ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that utopianism may usefully be seen and used as a process of becoming and a way of imaginatively prototyping that is rooted in the lived world and experience. Teaching is a practice with its eye on both beginnings and futures: it is a work of constant introduction in an atmosphere of hope. The work of the teacher is always to prepare students to encounter new ideas, knowledge, or techniques, then to arrange the meeting. The contemporary student of landscape architecture encounters a profession that is becoming less concerned with scenography and the iconography of power than it is with a meaningful engagement with the dialogue between culture and ecology in the creation of sustainable landscapes. The capacity of ‘the architect’ to create critical, practical utopian visions—and narratives—has immediate application not as an insurrectionary or revolutionary force, but rather insurgently within the processes, forces, and structures of practice.
