Forbes Lipschitz

Conventional agriculture comprises the largest anthropogenic land use in the world, with crop, livestock and aquaculture production systems impacting ecologies across multiple scales. Nevertheless these "working landscapes" have been largely absent from landscape architectural discourse--with designers and planners primarily engaging with food production vis-a-vis fringe systems like urban farming. My research explores opportunities for landscape architecture to reframe and reshape conventional working landscapes. I have explored a variety of different productive spaces and systems, from catfish farming in the Mississippi Delta to agricultural drainage networks in the Corn Belt. The resulting research outputs have included a range of visual works for exhibition, essays for edited books and scholarly journals and grant funding for transdisciplinary scholarship. Through representation, design speculation and interdisciplinary collaboration, I seek to expand the working methods of landscape architecture to include spaces of agricultural production.