Gareth Doherty

Gareth Doherty is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he is also Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture program and Director of the Critical Landscapes Design Lab. Through the framework of human ecology, Doherty’s teaching, research, and publications consider people-centered issues alongside environmental and aesthetic concerns. Doherty’s research advances methodological discussions on ethnography and participatory methods by asking how a socio-cultural perspective can inspire design innovations. Consequently, his work challenges and expands the theoretical canons upon which we understand landscape architecture.

In Doherty's book, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017), Doherty analyzed a Bahraini category for landscape—green. He spent a year walking through Bahrain, learning local language, talking with people, and recording his encounters with green, as color, space and as an environmental movement. Doherty’s edited books include Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism (Lars Müller publishers, 2018, 2020) and Is Landscape...? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, edited with Charles Waldheim (Routledge, 2015, and China Architecture and Building Press, 2019). Doherty was a founding editor of the New Geographies journal and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color (2011). Doherty edited Ecological Urbanism with Mohsen Mostafavi (Lars Müller Publishers, 2010, revised 2016), which has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, with forthcoming translations in Arabic and Persian. He has published in journals such as Topos, Kerb, Built Environment, Harvard Design Magazine, and Studies in Garden History and Designed Landscapes.

Doherty's recent research projects have centered on landscape-related practices at various sites across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds, specifically in the Arabian Peninsula, West Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Education

• MAgrSc University College Dublin (1995 — 1997)
• Aalborg Universitet
• MLA and Certificate in Urban Design University of Pennsylvania

Companies

• Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture & Director of Master in Landscape Archtecture Program Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2019)
• Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Senior Research Associate, Director of MLA program Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2017)
• Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Senior Research Associate Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2015 — 2017)
• Lecturer Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2010 — 2015)
• Teaching Assistant in Sanskrit and Indian Studies Harvard University (2010 — 2011)
• Visiting Fellow Queensland University of Technology (2003 — 2003)
• Tutor Aarhus School of Architecture (2002 — 2002)
• Senior Associate CHORA Architecture and Urbanism (2000 — 2002)
• Various Donegal County Council (1996 — 2000)

Skills

• Architectures
• AutoCAD
• Ethnography

Other

Design Anthropology, Rhino, Land Use Planning, Design, Mixed-use, Comprehensive Planning, Architecture, Urban, Sustainability, Design Research, Urbanism, Architectural Design, Sustainable Design, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design, Urban Planning