Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment - Volume 4

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Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment

Critical Conservation Colloquia Volume 4: Spring 2019 at the

Harvard University Graduate School of Design

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Critical Conservation

POWER & PLACE Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment

Critical Conservation Colloquia Volume 4: Spring 2019 at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Edited by Susan Nigra Snyder & George E. Thomas with Carrie Gammell

CONTENTS 2 INTRODUCTION

4 CONTRIBUTORS

8 STOP SAVING THE PLANET! A 21st Century Environmentalist Manifesto Jenny Price

48 THE BIG DAM QUESTION How Law Defines the River Rhett Larson and Dilip da Cunha

98 DESIGNING SAN FRANCISCO Gender, Power, and Urban Renewal Alison Isenberg

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INTRODUCTION

This publication is a record of lectures that were part of the Critical Conservation Colloquia, organized in Spring 2019 by the Master in Design Studies (MDes) program in Critical Conservation at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to accompany the course, “Power & Place: Culture & Conflict in the Built Environment.” The goals of the course and the accompanying Critical Conservation Colloquia are to foster an understanding of urban ethics and an awareness of the political uses of history and identity.

This course began as part of a wider GSD initiative borne out of distress over the rising awareness of discrimination and violence against the African American community that resulted in the fall 2015 Black in Design Conference.

At that time, Dean Mostafavi remarked that, “The relationship between race and space, the way in which one could say the racialization of space is becoming more extreme, is continuing. These issues have remained absolutely pertinent.” Critical Conservation is a natural center for this discussion because we focus on places where cultural conflict and the spatial patterns of exclusion such as historic districts and red-lining have suppressed racial, ethnic, economic and religious differences, leaving an indelible imprint on the material character of the city. The array of ideas and scholars presented here exemplifies the broader investigation that co-directors Susan Nigra Snyder and George E. Thomas are leading through the Critical Conservation research agenda.

This is the fourth year of the series that accompanies the class, “Power & Place.” This class studies places where cultural conflict has emerged from both intended and unintended regulatory and spatial patterns of exclusion.

2019 has continued to focus on three areas of Los Angeles: The Harbor: The Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro Bay is 20 miles south of downtown and handles 20% of all cargo coming into the United States. The mix of heavy industry, oil fields, trucking industry and port activities from one of the busiest container ports in the world has produced conflicts between conservation, community protection and market forces creating a situation of environmental discrimination for a working-class, low-education level population and increasing gentrification reflecting their locations near the Pacific Ocean.

The “Denas:” The “Dena” communities (Pasadena, Altadena, La CañadaFlintridge) at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains are independent of the City of Los Angeles, but part of LA County. They are connected to downtown LA by the Arroyo Seco Parkway that borders the Los Angeles River’s Arroyo Seco tributary—a source of flood waters for all communities downstream of the Devils Gate Dam. All three communities are affected by the restoration of the Devil’s Gate Dam reservoir—creating a conflict over dredging to maintain flood protection for the entire city versus protecting the habitat—now a park / open space—that has resulted from years of sediment deposits. The project estimates 400 trucks per day moving through the communities for sediment removal. These neighborhoods, once the site of racial covenant segregation are now the site of intense environmental conflict.

The Western San Gabriel Valley: The San Gabriel Valley is noted for its rapid Asianification since 1980 with many communities now having a majority-Asian population where recently they had a dominant white hegemony. Known as the “real Chinatown” of Los Angeles, wealthy immigrants now settle here first in an ethnic enclave creating the rise of a majority-Asian suburb even as historic regulations require “Mediterranean” styling that gives priority to European cultural frames.

The MDes program in Critical Conservation has been formed to shape a broader conversation about design and development that engages 21st century questions of environmental, social and economic sustainability to serve an ever more pluralist and global society. Critical Conservation explores how history and constructed narratives of heritage are used as instruments of power to control the identity of places and the subsequent inclusion and exclusion of populations these acts enable. The program makes clear that truly critical conservation is about social justice instead of being about buildings or places. Critical Conservation provides designers with a methodological foundation to research the cultural systems that frame conflicts inherent in making progressive places—the cultural ecology of place. It provides a theoretical understanding of the social construction of dynamic cultural meaning associated with places, artifacts and history. The knowledge gained provides an understanding that decisions critical to placemaking involving the uses of history and group identity demand that an ethical perspective be part of the design process.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Jenny Price is a relentless crosser of boundaries whose varied professional experiences range from artist / activist to writer / historian. A graduate of Princeton University, she received her doctorate from Yale University where William Cronon served as her thesis director. Her dissertation, Flight Maps: Encounters with Nature in Modern American Culture, anticipated the many issues that have continued to engage her, bringing historical narratives into direct juxtaposition with modern life.

Not content with the staid life of an academic, she has explored diverse ways to bring her interests to a broader public, using wit and a contrarian’s imagination to confront society with the depth and meaning of issues that shape our time.

In Los Angeles, she created an activist persona as a Los Angeles Urban Ranger, to make the point that the city whose great river is a concrete channel is nonetheless a part of the natural environment; her alter ego, the environmental advice counselor “JJ,” available at “Green Me Up, JJ,” proves again that humor is critical to learning.

Price’s fellowships and visiting professorships span from Guggenheim, NEH, and Rachel Carson Center fellowships to academic posts at UCLA, USC, Princeton and now Washington University in St. Louis. Her scholarship reflects the peripatetic life that she has created, crossing topics, places, and media in thought-provoking essays that become important books. Her current project, Stop Saving the Planet: A Twelve Step Guide for 21st Century Environmentalists, confronts feel-good environmentalism with the urgency that dramatic, largescale national action is required.

Rhett Larson, J.D. is senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute of Public Policy and an associate professor of Water Law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. He took his J.D. at the University of Chicago where he studied with Professor Lior Strahilevitz, who was a speaker in the 2016 Power and Place Colloquium.

His interest in water, a natural focus of a son of a western lettuce farmer, led him, after his initial law degrees, to an M.Sc. in Water Science, Policy and Management at the University of Oxford. After practicing law in the west for several years, where he encountered Native American Law and Spanishoriginated water law, he turned to academia which benefits from his global consulting practice spanning from India to the Middle East, Africa and the entire North American continent.

Professor Larson’s research focuses on the intersection of water law with food and energy security, the impact of technological innovation on water rights, and the law governing transboundary waters. He has published articles in leading American and British law journals, tackling such subjects as the sustainability implications of a human right to water, corporate governance reforms to facilitate remediation of contaminated rivers, the water rights of indigenous people based on religious water uses, and the role of water management in aggravating and mitigating armed conflict.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner working with his colleague and wife, Anuradha Mathur, in a global practice based in Philadelphia and Bangalore. At Harvard University he is Co-Director of the Risk and Resilience Master in Design Studies program at the Graduate School of Design. Da Cunha has a Master’s degree from MIT and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.

Mathur and da Cunha have focused their research and writing on waterways and wetness, beginning with Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009); and Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). In 2017, Mathur and da Cunha launched Ocean of Wetness, a design platform that seeks to situate the past, present, and future of habitation in a ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface dichotomy. This research led to da Cunha’s most recent book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Mathur and da Cunha have received a Pew Fellowship Grant in recognition of their collaborative work that imagines new possibilities for design of the built environment and challenges the lines separating land and water, urban and rural, formal and informal environments, among others. They are currently working on a multimedia exhibition titled The Ocean of Rain.

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Alison Isenberg is Professor of History at Princeton University; her undergraduate thesis at Yale University, directed by William Cronon, led to work in New York City’s planning department on public housing and urban parks.

That urban experience in turn led her to her doctorate in urban history at the University of Pennsylvania where she encountered data driven social history in a thesis directed by Michael Katz.

Professor Isenberg teaching experience ranging from Florida International University, UNC Chapel Hill, and Rutgers University exposed her to a broad array of American contexts that in turn has informed her research in gender, exclusion, and urbanism set against the framework of 19th and 20th century United States cities. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (Spring 2010), the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University (2006-7), the Institute for the Arts & Humanities at the University of North Carolina (Fall 2000), and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe (1998-9).

Dr. Isenberg’s books include Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (University of Chicago Press, 2004), which received the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and her most recent work, Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and urban Renewal in the City by the Bay (Princeton University Press, 2017), received the 2018 PROSE Award for Architecture & Urban Planning from the Association of American Publishers, and a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

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February 12, 2019

STOP SAVING THE PLANET!

A 21st Century Environmentalist Manifest0 Jenny Price

[SNYDER] Welcome to the first talk of the 2019 Critical Conservation colloquia. I’m Susan Snyder, and along with George Thomas, we co-direct the Critical Conservation program that is part of the Master of Design Studies program here at GSD. Critical Conservation explores how history and constructed narratives of heritage are used as instruments of power to control the identity of places, and the subsequent inclusion and exclusion of populations that these acts enable.

The Critical Conservation program makes clear that truly Critical Conservation is about social justice, instead of being about buildings or places. This is the fourth year of the series that accompanies our course, “Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment.” In this class, we look at places where cultural conflict has emerged from both intended and unintended regulatory and spatial patterns of exclusion.

This year we’re continuing our focus on Los Angeles, where environmental issues in an affluent community have produced a conflict over dredging a reservoir to maintain flood control versus those that believe it should remain in its present status as a habitat. In Wilmington and San Pedro, a less affluent area of heavy industry and oil production and one of the biggest container ports in the world, conflicts between conservation, community protection goals and market forces have created a situation of environmental discrimination. And finally in the San Gabriel Valley, we’re looking at the rapid increase in the Asian population in communities of once white-dominant hegemonies.

Our intention in this research is to foster an understanding of urban ethics, social justice and political awareness that is applicable to different parts of the world, hopefully leading our students and the GSD community to a broader understanding of the dimensions of the cultural ecology of a place over time.

Jenny is our first speaker, and George will introduce her.

[THOMAS] We are delighted to welcome Jenny Price to today’s colloquium. After her dissertation with William Cronon at Yale, she has taught at many of the United States leading universities, Jenny is presently a Research Fellow at the Sam Fox School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. We did not ask Jenny to speak today because of her academic credentials, prodigious though they are. We asked Jenny to come to GSD because she is a world-class disruptor whose creative intelligence counters long-established myths. I should tell you that in the three years plus of this colloquium, Jenny’s introduction has been the most difficult for me to date, not through any fault of hers. To get a bit of a handle on Jenny, I read some of her texts. I began with her article Jenny Price

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in Uncommon Ground that we use in our course readings. And then I found her dissertation online, and followed her narrative from the extinction of the passenger pigeon to their modern replacement with flocks of plastic pink flamingos, and then on to the commodification of nature in her look at the Nature Company. I then did a quick survey of the internet and found her as an urban ranger performance artist in Los Angeles—complete with Smokey the Bear hat—persuading Los Angelinos that their city was more than a smog-choked, car-centric, godless, anti-nature place. And then she morphed again into the Dear Abby of environmental columnists in her column “Green Me Up, JJ,” where she answers such deep questions as whether it’s green to have children. And which are greener, girls or boys? Or is there merit to LEED certification if no one can ever remember what LEED stands for? And if the industrial owners of LEED buildings are actually destroying the planet with their work inside the ostensibly green building, should they still win an award? In her JJ advice column, which I know she’s going to reference today, she invented a murderer-for-hire who asks how he can make his business green. These are important questions.

Jenny writes clearly and with flair. More Mark Twain than Al Gore, her humor engages us so that we aren’t defeated by the density of the text before we get to her message. Hers is an important strength because Jenny intends for us to explore the core issues of our time: issues of environmental justice given the reality that the poor contribute less to pollution but bear its brunt in most urban settings, and she asks whether environmentalism is just another form of elitism.

The cultural split that divides our society over the issue of climate change is evidence of the contemporary crisis. The issues that Jenny Price raises engage our Critical Conservation program. Please welcome Jenny Price.

[PRICE] Thank you. Oh my goodness. What a wonderful introduction. I always think, if only my mother could be here. Thank you to Susan and George for inviting me.

It’s really a pleasure to be at Harvard. And it’s really exciting to find out more about the Critical Conservation program and the Power & Place course. I think these are the phrases that will be on my tombstone, so it’s really fun to be a part of this for a little bit.

Stop saving the planet! Please. I beg you. Stop saving the planet.

I’m going to start with something from one of my alter-egos, JJ, who writes an occasional green advice column, “Green Me Up, JJ.” 10

“Dear JJ: My 8-year-old son, Rory, wants to play in a baseball league, but the closest one is two towns away—28 miles! My wife wants to do it, but I think it’s more important that Rory knows about climate change and learns how to act responsibly. Please advise! Warming up in Wallula, WA—Jason.”

“Dear Jason: Ah, yes, this is a tough question, and it’s exactly the sort of argument that families are having more and more these days. Happily, I can suggest two easy ways you might solve it, though. One, carpool. Or two, you might try a simple and very useful equation that two UC Berkeley math whizzes have just developed. Amazingly, it empowers families to calculate the answers to just these sorts of dilemmas.”

“Here’s how it works. First, you have to figure out your family warming coefficient, or your FWC. To do that, you take the weight in grams of your heart and the weight of your wife’s heart times two, and multiply by the volume in ccs of your child’s dreams. Multiply by the number of things that you value half or more as much as doing your part to reduce carbon—for example, family, friendship, travel, chocolate, et cetera. Then sit your child down and explain that the world as we know it is going to end if we don’t stop doing things like driving 8-year-olds 56 miles round-trip to play baseball. Add the weight of the child’s guilt to the previous total.

“OK, that’s your FWC, which you can now use to calculate answers to the specific questions that come up in your family. In this case, you’re almost there.

Just add together the distance one-way to the game, the weight of the vehicle you plan to drive, and the weight of the people and equipment times two inside it. Multiply this sum by the gas mileage, and divide by two if it’s a hybrid vehicle.

Add half the air miles you’ve flown in the past 15 months, and subtract the number of offsets you purchased and immediately add back the same number.

Subtract the square root of the number of children that you and your wife have decided not to have primarily because of their energy demands. Now add the distance that the grandparents will drive or fly to their grandchild’s games in the course of the season, and subtract the number of deceased grandparents times three. Then divide by the combined total weight of moms and apple pies in your town that will compensate for the absence of baseball.”

A student of mine actually once tried to use the equation. He tells me it doesn’t work.

Stop Saving the Planet is the title of a book that I very, very much hope to finish in the near future. It’s a critique of contemporary environmentalism, and it offers Jenny Price

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12 reasons to stop saving the planet and 50 ways to do so. What I’m particularly interested in here is what we talk about when we talk about environment. How do you think about environment? So what I’m going to do is to present my own Critical Conservation analysis. JJ is going to weigh in at a few points. And I hope to leave at least 10 or 15 minutes for discussion because I really want to hear from you too.

Also, I want to emphasize right up front that I’m not critiquing all of environmentalism—every solar panel, every regulation. There’s a great abundance of terrific environmental work out there, and I’m guessing that a fair number of people in this audience are doing it. Rather, I want to zero in on a dominant and powerful way of thinking about environmental problems, in which the stated goal is to “save the environment,” a.k.a. the planet. There are, as I’ll explain, a couple of hugely problematic things about this way of thinking— beginning with “save” and “planet,” and I’m not that happy about “the.”

My book project is motivated by two big questions. The first is, why aren’t we making ten times as much progress on climate change, the plastics apocalypse, and other environmental crises? In 2016, for example—in the pre-Trump era— the Obama administration’s EPA cleaned up one of 1,440 Superfund sites. Why are most problems actually getting worse, despite the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act? You might be thinking, “Blame big money!” “It’s Fox News.” “It’s the Kochs, it’s Exxon,” and so on. And while I don’t disagree with any of those causes, I also don’t think they’re the whole picture. Rather, are the strategies that many of us are using to tackle these crises actually working (fig. 1.2)?

OK, that’s the first question. The second question is, why does everyone hate environmentalists? And I’m not exaggerating when I use the word hate—I do mean hate. “Clean air and water for people’s kids!” It’s an agenda, you’d think, that should be about as contentious as free chocolate ice cream for all. In fact, 3 of my 12 reasons to stop saving the planet are “because everyone hates environmentalists” (fig. 1.2).

What we are now seeing, I think, is the culmination of five decades of antagonism towards “save the planet” environmentalism, that goes back at least to the first Earth Day in 1970. “Environment” has become the dirty word in contemporary American politics, which in turn has made “climate change” the “F-word.”

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Fig. 1.2

Fig. 1.1

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Fig. 1.4

Fig. 1.3

Consider this: the first day after the 2016 election, Trump promised to pull out of the Paris agreements. On the first day after the inauguration, his administration took information about climate change down from the federal websites (fig. 1.3). In Trump’s budgets, the agency with the biggest cuts has been the EPA (fig. 1.4). The first priority for rolling back regulations has been energy rules. When the president asked industry leaders to weigh in on what they’d like to see gone, the first priority was environmental regulations. This administration has been going after the environment most of all—and it’s the agenda issue on which they’ve arguably made the most progress, even if a lot of it has happened under the radar.

And this is enormously urgent, right? It has real consequences. We lack the public support we need to really tackle these issues. You can understand why people with a ton of money like the Koch brothers want to go after the environment, as they’re the ones who profit from environmental devastation.

Environmental regulations represent, for various reasons, the biggest threat to their ever-growing profits. But what about people who are considerably less rich? Why does the Trump base—largely white working-class and lower-income Americans—hate environmentalists? After all, these are exactly the people who are suffering most from these environmental problems. But oddly, you could say that one of the very few things that low-income minority communities and the white working-class right-wing communities agree on is that they all hate environmentalists.

You hear environmentalists say, “Well, those people don’t really understand what’s going on. They’re being manipulated.” But you have to ask, is this hatred logical? Have environmental solutions actually been helping or hurting the people who need them most? I do think we have to take their grievances seriously.

Okay, those are my two motivating questions.

So now, what does saving the planet have to do with all this? And if you’re freaking out about climate change, then why is the present strategy such a lousy game plan?

Jenny Price

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I’ll begin by asking where “save the planet!” comes from. Why do people say that (fig. 1.5)?

I’ll draw on a lot of my past work to argue that this idea is rooted historically in the unbelievably powerful definition of nature as a place apart—a definition I have been critiquing in many of my past projects. Indeed, I fear that I am rapidly in danger of becoming one of those people who only has one idea in their entire career. However, this has of course been an enormously powerful way of thinking about nature. In this way of thinking, nature is embraced as the real world. It’s the true world. It’s the world before humans (all of us!) arrived and ruined it. This is a way of thinking about nature as the opposite of modern life—as a kind of refuge from modern life, from cities, from the economy. And to think about environmental advocacy as “saving the planet!” is to define the goal as saving the world of “the environment” from the human world.

Fig. 1.5

And yet, a great many of us—I’m sure including some people in this room—have for decades now been shouting and screaming, “NO! Environment is not apart from humans!” Environment is the foundation of our lives. It is the resources we use, and it’s the landscapes and ecosystems we inhabit.

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We change environments to live. That’s the definition of being human on earth.

I think our mantra, instead of “Save the Planet!” should be “Change Environments Better!” Change environments better! It admittedly doesn’t quite have the same ring. Look around you. This podium is made out of environment.

Your clothes are made out of environment. A Prius is nothing if not 2,400 pounds of rocks and dirt and water and plants and animals. Environment is the foundation of a Tesla, an iPhone, Harvard, the White House, the Fox News headquarters building. It’s the foundation of Chicago and of the economy.

What is an economy? It’s basically how, as a society, we change environments to provide our needs and wants and how we distribute the benefits and costs.

Our economy is foundationally environmental. And if you think about solutions in terms of how to “save the environment,” you may be neglecting to think about most of how we change environments, and therefore about most of our environmental impacts, and also about most of the impacts on people’s lives.

For example, when you think about what a Prius does, what do you say? You might say it’s a great solution because it “saves the environment”: it doesn’t change environments. It doesn’t emit as much carbon as my neighbor Tim’s Escalade (so how cool am I?). Instead why don’t we ask how the Prius does change environments? And if you ask that question, the hybrid isn’t really that much different from an Escalade. It mostly changes the environment badly— both as a car and as a market commodity—from cradle to grave.

Ultimately, the first and most passionate question about environments—if you really want to save anything at all—should be, “How do we change and live inside environments better?” And environmentalism needs to be about how we live. It needs to be about how we change environments to maximize the health and well-being of people and environments. So I’m getting very verklempt here, but… stop saving the damn planet.

As to how do we change environments? Wildly unsustainably. Our industries and our economy are designed to maximize stuff and to maximize wealth. We need solutions, therefore, that massively challenge both. Which most standard “save the planet!” solutions fail to do. “Save the planet!” environmentalism is too often really “Sidestep the Problem!” environmentalism. Or in some cases, we’ve got counterproductive solutions that look more like “Screw the Problem!” environmentalism.

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And here’s the last little bit of my intro and set-up, which is that environmental advocates have so enduringly been accused of being elitist and have so consistently been bewildered by that (fig. 1.6). And yet, you can think of a lot of environmental solutions—and I’ll say a lot more about this—as trickle-down environmentalism. You can understand a lot of environmentalist culture as a sort of “have your Prius and drive it too” set of efforts, which essentially allows you to think you’re doing something positive and, at the same time, to rationalize the failure to challenge industrial and economic practices that benefit mostly more affluent Americans (and beyond).

Fig. 1.6

Okay, so how does this rationalization work? This is what I want to spend the rest of my time on. And to begin with, I’m not an economist. I’m not an engineer who thinks anew about engineering solutions. I’m going to talk about how we need to think anew about thinking. And so I want to talk a little bit about how the logic of “save the planet!” environmentalist culture works. I’ll throw in some of my “50 ways to stop saving the planet,” as the book will include a lot of things that you can do to stop saving the planet and actually be more effective.

So how does “save the planet!” culture work? I think you have to identify and be very wary of two major strands of “save the planet!” logic. They are powerful.

They are common. You will recognize them. I call them Green Virtue and Whole Planet Thinking, and I’m going to talk mostly about these two logics for the rest of my time today.

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I’ll talk a little about how both of these flow logically from this powerful way of thinking about nature as something “out there.” And then, I’ll bring in the convenient truth of a lot of environmental advocacy—about how these two logics conveniently allow you to rationalize solutions that in fact sidestep the problems.

Okay, Green Virtue. We all know about it, right?—about this “greener than thou” culture that has haunted environmentalism from the beginning. It’s widely mocked. It’s a kind of righteousness that even a lot of environmentalists don’t like. Here’s one of my favorite parodies—the Onion News Network’s “New Prius Helps Environment by Killing Its Owner” (fig. 1.7). By all means look up that video on YouTube. And here, also, is JJ’s advice to an assassin, who writes in to ask how to green up his practice.

Fig. 1.7

Green Virtue is annoying. It’s alienating. And it’s enormously powerful and enormously hard to resist. I, myself, every time I throw a yogurt container into a blue bin, I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m so amazing.” So where does it come from?

Why has this enduring greener-than-thou-ness haunted environmentalism?

Once you think about nature or environment as something “out there,” and as the “real world”—as the uncorrupt world, versus the crazy corrupt world we’ve created in here—then what could possibly be more virtuous than saving the real world? Saving it From All Humans. And in fact, historically (and this goes back close to millennia), there’s been a strong association between saving and caring about the environment and being a really super-virtuous human.

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Fig. 1.10

Fig. 1.9

Fig. 1.8

Fig. 1.11

Green Virtue is very powerful, and it’s incredibly important to understanding American environmental thinking, and to understanding how “save the planet!” environmentalism works. It works at all levels—individual, corporate, and policy—and all these work together.

So… what do individuals do to solve climate change? Green Virtue, first of all, drives this incredible over-emphasis on the importance of individual action— and, concomitantly, the under-emphasis on the need for systemic change. We see a huge emphasis on “what can I do”—on changing your light bulbs and driving a Prius and on what you can do in your house and your kitchen and your bathroom and your bedroom—and not nearly enough on the question, “What needs to be done?” (fig. 1.8, fig. 1.9, fig. 1.10, fig. 1.11) In fact, my #3 reason to stop saving the planet is “because I can’t solve the Middle East crisis by myself.” I think it’s really very telling that environmental crises like climate change are the only kind of global crisis that you are expected personally to solve from your kitchen. We don’t expect you to solve global poverty or child trafficking, but we expect you to solve climate change from your bathroom? We need to emphasize more systemic and public solutions.

How does Green Virtue work at the corporate level? What do companies do?

Well, you can track it right through the heart of greenwashing.

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Most of us know greenwashing when we see it. We all know that the companies are doing it. So why do so many of us fall for it? You know, I’m at the supermarket, and I see the word “natural” on a cereal box, and I just turn to putty. Companies smartly (and of course in part with good intentions) run with this association with virtue. They can deploy green acts as a kind of big sign to say, “Buy our product because we are so virtuous, both environmentally and also just in general.” And yet, while Nestlé’s new, thinner water bottle might boast less plastic, Nestlé, as many of you likely know, has been avidly draining and privatizing water supplies across the world (fig. 1.12).

In 2005, Walmart had suffered serious hits to their reputation. What didn’t they do to respond? They didn’t improve their labor practices (though that has now changed a little bit), and they didn’t start paying their vendors properly. They didn’t improve the quality of their products. What did they decide to do? They established a set of green efforts and a sustainability initiative. They telegraphed their virtue. They probably hired a sustainability officer (fig. 1.13).

What about the LEED-certified corporate headquarters (fig. 1.14)? It has, I think, become one of the trendiest 21st-century “we’re virtuous” signs. Here are some of the companies that now have LEED—generally LEED Platinum— headquarters. And you have to ask, are these particular companies actually challenging how our industries and our economy create stuff and wealth? BP, Exxon, Bank of America, Nestlé, BASF (the world’s largest chemical company), McDonald’s, JPMorgan Chase.

Take Bank of America. They have $20 billion out in loans to oil and gas companies—more than any other bank—but they have this beautiful LEED Platinum headquarters in midtown Manhattan (fig. 1.15). Which, as an aside, turns out actually to emit more carbon than other Manhattan buildings of comparable size, and also Al Gore has his offices there. JJ weighed in a little on this problem, to a CEO who wrote in to ask whether he should use LEED standards to green up the company’s new headquarters. She recommended a separate certification program—Green Roof for Economic and Environmental Devastation (GREED)—that’s proven to be more popular for the construction of corporate headquarters.

What these companies mostly do, I think, is to change environments to maximize profits in an economy that relies on infinite growth. And that is inherently unsustainable—and inherently inequitable, which I’ll get to—and it mostly sidesteps the problem.

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Fig. 1.13

Fig. 1.12

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Fig. 1.15

Fig. 1.14

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Fig. 1.18

Fig. 1.17

Fig. 1.16

Now, what do you get when you add individual green virtue to corporate green virtue? Green consumerism! We’ve seen a veritable explosion of green consumerism in the 21st century. Or in other words, if the most popular “save the planet!” question is “what can I do?,” what’s the most popular answer? How can you be a virtuous Save-the-Planeteer? Buy something (fig. 1.16, fig. 1.17, fig.

1.18)!

Hence we now have this environmentalist consumer culture which seems to say that the more green energy and resources you use, the more energy and resources you can save (fig. 1.19). Or, basically, five Priuses are better than one, and five Energy Star TVs are better than one. Which, I think, essentially adds up to using the problem to solve the problem—instead of actually challenging the problem and figuring out what to do about it. And this I think is a defining characteristic of a lot of these “save the planet!” solutions.

Okay, so you have this stew of Green Virtue individual and corporate and consumerist solutions. Now, just add public policy.

And, in fact, there are a lot of environmental policies that encourage this virtuous green consumerism. You have a lot of subsidies for hybrids, and subsidies to build big new huge LEED-certified buildings. You have what might be my favorite policy: Cash for Clunkers programs (fig. 1.20).

That was the 2009 federal program, which President Obama rolled out in the wake of the crash. It worked like this. You got up to a $4500 rebate if you traded in a car that got no more than 18 mpg. Or you could trade for a car that got at least 4 mpg more than your old one. Or you could trade a small SUV that got 16 mpg or less for one that got 18 mpg, or you could trade a large SUV that got 14 mpg for a vehicle that got at least 15 mpg. So what was the most popular trade? A 1-2-year-old Ford pickup for a new Ford pickup. And the program required the dealers to destroy the “clunkers.” Yeah, they had to destroy the vehicles.

So again, you have this “screw the problem!” solution that almost certainly created more emissions. And it failed entirely to address the problem, which is that we have an economy in which you’re supposed to buy a new car every two years, and instead relied on this logic of green virtue to justify and market what was in fact a program to stimulate an economy that requires runaway consumerism and unending growth.

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Fig. 1.20

Fig. 1.19

And finally, if you add all this together—all this green virtue swirling around— well, the final point I’ll make is that this incredible emphasis on virtuous acts tends to assume that everyone has equal responsibility to “save the planet,” which, first, flattens out the responsibility for who’s actually created these problems and who should be responsible for cleaning them up, and then, it actually celebrates a lot of the most culpable parties for engaging in virtuous and pointless (or worse) green actions.

So that’s how Green Virtue works.

Now, just imagine that you’re watching all of this play out from, say, coal country in Appalachia, which has been ravaged by the fossil-fuel-based economy, or from the heavily industrial Chelsea area in Boston. Or from South East LA (fig.

1.21), or from the Yakama reservation in Washington, or from working-class or impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago or Atlanta or Detroit. (Or from Nigeria, where this growth-based profit-maximizing economy has devastated environments and the communities who inhabit them.)

These are the places and communities where we stash the inevitable environmental devastation. If you live and work in these places, you are likely to contribute least to environmental messes. You benefit the least from creating the environmental messes. You are most likely to suffer the worst consequences at home and at work—absolutely devastating consequences.

And you’re being told that the solution is to buy cars. And to buy TVs. And to buy organic GMO-free gummy bears. Much of which you cannot afford. And, in addition, the government is subsidizing more affluent people to buy these things. You’re watching these solutions make other people’s neighborhoods cleaner and other people’s children healthier. And also, the fact that you’re not doing any of this—that you’re not buying all this stuff—means that you’re not considered virtuous environmentalists. You’re being told that you are part of the problem and not the solution.

You. You’re the problem (fig. 1.22).

Imagine all that—and at worst, “saving the planet” looks like a lot of silly elitist ridiculous nonsense. At best, it looks like trickle-down environmentalism that’s making the cleanest places cleaner.

It looks infuriatingly unfair.

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Fig. 1.22

Fig. 1.21

These are the places where we stash the devastating environmental messes, and all this virtuous “saving the planet” is almost wholly failing to seriously challenge the causes. It’s not cleaning up these messes. And it’s also seriously getting on people’s nerves.

When people in the coal towns in West Virginia say, “You don’t care about us, You don’t care about the economy, You don’t care about our jobs…” Well, instead of the standard response—“But we have to save the environment! We have to balance economic growth with protecting the environment”—why don’t you instead shout and scream and insist, “But this is about how we live!”

We change environments to live. So if the economy isn’t working for you, it’s not because we’re protecting the environment. It’s because this economy fundamentally requires that we change environments badly and unsustainably and inequitably. And that results in the way we stash the inevitable messes in the places where the people who benefit least from this economy “live and work and play”—to borrow a defining environmental justice phrase.

Okay, I’ll move on to Whole Planet Thinking—the second major strand of “save the planet!” logic. This idea comes out of thinking about the environment as something “out there,” but it enables you to rationalize solutions that actually sidestep the problem (fig. 1.23).

I’ll call it “whole frickin’ planet (WFP) thinking.” If green virtue helps you think about what to do—to save something—WFP thinking is really about how to think about what you’re saving: the planet, or environment, which have generally been used as synonyms since at least as far back as 1970. I’m simplifying here, but basically people have used “the planet” to mean the planet before and without us—aka “the” environment.

This way of thinking, too, has a long history which you can trace back more recently to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—that powerful and amazing book— and more generally to post-World-War-II globalization. And you can trace it back much further to western ways of thinking about environment as one thing which leads to thinking of all humans as the problem. As a consequence of these ways of thinking, the environmentalist target has so often been “the environment,” all of it, everywhere (fig. 1.24).

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Fig. 1.24

Fig. 1.23

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Fig. 1.32

Fig. 1.31

Fig. 1.30

Fig. 1.29

Fig. 1.28

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Fig. 1.34

Fig. 1.33

The icon for WFP thinking is the Blue Marble, the earth from space—and I’d be surprised if you haven’t already seen it at least once today. It’s everywhere (fig. 1.25, fig. 1.26, fig. 1.27, fig. 1.28, fig. 1.29, fig. 1.30, fig. 1.31, fig. 1.32, fig. 1.33, fig. 1.34). So can we ban this image? Just for a few years. Just to clear a little conceptual space. Of course, the whole planet seems imperiled in 2019, and yet, thinking about the target as the whole planet/environment has dangerously allowed environmental advocates to collapse problems and solutions.

You can collapse all problems into one problem—destroying the planet—and all solutions into the same solution (saving it!). So all problems become kind of oddly interchangeable. Eat an organic apple, save the planet! Enact a ban on a toxic pesticide, save the planet! Recycle your yogurt container, save the planet!

Clean up a sewage spill, save the planet!

It’s a way of thinking that has allowed many of us too often to be very vague about a few essential on-the-ground facts about environmental crises—such as what they are, exactly, and who created them, and who’s suffering most from them. Also, where are the messes, and where are they the worst? And how much do you actually have to do to clean them up? It’s a kind of “recycle a water bottle in Chicago, clean up an electronics landfill in India” way of thinking that allows you to rationalize and thus “sidestep the problem!” solutions in at least two really big ways.

One—and you hear this all the time—is that you have to do something, and isn’t something better than nothing. Which allows you to seriously avoid the question, What do we actually need to do?—as, say, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, that proclaimed Twelve Years to Disaster) report on climate change does insist. And two, WFP thinking ignores and makes invisible the vast inequities in where these problems are, who is responsible, and also where the worst problems are.

And of course, green virtue and whole frickin’ planet thinking work together. It’s a lot easier to think that your virtuous light-bulb-changing is actually making a difference if you think, well, I’m doing something, so that’s good—or, it doesn’t matter if I’m doing it in Bel Air or some other elite suburb because it doesn’t matter where you do things, right?

WFP thinking, too, rationalizes “sidestep the problem!” solutions at all three levels—individual actions, corporate initiatives, and public policy each of which represents intentions that can be good or can be less good.

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At the individual level, you might say, I’m just gonna do something, anything. We make bargains with ourselves, right? Like, I drive an SUV, but it’s okay because I buy organic apples. I think a lot of us do that. I know I do.

Fig. 1.35

At the corporate level, I think Green Virtue and WFP thinking are in fact the two pillars of greenwashing, and these combined logics—you’re doing something virtuous, and it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing or where you’re doing it or how much you’re doing—accounts for why greenwashing actually works as a sales tool. Apple can build a LEED- certified data center in North Carolina, but they have, you may also know, massively non-LEED factories all over China, which are hugely more consequential. Fiji, with this beautifully pure clear water, (owned by the California-based The Wonderful Company) is actually monopolizing the water supplies on Fiji itself, where, not so wonderfully, it’s in fact very difficult to find clean water (fig. 1.35).

On the policy level, WFP thinking plays out most obviously in offsets and trading—and in carbon trading, most obviously of all. (This parallels JJ’s advice to the assassin who asks her how to green his business is that his personal actions in any one place should just in no way increase the total number of homicides across the globe—and that he might even lower the worldwide total if he donates to the Brady Center every time he kills someone.)

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Fig. 1.38

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Fig. 1.41

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Fig. 1.39

Carbon trading is exceptionally complex. I’m sure a lot of you know more about it than I do. It’s been criticized for many reasons—technological, economic, political. However, I think what we’ve been missing, and what’s important to understand for why it’s emerged as such a dominant solution, is that it’s an exceptionally good example of WFP thinking (and I know, carbon isn’t toxic, but it generally is emitted with pollutants that are). There’s this powerful cultural component, which is that where you do something doesn’t really matter—and that you can trade a mess here for a clean-up there.

Environmental justice activists almost universally object to carbon trading, and to pollution trading generally, as inequitable. In California, the environmental justice advisory committee for the statewide plan to reduce carbon emissions— which would become the model for Obama’s federal plan—strongly urged the agencies not to rely on trading. And yet, the plan featured trading as its central strategy (fig. 1.36). These activists might say, “You’re trying to use the problem— industrial and economic practices that are inherently unsustainable—to solve the problem.” And in fact, carbon trading can make the most polluted places more polluted (fig. 1.37, fig. 1.38).

And again, we wonder why this “who cares where” approach fosters resentment.

Historically, environmental advocacy and the “save the planet!” approaches have made progress. Without question. You have almost certainly seen the popular before and after pictures (fig. 1.39). Many of them feature smoggy and now clear-aired Los Angeles, for example, my beloved former town. And yet, a lot of places in L.A. are actually at least as toxic now as they were before the Clean Air Act (fig. 1.40). Rather, I think it just might be fair to say that environmental initiatives have largely made progress where and when the problems have impacted the most affluent Americans (fig. 1.41).

And if you think about it, if you really want to clean up these messes—if you really want to tackle climate change and the 1,440 Superfund sites nationwide and other comparable crises—then shouldn’t you want to clean up the biggest messes first? Shouldn’t you focus on the places where we actually stash the devastating environmental messes?

And to do that, instead of saying, well, “we have to balance economic growth with environment protection—so I’m so sorry about the Superfund site in your backyard”—you need to absolutely challenge the inequitable economy.

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This idea is a core principle of the new Green New Deal proposals-which is so encouraging. (The millennials, it turns out, are going to save all of us after all.)

Or to say it another way, If you want to address the ways in which we really do all live on this one planet together, then you absolutely cannot do that unless you address the ways in which we do not all live on this one planet together.

So just to wrap up, a lot of us are making these arguments. I’d be surprised if you haven’t heard some or much of what I’ve been talking about here. My new favorite work is Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. I’ve just read the longread in The Guardian so far, and it’s quite powerful, and I can’t wait to read the whole book.

Many of you likely also know Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, which lays out much of the same critique that I’m trying to do—or perhaps I should say I’m doing a lot of the same critique she’s already done (fig. 1.42, fig. 1.43, fig. 1.44, fig. 1.45). She, too, argues that the 21st-century economy is fundamentally unsustainable and inequitable. She also critiques the “greener than thou” culture, greenwashing, carbon trading, and so on.

However, she mostly blames the movers and shakers, and chalks a lot of it up to greed and hypocrisy. And where I do diverge from her is that I do think that a lot of “saving the planet”—not all, but a lot—is full of good intentions. A lot of “save the planet!” environmental advocates seriously and deeply care about a lot of these problems.

And yet, my #12 reason to stop saving the planet is “because good intentions aren’t good enough.”

If you’re not making progress—if your strategies don’t work—then your intentions just don’t matter that much. I think this is a fair analogy—the right-wing environment-hating Republican base often harbors exceptionally legitimate anxieties and resentments, and yet they embrace solutions that are actually likely to make the problems worse for their own communities.

And at the heart of both cultures, I think—at the heart of both worldviews—is what we mean when we talk about environment.

Thank you.

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[QUESTION] I was just wondering what you think of nuclear energy.

[PRICE] Oh boy, just a little short question, right? I’m profoundly against it. Maybe that’s just because I’m a child of the ‘70s and I wrote a, you know, 6th-grade paper about why it’s so bad. Nuclear energy tends to be favored by one cadre of environmentalists who are very much into high-tech solutions. I don’t think that technology is going to save us. I think technology is technology. It reflects whoever we are, and nuclear energy is potentially so dangerous. Ask people in Japan, or people near Chernobyl, if they think doubling down on nuclear energy is a good idea.

Having said that, if there’s someone in the room who knows more about it, I’d be happy for you to say why you think my concerns don’t make sense. And I’ve heard the argument, well, coal kills people too, but I don’t see why we should therefore be pursuing such an inherently dangerous energy source.

[QUESTION] Yes, it’s become very trendy to like nuclear energy.

[PRICE] I’ve heard good arguments… I mean, one of the real proponents of nuclear energy is the Breakthrough Institute folks, who are all about anything hightech—the more high-tech, the more they love it—and who argue that we need to use technology to solve all of our environmental problems and then we’ll be just fine. This doesn’t make much sense to me at all. One of the arguments in favor of nuclear is that solar and wind are never going to provide enough energy. I find it hard to believe that people can say that definitively even though of course those technologies have problems too.

[QUESTION] You are saying don’t try to save the planet, which is kind of a centralized problem and therefore, like a centralized answer in a way. And it seems like part of what’s happening is whether you are conservative or liberal, there are many different kinds of approaches to solving local problems or regional problems of landscape or environment or whatever you want to call it. But a lot of those don’t necessarily agree with each other. Or there’s a contested nature around what we ought to do, either locally or regionally. And I’m curious how you think those different strategies can aggregate or work together.

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[PRICE] I probably have to have a more specific example. You could have very different answers depending on what problem you’re talking about—whether you’re talking about species conservation or climate change or another issue. What I would do is go back to this, which is that I think environmentalists are asking the wrong questions. This is in general, and does not reflect all environmentalists. A lot of environmental advocates are doing amazing work, but I do think that we need to shift how we ask questions about what’s causing these problems and how to solve them.

So I’m mostly focused on asking the right questions. I know that’s kind of a vague answer. If you can give me a specific example, I can try again.

[QUESTION] No, I don’t have a specific example. But what I’m hearing today is that a lot of your talk is aimed towards environmentalists to change their perspective.

Maybe what I’m wanting is more, what do you do with people outside of environmentalism who are also struggling? As you’re saying, how do we communicate with others on their terms?

[PRICE] Exactly. That’s a really good question, and hopefully I address some of that in my 50 ways to stop saving the planet. The 12 reasons to stop saving the plant are really about deconstructing this way of thinking, and then the 50 ways offer solutions that are about people who are mostly not like me—not writers and cultural critics, but who are economists and engineers.

This really is a good question, as it gets to who is the audience for this book. I hope all kinds of people will read it. But it’s not really for environmental justice advocates, since very little of this will surprise many of them. It’s not for the Koch brothers, it’s not for Trump. It’s not really for Trump’s base.

Really, I’m addressing people like me who are well-intentioned environmentalists. I’m saying you might have some good intentions, but we need to seriously rethink how we think about the causes of these problems.

And your solutions are far too convenient, and they far too conveniently allow you to basically live exactly as you’re living right now.

So, I feel as if there are plenty of critiques out there of the Koch brothers and of the base and all that, and I don’t need to redo those. Let’s start asking questions about ourselves.

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[QUESTION] I know you didn’t necessarily mean to be talking about nuclear energy.

[PRICE] Because it is something I know so little about.

[QUESTION] But I had a question. . .You mentioned earlier that you see it as very dangerous, whereas for example—the examples of Chernobyl is seen as a classically bad case of engineering, even though there are risks of nuclear energy, it’s seen as more of a poor reflection on the Soviet Union’s lack of planning.

OK. If I buy a Prius, then I’m being better for the environment, but then it’s obvious that one car or another doesn’t necessarily have a lot of impact in the long run. The idea of solar energy I see as fairly similar. My parents have solar panels on their roof, but my parents aren’t using that much electricity compared to maybe a huge corporation that isn’t patting itself on the back for that sort of thing. If we are able to say that maybe there isn’t that big of a risk with nuclear energy, how are we able to justify the individual process of buying solar panels for one’s house?

[PRICE] I would say that we can’t justify them. I’m not trying to say to people, don’t buy solar panels, don’t recycle. But its important to know that, the reason we have major recycling programs is because in the 1970s the oil and gas companies and the container lobbies like Pepsi and Coke got together and lobbied powerfully and extensively against regulations to limit single-use packaging. Instead, they threw the problem onto the public and onto individuals in the form of recycling programs.

These programs are now clearly not working that well or at all because China is not taking our recycling anymore. So I’m not saying the solution is for you or me to have a solar panel. I think a move to solar needs to be some kind of massive systemic public transformation of the energy grid. Again, I need to read the Green New Deal—and then maybe I’ll be able to answer this question in more detail—but I’ll say I simply can’t make the assumption that nuclear energy is not dangerous. You know, we tend to treat technology as if it has agency of its own.

It doesn’t, really, right? How are you going to ensure that it’s safe? You can’t just say, it’s the Soviets, it’s not nuclear energy.

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[QUESTION] I recently have been reading at a very cursory level about Chernobyl. There is technology to slow the process of the reactor. That failure was a problem of the prevention mechanism. It was completely mis-designed in the case of Chernobyl. I’m not trying to say that nuclear energy is wholly safe, but I’m trying to say that the examples that are used are perhaps not quite as tangible as the daily impact of not turning to a source like that.

[PRICE] I think maybe you have more faith in people and technology than I do. How are you going to ensure in the future that these power plants are not badly designed, and that they are not irresponsibly run. I mean, technology is people.

These plants are going to have all the faults of the people who create and run and regulate them, whether that’s corruption or what professional training looks like or whatever.

[QUESTION] Hi. So thank you. I’m a big JJ fan. I’m thrilled that you’re here. I have a question, something you touched on and circled around. Obviously this audience is receptive. How do we convince people being affected—like, I have relatives in Utah—and every year we have the conversation in which I try to convince them that a nearby Superfund site is hurting them. Is there a way to sell this message? Or is there a way to convince people who are in Utah, or in Orange County, that there are problems. These issues are affecting you, and here’s why you shouldn’t hate people trying to help you with that problem?

[PRICE] It’s not so much that they hate people who are trying to help them with that problem. It’s that the ways that people have been trying to help have not been very helpful, overall, on average. In LA, certainly, we’ve seen the emergence of a lot of more social-justice-informed environmental public policy. There are a lot of really good initiatives out there to tackle problems effectively in the most affected areas. But on the whole, a lot of the stuff that’s been happening is not in a lot of people’s best interest. And it’s not only not in their best interest, but the way it comes across is also incredibly annoying.

Even if people aren’t articulating it that way, I think they can feel it. They might think, everyone on my block still has asthma, and we have all kinds of rare cancers in my community.

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[QUESTION] Is there anybody conservative on your block you’ve had that conversation with?

Somebody where you’ve had to package your ideas for a different worldview?

Someone that’s an interesting personal example?

[PRICE] No, I’m ashamed to say, but hopefully in the future. That’s a really, really tough conversation, but, you know, a lot of people who voted for Trump actually voted for Obama in the previous election, right? You can’t always convince people to support something that’s in their interest.

Take the Green New Deal. It’s gained a lot more traction than anybody expected.

Moderate Democrats, I think, are a little bit terrified. My cousin Stephen—he’s really kind of my nephew—just said to me, well, how are we going to ever turn this around? He’s 25, so that’s sobering. But I think the current politics could actually turn on a dime if you just start enacting policies that are in people’s interests. As a lot of people have said, instead of constantly telling Trump that he can’t have his five billion dollars to build a wall, why don’t you say, this is what we’re going to use five billion dollars to do. We’re going to have universal healthcare, and we’re going to build great schools, and we’re gonna, you know, do all these things.

And then, I bet you’re not going to draw this small minority, right? You’re not going to get the Koch brothers, who are massively benefiting from environmental devastation, but you will get I think a majority of people who will see that it’s in their interest. And, you know, one thing I would say about the Koch brothers is that because we don’t talk about the economy as foundationally environmental… and because we tend to talk about economy and environment as countervailing forces that you have to balance… we don’t see that the biggest threat to the current economy that the Koch brothers benefit from—this incredibly inequitable economy—is environmental.

Right? This is because the contemporary economy requires us to change environments unsustainably and inequitably. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the biggest Trump pushback has been against environmental regulations, as the environment, in fact, is not this tiny side issue. These environmental crises lie at the very center of the inequitable economy. So I think if you start talking that way, then I think that’s maybe a way of talking about common interests. Still, as I said, I would have to admit that I myself live in a bubble.

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[QUESTION] Hal Harvey who just wrote a book called Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy, gave a very good talk at Harvard. And the issue of nuclear power came up, and basically he said that it costs too much and it’s going to take too much time. And the economics are such that even in the US, there are some places where utilities are now contracting for new solar and wind at 2 cents per kilowatt hour. The estimate of the Energy Information Agency of the United States in 2014 was that in 2019, nuclear would be maybe 9.6 cents per kilowatt hour. So it’s priced out of the market and it takes too long.

It’s very centralized. Australia is going to be almost 100% carbon neutral I believe or zero emissions for their electric system in 2025 because of their use of solar.

They will achieve this goal five years before their Paris Agreement because of the falling prices for renewables. But that’s not what I wanted to say. Back in the 1990s, I was videotaping a conference with a crowd of New Age people when Lynn Margulis, the great biologist, totally lost the audience when she said, half of life is microscopic. What became clear is that when we say we are saving the earth, what we’re actually talking about is saving ourselves. So from the 1990s, listening to her—when we say, save the earth, save the planet, heal the planet, heal the earth, we’re talking about ourselves. And we should get real about that.

And, you know. I couldn’t agree more.

I’ll bring up another example. There’s a company called Interface. Have you ever heard of it? It makes industrial carpet. In 1995, the CEO read Paul Hawken’s book, Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. And he said, wait a second. What am I doing? So he developed a plan since he owned the company and founded the company. He said, “OK. How are we going to do this so we do no harm?” I was at MIT in the fall. Unfortunately, he’s dead, but the company continues. They will reach their goal next year of zero emissions. All right? Next year, when he started in 1990.

[PRICE] Does that include offsets?

[QUESTION] It probably includes offsets, but they’re also beginning to make products which are carbon negative. I would suggest you look at that and see if you can critique it in the way that you’ve critiqued the other because they’re probably the leading company—in the world that is doing this kind of stuff. They’re not greenwashing. They’re trying to be real.

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[PRICE] Like Patagonia or a lot of others. I think that’s in my files, it sounds familiar, and I’ll include examples in my 50 ways of some companies that are I think actually grappling with these problems in serious ways. But the one caution I would have—and this is the Winners Take All argument, though I don’t think this is what you’re saying—is that we do have this kind of heroization of big corporate saviors right now. We see this rise of the great corporate hero because we’re basically transferring public wealth into private hands.

So Bill Gates is now running global health policy, and we have the rise of huge philanthropy. I would say that the changes that must occur need to take place company by company, but what we mostly need to focus on is big systemic changes that will mean that the goal of all companies is to maximize health and well-being.

Thank you for your questions, I really enjoyed this conversation.

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March 5, 2019

THE BIG DAM QUESTION

How Law Defines the River Rhett Larson and Dilip da Cunha

[SNYDER] Welcome to the second talk of this year’s Critical Conservation Colloquia.

I’m Susan Snyder, who, along with George Thomas, co-directs the Critical Conservation program that’s part of the Master of Design Studies program.

Critical Conservation explores how history and constructed narratives of heritage are used as instruments of power to control the identity of a place, and the subsequent inclusion and exclusion of population these acts enable.

Our Critical Conservation program makes very clear that, truly critical conservation is about social justice and not just about buildings and places.

This is the fourth year of the series that accompanies our course, Power and Place. In this class, we look at places where cultural conflict has emerged both intended and unintended over time as regulatory and spatial patterns of exclusion. Our intention is to foster a understanding of urban ethics, social justice, and political awareness that are applicable to different parts of the world, hopefully leading our students and GSD community to a broader understanding of the dimensions of the cultural ecology of a place over time.

[THOMAS] Today’s conversation between Rhett Larson and Dilip da Cunha continues themes of our Power and Place course that looks at Los Angeles. Water is crucial to human existence and central to modern urbanism. Los Angeles, built on the edge of the desert, is of particular interest as it draws water from hundreds of miles away, water that is claimed by other states to ensure the survival of its vast urban zone. Rhett is the first speaker to return to GSD in our CC series. Everybody else, has been one and done. “Rhett,” we said, “you must come back.”

Professor Larson’s talk last year, “From Tarzan to the Terminator,” blended pop culture, urban history, geography, and geology within the framework of law. He was a hit with students from the GSD who found him a source of real world information, and were delighted—and I guess I can say amazed—when he returned emails and answered questions. Rhett is senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute of Public Policy and an associate professor of water law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. His J.D. comes from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Professor Lior Strahilevitz who was a speaker in our first Power and Place colloquium. As the son of a Western lettuce farmer, Rhett’s interest in water comes naturally. After his law degree, he received a Master of Science in Water Science, Policy and Management from the University of Oxford.

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Practicing law in the West has led him to issues of Native American water law and Spanish Pueblo originated water law. He consults on water issues from around the world. Rhett was in Lebanon when we first discussed today’s talk.

Today, Rhett places water in the context of human activity and systems and asks “The Big Dam Question: How Law Defines a River.”

His fellow speaker is Dilip da Cunha, a Philadelphia and Bangalore-based planner and architect with his professional degree from MIT and a doctorate from Berkeley. He works on public issue projects with his colleague and wife, Anu Mathur, a landscape architect and architect who is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. Dilip and Anu are old friends of ours from our days at Penn; they have engaged us with the breadth of their interest and the depth of their inquisitiveness that spans continents and cultures. At GSD, Dilip is co-director of the Risk and Resilience program.

Last week, he gave the Dan Urban Kiley lecture to a massive audience where he presented his most recent research on the cultural reading of rivers published in 2018 as The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Rye and Ganga’s Descent.

Fig. 2.1

Today, in a more intimate setting, we welcome Dilip to explore topics that come out of his research into water. His talk today tops Rhett, as you can see, by asking “The Bigger Dam Question: Why People Design Rivers,” with his now condensed title “Wetness is Everywhere.” He will explore the cultural invention of rivers and then the counter of man-made rivers as themes for real estate development. Dilip reminds us of the importance of wetness and all of its multiple scales and intensities. Please welcome, Rhett and Dilip.

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[LARSON] Thank you very much to Susan and to George for having me out here again.

This is becoming a second home to me, and it’s good to be back with dear friends. I’m so privileged to be here speaking with Dilip. I just finished Dilip’s fantastic book and I can’t recommend it to you more highly. What I will be talking about today covers many of the same themes that Dilip will speak about, but in the narrower context of the law rather than the broader context.

Fig. 2.2

Law, when it comes to water, is fascinating because the role of the law is largely one of line-drawing. On this side of the line are legal activities, on the other side of the line are illegal activities. On this side of the line is your property; on that side of the line is my property. But water defies all lines.

Water flies, water sinks, water runs, water absorbs. So water is a unique challenge to the law, because the law is intent on drawing lines and water is intent on defying them. What I want to talk about is four ways in which the law attempts to define what a river is, its limits, and then tell you why I think the law is terrible at it and ways that the law can be better (fig. 2.1). So first, let’s begin with how law defines how rivers begin (fig. 2.2). Much of the way that law defines how rivers begin is based on the construction of large dams.

Unsurprisingly, most large dams are built in upland areas at the very heights of where water is, largely because this is where water has its greatest amount of kinetic energy, where it has the most potential to generate hydroelectric energy. Additionally, dams are placed where you have the least porous geology and the largest valleys where you can achieve the most in terms of reservoir storage. Thus water law does a lot, particularly in the Western United States and in arid regions, to encourage the development of large dams. Large dams are very complicated in what they mean and what they do.

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Fig. 2.4

Fig. 2.3

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Fig. 2.6

Fig. 2.5

Stop and think for a minute. Let’s imagine a place where 98% of its residents have no electricity, where 41% of the residents have no access to running water or flushing toilets, where 78% have to walk 200 meters or more to access water, where there’s widespread prevalence of malaria and typhoid, where life expectancy is 48 for males, where adult literacy is 33%, and where most of the people live on subsistence farming, and hundreds die every single year in catastrophic flooding. Where in the world do you think I am talking about? I’m talking about Tennessee in the 1930s, before the construction of the system that we now call the Tennessee Valley Authority (fig. 2.3). With the Tennessee Valley Authority, with the legal authority that was given to the federal government to acquire property and to build large dams, everything in the Tennessee Valley changed (fig. 2.4). Within one generation after the construction of the Tennessee Valley Authority, there was 100% adult literacy; there was no typhoid or malaria in the region at all, as well as 100% access to electricity, to running water, and life expectancy rose to 74 for males, and industrial productivity was up 500%.

When we talk about large dams and more specifically the development of large dams, one might think, this is a huge human intervention into the natural system, with a devastating environmental impact. And that is absolutely true, but there are enormous benefits from large dam development. For much of the Western United States, we have the privilege of being able to have an enormous amount of water storage which in turn makes possible modern western cities.

In the Western United States, in the Colorado River, we have a little over 1,000 days’ worth of storage, whereas in the Ganges or the Brahmaputra River basin in India, there is only about 30 days of storage in total in these river basins. There’s about 30 days total storage in the Colorado River basin for Sonora, Mexico. What a lot of these large dams do is take advantage of federal resources, to build huge dams, and thereby create a simulacrum of water security in the middle of the desert.

So you might ask yourself, why are so many people who are fleeing water insecurity in Central America and all of the consequences of water insecurity, which includes political instability, economic instability fleeing to a place that has just as much water insecurity? They are just running from one desert into another. The reason that we have water security in the Western United States is because we’ve built these huge pieces of infrastructure that allow us to simulate water security, to pretend like we have plenty of water. If we look at China’s Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, it is the largest hydroelectric 54

project on earth; it visible from space and was finished after nearly 20 years of work in 2012 at a cost of $22.5 billion (fig. 2.5). On the one hand, it displaced 2 million people, funds were taken and used by corrupt officials, it flooded out over 1,000 archaeological sites, it sits on a seismic fault, which creates all kinds of downstream risks, and the reduction of its water flows has likely resulted in the extinction of the baiji river dolphin (fig. 2.6). On the other hand, thousands and thousands of lives have been saved from catastrophic flooding because of the Three Gorges Dam and a huge amount of electricity is generated. It is pulling thousands and thousands of people from poverty and providing them new opportunities. As you can see large dams are complicated, and the law facilitates them and all of the damage that they do and all of the benefits that they bring in learning and creating the way that a river begins.

Fig. 2.7

How does the law decide how a river ends? The picture that you’re looking at right there is the Colorado River Delta (fig. 2.7). The Colorado River largely never reaches the ocean. I grew up in Yuma, Arizona, right where the Colorado River crosses from the United States into Mexico. When I was a young boy, I remember the river flowing, I remember playing in the river. The children who grew up in the neighborhood that I grew up in now have virtually no memory of what the river is like and what it looks like when it flows. The reason is because of the construction of dams all along the Colorado River basin.

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Fig. 2.8

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Fig. 2.11

Fig. 2.10

Fig. 2.9

The Colorado is an enormously complex river system, complex hydrogeographically, hydro-geologically, but particularly complex legally (fig. 2.8).

We’ve been fighting over the Colorado River now for over a century. In 1922, by agreements, the river was divided effectively between the upper basin and the lower basin. By agreement those using the upper basin were to receive 7.5 million acre feet a year, those depending on the lower basin were also to receive 7.5 million acre feet a year. And then in 1944, Mexico was to receive 1.5 million acre feet under the Rivers Treaty.

Fig. 2.12

Quite frankly, a lot of animosity and distrust have built up over the years between the jurisdictions of the Colorado River basin who have been yoked together under these agreements. We are in the midst right now of negotiating a drought contingency plan about how to survive shortage in the river basin, and it has been intense (fig. 2.12). And to be quite frank with you, it is much easier for Arizona and Nevada to negotiate with Mexico than it is for Arizona and Nevada to negotiate with California. We have a lot more in common with Mexico. California is what we call the hydro-hegemon. They are the beast in the basin, and their power scares every other smaller, poorer jurisdiction. Whether it’s Arizona, whether it’s the Navajo Nation, or whether it’s Mexico, we’re all worried and are suspicious of the power and the influence of California.

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Now, part of the challenge with this situation is that by law we have allocated 7.5 million acre feet of water to the upper basin, 7.5 million acre feet to the lower basin, 1.5 million acre feet to Mexico (fig. 2.9, fig. 2.10, fig. 2.11). We know we lose about 1.5 million acre feet every year to evapo-transpiration. In the law, we assume in the law, that there are 18 million acre feet of water in the river. But we know from tree ring analysis, historically, that the 1,000-year average of water in the river is actually about 13.5 million acre feet.

So when we talk about drought and the Colorado River basin, if drought means more demands on the river than the typical supply of the river can satisfy, then we are in perpetual drought, and there always will be because the law allocates more water than there usually is in the system, except in flood years. In fact, the reason that we have the numbers that we have is that in 1922, when we decided to divvy up the river, it was a flood year and we based all of the data on a flood year when there just happened to be too much water. Obviously that is not the sharpest decision anyone has ever made. We are dealing with the risk of shortage right now. That is part of the reason we are negotiating the drought contingency plan. In our discussion I am happy to talk more about the drought contingency plan and its effects. It is, if you’ve been noticing in the news, even national news, the drought contingency plan is hot, it’s a very big deal. But it’s a little more complicated than we’re able to get into now. What I want to focus on is how the law helps the river end.

The law is built, as you can see, to allocate every single drop of water in the river to human uses. No drop of water in the Colorado River basin is allocated to environmental uses or in stream flow. It is as if the river warrants no water at all. And a lot of the arguments we have right now in the drought contingency plan is about why humans get every single drop and the river gets nothing. And a lot of it is about explaining to people why keeping water in the river is a benefit to human beings, not just a benefit to us for aesthetic reasons or for cultural reasons, as important as those reasons are, but important for environmental reasons.

Water in the river means there will be water pushing back against a rising ocean. Every year, as the ocean rises, more and more saline water intrudes into coastal freshwater aquifers and this contaminates our coastal freshwater aquifers, which prevents farmers from being able to secure viable sources of groundwater along the coast. So putting water in the river to effectively fight the ocean back is an important part of water policy. In 2012, in negotiating an amendment to the treaty with Mexico, we negotiated what was called the pulse flow. It is the first time in the history of humankind that an international Rhett Larson 59

water treaty ever allocated water to the environment. But this act was only a temporary allocation. But under that agreement we opened the gates to Morelos Dam—this is a picture of the opening of the gates to Morelos Dam— for the pulse flow to allow water to reach the ocean in the Colorado River Delta which it did for the first time in years and years (fig. 2.13). It was a big deal for people like me who love the river and for people who lived with the river to see water in the river again, to watch children play in the river again.

And the power of this water to bring the river back to life and to bring riparian ecosystems back to life was amazing. We continue to struggle in negotiations, quite frankly, with Mexico about having a sustainable supply for a pulse flow to help the water reach the end of the line and to reach the ocean. But it was promising that we were able to pull this off, at least for one short period of time to let water reach the ocean.

Another item I wanted to bring up really quickly about how the law defines how rivers end is to compare what happens in the Colorado River basin to what’s happening in the Jordan River basin in the Middle East (fig. 2.14, fig.

2.15). You might think at first that these river basins have very little to do with one another, but they, in fact, have an enormous amount in common. One of the things that they have in common is that right now, one of the main projects that they’re looking at in the Jordan River basin is called the Red Dead project. What the Red Dead project will do is desalinate water from a plant on the Gulf of Aqaba, which will provide desalinated ocean water into Israel, Israel will allocate a portion of its allocated water rights of the Jordan River to Jordan and to Palestine, and then cooperatively, they will take the reject water from the brine stream from the desalination plant, pump it to the tops of the mountains, and then drop that reject water into the Dead Sea to refill the Dead Sea with reject brine water from desalination. It is an incredibly complex, expensive, and controversial project. But a lot of people view it as the possible future hope of sharing the Jordan River between these three co-riparian countries.

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Fig. 2.15

Fig. 2.14

Fig. 2.13

Fig. 2.16

What we are doing right now on the Colorado River basin mirrors this project.

One of the major obstacles to completing the drought contingency plan is the Salton Sea in California. For those of you who might not be aware of what the Salton Sea is, the Salton Sea is a depression in the Imperial Irrigation District, that, over generations of irrigating this land, ultimately filled up with salty runoff water from all of the agriculture, creating a large inland sea that had a huge community that grew up around it—effectively, a tourism industry and a fishing industry that grew up around this inland sea. As the Imperial Irrigation District became more efficient with its water, it cut back on its water outflows, and the Salton Sea dried up.

So a lot of the debate right now about the drought contingency plan is discussing do we refill the Salton Sea or restore that community, a community that arguably shouldn’t have ever existed in the first place, due to agricultural inefficiencies. Some of the discussions are to look at the Red Dead project and see if we can’t replicate something like that in the Colorado River basin.

It might be possible to desalinate water in the Gulf of California or in the Gulf of Mexico, then provide that water to Mexico. Mexico in turn would forgo allocations from the Colorado River, grant their former use of water to Arizona, and then the reject stream from the desalination would be used to refill the Salton Sea. Again, there are all kinds of challenges, including a lot of ecological challenges with using wastewater from desalination to refill a water body. But it is something we are discussing as to how to make the river reach the ocean.

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Fig. 2.18

Fig. 2.17

How does water determine the vertical limits of river (fig. 2.16)? How high up and how low down does the river go? I cannot get into all the details of water rights law, though I’m happy to talk about it later, but long story short, in the Western United States, water rights law works more or less in one way—it’s really the most ancient and sacred of all laws, which is the law of calling “shotgun.” First in time, first in right. I’ll give you a little story. Once, I was leaving a movie theater with my children when one of my children called, “shotgun,” meaning, I’m going to get the front passenger seat. And my oldest daughter said, “you can’t call shotgun until you see the car.” We rounded the corner, and then one of my other kids goes, “shotgun.” And my oldest daughter goes, “no, you can’t just call it when you see the car, you have to be standing on the same surface as the car when you see the car.” At which point, she hopped off the curb, stepped onto the asphalt, and called, “shotgun.” My other children looked if they had just been defeated by sound logic. Like, “Well, that’s the law, you can’t argue with the law.” The law of prior appropriation works in much the same way (fig. 2.17). It’s first in time, first in right. The first people to get there to use water out of the river and put it to beneficial use have superior claim to that quantity of water to anybody else who comes later. But despite its seeming simplicity the law is actually incredibly complicated, so complicated that we fight over it all the time.

But this law only applies to surface water and not groundwater, which raises a really difficult question of, when does the river stop underground and when does groundwater begin? This is perhaps the biggest source of challenge in terms of negotiating water right settlements in the Western United States because states like California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Nebraska have bifurcating water systems (fig. 2.18). We treat surface water as if it is a completely distinct resource from groundwater. And that fight leads us into disputes.

This map shows tribal land only in Arizona, but a lot of these disputes are between non-tribal water users and tribal water right users (fig. 2.19).

Unsurprisingly, given that our system is first in time, first in right, the most senior priority in all water rights in the Western United States is generally Native American water rights. They are usually the first in line. But as you can imagine, we have people who drill wells close to tribal land and say, “This isn’t surface water, this is groundwater,” so they pump water and the removal dries up the rivers to the tribes. And there’s nothing they can do to stop it because surface water and groundwater are treated as if they are completely distinct resources. So in Arizona, there are tests to determine whether water is surface water or groundwater.

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Fig. 2.20

Fig. 2.19

If water is underground but it is associated with the saturated floodplain Holocene alluvial, then it is considered surface water and thus part of prior appropriation. If it is outside of that zone, then it is considered groundwater.

Now, you might be thinking, wow, saturated floodplain Holocene alluvial—that sounds really smart. It’s rubbish. It’s the stupidest thing anyone’s ever come up with. And if you told a hydrogeologist that this was the test, they would say that is ridiculous. In fact there is no defensible line between surface water and groundwater. Any line that the law draws will be an arbitrary line, which means no matter what, we will fight forever. We have been fighting for 100 years about this line and there is no end in sight. This question involves water rights all over Arizona. In Arizona, this map shows two river basins—the dark blue is the Little Colorado River basin, the light blue is the Gila River basin—and these two river basins, every single water right from every single party is being held up in adjudication (fig. 2.20). Tens of thousands of parties have been arguing for decades about who owns what because a line attempts to draw a distinction between surface water and groundwater that again is absolutely ridiculous.

Fig. 2.21

Next there is the question of how the law determines the lateral limits of rivers (fig. 2.21). If we look at these pictures, how do you know which one is a river?

There is the evidence of erosional features, such as rain carving away the rock, there are ephemeral rivers, arroyos, wadis, playa, lakes, water bodies that flow only in response to precipitation, there are also perennial and intermittent rivers—intermittent rivers are rivers that only flow seasonally during the spring runoff, and there are effluent dependent rivers—rivers that wouldn’t be rivers but for the fact that we dump a bunch of wastewater into them and they start to look like rivers. When should the law treat these as rivers and when shouldn’t it treat them as rivers (fig. 2.22, fig. 2.23, fig. 2.24, fig. 2.25)?

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Fig. 2.26

Fig. 2.25

Fig. 2.24

Fig. 2.23

Fig. 2.22

Who owns a river? One way we determine ownership in the law, is we decide whether or not a river is navigable (fig. 2.26). A river is navigable and thus owned by the government when it is used or is susceptible of being used at the time of statehood for navigation. You might be asking yourself, how does that work? Let me give you a taste of how that works. If a river is navigable at the time of statehood, then it is owned by the state and held in trust for the benefit of all the state’s citizens. If it is non-navigable, then it’s just like any other piece of land and anybody can buy or sell it. This means that when we get in fights about whether or not a river is navigable, a lawyer will put a 90-year-old woman on the stand with a box of black and white photographs and say, Mrs. Jones, do you recognize this photograph? “Yes, I do.” “Is this a photograph of you with your great grandfather next to the river?” “Yes.” “What year was this?” “This was 1910.” “All right. Do you remember your grandfather ever having a boat on this river?” “I do remember my grandfather having a boat on this river.” “Well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that means that this river is navigable.”

And that is just how ridiculous the standard is. A navigable water between the ordinary high watermarks is owned by the government and outside of the ordinary high watermarks is owned by the state. And yet, we end up fighting constantly, using old, unreliable evidence as to where the river begins and where the river ends. There was recently a Supreme Court decision that was quite famous about this. This was in Montana. Montana school districts were struggling—they didn’t have enough money. And a very enterprising school district lawyer thought that many of the hydroelectric dams that were being built in the upland areas of Montana were in navigable rivers, and thus owned by the government and the government could claim royalties from all the electricity sales. So the state sued these hydroelectric companies and said, “You owe us a cut of the royalties.” And evidence was shown that they were navigable at the time of statehood, which means the government owns them, which means they could get royalties on the use of the water. This case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and evidence was introduced that showed that, at least in the portions where these hydroelectric dams were built, people would have to take their canoes out of the water at that point in the river and carry them around that point of the river and put them back in. And because of that evidence, because a few people remember their grandfather remembering their father remembering their friends saying that they used to have to take their canoes out of the water on that point of the river, it meant that the government didn’t own that segment, which meant the hydroelectric companies did, which meant that the government couldn’t get any royalties. So the entire case turned on these silly, arbitrary lines.

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Fig. 2.28

Fig. 2.27

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Fig. 2.30

Fig. 2.29

So how do we draw better lines? The challenge is what I call the Goldilocks governance challenge (fig. 2.27, fig. 2.28). If we draw the lines too big—if we say, “Well, water is going to be governed by the United Nations and we’re just going to have one water governance regime for the whole world”—then the people making decisions about water are going to be very remote from the places that the water is used—they’re going to be unfamiliar with the unique sociocultural values of the water, the unique hydrogeology of the water, the transaction costs will simply be too high, too many people who are disinterested in or unfamiliar with the water are going to be making decisions about it (fig. 2.29).

But if you draw the boundaries too small so that its just determined by the people who are sharing water within a river basin, then you’re just going to get what we have now, which is perpetual fights between jurisdictions. If you imagine the world is like a golf ball, a big sphere covered in divots, each divot is a river basin where all water drains to a common point. If you could remake the world in a way that made sense—if you wanted to solve the Goldilocks governance problem—you would redraw every political boundary on earth to correspond to watersheds, to the boundaries of a river basin.

Now, that is politically impossible. For example we could attempt to redraw all of the states in the United States so that, instead of having the United States of America, we would have the United Basins of America (fig. 2.30).

That would solve a lot of our interstate water dispute problems—we wouldn’t fight with each other so much. But overcoming the sovereignty issues—the sovereignty issues alone within states in the United States are insurmountable. Imagine having to redraw these lines in the Jordan River basin or the Brahmaputra or the Indus or the Mekong. This would be virtually impossible, given sovereignty concerns.

So how do we begin to approximate the Goldilocks governance ideal? How do we begin to attempt to draw these lines correctly? We use transboundary water commissions. We use treaties and compacts to negotiate to form a transboundary water governance regime, so that rather than drawing lines in water, we draw circles, circles that correspond to the river basins. And with that, I’ll turn the time over to Dilip.

[APPLAUSE]

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[DA CUNHA] Thanks, Rhett. Yes, I look forward to following on your talk and raising some questions for you. Thanks, Susan and George for organizing this. I think these are really significant questions. For me, in rivers, I have found the ultimate power of place and definition of place. And the ways that rivers have been marginalized is something that I can feel. This is really a significant justice issue. Today in the first five to 10 minutes, I will present, in summary, my thesis that I presented at the Dan Kiley lecture, and then I will make some points similar to Rhett’s about rivers like the Jordan in the Middle East or a river in Rajasthan on the border with Pakistan, where new rivers are coming into being in the same manner that they’re coming into being in Israel.

For me, the issue begins with wetness—not with water. And I ask this basic question: “If wetness is everywhere, why do we see water somewhere?”

So, first I would like to shift the conversation to the hydrologic cycle, to draw attention to other forms, of wetness; the river is just one of them (fig. 2.31).

This is one of the earliest drawings of the hydrological cycle. And these of course, are drawings that you or I might have done. This one is my favorite (fig. 2.32). How a child in India actually thought of drawing the whole water cycle in a drop is just amazing. I’ve never met this child, but I am going to try and trace him or her. It shows three moments in the hydrologic cycle that they have singled out. Obviously, the drop was significant; it wasn’t just the circle but I’ll return to the circle to explain the various moments that we deal with. To simplify the four moments in the hydrologic cycle that have been singled out—number one is forms of precipitations; rivers are flow formations in number two. It is rain that forms the flows that then move to the sea. The flows and ocean waters evaporate in phase three and then become clouds in phase four, and then the clouds condense to form rain and the cycle begins again.

This cycle is what we we’re familiar with. However, our focus on rivers suggests that we have constructed reality in only one of the moments of the hydrologic cycle, and that moment is chosen because we can identify an object on the surface of the earth; we can inscribe the surface of the earth with maps. And for all the things that Rhett said, the problems that the river creates are in fact issues that we have defined in some way because we have chosen one specific moment in which to constitute reality. This means that all the other moments become ephemeral.

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Fig. 2.32

Fig. 2.31

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Fig. 2.35

Fig. 2.34

Fig. 2.33

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Fig. 2.38

Fig. 2.37

Fig. 2.36

For example we tend to see rain as a visitor that comes through, but as Rhett showed us in a couple of his images, rivers are resident, even when they’re dry.

Even when there is no water in a river, we call it a river. How is that possible? It means that time plays a huge role in the definition of a river. So in this moment, we can separate waters above from waters below, which means that we separate rain and precipitation of all sorts, fog and mist from the surface water and groundwater. We refer back to that moment when, as the Bible says, the firmament becomes evident by being separated from the water.

For me, the surface of the earth must first become evident because if I cannot divide it from the water above then I don’t have a surface. So once I have a surface, then I can divide the surface between land and water, and that’s what we do in the maps of the coastline or the river bank, or the waterfront. These are all things that we take as natural, but they’re natural perhaps only in a moment of time. Once we are able to draw a line in that moment of time, we get a map. But the idea here is that the Earth’s surface is viewed in that moment of time. So when it’s not raining, when it’s not precipitating, when there are no clouds, when there is no fog, et cetera, et cetera, at that point in time, we can draw a piece of a map. Therefore, when we constitute a map, we are in fact constituting moments of time, moments of this place in this particular time of the hydrologic cycle (fig. 2.33).

But the line by which we draw the moment is ingenious, because we just draw it to separate land from water (fig. 2.34). We don’t actually see that line (fig. 2.35).

That line is invisible by definition. It is only length and no breadth. Even when we draw the line we don’t really pay attention to it. What we pay attention to is the water and land on either side. But this line is very different from any other line. This line separates, it contains, and it calibrates. So when I draw a line, I am calibrating a flow. It is time that I’m giving to that line. So without that line, I cannot measure flow. In fact, I cannot perceive flow without that line.

So there’s a literacy—a river literacy that I’m calling attention to—a literacy that we have inscribed to the surface of the Earth (fig. 2.36). So where does this lead us? It constructs an object, a river, that can be tracked, trained, diverted, dammed, linked (fig. 2.37). It relates to all of these issues that we’re talking about.

We wouldn’t be able to construct a dam if we hadn’t drawn two sides of a river—two lines. In Brazil, the Amazon is huge so it’s very hard to make a dam.

So what they do first is they channel the Amazon into a contained entity, a side channel, and then they make the dam. So first you create diversions, and with the aid of those diversions, we make dams, because otherwise, you don’t have 76

two edges. So you need those edges. Using this logic, India today is proposing to link many of its rivers.

When you think of the Red Dead project that Rhett discussed, it is possible only because we have the imagination of a river drawn with two lines. And, of course, under that logic you can even engineer the mighty Mississippi River. What we have over here is a system that can serve as an infrastructure of settlement (fig.

2.38). And it’s interesting that when Rhett raised the question about imagining the conditions in Tennessee before the TVA, we didn’t know it was Tennessee that he was talking about. But when Rhett spoke of infrastructures, he assumed that we all think with a river imagination, and therefore, we could respond to his question. It is these kinds of infrastructures that we are all trained to assume.

So we have a system that serves settlement for all the good reasons that you suggested, but look at the mess that we have created with the rivers—they contain our garbage, et cetera, et cetera. I won’t go into that issue here but draw attention to the fact that once we contain rivers, or rather once we construct a river we also construct the flood.

Flood is created in that moment of violation when we use a line to define a river and then water defies that line. We have created that defiance by drawing the line in the first place. And then, of course, we’ve also created a being. This is a photograph I took in Delhi outside a public school where there was this flashing electronic sign that proclaimed in sequence – “adopt an aged being; save a life,” “adopt a tree; save a life,” “adopt an animal; save a life,” adopt a river; save a life” (fig. 2.39). In this way rivers are thought of as living beings. This transformation into a being is a product of human imagination and a product of river literacy and the act of drawing.

Fig. 2.39

This line doesn’t come without significant problems in the definition of a river itself. To begin, the first condition of wetness is everywhere. How do we see water somewhere and why do you see water somewhere is the first question (fig. 2.40). The second one is regarding precipitation that falls everywhere; why do we see a river beginning in a line, in a point when precipitation comes from everywhere (fig. 2.41)? And then the last one, of course, is the idea of flood which occurs when water crosses a line that we have drawn (fig. 2.42).

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Fig. 2.41

Fig. 2.40

Fig. 2.42

How can something that is natural be a natural disaster? So in looking at all these issues we see that they inevitably come out of the act of drawing a line—the line has to start somewhere, it has to flow, and then it end. Looking with that literacy we identify things that somehow fit it. When I define those things, which I then call nature, I am creating a problematic situation that I have to then justify. And so I’ve constituted an earth surface; I’ve constituted a nature in which this makes sense. That’s how I look at it. So a river is a contradictory thing, and we have constituted nature so that its contradictions somehow survive without question. So I am driven to speculate on this question: Is there another moment in time in which I can constitute reality?

Why do I have to accept living in this particular moment of reality? And then I ask if there are people who inhabit those other moments? So the question it raises is, can I extend my legal framework not merely to satisfy my desire for water but to allow for other forms of wetness to have a place in law?

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In talking about the moment of rain in a place like India where wetness is ubiquitous, especially in the monsoons, the impulse is to hold rain rather than to let it drain. So I’m not thinking of the infrastructure that we are familiar with. I am thinking of using plants, I am thinking of using earth, I am thinking of all these situations as holding systems rather than as flowing systems. This requires a shift in the imagination. In one instance I’m thinking settlement and flow, and in another, I’m thinking of how to hold, saturate, and exceed wetness. And that’s the way wetness moves—it has times of momentary excesses. What I see and perceive as a flow in one paradigm are the excesses of holding in another. Hence, when I look at the Nile, the Nile is a river that some people see as a flow. I see it as rain that is exceeding its ability to be held. And thus I can take the ground as intrinsic to a holding system.

Fig. 2.43

The river leads us to divide surface from ground and from air. Wetness is something that is everywhere and ubiquitous. So what does it mean to work with the entire hydrologic cycle? And when I bring this image back, I say, we typically work with one—and if I suggest two, I have suggested a rain imagination as opposed to a river imagination, but there could be a hurricane imagination, there could be a tree imagination, there could be multiple imaginations in each of those moments of the hydrologic cycle (fig. 2.31).

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Fig. 2.45

Fig. 2.44

So I would like to take you to a place, Ahmedabad, in India where Anu and I saw different states of a river in the year 2000 and again I think in the year 2004 (fig. 2.43, fig. 2.44, fig. 2.45). At one time it was filled with water—with rain, I should say, and the other time when the rain had not come, there were just these puddles. This is a time that all these activities and this—I should say this ground called the Sabarmati at one time had all these activities going on in it. That middle row of pictures shows the Sabarmati River. Here are dyers on the Sabarmati River plain, dying the fabrics, et cetera. This photograph shows Mahatma Gandhi with a huge public gathering on the Sabarmati River plain, because when the British told him that you cannot gather in any public space, Gandhi figured that the so-called river bed was neither public nor private, and therefore he could hold a rally in this space. So this is where he gathered for his Salt March, this is where he began much of the independence movement of India. And I always think it wonderful that he found a special place at that time outside of the colonial power.

Fig. 2.46

But now, look what has happened to the place in recent times (fig. 2.46). This development project is now a riverfront project, where they are remaking the Sabarmati into a fixed river that was marked in a map by the British. Here is the same place where there was a flood, because when water comes through or when rain comes through, it created this scenario. Now, I don’t want to jump into actually looking at this as a slum that is now endangered, because the slum conditions are an excuse that has been used to advance this project.

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To anyone in India, when I say ‘the Sabarmati,’ it would be understood as naming a river, a river that sometimes runs dry. I use the proper noun here however to refer to it as a plain, an open ground we call a maidan in India. Now developers want the plain to be a river. The situation however is, how does one bring water to it? How does one make it a perennial system? What they’re doing to construct a permanent river is narrowing the so-called river, which they have marked along a river line. They’ve now narrowed it to construct real estate along the river on the river banks. They’ve displaced the residents, whom they call slum dwellers, giving them housing somewhere else. They are making this prime real estate along a channeled stream, not unlike the Los Angeles River that you have been studying in your Power & Place course. And this is what we saw this winter when we were there, a dead place—absolutely dead—with just a concreted channel.

But how then will they get the water? They will get the water from 200 miles away from a dam on another river called the Narmada River over near Pakistan.

And if I take you now to a more detailed image of the dam from where you can see the channel leave to the north, it siphons under all those other streams that cross it until it reaches the Sabarmati in which you see that little channel that enters it and you see the wetness below and the dryness above. So this is what they have done, they have created wetness below so that this city can have a river front. And that real estate now has been sold to people in Korea, in China, in Japan, and so on. This is the making of a riverfront project. You have these two conditions where people on the one hand worked with rain coming in at different times besides other things that came and went—the goats came, the rain came, people came, Gandhi came and his followers came. And so they were all accommodated on what I call a maidan. On the other hand, you have a river now, which is really nothing but a lake because it is stagnant water. But you want a water front so you put water across a line.

Another place I’ll take you quickly to in India is Rajasthan, where we traveled recently, and we documented what is called the Luni River (fig. 2.47). Like the Sabarmati, the Luni is a plain which they’re making into a river. This is the Luni on a Google map (fig. 2.48). It’s drawn this way, so you can see it’s already been made blue. Here is where the water comes and the rest is dry (fig. 2.49). So you have dry land and you have wet water. This is what we documented in the Luni. The so-called Luni is a wonderful plain, where there are fairs that come through with nomads that operate across North India, selling their wares (fig.

2.50). They anchor in this open plain. If I take you to other areas in the region, you see these traditional systems called orans by which people protected trees and areas like this as water or rather wetness holding systems (fig. 2.51).

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Fig. 2.49

Fig. 2.48

Fig. 2.47

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Fig. 2.54

Fig. 2.53

Fig. 2.52

Fig. 2.51

Fig. 2.50

Now, these are far away from the Luni, but the way I see it is, my understanding of the Luni is as this entire plain. Call it a basin, but I wouldn’t call it a river basin, I would call it a rain shed in which rain was held in all kinds of systems and practices. These images capture wonderful inscriptions of rain in the terrain, even in an aerial. The southwest monsoons come through each year. There are wonderful ways in which people have developed to hold this rain. I’ll end with this picture. This is a channel in the same region that is being made to construct a river for a city in the desert. It’s moving water from the Sutlej. Water that would otherwise go into Pakistan is being channeled here at a huge cost. This is one of the most expensive riverfront projects in India at this time, and there are 80 to 90 such riverfront projects going on today.

Bangalore for example, wants a ‘Thames River’ and a London Eye, So they are actually channeling treated water up so that they can bring it down in a flow.

And then they’re diverting rivers like the Sutlej. So once you define a river, you have projects like this that then follow from it. This raises questions that are, I think, as you noted in the beginning, before the law. They define an ontology; they define a system of beings that are given legal status, but then also, infrastructure status, also design status in the minds of all designers.

There are three levels of engagement that designers can have. In the first instance, they can just be involved in engineering interventions and systems (fig. 2.52). So I can work on the Colorado, for example, and see to it that perhaps there’s enough water at the end of the river. And so I can be ecological about it as much as I can be engineering about it. The second way a designer can be involved is in representational issues (fig. 2.53). Where is the river? And when the river moves, should this occur or that occur? And I think Rhett has raised enough questions about that. And it certainly brings to play a particular imagination, but as I said, there is also a river literacy that plays a role in where the line is drawn. And the third one is this ontological questioning of reality and what is real and what is ephemeral and where we choose to anchor our design imagination and our acceptance of reality (fig. 2.54).

I think the last one is the only stage of design that accommodates the indigenous voice that has been consistently kept out of conversations that have been controlled by river infrastructures. And indigenous people, in my view, have inhabited other moments of the hydrologic cycle and have been marginalized at that point before you even get to conversations of this. So they can never be included in the top two, they can only be included in the last, in my opinion. But I’ll stop there, and then I have a couple of questions for Rhett, but I don’t know whether you want me to raise them now or later.

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[APPLAUSE] [THOMAS] If the two of you want to go at it for a minute and build on each other’s ideas that would be great.

[LARSON] So I am curious to ask Dilip about the indigenous communities that you know of that do inhabit the different ontological approach. I can tell you that I get involved in a lot of water rights negotiations, and I had a moment where we were negotiating a water rights settlement between a group of farmers and a Native American tribe. And we had reached a new deal where the farmers would deliver right at the border of the tribal land 14 cubic feet per second of treated water, water treated to EPA drinking water quality. And I went with this offer to the tribe and they said “No.” I said, “OK, but why?” And they said, “We don’t want their water, we want our water.” And I was at a loss for how to bring their answer to back the other side. In fact, I went to the other side and I said, listen, whatever you’re proposing isn’t going to be good enough for them.

And the farmer said, “Well, you need to go back and tell that tribe that they’re being unfair.” And I looked at them and I said, “Let me get this straight, you want me to go to a Native American tribe and tell them that they are being unfair to you? What are they going to say?” I was off to a bad start already.

But it was watching these two sides attempt to negotiate a settlement with fundamentally different ways of thinking about water that was a huge challenge. And I’m just curious where you’ve seen communities that are living in the different ontological approach to water, to wetness.

[DA CUNHA] I can only speculate. Because one of the things that one has to accept is that there’s no language for communicating wetness other than water.

When I say water and when I speak water, I am being heard as saying not land. And when I speak land, I am heard as saying not water. So when that is the common ground of conversation, and at various levels, including with indigenous people, they are forced to speak the language of water. And I don’t know whether they realize that wetness is a much larger concept. Maybe they do and maybe you’ll find it in their texts, in their practices, and things like that. But they don’t negotiate on those grounds, so I’m not sure what the indigenous people were saying what you heard them say, but I can’t say categorically that I have met indigenous people with this idea. I can just put two and two together with the discomfort with which they live without river infrastructure. And seeing how they operate in the world and their inability Rhett Larson and Dilip da Cunha 87

to ‘develop.’ We’ve tried to have these people develop for centuries. Why are they defying us? Is it because they defy water? And so mine is purely a speculative act.

There was a student last year who did a thesis here on the Solega people in Southern India who are known as forest dwellers. She found in her conversations with them that they live by 18 different rains. And she made a calendar of rains where there was no definitive division between rains and sometimes when it doesn’t seem like it’s literally raining, but they still call it a rain. But they have 18 rains and that’s how they operate in the forest. The Solega people work with elephants, and they work with plants in that cycle of rains. So one would think that these are people who do not speak the language of water, they’re speaking a language of wetness, for which rain is a better frame of reference than a river. And of course, they’re in a forest.

That’s how I see it playing out. And this is where our role as designers is to call out these other imaginations that do not even figure in the rule of law and in these kinds of conversations. Rivers have been a spine of civilization, I would think, precisely because they can be objectified.

So one of the questions that I had for you, Rhett, is that the identity of a river, the objectness of it, the surfaceness of it, the visibility of it has lent itself to being an object of law, of jurisprudence, and we are comfortable with that identity. But, I can’t figure rain, I can’t contain it. And you said, groundwater, for example, is something that you can’t divide from surface water. Its division seems so arbitrary. The division even between land and water is also arbitrary in so many different respects. The second point I want to raise with you is the issue of security and scarcity. This is driven by a sense of water reading. Now, I know that it is not law—it’s a stage prior to law—that when I say, the British in India, for example, were driven to bring water in an equal fashion, across the subcontinent. They believed that people in deserts should have as much access to water as anywhere else. But that assumption then demeaned rain, because rain then became this unequal thing that wasn’t fair. Rain wasn’t fair.

The pushing of rivers as an infrastructure that brings fairness is something that we now regret, because when you take water to rivers, they start planting rice, water-heavy plants, et cetera, et cetera that now have environmentalists up in arms. So this imbalance that has been constituted by, in my mind, a river imagination raises questions about water security and water scarcity, and when we are thinking only water and we are thinking river water when we say scarcity.

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There’s enough rain in India, there’s so much monsoon water, even in Rajasthan, in this desert. If you look at the collections, it’s amazing the amount that you can get. But somehow, we don’t think rain security, we think river security, and scarcity, too. The third point I thought of, which was quite fantastic. I’d never heard about this, was the way you bring in the ocean with the idea that rivers that are now being used to keep the ocean out. I’ve heard of tank systems in India in the Bombay region, on the Western Ghats, wherein holdings of monsoon water gave enough pressure to aquifers to keep the sea out. We know there were times when fresh water from the monsoon reached a mile out to sea. And we saw people drinking seawater when we were there once. They were drinking seawater thinking it’s a miracle, but it was basically the monsoon that had overpowered the usual salinity. It was rain, not rivers, and it was rain all along the coast, which is the backwaters world. So I just thought that that it’s fascinating now how we’re turning to use the ocean for desalination on the one hand and we’re fighting against it using rivers on the other.

We are driven to problem solve little things. But when I stand back and see the war that we are having and it comes from this language of rivers and the thingness of rivers—and then, of course, my thought was about indigenous people and moving beyond surface water to these other forms of wetness to bring in the voice of people that are not heard at all. So even if you were to succeed with your move from lines to basins, as the United Basins of America, which I find very amusing, the notion of a basin can be fair only on the surface.

If I look at the ground beneath it, I have no clue what is there. And so basins are still inadequate when they don’t include the groundwater, which is the same problematic that you raise. Then what happens?

[LARSON] Dilip raises many great issues. Water as an entity for me is always a fascinating question. We talk about water as a source of conflict, but the vast majority of the time in human history, water has been a source of cooperation. It is unsurprising that our oldest civilizations all grew around rivers, because this is where people got together and where they had to find ways to finance infrastructure, had to find ways to share a resource that was scarce in the middle of the desert. Therefore water does a lot to bring people together, and as they bring it together, they start to have a conversation about how they’re going to protect the shared resource. One way that some communities are beginning to have a conversation about this, and others have been talking about this for a long time, for example the Maori communities in New Zealand have been speaking this way for generations. Is the river an entity, is the river a person?

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I confess that as a Western lawyer, I’m very skeptical of that approach, and I think it’s undoubtedly because of my cultural perspective. But to me, whenever I hear people say, “Well, we need to make the river a person, we need to call it a person so that it has the rights of people,” I always think, are people that great? What’s so great about being a person? People have some really nice rights, and then they go to court and they can enforce them, and that’s great. But a river can’t do that. And if you’re saying, “Well, the river is going to do that because we’re going to have somebody speak for the river,” that’s just a political question. Who’s going to speak for the river? And in the end, it’s just going to be that person’s vision of what the river is or should be, where the river begins and where it ends. So whatever choice we make about who will assert the rights of the river as the person in court is just turning over an enormous amount of power to a particular voice to speak for the river. And you might say, well, there are some voices that should speak for the river. You might be surprised the voices that, in your head, you think, surely they will be a great steward, they will speak for the river. I wonder if we are selling rivers short by calling them people. Because these dams, this infrastructure, they are a rash as far as the river is concerned. They are only temporary. The river was carving the Grand Canyon thousands of years before we showed up and it will continue to carve it thousands of years after we’re gone. And the idea that we have to give it our piddling little rights to protect it is assuming that this ancient powerful force is somehow in need of our feeble efforts to protect it.

We defend the river because we need it, not because it needs us. It doesn’t need us, we need it. So if this about building values in a community, I don’t think it helps us to say that the river is a person. I think it helps us to teach people why we need it and what it does for us and why it is so important, not that it is a child that needs our care, but that it is a mother who is providing for us.

On the security issue, water law is a disaster regime. This is something I try and teach my students, which is, fundamentally, water law is about droughts and floods. Because if everybody had the exact amount of water that they always needed all the time, we wouldn’t need law. Law would disappear because everybody would be fine. The only reason we have law is to teach people how to survive floods and share in times of scarcity. And so everything about water law is about focusing on security and what do we do in the middle of a disaster. Sometimes people will say things to me like, well, do you think that we have enough water? I always want to say to them that would be like walking up to a family and asking, “Do you have enough money?” The family would respond, “Well, that depends, it depends on what we want to do. What kind of lifestyle do we want to live and where do we want to go? Do 90

we want to spend our inheritance? Do we want to pass on something to our children?” All of these are the same kind of questions that communities have about water. You have enough water, depending on the life that you want to live, depending on what your priorities and your values are. So when people say, “Oh, does Los Angeles have enough water? Does Phoenix have enough water? Does Jerusalem have enough water?” I always say, “It’s just like saying to a family, do they have enough money?” It depends on what they want to do and what they want to pass on and what they inherited.

When I start thinking about the ocean, I think everything that I think is wrong.

I think that the Goldilocks governance challenge of finding the mean by trying to draw circles instead of lines—for example, what if we just make the basins the source?—I suspect that I’m wrong. And one of the reasons that I’m worried I’m wrong is that we are cutting rivers away from the ocean and that even though I’m drawing circles, I’m still drawing a line. I’m still drawing a line between freshwater and saltwater. And I worry that that my line is arbitrary and silly and that I’m going to end up asking for more problems than solutions if I cut freshwater away from saltwater and the way they feed into one another. Another issue that concerns me is the vertical challenge that is created with the water law drawing, which is maybe basins shouldn’t matter at all. After all desalination is an extra- basin source of water, it’s taking water that’s outside of the basin and turning it into freshwater. And cloud seeding, which is a new form of water augmentation, is extra-basin. Which just raises the question, is the water in the sky above the basin a part of the basin? We talk about drawing a line underground between surface water and groundwater. I’m afraid we’re drawing arbitrary lines in the sky between river and atmospheric river. They flow right into one another. Why are we drawing this line? So there’s a part of me that wonders if I’m just wrong all the way around. But if I’m wrong and we need to think about an integrated approach globally to water, then aren’t we just inviting more of the problems I’m worried about with people who have attenuated relationships with rivers who don’t understand their social situation. Aren’t we just going to end up having a global situation in the same way that I had a local situation with one person saying, “Oh, we’re giving you water,” another person saying, “That’s not what I mean by water.” And then we’re just having conversations that are too— there are too many transaction costs, there are too many voices to be able to possibly share the river.

On the issue of the indigenous community, one of the things I always try and remind people when we talk about water issues with indigenous people is there’s only one jurisdiction in Arizona or in California or in Nebraska that Rhett Larson and Dilip da Cunha

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has integrated water resource management that treats surface water and groundwater as one thing. That jurisdiction belongs to the Native American tribes. Why did they do that? Part of it is the exigencies of negotiating tribal water rights settlements. Part of it’s just being in the room and knowing that they have to protect their resources. But I do think that they simply have a different way of understanding. When you read water law cases, they talk about groundwater as being “occult,” as being invisible and mysterious. And yet, the tribes always seem to have a very forward-thinking approach when they negotiate a settlement over a river, they always include groundwater as well. So every single water rights settlement between a Native American tribe and the government in Arizona, every single one of them involves a moratorium on pumping around their land, on drilling wells near their land.

Why are they thinking that way? What made them and their lawyers move in the direction of thinking about groundwater in ways that most colonial settlers didn’t? I think it might be what Dilip is talking about, that indigenous communities come with a different conception of wetness, and it allowed them to be more forward-thinking than other people negotiating what their water supply is.

[DA CUNHA] One of the things that we’re exploring now and we’re posing it against not the river as such, but the notion of a geographic surface that is then divided between land and water which leads to many of the rights and the wrongs that frame your discomfort and comfort with the rivers. But to say an ocean of rain, on the other hand—or posit ocean of rain versus geographic surface— is to then think—and I would love to know more about this example that Rhett just gave—that people inhabit a section, a thickness, let’s say, between clouds and aquifers, and that they don’t see a surface at all. It just happens to be a situation that is nearest to them perhaps, if they even see it. But they don’t work by knowledge of gravity, let’s say, or by an earth-centric situation.

They’re working in this thickness. So that ocean of rain that then brings questions up, like that you’re bringing up between the coastline and the ocean, as well as between clouds and surface, I feel this is a shift in conversation, a shift in the ground that might create opportunities, let’s say, for indigenous people outside of the framework.

[THOMAS] It’s clear that Rhett and Dilip could be in conversation till the end of time. But in the interest of time, are there any in the audience that have questions for either of our speakers?

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[QUESTION] Actually, I just have a thought that I have been holding as you’ve gone back and forth, especially about this idea of the first way that you described—and I’ve heard you describe this before, Rhett—the river fighting back the ocean.

Even the language of that is re-inscribing and reinforcing this as conflict.

We could just as well be discussing an equilibrium, of a balance of these salinated and the non-salinated waters, but we put it in terms of this defensive struggle and along this arbitrarily defined boundary. And I just thought it was interesting to articulate that one point and add it to your back and forth.

[LARSON] Yes, and I think a lot of that is just a cultural way that we talk. But I also think that a lot of it is about a sales pitch—it’s a sales pitch to farmers. It’s trying to tell them—if we said, “What we’re trying to achieve is balance when we leave water in the river”—I don’t think that is an idea that’s going to sell. But when we tell them, “You have a tool, a weapon in a war against an invader,” it resonates in their minds. They’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what we want, we want a tool; we want a weapon to fight back against the ocean. We’re not trying to achieve balance; we’re just trying to defend ourselves.” I don’t know what the long-term consequences are of making that rhetorical choice. We might be making a temporary trade off in order to sell an idea that in the long run is going to cause us problems. But right now, this goes to something Dilip said, which is, I feel like with water, we’re constantly just solving the next little problem and then dealing with the ramifications of the solution we came up with in the next crisis.

[QUESTION] But with regards to any question of ontology, of our conception of ourselves in this environment, using this type of language is certainly perpetuating this conflict. It is not a discourse, like you said, of understanding environment, a river, water as a kind of a mother, something that we’re embedded within. But certainly the implications are— [DA CUNHA] I think that there is a need to—Rhett, even when you reminded us, for example, of the making of the Grand Canyon—our ecology approach tells us that it is a river that has eroded. It’s from that vocabulary of fighting back the sea—I feel that all this entire vocabulary is a water-driven vocabulary that holds our imagination hostage to this violence that comes with it, and that enamors and gets people to pick sides and so on and so forth. I think that I could describe all these events, and this is where I would put ecology Rhett Larson and Dilip da Cunha 93

law and culture, et cetera on the same ground of needing to question their acceptance of water. Take someone like Homer; for him, Oceanus was the river of rivers. This kind of conception, of rivers fighting back the ocean, would be inconceivable to somebody like Homer. He would not know how to think about something—if I told him, “You know rivers fight the ocean,” he’d say, “Come on. They are all the progeny of Oceanus.” There is this whole shift in conversation that is very much historically constructed, ground, driven by infrastructure and a necessity that has been built up out of interests for the land. And I think it is all land-centric ultimately, it’s all land that is dictating water.

[QUESTION] Isn’t water in many ways treated as capital? We turn it into power, we need it to live, we buy it for various things, and in a sense, we’ve capitalized water.

And it then becomes a financial situation that is beyond nature. It’s human nature maybe, but at its core, it is about money that we think of it in terms of how we use it and what it means to us. We don’t have a holistic take on it.

We’ve turned it into the monetized thing that is the core of our culture.

[DA CUNHA] I think this is a question for Rhett. Prior to capital is commodification, and commodification is ontology. It’s this particular ontology of the river that allows for it being commodified. And to tell you the truth, even the water cycle has been led by river thinking. So it’s actually a river imagination. We think of water cycle as a flow. It is much more complex than that, obviously.

But it still holds our imagination to rivers and river thinking, [LARSON] A lot of the conversation about water policy now tends to focus on markets.

So a lot of people will point to the Murray-Darling basin in Australia as the model for how to manage water because it’s a market-based system. I always caution people about relying too heavily on markets to solve challenges associated with water, in part because it is the nature of water to not lend itself well to markets. What makes for inefficient markets? Externalities, high transaction costs, poorly defined property rights. Aren’t I just describing water? Externalities are what water creates; it flows and carries things to other places, good and bad. Transaction costs, it’s everywhere all the time, everyone is involved in it, it’s embedded in everything. And speaking of poorly defined property rights, it defies all lines, it runs and flies and disappears and absorbs. So say, I drew this line, and on this side is your water and on this side is my water—so I appreciate the desire to try to manage the water. We have 94

commodified water. We have private property rights in water. That’s a lot of what I do. But it is attempting to impose this regime on something that is not interested in cooperating.

[QUESTION] Hi, Rhett. Thank you. That was really fascinating. You both want to mix them together and make policy. Quick question: It’s obviously one important aspect as to why water is so complicated to frame within the law. It’s actually its own nature to be difficult. As opposed to measurable land, water has other components. So two questions: Why is it so complicated to treat water in volume, for example in terms of the law? And the second is, is there any kind of hybridization of the law when you own aspects of the water, such as the basin? But shouldn’t the water be owned by a jurisdiction that takes care of basic constitutional rights, like water.

[LARSON] So water is generally considered to be a public trust resource in the United States, which means it’s just like a wild animal. In fact, when I try and explain water rights to people, I try and explain to them in like a wild animal. A water molecule is just like a coyote. It’s a wild thing that is running and flying and it goes wherever it wants. Who owns the coyote? Who owns the bear? The government does. And they hold the coyote, the bear, the birds in trust for the benefit of all citizens. And how do you get your hands on a coyote or a bear or a bird? You shoot it or you trap it. It is the same thing with water.

All water in its raw state is owned by the government and is a public trust resource. And how does the government tell people which water to use?

Catch it. And how much do you catch? The government tells you how much you catch. So here in Massachusetts, how much are you allowed to catch in the river? A reasonable amount. How much is a reasonable amount? That’s why people hire water lawyers. Because that’s where we make our money, arguing about what is reasonable. In the Western United States, how do we decide how much you can catch? What’s your hunting license for purposes of hunting water? It’s your prior appropriation right, and there’s a quantity.

Just like a hunting license might say, well, you can kill five deer this year, your water right tells you exactly volumetrically how much water you’re allowed to hunt and catch. So that’s really how it works. How well does it work? Not that well because that is a usufructuary right, which is the right that you have to catch, is still considered a property right under American law. So if the government steps in and says, “You know what, I know you have a right to catch a reasonable amount, but we’re going to tell you what reasonable means now.” Or, “I know you have a right to catch 10 acre feet a year, but we’re going Rhett Larson and Dilip da Cunha 95

to need you to be a little more efficient than that, so we’re going to need you to do it on 7 acre feet a year,” every single person with a water right will sue. And because the Fifth Amendment protects your private property right against encroachment by the government, the licensee will win. Which means it’s really, really difficult for interventions by the state to manage your water resource, because your constitutional right doesn’t empower the ultimate owner, the government, it empowers the individual water user.

I do think, in some ways—one thing I was just thinking about as Dilip was talking was the way that we talk about dryness in the West. I once went up in a helicopter with the general counsel of the Army Corps of Engineers, because the Corps of Engineers passed a law that said where rivers begin and end and where wetlands next to a river ceased to be a river. So you have a river, you have wetlands. At what point do you draw a line and say that wetland is no longer a part of the river? Whatever line it is, it’s silly and arbitrary. But as I went up into a helicopter with the general counsel of the Corps of Engineers, we started pointing down to the rivers in Arizona, and I said that’s the Agua Friea, that’s the Salt, that’s the Gila, that’s the Verde. And he goes, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, there’s no water down there.” I said, “Exactly, because what you think of in Washington DC as a river is not what we think of as a river in Arizona. You think a river is a thing full of water. That’s not what we think is a river. To us, rivers are dry. That’s what they are. They’re nearly always dry. And so when we talk about river, we never mean what you are talking about. So you’re passing a law in Washington DC and expecting it to translate into our cultural context, and it just doesn’t.” One thing that we talk about in Arizona is we talk about paper water. There’s wet water and there’s paper water. And paper water is the idea that you have a water right, but your priority date is so late—you have a 2015 priority date, and the river was fully allocated in 1938. Do you have a water right? You bet. But you will never see a drop of water. So we have this way of talking about wetness in the West which is the absence of it, and we speak about it in terms of paper water and dry rivers.

[DA CUNHA] And in my vocabulary, there’s no such thing as dryness.

[QUESTION] So my question is mostly for Rhett, but using the framework that you’ve presented. I’m really interested in flowing resources other than water, too, like oil or the air above certain jurisdictions. As you know, I’m working with tribes in Oklahoma on other types of natural resources, specifically oil and natural 96

gas. So maybe, does the framework that you’ve presented, these three levels of design, can they be exported to trying to understand other types of natural resources, like oil? I’m also interested in this delineation of flowing resources, like oil, because of their invisible qualities, because they’re largely invisible to us, much like you’ve described wetness aside from rivers. And so that sort of inscription has happened in certain ways with oil, but not necessarily in a way that doesn’t produce legal conflict.

[LARSON] I think it is challenging to try and take that regime and place it in the context of oil rights in the United States, mainly because oil is not a public trust resource. Oil is a true honest to goodness property right. It is a stick in your bundle if you own land. There is only one jurisdiction for oil in the United States of America, unlike in groundwater law where we have the American rule and the English rule. The American rule is you must use a reasonable amount of groundwater: the groundwater is owned by the government and you can only catch a reasonable amount. The English rule is if you own the land, you own the groundwater, suck it dry if you want to. There’s only one state in the United States of America that has the English rule and it is the most English state. What’s the most English state?

Oddly enough, the least English state is the only one with the English rule: it is Texas. So if you own land in Texas, you own the groundwater, and you can pump it just like you can pump oil. So it’s one of the ways in which American law is strange, in that we treat oil no differently than we would treat an ore body as if it’s not flowing. How could you begin to take this framework and use it in the oil context? There are ways in which it’s done. The United States is relatively unique in terms of its approach to oil rights. Most other petroleum rights—many of them are owned by the state. So if you go to Brazil, the Brazilian government effectively owns the oil. And by doing that, you can have something closer to a true public trust resource that is about hunting and catching it as it flows. But in the United States right now, if you attempted to convert the petroleum industry here would bring a constitutional claim that would—I don’t know—wipe out all of humankind or something. It would be disastrous.

[THOMAS] Rhett and Dilip, we clearly should have scheduled a couple more hours. But it’s time for us to wrap up. Thank you both so much. This has just been so much fun. Thank you.

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April 2, 2019

DESIGNING SAN FRANCISCO

Gender, Power, and Urban Renewal Alison Isenberg

[SNYDER] Welcome to the third talk of the Critical Conservation colloquium. I’m Susan Snyder, and along with George Thomas, we co-direct the Critical Conservation program that is part of the Master of Design Studies program. The series is part of our course “Power and Place.” Critical Conservation focuses on how the identity of places is constructed by controlling a version of the past or by constructing a heritage narrative to benefit one group over another.

We ask questions about whose history is being told and why and who is included and excluded by the narratives that shape places. We want to open new discussions about how the built environment contributes to or undercuts social justice and to move beyond talking about a single building or a dominant group’s history. Issues of power, race, and ethnicity have dominated our Critical Conservation colloquium talks. Allison’s talk today, however, opens a new dimension to include the role of gender in designing urban places.

[THOMAS] As a historian, I’m always looking for connections. What is fun for me, as I introduce Professor Isenberg today, is that she connects to both our first speaker of this year and the first speaker of our series three years ago. She and Jenny Price both worked under Bill Cronin at Yale and learned from him the depths and breadth that modern scholarship can take. But then Allison moved on to her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania where Susan and I both taught for many years. Her dissertation in the History Department connected her to many of the team led by Ted Hershberg, who began exploring the history of the city using modern data sets as opposed to the abstract spatial myths of the so-called “Chicago School.”

Penn’s history program was deeply rooted in verifiable facts. Alison’s dissertation at Penn was developed under Michael Katz along with Tom Sugrue. In the process of her work, she found ways to understand that people’s lives are shaped by the worlds in which they live. Allison found in historic post cards a research tool that demonstrated how cities could shape their identity; she saw post cards not just as an artifact but as an urban identity expression tool that countered the WPA depression era urban images as the underbelly of bad capitalism. Post cards were in fact representations of the value of places and she used them as a tool to understand a place, in a way that we think was really brilliant.

In digging into Allison’s work, I encountered her wonderful article “Culture-aAlison Isenberg 99

Go-Go: The Ghirardelli Square Sculpture Controversy and the Liberation of Civic Design in the 1960s.” I recommend it to all of you because there she accomplished what a good historian does. She found a world in which events occurred and figured out why those events happened. In the process she takes you into the world that those of us of a certain age remember of the sexual revolution that appeared in San Francisco and spread across the modern world; further she explained in wonderful ways the whys of San Francisco and how Ghirardelli Square became what it became. So without further ado, we welcome Allison to the podium. Today she will be discussing aspects of her recent book, Designing San Francisco: Art Land and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay, with the added subtopics of gender power and urban renewal. Thank you.

[ISENBERG] Thank you very much, Susan and George, and to everybody for this invitation.

I gave a talk about 10 years ago at the GSD when this project was just beginning, so it means a lot to come back and be able to talk about it, not just after the book is out. One of the things that I’m going to do today is not just build on the book but bring in topics of the talks that I’ve given in San Francisco after the book and responses to questions that journalists who contact me inquire about regarding the content of the book. One way of asking this is how are people who are not historians, and don’t care that much about the 1960s, how are they going to deploy that research in their understanding of the development issues in the city today? So I will end this talk by offering some of those thoughts.

What I’d what I’d like to do today is to discuss with you the Bay Area and particularly the north waterfront of San Francisco as a site for bringing a fresh perspective to a national narrative of redevelopment and planning. In doing this, I start with the premise that in the 1960s, which we rightfully regard as an era of civic and cultural expansion, of protest and participatory ferment, I argue that the principles and practices of urban planning and design, in the United States, were narrowed and over the next decades became rigid. If you think of the debate that has been fostered by the publication of Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities as opening a new discussion, it met its moment. It met the demands of the day for a new kind of critique about cities and consolidated a host of new ideas, but its critique was so strong that we are still engaging with it today. The narrowing of planning practice represented by Jacobs’ thesis is something that I’d like to work with a little bit today. This is part of a larger reorientation, a shift of what 100

happens when you think about cities in the 1940s through roughly the 1970s by not taking your starting point as Manhattan but instead starting with San Francisco. Louis Dunn’s cartoon embodies this very well (fig. 3.1). It’s not just coincidental to shift from Manhattan to San Francisco. San Francisco has a very long history of what you might call anti-manhattanization. It has been the heartbeat of the anti-manhattanization movement.

San Francisco’s role in that movement means that you could not do the exact same study of any city. In my work on the City by the Bay, I became increasingly convinced, that San Francisco, and I hope today that many of you who are immersed in Los Angeles will agree, makes for a really interesting set of questions. For example, what are the specific reorientations to the national narrative that occur when you start in this case in San Francisco or perhaps, in your case, in Los Angeles? What changes?

I am going to begin with Jane Jacobs’ book and then the other bookend of the narrative, Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which was published in 1974. Robert Moses was not known as a writer. Jane Jacobs was. In many regards, it was Caro’s biography that solidified the “powerbroker” image of Robert Moses. An example from my research that illustrates the power of these narratives is a photograph of the signing of a beam that’s about to be lifted to the top of one of the urban renewal sites in San Francisco. It shows Justin Herman who was the Redevelopment Authority director in San Francisco. Nobody called Justin Herman the Robert Moses of San Francisco until 1974, which was when The Power Broker was published.

That nickname speaks to the power of how the Jane Jacobs / Robert Moses construct has frozen our thinking and makes clear the need to look at it today as we historians look at the history. What does the history tell you? What issues emerge when you study San Francisco during these years? And what happens when you set aside Jane Jacobs and you set aside Robert Moses?

They’re still there. For example, Jane Jacobs was invited to participate in a really important San Francisco design competition in 1960, and she turned it down. So there were ways that they were entering the story, but first I want to focus on the north waterfront in San Francisco as a touchstone.

For those of you who are less familiar with San Francisco, this aerial view shows the Bay Bridge going out to the East Bay, Oakland, Berkeley, and in the center is the Ferry Building and the San Francisco waterfront that curves around to the aquatic park (fig. 3.2). Ghirardelli Square, is in the heart of the city, and was the touchstone of so many of the redevelopment issues Alison Isenberg 101

that I’ll be discussing in this neighborhood. As background for today’s talk is a provocation that if Jane Jacobs, working from Greenwich Village, which everybody in 1961 knew was not typical America, and if she succeeded in making Greenwich Village the touchstone of her ideas in this book that became the stand-in nationally for the stories of development and preservation, then what is the story in the north waterfront of San Francisco?

As you will see, part of my argument is that the north waterfront has played a very comparable role to Jacobs’ Greenwich Village within San Francisco’s redevelopment stories.

If we start with the idea of Jacobs and Caro as the bookends of modern planning concepts, one of the mysteries to keep in mind is a book, The Ultimate Highrise: San Francisco’s Mad Rush to the Sky. I’m positive you have not heard of it. Even people who work in San Francisco redevelopment have not heard of it. The Ultimate Highrise was a product of the staff of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, an alternative newspaper that was the political voice in San Francisco. It provides a parallel with Jane Jacobs who was backed by the New York alternative press, The Village Voice. But it’s not just the weekly or monthly publication of the Bay Guardian that is such a rich source—they also had these major spinoff publications like The Ultimate Highrise. One of the reviews for that book that was written just a year after its publication said there’s probably been no more important book on the urban question since Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. Now admittedly, The National Transportation Newsletter is not exactly cutting-edge, but still, that is an interesting comparison.

Why have we not heard of this book? On what basis would somebody think that this could possibly be as important as Jane Jacobs? What’s different about it? What’s the critique that it made? To me, this is a stand-in for various kinds of lost publications that I won’t be able to go into the detail about here.

But lost narratives are one reason why you write a book. I can tell you that each of these publications was either forgotten or were manuscripts that were never even published or were by individuals who were very influential who we don’t know about anymore—each of those has a story. I’ll just be able to pull out one or two or three of these stories today.

One of the things that I hope is especially helpful to you in your work on Los Angeles is to shift the thinking to how this might not just be a West Coast story but also a broader Western story. This illustration in my book pinpoints some of the sites that I fold in (fig. 3.3). It’s technically about San Francisco.

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By following the influential people in urban design and rebuilding in San Francisco, by following their trails, where they got their ideas, we arrive at the tiny little towns in what is called Gold Country, east of San Francisco where they experimented in the 1950s. The map also leads us to what I just promised in terms of thinking of that longer Western Americana history.

As a shorthand, what I’m going to point out here is that a century before, in the 1870s, one of the most influential thinkers in land value and urban development questions was the utopian tax theorist Henry George (18391897). George wrote Progress and Poverty, one of the best-selling books of the 19th century that was right behind the Bible in popularity. Most people don’t realize that Henry George’s work was based on a comparison between Manhattan where he lived in the late 1860s and his adopted home in San Francisco in the same late 1860s, early 1870s. His basic point was it it’s too late to save Manhattan where you had terrible poverty and terrible wealth right next to each other. But in San Francisco, there was still hope. There were

Fig. 3.2: aerial

Fig. 3.1: Dunn cartoon

still ideals and possibilities.

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In the West there was a more egalitarian set of laws that were inherited from Spanish settlement. What Henry George revolted against were land giveaways to the railroads. The post-Civil War years were an era of land grabs. This was a land grab that was on the front page of the newspapers. Obviously every land grab wasn’t all bad. In a way they were something to admire. These people knew how to grab land. Let’s find out how they did it. This is very instructive because it helps us see that the mid-20th century was also another land grab era. As we will see land grabs were in the news with urban renewal. So it’s not just accidental. This is a pattern. In 1871 George provides a San Francisco perspective. He wrote: “A generation hence, our children will look with astonishment at the recklessness with which the public domain has been squandered. It will seem to them that we must have been mad. For certainly, our whole land policy, with here and there a gleam of common sense shooting through it, seems to have been dictated by the desire to get rid of our lands as fast as possible.”

George offered a theme of land stewardship of the public domain that cuts through to the period that I’m going to focus on, which is basically the 1940s to the 1970s.

I’m going to start with what we think of as the one of the more preservationist projects of this era, the Ghirardelli Square story. I’ll also give you a bit of the “Culture a-Go-Go” story. And I’m going to end with what we call urban renewal, the modernist clearance and reconstruction of downtown sites (fig.

3.4). Part of my goal, along with many other scholars who are doing some of the same work but from a different perspective, is to unravel the binaries—the preservation/modernist, the development/antidevelopment issues that are epitomized in the Jane Jacobs / Robert Moses conflict. All of these paired topics are going to come apart in this story.

To do this I will focus on the people that were involved in all of these different redevelopment projects. The big picture is in the Bay Area, from the 1940s to the ‘70s, where there was a huge boom of large scale rebuilding, whether it’s something like Ghirardelli Square, which was unprecedented, or the big office towers of Embarcadero Center or the new skyscrapers of that era, like Transamerica. There also were huge projects that were proposed like that International Market Center site that were defeated. As you can see here by the footprint, it was to be massive.

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Fig. 3.4: Locator map showing redevelopment sites

Fig. 3.3: Locator map showing redevelopment sites

All of those projects spurred the proliferation of a host of what I call allied design professions—architectural model makers, real estate publicists, the lawyers that fought the battles, the property managers, the writers about design for The Bay Guardian. This is a group of people whose ideas should be at the center of the narrative. But usually, if they ever even appear in histories of preservation or architecture urban planning, they are completely at the margin. For many of these fields, this is the first time that anyone has studied them as a category at all. So there are two takeaways for today’s purposes.

First there was a lot more disagreement; there was a lot more irreverence; there was a more intellectual ferment; there was a lot more fighting than is usually reported.

Why? Because if you look at the way I learned about 1950s and 1960s architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning in the schools, in conferences, these were battles that the participants were fighting amongst themselves. They were competing for legitimacy for students. Landscape architecture was always trying to influence the situation and planning didn’t really have a chance. When you look at the allied fields, you see more the intellectual homogeneity and the shared values of people who considered themselves to be professional designers.

For example, the landscape architects’ ideas and the architects’ do not seem very far apart. But when you put the property managers in there, or you put the disaffected graphic designer or you put the real estate publicist or you put the alternative journalists, newspaper journalists, then you can see the criticism. Their comments are where you start to see these alternative ideas.

In this case, one of the main themes will be about seeing the issues of the city not only in terms of design but in terms of a competition for urban land. When you read Jane Jacobs, for all of her strengths, she does not center on the question of land. The Jacobs/Moses debate has shifted our thinking to the role of space, to who has access to space. Whereas if you study San Francisco, you cannot miss these arguments about the competition for land and that’s often in tension with matters of design. So that’s going to be one of today’s big takeaways.

Second is the gender story. When you study these allied professions, they are filled with women—women working with men and working with women (fig.

3.5). This is the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s. To me, it completely alters the narrative that we have about what we might call another binary which you encounter the standard newspaper story, namely, the domination of the fields 106

of design by men, and the absence of women in the fields of architecture.

This also is a crucial binary. But what it brings home is that, rather than looking at the failures of feminism in the 1970s to somehow bring women into these design fields, it suggests that in addition we should also be trying to understand what their history is, what their presence is—what their role was in these fields in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s. So this changes that trajectory. There is still a lot to answer for the question of the impact of second wave feminism on design, but this also gives us another entry point.

To begin, I want to discuss the waterfront Aquatic Park and its WPA era bathhouse. Just behind it in the city is the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory.

The way the story of preservation has been told—as you know, is that San Francisco is one of the cities in one of the regions where the idea of valuing the old first appeared. It is one of the cities like New Orleans or Charleston, Boston that pop up on that radar. The way the story is conventionally told begins with the Fontana Towers. Only the first of two towers was built; it was about 20 stories tall and the second tower was not built. The usual story about the towers is as an example of why the Ghirardelli Factory building was saved in 1962. The project that was proposed to replace the old factory complex was called Ghirardelli Center, which was viewed as a threat to the waterfront. It was going to be built on the little piece of land that’s right behind the boathouse.

The usual story goes that it was this illustration of what would replace the old factory that horrified this very planning savvy benefactor, Bill Roth of the Matson Shipping Line fame (fig. 3.6). This motivated him as a private benefactor to buy the factory. And then according to the story just a year later in 1963, they were breaking the ground on the project and the Ghirardelli Factory has been saved by a public-spirited, private individual. Of course, there’s obviously some truth in this. But what really deepens the story and what is lost if you seek out that pattern of developer and anti-developer, what you miss is a proactive vision.

This illustration from 1950 shows an historicist’s vision of what the San Francisco’s harbor front could be with old ships and shops that long predates the Fontana Towers and the skyscraper problem, or for that matter any of the manhattanization problem in San Francisco (fig. 3.7). And it also predates Walt Disney’s Disneyland, which it might be accused of resembling, but it predates it because this was 1950 and Disneyland was designed three years later. This vision that was put forward by a local historian, named Karl Kortum, Alison Isenberg 107

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Fig. 3.5: UHR folks

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Fig. 3.7: 1950 rendering

Fig. 3.6: Ghirardelli Center rendering

who caught the ear of The San Francisco Chronicle editor, Scott Newhall, and managed to promote this a faux-historic concept of a low rise, vibrant commercial district (fig. 3.8). He proposed a row of fake old buildings. These were like “ye olde buildings.” The core of his idea was for a very economically vibrant commercial district. It wasn’t to be just a museum.

This concept was actively promoted by Kortum. In short he melded an original idea of turning the white elephant WPA bathhouse into a maritime museum for the city. He was a very visual thinker. He was a photographer, and he was inspired by a vision of the old brick warehouses, enfolding the waterfront. His scheme differed from the way that people talk about high rises cutting off the waterfront by actually using the brick warehouses to create a district—an historic, low-rise district. This was in 1948 and had the goal of saving something that was about to go down. His ideas were on the table.

But Kortum’s scheme was also about public domain. Effectively, what Kortum did was to apply the Western idea of public stewardship over the land in San Francisco. The public trust laws about lands of the coast in California differ from the east coast laws that support private ownership of coastal lands.

These laws date back to the Civil War era when those rights were taken by the public and held to prevent supposed corruption. What it meant in practice was that much of the waterfront land in San Francisco could only be leased and could not be sold. This is unique. It is not a story that could be told about New York.

This takes us back to the Western land story. What Kortum did was expand his scheme from a municipal maritime museum. When he received the first grant for a state park it became more than just a maritime museum; instead he proposed a whole district. Ghirardelli Square is still in the future. In his first proposal, Kortum proposed that Ghirardelli Factory should be bought by the state. So again this is really about public stewardship. And then eventually there was the announcement that was very exciting. Tide land oil funds could be used to support this kind of work. So this really begins as a story about public domain that emerges in the waterfront commercial district. Did Bill Roth play a role? Was it important that he saved the Ghirardelli complex?

Absolutely, but was it just a reaction to the Fontana Towers project? No, actually, the original vision came from Karl Kortum – long before the towers and it came in a context of Western public values.

So if we stay with Ghirardelli Square for a moment, another example is the public space story embodied in the controversy over a fountain (fig. 3.9).

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Fig. 3.9: Ghirardelli Square and fountain

Fig. 3.8: Rendering of district

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Fig. 3.10: Mermaids

On the surface it really interests me because it seems like an art historical/ aesthetic kind of conflict that emerges in the mid-1960s. The conflict was about the mermaid sculptures that are now in the fountain. But imagine that the fountain site was empty. The landscape architect of the complex was Lawrence Halprin, who is a modernist. You might wonder about the fact that it was the modernists in the 1960s who were the ones doing the preservation projects, but this happened because there wasn’t the niche of a professional preservation design practice at the time.

So the design of Ghirardelli Square was born in the modernist realm by somebody like landscape architect Lawrence Halprin or the architect, William Wurster of Wurster Bernardi Emmons, the firm that designed the overall project. There were arguments between the architect and landscape architect, but as you’ll see, in this case, the greater fights were with the allied artists.

In this case, the developer, Bill Roth commissioned a design for the central fountain by artist Ruth Asawa. It was her first public art, and it also turned out to everyone’s surprise to be her first representational project.

Here’s what the plaza was to look like from Halprin’s perspective (fig. 3.10). It was to be a stark and modern site that’s barely even mitigated by any shade.

And this is the same site that really I think embodies Ruth Asawa view with a connection to the harbor in the Bay and the history of the site. Halprin was enraged when he saw Asawa’s representational sculpture a couple days after the fountain was installed in the middle of the night. Halprin wrote to all of the design press nationally and locally, to demand that the sculpture be removed because he said it ruined the balance between modernism and the old history that was cloyingly like the Victorian thing. It was going to drag down Ghirardelli Square. This must sound like an effete art historical conflict but it’s really about the conflict between history and the value of the stark modernism. Halprin’s preferred sculptor James Fitzgerald created an abstract sculpture at the Seattle World Fair that Halprin thought was ideal for the site because it would not limit the minds of people pondering it. There’s one just like it at Princeton that I see every single day. In this frame Asawa’s sculpture was anathema. It reminded Halprin of Disney. So he demanded that it be removed.

Asawa was famous at the time for hand crocheted wire art sculptures. She presented herself in a maternal way to the public. This photograph taken by her friend Imogen Cunningham of her at work with her children around her was one of her favorite images of herself. So she was not averse to Alison Isenberg 113

being known as a mother of six as well as a great artist. But then the public commentary rolled in. This cartoon was mailed to Halprin and I found it in Halprin’s records. When I found it, I asked the Architectural Archives at Penn to please let me publish it. Tellingly the first reaction and the commentary were all about issues of gender and sexuality. In this case, it was an architect who wrote to Halprin and said you should be ashamed of yourself. You are too big for your britches. You have no room for the public artists.

Halprin argued for his position based on Philadelphia city planner Edmund Bacon’s concept of the “second man,” which is the idea that the second designer that comes in has to be beholden to the first designers; Halprin did this while ignoring the facts that Asawa was a woman, and ignoring the fact that he was the second man because he was not the original designer of the factory building. He kept trying to erase her in so many different ways. The San Francisco public responded to it as an issue of a female designer’s role being curtailed and denied.

When I looked at that sculpture for the first time, it seem very innocuous to me—mermaids, et cetera. But it turns out that the intent behind it was the very 1960s feminist theme of having two mermaids, one nursing her merbaby.

Ruth Asawa’s intent was to show a woman breastfeeding in public. This wasn’t something that the press picked up on at the time until the controversy, but it was her underlying intent. The person that she modeled it after was her neighbor and friend Andrea Jepsen, who you see here in the red wax model for the sculpture, which best shows the connection to the real human being.

The reason that she picked her friend, as the model was because she was a nursing mother. And so the physical being embodied this reality in the sculpture itself.

There are other details too; the frogs are supposedly fornicating, and there are little toads on piles and the lilies. There is even a poem about two lesbians in the fountain. So the public reacted to it as a question of sexuality that was juxtaposed with the proliferation of the topless bars in nearby North Beach.

And people understood this context at the time. There is a recent memoir

by Naomi Wolf called Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood that exactly juxtaposes what Ruth Asawa wanted and analyzes the difference between the topless bars and the hyper-sexualized Carol Doda versus what the mermaids represented to the public as kind of a wholesome alternative idea of women in public.

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So if this was the view of Asawa and this was the idea of Halprin, then I want to point out another view, which is the construction site of Ghirardelli Square because it allows me to gesture to one of the hidden professions that is deeply involved here, namely the role of property managers. In this case, the property managers Stuart Rose and Caree Rose were the construction managers. Even though all of the coverage gave credit for Ghirardelli Square’s experimentation to Lawrence Halprin and Wurster Bernardi Emmons, the reason that Bill Roth hired the Roses was because of their commercial adaptive reuse work in Sausalito where Bill Roth also lived.

So this story takes you back to the core question, where did the idea come from to reuse old commercial buildings in any substantial form? The Roses had become builders but they’re competing with the architects. This was in the post-war boom in residential architecture but they also developed Village Fair in Sausalito, mid-1950s. That was almost 10 years earlier. It was their ideas that Bill Roth openly credited. There was some particularly entertaining back and forth between Caree Rose, who was an incredibly bright woman who never went to college, and Lawrence Halprin, because she couldn’t stand his landscape architecture style. She claimed that after he left the job, she pulled out all of his plantings. She rearranged everything except the stuff that was literally set in concrete. So that would be an example of the underlying conflicts and tensions.

Leaving Ghirardelli Square, next we’re going to see the representation of another role, a graphic designer; this also was very unusual on a construction site. In 1962, graphic designer Bobbie Stauffacher’s name was listed along with the other professionals on the construction sign in the north waterfront (fig. 3.11). It was a very quiet part of the city at this time. What was interesting about Stauffacher, in addition to her role as a graphic designer, was that she wrote a memoir that was called Duped by Design. It is another example of these unpublished critiques. You can tell its direction from the title. She’s very, very funny. It’s a fantastic memoir that is rich with detail. She is a designer.

She became an architect. She was a fabulous writer, but she couldn’t get it published. Hence it’s one of those languished publications. Stauffacher won great acclaim in the 1960s for her super graphics work in the city of San Francisco.

Some examples were in Ghirardelli Square but Sea Ranch was her most famous intervention. That project takes us up the coast. This is where it gets interesting to think about the fact that the very same people who brought you Alison Isenberg 115

Ghirardelli Square, the landmark so-called preservationist innovators are very much the same team of designers, publicists, et cetera, who collaborated in the same years on Sea Ranch, which is another large scale development but a very different kind of scale. It was an experiment combining the urban and the environmental. They used urban models in the planning of it.

By that time Stauffacher was famous for her powerful graphics as represented by a cover of Progressive Architecture in March ‘67. It’s the interior of the Sea Ranch swim club—a very private space that was placed on the cover of one of the most prestigious American architecture magazines. This placement was certainly due to the work of her friend and publicist Marion Conrad (fig.

3.12); Conrad was also essential with Stauffacher in the credit for why Sea Ranch became so famous. Unfortunately, even despite Stauffacher’s fame, within 10 years, the managers of the complex mistakenly painted over the famous interior of the swim-bathhouse. They painted it over and Bobbie Stauffacher’s role became more and more diminished, despite her being well known at the time and receiving the big awards. Conrad was her friend whose role was so important and Sea Ranch was important in creating Bobbie’s Stauffacher’s career. The Wall Street Journal, in the same year, 1967, ran its first personal profile ever, a front page story on Lawrence Halprin. This helped make his career. Again, everybody in the business knew that Marion Conrad had placed that story. Conrad explained the work of these California designers to the press, her meetings one on one with journalists in New York City made the case for why this work was innovative; she explained how a landscape architect was different from a gardener. That kind of thing was very much to Conrad’s credit to the point that she was also in the sights of The Bay Guardian. Here is her title block with her business name, Marion Conrad Associates, with what looks like a little gesture to the Transamerica pyramid.

But Marion Conrad worked out of the basement of her Victorian home on Pacific Heights. There was no office building. The Bay Guardian provides a window into an entire industry of the illustrators and the cartoonists, the publicists and the graphic artists. The people who made the critiques of urban redevelopment have otherwise been completely unstudied. This study today just opens a tiny little piece of this topic.

What is revealing when you look at the architecture journals—which focus only on design in architecture, and when you look at the issues of the region through the lens of The Bay Guardian, no attention was paid to architecture.

There really is none at all. To make political points, the writers and illustrators just created the shapes of the buildings that they needed for their point.

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Finally the last part of this talk turns to the kind of projects that we think of as urban renewal, the federally involved clearance projects that took out huge parts of the city. The produce market is what was cleared for the most part for the new project. This focuses on the last part of the waterfront over near the Ferry Terminal building. There were several large projects such as the International Market Center, the Transamerica Pyramid, and then the two different parts of this big, big commercial redevelopment, the Golden Gateway and the Embarcadero Center. Golden Gateway was to be more residential and the Embarcadero Center was to be commercial. These are the first of the Golden Gateway buildings.

This brings us to the last couple of examples. At that time Grady Clay, journalist and later editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine was working in tandem with Jane Jacobs. In the 1958 book, The Exploding Metropolis, Clay wrote a little essay that was literally embedded in Jane Jacobs’ piece. Their piece made the argument that downtown is for people which became the germ of The Death and Life of Great American Cities that was published three years later in 1961. Jane Jacobs had the good fortune to be sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Grady Clay proposed a critique of urban renewal that was going to look at the competition for urban land and particularly the new role that design competitions were playing in giving away land. He asked “What does design have to do with land?” This is something that was becoming increasingly common at the moment. It’s something you have to understand. You were not just bidding for sites, but you were designing to be awarded the land in these competitions. So Clay wrote an entire manuscript about this topic. He was funded by the Ford Foundation. Jacobs was funded

by Rockefeller. His manuscript was never published. Clay’s story was about the competitors but it was really about competition for urban land. I obviously can’t go into any real detail here, but there is one really important point. The reason that Grady Clay wrote his manuscript about San Francisco was that it allowed him to juxtapose San Francisco with two other examples, To help make the point about San Francisco those two examples were, believe it or not, London and an urban renewal project in Brookline, Massachusetts, a few miles from where we are today. Not many people have studied that story but, it was a huge story in his manuscript.

The facts were that there was a design competition around 1959 for Brookline, Massachusetts, that went totally wrong. It was one of the first total eliminations of an old town center. Everybody nationally referred to it as the disaster. So when San Francisco had its competition for Golden Gateway, the Alison Isenberg 117

Brookline competition was the thing that they could do better. And then there was another example in London that was referenced. But why did he look to London? In London, the planning officer said, “We do not buy the land to hand it over to somebody else in small pieces or to hand it over by competition in one big piece. It would be immoral for us to take land by compulsory purchase condemnation and hand it over, i.e., sell to one man or one company.� So the question of whether you sell urban renewal land in 1960 was in play. The whole idea of giving developers the land itself was not a set policy. So why did Grady Clay, from Louisville, Kentucky turn to San Francisco? In part, it was because Justin Herman, and this is pretty shocking for people who want to call Justin Herman the Robert Moses of San Francisco, Justin Herman looked for three different ways that the city could keep ownership of the urban renewal land. He did not want to just hand over the land. And he tried, and he worked with Urban Renewal Administration in Washington. And he failed, but

Fig. 3.11: Stauffacher

he tried in three different ways.

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Alison Isenberg 119

Fig. 3.13: Johnston and Green

Fig. 3.12: Conrad photo

The other part takes us to the last piece of our talk today. We need to pay attention not just to the planners and the architects but also to the unsung but truly important architectural model makers. I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to discover late in my research that Grady Clay had this unpublished manuscript because, first, it was about San Francisco, second it was about land, and third, it was about architectural model makers. Why was he focusing on the models? Because the decisions about giving away these huge parcels of land were not necessarily based on the theories of the architects themselves or what they proposed, but they were actually based on the models. Was it the models that won the competitions?

Again, I can’t go into the details, unfortunately, but it becomes clear that the models themselves were crucial mediating forces that played a role in urban renewal design competitions. In this particular case this really stark plastic model, Number Five in the competition, got so much attention that the architect thought that his model had actually won the larger competition. But really, it was because the model was so neat. The model was really different.

Why was the model different? Because it was made by a different model maker. Most of the other models for this competition—and there were eight finalists—most of the other models were made by the same model-making firm. That led to a kind of uniformity that despite the expense of the models, all looked the same.

That one that mattered cost something like $500, which is why I knew it wasn’t made by the big model-making firm. So this photograph shows the classic story of the male architects hovering over the models and the competition, steadying the towers. To me, the other really compelling story here is the story of Leila Johnston and Virginia Green in their model-making company (fig. 3.13). They’re the ones that made all those other models in the competition. They started their firm in the early 1950s, and they dominated the industry. Green’s first model was the Crown Zellerbach Building which was only 20 stories. San Francisco is not Manhattan. That project was in the mid1950s and the Crown Zellerbach Building was the first steel frame curtain-wall skyscraper in the city. Johnston and Green’s firm became the training ground for most of the major San Francisco model makers in the mid-20th century.

The idea that model making was a kind of hobbyist art where you were just doing a duplicate of a building at small scale is completely inaccurate because they were the first ones to imagine what a building would actually look like.

The architect hadn’t built the building. They were the ones imagining, and 120

there are a lot of stories about how the architects would respond to the model and then make changes and would ask the model maker their opinion.

But also I think it’s very compelling that this is from Virginia Green’s master’s thesis, which was a MFA at the University of Oregon which was where she and Johnston met. She was an abstract thinker, too. She wasn’t a little hobbyist.

For example, there was a public sculpture she did in Palo Alto right before her model making work took off. I love the fact that there was another woman model maker in the East Bay, Anne and Luckhart Chalmers who started her company in 1940s. And so when their company went out of business, Green and Johnston took over. It was a very gender-mixed workplace.

The Embarcadero Center was the commercial part of the development that looks a little bit like Rockefeller Center. There was a design controversy about it because the buildings were thought to be too tall, indeed way too tall.

Despite the planners’ 25-story height limit, there was a 45-story building, and a 60-story building. The architects freely obliterated the height limits. And then you can see that the image in the rendering is a whole other story that I can’t go into here. But the renderer, Helmut Jacoby, was trying to convince you that the towers were not that tall. He chose the five perspectives to represent Embarcadero, so this important task of image-making was completely left up to the illustrator. The architect didn’t say, “Do this, do that.”

It was completely Jacoby’s artistic choice about how to portray this. This is not a secret.

In The Examiner, the mayor only announced that a group led by David Rockefeller had agreed to buy the five gateway blocks for $11,572,000. This was the largest sale of unimproved land in San Francisco’s history. It was the land sale that Grady Clay would say was what mattered. And then the last comment would be about the problem of height limits, which San Francisco famously viewed as manhattanization that would cause the beloved city to disappear under a new era of skyscrapers.

In the case of the Furniture Mart project, there was a green space on the top that was supposed to be accepted as a public park. But, as Karl Kortum argued, about 22% of the site was formerly public streets. Even though it was technically lambasted for the design problems, what actually took down the project was not design but the lawsuit about the inappropriateness of selling of public land at cut rate amounts to private developers. Thus it really was very much a land issue which goes back to the idea that the west was different. Kortum said of the whole project that the San Francisco Alison Isenberg 121

International Market Center was like a giant, green hairpiece on a horrible, horrible architectural project.

In the west the land questions are prevalent. Jean Kortum (Karl Kortum’s wife, and active conservationist in San Francisco) played an important role in these lawsuits. The counterpart to the International Market Center was the Transamerica Pyramid. The Transamerica Pyramid famously was a design problem. It was a pyramid, and that got a lot of people upset. There was a lot of commentary on the pyramid and its shape and its location in the city and endless variations (fig. 3.14). Streets had to be vacated. This was what’s required when you close and you sell a public street. So this actually shows the documentation of the city of San Francisco closing and selling Merchant Street to the Transamerica Corporation.

The process of street vacations and lawsuits were what sunk the Market Center. But in the case of the Transamerica Pyramid, its developers actually won their case. The pyramid was already built. They had to pay more money, but they did win the case. Interestingly, about five years ago, in another of the ongoing battles against the overdevelopment in San Francisco, the board of supervisors who were fighting a project went back to these winning street vacation lawsuits to find out if there were tools in the lawsuits that could still be used in these fights today. Why don’t we know more about these lawsuits? Because they won the cases at the same time that California passed its Environmental Quality Act which put much tighter regulations on design. Finally, the city was trying to get ahead of the developers. That was the explanation. So the Ultimate Highrise reveals that you can actually do something about these redevelopment problems, in particularly, the skyscrapers. Remember that Jane Jacobs was not against skyscrapers. That itself to me is interesting because her view was not typical. Most American cities in the mid-20th century had to face skyscrapers and urban renewal at the same time. Jane Jacobs loved lower Manhattan skyline. She has a really evocative passage about the skyline in The Death and Life. Jacobs wasn’t against skyscrapers per se. But what The Bay Guardian said is that you can find who owns the land. You can do the research. It’s in your hands. The developers were saying that skyscrapers are in everyone’s interest, but they’re not. And here’s how you can prove that yourself. I think that this is again that kind of cross-gender mixed view of who the people behind The Bay Guardian and Ultimate Highrise were. Sue Hester, for example, is still one of the leading land lawyers in the city of San Francisco. Louis Dunn is the artist. So I think it makes a really good contrast—some of Dunn’s work—the idea that this is 122

not hidden information. It’s hidden in plain sight. And this leaves you with that world of these unpublished memoirs, the stories about land.

I promised just a word or two about the questions that have been raised since then. So one of the questions might be, how prevalent are some of these stories beyond San Francisco? Right now, on display in San Francisco, through the public library, is a really wonderful exhibit of their WPA model of the city that was in the basement of the design school at Berkeley for decades.

It has been unpacked and cleaned. And again there is another gender story that comes in the photos that even in the late 1930s, there were a handful of women involved in the model making. The WPA favored men because they were presumed to be the breadwinners. This is of course, more traditionally the way women are portrayed in urban renewal in the labor last summer that

Fig. 3.14: Transamerica cartoon

went into bringing the models back.

Alison Isenberg 123

But this did take me to do a little bit more work. Since I wrote the book, the work behind the huge, famous panorama at the Queens Museum from the 1964 World’s Fair has been made more public. There wasn’t any material on this when I started the project. But I looked into it a little bit. Of course, ‘64 is perfect timing for my project. This was work done in ‘62. Also, it was a project of Robert Moses because it’s a World’s Fair in New York, and this was a statement of his putting forward via the model what he could do for the city. And the really interesting fact for me was that the historical photos of the team with Lester & Associates who made the model looks like they were almost all women. It really looks a lot like the Virginia Green and Leila Johnston firm.

And then finally, there is the issue of height limits. When the Salesforce Tower opened a little over a year ago, I got a lot of calls about what this meant. And the journalists really wanted me to say this is a really big deal. I think that tall buildings matter, but I also think that the historical story shows that height limits are not the only part of the story. These design questions of height can also be distracting from other issues that are just as pressing. I know you want to talk about the tech industry. But what if in five years, it’s no longer the Salesforce Tower and they sell it to a vacuum cleaner company? It is part of a cluster of tall buildings that mark the downtown but their concentration is telling. The Transamerica Pyramid really did stop the movement of skyscrapers further north into the city. That was the point—pun intended.

It’s not so much the shape as it was the fact that as a land use concern, it did mark a boundary. And you have a kind of other bookend here.

And to be a little bit of a devil’s advocate, I do not do the history of architecture. When I saw early photos of the new World Trade Center tower, one of the first things that struck me was the kind of tall pyramid shape that’s built into it and it reminded me of the Transamerica Pyramid. Obviously the skyscraper has been around as a symbol of the modern American city since the mid-19th century, and the designs change, and you might get a pyramid.

You might get a can opener. You might get a brick, but the fact of a skyscraper is still fundamentally the same. So to me, that may be an example of where shape is a distraction.

And then finally, one of the other talks that I gave was an effort at Sea Ranch to bring back Bobbie Stauffacher. After admitting to what their staff had done, they were worried about what she would say. She handled it so beautifully.

They invited her to come. She had never been back to that dressing room 124

side. It was really pretty unbelievable what they had done to it because they brought in somebody later to do a fake version of her thing. So it was really pretty bad. If they just painted it white, it would have been better. But this marks a kind of change in that recognition of her role in a lot of the others of her generation.

[APPLAUSE] [QUESTION] I’m just curious what happened to the Clay manuscript and if he was still alive and what you discovered about that.

[ISENBERG] Right, he was almost 100 years old when he died very recently. In the book I document very closely the back and forth with the publishers. He tried to get it published but its lack of publication didn’t hurt his career. He became one of the most influential cultural landscape writers in the United States.

The publishers just couldn’t see the importance of it because it was about architectural models and land. And they felt that it was going to be outdated.

In some ways, they were right because that question of selling urban renewal land was resolved. Everybody sold the urban renewal land but I don’t think anyone raised it as forcefully as he did.

So in theory, if you think that Jane Jacobs, who clearly had a lot of brilliance, captured her moment, and she said what a lot of people were thinking, she said it incredibly well. I’d say it’s more likely that Clay’s views were more at the outside of what a lot of people thought. The people who most resonated with his arguments about land, for example, was the black press who kept saying that urban renewal was Negro removal and that land was being grabbed from them. So you can kind of see why Clay’s work was actually more allied with the black land movement. And that just wasn’t really going to break out into architectural or planning thinking.

[THOMAS] Thank you Alison. This brings important issues of gender into our broader discussion.

Alison Isenberg 125

Editors: Susan Nigra Snyder George E. Thomas Carrie Gammell Contributors: Jenny Price Rhett Larson Dilip da Cunha Alison Isenberg Special Thanks: John J. Aslanian 126

Copyright Š 2019, All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means without prior written permission from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

This publication was funded by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Office of Student Services and the Master in Design Studies program in Critical Conservation.

The editors have attempted to acknowledge all sources of images used in this publication and apologize for any errors or omissions.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design 48 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 127

designed by Javier Ors Ausín MDes Critical Conservation ‘17

The images for Jenny Price’s lecture are taken from her lecture illustrations.

The editors have made all decisions on the use of the author’s images.

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“Earth from Space,” Graphic by Carrie Gammell on NASA photograph.

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bank-of-america-tower/291 (accessed 10.2019) ebay advertisement, “Buy and Sell to Support the Environment.”

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The images for Alison Isenberg’s lecture are taken from her book, Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay (Princeton University Press, 2017). To facilitate further examination, illustration numbers for the lecture are followed by the illustration number and page number in the book.

Cover (#97; p. 236) BANC PIC 2006.029:140346.91.24-NEG, Fang family San Francisco Examiner photograph archive negative files, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 1967 photograph.

3.1 (#1, p. 11) From Bruce Brugmann and Greggar Sletteland, eds. The Ultimate Highrise: San Francisco’s Mad Rush toward the Sky (San Francisco: San Francisco Bay Guardian Books, 1971). Illustration © Louis Dunn, all rights reserved.

3.2 (#3, p. 13) HI326, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Lawrence Halprin.

Photograph ca. 1960.

3.3 (#13, p. 35) Drawn by Misha Semenov, in collaboration with Louis Dunn.

3.4 (#124, p. 306)

Drawing by Misha Semenov, adapted from “Changing San Francisco: You’d Never Know the Old Produce Market.” Sunset, March 1973, reprint in folder, Real Estate-Embarcadero Center, N-Z,

3.5 (#147, p. 355)

Box 412, RG 3. Rockefeller Family, Rockefeller Archive Center.

From Brugmann and Sletteland, The Ultimate Highrise. Courtesy of Louis Dunn, Bruce

3.6 (#9, p. 31)

Brugmann, and Jean Dibble.

Mooser Architects, ca. 1951. A11.18453, Ghirardelli Center, San Francisco Maritime Research

3.7 (#22, p. 50)

Center.

Illustration by Hubert Buel, 1953. SAFR 22911, San Francisco Maritime Research Center.

3.8 (#8, p. 29)

Illustration by Hubert Buel. AAA-6818, folder S.F. Parks-Aquatic-Plans & Proposals, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. From San Francisco News, May 8, 1950, 1.

3.9 (#36, p. 90)

014.IV.A. 17, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Lawrence Halprin, 2010 accession. Photo ca. 1965 by Ernest Braun.

3.10 (#44, p. 103) 3.11 (#93, p. 220)

Courtesy of the estate of Warner Jepson, all rights reserved.

BANC PIC 2006.029:041891.05.02—NEG 19A. Fang family San Francisco Examiner photograph

3.12 (#75, p. 176) 3.13 (#97; p. 236) 3.14 (#137, p. 335)

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archive negative files, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

“Marion & Hunt,” Bay Guardian, February 26, 1971. Used with the permission of Tim Redmond, Bruce Brugmann, and Jean Dibble.

BANC PIC 2006.029:140346.91.24-NEG, Fang family San Francisco Examiner photograph archive negative files, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 1967 photograph.

Illustration by Michael Doyle, from “San Francisco and the Transamerica Pyramid,” Environmental Workshop, 1969, Telegraph Hill Dwellers Collection. Used with permission of Susan Landor Keegin.

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