The John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize
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 will be considered. The purpose of this prize is to reward contributors to the intellectual vitality of garden history and landscape studies. The jury considers each submission on the basis of its success in expanding the field to new areas or increasing knowledge within an existing branch of the discipline. It seeks to support authors with an ability to write for a general readership as well as for a scholarly audience.
ELIGIBILITY + APPLICATION PROCESS
ELIGIBILITY
Books published on a landscape-related subject during a three-year period ending in the current calendar year are eligible for consideration by the Awards Committee.
APPLICATION PROCESS
Publishers must send books by mail to each of the appointed jury members before May 1. A cover letter should include a complete mailing address, phone number, and email address of the author(s). To request the mailing addresses for the jury, please email the book prize jury chair, Elizabeth K. Meyer at LSIbookprize@virginia.edu and include "J.B. Jackson Book Prize Application" as the subject line.
2025 Winner & Finalists
2025 J.B. Jackson Book Prize Winner
JAMES MICHAEL BUCKLEY
City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry
University of Texas Press, 2024
California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment.
Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.
James Michael Buckley is an urban planner and historian.
2025 J.B. Jackson Book Prize Finalists
J.T. ROANE
Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and Politics of Place
New York University Press, 2023
In this book, author J.T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate spaces to expressly confrontational and liberatory efforts to transform the city’s social and ecological arrangement, these communities challenged the imposition of Progressive and post-Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them.
Under the rubric of dark agoras Roane brings together two formulations of collectivity and belonging associated with working-class Black life. While on their surface diametrically opposed, the city’s underground—its illicit markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, as well as spaces housing illicit sex and informal sites like corners associated with the economically and socially disreputable--constituted a spatial and experiential continuum with the city’s set apart—its house meetings, storefronts, temples, and masjid, as well as the extensive spiritually appropriated architectures of the interwar mass movements that included rural land experiments as well as urban housing, hotels, and recreational facilities. Together these sites incubated Black queer urbanism, or dissident visions for urban life challenging dominant urban reform efforts and their modes of producing race, gender, and ultimately the city itself. Roane shows how Black communities built a significant if underappreciated terrain of geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. This fascinating book will help readers appreciate the importance of Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking in shaping matters of urban place and politics.
J.T. Roane is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Geography at Rutgers University and Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.
KOFI BOONE AND M. ELEN DENNING (EDS.)
Empty Pedestals: Countering Confederate Narrative through Public Design
Louisiana State University Press, 2024
Empty Pedestals uses a design perspective to explore how monuments to the Confederacy speak to regionalism, racist political agendas, and residual collective pain. Many designers and artists working in the public realm have created innovative projects to replace Confederate memorials, contextualize those that still stand, and foster new conversations about history, race, and justice in America. By drawing lessons from these initiatives and considering the questions that remain, editors Kofi Boone and M. Elen Deming hope to assist educators and students in combating endemic prejudice and other forms of social division.
For more than a century, the endurance of Confederate monuments, street names, and other memorials in the United States has permitted proponents to establish false and oppressive arguments in defense of so-called historic preservation. The continued presence of these objects maintains symbolic forms of systemic injustice, exclusionary policies and practices, and erasure of the stories, memories, and values of marginalized populations in the American South. While many of these monuments have been taken down since 2017, they account for only a small percentage of the overall number of Confederate relics on public display.
Boone and Deming, along with the volume’s fourteen contributors, strive to elevate novel frameworks and shared solutions for the issues that continue to trouble American cultural landscapes. Above all, Empty Pedestals lifts up the voices of people who have confronted hateful narratives and devised strategies that stand up to, and apart from, old mythologies. If and when oppressive symbols such as Confederate monuments are permanently eliminated, design alternatives such as those presented here may offer healing in shared spaces, healthier social discourse, and stronger community resilience.
Kofi Boone is the Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor and University Faculty Scholar in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at North Carolina State University. He works in the overlap between landscape architecture and environmental justice, with specializations in democratic design and cultural landscapes.
M. Elen Deming is professor of landscape architecture and director of the Doctor of Design program at the College of Design at North Carolina State University. She is an essayist and editor who considers how society shapes, and is in turn shaped by, its cultural landscapes.
