The Social Aftermaths of Landscape Architecture: Urban Parks and Green Gentrification

Abstract

To date, the scholarship of landscape architecture has ignored the evolving research on green gentrification, which studies the mechanisms behind the social aftermaths of urban environmental improvements. The paper uses a case study analysis to prove that landscape architecture practice shares with other planning professions and policy makers the responsibility for the displacement of residents following environmental improvements. The paper analyses the inclusion of social structures, social justice, and the social impacts of projects in the professional discourse, scholarship, and practitioners' design discourse. The interpretations of the case study and the scholarship maintain that there is a desire to include social structures and social justice in the discipline's traditional mandate for preservation and representation of the relationship between culture and nature. However, partially admitted deficiencies in tradition, knowledge, and methodology have thwarted this goal in both the practice and scholarship of landscape architecture. The research on the social and economic benefits of a project’s performance is uncritical of the lack of assessment of the detrimental social outcomes of projects. By demonstrating and criticising the state of the art concerning the treatment of social structures in landscape architecture, the paper attempts to expand the discussion about the discipline's scope, performance, pedagogy, and research.