Decolonizing Design: Notes from the Amazon
Time and time again the question of, "what is nature?" came up in my graduate landscape architecture classes. There was this feeling of both humans and our field itself being something outside of it all, maybe "above" nature, maybe something artificial.
Inside of our sterile classrooms and sleek desks, we debated this topic, and I began to wonder if the question itself was a distraction from other more important ones like why we think humans are superior to this construct of "nature" we choose to define and put in a neat little box. I wondered why we needed to define it at all.
Much of design school functioned in a similar fashion. There was a pressure to define complex ideas in simple terms. A pressure for realism. A pressure to do things a particular kind of way. A process that felt limited in ways I struggle to put into words, even to this day.
When one of our studios took place on a piece of contested land - one that had an active Land Back movement taking place on it for many years - I started to wonder what role our field plays in dominating and controlling the narrative of the land itself, of nature and of who deserves to exist where and in what ways.
I felt as though ignoring this movement would be a mistake and became very uncomfortable with the reality that landscape architecture is often a physical manifestation of colonization. We have the power to define undefinible terms in ways that make our field relevant.
We often erase the land and build over the stories and people who lived in relationship to it. I worried about how I'd cope with contributing to this erasure and development cycle when I finished school - this cycle that was never talked about. Because we never chose to define it and put it in a neat little architectural box; it was like this uncomfortable reality didn't even exist.
As I write this piece, I am living in an off grid ecovillage in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon Jungle - a place where the sound of bugs I've never even heard of constantly radiate in the background, where the seeds of the cacao plant are the most delicious things I've ever tasted, in a home where the walls are built with wild clay and the roof is made of palm leaves. It's here where I've begun to deconstruct my design school education, where I've started to understand what decolonization could actually look and feel like.
It's uncomfortable and messy for my mind and for my body, but it's a necessary task in a field that carries the power of designing what kind of world we live in.
