LA+ Community

Tatum Hands is Editor in Chief of LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture produced at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. From 2003 to 2013, she was director of a project consultancy specializing in parliamentary reporting on legislative, policy, and institutional evaluation and reform. She was co-editor of a national law journal for 13 years and has worked as a freelance publications editor and as a forensic editor for state and federal courts. Dr. Hands has also held positions as executive officer of the Law Reform Commission (WA) and as judicial associate to the chief justice of Australia. She has published widely in the areas of law and political theory.

Richard Weller is the Meyerson Chair of Urbanism, professor and chair of landscape architecture, and co-executive director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is former co-director of Room 4.1.3—a design firm acknowledged with a Penn Press monograph (2005) and noted for critical design projects such as the National Museum of Australia.

Weller sits on the board of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) in Washington, is a member of the International Federation of Landscape Architect’s (IFLA) Advisory Circle and is the Creative Director of the interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture LA+.

Contributions from:

• Anne Whiston Spirn reflects upon her personal and professional journey through her long-term engagement with the Mill Creek community in the West Philadelphia Landscape Project.
• Architect and cofounder of the DisOrdinary Architecture Project Jocelyn Boys discusses how designers and policy-makers make assumptions about the “ordinary user” of public space and explores ways of understanding and improving how people with disabilities engage with such spaces.
• Historical geographer Garrett Dash Nelson contemplates the conceptual and practical slippages between understanding community in both its geographical and sociological forms, and what this means for designers seeking to give spatial form to the concept of community.
• A multi-perspective Q+A with BIPOC designers, educators, and artists Kofi Boone, Julian Agyeman, Hanna Kim, Alma du Solier, Jeffrey Hou, Melissa Guerrero, and Kat Engleman confronts the enduring practices of spatial injustice and the need for new processes, engagement, and outcomes for a racially and culturally inclusive future.
• Philosopher and author Mark Kingwell considers the literal ins and outs of the question “What is community?” in the midst of a global pandemic.
• Landscape architect Kate Orff speaks about the ways in which she uses community activism and different practices of engagement to drive better design outcomes.
• Criminologists James Petty + Alison Young open our eyes to the rise of hostile architecture and criminalization of homelessness in public space.
• Designer Chrili Car reflects on lessons learned from working with a self-organized community in a remote village in northern Ghana to masterplan long-term local sustainability and greenbelt projects.
• Ecologist Jodi Hilty, President and Chief Scientist of the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, speaks about the realization of this visionary wildlife-corridor project spanning 3,200 km, two countries, and hundreds of different communities and interests.
• Historic preservationist and planner Francesca Russello Ammon teases out the contradictions in the canonical urban renewal success story of Philadelphia’s Society Hill.
• Landscape architect Jessica Henson gives us the inside story on the intractably complex socio-political and ecological task of master planning a 51-mile swath of the Los Angeles River with a diverse range of user communities.
• Michael Schwarze-Rodrian recounts the extraordinary achievements of the Emscher Landscape Park in Germany’s Ruhrgebiet, where over the last 30 years a working-class community facing the trauma of transition to a post-industrial economy has been sustained by the medium of landscape, without the forms of displacement or gentrification typically associated with high-end greening.
• Urban planner and author of Just Sustainabilities Julian Agyeman elucidates what the culturally inclusive design of public space entails.
• Architect Mario Matamoros delivers a stinging critique of the way in which developers and designers in the Honduran city of Tegucigalpa dupe the public with cynical community consultation so as to anesthetize the possibility of dissent, and
• Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard interviews the CEO of the Federation of Traditional Owner Corporations, Paul Paton and landscape architect Anne-Marie Pisani about working with Indigenous communities in Australia to help facilitate self-determination and connection to their lands.

ISBN: 978-1-954081-00-0
Binding: Softbound
Pages: 124pp
Publication Date: Spring 2021
Size: 8.75” x 10.5” Portrait
World Rights: Available