Transdisciplinarity and Boundary Work for Landscape Architecture Scholars

To substantively advance sustainability and equity, landscape architecture scholars must reform our own scholarly norms. To increase the influence of our discipline and offer practitioners and communities more relevant knowledge and tools, we can build on our strong tradition of transdisciplinary work to: 1) more credibly affect and be informed by knowledge in other socio-environmental disciplines that study landscapes and communities, and 2) confront our own “two cultures” problem in which science may be misunderstood as limiting creative excellence. To achieve these aims, I suggest we employ the landscape as a transdisciplinary boundary object—recognizing that all landscapes function within dynamic multiscalar socio-environmental systems, and viewing both commonplace and unique landscapes as essential objects of our scholarship. Doing this presents opportunities for individual scholars to serially specialize in different areas of landscape inquiry, teaching and learning from colleagues and communities throughout our careers, and to be credible leaders of transdisciplinary science. It also offers a conceptual frame for activating boundary work between the two cultures within our own discipline. Importantly, it also helps us to be more fully prepared to teach future practitioners to use landscape science in design and planning, empowering the profession to support communities in advancing sustainability and equity.