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Designers and planners quoted in a 2020 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) event report say erasure is challenged by sharing decision-making power, co-producing knowledge with communities, preserving cultural memory, and confronting difficult questions about race, disability, displacement, and environmental justice. Simply inviting residents to a meeting is not enough: their knowledge must shape the project and remain visible in its outcomes.
The discussion took place at Cut|Fill, a two-day virtual “unconference” organized by Urban Studio and Ink Landscape Architects. The account is a report of what named speakers said, not a survey of the profession or evidence that these recommendations produced measured results.
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What Cut|Fill was—and what its report establishes
Jared Green’s August 15, 2020 article in The Dirt, the publication of the American Society of Landscape Architects, covered Cut|Fill, a virtual gathering focused on race, equity, and landscape architecture. Unlike a conventional conference with a fixed program, the unconference let participants set the agenda, create discussion groups, dissolve them, and exchange knowledge and resources over two days.
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The event’s central question was: “how can landscape architects design with empathy and end dismissive behavior towards people of color?” The answers below belong to the speakers and to Green’s report of their discussion. They should be read as proposals for practice and interpretation, not as a consensus standard or a tested intervention.
What erasure means in landscape architecture and planning
Erasure can remove a community from a place
Justin Garrett Moore, then executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission, linked erasure to urban renewal, displacement, and gentrification. In his account, a neighborhood does not disappear through one isolated decision. The process can take years of investment, policy choices, construction, and rising costs that make it harder for the people who built a community to remain there.
Moore captured the emotional and historical stakes in the sentence: “Imagine the place you love is erased. This has happened to people of color for generations.” His point is not that every redevelopment project has the same outcome, but that designers must recognize how physical change can also be the loss of social networks, institutions, memories, and the right to stay.
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Moore described a panel recording that was edited so that only the white speakers remained. The example connects place-based erasure with representational erasure: even when people of color participate, their presence and expertise can be removed from the version that circulates publicly.
Tamika Butler, described in the article as a planning and equity professional, addressed the unstable boundary between invisibility and scrutiny: “If you inhabit a black body or are disabled, you are so invisible. That is until you’re not.” Her observation points to a pattern in which a person may be ignored in routine decisions, then suddenly treated as highly visible when a conflict, safety concern, or symbolic moment draws attention.
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For a project team, the implication is practical. A participation list, photograph, or quote does not prove that a community has been represented fairly. Teams need to ask whose knowledge was recorded, whose recommendations survived editing, and which people can see their contribution in the final decision.
Why invitation alone is not meaningful engagement
Co-create knowledge instead of extracting comments
Maria Arquero de Alarcon, then an associate professor of architecture and urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, described a method that changes the role of residents from respondents to knowledge partners: “One important methodology is ‘co-creating and co-producing knowledge together in spaces of inclusion.’”
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Give participants influence over decisions and outcomes
Ulysses Sean Vance, then an associate professor of architecture at Temple University focused on universal and inclusive design, drew a sharp distinction: “Too often, ‘involvement is done to a community; engagement is done to them.’” The wording identifies a power problem. A meeting can be held for residents while the agenda, budget, schedule, and success criteria remain controlled elsewhere.
Meaningful engagement requires an identifiable route from contribution to decision. Participants should know which choices are open, who has authority, when decisions will be made, and how their recommendations changed the work. If a suggestion cannot be adopted, the team should explain why rather than allowing silence to imply agreement.
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| Question | Symbolic or limited involvement | Engagement with community influence |
|---|---|---|
| Who defines the problem? | The professional team sets the problem before residents arrive. | Residents help frame the problem and identify what counts as success. |
| How is knowledge treated? | Comments are collected as opinions alongside a finished technical brief. | Lived experience and professional analysis are combined to produce the brief. |
| What power do participants have? | People may speak, but decision rights remain unexplained. | The team states which decisions participants can shape and when. |
| Where does input appear? | Attendance is reported, with little trace of what changed. | Drawings, specifications, priorities, or phasing show how input affected the outcome. |
| What happens after a disagreement? | Objections are treated as delay or resistance. | The team documents the conflict, responds to it, and records the final rationale. |
This comparison is an interpretation of the distinctions made by Arquero de Alarcon and Vance; the Cut|Fill report does not rank engagement models or provide a scoring system.
How cultural memory can survive in a changed landscape
Read the landscape for knowledge that official histories omit
Austin Allen used South Carolina rice cultivation as an example of cultural knowledge that remains embedded in a landscape. African knowledge and farming practices brought by enslaved people helped shape the region’s rice economy and its physical systems. Allen’s example, as reported at Cut|Fill, shows that a landscape can retain the imprint of a marginalized community even when the people and histories behind it have been overlooked in conventional accounts.
The article does not present a complete history of South Carolina rice cultivation. Its point is methodological: designers should ask what skills, labor, technologies, names, stories, and relationships made a place possible before deciding what the place means today.
Make memory consequential, not merely decorative
Commemorative signs or a historical theme can acknowledge a past without changing who benefits from the present project. A stronger approach connects memory to decisions about access, programming, materials, planting, interpretation, and stewardship. Community members can help determine which histories are accurate, which names should be restored, what should remain visible, and who will maintain the work.
For construction and landscape teams, that means bringing cultural-history questions into site investigation and concept development rather than adding them after the design is fixed. It also means paying attention to living custodians of memory: residents, cultural organizations, elders, workers, and descendants whose knowledge may not appear in a standard property or engineering record.
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Why intersectionality changes the conversation
Design for people who experience more than one barrier
Butler connected race, disability, and visibility, arguing that designers must recognize how different forms of exclusion overlap. Her street-intersection analogy described conflict and friction: intersections are places where forces meet, and they require active attention rather than a promise that everyone will move smoothly through.
An accessible ramp, a public meeting, or a new park can still fail people whose needs are considered separately or too late. A Black disabled resident may face barriers that are not captured by a race-only or disability-only checklist. The same is true for people whose age, gender, income, language, housing status, or immigration history affects how they use and experience a site.
Create room for candid disagreement
The speakers’ call for “brave spaces” refers to a willingness to discuss difficult social and environmental justice questions openly. It should not be treated as a guarantee that any meeting is automatically safe. A candid process needs clear expectations, skilled facilitation, ways to report harm, and enough time for disagreement to be understood rather than rushed out of the room.
Questions worth putting on the table include: Who may be displaced by the project? Which environmental burdens are being shifted elsewhere? Who controls the land after construction? Whose safety is prioritized when uses conflict? What happens when a community’s preferred outcome differs from the owner’s schedule or budget? Avoiding these questions can preserve a calm meeting while reproducing the very exclusions the process claims to address.
Empathy is an ongoing relationship, not a quick fix
Steven Lewis, then a principal at ZGF, described moving between Black and white social worlds and the effort required to build understanding. He said, “There is self-realization as a young Black person that jars you.” In the article’s account, Lewis urged empathy and care while warning against quick fixes.
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That warning matters for project teams. Empathy is not a substitute for changing who sets priorities, who controls resources, or who can challenge a decision. It is an ongoing practice of listening, learning, and maintaining relationships through the uncomfortable parts of a project. A team may need to return to a community after a design revision, acknowledge an earlier mistake, or alter a schedule when the original process excluded people.
A source-grounded workflow for project teams
The Cut|Fill report does not test a step-by-step program. The following workflow translates its themes into questions a construction or landscape team can use; it should be adapted to the project, jurisdiction, and community.
- Map the people and histories connected to the site. Identify current residents, displaced groups, workers, cultural organizations, disability advocates, and stewardship networks. Review how earlier development, zoning, infrastructure, or environmental decisions affected them.
- State the decisions that are genuinely open. Before inviting participation, list the choices that can still change: program, access, circulation, materials, planting, phasing, maintenance, mitigation, or interpretation. Do not present a predetermined design as a consultation.
- Set decision rights and compensation clearly. Explain who decides, how recommendations reach that decision-maker, and how participants will be paid or otherwise supported for substantial expertise. If a constraint is fixed, disclose it at the beginning.
- Co-produce the brief. Use walks, mapping, interviews, workshops, translated materials, accessible formats, and other methods chosen with participants. Treat observations about memory, safety, displacement, and daily use as inputs to the technical brief, not as anecdotes filed separately.
- Show the chain from input to design. Keep a public decision log or annotated drawings that identify what changed because of community knowledge. When a recommendation is not adopted, record the reason, the responsible authority, and any alternative response.
- Test for intersectional effects. Review the proposal with people who experience overlapping barriers. Examine access, cost, safety, environmental exposure, construction disruption, and the possibility that improvements could accelerate displacement.
- Plan accountability after completion. Name who will maintain cultural elements, monitor access, respond to harm, and revisit the project. Participation that ends at the ribbon cutting leaves communities with no influence over the conditions that follow.
Signals that participation has real influence
A team can examine its own process without claiming that a checklist proves justice. Useful signals include:
- Community members helped define the project question, not only react to a finished concept.
- The team can identify specific drawings, specifications, budgets, or schedules changed through community input.
- Participants know which decisions remain open and who can approve a change.
- Historical and cultural knowledge affects site organization, naming, programming, or stewardship rather than appearing only in promotional text.
- People facing overlapping barriers were able to participate in accessible formats and influence the same decisions as other participants.
- Disagreement and rejected recommendations are documented with reasons.
- Accountability continues through construction, opening, and maintenance.
Warning signs point in the opposite direction: a single late meeting, praise for diversity without shared authority, edited stories that remove uncomfortable voices, or a final design that cannot show what participation changed.
What the 2020 account can—and cannot—tell us
Green’s article supports a clear account of the Cut|Fill discussion and the positions of its named speakers. It records concerns about displacement, gentrification, representational erasure, cultural memory, intersectionality, and empathy. It also records the event’s approximate online attendance of 500 people.
It does not establish the current positions of the speakers, describe the present state of the landscape-architecture profession, or prove that any recommendation reduced displacement or increased community control. No outcome statistics, comparative projects, or independent transcript are supplied. The quotations are reproduced from the article’s event report, not checked against a complete recording.
The practical lesson for landscape and construction work
The speakers’ challenge is not to add a more welcoming tone to an unchanged process. It is to change how a project knows a place and who has authority over what happens there. Communities of color should be treated as participants and co-producers whose knowledge can alter the brief, the design, the construction choices, and the long-term stewardship plan.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsThat approach also requires accepting friction. Difficult conversations about race, disability, displacement, and environmental justice may expose conflicts that a conventional consultation would hide. Addressing them early, documenting decisions, preserving cultural memory, and maintaining relationships after construction are ways to resist erasure without pretending that empathy alone resolves structural power.
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