Faculty Profile
Nazanin Gaffari
Assistant Professor
Department of Landscape Architecture
254 Marshall Hall
Background
I am an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where I teach and research at the intersections of landscape architecture, planning, racialized ecologies, public space, cultural landscapes, and environmental justice. My work asks how landscapes are shaped by power, governance, race, memory, and repair and how design and planning might become more accountable to the histories and communities they engage.
My current research examines racialized ecologies, plantation afterlives, forest governance, and reparative landscape futures in New York State. Supported by a USDA McIntire–Stennis grant, this project investigates how histories of enslavement, extraction, land ownership, and ecological transformation remain embedded in contemporary landscapes. I am especially interested in how planning and design can make these histories legible while also asking what repair requires beyond representation: in land governance, stewardship, public memory, and institutional accountability.
This work builds on a broader research agenda concerned with landscape, governance, and racialized value. In Chicago’s South Side, through a SSRC supported fellowship, I studied arts-based placemaking, philanthropy, Black cultural space, and racial capitalism, examining how cultural production and design can create beauty, memory, pride, and community affirmation while also becoming entangled with institutional power, property, redevelopment, and uneven forms of recognition.
Another strand of my scholarship focuses on public space governance and the politics of inclusion in signature urban parks. Building from my doctoral research on downtown Dallas parks, I examine how ownership, management, programming, security, representation, and everyday use shape who feels welcome, who is rendered out of place, and how rights to the city are negotiated in designed publicly-used landscapes.
Across these projects, I examine landscapes not only as physical or ecological systems, but also as political, cultural, and institutional formations. I study how public spaces, historic landscapes, arts-based initiatives, philanthropic institutions, and environmental governance systems produce inclusion, exclusion, visibility, and value. A central question across my work is how claims of repair, reparation, care, and community benefit are translated into spatial practices, design decisions, funding structures, and governance regimes.
In my teaching, I work with students to connect theory, fieldwork, historical research, and design practice. My seminars and studios often focus on place-based inquiry, critical public space studies, reparative design, community engagement, and the ethical responsibilities of landscape architects, urban designers, and planners. I encourage students to ask difficult questions about land, power, memory, and accountability, while also developing rigorous methods for observation, research, representation, and design.
I welcome collaboration with students, scholars, practitioners, artists, community organizations, and public agencies interested in racialized ecologies, reparative planning and design, landscape justice, cultural landscapes, public space governance, and community-based research. I am especially interested in work that bridges scholarship with policy and practice, and that treats design not simply as a way to solve problems, but as a way to ask better questions about the landscapes we inherit and the futures we choose to build.
Education
Ph.D., Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of Texas at Arlington (2021)
MA., Urban Design, Tehran Azad University (2010)
B.Arch, Tehran Azad University (2006)
Teaching Experience
State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Syracuse, NY.
Assistant Professor | Department of Landscape Architecture
- LSA 640 - Research Methods in Landscape Architecture,
- LSA 650 - Critical Place Studies
- LSA 470/670 - Thematic Studio
- LSA 212 - Place, Culture, Design