LANDSCAPE BODY
LANDSCAPE BODY
DESIGN RESEARCH LOG
Claire Casstevens
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 01 Bodies, burial, ground Landscape-body 02 Corporeality 03 Constructed ground 04 Corporeal cities 05 Flux and flow 06 Waste, sanitation, toxic discourse 07 Queer ecology 08 Sublime, sensuous, intimate Drawing catalog 09 Experiments in representation
INTRODUCTION
Introduction The burying of our dead is arguably the practice through which people engage most directly with landscape. “Dust unto dust,” as the saying goes; burial is a return to the earth. But how else does burial, as a concept and spatial practice, link bodies and landscapes? In the Oxford English Dictionary, entries on the verb “to bury” range dramatically, revealing that burial is an act both literal and metaphorical. While definitions begin with “to deposit (a corpse) in the ground,” to bury is also more generally a way “to consign to oblivion, put out of the way, abandon and forget” that which we no longer desire. A third definition offers yet another take: to bury oneself is “to be profoundly absorbed or engrossed in a habit
or practice,� such as work, a hobby, or an idea. So while burial is actually not always about the disposal of human bodies, it can still be used as a powerful framework for investigating the relationship between people and landscapes they inhabit. In the research that follows, I explore how attitudes, ethics, theories, and spatial practices concerned with embodied experiences of landscape might be read through this multivalent concept of burial. It is my goal to expose some of the risks (physical as well as intellectual) involved with our current notion that the ground is an ever-willing receptacle for waste. Even more than that, however, I hope to illuminate the importance today of approaching the ground, the landscape, and the environment at large by way of that third definition above. We have to become absorbed and engrossed in it—with conscious intent. The dawn of the Anthropocene throws into high relief the fact that landscape and body have never truly been separate entities, even as people live out the majority of their lives above ground, eyes to the sky. Science
has now shown that we have literally constructed the earth in our own image, or at least the image of our consumption. It is time to really question what this means for the way we engage with—rather than deal with, or neglect—the ground as a kind of body. So yes, this is a critique of the many dangerous ways that people have conceived and constructed the ground, and it is a call-to-arms for designers to figure out how to translate the large-scale, and often invisible, implications of our burial practices into something that the body can recognize and be moved by. It’s time to get personal. What follows is effectively an annotated bibliography of sources that have been especially germane to this line of research, interspersed with images and drawings that visually represent the ideas or proposals therein. It is divided into chapters based on subtopic. Beginning with “Corporeality,” I build a concept of what exactly a body is in the first place. What distinguishes a human body from a non-human body? Are there certain qualities that get to the essence of what makes
Keith Arnatt, Self-Burial (Television Interface Project) (1969)
something a body? The second section, “Constructed Ground,” does the same for that thick edge—or is it a thin surface?—that separates our waking world from the subterranean realm. It pulls from several texts dealing with the physical manipulation of earth, as well as the role of representation in reinforcing certain ideas about the ground. In “Waste and Sanitation,” I examine burial through a historical lens with an emphasis on public health. I propose that beginning with the construction of cemeteries, many burial practices can be attributed to a fear of disease. Landfills, sewer systems, and the filling in of swamps and marshland are key examples. This lays the groundwork for the next chapter, “Corporeal Cities.” Here, I begin to make connections between the first three chapters and suggest that cities, in particular, have taken on qualities of a human body. “Flux and Flow” then reinforces the physical interconnectedness of bodies and landscapes. It introduces several key works of cultural and architectural theory related to systems thinking and also introduces essays on toxic discourse that outline what concepts of flux and flow
mean for the movement of contamination through the porous membranes of the ground and the body. The chapter on “Queer Theory� continues to dismantle the idea that the ground is just the ground, a body just a body, through ideas about hybridity. It also brings the issue of sensuality into the picture, which I take up in the final bibliographic chapter as I build an account of how the sublime, the sensuous, and the intimate are integral aspects of an embodied experience.
SANITATION STORMWATER STORMWATER WASTE SEWER SEWER
SANITATION
WASTE
INFRASTRUCTURE INFRASTRUCTURE
Robert PogueRobert Harrison Pogue The Dominion ofThe theDominion Dead (20
DISEASE
PUBLICPUBLIC HEALTH HEALTH
DISEASE
CORPOREALITY CORPOREALITY Marc Angelil +Marc CaryAngelil Siress + Cary Siress “Going Around “Going in Circles: Around in Circles: Regimes of Waste” Regimes (2010) of Waste” (2010) Vittoria di Palma Vittoria di Palma Wasteland (2016) Wasteland (2016) Alan Berger Alan Berger Drosscape (2006) Drosscape (2006)
Landschaftspark Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nor
Thaisa Way Thaisa Way “Landscapes of Excess: A Thick “Landscapes of Excess: A Thick Section Approach Section Approach to Gas Works to Gas Works Park” (2013) Park” (2013)
Gasworks Park Gasworks Park
Jane Bennett Jane Bennett Vibrant Matter Vibrant Matter David Gissen David Gissen Subnatures Subnatures
Central Park Central Park Greenwood Cemetery Greenwood Cemetery
IA BURBU
BOUNDARIES BOUNDARIES DISPLACEMENT DISPLACEMENT CONTAMINATION CONTAMINATION POROSITY POROSITY
E E P P A A C C S S D D N N L AL A DYDY O O BB Julhani Pallasmaa Julhani Pallasmaa The Eyes of the The SkinEyes of the Skin
Fresh
Orang
Karen Wilson Karen BaptistWilson “The Post-Ind “The Post-Industrial Sublim Forgetting Forgetting Love Canal” Lo
Maurice Merleau-Ponty Maurice Merleau-Ponty “Eye and Mind” “Eye and Mind”
AESTHETICS AESTHETICS
PHENOMENOLOGY PHENOMENOLOGY
VISIBILITY INVISIBILITY
SUBLIMESUBLIME FEAR BEAUTY
VISIBILITY INVISIBILITY FEAR BEAUTY
RECREATION LEISURE
e Harrison of the Dead (2003)
EVERYDAY LIFE
SPATIAL TYPOLOGIES
CULTURAL PRACTICES
PARK GARDEN CEMETERY
Beth Meyer “Uncertain Parks: Disturbed Sites, Citizens, and Risk Society” (2007)
LANDFILL FACTORY AIRPORT
Robin Dripps “Groundwork” (2005) ETHICS RISK
PUBLIC SPACE
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
k Duisburg-Nord
URI AL
E TH ) IN R . E SE T T P R IN OU C O TO U T E T. ; (A P B , T I G M N IO O S A TO OR EP LIV ND F OR OB O D D, IN A T O N N ED CE . 1. T N DO RB OU TI G N R O I C S G S BA RA AB ON ,A RP LY O C W AY O D T N IT E 2. OU HAB TH OF A OF PR N I E B D SE TO OS 3. GR EN
Hudson Yards
Kristina Hill “Shifting Sites” (2005) Julia Czerniak Site Matters (2005) Large Parks (2007)
PROCESS
Hampton Roads
Fresh Kills Park
SHIFTING CIRCUMSTANCES
Orange County Great Park
n Baptist dustrial Sublime or ove Canal”
CLIMATE CHANGE
UNCERTAINTY
DENSIFICATION
POPULATION GROWTH
FLOODING LEACHING SEA-LEVEL RISE
SHRINKING CITY
“UNBUILDING”
CLAIRE CASSTEVENS
CORPOREALITY
Corporeality Our bodies are vehicles for experiencing the world, vehicles for life and living. We assert ourselves materially, through the visibility of our bodies. But what is a body, anyway?
To act as an American, and to become a citizen, one must become an inhabiter of this thing called a body. The relationship of women in the United States to their bodies, then, can now be explored in light of the special significance given to “possessing a body” more generally. — Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body (2001)
Anna Halprin
By “body” I understand a concrete, material, animate organization of flesh, organs, nerves, and skeletal structure, which are given a unity, cohesiveness, and form through the psychical and social inscription of the body’s surface. The body is, so to speak, biologically “incomplete”; it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities that require social triggering, ordering, and long-term “administration. The body becomes a human body, a body that coincides with the “shape” and space of a psyche, a body that defines the limits of experience and subjectivity only through the intervention of the (m)other and, ultimately, the Other. — Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies-Cities,” in Space, Time, and Perversion (1995)
Ana Mendieta
Only through the monument, through the intervention of the architect as demiurge, can the space of death be negated, transfigured into a living space which is an extension of the body; this is a transformation, however, which serves what religion, (political) power and knowledge have in common. — Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991)
I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body on to the façade of the cathedral, where it roams over the mouldings and contours, sensing the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the cathedral door; and my hand grasps the door pull as I enter the dark void behind. I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. — Julhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (1996)
CONSTRUCTED GROUND
Constructed Ground As conceptions of the human body change, what does that mean for conceptions of the ground/earth as a kind of body? Or at least a thing onto which we have projected body-related metaphors? We understand earth by translating it into terms that we share, by personifying it to an extent—often as woman, the mother, but not always. Sometimes we take a mechanistic route, understanding the body as not just a material entity but as a processing thing, a kind of machine for which there are inputs and outputs. It would be worth exploring the example of the tree-hugger chaining one’s body to the tree to prevent it from being cut down. In moments of environmental protest, the body is attached to the thing that is threatened in order to do two things: the first is to fuse these two bodies into one, to say that if you cut this tree in half, you also cut me
in half. To presume and perform a oneness. The second thing it does, however, is acknowledge the power of the human body in contrast to that of the nonhuman body. Affixing the nonhuman body with a human body is an act of fusion that is not just physical but also involves ethics, hierarchies, priorities. With the attachment of the human body, it suddenly renders that thing visible. The ground has a certain characteristic that allows its myth as neutral receptacle to persevere: it is opaque. Compare this to the transparency of water, which reveals but often through distortion, making things even more monstrous than they initially might be. Water also quite literally has a reflective power—think of Narcissus here. Whereas seemingly solid ground just seems to absorb and doesn’t ask any questions, watery territory implicates us. The ground remains anonymous, and it lets us be anonymous. We like this because we are not involved.
Caravaggio, Narcissus (c. 1597)
We should be infinitely grateful, therefore, for the hiding and receiving power of this terraqueous globe, which Michel Serres... rightly calls “a tabernacle, a receptacle for all decompositions”. — Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (2005)
It is critical to understand the ground as not just matter but as space. The soil itself is porous, albeit when you get to the particle size of clay, those pores get increasingly small. But the constructed ground that is of concern here is absolutely a space. It is not solid; it has been punctured and aerated by our own burial practices. We inhabit the ground by putting things there. It is a physical inhabitation, thus the ground is space. New Orleans, LA
AF TE R NATUR E A Politics for the Anthropocene
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Officially, for the past 11,700 years we have been living in the Holocene epoch. The Holocene, which takes its name from the Greek word for “totally new,” is an eye-blink in geological time. During its nearly 12,000 years, plate tectonics has driven the continents a little more than half a mile: a reasonably fit person could cover the scale of planetary change in a brisk eight-minute walk. It has been a warm time, when temperature has mattered as much as tectonics: sea levels rose 115 feet as ice melted, and northern landscapes rose almost 600 feet, rebounding from the weight of now-melted glaciers. But the real news in the Holocene has been people. Estimates put the global human population between 1 million and 10 million at the start of the Holocene, and keep it in that range until after the agricultural revolution, some 5,000 years ago. Since then, we have made the world our anthill: the geological layers we are now laying down on the earth’s surface are marked by our chemicals and other industrial emissions, the pollens of our crops, and the absence of the many species we have driven to extinction. Rising sea levels are now our doing. As a driver of global change, humanity has outstripped geology. This is why more and more voices in a great range of fields, from the earth sciences to English departments, propose that we live in a new era: the Anthropocene—the age of humans. The term was coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s and has gained prominence since 2000, when Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-winning
Things operating in the background— including the earth—have not always been well understood or valued. It is easy to understand how the earth’s rough and bumpy surfaces, its uncertain and shifting fixity and its damp porosity, could be considered qualities that would destabilize physical, political, and even psychological equilibrium. But, it is not only the intense earthiness of the earth that proves problematic, but the whole question of how humans ground their thoughts, actions, and structures so that effective hypotheses can be made about relationships among things. — Robin Dripps, “Groundwork,” in Site Matters (2005)
As figures become more porous and more prickly, they begin to take on many properties of the ground. A more accessible figure, in turn, promotes comparison with the ground to reveal properties there that would have been though more the province of the figure. As distinctions involving figure and ground become ambiguous and shifting, the limitations of an antagonistic juxtaposition become apparent. — Robin Dripps, “Groundwork,� in Site Matters (2005)
In “Landscape Architecture as Modern Other and Postmodern Ground,” Elizabeth Meyer writes about the “othering” of landscape in relation to modern discourses of art and architecture. She argues that landscape is often construed as architecture’s opposite, and that the construction of this dichotomy runs parallel to other binary systems of thought, such as oppositions of nature-culture and male-female. Meyer declares that as an “other,” landscape is typically portrayed as “woman and female, i.e. unseen, inessential, and ignored…or feminine, i.e. unstructured, soft, romantic” (p. 16). Nature, more broadly, shares this characterization as well, and is similarly described as “soft, romantic, irregular, unstructured, and unformed” (p. 16) in the texts that Meyer references. These words qualify personality and treatment, yes, but are more germane to a description of form when used in relation to concepts of landscape and nature. By referencing form, they draw analogies not just between nature and femininity as abstract concepts—but between nature and a physical female body. Meyer eschews the characterization of nature as this feminine-bodied “other” in her essay, yet phrases such as “the landscape body,” “earth’s body” (p. 17), and “Earth’s undulating corporeality” (p. 21) appear throughout. They beg the question, “What is a body?” And they challenge us to think about how exactly we use concepts of
the body—male or female, human or non-human—to define and relate to nature. The following pages are the beginning of an investigation into the distinctions between several ways of describing nature: as a gendered body; as personified but not necessarily gendered; and as a non-gendered, non-human agent of its own accord. Meyer also personifies nature when she writes of ‘giving voice’ to the landscape and allowing “the ground to speak its own language” (p. 22). What is the result of thinking about nature as a non-gendered yet personified entity? On the one hand, it seems to encourage empathy. It takes nature—a force too great to fully conceptualize—and rescales it into a frame we can fit with the scope of our vision. It puts nature in human terms—into our system of existence. Perhaps this is the “humanized landscape,” where to “humanize” means “to make human; to portray or endow with human characteristics, qualities, or attributes; to represent in human form; to adapt to human use” (OED). And finally, we now return to Meyer’s terms, such as “the landscape body” and “earth’s body.” These give nature a body but not a gender and not a personality. Are they continuing to humanize nature, to humanize landscape? Not necessarily so.
Yet to build landscape requires the ability to see it, and the inability to do so continues to permeate architectural design culture. This persistent blindness is evident in the still common recourse to the figure/ ground plan, which fails to engage the material aspects of a site, representing the ground as a void around buildings. This convention of figure/ground is part of a historically embedded oppositional system of thought. — Linda Pollak, ‘“Constructed Ground: Questions of Scale,” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader (2006)
I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye—not even his—could have detected any thing wrong. There was nothing to wash out—no stain of any kind—no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all— ha! ha! — Edgar Allen Poe, “The Tell-tale Heart” (1843)
WASTE AND SANITATION
Waste and sanitation The idea that one’s environment could threaten human health are deeply rooted. As Vittoria di Palma writes in Wasteland: A History, the swamp as a landscape type has long been associated with disease in England. Neither wholly land nor water, a swamp was a “waste landscape” because it could not easily be farmed and thus failed to contribute to a community’s economic prosperity. Culturally, it also could not easily be categorized. Unproductive and amorphous, swamps were thus considered to be diseased themselves. Walter Blith, in his well-known publication of 1652 entitled The English Improver Improved, describes a bog as a healthy spring that had otherwise been “held down by the power and weight of the earth.” As such, it was a swollen mass of earth, like a sore or boil on the landscape. The land’s sickness was contagious. The dampness and acrid odors that emanated from swampy territories were the carriers of this disease, easily felt and
taken in by the human body. So environments like swamps were uncertain spaces that posed threats to the body. The body was understood as permeable and subject to disease. Miasmatic theory depended on this model of the body as a thing that was not armored and entirely separate from the environment. Important though is also the fact that the ground, as di Palma describes it, was perceived as sick. Both human body and the ground shared a predilection to disease. Isn’t disease something that affects a body? Disease as a link between these two entities—the human body and the ground—shows that they have some kind of commonalities in terms of how they have been perceived and understood, as well as how they relate to one another. Disease was located in ambiguity, in fluidity, in flow, in destabilization of the objectness of something or its ability to be discerned among others. Although some of that thought remains, there has been a shift in theory that points to this kind of ambiguity as the very nature of things. This is clear in theories of networks, rhizomes, spreading systems that are open rather than closed. From the scale of the body to the global scale of Appadurai’s scapes, these theories have been applied to space and time. Conversations about purification and contamination enter here—what is hybridity, and what is contamination? Are these terms inherently different, or are they reflective of two different attitudes toward these newer ways of seeing the world? Walter Blith
It seems that a history of many types of burial is essentially a history of separating the body from fearful, disease-ridden, deadly things by way of the ground. The interment of swamps, wastewater, trash, and toxicity are all moves responding to public health-related demands. That is, they are all necessary actions for protecting the human body from a range of risks often having to do with disease (malaria, cholera, cancer). Again, the ground as a burial place is thus something that is away, something that has a capacity to distance us from that which we fear because it hides it. It makes things no longer visible. The rural cemetery movement was in part about preserving the sacred act of burial once churchyard cemeteries had run out of room. But it was also about sanitation issues and public health; deceased bodies were causing disease, and they needed to be put somewhere that would not allow disease to spread. Whereas the act of burial was once sacred, making the ground a sacred space for holding the dead, a kind of death womb, it increasingly became an act whose aim was to eliminate the profane: disease, death, decay. The ground was a receptacle, a way to case aside that which we want to be distinct from ourselves: that which is not us and has no business engaging with our bodies.
Those piles of ordure collected at street corners, those carts of mud jolted at night through the streets, those frightful barrels of the night-man, those fetid streams— do you know what they are? They are the flowering field, the green grass, the mint and thyme and sage, the game, the cattle, the satisfied lowing of the heavy oxen at night, the perfumed hay, the golden wheat, the bread on your table, the warm blood in your veins, health, joy, life. — Victor Hugo
The body, specifically the body’s physical well-being, offered a powerful way of understanding local environments, a form of understanding that lay outside simple calculations of profit. — Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (2007)
A landfill, for example, is something we typically think of as a stagnant heap of trash. When framed through the lens of Latour or Bennett, however, a landfill is an active agent “generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane” (Bennett, p. vii). Things act on the environment. They don’t just sit there; they perform, and they set in motion tangential events. Di Palma echoes this in her account of marshes, swamps, and bogs as kinds of wastelands: “neither earth nor water, solid nor liquid, and in its imprecision, its unsettling resistance to categorization, it harbors particular charge. The swamp is a landscape that is dangerous not only to the body but also to the soul: its muddy substance is the incarnation of uncleanliness, possessed of the power to defile” (di Palma, p. 95). Perhaps this is behind our resistance to accept continuities between our bodies and these landscapes – it reveals that very fact that we are directly implicated and affected. It opens the door to the realization that we are susceptible and ultimately at risk.
Disgust undoubtedly involves taste, but it also involves—not just by extension but at its core—smell, touch, even at times sight and hearing. Above all, it is a moral and social sentiment. It plays a motivating and confirming role in moral judgment in a particular way that has little if any connection with ideas of oral incorporation. It ranks people and things in a kind of cosmic ordering.
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— William Ian MIller, “Darwin’s Disgust,” in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Cultural Reader (2005)
The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space Matthew Gandy Sewers are perhaps the most enigmatic of urban infrastructures. Most citizens of modern cities are aware of their existence, yet few could accurately describe their layout or appearance. This paper takes as its starting point a key moment in the cultural representation of urban space: the photographs of the Paris sewers taken by Fe´lix Nadar in the early 1860s. These images capture a dramatic transformation in subterranean Paris, initiated in the early 1850s by Baron Georges Haussmann and his chief engineer Euge`ne Belgrand as part of the comprehensive reconstruction of the city’s infrastructure during the Second Empire of Napole´on III. This paper argues, however, that with respect to the underground city, we cannot consider the Haussmann era to be the unproblematic epitome of modernity. The reconstruction of subterranean Paris revealed a series of tensions that were only to be resolved in the post-Haussmann era in response to the combined influence of growing water usage, the persistent threat of disease and changing conceptions of public health policy. It is concluded that the flow of water in Second Empire Paris is best conceived as a transitional phase in the radical reworking of relations between the body and urban form engendered by the process of capitalist urbanization. key words sewers water modernity urban planning Fe´lix Nadar Baron Georges Haussmann
nineteenth-century Paris
Department of Geography, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP email: m.gandy@ucl.ac.uk revised manuscript received 21 July 1998
Introduction . . . un encheveˆtrement difforme de sentines et boyaux a` de´fier l’imagination de Pirane`se. (Fe´lix Nadar)1 Les grands e´gouts de Paris ont toujours pre´occupe´ l’attention publique et ont e´te´ honore´s des plus illustres visites. Il n’est pas un souverain e´tranger, pas un personnage important qui ait quitte´ Paris sans avoir visite´ les collecteurs. (Euge`ne Belgrand)2
The rebuilding of Paris between 1850 and 1870 is a crucial moment in urban history. The attempt by Emperor Napole´on III and his Pre´fet de la Seine, Baron Georges Haussmann, to rationalize urban space is one of the formative legacies in the development of urban planning. For Frederick Hiorns, the Second Empire reconstruction of Paris was a time in which,
the evils of long-continued civic neglect were redeemed and Paris placed in the forefront of modern cities by imaginative reforms applied to the most onerous of human problems.3
Edmund Bacon echoed similar sentiments in describing the new spatial structure of Paris as a reversal in the direction of energy, from the outward explosion of avenues and palaces of the Louis Kings to the implosion of the connecting and life-giving boulevards of Haussmann.4
For many authors, the Haussmann era has been read as axiomatic of modernity; yet the reality is far more complex, involving an interweaving of ideas and developments spanning both modern and premodern conceptions of urban form.5 In fact, as this paper will show, the flow of water in Paris did not
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 24 23–44 1999 ISSN 0020-2754 © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 1999
CORPOREAL CITIES
Corporeal Cities We have created the ground in our own image. For some, this is called the Anthropocene, but my take is slightly different. Rather than the geological era that bears the mark of human existence, I am talking about the overt construction or understanding of the earth as a kind of body. Although the idea most certainly predates him, Frederick Law Olmsted articulated this when he described Central Park as the lungs of the city. Through the burial of wastewater and the development of the sewer system, the city suddenly has bowels, in addition to its lungs. It has a circulatory system. It is expected to digest; it has a metabolism.
Thus I am interested in exploring the ways in which the body is physically, socially, sexually, and discursively or representationally produced, and the ways, in turn, bodies reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so that this environment both produces and reflects the form and interests of the body. — Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies-Cities,” in Space, Time, and Perversion (1995)
Cardiologists, for example, are coming to see the heart, not as the quintessential mechanical body part, the pump, but as a self-organizing system.
— Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body (2001)
The idea of projecting the body onto the city is founded on the body-as-machine metaphors that have more recently given way or been replaced by chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, etc.
Another equally popular formulation proposes a kind of parallelism or isomorphism between the body and city. The two are understood as analogues, congruent counterparts, in which the features, organization, and characteristics of one are reflected in the other. This notion of the parallelism between the body and social order (usually identified with the state) finds its clearest formulations in the seventeenth century... The law has been compared to the body’s nerves, the military to its arms, commerce to its legs or stomach, and so on. — Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies-Cities,” in Space, Time, and Perversion (1995)
WORLD LEISURE JOURNAL, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/16078055.2016.1211171
Evolution of the “parks as lungs” metaphor: is it still relevant? John L. Crompton Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA ABSTRACT
Conceptualizing urban parks as “the lungs of the city” is one of the parks field’s most enduring metaphors. Indeed, it is often uttered unthinkingly as a cliché. Its roots date back over 200 years. The reason it was so widely adopted in the nineteenth century is that it was unusually powerful and resonant in the context of the ubiquitous filth and stench in the industrial cities where it originated. This paper describes the conditions which fostered the metaphor; explains its private and public good dimensions; traces its genesis and diffusion, including its transition from England to the US and concludes with an assessment of its potency in contemporary society.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 24 November 2015 Accepted 11 March 2016 KEYWORDS
Urban parks; lungs; disease; industrial cities; miasmas
The role of miasmas in the evolution of urban parks was discussed in an earlier article in this journal (Crompton, 2013). Miasmas were defined as “noxious emanations carried in and by the air” (Cartwright, 1977, p. 198). They emanated from the filth, squalor and stench which were ubiquitous corollaries of the rapid growth cities emerging from the industrial revolution. Miasmas were the prevailing explanation for disease in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Miasmatic theory was vague about the physiological processes that caused disease, which led to them being variously described and defined by multiple authorities. This vagueness meant the theory was sufficiently malleable that it could be used to explain all manner of diseases, which was part of its appeal. As the world’s first industrialized state, Britain became its most heavily urbanized one. Prominent among the epicenters of Britain’s industrial revolution were Manchester and Liverpool, while London as the greatest city in the world was “the source of prodigious novelty and invention” (Joyce, 2003, p. 9). It was in these cities that the concept of urban public parks accessible to all citizens was primarily nurtured. The “parks as lungs” metaphor was prominently used in public debates at the outset of this movement, and it appears to have been effective in communicating the “anti-miasmas” rationale for urban parks (Crompton, 2013). Urban parks emerged in the UK approximately 15 years before they were developed in the east coast cities of the US, where conditions resembled those in the UK (Corburn, 2009). The urban parks movement also quickly migrated to Australia and subsequently CONTACT John L. Crompton © 2016 World Leisure Organization
jcrompton@tamu.edu
The private dimension of parks as lungs Walking for its own sake and for the pleasure of being in a pleasing landscape, as a complement to walking for utilitarian purposes, emerged in the UK in the late eighteenth century. The great sages if the late eighteenth century were country gentlemen and their writings exhibited the harmony they perceived in nature. The renowned poet William Wordsworth’s accounts were prominent among them. His long walks from his Grasmere cottage in the Lake District have been credited with popularizing walking. He has been described as its “founding father” (Solnit, 2000). His friend and fellow poet Samuel Coleridge estimated that Wordsworth walked 180,000 miles during his adult life and he championed protection of the public footpaths and rights-of-way during the enclosure movement. The theme of walking was pervasive in his extensive portfolio of poetry and his poems were widely disseminated in the first half of the nineteenth century (Wallace, 1994). Hence, “A cultural framework arose [from Wordsworth’s walks] that would inculcate such tendencies in the wider public … It is impossible to overemphasize how profound is the effect of this revolution on the taste for nature and the practice of walking” (Solnit, 2000, p. 83). These beginnings led to “making places to walk, places that became larger and more culturally significant” (p. 86). However, there was a big difference between establishing a walking culture in picturesque rural areas among the relatively wealthy, well-educated “intellectual classes” and inculcating a walking culture among the working classes in industrial cities. As Murray (1839) observed, “Genteel people are abundantly provided for” with private parks, estates and access to the countryside, “with the poor artisan and laboring man it is not so” (p. 227). Wordsworth recognized that “walking in the city [was] a perilous business” (Wallace, 1994, p. 22), because there was no separation of street and sidewalk and no street crossings, “The pedestrian had to fight his or her way in a crowded area” (Joyce, 2003, p. 205). The prevailing stench and the physical tumult of city streets meant that walking was neither pleasant nor safe. For it to flourish in the cities, locations dedicated for that purpose were needed. The legislative champion of the effort to accomplish this was Robert A. Slaney, MP for Shrewsbury. During his 30 years in Parliament (1826–1841 and 1847–1862), he was unrelenting in his commitment to establish urban parks. His efforts were first rewarded in 1833 when he persuaded Parliament to establish the Select Committee on Public Walks and to appoint him as its chairman. The Committee’s report noted “little or no provision has been made for Public Walks or Open Spaces, fitted to afford means of exercise or amusement to the middle or humbler classes” (p. 1). It stated: “It must be evident that it is of the first importance to their [Working Classes] health on their day of rest to enjoy the fresh air, and to be able (exempt from the dust and dirt of public thoroughfares) to walk out in decent comfort with their families” (p. 9). It recommended “that Public Walks be gradually established in the neighborhood of every populous town in the Kingdom” (p. 11). Public walks was the focus of their report, rather than parks per se. They were criticized for this: “In one respect the Committee did not go far enough … Public grounds, not walks, are the things wanted” (Westminister Review, 1834, p. 513). Nevertheless, the report marked the first serious effort in the UK to secure public funding for open space. For this to occur, however, towns needed enabling authority to incur the long-term debt supported by local tax money that was needed to develop parks. Slaney envisioned that the
We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism–the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature–to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world. —Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010)
FLUX AND FLOW
Flux and Flow This research is clearly a synthesis of many different lines of theory and design practice. Broadly, it follows trends of thinking about dematerialization, of fluidity and flow—paradigms used to describe systems broadly but which are especially applied to landscape architecture. Landscape architecture as a process-based practice. But more specifically, it aims to apply these to the body, placing both landscape and body under a single umbrella or lens, trying to figure out what exactly is the connection between these two apart from the body being a thing that occupies the landscape, the landscape a thing that surrounds the body. It is about the various exchanges that occur between these two entities, each of which I will begin to describe as a kind of “body” in its own right. And it is about the degrees of separation that we have placed—physically, culturally, etc—between these two bodies. I am interested in why we put up those boundaries
in the first place, and in the reactions that we (people) have when those boundaries are breached. What are we afraid of? Should we be afraid? What should we fear? What should we embrace? What are the risks and opportunities?
Monumental ‘durability’ is unable, however, to achieve a complete illusion. To put it in what pass for modern terms, its credibility is never total. It replaces a brutal reality with a materially realized appearance; reality is changed into appearance. — Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991)
Toward the end of “The Complex and the Singular,� Sanford Kwinter argues for a revised concept of the subject. We must understand not how something appears but how it practices, i.e. we should try to understand it in functional terms, how it performs. When we do that, the unitariness of an object vanishes, allowing us to see that object as existing within a field of relations. Movement is a first principle.
The art of Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow reflects a connectedness between earth and body, each having an anatomy that can be transformed into the other: “Relying on his intimate knowledge of the human anatomy from his years working as a physical therapist, he created imposing, rough-textured figures, bristling with energy, that seemed to embody the fierce spirit of postcolonial Africa.�
The reconceptualization of boundaries associated with the spatial scale shift I described here will probably be a key influence on future design thinking. As sites were once described by ecologists using the metaphor of organisms, I expect that future designers will see organisms more clearly as sites—as nodes in a netowrk of flows that penetrate permeable skins (human skins, animal skins, plant skins, even soil “skins”). Body and site overlap. — Kristina Hill, “Shifting Sites” (2005)
The comforting illusion that our bodies can remain separate from their ecological surroundings cannot be sustained, nor can the idea that relationships with landscapes are unidirectional—that they can be described solely by what we do to the landscape, without accounting for the effects of landscape on and in our bodies. — Kristina Hill, “Shifting Sites” (2005)
In her essay “Shifting Sites,” Kristina Hill also reinforces the idea that a body cannot be delimited from its environment—or nature; neither is “geographically discrete” (p. 140). “The human body is permeable to many kinds of flows—of energy, materials, and organisms that can both support health and cause disease.” She continues: “Body and site overlap” (p. 140-1).
A dynamic and perhaps more kinesthetic aesthetic is clearly in the process of developing, in a slightly delayed response to the evolution of nonequilibrium views of the world. — Kristina Hill, “Shifting Sites” (2005)
A potential line of inquiry would be to compare Hill’s super-organisms with Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects.
Today, according to a new concept of purity and rigor, certain rock climbers will attack a mountain with no tools whatever. The morphogenetic principle of the climbers’ space is no longer susceptible to forms imposed from outside (the “assisted” ascent). The free-soloists must flow up the mountain, flow or “tack” against the downward gradient of gravity—but also must become hypersensitive tamers and channelers of the gravitational sink, masters as storing it in their muscles or making it flow through certain parts of the pelvis, thighs, palms, and this only at certain times...
... The site is brimming over with interweaving forces and flows—though without these the face’s asperities and differences would fall back into a true near-featurelessness—and the climber’s task is less to “master” in the macho, form-imposing sense than to forge a morphogenetic figure in time, to insert himself into a seamless, streaming space and to subsist in it by tapping or tracking the flows—indeed to stream and to become soft and fluid himself, which means momentarily to recover real time, and to engage in the universe’s wild and free unfolding through the morphogenetic capacities of the singularity. — Sanford Kwinter
Kwinter writes about the dissolution of distinct object of the body in the gravitational field of the mountain. They have to be put into the same language, understood through the same flows, in order for rock climbing to work. There is no external addition by the rock climber, just the gravity that both the body and the rock face is subject to. This is the conclusion. So I think that this project, in a way, is about dealing with the shift away from binary understandings and object-hood. People first battled ambiguity in the land in order to make it legible. Now we have rejected that kind of legibility in favor of networks, multiplicities, decentering, deconstruction. But that actually reinvigorates that old kind of fear we got from the swamp because we have not really been dealing in a way that makes for a safe approach to a non-binary world. This awakening happened, on the one hand, with Rachel Carson. An acknowledgment of flows and toxicity, that nothing was exactly localized but rhizomatous and spreading. Is the body an object? Does time have a body? This extended quotation by Kwinter makes an example of how the rock climber achieves a state of being that is fused with the mountain face. It is not about a sappy “oneness” but about synchronization, coordination, a tapping of one entity into the other. That ability of the rock climber to “stream and to be come soft and fluid himself ” is key here: this reflects willingness to be a flexible being not delimited by the traditional definition of a body. Perhaps this is actually related to what Hardt writes about in his essay on the “multitude”—the acknowledgment of commonality. It is not that the body is the rock face and the rock face is the body but that they are both engaged together in a relationship through gravity. The body succeeds when it does not fight gravity but allows gravity to flow through it. Rock climbing is extraordinarily sensual in this way because it demands a total awareness of the body, the forces it exerts, and the forces exerted on it. It is cognitive but also intuitive.
Corner investigates the “hybrid practice” of landscape urbanism and an emergent interest in the design fields in “shifting attention away from the object qualities of space… to the systems that condition the distribution and density of urban form” (p. 28). That is, a shift in emphasis from “terra firma” to “terra fluxus,” from fixed to fluid. Corner uses words such as fluid, shifting, field, range, matrix, flexibility, process, network, relationships, and sets of possibilities. On the one hand, this essay speaks to the dissolution of boundaries between disciplines: architecture and landscape architecture are no longer outside of one another. But it also raises questions of the city itself. If the architectural and landscape surfaces of the city are continuous, does inside and outside cease to exist?
QUEER THEORY
Queer Theory This way of understanding human body and other bodies in relationship relates to issues raised in queer theory and performativity.
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Feminism has a necessarily contradictory relation to the body, since, on the one hand, the body is the site of oppression of women, and, on the other, women’s bodily specificity is the basis of feminist practice. The new theories of the body seem to resolve this paradox insofar as they are really against the body and for the common performativity of the queer social flesh—and here we can begin to glimpse the connection to pragmatism and its notion of social life in common. — Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, “Traces of the Multitude,” in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005)
All life-forms, along with the environments they compose and inhabit, defy boundaries between inside and outside at every level. When we examine the environment, it shimmers, and figures emerge in a “strange distortion. When the environment becomes intimate—as in our age of ecological panic and scientifically measurable risk (Beck)—it is decisively no longer an environment, since it no longer just happens around us: that’s the difference between weather and climate. — Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” in PMLA (March 2010)
Life-forms are liquid: positing them as separate is like putting a stick in a river and saying, “This is river stage x” (Quine). Queer ecology requires a vocabulary envisioning this liquid life. I propose that life-forms constitute a mesh, a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment. — Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” in PMLA (March 2010)
Strange strangers are uncanny, familiar and strange simultaneously. Their familiarly is strange, their strangeness familiar. They cannot be thought as part of a series (such as species or genus) without violence. Yet their uniqueness is not such that they are independent. They are composites of others strange strangers. Every life-form is familiar, since we are related to it. We share its DNA, its cell structure, the subroutines in the software of its brain. Its unity implies its capacity to participate in a collective. Queer ecology may espouse something very different from individualism, rugged or otherwise. — Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,� in PMLA (March 2010)
Tree hugging is indeed a form of eroticism, not a chaste Natural unperforated. To contemplate ecology’s unfathomable intimacies is to imagine pleasures that are not heteronormative, not genital, not geared to ideologies about where the body stops and starts. — Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” in PMLA (March 2010)
On p. 280, Morton continues on about eroticism. He mentions a phobia of intimacy that can be found in the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “I fear thy skinny hand.” The poem necessitates intimacy with the text as another person in the form of a talking, walking book and with a “thousand thousand slimy things,”. This personifies the strange stranger.
In “Traces of the Multitude,” Hardt is talking about flesh and body. While this references the kind of soft, fleshy body that we think of as comprising mammals like humans, he is using these terms to talk about a much larger social body: the multitude. This he describes as “a fundamentally new kind of body, a common body, a democratic body.” He quotes Spinoza: “The human body is composed of many individuals of different natures, each of which is highly composite”(Spinoza)—”and yet this multitude of multitudes is able to act in common as one body” (Hardt). He writes about a kind of living social flesh. He draws upon Merleau-Ponty: “flesh is common.” The takeaway here is how Hardt transforms that which is monstrous into something that makes an alternate society possible. We actually owe it to monsters for creating opportunities to do this. He is writing toward a new notion of democracy (or finally achieving it).
The problem is no longer deciding whether to accept these human techniques of transformation but learning what to do with them and discerning whether they will work to our benefit or detriment. Really, we have to learn to love some of the monsters and to combat others. — Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, “Traces of the Multitude,” in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005)
Like Walter Benjamin’s essay, Multitude is asking us to not think about whether something belongs or whether something doesn’t. Rather, it is about changing conceptions of categories altogether. For Benjamin, the aura essay called for a departure from the question of “is it art” and a movement toward “let’s take a step back and reconsider how we define art to begin with.” What does this mean for the landscape-body? Well, if we shift Hardt’s conversation about vampires to the subject of zombies, this starts to get at it.
This living social flesh that is not a body can easily appear monstrous... We need to find the means to realize this monstrous power of the flesh of the multitude to form a new society... We can recognize these monstrous metamorphoses of the flesh as not only a danger but also a possibility, the possibility to create an alternate society. — Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, “Traces of the Multitude,� in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005)
The zombie provides a good case study within this larger project. It is a being that is monstrous, not quite like us. And yet it was once a human. What makes it different is that it has been incubating in the ground and then suddenly reappears. It transgresses the boundary between the subterranean world and our waking one.
SUBLIME, SENSUOUS, INTIMATE
Sublime, Sensuous, Intimate Bodies converse. Despite our attempts to distance ourselves from the things that we bury, we cannot make ourselves distinct from that layer of ground beneath our feet. It is what we stand on. It is an interface. The ground is porous, and so are we. Here, I invoke the term “landscape-body,” which refers to the liminal state of both body and ground in relation to one another. It is a meeting point, a hybridization. Figure-ground is no longer a very useful distinction. A bodily experience is a sensuous one. A sensuous experience of an unsettled landscape (a landscape whose history of burial is being exposed, or turned on end) is itself unsettling. As we witness the process of disinterment, we realize the ground’s instability— that it isn’t solid but full of all sorts of stuff, and that this stuff affects us. We breathe it, we touch it, we carry it on our clothes. This may inspire
a mixture of both fear and joy—perhaps what one might call the sublime. It initiates a perception of something that was once just beyond the precipice of our knowledge.
Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just prompts designers of disturbed sites to recognize that simply cleaning a site is not enough. Creating beauty—out of the strange, particular character found on contaminated industrial sites—is the first step in the process of environmental recentering. The challenge for designers of disturbed sites is Scarry’s claim that the beauty that recenters, destabilizes, and moves us to care about “the other”—the beauty that has agency—is not generic or familiar. It is always particular. — Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Uncertain Parks: Disturbed Sites, Citizens, and Risk Society, in Large Parks (2007)
In the landscape, as in anatomy, the sublime is frequently found “lying near the surface,” at that boundary between land and water, dry and wet, contained and flowing, terra firma and terra incognita. — Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Seized by Sublime Sentiments,” in Richard Haag: Bloedel Reserve and Gas Works Park (1998)
Narrative dimensions, while conducive to epistemological communication… sometimes overlook how we ponder the world as existentially embodied beings, as individuals in search of transmogrified fact. The pondering, I suggest, remains exceedingly important as a form of value remains under-theorized and thus underacknowledged as an enduring source of aesthetic knowledge. A clarification of this neglected ambient dimension provides more lucid access to the full range of potential aesthetic values in relation to the natural environment. — Cheryl Foster, “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics” (1998)
We encounter nature as an enveloping other, a place where the experience of one’s self drifts drastically away from the factual everyday. — Cheryl Foster, “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics” (1998)
DRAWING CATALOG
CLAIRE CASSTEVENS
DESIGN RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT 8
CLAIRE CASSTEVENS
DESIGN RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT 8
The burying of our dead is arguably the practice through which people engage most directly with landscape. “Dust to dust,” as the saying goes; burial is a return to the earth. But how else does burial, as a concept and spatial practice, link bodies and landscapes? In the Oxford English Dictionary, entries on the verb “to bury” range dramatically, revealing that burial is an act both literal and metaphorical. While definitions begin with “to deposit (a CORPSE) in the ground,” to bury is also more generally a way “to consign to oblivion, put out of the way, abandon and FORGET” that which we no longer desire. A third definition offers yet another take: to bury oneself is “to be profoundly absorbed or ENGROSSED in a habit or practice,” such as work, a hobby, or an idea. So while burial is actually not always about the DISPOSAL of human bodies, it can still be used as a powerful framework for investigating the relationship between people and landscapes they inhabit. In the research that follows, I explore how attitudes, ethics, theories, and spatial practices concerned with EMBODIED EXPERIENCES of landscape might be read through this multivalent concept of burial. It is my goal to expose some of the risks (physical as well as intellectual) involved with our current notion that the ground is an ever-willing RECEPTACLE for WASTE. Even more than that, however, I hope to illuminate the importance today of approaching the ground, the landscape, and the environment at large by way of that third definition above. We have to become absorbed and engrossed in it—with conscious intent. The dawn of the ANTHROPOCENE throws into high relief the fact that landscape and body have never truly been separate entities, even as people live out the majority of their lives above ground, eyes to the sky. Science has now shown that we have literally constructed the earth in our own image, or at least the image of our CONSUMPTION. It is time to really question what this means for the way we engage with— rather than deal with, or neglect—the GROUND AS A KIND OF BODY. So yes, this is a CRITIQUE of the many dangerous ways that people have conceived and constructed the ground, and it is an urgent call for designers to figure out how to translate the large-scale, and often INVISIBLE, implications of our burial practices into something that the body can recognize and be moved by. It’s time to get personal. What follows is effectively an annotated bibliography of sources that have been especially germane to this line of research, interspersed with images and drawings that visually represent the ideas or proposals therein. It is divided into chapters based on subtopic. Beginning with CORPOREALITY, I build a concept of what exactly a body is in the first place. What distinguishes a human body from a non-human body? Are there certain qualities that get to the essence of “body”? The second section, CONSTRUCTED GROUND, does the same for that thick edge—or is it a thin surface?—that separates our waking world from the subterranean realm. It pulls from several texts dealing with the physical manipulation of earth, as well as the role of representation in reinforcing certain ideas about the ground. In SANITATION I examine burial through a historical lens with an emphasis on public health. I propose that beginning with the construction of cemeteries, many burial practices can be attributed to a fear of disease. Landfills, sewer systems, and the filling in of swamps and marshland are key examples. This lays the groundwork for the next chapter, CORPOREAL CITIES. Here, I begin to make connections between the first three chapters and suggest that cities, in particular, have taken on qualities of a human body. FLUX AND FLOW. reinforces the physical INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF BODIES AND LANDSCAPES. It introduces several key works of cultural and architectural theory related to systems thinking and also introduces essays on toxic discourse that outline what concepts of flux and flow mean for the movement of contamination through the POROUS MEMBRANES of the ground and the body. The chapter on QUEER ECOLOGY continues to dismantle the idea that the ground is just the ground, a body just a body, through ideas about HYBRIDITY. It also brings SENSUALITY into the picture, which I take up in the final bibliographic chapter as I build an account of how the sublime, the sensuous, and the intimate are integral aspects of an embodied experience. claire casstevens / alar 8100: DESIGN RESEARCH (F16)
LAND
SCAPE
BODY