With Place: Toward Landscapes of Healing and Collective Futures

Abstract

What does it mean to be held by the land, and to hold it in return? This thesis is motivated by histories of forced land dispossession, environmental degradation, and colonial structures that have disrupted relationships between land, its communities, and cosmological understandings of place. It asks how landscape architecture can support healing through restoring these relationships, and how this process opens possibilities for collective self-determination. Situated at the southwestern edge of Golden Gate Park, the project draws from Indigenous relational frameworks, understanding land as deeply interconnected and shaped through ongoing relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. Through speculative visualization and radical imagination, it embraces the dynamic forces of the site as active participants in reshaping spatial ontologies — reengaging cosmological relationships to land and opening the capacity to imagine otherwise. This thesis recenters landscape architecture as a relational practice that creates conditions for collective healing, where renewed relationships to land make more self-determined, sovereign, and collective futures possible.