ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a series of speculations on what might constitute an auto-pedagogy for landscape architecture as a means to co-invent it. Drawing on multifarious ‘land’ case studies, more often assumed to be outside of the remit and responsibility of landscape architecture, the authors advocate for an inclusive and intimate reimagining of the discipline and its professional practice, and propose a rationale for positioning social justice and climate crisis concerns as core curricula content. Methodologically, the chapter fashions its thesis by sampling, hybridizing and playfully reinventing principles and processes from autoethnography, auto-theory, post-humanism, indigenous methodologies, Feminist Theory and Queer Theory, in an effort to establish a set of auto-pedagogic prototypes that redefine landscape architecture’s relationship with the practices of empathy and care. Such practices cannot emerge if a critique of the pervasive economic imperatives that drive acts of land exploitation defaults to using the same methodologies deployed to justify land exploitation in the first place (See Audrey Lorde’s 1984 essay, The Master’s Tools will never Dismantle the Master’s House). The essay is dedicated to redeeming damage and injustice, sustaining empathy, seeking and sharing wisdom and propagating a learning relationship that supports the interests of future generations.
