This guide was created in relation to the African Landscape Architectures conference held at the GSD in 2025. A central aim of the African Landscape Architectures conference and its accompanying bibliography is to highlight the plurality of ways people shape landscapes across the African continent and demonstrate how landscape architecture can contribute to mitigating the impacts of climate change and social injustices. Africa is abundant in landscape projects and practices, yet most landscape architecture programs on the continent do not include African landscapes in their curriculums. Similarly, African landscapes are mainly absent from formal landscape architectural education in other parts of the world. This bibliography seeks to help bridge this educational gap by compiling existing literature on African landscapes and making it accessible for use in research and teaching.

Gareth Doherty (DDes '10), Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the GSD and Affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, recognized the need for this bibliography and developed it with his students, Daniella Slowick (MLA '24) and Andrew O Murchu (MLA '25), in collaboration with the Frances Loeb Library.