The Center for Cultural Landscapes Announces 2024 J.B. Jackson Book Prize Winner
The Center for Cultural Landscapes (CCL) at the UVA School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Rosetta Elkin’s 2022 book, Landscapes of Retreat (K. Verlag) is the 2024 winner of the Landscape Studies Initiative’s J.B. Jackson Book Award.
The John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize is awarded to the author of a book published within the past three years on a subject pertaining to landscape studies. There are no restrictions with regard to period, topic, or author’s nationality. Only books based on original research and those that break new ground in method or interpretation are considered. The purpose of this prize, awarded annually since 2011, is to reward contributors to the intellectual vitality of garden history and landscape studies. Elkin will receive a $2000 cash prize and participate in a public discussion about her book with Professor Elizabeth K. Meyer at the University of Virginia in the Spring 2025 semester.
This year, the award jury chose one prize winner for the J.B. Jackson Book Prize, and three finalists to cover today’s breadth of landscape studies publishing. These recognitions celebrate recent (2021-2023) scholarly publications of landscape historians, historical geographers, urban historians, and art historians involved in landscape studies and the environmental humanities.
The three finalist titles are Steven Conn's The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is-and Isn't (The University of Chicago Press), Martin Hogue's Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities (Princeton Architectural Press), and Sara Safransky's The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit (Duke University Press).
Collectively, we sought books with landscape as a central topic and an innovative research method clearly explained. We were drawn to books that “taught us a lot” about the author’s process of discovery and were beautifully written as well as produced. Finally, we were inspired by books that examined the material and social processes through which landscapes came into being, evolved, and changed.
— 2024 J.B. Jackson Book Prize Jury
This year’s jury included continuing members, Professor Emeritus Kenneth Helphand (University of Oregon) and Professor Elizabeth K. Meyer (University of Virginia) with a newly added member, Associate Professor Sarah Lopez (University of Pennsylvania). This was Helphand’s final year as a juror. He won the inaugural JB Jackson prize for Defiant Gardens, in 2007 and has volunteered his time as a juror since 2008. The Center for Cultural Landscapes expresses gratitude to Helphand for his exceptional leadership, participation, and discerning expertise over the past sixteen years, and especially for his counsel during the first three years of hosting by the University of Virginia’s Center for Cultural Landscapes. CCL continues to be grateful to the generosity of Elizabeth Barlow Rogers for transferring her Foundation for Landscapes Studies’ annual J.B. Jackson Book Prize and David Coffin Publication Grant to the UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes three years ago.
2024 J.B. Jackson Book Prize Winner
Landscapes of Retreat
Rosetta Elkin
Associate Professor, Pratt Institute
K. Verlag, 2022
Landscapes of Retreat are portraits of climate adaptation. Retreat is found in the land that is left behind as settlement patterns shift due to a changing climate. The term landscape refers to the earth animated by the aliveness of creatures and organisms, and the term retreat suggests that human patterns are not fixed but might also be enlivened. Featuring in-depth field studies from Nijinomatsubara Forest/Japan, Maule River/Chile, Niugtaq Village/Alaska, Langtang Park/Nepal, and Gaspésie Peninsula/Québec, the stories in Landscapes of Retreat suggest that communities are more likely to adapt to change when the landscape is appreciated, so that retreat can be valued. The results cut across history, fieldwork, citizenship, and geography in order to rethink and rework “change” as a means toward shared climate futures.
Rosetta S. Elkin is Associate Professor and Academic Director of Landscape Architecture at Pratt Institute, Principal of Practice Landscape and Research Associate at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. She is author of Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation and Tiny Taxonomy: Individual Plants in Landscape Architecture.
Landscapes of Retreat includes guest contributions by Mariel Collard Arias, John Koepke, Sara Pantuliano, and Bernardo Reyes. Creative director and editor: Etienne Turpin. Book design by K. Verlag with Ginny Rose Davies. Web platform by K. Verlag with Liam Asprey.
The printed matter publication is accompanied by a free digital publication at LandscapesofRetreat.com.
2024 J.B. Jackson Book Prize Finalist
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The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is — and Isn't
Steven Conn
Professor, Miami University
The University of Chicago Press, 2023
It seems everyone has an opinion about rural America. Is it gripped in a tragic decline? Or is it on the cusp of a glorious revival? Is it the key to understanding America today? Steven Conn argues that we’re missing the real question: Is rural America even a thing? No, says Conn, who believes we see only what we want to see in the lands beyond the suburbs—fantasies about moral (or backward) communities, simpler (or repressive) living, and what it means to be authentically (or wrongheadedly) American. If we want to build a better future, Conn argues, we must accept that these visions don’t exist and never did.
In The Lies of the Land, Conn shows that rural America—so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind—has actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Examining each of these forces in turn, Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we’ve believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.
Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of many books, most recently Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools.
An audiobook version is available.
2024 J.B. Jackson Book Prize Finalist
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The City After Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit
Sara Safransky
Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University
Duke University Press, 2023
In The City after Property, Sara Safransky examines how postindustrial decline generates new forms of urban land politics. In the 2010s, Detroit government officials classified a staggering 150,000 lots—more than a third of the city—as “vacant” or “abandoned.” Analyzing subsequent efforts to shrink the Motor City’s footprint and budget, Safransky presents a new way of conceptualizing urban abandonment. She challenges popular myths that cast Detroit as empty along with narratives that reduce its historical decline to capital and white flight.
In connecting contemporary debates over neoliberal urbanism to Cold War histories and the lasting political legacies of global movements for decolonization and Black liberation, she foregrounds how the making of—and challenges to—modern property regimes have shaped urban policy and politics. Drawing on critical geographical theory and community-based ethnography, Safransky shows how private property functions as a racialized construct, an ideology, and a moral force that shapes selves and worlds. By thinking the city “after property,” Safransky illuminates alternative ways of imagining and organizing urban life.
Sara Safransky is a geographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University. She is coeditor of A People’s Atlas of Detroit.
2024 J.B. Jackson Book Prize Finalist
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Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities
Martin Hogue, Cornell University
Princeton Architectural Press, 2023
From the early days of recreational camping in the late nineteenth century through the multitude of modern camping options available today, Making Camp explores the history and evolution of the popular activity through the lens of its most important and familiar components: the campsite, the campfire, the picnic table, the map, the tent, the sleeping bag, as well as the oft invisible systems for delivering water and managing trash.
Find out how early nineteenth century German peasants fashioned rudimentary sleeping bags by burrowing into bags full of leaves for the night. Look back over several millennia to learn about the progression of tents from animal skins, goat's hair, and heavy canvas to featherweight nylon. Learn about the ways in which the skills to build and maintain a campfire have been displaced by the portable gas stove. Pinpoint the details of the essential campground map and its unique place in the camping imagination.
Each chapter includes a broad range of visuals to help illustrate the rich history of camping and our collective devotion to it, including drawings, patents, diagrams, sketches, paintings, advertisements, and historical photographs. A must-have for avid campers, nature lovers, and all who seek to connect with the universe by sleeping under the stars.
Martin Hogue is a licensed architect and an associate professor in the department of landscape architecture at Cornell University. His first book, Thirtyfour Campgrounds, was published in 2016.
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2025 Landscape Studies Initative Book Awards
Details about the 2025 UVA CCL’s Landscape Studies Initiative Book Awards will be available in October on the CCL website.
Submissions for books published between 2022 and 2024 are eligible for the J. B. Jackson Book Prize. Nominations are due May 1, 2025.
Authors who need pre-publication funding, such as travel and photography, are encouraged to apply for the David Coffin Publication Grant.
Submissions are due January 1, 2025.
Professor Meyer welcomes inquiries about the awards program at Lsibookprize@virginia.edu.