How are landscapes actually made? Not designed on paper, but built — by hand, over time, often by people history forgets. Landscapes in the Making turns away from the architect's or planner's vantage point to look instead at the labour, skill, and improvisation behind landscapes of every kind: trash dumps and gravel pits, abandoned canneries, quarry sites, church and palace construction, parks and gardens, government grounds. Edited by cultural geographer Stephen Daniels and architectural historian Dell Upton, the volume draws on documentary, visual, and field sources to recover the agency of the people who physically shaped these places, frequently under demanding or coercive conditions. It also widens the lens outward, tracing how materials and labour moved across regional and international geographies. The landscapes it describes are never finished — always provisional, always still being made.
Key Features
- Contributions spanning multiple continents and centuries, from ancient quarries to twentieth-century industrial sites
- Richly illustrated with photographs, maps, and archival images documenting landscape labour in progress
- Brings together cultural geography, architectural history, and material culture in a single interdisciplinary volume
What You'll Discover
- How everyday sites of labour — dumps, pits, canneries — carry their own histories of skill and making
- The overlooked contributions of workers, tradespeople, and communities typically excluded from landscape and architectural history
- How materials and people moved across regions and borders in the physical construction of place
- Why landscapes are best understood not as finished designs but as ongoing, provisional processes
About the Author
Stephen Daniels is Professor of Cultural Geography, Emeritus, at the University of Nottingham. Dell Upton is Distinguished Research Professor of Architectural History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Professor of Architecture, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley.
Specifications
Format: Hardcover
Dimensions: 21.6 x 26.7 cm
Pages: 388
Language: English
ISBN: 9780884025214
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
Publication Date: 4 February 2025
Perfect For: Landscape architects, cultural geographers, architectural historians, and anyone interested in the physical labour and material histories behind built environments.