2015 Postdoctoral Fellowship – Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, TAU
Research Plan by Naama Meishar
Urban Landscape Architecture amidst
Environmental Ethics and Ethics of the Other
The discourse of ethics in landscape architecture research is not proliferate and it is
dominated by the discourse of environmental ethics. In the 1970s a growing interest in
ecological and environmental sustainability ignited a search for the fitting design
aesthetics and landscape policies in both discourse and practice of landscape
architecture. These were trailed by both practical activity and discursive interest in the
theme of environmental ethics (Wolschke-Bulmahn 1992; Thompson 1998). In the
landscape architecture discourse the term "humanistic ecology" was proposed in order
to reconcile between two ethical systems – anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric
(Thompsom 1998; Thompson 2000). While in this field this discourse faded about a
decade later, the geographical discourse defined the impact of some recent urban
landscape architecture projects as ecological/green/environmental gentrification
generators (Swyngedouw 2009; Dooling 2009; Quastel 2009; Checker 2011; Curran
and Hamilton 2012). My proposed project aims to address this lacuna in the
landscape architecture discourse.
After contributing a novel conceptualization of the landscape utterance of ethical
experience to landscape architecture's discourse within my dissertation, I now propose
a policy-oriented study based on these incongruities in landscape architecture ethics,
in both practice and theory.
The research will comprise three major segments:
1. Empirical. Studying the reception of the case study of Jaffa Slope Park in the
neighborhoods surrounding them. In these locales many residents are poor and
their residential status is of protected and unprotected tenets, some of them are
considered trespassers. The study will comprise analyses of master plans,
collecting data on the prices of property, and face-to-face interviews with
planners, landscape architecture and officials. An analysis of the data collected
will allow for the defining of these environmental project's impacts on
residents, and the existing urban policies concerning environmental and
housing issues, separately and as mutually influential.
2. Theoretical. Construct a theoretical framework that will map landscape
architecture's discourse of ethics, environmental interventions and social
justice and its lacuna in light of the discourse in other fields on green urban
gentrification. Construct a theoretical framework for landscape architecture's
ethics and policies that address the need to moderate and regulate this
practice's ethical incongruities.
3. Interpretational. Finally, the project will re-address landscape architecture's
aesthetic sign-system in the park in order to examine them in light of the term
"just green enough" (Curran and Hamilton 2012), which conceptualizes the
type of landscapes that may restrain gentrification.
The project is expected to contribute to the theoretical discourse of landscape
architecture and urban planning, to the critical discourse of environmental/social
urban justice and to the discourse of environmental ethics.
Works Cited
Checker, Melissa. 2011. "Wiped Out by the "Greenwave": Environmental
Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability," City and
Society 23(2): 210-229.
Curran, Winifred and Trina Hamilton. 2012. "Just Green Enough: Contesting
Environmental Gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn," Local Environment
17(9): 1027-1042.
Dooling, Sara. 2011. "Ecological Gentrification: A Research Agenda Exploring
Justice in the City," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
33(3): 621-639.
Quastel, Noah. 2009. "Political Ecologies of Gentrification," Urban Geography 30(7):
694-725.
Swyngedouw, Erik. 2009. "The Antinomies of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a
Democratic Politics of Environmental Production," International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 33(3 ):601–620.
Thompson, H. Ian.2000. "Aesthetic, Social and Ecological Values in Landscape
Architecture: a Discourse Analysis," Ethics, Place and Environment, 3(3):
269–287.
___. 1998. "Environmental Ethics and the Development of Landscape Architectural
Theory," Landscape Research 23(2): 175-195.
Wolschke-Bulmahn, Joachim. 1994. "Ethics and morality questions in the history of
garden and landscape design: A preliminary essay," The Journal of Garden
History 14(3): 140-146.