Natasha N. Harkison

Natasha Harkison is an Indian-American landscape architect and urban planner interested in cultural landscapes, sustainable infrastructure, and issues of contemporary urbanism. Her research focuses on South-Asian diasporic landscapes in North America, positing heritage practices and collective memory as a basis for authored and constructed built environments. Her research and design practice aims at making transient infrastructures suitable for hybrid identities and contested spaces. Her work draws upon alternative storytelling and overlooked narratives as generative places to be recognized and preserved.
 

Natasha is a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, where she is teaching design studios, representation, and environmental design theory. Her teaching and research methods involve participatory decision-making, urban fieldwork, and investigating public histories to provide depth to daily rhythms and everyday landscapes. Recently, she was a studio instructor in the Harvard GSD Design Discovery program, which provides interdisciplinary early design education to students with non-design backgrounds. She has worked on numerous projects including public space planning and design, neighborhood frameworks, and community-based design in North America. Over the course of ten years, she has experience collaborating with the Norman Foster Foundation, Urban Land Institute, Illumination Foundation, SWA Group, Marmol Radziner, and Orange County Parks. She has been recognized as an Emergent Leader in Urban Planning and Design by the Urban Land Institute.

 

Natasha holds a Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard GSD and a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Cal Poly Pomona. She was awarded the CPPLA Howard O Boltz Award, and the ASLA General Design Honor Award for a project titled ‘Concrete Habitat Units’. The project repositions the term ‘landscape’ as a series of hybrid ecologies suited for potential resilient futures.