E48. Sara Zewde: Parks and Liberation‪.‬ The Institute of Black Imagination.

Today’s episode is with landscape architect, designer, urbanist, and public artist Sara Zewde. Sara is the co-founder of Studio Zewde– a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urban design, and public art, as well as an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In this episode, she shares how design has been leveraged as a tool of oppression and how everyone must be involved in the process of thinking about the world they want to create. 
We explore the controversial origins of landscape architecture along with topics that range from Hurricane Katrina not only being a natural disaster but a political failure that ignited her curiosity about the land, architecture being built on the backs of Black women, and ultimately the bold moves we should be making now to engage with the environment. Sara’s story introduces you to the origins of architecture that have been omitted and challenge us to participate in the design of being. 

Things mentioned
Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. is the father of landscape architecture
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. 
Seneca Village existed before Central Park 
Liberatory Design is a process and practice
Africatown Community Land Trust can be a model for us
Graffiti Pier by Studio Zewde

What to read
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional by bell hooks
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois 
Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States Based Upon Three Former by Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. 

Who to follow
Find her on IG
To learn more about her work, visit Studio Zewde and follow them on IG

This conversation was recorded on May 3rd, 2022. 

Host Dario Calmese 
Production Assistant: Coniqua Johnson 
Visual Art Direction and...