Landscapes in the Making

How are landscapes created? Landscapes in the Making goes beyond professional design and planning to examine the social range of knowledge, technique, and imagination in the making and meaning of landscapes—from the work of quarrying and construction to that of cultivation, maintenance, stewardship, salvage, reclamation, ritual, and remembrance.

Deploying an array of documentary, visual, and field sources, this volume brings to life the agency and skill of diverse and often disregarded peoples, in a range of periods and places, working in often demanding, precarious, and coercive conditions.

Chapters focus on the physical and social worlds of trash dumps, gravel pits, and abandoned canneries as well as on construction sites for churches, palaces, parks, gardens, and government buildings. In addition to addressing local place-making, the volume surveys wider regional and international geographies of movement, both of people and materials.

The landscapes described are far from finished—they are provisional and always in the making.