We champion underdog landscapes: places that are undervalued, overlooked, and unappreciated. Grounded in the landscapes of our home state of Alabama, we focus our attention on places where these issues are prominently felt: post-industrial cities, infrastructural landscapes, rural landscapes, and coasts. We aim to be both humble enough to admit that we cannot solve these issues on our own and confident enough to tackle them head-on, working with collaborators, partners, and communities. Too often, these issues are oversimplified, reduced to dualities that offer easy answers, papering over richness, complexity, and messiness. We focus our attention on places where issues like climate dynamics, poverty, and the spatial legacies of racial inequity manifest. The world is already being designed, we just believe that it could be better if the vision, imagination, and practical knowledge of landscape architecture are involved. Human impact is inescapable: scientists describe our current age as the ‘Anthropocene’, which literally means the “age of humanity,” because the collective impacts of our civilization on our planet are so broad and pervasive. These choices are design choices, even when they are not made by designers. From forests that are grown and cut to provide timber, to cities dealing with legacies of declining heavy industries, to the streets of new suburbs, our world and our landscapes are shaped by the choices people make. We are motivated by the recognition that design is already everywhere around us.
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