Concurrent Education Session

WED-B07: Reframing the Plantation Narrative: A Community-driven Evolution of Latta Place

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

10:15am – 11:30am ET

Location: Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Room 146C

1.25 PDH, LA CES/HSW, AICP, NY/HSW, FL

Lead Speaker(s)

Gina Ford, FASLA

Principal and Co-Founder
Agency Landscape + Planning
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Session Guide

Speaker(s)

Kofi Boone, FASLA (he/him/his)

Professor
NC State University
Durham, North Carolina
Darneka Waters, ASLA

Planner
Mecklenburg County Park & Recreation
Charlotte, North Carolina

Latta Place is a historic house and plantation, formerly a home to enslaved people and currently a heritage site within the Mecklenburg County, NC, park system. We will explore the community-driven process to restore the site and recenter its dominant narrative. Lessons for working on complex sites will be shared.

Learning Outcomes:

Understand processes for inventorying, analyzing, and assessing landmarked sites, including historical research, digital scans, and more.
Learn about new tactics for community engagement related to complex historic sites and how feedback gathered can inform design.
Explore representation and storytelling techniques used to present and collectively evaluate potential futures.
Walk away with more knowledge about how sites with painful pasts can be acknowledged and addressed by landscape architects.