From novel to relational: An approach to care for relational landscapes

Abstract

Abstract Novel landscapes, landscapes altered by humans but not actively managed by humans, have come to represent the resiliency of nature to thrive in the context of otherwise overwhelming losses of biodiversity. While novel landscapes may contribute much needed ecological value among declining habitats, discourses about novel ecosystems within landscape architecture have focused primarily on their normative categorization, emergence and performance. Such framings overlook how these landscapes exist as capitalist ruins among economic neglect and abandonment. This focus risks reproducing the same economic and political structures that initially produced the conditions for novel landscapes to emerge. Bringing science and technology studies and feminist care ethics into conversation with practices of landscape architecture, I consider how novel ecologies might be better understood as relational landscapes with distinct and co-constituted histories, memories and timelines. Framing novelty through relational ontologies, I form a theoretical framework for a more radical notion of care ethics rooted in an attention to and responsibility for the uneven ways that human-dominated action has impacted historically overlooked landscapes.