Garden History & DesignKat Chavez

Design as Cultural and Collective Healing: Learning from Landscape Caretaker Communities in Southern California

This project aims to recognize the work of contemporary landscape and garden caretakers in stewarding an ongoing practice of cultural traditions and knowledge, with a focus on how they facilitate learning, sustenance, and medicine-making along the way. Through deep engagement with a network of community-led projects based on the land, we will explore how residential and community gardens shared by communities of color in urban and suburban environments of Southern California contribute to the health of communities and their ability to sustain and expand cultural knowledge and collective healing. Building on the foundations of scholarship in the study of community gardens, this project will explore methods of creative research to find learning opportunities among humans, plants, and animals. With this work, I ask: How might landscape architects learn from the caretakers of residential and community gardens to find new ways of embedding healing work in their design projects?