Collaborative Art Making: A New Method for Landscape Architecture
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Date
2018-08-25
Authors
Holt, Whitney
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Abstract
As communities and demographics shift rapidly in the United States,
landscape architects are responsible for creating and curating progressively
more urban spaces for increasingly diverse communities. In an era of
extreme nationalism and xenophobia designers are confronted with a
moral and ethical duty to design spaces that recognize diverse needs and
actively foster inclusion. This project explores the capacity of collaborative
art-making, a tool from arts education, to engage community and solicit
individual’s values and priorities as part of the landscape architecture design
process.
Currently, there is a dearth of documented methods/strategies for
facilitating public engagement ascribed to landscape architecture (LA). LA
primarily borrows public engagement methods from Public Planning and
many of these strategies elicit specific, concrete desires/wishes, rather than
more comprehensive values. Furthermore, these methods don’t consistently
address how to engage diverse communities and groups of people and/or
how to facilitate activities that foster empathy. Meanwhile, recent studies in
arts education maintain that collaborative art-making fosters relationships,
strengthens community, reduces marginalization, and promotes inclusion
(Hajisoteriou and Agelides 2016). Consequently, this project asks; What
are roles for collaborative art making, as a tool for community engagement
and inclusion, in the landscape architecture design process of urban public
spaces?
This project employs two collaborative art-making projects to
explore individuals’ perceptions and values regarding the Pioneer and
Pioneer Mother, two culturally and historically significant statues situated on
the University of Oregon campus. I asked participants for specific feedback
pertaining to facilitation, process, and outcomes of the art-making projects in
order to further realize the potential values and deficits of collaborative artmaking
as a tool for public engagement in landscape architecture practice.
Description
Examining committee chair: Liska Chan
Keywords
Collaborative art, Landscape architecture, Process, Site analysis, Public engagement, Collaborative collage, Designing for diverse users, Community engagement