composed of multiple overlapping orders, traces, and spatial patterns shaped by both human and non-human forces; to introduce and apply the three key interpretive frameworks in order to deepen critical understanding; to explore how design can function as a research methodology through “research by design” for the interpretation, mapping, and regeneration of landscapes; and to reconsider canonical case studies, such as the Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor in New York, as layered palimpsests of infrastructure, ecology, memory, and erasure, including Indigenous histories and more-than-human narratives.