1 Introduction
At a time when landscape planning and design are increasingly shaped by digital tools, globalization, and standardized workflows, Gareth Doherty’s
Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design offers a clear and compelling argument: landscape is not an object that can be fully abstracted and analyzed from a distance, but a complex living system that can only be understood through bodily immersion, multisensory perception, and sustained interaction
[1]. Through a series of practice-based cases, the book demonstrates that fieldwork is not merely a tool for information collection in the early stages of design, but a foundational method, methodology, and ethical stance that permeates research, teaching, and design practice as a whole.
2 Fieldwork: From Professional Method to Ethical Stance and Way of Life
2.1 A New Position on Fieldwork
Through five carefully selected cases—ranging from rural plazas in Ireland and the paradox of green in Bahrain, to collaborative research in the Bahamas and slow ethnographic work within Afro-Bahian communities and religious sites in Salvador—Doherty systematically reveals the diversity and flexibility of fieldwork practices. Rather than offering a “universal recipe” or standardized procedure, he emphasizes the need to calibrate research approaches in response to variations in site scale, cultural context, and design challenges. The concept of “embodied engagement, ” repeatedly highlighted in the book, is particularly significant. It can be understood as a concrete elaboration of Günther Vogt’s assertion that “You must expose yourself, as a body, to this landscape. What are your impressions, your feelings? And then you can start to design with it.”
[2] In this sense, the role of landscape architects needs to shift from an external planner to an insider participant. Through full bodily presence and prolonged interaction (walking, observing, conversing, participating in daily activities and even rituals), one becomes one with the site and its users, thereby transcending purely rational data analysis to gain a bodily, emotional, and multi-sensory deep understanding of the landscape.
[1]2.2 Disciplinary Connections Grounded in “Relationships”
Drawing on the sociological notion of “bridging”
[3], one of the book’s major contributions lies in its ability to bridge the gaps between description and prescription, reflection and action, and between landscape planning and design and anthropology
[4–
6]. Doherty argues for combining ethnographic “thick description” and participant observation with the inherent projective quality of landscape planning and design—understood here as a future-oriented, constructive imagination
[1]—as well as its imaginative capacity. As the book states, “Anthropology is about understanding relationships, and what is landscape architecture if it’s not about the construction of relationships?”
[1] This interdisciplinary synthesis offers a richer toolkit for addressing complex challenges such as climate change, cultural conflict, and social injustice. Thick prescription is the most crucial instrument for forging such connections. It proposes that design actions aimed at spatial change must be rooted in a profound understanding of the ecological and social relationships embedded within a site; design, therefore, emerges as a responsible intervention that arises naturally from a thick description of the place.
[1]2.3 Fieldwork as a Way of Life
The deeper significance of Landscape Fieldwork lies in its elevation of fieldwork from a professional technique to an ethical stance, and ultimately to a way of life for landscape practitioners. It calls on designers to become “perpetual students, ” continually learning from land, communities, and non-human life. In an era marked by the simultaneous pressures of climate change and civilizational conflict, such a humble yet resilient mode of practice may be closer to the root of contemporary challenges than any single technical solution. Doherty reminds us that landscape is not an object for detached observation, but a substrate that demands deep engagement and co-existence. To value observation is to relinquish the illusion of control and to embrace the complexity inherent in participatory processes. The book thus stands not only as an essential text for Landscape Architecture, but also as a methodological and ethical guide for practitioners seeking grounding in an unstable world: only through the honesty of stepping barefoot onto the land and the patience of listening to all forms of life can we design communities, ways of living, and futures that do not impose themselves upon the earth, but grow from within it.
3 Practical Pathways for Planning and Design Disciplines
Landscape Fieldwork offers a range of valuable insights for educators and practitioners in fields like urban and rural planning, and landscape planning and design.
1) From site survey to engaged fieldwork: redefining the pedagogical starting point. Traditional site surveys should be upgraded into immersive fieldwork studios, requiring students not only to engage with sites at the outset of a project but to return to them at regular or irregular intervals throughout the entire design process. Deliverables should extend beyond a single analytical report to include continuously updated field journals incorporating sketches, photographs, interview excerpts, and personal reflections. By breaking the linear procedure of “survey–analysis–design–representation, ” this approach establishes a cyclical, iterative workflow in which design decisions remain in constant dialogue with evolving site understanding.
2) Promoting multi-modal documentation to overcome the limits of single-media representation. Students should be required to employ at least three different media in field documentation—such as hand sketches, thematic photography, audio interviews, short videos, and material samples—and to analyze and synthesize insights across media through structured workshops. As digital tools such as CAD and GIS become ubiquitous, students’ sensitivity to real environments may be diminished; guiding them to recognize that no single medium can capture the latent cues embedded in a site is therefore essential.
3) Introducing “minimal scene writing” to cultivate narrative capacity and critical imagination. Drawing on Doherty’s discussion of the “minimal scene” approach, students may be assigned specific micro-sites (e.g., a street-corner bench, a newsstand) and asked to observe them within a limited timeframe (e.g., 15 min), followed by a short narrative text of approximately 300 words describing events that may occur or have occurred. This exercise directly links description with projection, encouraging students to develop grounded imagination based on close observation, and serves as an effective means of fostering humanistic awareness and critical imagination.
4) Designing role-playing and scenario simulation in class. Classroom settings can simulate public consultations or stakeholder coordination meetings, with students assuming the roles of developers, officials, local residents, environmental advocates, and others. Debates and negotiations are then conducted based on insights derived from fieldwork. This approach concretizes the multiple—and often conflicting—meanings① attributed to field-based information, enabling students to grasp the political and governance dimensions of design: design is not merely the shaping of space, but the mediation of social relationships.
① Referred to here as “tension, ” a dynamic yet generative state of balance between two or more contradictory or even opposing forces, a concept widely discussed in Anthropology and Sociology.
5) Advocating collective rather than isolated fieldwork through team-based investigation. Inspired by Doherty’s practice in the Bahamas project, students from different disciplinary backgrounds—such as Planning, Architecture, and Sociology—should be encouraged to conduct fieldwork in teams and to compare and integrate their findings in subsequent stages. Cross-disciplinary co-observation helps overcome the limitations of individual perspectives, fosters more comprehensive site understanding, and anticipates the collaborative conditions of professional practice.
6) Positioning reflexivity as a core criterion in fieldwork assessment. Evaluation frameworks should assign significant weight to reflexivity, focusing not only on what information students have collected, but on how they understand their relationship with the site, how they critically examine cultural biases, and how they document uncertainty and transformation during the research process. This shift supports the transition from technical executors to reflective practitioners and plays a critical role in cultivating professional ethics and social responsibility.
7) Requiring thick prescription as a foundational component of final outcomes. Doherty’s contribution to fieldwork in planning and design lies mainly in his proposition and emphasis on thick prescription. Design delivery should be accompanied by a thick prescription report that clearly demonstrates how the proposals emerge from specific field findings, with corresponding evidence traceable within field journals. Planning and design documents should move beyond purely formal solutions and avoid self-generated problem statements, self-imposed constraints, and self-referential narratives. Fieldwork should no longer be treated as an isolated, dispensable preliminary phase, but as a core method that persists throughout the entire process, thereby enabling a genuine integration of research and design.
4 Transcendent Action Potential in Balancing the Tension Between Ideals and Reality
While Landscape Fieldwork strongly advocates immersive field-based investigation, it also inevitably reveals certain internal limitations. First, the method’s heavy reliance on time and resources renders it relatively “uneconomical” in practical terms. Long-term immersion—such as the year-long study described in the Bahrain case—is difficult to replicate within conventional planning and design cycles, a constraint that may discourage early-career researchers and practitioners operating under tight schedules and limited budgets. Second, methodological tensions also emerge. Although in-depth case studies can generate thick description, their context-specific nature constrains the generalizability of findings, making direct transfer to other projects challenging. The third, and more profound, limitation lies in the disjunction between knowledge and action. The slow tempo of ethnographic research often conflicts with the urgency of planning and design decision-making. The reflection presented in the Bahrain case is particularly telling. While researchers were still engaged in deep interpretation, date palm groves with significant ecological and cultural value had already been destroyed. This reality underscores the potential lag of fieldwork in influencing real-world decisions. Moreover, although the book emphasizes reflexivity, it pays insufficient sustained attention to the researcher’s own positional power and to the challenge of maintaining “role neutrality” during processes of knowledge extraction, leaving the ethical question of “who has the authority to speak for the landscape” only partially addressed.
Taken together, these limitations point to a core dilemma: a persistent gap exists between idealized immersive research and the constraints of real-world projects, ethical complexity, and the effectiveness of action. These issues neither diminish nor negate the scholarly and practical value of the book; rather, they create critical openings for further exploration. Building on Doherty’s methodological insights, and from the perspective of exploring possible solutions, this article therefore proposes several fieldwork strategies more closely aligned with planning and design practice
[7], seeking to transform idealized thick description into a practical tool that integrates ethical responsibility with action capacity.
4.1 Methodological Strategies: From Long-Term Immersion to Agile Deep Engagement
To mitigate tensions between time and resources, an agile fieldwork strategy based on layering, phasing, and focusing can be adopted. In practice, project timelines may be divided into research stages of varying depth. In the initial phase, the objective is wide-angle scanning and hotspot identification. Within the first one to two weeks after project initiation, a basic cognitive framework of the site can be rapidly established using multi-source data. This may include “digital fieldwork, ” such as systematic analysis of satellite imagery, geotagged social media content, local news, and online forum discussions, to quickly locate spatial patterns, build preliminary understanding of cultural and historical contexts, and familiarize the team with public issues. In parallel, focused group reconnaissance can be organized: cross-disciplinary teams with ecological, social, and economic expertise conduct intensive joint site visits (Fig. 1), resident discussions, and random on-site interviews. Through the rapid exchange of multiple perspectives, key zones of tension—such as ecologically sensitive areas, zones of social conflict, and spatial use bottlenecks—can be efficiently identified.
The intermediate phase may then shift toward in-depth investigation. Short-term but high-intensity investigations can be conducted around identified hotspots or critical issues. For example, several consecutive days of behavior-mapping observation can be carried out in specific residential neighborhoods, public squares, or rural settlements, supplemented by focused micro-interviews (15 ~ 20 min each) or deliberative meetings. This approach enables deeper understanding of the drivers behind observed spatial phenomena, residents’ demands, and future expectations.
In the later phase, a mechanism of sustained dialogue can be established by maintaining long-term contact with key informants through regular communication or online community platforms. In this way, one-off field investigations are extended into an ongoing process of social learning, partially compensating for the limitations imposed by insufficient immersion time.
4.2 Ethical and Practical Strategies: From Knowledge Extraction to Capacity Co-building
To address the challenge of researcher neutrality in knowledge production, the core orientation of fieldwork should shift from knowledge extraction toward community empowerment (Fig. 2). During the early and intermediate stages of fieldwork, spatial cognition workshops can be organized for local residents, reinforcing participation through co-production and ensuring that lived experience and local knowledge are meaningfully recognized
[8]. Participatory resource mapping is an effective method in this regard. Research teams provide simplified base maps and invite residents to mark places and routes of importance using symbols or sticky notes—such as safe activity spaces, areas causing disturbance, heritage trees, children’s informal play areas, viewpoints, and daily movement paths. In doing so, professional investigation processes are transformed into collective knowledge-building activities.
At the same time, the democratization of design tools should be promoted. Certain basic analytical instruments—such as simple devices for measuring wind speed, noise levels, and light intensity, along with cameras and audio recorders—can be entrusted to residents, accompanied by necessary training. This enables communities to gradually develop the capacity to monitor and evaluate their own environments. In this process, establishing a complete “feedback–iteration” loop is crucial. Research outputs, including preliminary analytical diagrams and design concepts, should be communicated back to the community in accessible formats—such as diagrams, models, and short videos—and feedback should be actively collected. Subsequent design revisions should explicitly respond to this feedback, forming a transparent cycle of “research–feedback–refinement” that ensures outcomes genuinely serve local needs.
4.3 Action-Oriented Strategies: From Delayed Interpretation to Timely Intervention
To overcome the disconnection between research and action, it is necessary to introduce an “action–research” model that tightly integrates field investigation with micro-interventions and prototype testing (Fig. 3). On the one hand, drawing on practices from tactical urbanism, low-cost and short-cycle spatial prototypes can be designed and implemented during fieldwork to address identified issues. Through co-created temporary installations—such as informal chess corners—“fieldwork in action” generates knowledge that is more immediate, vivid, and directly grounded in lived experience
[9]. On the other hand, final deliverables should not be limited to comprehensive research reports. Instead, they should include a set of operational knowledge products that communities and subsequent designers can directly use, such as community space management guidelines, concise manuals or activity toolkits derived from field findings, and briefing documents tailored to different decision-making actors (e.g., subdistrict offices, property managers, local businesses). In this way, core insights are translated into clear and actionable recommendations.
The “transcendent actions” proposed here do not seek to negate existing methodologies, but rather to reframe the role of fieldwork by articulating a form of practical wisdom in which action, experience, imagination, and cognition are interwoven. Fieldwork should be understood as a collaborative and action-oriented framework that permeates the entire design process, rather than as an isolated preliminary phase. Through methodological optimization via agile deep engagement, ethical practice through capacity co-building, and action orientation through timely intervention, fieldwork can continue to function as a bridge between profound understanding and effective action under complex real-world constraints, fulfilling its promise to reveal realities, empower communities, and catalyze positive change. Landscape Fieldwork provides a transformative core framework for landscape architecture education, elevating fieldwork from a technical tool to a mindset of design thinking and professional ethics. It points the way toward pedagogical innovation to cultivate future designers capable of grounding themselves in reality, connecting all things, and taking responsible actions.
5 Conclusions
Approximately three months ago, shortly after reading Landscape Fieldwork, the basic structure of this article had already taken shape. However, the formal writing process was abruptly interrupted by the unexpected passing of Professor Kongjian Yu. Several weeks earlier, as emotions gradually settled and the author prepared to revisit and refine the manuscript, an alumna shared a personal account of professional experience. She sorrowfully yet vividly recounted a young engineer’s memory of participating in fieldwork alongside Professor Yu: during a site investigation for the Liangshui River waterfront enhancement and ecological restoration project in Beijing, the engineer encountered Professor Yu in person for the first time. From the outset, Professor Yu led the group with visible enthusiasm, often requiring others to quicken their pace to keep up. He continuously documented the site through photography, alternately pausing to observe from afar, surveying the surroundings, stepping off the riverbank to explore adjacent spaces, and engaging in animated discussions around drawings with team members (Fig. 4). The entire site walk covered more than 10 km along the river (approximately 11 km of the total length). By lunchtime, most participants were visibly exhausted, yet Professor Yu remained energetic, systematically sharing his on-site observations and key principles of fieldwork methodology. Even before the meal was served, an entirely new vision of river governance had begun to take shape within the collective imagination of those present. The engineer later reflected that such an intensely immersive, field-driven cognitive experience was unprecedented in his own educational and professional background. Today, the first phase of the Liangshui River project has been completed. What was once a site people hurried past while holding their breath has been transformed into a vibrant waterfront space, warmly embraced by local residents (Fig. 5).
There is little doubt that Professor Yu was a fieldworker endowed with exceptional capacity for transcendent action. The ideas and practices articulated in his works—Landscape: Culture, Ecology, and Perception; Tracing the Roots of the Ideal Human Settlement: From the African Savanna to the Peach Blossom Spring; Returning to the Land; among others—are deeply grounded in his sustained and immersive field experience. Every page of these writings bears clear witness to the profound influence of fieldwork on the generation of thought and the enactment of practice.
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