Halloween evening in Brooklyn, New York. Outside, a menagerie of children milled the sidewalks in spooky costumes seeking offerings of candy. At the same time, a smaller coalition of diverse students, faculty, and researchers gathered inside Higgins Hall at Pratt Institute to engage in a tricky debate over public trailways, the return of indigenous lands, and experimental farming collectives in the Deep American South. Introducing: the Landscape Seminar Series.

The Landscape Seminar Series is an initiative launched within Pratt’s new Master of Landscape Architecture Program. The series aims to overcome the stalemate of the lecture format, leveling the field of conversation to allow for a moderated discussion between practicing professionals and students engaging with questions of land-based learning. Each seminar gathers speakers from associated disciplines that use landscape architectural principles or methods in their practice. Past participants include urban theorist Neil Brenner, who shared his research on the rapacious material metabolisms of cities in contemporary supply-chain capitalism, and public horticulturalist and historian Abra Lee, who presented research on horticultural education and garden history at Black colleges and among Black communities during Reconstruction in the Southern United States. In my own opinion as a student in the MLA program, the series creates an open dialogue that expands and deepens the field of landscape architecture, creating nuanced and thoughtful opportunities to learn from each other in ways that depart from traditional academic lectures.

The most recent seminar invited architect and scholar Keller Easterling to present unpublished research on a project entitled “ATTTNT”. Easterling is best known for her analysis of the opaque systems and spatial typologies that mediate the form and function of global capital and how they manifest in real estate and urban design, as well as imaginative provocations for activists on how and why to undermine those systems. Her books, essays, and media exhibitions investigate infrastructural politics and contemporary media landscapes, challenge techno-solutionism, and champion opportunistic hybrid strategies for designers and thinkers that embrace complexity in order to build a more just and enduring society.

The event began with a reading of the Pratt Living Land Acknowledgement, a document acknowledging the theft of indigenous land and the Black communities that Pratt is built on and the responsibilities this legacy implies. Reading this document takes time. It occurs to me that the time spent reading this document aloud helps to affirm our collective commitment to justice as designers. Easterling’s proposal grapples with exactly this; the ATTTNT offers a theoretical proposal to connect stolen territories –  public recreational space, historic national monuments, and private, cooperative-led land projects –  into a “lumpy and patchy” collection of landscapes designated for Black and Indigenous reparations.

To discuss this proposal, Easterling sat in conversation with Scott Ruff, Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture, and Rosetta S. Elkin, Associate Professor and Academic Director of Landscape Architecture. Faculty lined the front rows and chairs along the side of the room, with students from different disciplines filling the rest of the space. All of those who had registered were sent an unpublished draft of Easterling’s proposal to read in advance, eliminating the need for a lengthy presentation and opening the door for questions.

Easterling’s speculative project begins by mapping physically adjacent but seemingly unrelated landscapes: the backpacker’s destination Appalachian Trail, stretching from Georgia to Maine; the intersection of the publicly owned Tennessee Valley Authority and the Trail of Tears, the pathway along which Indigenous people were forcibly relocated from their lands to reservations in the American West; and the Natchez Trace Parkway, a New Deal highway project conceived of and organized by a white woman of southern high society as a 444-mile monument to Manifest Destiny. Hence, the title: AT=Appalachian Trail, TT=Trail of Tears, NT= Natchez Trace (ATTTNT).

Alongside these sprawling interstate territories, Easterling’s research draws connections with grassroots collectives in the southern United States. Across a cultural landscape rife with violence, utopian communities sought to establish viable agricultural cooperatives as part of the struggle for civil rights and Black self-determination. A longstanding and rhizomatic effort that rarely receives just recognition, Easterling maps this ecosystem of farms and land tenure experiments led by Black and interracial collectives whose hyper-localized communes developed in solidarity and reciprocity with anticolonial organizing for public land reform in the Global South.

The ATTTNT proposal is thoughtful and inclusive in scope. How often do projects reckon with the nested injustices of racial disparities, indigenous dispossession, and environmental degradation? The fibrous roots of the ATTTNT are focused on the messy and deeply interpersonal work of what reparations mean for Black and Indigenous people in the United States. Consider this statement from the ATTTNT proposal:

“Besides yet more progressive proposals, what kind of courage and savvy is needed to influence a dominant white culture or, going further, to infiltrate and deradicalize the conservative, white right wing? This is work that the left has continually avoided while simultaneously asking how it can “help.” And yet the door has always been open to work on reparations. Reparations is white work. How can it be anything but white work? It is not the job of Black and Indigenous people to wrest the resources from a white establishment, it is the job of the white establishment to release their hold on these resources to meet a long overdue and incalculable debt.”

At the outset of the conversation, Ruff turned inquisitively to Easterling asking, “what do you mean ‘this is white work?’”. Easterling referenced the many attempts of Black farmers and land workers to create self-sufficiency and collective prosperity despite the relentless physical and economic violence of white farmers and policymakers to thwart any such attempt. Therefore, the work that white Americans are tasked with is to build the collective capacity to fight and undermine authoritarian regimes and return land and resources to Black and Indigenous leaders who are actively demonstrating better ways of managing landscapes at the local level that serve the ecology and health of the land and the people who live on it, both now and in the future.

Following this, Elkin added that “land is not land is not land”, implying how land is treated within many reparations narratives as a monolithic concept that disregards the specific needs, histories, and appropriate uses of each place’s context. The conversation turned to how each landscape carries a cultural, ecological, and geological individuality that our society either fails to recognize or blatantly disregards, despite dire consequences, such as building permanently in floodplains or incentivizing settlement on hurricane-prone barrier islands.

I reflected on my own relationship with land: before I began my studies in landscape architecture, I could not identify many of the street trees growing in my Brooklyn neighborhood, but I could name the brand of each and every car parked along the same sidewalks. Most of my peers share this experience. Does this signal a worrisome collective ignorance of the landscapes we inhabit? Easterling’s work is renowned for demystifying the entangled systems of transnational power that create spatial hegemonies: consortiums that evade traditional political accountability while exerting tremendous control over the flow of goods and labor, such as Free Trade Zones and the International Organization of Standards, and the interstitial architecture of interstate highways, shipping ports, and telecommunications networks.

Easterling’s presentation builds on her remarkable oeuvre, and sparked a cornucopia of ideas from those assembled: additional territories that could be aligned with the ATTTNT, such as returning the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Oceti Sakowin confederacy, or the challenge of green gentrification as an unintended consequence of new civic space. Others commented on the similarities between the ATTTNT and speculative fiction wrestling with changing climates and fraught political landscapes, such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and on the possibility of ground-truthing the mapping component of the ATTTNT with human-scale methodologies such as theater, ceremony, or even psychoanalysis.

Elkin pointed out that reparations are too often a short-term economic payout, a pittance of cash that does nothing to mend generations of abuse. But the conversation that evening offered an alternative. Easterling’s work turns reparations into a cultural practice that grounds politics in the land itself. Easterling’s work is unique in this way; it does not stop at critique, but is endlessly curious about new possible spatial arrangements and counter-movements. The ATTTNT is not a history, but a design proposal informed by fastidious research.

As a descendant of settlers, I can see the value in this proposal. My ancestors and I have benefited materially and economically from laws rooted in white supremacy, principles that still contour American life. After reading Easterling’s research I reflected on where my own lineage transects the ATTTNT: farmers living on stolen lands in the American midwest, subdivided and sold by the Homestead Act, or home loans for veterans like my grandfather in Philadelphia that were denied to Black veterans who lived through the same wars. As Black feminist scholars and activists continue to remind us, the personal is always political. Hearing Easterling describe the ATTTNT project as “a tangled braid of lines—trails, waterways, and infrastructural corridors that deliberately revisit scars and wounds of modern programs and white supremacy”, I am more hopeful that the landscape of the future will reckon with history in reparative ways. Landscape architects can and must design public places and build modern coalitions that embody the values of liberty and equality that our nations aspire to, just as we must design with great respect for the diverse life of our planet.

The ATTTNT demonstrates how multiscalar methods can serve the public and expand our field. As a student at Pratt, I am encouraged to engage with the wicked problems of the profession. The Landscape Seminar Series intends a “hard reboot for designers to consider the role of academic discourse in their pedagogy.” Instead of dismissing complexity, our program embraces the planetary polycrisis of climate change and economic inequality as a designer’s responsibility. Our universities must create an intellectual environment that supports experimentation and meaningful collaboration within and outside of our institutions, fostering living and dynamic relationships with land. Both students and practitioners would be wise to integrate the kind of pluralistic research that Easterling generously shared with us. Perhaps by forming a “tangled braid” of knowledge and experience, we can design landscapes in ways that acknowledge the past, heal present wounds, and can adapt with an unknowable future.

About the Author

Tim “Teal” Nottage (they/he) is a designer, researcher, and maker with a background in urban planning, environmental justice, and the arts. Their work spans a range of disciplines including immersive installation, sustainable design and construction, composting and urban soil rehabilitation in community gardens, and land-based research and advocacy. They are currently based in Brooklyn, NY (Lenapehoking) and are pursuing a Masters in Landscape Architecture from Pratt Institute.