The Topography of Wellness
Award of Excellence
Communications
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Sara Jensen Carr, ASLA
The Topography of Wellness uncovers the strata of health and environmental issues that bridge landscape architecture, the natural environment, and the medical profession.
- 2024 Awards Jury
Project Credits
Boyd Zenner and Mark Mones, Editors, University of Virginia Press
Derek Thornton, Cover Designer, Notch Design
Jane Curran, Copy Editor
Ina Gravitz, Indexer
Project Statement
The Topography of Wellness: How Health and Disease Shaped the American Landscape is a chronological narrative of how six historical epidemics had a reciprocal relationship with urban landscapes, reflecting changing views of the power of design, pathologies of disease, and the epidemiology of the environment. From the contagions of cholera and tuberculosis to the more complicated pathways of contemporary chronic illnesses, each disease narrated here, alongside their associated combat strategies of urban quarantine, eradication, and acupuncture has left its mark on the present-day environment. The consideration of this history ends with a call to reframe and reclaim health and equity as central tenets of our profession for the future.
Project Narrative
There have been many thorough accounts of both public health history and histories of the American landscape, but they have yet to be combined in a narrative that shows their intersections, divergences, and parallels.The Topography of Wellness examines how changing American ideals about wellness and its associated implications have influenced the practice of landscape architecture, as well as how cities have turned to the built environment to address epidemics. Beginning with the sanitation movements of the Industrial Revolution, the book discusses how public health practice and landscape design became even more closely entwined during the Progressive Era, led by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of landscape architecture who embedded his own extensive history of public health practice in his work and writing. Subsequent chapters take the reader through the landscapes of housing, urban renewal, and New Urbanism, as well as contemporary research on neuroscience and landscape. Through narratives of cholera, respiratory illness, cancer, obesity, and the health threats presented by the climate crisis, it also describes how “wellness” has not only been used successfully as a means for good intentions and urban improvements but also as a tool of exclusion, moral judgment, and gentrification. The book is a chronological, extensively illustrated accounting of major American epidemics and design history. Although published in late 2021, the initial manuscript of this book, the culmination of seven years of research and writing, was actually completed in February 2020 just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States. Thoughts about the pandemic were added to the conclusion, but with recognition of COVID as an airborne disease, and as we see widening health disparities and limits of individual action, the book stands as an argument for the re-integration of public health into the profession of landscape architecture as an environmental ethic rather than an inequitable amenity.
Due to the unexpected timeliness of its publication, I’ve been fortunate that the book has reached a wide audience, with a great deal of crossover appeal. Since the book's publication I have given over 30 talks regarding this research and the book to several universities, not only to schools of design and planning but also medical schools, museums, local ASLA and AIA chapters, historic preservation societies, and nonprofit organizations. The book has received mentions and reviews in media outlets such as The New Yorker, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The New Republic, Bloomberg CityLab, the BBC, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and CNN. The book has been adopted in syllabi in urban planning, architecture, and landscape architecture courses at MIT, Brown University, Cornell, Syracuse, and University of Chicago, among others, and received the JB Jackson Book Prize and a Special Jury Prize from the Boston Society of Landscape Architects. To date, it has sold over 1,200 copies and is already almost in its third printing, a huge accomplishment for an ostensibly academic book. The Topography of Wellness communicates the importance of landscape architecture to a wide audience, from academic to professional to those with a casual interest in urban history. As we enter the age where we must grapple with both pandemics and the climate crisis, the hope is that it becomes a touchpoint for how we can design with intent for a healthier and more equitable future.