ABSTRACT
This chapter examines conventional Western landscape architecture history textbooks from the perspective of “epistemic decolonization.” It finds that they relegate non-Western and indigenous precedents to before what Mignolo calls “the zero point” of the Renaissance, thereby privileging Western precedent, which is included in the canon. Included Western precedents are characterized by having architectural form, while I argue that landscapes are about processes, and therefore indigenous land management practices have great relevance to a contemporary practice of landscape architecture. To demonstrate this, this chapter focuses on two case studies’in the Amazon and in Australia’that show significant resonance with contemporary debates in landscape architecture around planting design, productive landscape and landscape management. Ultimately, this chapter attempts to help develop a discourse of decolonization in landscape architecture theory.
