The Itinerant Inhabitant

Environmental design professions, such as landscape architecture and urban design, ultimately make statements about how humans live in the world. To reflect more deeply on how we live and therefore how we design, this article employs a conceptual figure: the Itinerant Inhabitant. Through this figure, the author and her design students consider how one might live on a particular site without building permanent structures. The Itinerant Inhabitant serves as a tool for phenomenological reduction, enabling an exploration of what is most essential for human habitation on the land. Reflecting on theoretical precedents, including Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic thinking, and the students’ design explorations, the article develops a proposition of four ways this phenomenological reduction might unsettle conventional approaches to landscape design in terms of knowledge, aesthetics, sustainability, and resiliency. It presents a philosophical argument that designing from immediate, lived experience can overcome divisions between subjective and objective knowledge, embrace the particular qualities of a place, inspire more meaningful design, and engage people more deeply with the world around them.