Land ownership is the legal and cultural system of assigning exclusive rights to use, control, and transfer land. It is a human fiction that turns ground into property, bordered and tradable. Eventually, based on this fiction, physical properties and structures will emerge that reflect borders. Nonhumans and natural processes do not recognize such borders—watersheds, habitats, soils, and atmospheres move freely across property lines. Yet ownership governs how land is exploited, protected, or enclosed, often concentrating power and excluding communities. Environmental ontologies that ignore ownership risk overlooking the strongest force shaping landscapes today. Land ownership appears to be in radicalisation, as property values have risen significantly over the past decade, and the top 1% is buying land at an unprecedented pace.
Organized by The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), the online event commemorates the occupation of the Alcatraz Island by the Indigenous people. On March 9, 1964, five Lakota Sioux briefly occupied Alcatraz Island, declaring it “Indian Land.” A longer and more influential occupation followed from November 20, 1969, to June 11, 1971, when the group “Indians […]
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, […]
Sara Eichner is a visual artist and designer with a keen interest in data visualisations and cartography. She works with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and programming languages like Python and uses design software to translate data into comprehensible visual stories. Her work is people-centred and she often uses data to represent less-heard voices. Eichner is […]
Günther Vogt probably needs no introduction in our profession; he has been an important practitioner for a couple of decades now, appreciated globally for his rich, non-linear and adventurous design approach. Initially, his education was more in the direction of botany. He later shifted to landscape architecture by studying in Rapperswil, Switzerland. After his study […]
In this essay, Zaš Brezar writes about the role of urban roofs in our collective memory. Illustrating the meaning of roofs through a selection of cultural references from films and music. The article is a part of Living Roofs focus on Landezine that is going on in October and November 2022.
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