Michelle Arevalos Franco: Jardineros

Michelle Arevalos Franco seeks to cultivate thriving social and ecological relations through the work of landscapes. Franco’s research is informed by her Mexican roots and explores landscape architecture’s dependence on Latine immigrant labor for construction and maintenance. Critical to this work is the interrogation of race, class, and knowledge stratification inherent to contemporary landscape architecture practice. This work is both academic and activist, calling for institutional and individual reforms within the discipline. Her publications illuminate landscape architecture’s complex political and social entanglements with immigration, and this work has been enthusiastically received by diverse stakeholders. Landscape practitioners, academics, and students as well as contractors, laborers, and tradespeople, have acknowledged the urgency of Franco’s scholarship, which is committed to strengthening the value of physical labor and laborers within the discipline. To that end, her pedagogy expands traditional landscape education with community-based, collective landscape labor as an emancipatory and critical practice.

Franco is an assistant professor in landscape architecture at The Ohio State University and founder of Más Común. She is an Inaugural Research Fellow of the Midwest Landscapes Lab. Her work has been supported by the Greater Columbus Arts Council, OSU’s Global Arts and Humanities, and Ohio State Energy Partners. She was a landscape designer at Oehme, van Sweden & Associates in Washington, DC and holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she received the Peter Walker Partners Fellowship and the American Association of University Women’s Selected Professions Fellowship. Prior, Franco was program director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York and received a bachelor’s of fine art (magna cum laude) from the University of Arizona.

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