Timothy McLellan

This project will explore the aspirations of landscape architects to build sustainable urban futures through the design of ‘nature-based green infrastructure’. Through participant observation across a variety of Thai landscape architecture organizations, I will examine initiatives to create nature-mimicking urban landscapes capable of delivering infrastructural functions such as water purification, recreational space, and flood management. I will focus especially on three key themes. First, the ways in which proponents of green infrastructure present it as a movement away from the modernist nature/culture binary, as well as the ways green infrastructure may nevertheless reproduce key assumptions of modernist environmental management. This includes examining how landscape architects understand design as a process of simultaneously social and material transformation. Second, the ways in which Thai green infrastructure projects are inspired by Chinese sponge city projects, and how associated Sino-Thai collaborations are shaped by wider Thai discourses about China and the West. Third, I will examine convergence and divergence between the green infrastructure movement and environmental anthropologists’ own efforts to critique and move beyond the nature/culture binary. This examination will in turn provide an entry-point for para-ethnographic dialogue and experimentation in anthropological collaboration with landscape architecture.