Unearthing Contextual Foodscapes

<p><b>This research investigates how landscape architecture can engage with foodscapes to enhance their agency in addressing environmental and spatial injustices. The research poses the question: How can landscape architects engage with foodscapes and their role in environmental and spatial justice?</b></p> <p>Concerned with developing new ways of engaging with foodscapes within the landscape architecture discipline, the following sub-questions frame the practice ambitions: How can landscape architects progress urban agriculture initiatives to become more spatially and culturally integrated within the landscape? How can landscape architects unearth and contextualise foodscapes?</p> <p>Through an experimental practice-driven methodology, the research first defines the meaning and significance of a contextual foodscape for landscape practice; secondly explores the practice of unearthing environmental and cultural relationships within the landscape concerning food practices; and thirdly produces a body of work that helps envision the application of a contextual foodscape. This is done through engagements with site specific land based relationships in Porirua.</p> <p>Unearthing is a key term defining itself through its practice. In this occasioning unearthing is discovered as the practice of forming a contextual awareness and narrative of a place by critically drawing different environmental, social, cultural and spatial relationships engrained within the landscape. It is a practice that focuses justice in its exposure of spatial relationships and landscapes that are under-appreciated, hidden, marginalised or dominated. Findings from unearthing are found to play out in vision making for a contextual foodscape in Porirua.</p> <p>This research offers insight into food’s powerful role in environmental and spatial issues challenging current landscape practices . By allowing the practice of contextual foodscaping to enter landscape architecture, this research demonstrates how landscape practice can impact its design approaches to environmental and spatial injustice.</p>