Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Michelle Franco has been interviewed by the The Architect's Newspaper for “Fair Trade; Landscape architecture design studio Terremoto addresses labor exploitation in its industry.” The article focuses on the exploitation of the workers who build the projects that landscape architects design, and how they have become underrepresented, under acknowledged, and undervalued. 

The norms around professional practice further reinforce this distinction. Michelle Franco... has been researching how the laborers who construct and maintain projects have been erased from the bureaucratic structures that prop up the industry...

In her recent article for Landscape Journal titled “Invisible Labor: Precarity, Ethnic Division, and Transformative Representation in Landscape Architecture Work,” Franco posits that depictions—especially visual—of the design process often leave out and render the people who build them invisible. As Franco states: “The processes of division and devaluation of labor inform a social understanding of whose work ‘counts’ and whose work is worth documenting..."

“Fair Trade; Landscape architecture design studio Terremoto addresses labor exploitation in its industry”
by Terremoto

Read more at The Architect's Newspaper