Unearthing Contextual Foodscapes

This research investigates how landscape architecture can engage with foodscapes to enhance their agency in addressing environmental and spatial injustices. The research poses the question: How can landscape architects engage with foodscapes and their role in environmental and spatial justice?

Concerned with developing new ways of engaging with foodscapes within the landscape architecture discipline, the following sub-questions frame the practice ambitions: How can landscape architects progress urban agriculture initiatives to become more spatially and culturally integrated within the landscape? How can landscape architects unearth and contextualise foodscapes?

Through an experimental practice-driven methodology, the research first defines the meaning and significance of a contextual foodscape for landscape practice; secondly explores the practice of unearthing environmental and cultural relationships within the landscape concerning food practices; and thirdly produces a body of work that helps envision the application of a contextual foodscape. This is done through engagements with site specific land based relationships in Porirua.

Unearthing is a key term defining itself through its practice. In this occasioning unearthing is discovered as the practice of forming a contextual awareness and narrative of a place by critically drawing different environmental, social, cultural and spatial relationships engrained within the landscape. It is a practice that focuses justice in its exposure of spatial relationships and landscapes that are under-appreciated, hidden, marginalised or dominated. Findings from unearthing are found to play out in vision making for a contextual foodscape in Porirua.

This research offers insight into food’s powerful role in environmental and spatial issues challenging current landscape practices . By allowing the practice of contextual foodscaping to enter landscape architecture, this research demonstrates how landscape practice can impact its design approaches to environmental and spatial injustice.