Designing for direct action

The climate movement is taking and remaking public spaces, and the Schools Strikes, the Climate Coalition, and Extinction Rebellion are providing clues to creating more democratic landscape practices.

Ed Wall

University of Greenwich

Remaking public spaces through environmental protests, strikes, demonstrations, and occupations makes landscapes of the climate crisis visible.

Direct action provides an essential voice in discourses aimed at addressing anthropocentric climate change – it makes an urgent contribution to discourses that move too slowly due to the need for international agreements, because of resistance by corporate lobbies, and by politics of national economic interest. The actions of the climate movement involve taking and remaking of public spaces – from streets to squares, government buildings to global corporations, airports to oilfields, newspapers to printing presses – to demand action from banks, corporations, the media, and elected representatives around the world.

These are not just public spaces as material places owned and managed by the state, but instead they are an array of sites made public through the coming together of people around issues of concern. They are also not necessarily the traditional public spaces of landscape architecture, urban development, and masterplanning projects that can operate in tension with such direct action. As Shelly Egoz writes: “All too often, politicians, security forces, and in some cases a small army of design experts and landscape professionals, have gradually erased the visibility and symbolic prominence of these landscapes.” 1 As public spaces are redesigned, agendas for limiting ‘undesirable’ communities, from homeless people to political protestors, can manifest in planning processes, material specifications, new bylaws limiting protest, and police patrols that restrict public gatherings.

This protest banner is the starting point for The Wilderness Assembly, a new public space for human and nonhuman participants in the Greenwich Park deer park.

© Meredith Will, University of Greenwich, 2019

The global rebellions in cities around the world were marked by the distinctive Extinction Rebellion logos.

© Ed Wall, 2020

But the public spaces of the Schools Strikes, of the Climate Coalition, and of Extinction Rebellion can provide clues to more democratic landscape practices, more just relations with worlds around us. Rather than focusing on the visual and material reconfiguration of urban spaces that may fulfil a client brief to appeal to narrower, more commercial, more passive, the formation of public spaces around concerns for the climate crisis demonstrates openness to collective participation, invention in forming social spaces, and determination in organisation.

It is through the remaking of public spaces that shared concerns are revealed, whether they are public spaces reconfigured through planning and design, reconstituted for events, or claimed and occupied during civic actions. The geographer Don Mitchell writes that “any movement or struggle to create an alternative spatial organisation of society must necessarily take and produce new spaces.” 2 Environmental movements, political ideologies, and commercial agendas reveal themselves in the remaking of public spaces – from marketplaces to civic squares, from built-over green spaces to pedestrianised thorough-fares. Mitchell reminds us that public spaces “are produced through constant struggle in the past and in the present.” (3)

Walk Out is the winning proposal in a competition organised by the Royal Parks, Museum of Architecture, Zaha Hadid Design, and University of Greenwich. The manifesto is a basis for new interactions with the Wilderness in Greenwich Park.

© Nicola Ida, University of Greenwich, 2019

Climate protests are moments in wider landscapes of the climate crisis. These are landscapes that make visible associations between fossil fuel corporations and coastal flooding, between debating chambers of national governments and the lack of progress in addressing wildlife destruction, between marketplaces of global banks and destructive resource exploitation, between printing presses of media conglomerations and the denial of global warming by corporate interests. The urban sociologist Fran Tonkiss explains: “The sites of urban protest in this way are politicized in terms of a much larger spatial system of global relations and inequities.” 4 Climate protests in public places provide an intense illustration of these interconnected planetary landscapes. Defending, and advocating for these sites of environmental protest are also landscape practices. It is no longer sufficient just to plant trees that reduce heat-island effect, to design spaces that reduce stormwater flooding, to specify materials that have lower embodied carbon. Finding ways to support and inform structural change is also an increasingly urgent landscape practice. Landscape architects need to support climate movements in their diverse forms and practices, through designing spaces that enable public gathering, by advising clients of the importance of democratic public spaces, by defying clients who seek to impose new restrictions that undermine spaces of politics, and by calling out development that builds on shared, green, and open spaces.

The Extinction Rebellion protests in London led to a clampdown on public assembly through The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 that grants the police new powers to restrict public protest.

© Ed Wall, 2019 3

Contesting public spaces is one of many landscape practices that can engage with the climate crisis. The slow movement of policy makers, of corporate interests, and of public behaviour suggests that professionals with knowledge and concern for landscapes impacted by global warming must claim their role in making change. Referring to ‘radically unbuilding’, the American landscape architect Kate Orff writes: “The act of unmaking the errors of the past, of gathering, and of recognising each other and the earth as worthy of deep care is one of the most profound challenges before us.” 5 To do this, we must support landscape practices of environmental protest to make visible and force open conversations about the climate crisis and its impact on marginalised communities and threatened landscapes around the world.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank all the Landscape Architecture and Urbanism students at the University of Greenwich for embracing our 2019 brief of designing for direct action.

Ed Wall is Associate Professor of Cities and Landscapes, Academic Portfolio Lead for Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, co-lead Faculty Postgraduate Research, and co-lead of the Advanced Urban research group at the University of Greenwich. He is also Visiting Professor at the Polytechnic University Milan, Director of Project Studio, Founding Editor of Testing- Ground: Journal of Landscapes, Cities and Territories, and External Examiner at the Architecture Association.