Landscapes of care: politics, practices, and possibilities

Abstract

Care offers a framework to shift relations with land and suggest alternative possibilities to dominant, and often extractive, landscape practices. With increasing attention to inequities in labour, histories of erasure and exclusion, ongoing harms of colonisation, and the uneven impacts of how climate change reshapes landscapes, care has come to describe hopeful ideas for how landscapes are researched, maintained, and designed. Yet, care is not a simple solution to complex problems. In reviewing landscapes of care through politics, practices, and possibilities, we assert that care situated in landscape must acknowledge the relationship between the control of land and power, and resist paternalistic modes of care which normalise social and environmental injustices manifest in landscapes. As landscape scholars increasingly engage topics of care, we urge for a more critical politics of care that is reflective of how landscape relations generated through care reveal and remake relationships to power.