Landscape Futures from the South: Care, Context and Community
University of Cape Town
Our criteria have grown out of ongoing work with postgraduate students, who continue to teach us about the possibilities that emerge when we center care, context and community in landscape architecture practice.
Our selection of student projects reflects a canon-expansive approach that acknowledges diverse perspectives, multiple ways of knowing, and plurality. These projects make visible that which was previously ignored or marginalised, pushing landscape architecture beyond its traditional Euro-American frames through the recognition and elevation of local knowledge systems.
Cape Town’s landscape reveals profound beauty alongside deep socio-spatial inequalities, remarkable resilience amid persistent injustice. These projects hold
space for contradictions: they grapple with messy postcolonial and post-apartheid legacies, cultivating methods that are simultaneously rigorous and speculative. Students demonstrate the capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously, make decisions in uncertain contexts, and acknowledge their assumptions while taking meaningful action.
Central to our selection are projects that embody care and contextual literacy, grounded in the African philosophy of Ubuntu and committed to social, ecological, and spatial justice. Students pursue repair, dignity, and social change through embodied experiences that prioritise who is being heard and how healing might be facilitated through thoughtful design. This represents landscape architecture as cultural practice—recognising that how people feel in spaces, whose voices are heard, and how power dynamics play out are as important as ecological or aesthetic considerations.
We believe the most transformative landscape interventions emerge when students are empowered to follow their own curiosity and intuition. These are fundamentally student-led projects that exist at the intersection of students’ positionality as activists, designers, and researchers. Students bring insights from having lived within these systems, asserting agency in shaping design priorities that resonate with their communities.
These projects showcase how emerging practitioners don’t just design spaces but advance landscape futures through thoughtful and diverse design practice.