ABSTRACT
Agency arises from advocacy, and advocacy depends on vocabulary. Because agency, advocacy and vocabulary depend on context, the projects differ in their scopes, media, venues and audiences. In the early days of landscape architecture in North America, Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Eliot worked not only as designers but also as advocates for public awareness, public value and public protection of landscapes they considered essential to their culture. Making progress toward ecological integrity in hybrid landscapes means coming to terms with their specific qualities and characteristics. This chapter presents three case studies to address an urgent task for designers: engaging broad audiences and diverse constituencies in the discussion of complex, contested landscapes. Resilience also means building a culture whose understanding, whose vocabulary, can adapt to and flourish in the complicated, idiosyncratic, hybrid landscapes it inhabits.
