Michelle Arevalos Franco seeks to cultivate thriving social and ecological relations through the work of landscapes. Franco’s research is informed by her Mexican roots and explores landscape architecture’s dependence on Latine immigrant labor for construction and maintenance. Critical to this work is the interrogation of race, class, and knowledge stratification inherent to contemporary landscape architecture practice. This work is both academic and activist, calling for institutional and individual reforms within the discipline. Her publications illuminate landscape architecture’s complex political and social entanglements with immigration, and this work has been enthusiastically received by diverse stakeholders. Landscape practitioners, academics, and students as well as contractors, laborers, and tradespeople, have acknowledged the urgency of Franco’s scholarship, which is committed to strengthening the value of physical labor and laborers within the discipline. To that end, her pedagogy expands traditional landscape education with community-based, collective landscape labor as an emancipatory and critical practice.

Franco is an assistant professor in landscape architecture at The Ohio State University and founder of Más Común. She is an Inaugural Research Fellow of the Midwest Landscapes Lab. Her work has been supported by the Greater Columbus Arts Council, OSU’s Global Arts and Humanities, and Ohio State Energy Partners. She was a landscape designer at Oehme, van Sweden & Associates in Washington, DC and holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she received the Peter Walker Partners Fellowship and the American Association of University Women’s Selected Professions Fellowship. Prior, Franco was program director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York and received a bachelor’s of fine art (magna cum laude) from the University of Arizona.

Upcoming:
Jardineros. Public Lecture Series, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania (April 2025)
Jardineros. Banvard Gallery, Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University (April 2025)
Jardineros. Beyond Maintenance Symposium, ETH Zurich. Zurich, Switzerland. Keynote speaker (February 2025)
"Migration and Maintenance: Mesoamerican Making of Landscapes in El Norte," in Landscapes in the Making (Dumbarton Oaks, 2025)

Ongoing:
Open Letter to Accreditation and Licensure Boards in Landscape Architecture on the Topic of Immigrant Landscape Labor. The open letter to the governing bodies of the landscape architecture profession calls for increased recognition of the lives and contributions of manual laborers to the creation of landscape architecture. LETTER / SIGNATORIES / RECIPIENTS

Recently published / presented:
The Role and Rights of Immigrant Workers in Urban Development. Next City Webinar (September 2024)
Working at the Scale of Labor: Practice and Pedagogy, Ecological Landscaping Alliance Annual Conference (February 2024)
Care's Repair, presented at "Missing Masses: Architecture of the Unseen," Knowlton School of Architecture Annual Symposium (January, 2024)
Care's Repair, Landscape's Labor (Landscape Research, November, 2023)
We are Landscapers: Research and Pedagogy at the Scale of Labor (Society of Architectural Historians, April 2023)
Invisible Labor: Precarity, Ethnic Division, and Transformative Representation in Landscape Architecture Work (Landscape Journal, May 2022)

In the media:
Sisson, Patrick. “The Construction Industry Needs Undocumented Workers. So Why is Nothing Being Done to Help Them?” BizNow, August 8, 2023.
Mortice, Zach. “What Landscapers Can Teach Landscape Architects.” Bloomberg CityLab, July 26, 2023. Feature on The Diggers Studio
Berg, Nate. “Wage Theft is Rampant Among Construction Workers. This App Helps Them Get Their Money Back.” Fast Company, June 6, 2023.
Terremoto. “Fair Trade: Landscape Architecture Design Studio Terremoto Addresses Labor Exploitation in its Industry.” The Architect's Newspaper, November 8, 2022.

Courses:
Glimcher Seminar with Terremoto at The Pizzuti, Columbus Museum of Art (upcoming, SP25 and SU25)
Commons Ecology (AU22, AU23, AU24)
The Diggers Studio (SU22, SU23)

Social:
Twitter: @michelleafranco
Instagram: @mas_comun