Landscape Dialogues 2021 is a podcast created by students in Nicholas Brown’s class, “Cities, Landscape, and Contemporary Culture” (LARC2340), which is offered every spring in the School of Architecture at Northeastern University in Boston. The class focuses on contemporary urban design and climate justice. By critically engaging the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s 2016 New Landscape Declaration and 2020-21 Green New Deal Superstudio students consider how contemporary landscape architects, architects, urban designers, planners, and artists are responding—both professionally and as everyday citizens—to the challenges of environmental change and climate breakdown, including grappling with difficult ethical and political questions. The podcast provides an opportunity for students to add their voices to these urgent conversations.

 

Landscape Dialogues 2021 features 3 episodes, plus a series of entangled landscape profiles. The first episode focuses on the New Landscape Declaration and the designers Kate Orff and Billy Fleming. The second episode focuses on historian Jenny Price’s new book Stop Saving the Planet! An Environmentalist Manifesto. The third episode focuses on the Green New Deal Superstudio. Drawing inspiration from Price’s book, Stop Saving the Planet! and anthropologist Laura Ogden’s book, Swamplife, entangled landscape profiles are short audio stories about specific landscapes. Price says that the Los Angeles River is “an ideal site to stop saving the environment.” She also argues the LA River is one of the “best examples anywhere for costs of making of nature invisible where you live." These entangled landscape profiles are a response to the question: What is your Los Angeles River? We invite you to listen these stories and then reflect on this question as well.