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 Designs: 

River Wildmen, AfroVisualism

Original Music composed by Dario Calmese 

Visit us at blackimagination.com