Environmental Readings 2021 & 2022

2021+

2022

Environmental Readings

Editors

Julian Graybill Brubaker

Helen Lea

Matthew Limbach

Environmental Readings 2021 + 2022

Editors

Julian Graybill Brubaker

Helen Lea

Matthew Limbach

© Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania

Published by: Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology University of Pennsylvania

Stuart Weitzman School of Design

102 Meyerson Hall

210 South 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Designed by Helen Lea

All rights reserved. Neither the whole nor any part of this paper may be reprinted or reproduced or quoted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or here-after invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without accompanying full bibliographic listing and reference to its title, authors, publishers, and date, place and medium of publication or access.

Cover photo:

Jenny Lake overlook at Grand Teton National Park, WY (Helen Lea)

Table of Contents

Foreword

PART 1:

Robert

Kongjian

Kongjian

The

Are Landscape Architects Narrators?

Dingwen Wu 282

Looking for Love in Hybrid Places: The Values of Our Commercial-Natural Landscape

Charles Starks 287

Human-Nature Relationships Influenced by Technological Evolution: How the Internet Reshapes Cities

Huiyou Ding 298

A Story of Community Engagement and 10 Learned Lessons

Yasmine McBride 304

Contributors

Foreword

Fritz Steiner

I learn so much from teaching and literally fall in love with every class. Each one is special to me and has a specific chemistry. Every time I teach Environmental Readings, I offer to help the students publish their papers. Two groups at University of Texas at Austin, where I taught for 15 years before coming back to the University of Pennsylvania, took me up on this. This collection is the first at Penn, and includes two classes, which are extra special because they are pandemic classes. The spring of 2021 class was hybrid, remote (in some cases over long distances) and in person. For some, it was their first time on campus. We navigated the unusual circumstances of trying to stay healthy as COVID kicked our butts. Even the spring of 2022 group—which, in theory, was in person—functioned in a somewhat hybrid manner.

Not all the students in the classes are represented in this collection. Some graduated, moved on, and are focusing on other things. Not all my students’ papers are included because—Good news!–– some were already published in other venues. Still, the papers stand as strong representatives of the Environmental Readings classes of 2021 and 2022.

Both classes included a healthy mix of students from within the Weitzman School––architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning––at the professional- and doctoral-degree levels and from the School of Social Policy and Practice.

Through the pandemic, the tide of interest in social and environmental activism rose, which was evident in what we read, what we discussed, and what was written. These “environmental readers” write about crime prevention, landscape urbanism, environmental racism, restorative urbanism, and the science of cities; as well as designers, scientists, and environmentalists including Larry Halprin, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Kongjian Yu, Buckminster Fuller, Denby Deegan (a Sioux architect), Jens Jensen, and Richard St. Barbe Baker; plus their own theories about landscape story telling, civility and disobedience, illumination, and suburbia. Although the seminar includes “reading” in its title, it is as much about “writing.”

Each of the three times we have published students’ papers, three student editors stepped forward to edit and design the publication. This year, it was Julian Graybill Brubaker from Social Policy and Practice, Helen Lea from Weitzman City Planning, and Matthew Limbach from Weitzman Landscape Architecture. I fall in love with every class but fall even harder for the student editors. I appreciate all this amazing trio has done to make this happen.

Image courtesy of Fritz Steiner

PART 1: Environmental Theorists

Opposite: Banyan Tree at Fasilides’ Bath Palace in Ethiopia (Robert Levinthal)

Robert Smithson: Dialectical Entropy Exploration on Earth

Huiyou Ding

Robert Smithson (1938-1974) spent the first thirty years of his life exploring the existing art world. As he became increasingly preoccupied with the context for works of art, Smithson began to work outside, in natural sites ruined by industrial waste or mining, especially after 1968. Although he died in 1974 in a tragic accident, the last six years were an incredibly productive period when he produced many significant earth art works, and had very provocative philosophical and artistic ideas which have considerably inspired people about landscapes.

1938 – 1968 Explorations

Robert Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and spent his childhood in Rutherford until he was nine. Then, his family moved to the Allwood section of Clifton, New Jersey. Smithson was largely a self-taught artist. He earned a two-year scholarship to the  Art Students League in  New York City from 1955 to 1956, where he studied painting and drawing. Then Smithson studied briefly at the Brooklyn Museum School in 1956. Through his studies and training, Smithson became fascinated with the Abstract Expressionists, particularly  David Smith, Tony Smith, Jackson Pollock, and Morris Louis. Later in his career, Smithson observed that he found David Smith’s sculpture particularly captivating for its use of unnatural materials like steel that were altered by time and natural processes such as rust, decay, and discoloration. Through these studies, he was consistently drawing, painting, and making collages.1

“When a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed into something that is nothing. This all-engulfing sense provides the mental ground for the object, so that it ceases being a mere object and becomes art.”

- Robert Smithson

In the late 1950s, Smithson was noticed by the art dealer Virginia Dwan, and she organized his first solo show at the Artists’ Gallery in 1959. At this time, Smithson’s paintings, drawings, and collages drew in part on Abstract Expressionism; his works were multimedia, but were still two-dimensional artworks made by using gouache, crayon, pencil, and photography. Through his connection with Dwan, Smithson was introduced to several key artists and sculptors who were pioneering the Minimalist art movement of the early1960s including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, and Smithson’s soon-to-be wife, Nancy Holt. Holt and Smithson married in

Robert Smithson sitting at a table he designed in his New York City studio at 799 Greenwich St, 1970

(© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

Oxted Quarry, Surrey, UK

Sixteen mirrors and chalk

Diameter 120 in. (304.8 cm)

Collection: Art Institute of Chicago

Photograph: Robert Smithson

© Holt/Smithson Foundation

/ Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

1963. The formation of all these friendships would mark a significant turning point in Smithson’s career.2

The collages Smithson produced in the early-1960s, including Tear (196163), Conch Shell, Spaceship and World Land Mass (1961-63), and  Algae (c. 1962), are very much grounded in an abstract and expressionist aesthetic, but they clearly suggest the artist’s growing fascination with the earth as an inspirational resource and his concern with themes of permanence, natural and unnatural materials, and site-specific art.3

Throughout the mid-1960s, he made several trips to New Jersey to visit quarries and industrial wastelands. Smithson also paid several visits to the American West and Southwest, sparking an interest in deserts and sprawling expanses of land that appear unblemished by human intervention.

Sixteen mirrors and chalk

Diameter 120 in. (304.8 cm)

Collection: Art Institute of Chicago

© Holt/Smithson Foundation

/ Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Figure 1: Robert Smithson, Chalk-Mirror Displacement (1969)

Figure 2: Robert Smithson, Chalk-Mirror Displacement (1969)

By 1967, Smithson was focused on two peculiar and interrelated forms of sculpture, Sites and Non-sites, using mirrors and natural materials to create a new form of three-dimensional work. Many of these Non-site projects would directly mirror his Sites, as in the case of Chalk Mirror Displacement (1969), a single work located in two different locales: its original quarry site in Oxted, England (Site) (Figure 1), and later in the gallery space (Non-site) (Figure 2). What made the Sites/Non-sites such a unique artistic endeavor was that Smithson was first altering the landscape, and then bringing the exhibition materials from the site into the gallery. Simultaneous with Sites/Non-sites, he was also creating a series of works called Photo-Markers (1968).

1938 – 1968 Innovative Earth Art and Transition

For the final six years of his life, certain innovative thoughts are reflected both in Smithson’s earth art and writings, including the picturesque, dialectical materialism, entropy, time, and sight of art.

Picturesque

Many of Smithson’s ideas about “picturesque” are described in his essay “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape.”4

A tree struck by lightning, for example, was something other than beautiful or sublime – it was “picturesque” because it has the feature of time. The picturesque, is based on real land; it precedes the mind in its material external existence. We should see landscape as dialectic rather than one-sided. Landscapes are processes of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region. That is how things become “picturesque.”

Dialectical Materialism

For Smithson, dialectics are a way of seeing things in a manifold of relations, not as isolated objects. Nature/landscape for the dialectician is indifferent to any formal ideal. Nature is unexpected. For him, Olmsted’s parks exist before they are finished, which means they are never finished; they remain carriers of the unexpected and of contradiction on all levels of human activity, be it social, political, or natural.5

To speak broadly, nature’s development is grounded in the dialectical, not the metaphysical.

Entropy

That dialectical thinking relates back to Smithson’s understanding of entropy. In the essay “Entropy and the New Monuments”, Smithson expanded the Second Law of Thermodynamics – power disperses towards the maximum end of entropy.6 That is, entropy started from zero at the Big Bang of the universe, and keeps increasing, with everything being more and more disordered; as entropy expands, usable power keeps decreasing, until the very end of the universe. This is called “silent chaos.”

Smithson shows pessimism throughout his works of earth art. Compared to other land artists such as landscape architect George Hargreaves who

Rome, Italy

Sculptural event

Asphalt and earth

Photograph: Robert Smithson

© Holt/Smithson Foundation

/ Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Sculptural event

Glue and earth

Photograph: Christos

Dikeakos

© Holt/Smithson Foundation

/ Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 meters) long and 15 ft. (4.6 meters) wide

Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Photograph: Gianfranco

Gorgoni, 1970

© Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Figure 3: Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown (1969)

Figure 4: Robert Smithson, Glue Pour (1969)

Figure 5: Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

focuses on inspirations and mechanisms of nature, Smithson reveals more about how entropy works on the earth. Instead of pessimism, it is instead a simple statement of truth about the destined orientation of the universe.

Early Earthworks, such as Asphalt Rundown (1969) (Figure 3) and Glue Pour (1969) (Figure 4), were inspired in part by his interest in entropy and abstraction, since the dumped and cooled materials created hardened abstract forms that resulted from their loss of heat.

In addition to art, the manifestations of technology, for Smithson, are at times less “extensions” of people, than they are aggregates of elements. Even the most advanced tools and machines are made of the raw matter of the earth. Many art magazines have gorgeous photographs of artificial industrial ruins (sculpture) on their pages. The “gloomy” ruins of aristocracy are transformed into the “happy” ruins of the humanist; while Smithson approached those sites with a unique perspective, which is based on entropy.7

Smithson also had the idea of entropy reflected in other political thoughts. Democracy, for Smithson, is the political form of entropy, wherein social conflict is worn down. Democracy is always a failure, always a struggle toward entropy, yet always open to a restructuring because of its orientation to a primordial consciousness.8 9

Time

Throughout his career, Smithson became increasingly fascinated with the element of time and with humankind’s repeated attempts to control it. From the perspective of entropy, these attempts, according to Smithson, were foolish. He viewed any attempt to control time as tantamount to devaluing it altogether and defrauding the earth of its essential right to exist. He also presented this theme in his 1970 Earthwork Partially Buried Woodshed, located in Kent, Ohio, which consists of a woodshed partially buried under 20 truckloads of earth. This piece was “built” to illustrate the effects of geological time and its eventual consumption of all man-made endeavors. Incidentally, other major works, such as Spiral Jetty (Figure 5), would eventually be consumed temporarily by the waters that surrounded them, also indicating entropy. Similarly, the bedrock of Central Park, for Smithson, is simply the glacier dragging itself along.10

Sight / Perspective of Art

In “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” he writes that the best sites for earth art are sites that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization, or nature’s own devastation. For instance, the Spiral Jetty is built in a dead sea, the Great Salt Lake, and the Broken Circle and Spiral Hill in a working sand quarry. Such land is cultivated or recycled as art.11

In Smithson’s view, Olmsted was a great artist who contended with magnitudes, and he set an example which shed a whole new light on the nature of American art.

Regarding art, Smithson theorizes on the climate of sight, which changes from wet to dry and from dry to wet according to one’s mental weather. The prevailing conditions of one’s psyche affect how he/she views art. The wet

mind enjoys “pools and stains” of paint. Such “wet eyes” love to look on melting, dissolving, soaking surfaces that give the illusion at times of tending toward a gaseousness atomization, or fogginess. “Paint” itself appears to be a liquefaction.12

Similarly, a “wet” mind enjoys landscape by extending the current sight to history and future, which reorganizes our personal memory and feelings. The landscape then becomes no solid morphology, and then becomes part of ourselves with the perspective of time. Landscape becomes art. In contrast, for Smithson, the stratum of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art.

This kind of “wet sight” is also reflected in his early work Site and Non-Site He would allow the structures of the site materials to define his experience of sight. In this way he would begin to think like the site. In other words, our sight actually projects art to the world.

Art + Time

In “A Sedimentation of the Mind Earth Projects,” Art is considered “timeless” or a product of “no time at all.” Through the consciousness of temporality, a thing ceases to be a mere object and becomes art. Every object, if it is art, is charged with the rush of time even though it is static, but all this depends on the viewer. A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance. A set of glances could be as solid as anything or any place, but society continues to cheat the artist out of his “art of looking,” by only valuing “art objects.”13

For Smithson, art became a very personal thing. He did not think the site should determine the art. He was an advocate for ideas about the non-place, nonsite, non-environment. He thought art tended towards that; it was abstract. He did not like the idea of the public. It was not necessary. The artist is the most important person and does not need the public. He needed support to do his work. Whether or not the public liked it was irrelevant—it should not depend on public involvement. The only person that should be involved is the artist, so they can follow out their states of consciousness.14

On July 20, 1973, while inspecting the site of  Amarillo Ramp on the ranch of Stanley Marsh 3 near Amarillo, Texas from a light aircraft, Robert Smithson, a photographer, and the pilot died when their Beechcraft Baron E55 crashed. The National Transportation Safety Board attributed the accident to the pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed, with distraction being a contributing factor.15 The work was subsequently completed by Smithson’s widow Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Tony Shafrazi. It was originally built to rise from a shallow artificial lake, but the lake later dried up, and the earthwork has become overgrown and eroded.

Notes

1. Cummings, Paul. “Interview with Robert Smithson, oral history.” Archive of American Artists, interviews conducted on 14 Jul 1972 and 19 Jul 1972.

2. See p. 664 of Chilvers, Ian, and John Glaves-Smith. Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art. Oxford University Press (2009).

3. Tsai, Eugenie. Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings. Columbia University Press (1991).

4. Smithson, Robert, and Nancy Holt. The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations. New York University Press (1979).

5. Ibid

6. See pp. 10-23 of Smithson, Robert. “Entropy and the New Monuments,” chapter in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. University of California Press (1996).

7. Ibid.

8. Martin, Timothy D. “Robert Smithson and the Anglo-American Picturesque,” chapter in Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945-1975, edited by Rebecca Peabody. Getty Publications (2011).

9. See pp. 310-12 of Smithson, Robert. “Robert Smithson on Duchamp: Interview with Moira Roth, October 1973,” chapter in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. University of California Press (1996). Originally published in Artforum (Oct 1973).

10. See p. 163 of Smithson, Robert. “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape, February 1973,” chapter in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. University of California Press (1996). Originally published in Artforum (Feb 1973).

11. Ibid., p. 164.

12. See p. 44 of Smithson, Robert. “A Sediment of the Mind: Earth Projects.” Artforum (Sep 1968).

13. Ibid.

14. Sandler, Irving, and Alexander Nagel. “An interview with Robert Smithson.” Res: Anthropology & Aesthetics, Vol. 63/64, Wet/Dry (Spring/Autumn 2013).

15. Tsai 1991.

Kongjian Yu: A Chinese Landscape Architect

Dingwen Wu

Born in a small village in rural China, Kongjian Yu has become an internationally celebrated landscape architect. Yu has the reputation of “China’s Olmsted,” for he wins a lot of international prizes with Chinese projects, and he is a pioneer in the field of landscape architecture in China, bringing advanced ecological planning methods and ideology into practice. Yu shares much in common with Olmsted: they are both good writers and planners, both own their own businesses, and both have an international reputation. Although Yu was educated in the United States and is lecturing worldwide, his works are based on inherited cultural wisdom and a deep-rooted philosophy about nature and society. Yu is writing his own story as a Chinese landscape architect.

Childhood Memory and Experience

Childhood life and family experience is repeatedly mentioned by Yu as an enlightenment of nature and landscape. Yu was born and raised in the picturesque village called Dongyu, a village of five hundred people in the Zhejiang Province of China.

During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, Yu’s family members were ostracized and treated as “bad families” because their ancestors used to be wealthy. Yu’s parents were jailed, and he also suffered for being part of the family. Though his intelligence was recognized, he was excluded by classmates and not allowed to attend middle school.

Nature and agriculture became Yu’s consolation during his hardship at that time. Years later, in his lecture “The art of survival” in Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), he for many times reiterated his philosophy of making friends with nature, which might deeply come from his experience in early ages. He found “an Eden” with animals, flowers, and streams in a pine forest 500 meters away beyond the paddies and ponds from his house. He raised buffalo, rabbits, and goats, sometimes feeding them the mushrooms, weeds, and grasses picked up from the forest. To the west of his village was the White Sand Creek, a crystal clear creek full of fishes. Yu used to swim and catch fishes there. The creek was surrounded by huge willow trees with birds nesting inside, and the abundance of nature nourished him and shaped his design values significantly.

As his father was in charge of taking care of the rice paddy irrigation system, Yu joined his father from an early age. He enjoyed riding on a water buffalo, negotiating among the paddies and vegetation. Corn, hemp, sugar cane, and yellow-flowered rapeseed were the common crops around him and are elements which he would often use in his future park design.1 In his seventeen years of childhood living in the village, Yu mastered farming techniques as well

as engineering skills. The village he lived in was structured with seven humanmade ponds, which villagers connected with channels, diverting creek waters into ponds. The ponds provide drinking and irrigation water for the village and worked as water retention ponds for excess water on rainy days. Yu and his fellow villagers learned grading and building weirs through the construction of ponds and water channel systems.

In the 1970s, by the time Yu was in high school, he experienced dramatic changes of the environment when the increasing use of DDT in commune killed fishes in the waterway. The water became heavily polluted. The abuse of nature had totally changed the landscape of his village. In his words, “The beautiful become ugly.” And soon he realized the change happening in his hometown was not alone; it was typical across China. The early experience helps to explain his commitment to protecting nature resources as well as recreating natural abundance.

Starting A New Journey at Beijing Forestry

In 1980, Yu was admitted to the Department of Landscape Architecture of Beijing Forestry University. He was the only student of his 300 peers who was admitted to the University. It just so happened that Beijing Forestry was moving back from Yunnan Province to Beijing, and Yu happened to be selected as one of the four rural students. In the second semester of his study, the students were separated into two branches: some would study design and the others would study horticultural science. Although Yu wanted to be a designer, he failed to pass the drawing test and started to study the cell movement of plants, while studying pavilions, ornamental gardening, and other courses. At Beijing Forestry, Yu met his first mentor, Professor Sun Xiaoxiang, who was a respected designer, and known as “the first modern landscape architect in China”. Sun advocated that landscape architecture is a discipline that

Kongjian Yu (Парки Татарстана on Flickr)

solves environmental problems from local to global scale.2 At that time, the mainstream of landscape design in China was focusing on park management, gardening, and nourishing, Sun’s theory was ahead of his time. Sun has a direct influence on Yu, not only through his theory but also his connection with Professor Carl Steinitz. In March of 1986, Sun’s speech on the “World Conference on education for landscape planning” was greatly admired by Carl Steinitz, who was the lead sponsor of the conference and later became Yu’s advisor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

Another important advisor of Yu in Beijing Forestry was Professor Chen Youming, who provided Yu an opportunity to study plant geography in Peking University. He also encouraged Yu to work across disciplines and work with professors in other fields. As part of Chen’s tourism planning and regional development consulting team, Yu was able to travel around China. This experience enabled him to think thoroughly about the relationship between landscape and culture. He also participated in the project of Red Stone National Park, which later led to his research on the aesthetic assessment of landscape resources.3

Days in GSD

After receiving both a bachelor and a master’s degree of landscape architecture at Beijing Forestry University, and a five-year teaching career there, Yu left Beijing for a new Doctor of Design Program at GSD, where he studied landscape ecology with Professors Richard Forman and Carl Steinitz. Yu’s study in GSD is crucial to his career and theory. According to Yu, he was greatly affected by Carl Steinitz, Richard Forman, and Ian McHarg.

Yu’s primary mentor is repeatedly specified as Carl Steinitz, who was Wiley Research Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at Harvard GSD. Yu’s connection with Steinitz started from his time in Beijing: he was one of the three translators of Professor Carl Steinitz’s lecture series of land planning in Beijing Forestry University. At that time, he impressed Steinitz with his talent and was encouraged by Steinitz to study at Harvard. Steinitz influenced Yu in many regards. Yu identified Steinitz’s landscape analysis method as visual analysis and application of geographic information systems (GIS). “He influenced my analysis method of landscape, especially on largescale landscapes. Carl Steinitz gave me the tools of design.”4 The influence of Steinitz’s method is obvious in Yu’s regional and national plans.

Steinitz received his education and doctoral work with Kevin Lynch (19181984), the great urban planner who is well known for his influential book The Image of the City. From Lynch, Steinitz learnt to design at the scales of cities and regions. His passion is looking at issues at the larger scale and related to broader topics like water quality, air quality, biodiversity among others. Steinitz has devoted his career to improving methods for designers to analyze information of large land areas and make decisions for landscape design.4 The framework, which later he called “Geodesign”, is a systematic process of measuring, modeling, interpreting, designing, evaluating, and making decisions.5 Steinitz used the word “Heuristic” as a method of decisionmaking. Steinitz also sees Feng Shui, a traditional Chinese term which is under debate, as a heuristic that is used to organize empirically observable patterns in ecology, hydrology, and geomorphology.6 Yu was one of the students

who helped Steinitz in this work, and Yu’s first publication in China was also about Feng Shui. Feng Shui remains a controversial concept in today’s China and is usually criticized for a lack of scientific demonstration and treated as superstition. Steinitz provided a scientific framework for Yu about this cultural art. It becomes Yu’s identity to combine advanced planning knowledge and techniques with the cultural wisdom from traditions.

Besides working closely with Steinitz, Yu also studied landscape ecology with Professor Richard Forman, who was a well-known landscape ecologist and has been called the “father” of landscape ecology. Forman’s ideology is about linking ecological science with spatial patterns describing how people and nature interweave on land.7 He developed a list including water quality and quantity, biodiversity, air quality, soil fertilization, human health, fuel availability, and cultural cohesion.8 Forman relates his idea about connecting the spatial pattern and ecological function to regional planning. There were only limited applications and research about spatial concepts in ecology before the 1990s, and Forman’s landscape ecological set a foundation for the collaboration of the two disciplines. Forman’s idea of spatial patterns and ecological functions had a great impact on Yu’s doctoral dissertation.

The last but not least important mentor of Yu at Harvard was Ian McHarg. Yu first knew McHarg through reading his well-known book Design with Nature. At that time, there were only a few books in this field introduced to China, and Yu read the English version of it. According to Yu, Carl Steinitz gave him the tools to design, while Ian McHarg taught him the mode of thinking. Yu met McHarg during his study in Harvard, when McHarg was a visiting professor. They often encountered one another in the department. Yu’s later work in Turenscape builds on McHarg’s ideas and use of GIS technology. Yu’s ideas are often seen as successful practices of McHarg’s national-level inventories.

In the early 1990s, McHarg and his colleagues proposed a database for a US ecological inventory, which was an extensive multi-scale approach, consisting of comprehensive national, regional, and local information about geology, climate, hydrology, soils, plants, animals, and land use.9 In Yu’s pursuit and practice of large-scale planning in China, the ecological security pattern for example, McHarg’s influence can be fairly seen as an antecedent of Yu’s work.

With the instruction and support of Steinitz, Forman, and Stephen Ervin (Yu practiced using GIS under the instruction of Ervin), Yu worked on the maps that he called “security patterns” and received his degree with dissertation

“Security Patterns in Landscape Planning: With a Case in South China.” The “security patterns” are spatial patterns composed of strategic portions and positions of the landscape that have critical significance in safeguarding and controlling certain ecological processes.10 These patterns provide spatial strategies of connecting large patches by vegetated corridors to increase the patches’ functional value and at the same time extend their boundaries as well as protect their interior from urban and industrial disturbance. One of his most important projects is the National Ecological Security Patterns, which he produced with his firm after his return to China, based on the ideas and research he did at GSD.

Yu the Entrepreneur, Activist, Educator, Publisher, and Writer

Yu has many identities: he was the chair and founder of the landscape architecture department in Peking University; he led the establishment of Turenscape, an ecological-based international landscape and planning firm; he is responsible for the editing and publishing of LA China magazine; and himself has so far written hundreds of books or articles in multiple languages. Yu has won dozens of awards both in China and internationally. He is the winner of the 2020 Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award, and his company received the Award of Excellence in 2010. Although Yu’s professional achievement is so shining, people often overlook that he is a successful entrepreneur with a company of more than 500 people. His entrepreneurial spirit might be critical to all his achievements.

In 1996, Yu worked as a designer in SWA California for two years after his graduation from GSD. He was visited by Chen Changdu, the chair of the geography department and the pioneer of landscape ecology in China. Chen invited him to come back to China for his ambition of ecology practice and education. Yu took the invitation and started the landscape architecture center in Peking University under the department of geography.

Yu founded his company Turenscape in 1998, which was a bold move as he was recognized as a scientist rather than designer, and there was not a good environment for the establishment of a landscape architecture company at that time. However, Turenscape becomes critical in Yu’s education, theory, and practice. As the landscape and architecture program in Peking University used to be a small program with six faculty members at the beginning, Yu’s firm became the sponsor of the visiting professors. Yu realized that with the salary paid by the government, professors need extra income from projects to make a decent living. Thus, the independent operation of Turenscape enables him space and money to hire professionals, sponsoring students, and inviting guest professors with a much higher salary than normal college professors. Students of the department can also be involved in the real practice in his company. Yu uses his firm to feed the growth of academic landscape architecture education, while Turenscape itself also becomes a unique firm, which is operated like a collage. “We manage in the way of the school, not only doing projects, but also cultivating people and training talents to meet various landscape design tasks from land to region to city to site. We learn from and teach each other, invite famous scholars from all over the world to give lectures, and international students come here to form a very active and large work platform.”11

Yu is also an activist who has a deep concern for the resource-depleted and nature-damaged future of China. On the first day of Chinese New Year in 2006, he wrote directly to prime minister Wen Jiabao for his concern of the ‘new socialism countryside’ policy. His bravery won him national support for his research in ecological security patterns. Yu and his team in Peking University were hired to do ecological security pattern planning and suburban land use planning. The patterns they work out can help Chinese planners identify broad conservation areas that can be further elaborated at the regional and local level.12

Turenscape won its reputation through continued winning international prizes, and Yu pushed his international recognition forward by his articles, books, and

lectures. Yu is a prolific writer, and he is good at international communication and publicity. His team and students help him in translating and publishing his ideas and introducing the international frontiers to Chinese design.

Big Feet Aesthetic and the Art of Survival

Growing up in rural China, Yu has been nourished and affected by a vernacular landscape and traditional wisdom of nature-based solutions. As a rural student who came to study in big cities and abroad, he has always been treated as “bumpkin.” Yu has been aware that a “citizen elite” taste of beauty and judgment has been dominant in China from an early age. “For thousands of years, the urban elite worldwide has maintained the right to define beauty and good taste as part of its assertion of superiority and power.”13 However, as nature has been abused and more and more beautiful villages torn down for concrete based gray infrastructure construction, Yu realized that bad decisions were being made simply because of a misguided mentality about civilization and misguided aesthetic sensibilities.14

Thus, Yu proposed his theory of “Big Feet Aesthetic” as an approach to explore sustainability and aesthetics in China. “Big Feet” is the term in contrast to “Little Feet.” To meet the taste of elites, Chinese girls were forced to bind their feet. Foot-binding was also treated as a privilege of the high class for a thousand years. It is a taste that privileges the ornamental value above the functional value. However, like foot-binding, current movements of big construction in China are also rejecting nature’s inherent principles of health, survival, and productivity.15

The Big Feet revolution is a collection of Yu’s theory and practice, including sustainable city, water management, green infrastructure among others. In Yu’s theory, the Big Feet revolution could happen at three levels of action: planning ecological infrastructure across scales, creating nature-based engineering models and developing new aesthetics to create deep forms. Yu criticizes a “manicured little foot” gray infrastructure which lacks resilience in facing risks. The gray infrastructures are also a great waste of money and resources.  Through planning the “big feet,” Yu proposes planning ecological infrastructure across scales, and weaving green infrastructure together with gray infrastructure. “‘Creating working Big Feet’ means creating naturebased engineering models inspired by ancient wisdom, particularly from agriculture.”16 Based on traditional farming techniques, Yu and his team have developed replicable modules to address climate change and relate problems at a large scale.

Design Practice at Turenscape

The name Turenscape is derived from two Chinese words: “Tu” has the meaning of “land” and “Ren” means “people,” combined with the English word “scape” to create a word that indicates the harmony between land and people. Like Yu’s mentor Sun Xiaoxiang’s ideology of “earth-scape,” Turenscape is created as a multidisciplinary firm that creates landscape ecologically friendly and solving environmental problems from local to global scale. Turenscape is doing projects worldwide with a wide spectrum of project types. However, most of their projects are in China, and there are several topics repeatedly being discussed in their practices.

1. Make Friends with Floods

Yu always quotes the ancient story of Yu the Great, another Yu in Chinese history who was the legendary leader leading people to manage water and protect their homes from damage. Yu the Great managed water by knowing the dynamics of it, and that is also what Kongjian proposes in his theories and projects of sponge city and stormwater management.  “We need to accept and embrace flooding as a natural phenomenon.” The strategy of including flood in the design and life of cities is one of the main mechanisms of Turenscape’s projects.

The project of the floating gardens of Yongning River Park in Taizhou is one of the cases. It enacts an ecological approach to flood control and stormwater management. Like all the water channels in China, Yongning River is embanked with concrete following a local flood control policy. Yu and his team propose an ecological stormwater management system, which is a regional drainage approach, replacing the concrete banks with wetlands that provide flood mitigation, biodiversity conservation, outdoor recreation, and environmental education. With the ecological embankments, the peak flood flows can be reduced by more than half, creating a seasonally flooded natural matrix of wetland and natural vegetation that sustains natural processes. It demonstrates an ecological approach to flood control and stormwater management beyond engineering.

Another famous project by Turenscape won the 2010 ASLA Award is Houtan Park in Shanghai, China. The project was facing the challenge of transforming the degraded and polluted postindustrial land into a safe place for recreation, as well as improving flood control. Designed as a living system with ecological services, Houtan Park can provide multiple services including food, water and energy production, water purification, carbon sequestration, climate regulation, crop pollination, and cultural and intellectual inspiration.

2. Productive Landscape

The childhood memory and Yu’s early days in rural China largely influenced Yu by developing the productivity of landscape. Crops are elements frequently used in the practice of Turenscape’s projects. The project of the rice campus of Shenyang Agricultural University is the most distinctive case which demonstrates that the agricultural landscape could become part of the urbanized environment. Yu’s firm proposed productive rice fields for the 80-hectare new campus. Crops are irrigated by stormwater, frogs, and fish are raised to control insects and double productivity. The project is designed to be educational, in which students can be involved to study the farming processes. Like in Yu’s other projects, he expects that the design could increase people’s sensitivity about the environment and farming.

Notes

1. Saunders, William S., ed., Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2012): 61.

2. Ibid. p. 63.

3. Ibid.

4. “Prof Carl Steinitz Research Summary.” The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, 6 January 2017.

5. “A Conversation with Carl Steinitz.” ArcWatch: GIS News, views, and insights. Esri, April 2012.

6. Hill, Kristina.”Myths and Strategies of Ecological Planning,” chapter in Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2012): 145.

7. “Richard TT Forman,” Wikipedia

8. Izaak S. Zonneveld and Richard T.T. Forman, eds. Changing Landscapes: An Ecological Perspective. New York: Springer Verlag (1990).

9. McHarg, Ian L. A Quest for Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons (1996).

10. Kongjian Yu, “Security patterns and surface model in landscape ecological planning,” Thesis for Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge. 2 July 1996.

11. “Kongjian Yu: Solving Problems on a National Scale to Reconstruct the Beautiful Landscape.” GOOOOD interview No.12. 谷德设计网. 3 November 2016.

12. Steiner, Frederick R., “The Activist Educator,” chapter in Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu. ed. William S. Saunders (Basel: Birkhaüser, 2012): 112.

13. Yu, Kongjian. “Beautiful Big Feet.” Harvard Design Magazine: No. 31 / (Sustainability) +Pleasure, Vol. II, Landscapes,Urbanism, and Products (Fall/Winter 2009/2010).

14. “Kongjian Yu Wins 2020 Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award.” The Dirt, 12 October 2020.

15. Yu 2009/2010.

16. “Kongjian Yu Wins.” The Dirt 2020.

Kongjian Yu: Practitioner, Theorist and Rhetorician of Ecological Planning in Contemporary China

Charles Starks

Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu (1963–) has created China’s most globally known and honored environmental design firm, Turenscape; founded and led the graduate program in landscape architecture at Beijing University; published widely on his own platform, LA China, as well as others, in English and Chinese; and had a leadership role in planning and designing countless landscape projects both in China and internationally, ranging in scale from small parks to regional and national ecological inventories. Yu is a singular figure, a “star” landscape architect of the 1960s generation in China who has captured the profession’s attention around the world. This essay will explore Yu’s personal and professional background, theories, and rhetoric to draw out the reasons this status has crystallized.

In an edited volume of essays on Yu’s life and works, the American practitioners and scholars Peter Walker, Kristina Hill, and Frederick Steiner all compare Yu to the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, leaving no doubt that they place Yu in the first rank of landscape architects. Walker writes that Yu has reconstituted Olmsted’s unified conception of planning and landscape architecture that broke apart into separate professions in the 1920s. Steiner suggests that Yu’s public impact is comparable to that of Olmsted and Ian McHarg, both of whom considerably raised the profile of landscape planning in the United States. Hill notes that Olmsted, like Yu, “successfully persuaded … politicians that parks could be organized into continuous multi-functional spatial systems.” Not only do they serve aesthetic and recreational functions, she points out, but the parks of Olmsted and Yu are, just as importantly, designed to control flooding and purify water.1 Yet another mode of comparison to Olmsted is also apt. Olmsted and Yu both established careers and innovated concepts in landscape architecture at times when their respective nations were particularly in need of sustainable and humane frameworks for growth, but not always receptive to them. Like today’s China, Olmsted’s growing America featured widespread environmental and human rights abuses, which Olmsted both documented, as an observer of the slave system, and had a hand in perpetuating, as a California mine manager, along with soaring possibilities for shaping nationally significant landscapes. So it is now with Kongjian Yu’s China.2

Yu’s life has spanned the China’s transition from a rural and poor land of socialist revolution to an urban and wealthy modern authoritarian state. He is a native of a rural area of the Zhejiang Province, located in southern China, born to a family of landowning farmers who had been dispossessed amid the liberation of the peasants after the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Shortly after Yu’s birth, the family was targeted again during the Great Cultural Revolution, a period of political chaos and social unrest fomented by

government leaders who wished to further the revolution by inciting public anger at people deemed to be enemies. His parents were rounded up by officials, underwent forced labor and confessions, were stripped of their personal property, and were forced to live in a cowshed for a time. During the latter part of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted until 1978, Yu was deprived of a year of schooling. Despite these injustices and setbacks, Yu’s childhood also prepared him for his later education and career as a landscape architect. He excelled in track and field, where he was allowed to compete on a level playing field with other children. He worked in the rice fields and helped his father maintain the village’s irrigation system. He also explored a nearby woods and stream that formed a natural landscape from which wild plants and animals could be harvested. After a time, this ecological landscape was polluted, overexploited, and ultimately destroyed for the sake of development—the ground cover eradicated, the trees cut down and the waterways channelized into concrete beds. This troubling aspect of China’s modernization made a strong impression on Yu.3

Unusually for someone from his village, Yu attended high school and then placed well enough in the college entrance examination to attend university. He was one of four rural students in a class of 30 admitted to Beijing Forestry University in 1980 to study landscape gardening. Despite his interest in design, he was placed into a horticulture science track, where he wrote an undergraduate thesis on plant cell genetics. During this time, he studied with Sun Xiaoxiang, considered the godfather of Chinese landscape architects. Remarking on traditional Chinese aesthetics, Sun noted that the naturalism of Chinese landscape painting and gardening contrasted with formal European gardens, which gave the views a strong sense of human design and control. Sun inferred from this observation that Chinese traditional aesthetics were compatible with the concept of ecology, which emphasized the mutual dependence of humankind and the rest of nature rather than the dominance

Kongjian Yu (Sapienza Universita di Roma on Flickr)

of nature by humans. Sun, whose career spanned the second half of the 20th century, was inspired by, in his words, “painting, ecology, horticulture, architecture and poetry,” combining his love of traditional aesthetics with modern science. However, he also felt that even this combination was not adequate to the task of contemporary landscape planning, which, he said, would require economics, surveying, remote sensing, and computer-aided design skills. Chinese landscape architects, Sun wrote, must learn these skills from institutions in other countries.4 After Yu completed a master’s degree at Beijing Forestry University, he set out to do this by undertaking further graduate study in the United States.

Yu wrote his master’s degree thesis on landscape perception and assessment and studied geomorphology, landscape ecology, and physical geography. He traveled to northeast and southeast China for a tree zoning study and, after graduating, worked with geographer Chen Chuankang on tourism development, including a master plan for Red Stone National Park in Guangdong. During this time, he was introduced to the American landscape architecture scholar Carl Steinitz, who taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Yu had a common research interest with Steinitz, who was also involved in landscape preference research in the late 1980s, when he conducted a study of visitors’ and residents’ perceptions of ecological design in Acadia National Park in Maine. Yu subsequently attended Harvard as a student in the Doctor of Design program and studied with Steinitz and Richard Forman. Yu’s work at Harvard combined the social and natural sciences, and he published a study on visual preference as well as on the identification, using GIS, of so-called “security patterns” in the landscape that are important in protecting species’ habitats. This research became the subject of his doctoral thesis.5

Yu’s doctoral thesis used Red Stone National Park, where he had earlier worked with Chen Chuankang, as a case study location for identifying ecological, visual, and agricultural security points. The concept of ecological security patterns is that the configuration of landscape components, measured in terms of juxtaposition, adjacency, and connection, has significant impacts on the viability of an ecological system. The components include conservation zones, buffer zones, corridors and routes emanating from these zones, and strategic points for maintaining and dispersing species. In the system that Yu developed, these components are mapped onto cells in the landscape and the cells are classified according to suitability for and accessibility to the species being studied. Visual security patterns were identified using a matrix of visibility studies and visual preference surveys, and agricultural patterns were based on factors impacting the conversion of land to agricultural use. Once security patterns are mapped, Yu’s method proposes that future scenarios be developed based on the preference of decision makers for high, medium, or low security. The higher the level of desired security for ecological, aesthetic, or agricultural purposes, the more lands would need to be protected.6 Yu has applied the concept of security patterns at multiple scales in his subsequent work in China.

Yu left the United States to return to China in 1997 at the invitation of the ecologist Changdu Chen, who recruited him to start a center for landscape planning and architecture at Beijing University. Few such programs existed in China at the time, and Chen sought to add them to the geography department, from which he retired soon after the center was launched. With Yu at the helm, in later years the center would become a separate graduate school of landscape

architecture and then a college of landscape architecture and architecture. By 2010, the program was admitting 65 students annually and it had added a doctoral program in landscape architecture. There are now hundreds of such offerings in landscape architecture at universities in China. As he began to act as a higher education administrator, Yu also started a landscape design studio, called Turenscape, which has since expanded to 5 offices, one in Beijing and the others in southeastern China, and 500 employees, among them 80 who have received training abroad. The firm is closely associated with, though separate from, the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Beijing University, and it has sponsored faculty members at the college. The firm found initial success with park commissions in Sichuan and Guangdong provinces and has since worked on over 2000 planning and design projects in more than 200 cities inside and outside China. As of October 2020, it had won 40 ASLA awards as well as five World Architecture Festival and China Architectural Design awards. Yu has also developed publishing platforms associated with Turenscape. He founded a journal, LA China, and an associated website, Landscape.cn, and his firm has sponsored the translation of numerous books from English into Chinese, as well as the publication of journal articles and books in both Chinese and English. In 2020, Yu was awarded the Sir Jeffrey Jellicoe Award by the International Federation of Landscape Architects for his impact on the profession, students, and the public. One of Yu’s mentors, Sun Xiaoxiang, won the award in 2014.7

Yu’s theory of design is based in the security pattern idea that he developed at Harvard, and he has found himself aligned not only with the ecologists who were his advisers but also with contemporary theorists such as Charles Waldheim, who promotes large-scale environmental design as a driver of planning and praises Yu’s ecosystem approach. Yu’s application of his theory to planning can be most clearly seen in a 2008 growth plan for Beijing, which involves a “negative approach” whereby lands needed for ecological security are identified and protected as ecological infrastructure. In line with his thinking about the unity of nature and humanity, Yu broadly defines ecosystem services as including such environmental needs as water filtration, flood protection, avoidance of geological disasters, protection of native habitats and biodiversity, as well as more distinctly human needs such as protection of the cultural landscape, accessibility of recreation, and protection of agricultural lands from urban growth. According to Yu, it is on the basis of the “positive” frame of the protection of this ecological infrastructure that a “negative” framework for urban growth is developed.8

Like Olmsted, who pioneered such comprehensive ecological and social planning in 19th century American cities, Yu has also found it necessary to play politics in order to exert influence and win commissions. For Olmsted, operating in the vicious partisan atmosphere of Gilded Age America, it was necessary to curry favor with competing political parties while also developing a reputation as an independent expert not partial to one side or the other. In the one-party state of post-reform China that proclaims itself both socialist and nationalist, Yu’s political strategy is to deploy rhetoric that aligns to the ideals expressed by the leaders of the party and state apparatus while demonstrating how landscape planning can help achieve national goals. Yu has adopted revolutionary rhetoric that self-consciously breaks from the ornamental tradition of landscape architecture that was traditionally associated with Beijing Forestry University, the school he attended as an undergraduate and a master’s student. Invoking a well-known trope of

traditional Chinese culture, the bound female foot, he compares the fussiness of aristocratic Chinese gardens to the fetishized feet of subordinated women in China’s imperial past. Instead, Yu casts his designs as championing a “big feet” aesthetic that valorizes the hardworking peasants and laborers whose interests the party has traditionally served. If the new China puts its workers first, Yu’s rhetoric implies, then its landscapes should embrace an aesthetic of human survival. For someone who was undoubtedly scarred by the experience of being a member of a persecuted family during the Great Cultural Revolution, perhaps, on some level, Yu’s deliberately exaggerated rejection of traditional Chinese aesthetics is a defense mechanism. But it also provides an ideological justification for the ecological theories he has been working out throughout his career, which have more to do with social and environmental than political objectives.9

Most recently, Yu has developed rhetoric around a relatively recently adopted state slogan, “ecological civilization,” which the Communist Party announced in at its 108th Party Congress in 2013. Embedded within the statement about ecological civilization was another slogan, “Beautiful China,” which describes an ideal future state whereby “ecological civilization construction” is integrated into the “economic, political, cultural and social construction” of the Chinese nation. Embracing this new rhetoric, Yu ties it to his earlier rhetoric of the Big Feet Aesthetic. “Beautiful China is an activity that transforms the world through adaption of nature … the labor of transforming nature and society for human survival is the fundamental driving force for human evolution and the advancement of human society. In this sense, Beautiful China is the ‘art of survival’ of the Chinese people.” He further develops this rhetoric with a three-part theory of “beautiful deep form” within landscape architecture.10 Reading between the lines of this rhetoric, one can see that the slogans of “ecological civilization“ and ”Beautiful China” have given Yu an opening to advance the ecological design principles that he has been working out since his university years. But one can also hypothesize that the impact of Yu’s vast oeuvre of designs, plans, built works, publications, and disciples may have made an impact on the party’s decision to adopt ecological rhetoric that was compatible with his thinking. There is, perhaps, an invitation here for further research into the influence of Yu’s works on Chinese governance in the period leading up to the party’s “Beautiful China” statement.

Notes

1. Walker, Peter. “Foreword: Kongjian Yu’s Challenge,” in Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu, ed. William S. Saunders and Kongjian Yu. Basel: Birkhäuser (2012): 8; see also Steiner, Frederick R. “The Activist Educator,” in Designed Ecologies (2012): 107; see, finally, Hill, Kristina. “Myths and Strategies of Ecological Planning,” in Designed Ecologies (2012): 147.

2. The scope of China’s extraordinary urban growth is described in Campanella, Thomas J. The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press (2008): 14–18. Olmsted’s involvement with various aspects of American expansion in the 19th century is explored in Rybczynski, Witold. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century. New York: Scribner (1999),:109–121, 227–249, 393–399. Contemporary human rights violations associated with China’s growth are documented in “China and Tibet: Country Page,” Human Rights Watch, accessed 22 February 2021.

3. Beardsley, John. “Popular Aesthetics, Public History,” in Designed Ecologies (2012): 11. See also Kraus, Richard Curt. The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011): 1– 23. Finally, see Saunders, William S. “The Boy Who Read Books Riding a Water Buffalo,” in Designed Ecologies (2012): 60–62.

4. Saunders 2012, p. 63; Steiner 2012, p. 113-114; Sun, Xiaoxiang. “The Aesthetics and Education of Landscape Planning in China,” Landscape and Urban Planning Vol. 13 (January 1986): 483, 486.

5. See Saunders 2012, p. 64. See also Steinitz, Carl. “Toward a Sustainable Landscape with High Visual Preference and High Ecological Integrity: The Loop Road in Acadia National Park, U.S.A.,” Landscape and Urban Planning Vol. 19, No. 3 (June 1990): 213. See also Yu, Kongjian. “Cultural Variations in Landscape Preference: Comparisons Among Chinese SubGroups and Western Design Experts,” Landscape and Urban Planning Vol. 32, No. 2 (June 1, 1995): 107. See also Yu, Kongjian. “Security Patterns and Surface Model in Landscape Ecological Planning,” Landscape and Urban Planning Vol. 36, No. 1 (October 1, 1996): 1.

6. Yu, Kongjian. “Security Patterns in Landscape Planning with a Case in South China,” Doctor of Design Thesis, Harvard University (1995): 1–39, 60–65, 79–83.

7. See Saunders 2012, p. 64. See also Steiner 2012, p. 106–110, 115-116; See “Turen Jianjie” [in Chinese], Turenscape, accessed 22 February 2021. Finally, see “Beijing Daxue Jiaoshou Yu Kongjian Huo 2020 Jiefulie Jielike Jueshi Jiang” [in Chinese], Landscape.cn, accessed 22 February 2021.

8. Charles Waldheim, “Is Landscape Urbanism?,” in Is Landscape...? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, ed. Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim. New York: Routledge (2016): 162, 182– 87; See also Yu, Kongjian, and Sisi Wang, and Dihua Li, “The Negative Approach to Urban Growth Planning of Beijing, China,” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management Vol. 54, No. 9 (November 2011): 1221–22, 1232.

9. Rybczynski 1999, p. 151; Beardsley 2012, p. 10-11; Yu, . “The Big Feet Aesthetic and the Art of Survival,” Architectural Design Vol. 82, No. 6 (1 November 2012): 72–77.

10. Yu, Kongjian. “Beautiful China and the Mission of Landscape Architecture,” in Beautiful China. Reflections on Landscape Architecture in Contemporary China, ed. Richard J. Weller and Tatum L. Hands. Los Angeles: Oro Editions (2020): 22–31.

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Fearless in the Field

Helen Lea

Introduction

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander was one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th and early 21st centuries. From designing public housing to green roofs, Oberlander never ceased to challenge what was possible. She drew from her childhood and from her education to develop a signature process and style of design. Through investigation of these early influences and the ways in which her innovative practice developed throughout her career, it is apparent that this fearless pioneer has left a legacy on landscape architecture that will continue to grow as the future leaders of the field continue the work she started.

Early Life

Oberlander’s childhood formed the foundation of a lifelong affinity for people, nature, and design. She was born on June 20, 1921, in Mülheim-Ruhr, a city along the Rhine River in western Germany.1 Her mother, Beate Hahn, was a horticulturalist, and she also wrote children’s books. Her father, Franz Hahn, was an engineer in the steel industry.2 Some of Oberlander’s first impressions of the environment came from growing up in Dusseldorf and Berlin, two cities experiencing a new wave of modern architecture. The timing of her experiences of these places would be formative as she developed her modern style as a young professional.3 Oberlander’s mother was also an important influence on her early introduction to nature, exposing her to gardening and horticultural practices and soliciting her help as an illustrator for her books.4 Oberlander first expressed her conviction to become a landscape architect after studying a landscape painting in an art studio while her portrait was being painted at age 11. Upon learning about the streets, parks, and Rhine River depicted in the work, she told her mother, “I want to do parks.”5

As Oberlander continued to cultivate her passion for the environment in her early years, Germany was quickly becoming a dangerous place for her and her Jewish family. Franz and Beate decided to plan their exodus to the United States in 1932, but after Franz died in a tragic ski accident in 1933, most of this planning was left to Beate, who was now a widow and single mother.6 Oberlander, her mother, and her sister finally fled Nazi persecution in 1939, arriving in New York with a determination to adapt that was characteristic of German refugees of her generation.7 Soon after she moved to Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, where she lived and worked on her mother’s organic farm until attending college.8

Oberlander’s passion for designing landscapes continued to grow, so she sought out the training she needed to succeed. “When I came to America, all I could think of is to find a college that would teach landscape architecture and architecture.”9 Oberlander found the interdepartmental undergraduate program at Smith College in 1940, which she admired for its interdisciplinary approach.10 Because of the war, her program at Smith College closed, and she was admitted to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). In 1943, she became part of the second cohort of women at the GSD and was one of only six women to graduate in her cohort.11

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander

(Photo by Kiku Hawkes)

Design Methods and Philosophy

At the GSD, Oberlander began to develop her design style with the help of the leading designers and academics she met through the course of her studies. One of her most influential professors was Walter Chambers, who taught grading. Seeing Oberlander’s fascination with complex grading and design challenges, he encouraged her by saying, “just go sculpt the earth.”12 Harvard’s Basic Design course, which Walter Gropius advocated for, was also influential to Oberlander’s growth as a designer.13 Basic Design taught how areas should fit together and how to build abstract shapes into the landscape.14 Oberlander’s skill in grading, coupled with the GSD’s emphasis on basic design, would prove to be a dynamic combination heading into the modern era of landscape architecture.

As a professional, Oberlander looked beyond style into the social aspects of the profession as inspiration. After graduating in 1947, Oberlander started her practice as a community planner in Philadelphia, working with notable architects Louis Kahn and Oscar Stonorov.15 In 1951 she collaborated with Kahn on the Millcreek Housing Project, where she was also able to convince owners of a vacant lot nearby to develop it into a neighborhood park for children and mothers.16 She was later hired by landscape architect Dan Kiley to work on the Schuylkill Falls public housing project, and she moved to Vermont to live and work on the project with the Kileys.17 Having come from a family with a long tradition of service on both sides, the opportunity to work on public housing projects was an exciting prospect.18 Though the landscapes were not fully realized, this work still helped Oberlander solidify her fundamental belief in the social responsibility of landscape architects.19 “That was one of the very important goals of my life, to give people a better house to live in.”20 She made sure to emphasize through her work that landscape architecture was more than plants, but all the other human and societal considerations in between.21

One other aspect of Oberlander’s design philosophy was her focus on sustainability and the environment. This aspect of her professional aspirations had been growing since she was a girl but was cemented as a permanent priority after reading Our Common Future.22 Oberlander was passionate about stormwater, sustainable materials, and environmental preservation.23 She was one of the first designers to act on the issues of climate change and consistently showed the value of the environment in her work.24

Pioneering Efforts

Oberlander’s career of nearly 80 years was driven by her strong design philosophy and belief in the design process. Her passion for the environment and for people that stemmed from her experiences as a child made her a fearless practitioner. The massive body of work and influence Oberlander contributed to the profession of landscape architecture can be summarized in one word - pioneering. Over the course of her career, Oberlander would pioneer in four key areas – playground design, environmental design, the role of women, and the practice of landscape architecture.

Pioneer of Playground Design

In 1953, Oberlander’s career shifted as she moved to Vancouver, Canada with her husband Peter Oberlander, whom she had met while at Harvard. While he worked to create the new School of Community and Regional Planning at University of British Columbia, Oberlander quickly got to work as a designer of the Canadian landscape. She and Peter also started their family at this time, and Oberlander began to draw inspiration from her own children as she observed how they interacted with the environment.25 One of her most notable projects in Canada was in 1967 at the World’s Fair (Expo 67) in Montreal.26 Having become a specialist in the realm of playground design, particularly for her 18th and Bigler Street playground in Philadelphia, Oberlander was asked to design an outdoor play space to accompany the Children’s Creative Center.27 When she started developing the design of this space, Oberlander knew she did not want to use traditional playground equipment. Her extensive research led her to create a concept centered around five elements: hills and dales, water and sand, and buildable parts. Oberlander’s concept was the first playground of its kind in North America.28

Oberlander continued to build on the success of the Children’s Creative Center through writing and advocacy. Oberlander’s passion for outdoor play stemmed from her belief that all children should have access to nature. “If kids don’t have contact with nature, how will they ever come to understand it, learn to care about it, respect it, and cooperate with it?”29 The Children’s Creative Center playground was designed to inspire children’s curiosity and invite them to interpret the landscape in their own way.30 The project was a massive success, drawing 30,000 children to the expo to explore this new type of play.31 Her work ultimately helped to shape national policy on playgrounds and led to the creation of 70 additional parks across Canada in the following seven years.32 Her vision for play spaces persists today and her ideas have spread internationally.

Pioneer of Environmental Design

The first large scale project Oberlander was hired to design was the iconic Robson Square in Vancouver alongside architect Arthur Erickson.33 This was also the project that would introduce Oberlander to green roofs and their ecological benefits.34 She enjoyed working with Erickson because he understood the impact of not being able to connect with nature or light, and had compelling concepts for his designs.35 Oberlander continued to push the boundaries of modern design and create an oasis of greenery in the city on Robson Square’s iconic skyscraper laid on its side. The building was laid on its side to protect the light and open spaces originally proposed at its base that would be in perpetual shadow if the project took on a more conventional form.36 “Who in 1974 wanted a park on the roof? Nobody.”37 Despite the design’s novelty, the team succeeded in creating intimate spaces throughout the linear park that traversed three blocks, weaving open spaces between plantings that mimicked the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.38

To support this ecological oasis, Oberlander and Erickson also put substantial effort into greening the systems in the architecture and landscape. The green roof designed by Oberlander was intentionally low maintenance and insulated the building for more efficient heating and cooling. She also researched the emerging technology of drip irrigation to minimize water usage in the

landscape.39 “I’ve tried very hard to introduce storm water management through green roofs or wetlands so that we will take care of our environment.”40 Oberlander believed that stormwater management was the most important aspect of a successful green roof, even over aesthetic quality and maintenance minimization.41 Her research-focused, detail-oriented approach to these sustainable systems led the way to future ecologically conscious projects.

Oberlander was also adamant in this project that if the green roof was going to be accessible to some, it would have to be accessible to everyone. At its tallest, Robson Square sits 30 feet above street level.42 To connect the spaces, her colleague Alberto Zennaro had designed several stairways. In search of a more integrated approach to accessibility than putting a ramp off to the side, Oberlander jumped in and drew a “goat path” across Zennaro’s stairs, and consequently invented the stramp.43 The stramp was yet another pioneering idea Oberlander brought to the profession that increased our connection to nature and with equitable and accessible parks.

Pioneer of Women in Landscape Architecture

Oberlander had a lasting impact on the role of women in the profession. Although she he did not consider herself a feminist, Oberlander’s work ethic, professional values, and family responsibilities all came together to create a model for what was possible for modern women. Oberlander’s views on traditional feminism were made especially clear one night in an argument with Smith College classmate Betty Friedan, saying, “If you have a profession, just get to work.”44 Oberlander preferred to promote the role of women in her field through action, concentrating on becoming a landscape architect rather than wasting time on discussions.45

As one of the first women to attend the GSD, Oberlander still had to navigate inequalities surrounding gender discrimination. At the time, more than 50% of women admitted to the GSD would eventually drop out.46 Oberlander’s determination to succeed and the resilience she built as a German-born Jewish immigrant made her strong in the face of these challenges.47 “I never looked right or left… that’s the only way that I could succeed in this maledominated world.”48 Oberlander was not a woman in landscape architecture - she was a landscape architect.

What is more impressive still is the amount Oberlander achieved while also being a mother of three. Feminists of the time frowned upon sacrificing professionalism for motherhood, but to Oberlander, striving for both seemed obvious.49 She chose to adapt to the need to stay home with her children and used it as an opportunity to work on public housing once again. Skeena Terrace and McLean Park were both designed by Oberlander during this time, proving that motherhood would not compromise her professional aspirations.50

Pioneer of Practice

Oberlander is distinctive in her field not only because of her design ideas, but also because of her goals for leadership and collaboration among practitioners. Since the beginning of her education at Smith College, Oberlander recognized the importance of working across disciplines with both architects and landscape architects. At Harvard, she learned from Christopher Tunnard that the landscape and the building were linked and must work with

each other to achieve a great design.51 Throughout her practice, Oberlander would make it a priority to work with architects, elevating the quality of her designs and creating a model for future practitioners to consider in their own collaborative processes.52 She believed that landscape architects, through their multidisciplinary training and ability to adapt with the changing conditions of the landscape, would be the future leaders of any design team.53

As a pragmatist, Oberlander was also a strong believer in process and research.54 “I’ve tried to bring the profession to a state where it is understood and accepted.”55 She spent countless hours researching the scientific and technical aspects of her designs, always making sure she was prepared for anything a client might ask. She also kept a sizeable library in her home. Oberlander was an innovator in the scientific approach to design, organizing several innovative studies, including a light exposure analysis for the courtyard of the New York Times Building.56 Oberlander was brave enough to constantly ask what was possible, raising the standard of excellence for the entire profession with her analytical and precise methods.

Oberlander also set herself apart through her abundance of energy and dedication to her work.57 As a child she vowed to never slow down after being told a Jewish girl should not win her school’s track meet.58 Oberlander continued to work as a leader in the profession up until she died in 2021 from COVID-19 complications.59 She purposefully led a small office so she could have direct interaction with each of her projects.60 She was 99 years old and just one month away from her 100th birthday when she died. Oberlander brought her fearlessness into every project, leaving a lasting mark on the practice of landscape architecture.

Conclusion

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s pioneering legacy has shaped the modern practice of landscape architecture. At the heart of her work, Oberlander consistently prioritized people to foster social equity, environmental justice, and community connections. She also devoted her career to improving the environment, never cutting corners on quality in her plans for planting or stormwater. Above all, Oberlander relentlessly pursued improvement, never shying away from a challenge or underestimating the power of landscape architects to effect change. “I was always looking forward to what was happening next.”61 Oberlander’s work addressed many of the critical issues practitioners face today on both social and environmental fronts. Learning from Oberlander’s example of diligent, multidisciplinary practice, today’s designers can respond more thoughtfully to the unique challenges facing the built environment. However, that is only if we are fearless enough ourselves to keep up with the girl from Mülheim-Ruhr.

Notes

1. Lewis, Anna M. Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspirational Architects, Engineers, and Landscape Designers. Chicago: Chicago Review Press (2014): 193.

2. Green, Penelope. “Cornelia Oberlander, a Farsighted Landscape Architect, Dies at 99,” The New York Times, 10 June 2021.

3. Herrington, Susan. Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (2013): 12.

4. Ibid., pp. 13-14.

5. See p. 2 of Oberlander, Cornelia Hahn. Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Oral History. Compiled by Charles A. Birnbaum. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, August 2008.

6. Herrington 2013, p. 13.

7. Herrington 2013, p. 12.

8. Green 2021.

9. See p. 2 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008.

10. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, “Announcing the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize,” 1 October 2019: video, 11:59.

11. Herrington, Susan. “Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: a model modern,” in Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture, ed. Sonja Dümpelmann and John Beardsley. London: Routledge (2015): 186-187.

12. See p. 4 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008

13. Ibid.

14. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, “Interview with Cornelia Oberlander,” 19 August 2011: video, 3:51.

15. Cohen, Susan. “In Memoriam: Cornelia Hahn Oberlander,” Landscape Architecture Magazine, July 2021.

16. Lewis 2014, p. 197.

17. “Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Pioneer.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, accessed February 8, 2022.

18. Herrington 2013, p. 18.

19. Vernon, Noel D. “Oberlander, Cornelia Hahn,” in Shaping the Postwar Landscape, ed. Charles A. Birnbaum and Scott Craver. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (2018): 143.

20. See p. 19 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008.

21. Ibid., p. 14.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p. 13.

24. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, “Announcing the…” 2019 video.

25. Herrington 2013, p. 105.

26. Vernon 2018, p. 143.

27. Herrington 2013, p. 104.

28. See p. 22 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008.

29. Lewis 2014, p. 198.

30. Herrington 2015, p. 199.

31. See p. 22 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008.

32. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, “Announcing the…” 2019 video.

33. Vernon 2018, p. 143.

34. Canadian Green Building Council, “Ask the Expert: CaGBC Lifetime Achievement winner Cornelia Oberlander talks about the evolution of green landscaping,” accessed February 8, 2022.

35. See p. 11 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008.

36. Herrington 2013, p. 123.

37. See p. 27 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008.

38. Ibid.

39. Herrington 2013, p. 127.

40. See p. 1 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008.

41. Ibid., p. 17.

42. Ibid., p. 27.

43. Herrington 2013, p. 134.

44. Ibid., p. 18.

45. Cohen 2021.

46. Herrington 2015, p. 187.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., p. 18.

49. Ibid.

50. See p. 8 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008.

51. Ibid., p. 4.

52. Ibid., p. 14.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., p. 15.

55. Ibid., p. 1.

56. Ibid., p. 9.

57. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, “Announcing the…” 2019 video.

58. Cohen 2021.

59. Green 2021.

60. See p. 9 of the Oberlander oral history, 2008.

61. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, “Announcing the…” 2019 video.

Lawrence Halprin

David Wangkyu Kim

Early Life

Lawrence Halprin was born on July 1st, 1916, in Brooklyn, New York, but spent his childhood going back and forth between Israel (then, British-governed Palestine Mandate). He graduated in 1933 from Poly Prep High School in Brooklyn New York and at 17 returned to Israel. In Israel, he joined a group of pioneer men and women involved in the utopian Kibbutz movement, social collectives based on agriculture, namely Kibbutz Ein Hashofet. His experiences while living within the Kibbutz community were critical in shaping his views on social interactions, social gatherings, and sense of community. He goes so far as to say, “Israel and Jerusalem have affected my life ever since—my value systems and my attitude have been deeply influenced. I have been deeply swayed by Israeli’s reverence for the land….”1 After spending some time in the Kibbutz, upon request of his mother, he returned to the United States and enrolled in Cornell University’s plant sciences program and graduated in 1939.2

After his graduation, Halprin pursued an M.S. in Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin. It was here where Lawrence Halprin would meet his future wife, Anna Halprin. During his time at the university, Anna convinced Lawrence to visit Frank Lloyd Wright at his home studio, Taliesin East. Halprin’s visit was pivotal in inspiring his interest in design, and upon returning to school, he proceeded to look up books about architecture at the library. Towards the end of his reading, he saw the words “landscape architecture” and upon investigation, happened upon a book by Christopher Tunnard titled “Gardens in the Modern Landscape.” He was intrigued by the implications and the services that landscape architecture provided. However, he was soon recommended to study at Harvard Graduate School of Design with a scholarship, where he studied under the likes of Christopher Tunnard and Walter Gropius, who was the chair of the Department of Architecture. Gropius’s goal was to unite the fine and practical arts to structure positive social change, and thus Halprin was deeply influenced by the focus on creating designs over learning theory. The onset of the Second World War, however, put a delay on his entry into the profession of landscape architecture. Halprin enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943. He returned in the spring of 1945 and worked under Thomas Church in San Francisco for four years, after which he opened his own office which eventually grew from four members to more than 60 staff.3’

Halprin in Israel

In 1955, Halprin was invited back to Israel by Meyer Weisgal, director of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot to “establish basic design principles for the continued development of this important scientific research.”4and his design provided the basis for greenbelt, park, and terrace infrastructure. Two years after this, Halprin again returned to Israel, this time to design the open space plan for the Hebrew University Givat Ram Campus. This was one of many designs that he did in Israel, and his roots, experiences, and interests in the Israeli landscape and his endeavors reflected “his continuous creative exploration to understand the Israeli landscape in all its complexity.”5 Halprin was described to be extremely meticulous in his attention to detail, considering critical aspects such as history, and culture, but also starting to investigate the finer details that created the identity of a site, such as the texture of stones, and observation of the lifestyle of the Israelis in the city; namely “a deliberative process of learning the Mediterranean and desert landscape through study, meeting with experts, and continued visitation that capitalized on his abilities as a perceptive and astute observer.”6 Halprin’s experiences in working in California and in Arizona with the Navajo nation also played a key role in understanding desert landscapes; “as the California lifestyle, where life out-ofdoors is paramount, has[had] a parallel in Israel”7 It was his time in Jerusalem that amplified Halprin’s exceptional talent in sketching, “demonstrating a remarkable ability to capture the essential qualities of place and succinctly conceptualize landscape design at multiple scales.”8

Lawrence Halprin (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

Figure 1: Ira Keller Fountain Park (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

Figure 2: Children play on the Keller Fountain (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

Design

Halprin’s perspective of designing landscape echoed the appreciation and value of nature, not unlike Frederick Law Olmsted. However, Halprin sought inspiration from nature, instead of replicating it. His design endeavors and sketches sought out forms, interactions, and relationships within nature, and his imagining of a site as a process, or an experience, deeply influenced how he approached design. Halprin believed that the urban landscape functioned as the everyday backyard for city residents Halprin’s approach to design and philosophy of being inspired and transmuting nature into the urban space defined his creative processes behind design, linking ecological design with creative impulses and processes. He believed that every space and landscape was a stage on which interactions, movement, and gathering of people within said landscape became a performance.

One of his most iconic projects, the Ira Keller Fountain Park (Figures 1 and 2), located in Portland Oregon, formerly named Forecourt Fountain. This design reflects Halprin’s philosophy of setting a stage for people to interact with; raised platforms above the water encourage people to move through the space; through the fountains we can start to see Olmsted’s philosophy of capturing aspects of nature; form, sound, scale and then re-imagining them in a more man-made form (which, he believed, had just as much merit as natural form and had its own constraints and opportunities).9 Halprin’s particular interest in movement, partially if not completely influenced by Anna Halprin, manifested in his philosophy behind designing sites, especially public ones. To Halprin, the idea of motion was key in his designs, and he went so far as to coin the term “motation” a combination of the word “movement” and “notation”: a system in which movement and motion was used as a generative strategy for design.10 In his publication Cities, Halprin starts to lay out the details behind his philosophy of what an urban space should look like and what role urban spaces should play. “The city comes alive through movement and its rhythmic structure.”11 Halprin’s approach to designing urban environments was very much concentrated around the idea of the creative city environment as a process; “The creative city environment evolves as a result of both new and old buildings and a recognition that the city is a continuum…”12 This temporal and less specific goal-driven approach allowed for Halprin to understand the city beyond its buildings and physical forms, and acknowledged the spontaneous aspects of the city—good or bad— that was created through the interrelationship and juxtaposition of designed, and non-designed elements.13

Although this approach and acknowledgment of the informal aspect of the city being just as vital may seem like a laissez-faire approach to design, it was quite the opposite for Halprin. His background in plant-science and horticulture, paired with his experience working in the field resulted in a detail-oriented, but socially and culturally sensitive design ethic, not just from the perspective of creating designs, but nurturing experiences through space. “Space itself is only an envelope within which events happen, and the city, like a stage set demands modulators for people in motion”14 Halprin’s great interest in the human scale also contributed to how he intended to design spaces. In his book Cities, he reflects fondly upon his experiences in Venice:

“I remember with great clarity that greatest urban experience I have ever had… in front of the church of San Marco…it was cold and foggy, and the top of the Campanile barely showed sunlit above the low hanging sea mist…the black and white stones of the intricately laid pavement were covered with a thin film of water. There was no sound—no automobile exhausts, no buses. Absolute quiet…all of a sudden, the air became dark with birds, the square filled with the beating of thousands of wings…the deserted square became absolutely filled with pigeons. The noise was incredible—even frightening…they left just as quickly, and the great square was empty and quiet again.” - Lawrence

Halprin, Cities (1963)

From the quote above, one can start to get a sense of how Halprin observed his sites. Halprin’s attention to the sensory details, as well as the visual details, allowed him to form a narrative of sorts, that was inherently tied to the space both visually and temporally. To Halprin, this narrative was key to designing spaces for people. Halprin saw the urban environment as a great opportunity to manifest his ideas of what an urban space could provide to its users and does not hesitate to delve into the finer details that compose a space stating: “The fact is that attention to the detail and design of object in its streets is as important to the qualities of a city’s aesthetics as its buildings themselves.”15 This statement is strengthened by his approach to landscape furniture, for example: “The modern city is a kaleidoscope of overlapping activities and people in motion. As the people eddy and move in a multifaceted series of actions, the furniture in the street becomes the fixed point which can guide and enrich their movements,”16, and signage: “An exciting environment of color, symbols, and letters—all thought of as painterly devices—can transform our advertising and communication into a great art for in the heart of the city.”17 This idea of bringing an artistic element on top of ecological services to the urban environment was a driving force for Halprin’s idea of a modern urban environment. Throughout the book, Halprin expresses a disappointment with the role and prominence of automobiles in the city, citing the Champs Elysees as a “example of redevelopment…without regard to the democratic process,”18 and his sketches of the proposed Market Street in San Francisco (Figure 3), which places rails underground, away from the pedestrians, with sidewalk widths maximized to allow for predominantly pedestrian traffic. The automobiles do not take center stage in this design, making way for wide pedestrian crossings and an impressive pedestrian streetscape of trees and furnishings.

Halprin’s vision of the city also differed from the conventional model of redevelopment at the time: he eschewed the common practice of tearing down “blighted” façades in favor of dull and repetitive aesthetics, and instead chose to focus on the value that old buildings, structures, and objects held. “The meaning, today, of some of the heroic sculpture employing junk as its medium—old parts of industrial machines and automobiles—cannot go unnoticed.”19 Halprin’s idea of taking nature into the urban environment was also key in his designs. While Olmsted’s Central Park masterplan serves as the epitome of nature replicated within a city, Halprin’s approach addressed many different scales spanning from public plazas to tiny garden plots in front of city rowhomes. This flexibility, paired with Halprin’s affinity for capturing the processes and atmosphere of nature, allowed him to design at all scales, and develop strategies for designing at all scales which took into account the physical, social, and temporal aspects of any given space and scale.

“Space itself is only an envelope withing which event happen, and the city like a stage set, demands modulators for people in motion—objects of use and comfort and artistry—guides for activity, shelters for incidental but necessary events, semi buildings, signs, symbols, places for sitting—a while universe of objects. They are the small-scaled elements which we constantly use and see; they set the dominant quality of streets and plaza, and by their ubiquity, they become the street.”

-Lawrence Halprin, Cities

(1963)

Influences from Anna Halprin

Before delving into the designs of Lawrence Halprin, we must first look to one of his biggest influences, Anna Halprin. Anna met Lawrence at the University of Wisconsin and was pivotal in paving the path for Lawrence’s career as a landscape architect. Her approach to performance, along with her participation in Halprin’s classes at Harvard, led her to formulate her own understanding of the importance of physical space and the kinesthetic reactions of people based on a space’s spatial layout and composition. Anna’s profession as a dancer and choreographer inspired Lawrence’s design philosophy: being surrounded by dancers, his work reflected an emphasis on a “kinetic approach to movement through the landscape,”20 and he goes further to mention that landscape architecture takes on the role of “design choreographers” unlike architects or planners.21 Lawrence was intrigued by complexity, and Anna’s dance and choreography influences drove him to address the speed at which spaces are experienced.

Figure 3: Halprin’s Sketch for the Proposed Market Street in San Francisco (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

“The detail with which he regards this human motion is clearly influenced not just by his observations of landscapes but also by his work” - Wasserman, ‘A World in Motion’

Through these influences from Anna, coupled with his exposure to her work and dancers, Halprin started to develop an idea of “scoring” as a process in which design could be organized and thought out. “I saw scores as a way of describing all such processes in all the arts, of making process visible and thereby designing with process through scores.”22 Scores, in a design, served to provide roles of components within a landscape; physical, temporal, atmospheric, and social interactions all were part of Halprin’s “score.” These ideas eventually led to Halprin creating the “RSVP cycles”—a design philosophy that focused on a fluid participatory approach not just to design, but across all disciplines and across all aspects of life.23

The RSVP Cycles

The term “RSVP” comes from the French phrase “Respondez-vous s’il vous plais” meaning, “please respond.” However, the coining of the RSVP cycle name was interestingly, a coincidence, and Halprin mentions: “By chance, when I finally put the headings together, they spelled out RSVP which is a communications idea meaning “Respond.”24 Each letter represents a component and step in the process: “Resource = Inventory/ Analysis, Score = Design/Plan, Valuaction = Evaluation, and Performance = Build/Implement.”25 However, despite the familiarity and commonality of these processes within the world of design, the nomenclature that Halprin decided to choose created a system in which “designers and planners cannot simply fall back on the standard techniques but must reconfigure and recompose the process with the assistance of the RSVP Cycles tool.”26

“Together I feel that these describe all the procedures inherent in the creative process. They must feel back all along the way, each to the other, and thus make communication possible.” -Lawrence Halprin, RSVP Cycles (1969)

Figure 4: “Scoring” pattern of the Overhoff-Halprin Fountain for the 1962 World’s Fair (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

Figure 5: Halprin, “RSVP Cycles” (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

The RSVP cycle was formulated in layers (Figure 6) with the inner circle representing the self and the people close to us—“your personal environment, attitudes, interests, even hang ups…”27—and the outer circle representing the outer-oriented world of interactions not exclusive to the self. The idea is better illustrated when looking at (Figure 7) which shows two cycles overlapping, representing points of interaction with different cycles in the process. Halprin expressly states that the RSVP cycle is not bound to an order, and that “the cycle operates in any direction and by overlapping.” And that “These…cycles… are not meant to categorize or organize, but to free the creative process…by making it visible.”28

Following this approach to an iterative and collaborative process, Anna and Lawrence held workshops to explain and teach this process to others, leading to a non-traditional, albeit extremely effective way of interdisciplinary exchange between designers and non-designers alike. Working with the cycles also allowed Anna and Lawrence to recognize the need to involve multiple communities to create a more inclusive process29—an idea not unlike Paul and Linda Davidoff’s advocacy planning formula.

Visualizing Thought: The Sketches of Lawrence Halprin

“I’ve always drawn in the sense that it’s a secondary language, I find it much easier to make a drawing about something than to describe it, or to talk about it, and usually when somebody asks what I think about it, I draw it” -Lawrence Halprin, “Lawrence Halprin on Design”

To Halprin, sketching was not a means for creating art. To him, sketching was a process of thinking, and his sketches of various projects and locations show an intimate attention to detail and relationships within the topic of his sketches. Halprin states, “I just draw, I don’t worry about if its good or bad, I just draw.”30

One notable observation that can be made from Halprin’s sketches is that his sketches do not illustrate a place at one point, but illustrate a process and combination of experiences. This method of capturing not only physical, but temporal and atmospheric aspects of the site, belied a depth to his process of understanding a space through sketch. To gain insight into how Halprin used his sketches as a medium for formulating, processing, and developing ideas, we look to the Sea Ranch project. His sketches along with his notes did not conform strictly to the classical ideas of perspective and form—as the process was more important than the result to Halprin, a repeating theme

Figure 6 (Left): The RSVP Cycle (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

Figure 7 (Right): Overlapping RSVP Cycles (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

Figure 8: Rock Study at the Sea Ranch (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

Figure 9: Sketches and Notes, Overlooking the Cliffs at the Sea Ranch (Courtesy of The Lawrence Halprin Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

throughout his career as a landscape architect. Seen here are two sketches by Halprin—one of many studies he did while observing the landscape around the sea ranch. Although the sketch (Figure 8) looks abstract at first, one can start to see how he dissected what he saw through his own personal artistic lens, emphasizing the subtle changes in color of the rock faces with brighter more contrasting colors to express what he saw was important in his observations. Halprin was less concerned with the “style” of his artwork, and in his words; “I have looked for how things arise and develop in Nature as a guidepost NOT to copy what is there so much as to understand the processes by which things occur.”31 Halprin’s sketches vary in aesthetics and purpose, seen above (Figure 9) is another sketch of the surroundings of Sea Ranch, but in a different style of sketching. Upon closer inspection, one can start to see the small details in his lines and one can start to understand which elements within that view Halprin found important—smooth rock formations are splashed with color, while ghost lines between the rocks in the ocean show an intention to mark significant features in the landscape in relation to each other. Such mastery of sketching defined Halprin just as much, if not more than the projects he built during his career as a landscape architect.

Conclusion

Lawrence Halprin’s ideas of viewing the landscape is still well-reflected in the profession of landscape architecture, and his emphasis on the process to inform the outcome of the design, both aesthetically, and socially— juxtaposed with influences from Anna’s dancing career and his mastery of thinking with sketches —led to a landscape architect that saw no boundaries in trying to understand the process and components of good design. Halprin’s kaleidoscope of experiences in Israel in his youth, as well as his biological expertise during his early studies, allowed for the perfect balance of creating meaningful and effective spaces for people.

Notes

1. Helphand, K. I. (2012). “Halprin in Israel.” Landscape Journal, Vol. 21 No. 1-2 (2012): 198–198.

2. Apostolos, M. Reflections on Lawrence Halprin. The Cultural Landscape Foundation. February 2010.

3. Birnbaum, C. A. Halprin Gallery Guide - TCLF. The Cultural Landscape Foundation. 5 November 2017.

4. Helphand 2012.

9. Halprin, L. Lawrence Halprin Biography: Becoming a landscape .... YouTube. 15 January 2015.  See also Halprin, L. Lawrence Halprin on design: RSVP cycles. YouTube. 15 January 2015. Finally, see also Halprin, L., & Halprin, A. Lawrence Halprin on design: Freedom of expression. YouTube. 15 January 2015.

10. Halprin, L. The Rsvp cycles: Creative processes in the human environment. George Braziller. 1969.

11. Halprin, L. (1963). Cities. New York: Reinhold.   12.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid

18. Ibid

19. Ibid

20. Wasserman, J. “A World in Motion: The Creative Synergy of Lawrence and Anna Halprin.” Landscape Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1/2, (2012): 33–52

21. Ibid

22. Halprin 1969.

23. Wasserman 2012.

24. Halprin 1969.

25. Wasserman 2012.

26. Ibid

27. Halprin 1969.

28. Ibid

29. Ibid

30. Halprin, L. Lawrence Halprin on design: I love to do sketches. YouTube. 27 October 2009.

31. Rajendran, S. “Drawing out the Landscape: The Sketches of Lawrence Halprin.” Journal of Landscape Architecture, Vol. 42 (2014).

Buckminster Fuller: Life, Contributions, and Spaceship Earth

Yasmine McBride

The life and contributions of Buckminster Fuller were enormously significant to the fields of architecture, engineering, planning, and landscape. His inventions not only provided concrete tools for the built environment moving forward, but his theories and writings catalyzed many ways that we talk about our world around us today. He encouraged planners and designers to think “big,” to essentially employ a systems approach to their work, and he certainly practiced what he preached. Among the most influential of these big ideas were his writings in “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” which feels in many ways that it could have been written in the 21st century.

Buckminster Fuller was born in Milton, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1895. He grew up often going to Bear Island in Maine with his family from a very early age. There, he participated in outdoor activities and boat maintenance, later citing this time as cultivating his love of both nature and structure. As a young man, Fuller attended Harvard in 1913. For socializing too often and missing his midterms, he was expelled from the University. From there, Fuller worked at a mill in Canada, further deepening his knowledge of machinery operation and repair. Two years later, he returned to Harvard and was subsequently expelled again.1

In 1917, Fuller joined the Navy. In his two years there, he made several significant contributions, including inventing a winch for rescue boats. This equipment could remove downturned planes from the water and save pilots. The invention led him to receive officer training prior to his exiting of the military. Soon thereafter, his father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, collaborated with Fuller to develop a concrete reinforcement method that was the first of Fuller’s 25 patents. Unfortunately, the concrete business with his father-in-law failed, and, nearly a decade later, in 1927, Fuller went through a depressive period brought on by this hardship. He even mentions at some points feeling suicidal during this period.2 This moment is perhaps the time where Fuller truly begins thinking about the universe, humanity, and his greater role in the larger systems at play.

Later that year, Fuller designed the Dymaxion House. It was originally called the 4D House, and was inexpensive, designed for mass production, and could be airlifted to its intended location. Fuller calls this “doing more with less.” He would go on to invent many other products, including the dymaxion car, a three-wheel automobile, the dymaxion bathroom, and even dymaxion deployment units. These were mass produced homes based on the design of circular grain bins, which were ultimately used in World War II for radar shelters.3 In 1947, he invented the famous geodesic dome. It employs what he calls “synergetic geometry,” and is lightweight, cost effective, and easy

to assemble. In 1953, he patented this invention. Today, there are more than 300,000 geodesic domes around the world, from shelters in Africa, to radar stations, to children’s playgrounds.4 Fuller would later theorize about putting a geodesic dome over the entirety of Manhattan.

All throughout this period of invention, Buckminster Fuller wrote and theorized around enormous ideas. In 1927, the year he invented the Dymaxion House, Fuller also wrote of a “one town world,” where he foresaw a future where cargo can be carried “over the pole” from America to Europe. In 1946, the year before the geodesic dome, he invented the dymaxion map, a map of the whole world on one single flat sheet without visible distortion. He used this as a way to talk about global ideas, and intended for the user to think about the world and its problems in more comprehensive, holistic ways. In 1950, he coined the term “spaceship earth,” and in 1969, he wrote the Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.5 It is in this text that we see many of his big ideas laid out and unfold through a series of metaphors and examples. He urges us to think about our existence and global relationships, and to design and plan our way out of many problems. It is something of a manifesto, something of a warning, but in many ways the Operating Manual is a hopeful and optimistic document about the future of humanity.

Fuller opens this text with how he is fundamentally impressed with the way that humans are innately ingenious when it comes to problem solving. He paints a picture of using a piano top as a life preserver when one is drowning. His criticism, however, is that we have too many “piano top solutions,” and need to think more comprehensively about our problems rather than just employing panaceas. He believes that we must “alter our comprehensive physical circumstances,”6 and that many of our problems have to do with mere shortsightedness. He fundamentally attributes this issue with humanity as a problem of too many specialists and not enough broad thinkers, that we reward the specialist and therefore cannot see the bigger picture. “If the total schemes of nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.”7

CANADA. US Pavilion Expo 67. Buckminster FULLER before his geode dome at Montreal World Fair (Courtesy of Dennis Stock and Magnum Photos)

He explains this phenomenon through an anthropological lens, essentially arguing that we were once landlocked mammals, and that the vast majority of us lived on only 10% of the available land. There were, in addition to this vast majority, a minority of people who he calls “sea masters,” or people who could travel from place to place and subsequently discovered that very little of the world was aware of other peoples in it. Therefore, they could make money by selling products from one place to another, and these “sea masters” became the most rich and powerful people. This was, in his mind, a form of specialization. He goes on to say that “specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position.”8

He also discusses the history of specific inventions and the way that each has fundamentally changed humanity. He discusses Da Vinci and Michelangelo as men who were first military tacticians, specializing in fortifying defenses and weaponry, but that they both emerged as comprehensive designers, scientists, artists, and inventors. Surely Fuller cites these particular men, what we may call “Renaissance Men,” in order to champion the idea of thinking and creating holistically across a wide variety of specialties, and to insert himself into this lineage of inventing for warfare and then creating a much wider variety of contributions to humanity. He argues for an ideological line of human progress, starting with Einstein. Fuller discusses Einstein’s most famous discovery, that E = MC2, as being the first time in which someone recognized that the physical and the metaphysical, or, in this case, matter and energy, respectively, are inextricably tied. Next along this line of knowledge, Fuller discusses Thomas Malthus, who was responsible for recognizing that man is multiplying exponentially, but his resources are not. This will prove to be a very important concept to Fuller. Fuller goes on to say that Darwin told us that survival is only for the fittest, and that Marx told us that “the workers who produce things are the fittest because they are the only ones who know how to physically produce and therefore they ought to be the ones who survive.”9 Fuller argues that these enormous concepts around humanity have always led to class warfare, but this does not need to be and no longer is that case. He says that class warfare is becoming extinct, and that we need to again think about things much more holistically and rid ourselves of the burden of specialty.

After Fuller introduces his concepts and pleas for moving away from specialization, he goes on to introduce what exactly he means by spaceship earth. “Spaceship earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship.”10 He expounds on this extraordinary design by saying that we consume energy through the sun, although that is not really enough for humans to survive. So, we eat plants, who process this energy for us, although that is not really enough either, so we eat animals who eat the plants who get their energy from the sun. We do this all intuitively. The spaceship earth is this well-designed, well-oiled machine, that essentially seems to be operating for all of the plants and animals aboard it perfectly. The spaceship earth, in Fuller’s mind, is a mechanical thing, yet we never got an instruction manual. So instead, we invented science to give our minds a framework to better understand its operation. Fuller conceives of this as not a hindrance to our existence, but the purpose of it, that there was a “designed omission of the instruction manual.”11

As to who should be working towards an understanding of our spaceship earth, Fuller argues that “the architects and planners, particularly the planners, though rated as specialists, have a little wider focus than do the other professions.”12 This call to action for architects, planners, and presumably landscape architects, is at the forefront of Fuller’s mission in writing this text. He believes that designers, by the very nature of their work, can think in comprehensive ways and therefore address many of these problems in holistic fashions.

One issue that he calls upon planners and architects to consider is the problem of wealth and resources. Fuller asks: what is wealth? He says that the way that we calculate and perceive wealth in the world today is meaningless, and likens it to a man going down on a ship because the weight of his gold merely makes him drown faster. According to Fuller, the true meaning of wealth is as follows: “wealth is our organized capacity to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.”13 By this, he essentially means that our ability to coexist as people and species on spaceship earth is to keep the mechanisms doing more with less. He states that our physical wealth, things like natural resources, can only decrease, whereas our metaphysical wealth, things like tools and general knowledge, can only increase.14

It is in this relationship, between the physical and the metaphysical, that Fuller’s ideas around wealth redistribution, environmentalism, and sustainability really come into focus.

“It is utterly clear to me that the highest priority need of world society at the present moment is a realistic economic accounting system which will rectify, for instance, such nonsense as the fact that a top toolmaker in India, the highest paid of all craftsman, gets only as much per month for his work in India as he could earn per day for the same work if he were employed in Detroit, Michigan.”15

Such seemingly simple phenomena so clearly laid out by Fuller are the exact issues that we are still grappling with today. He makes almost no distinction between this discrepancy of individual wealth to the lack and constant depletion of our resources of humanity. He argues for new systems, wherein technology can improve, but people need not fear losing their jobs to this improvement. Rather, people can embrace a world in which we are all thinkers and shapers of humanity instead of mere producers.

In a speech Fuller gave later entitled “World Man,” Fuller says that it is “of course cheaper to rob the piggy bank than to do the work.”16 By this, he means that our current system is yet another “piano-top solution” to merely harvest the energy out of the earth than to go through the trouble of exploring how to harvest it in more sustainable ways, where we need not fear simply running out of resources. He specifically calls out our use of fossil fuels - his hope to harness energy from the sun and the wind. “I see our error of burning up fossil fuel to this point is something that might be converted very, very, readily as we begin to understand it.”17

Fuller does not shy away from optimism. He is not afraid to look directly into our future. And interestingly, he does not distinguish between the problems of a single, theoretical person on the other side of the planet and the fate of

so it no longer remains enclosed, but it still stands as a landmark of the city. (Caribb on Flickr)

humanity altogether. For Fuller, these are one and the same. As we learn more about our spaceship earth, these thoughts continue to resonate with us and inform the way that we live and work. Perhaps if we can specialize less, think more broadly, and not fear the big questions, we can come closer to filling out the operating manual after all.

Figure 1: The Geodesic Dome, designed by Buckminster Fuller for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The dome caught fire in the 1970s,

Notes

1. “About Fuller: R. Buckminster Fuller, 1895 – 1983.” The Buckminster Fuller Institute. 2022.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid

4. Ibid

5. Ibid.

6. Fuller, R. Buckminster, and Jaime Snyder. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Originally published 1969): 3.

7. Ibid

8. Ibid., p. 9.

9. Ibid., p. 11.

10. Ibid., p. 15.

11. Ibid

12. Ibid., p. 18.

13. Ibid., p. 23.

14. Ibid

15. Ibid., p. 35.

16. Allen, Stan. Buckminster Fuller: World Man. Princeton University School of Architecture (from a lecture given in 1966): 37.

17. Ibid., p. 42.

Richard St. Barbe Baker: A Life Devoted to the World’s Trees

Robert Levinthal

There are few figures who have had as great of an impact on the environmental movement (1960 to present) than Richard St. Barbe Baker, yet have received minimal public recognition. As an activist and scholar, St. Barbe spent most of his life advocating for environmental restoration around the world, up until the day before his death in 1982, when he arose from his wheelchair to participate in his last tree planting ceremony at the age of 92. Yet, as part of his ongoing legacy, over a trillion trees will be planted from his ideas and from those that he inspired.1 When discussing many of his contemporaries like John Muir, an aside is often necessary to acknowledge a racist ideology behind their actions.2 However, nothing of this sort tarnishes St. Barbe’s legacy. Instead, he deserves to be recognized as one of the first of European descendant to readily adopt and preach Indigenous and local practices and beliefs to a larger audience.3 This paper will illuminate St. Barbe’s life, discuss his contributions to environmental restoration, and aim to establish him as an exemplary model and influence when combating the forces of the current climate and biodiversity crises. Composed of four parts, I begin with St. Barbe’s early life from his birth in 1889 to his service in the Great War. Following this, I will address his years of work in colonial Africa and abroad from 1920 to 1950. The third part will recognize his latter contributions from 1951 to 1982. The paper concludes with a discussion section on the projects and people St. Barbe touched and how his work and visions are relevant today.

St. Barbe’s Early Years (1889 - 1919)

Born in West End, Hampshire in 1889, Richard St. Barbe Baker’s lifelong interests were a product of his upbringing. His father, a clergyman, would invite all religions to their family’s home to openly discuss their beliefs. He also ran a large tree nursery both as a hobby and profession.4 From this childhood environment, Richard, or St. Barbe, as he was commonly called, developed a passion for spirituality and safeguarding open spaces.5 At the age of four, St. Barbe successfully planted two weeping willows (Salix babylonica) from cuttings that he would watch grow to maturity and frame his parent’s home.6 Like other famous planners and environmentalists of his time, such as Frederick Law Olmsted,7 Benton MacKaye,8 and Patrick Geddes,9 Baker also had an affinity for the outdoors and an experience in which he got lost in a natural space without adult supervision during his youth. At only five, St. Barbe wandered alone for a full day in the woods, though he would later attest that he never felt truly lost. Instead, he found something close to an awakening, an event he often acknowledged as a fundamental moment of his life.10

From England, St. Barbe would go to the Canadian frontier as a homesteader in 1909. He was attracted to the frontier by stories about his uncle who had

lived there and who had once killed a large bear. However, St. Barbe could not prove his homesteading abilities, as the practice of clear-cutting native bushes and trees to settle and farm did not agree with him.11 Additionally, he began to notice, both visually and through the tales of his neighbors, that clearcutting was leading to erosion and substantive land degradation,12 though the link between the two was still not widely understood by Europeans at that time.13 A similar understanding of unsustainable activities also emerged in these same years from noted environmentalist Aldo Leopold, regarding the mismanagement and overhunting of game across the American Frontier.14

After four years of homesteading, St. Barbe attended the University of Saskatchewan as a theology student. During this tenure, he lived on the outskirts of the new college campus by a river, preferring to live out of a

Richard St. Barbe Baker (Photo by Howard Coster, courtesy of © National Portrait Gallery, London)

tent with closer proximity to open spaces; a choice similar to, and perhaps influenced by, transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.15 Raising horses for money, St. Barbe would take long horseback rides through the frontier on his days off to visit and preach at different parishes. On these trips, he became an admirer of the White Cap and Dakota First Nation’s way of life, and through a friend in this community, learned more sustainable indigenous practices and beliefs. As money grew tighter, St. Barbe would become a lumberjack to make ends meet, though this job would also not last very long as he was appalled by the industry’s wasteful practice.16

St. Barbe would move back to England to continue his study in divinity at the University of Cambridge until the Great War broke out.17 He enlisted as part of the Royal Horse and Field Artillery where he could utilize his well-established horseback riding skills developed over his lifetime. World War I was particularly rough for St. Barbe as he was injured three times and nearly died in an explosion.18 It is believed that from his injuries and the things he witnessed during this time, his stance as a devout pacifist was formed. However, St. Barbe would not shy away in the future from using bellicose language to combat environmental destruction, where he believed that restoration efforts should resemble warfare.* Following the war, St. Barbe returned to Cambridge but changed his focus of study. In 1919, he would receive a bachelor’s degree in biology and botany that would serve him well for the rest of his life. To finance these studies, St. Barbe fashioned old war plane parts into trailers to be hitched to automobiles for camping in the countryside. Not allowed to buy just a single plane for the parts needed, he purchased the minimum lot of 36 planes from the Government Disposal Board.19 This act serves as a perfect example of St. Barbe’s propensity to think big and take chances. These trailers are considered by some to be the creation of the first modern-day trailer, which would become a multi-million-dollar worldwide industry over the next several decades.20

Service in Colonial Africa and Professional Work (1920-1952)

Following his graduation from Cambridge, St. Barbe applied for service in British-occupied East Africa. He was stationed in Kenya as an Assistant Conservator of Forests, but this was a position without a budget and was in direct contrast with its title, as its main objective was towards the greater exploitation of the natural resources for export and profit abroad.21 As his early experiences suggest, St. Barbe did not participate in these unsustainable and unjust activities. Instead, he bucked tradition and became friends with the local Kikuyu people, extolling better farming practices to stop the erosion and desiccation of the land from the removal of its trees.22

Recognizing the importance of the Kikuyu custom of a community-wide dance before any planting activity, St. Barbe went to the different village chiefs and explained the need for a dance for tree planting. He believed that this ceremony would help form a greater understanding of the purpose and need of trees in agricultural practices in the area. The chiefs met this idea with

* In the Sahara Challenge (1954), St. Barbe Baker describes the need to fight land degradation like it was a war for survival. It is interesting to note that many books addressing climate change within the last few years are now using similar warlike language. SeeMalm, A. (2021) How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight on a World on Fire. New York, NY: Verso Books.

resistance as they viewed tree planting as God’s work.23 However, St. Barbe was able to demonstrate the importance of trees in stopping erosion and he offered a reward of jewelry for women and a bullock to the strongest warrior in attendance of the tree planting dance to gain their approval. This approach was successful, with over three thousand residents coming from the local community to participate.24 It was during this event that St. Barbe would form the Men of the Trees Foundation, for which men would be responsible for planting ten trees annually and would be obligated to protect trees wherever they stood.25 Through his four years of service in Kenya, St. Barbe would become a trusted member of the Kikuyu community and was the first European inducted into their secret society of chiefs called the Kiama.26

Following his work in Kenya, St. Barbe moved across the continent for a similar position with the British Empire in the Mahogany forests of southern Nigeria.27 His tenure there was short-lived. While an uncanny number of Europeans in government positions in Nigeria died of malaria,28 he was fired from his job after stepping in front of a colonist “disciplining” a local with a club. The strike broke St. Barbe’s clavicle and ultimately lead to his dismissal, however it gave him similar veneration among those whose land was being unjustly pillaged by foreign invaders. Before leaving, St. Barbe found uses for the poorer quality wood species, pursued sustained yields long before it became a popular method, and promoted agroforestry, which he saw being practiced in his travels around East Africa and in Burma.29 Additionally, he established the need to plant and protect the slower growing hardwoods.30

It did not take St. Barbe long to regain his footing in forestry after Nigeria. In 1926, he attended the First World Forestry Congress and met Gifford Pinchot.31 In the following year, St. Barbe made a 17,000-mile survey of the forests in the United States and measured damage from settler activities. Around this time, he found his spiritual calling in the Baha’i faith. Arising in the Middle East in the early to mid-19th century, the Baha’i believe in the unity of God, unity of all religions, unity of humans, and equality among men and women as its main pillars, clearly reflecting St. Barbe’s upbringing and wide cultural appreciation. St. Barbe befriended Shoghi Effendi, the grandson of the religion’s founder who served as the Guardian of Baha’i, a position equivalent to the Pope for Catholics. In 1929, as a result of this friendship, he was invited to work in Palestine. In light of his new religion, he sought to bring together all of the disparate and rivaling faiths to discuss the abundant desertification taking place throughout the region.32 Though these religious leaders would never accept a meeting with other faiths present, St. Barbe tricked them all into coming together in the same building to discuss measures to stop the spread of degradation across the semi-arid landscape.33 This act, though bold, was successful in its approach and ensure the membership and longevity of the Men of the Trees Foundation with enormous enrollment from attendees. Beginning in 1929, the Men of the Trees began publishing a journal and an annual Tree Lover’s Calendar,34 nearly a decade prior to the Sierra Club’s famous calendars, which helped create a growing conservation movement in the United States.35 St. Barbe’s Men of the Trees organization persists in the present day as the rebranded and immensely popular United Kingdom-based International Tree Foundation.

Following his brief stay in Palestine, St. Barbe returned for several years to the United States. During his numerous stays, St. Barbe befriended thengovernor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where the two discussed the

importance of trees and combating erosion with his 1927 survey.36 In Nature’s New Deal (2008), author Neil Maher scoffs at the idea that St. Barbe was responsible for the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, for which he apparently claims credit, The Corps planted three billion trees and employed six million youths during the Great Depression over a nine-year period.37 Whether it is fair to ascribe credit to St. Barbe for the Civilian Conservation Corps or not, there is considerable overlap between his ideas and this New Deal work relief program, and he would have helped provide further evidence for its need if little else. The Roosevelt administration also built the Great Plains Shelterbelt Project, which proposed a line of trees to be planted fifty miles wide from Texas to North Dakota to stop the Dust Bowl and the spread of the desert. This practice would later manifest in St. Barbe’s vision for Africa, though he never claims credit for this approach, and he cites the shelterbelt project as an influence,38 further illuminating his integrity.

In the early to mid-1940s, St. Barbe spent several years in California which resulted in his publication of The Redwoods (1943) and leadership within the Save the Redwoods movement. Noting the magnificence of these trees and their fragile ecosystem, St. Barbe fought diligently for their protection, raising money from all over the world through his foundation. This illustrated book was his eighth book of over thirty that he would write in his lifetime on the importance of trees and sustainability. In 1946, St. Barbe started the First World Forestry Charter Gathering, which sought to bring together people from all over the world to discuss the state of forests, their destruction, and best management practices for their restoration. This turned into an annual meeting that would last for 15 years and was reinstated by the United Nations for several years in the early 1990s. In 1947, St. Barbe published “The New Earth Charter,” which called on all nations to recognize their responsibilities to Nature and acknowledged the importance of Indigenous peoples in this fight to restore the earth.39 A similar “Earth Charter” was created nearly four decades later by Mikhail Gorbachev, winning him the Nobel Prize.*40

St. Barbe’s Latter Years (1951 - 1982)

In 1951, at 62 years of age, St. Barbe and a small team of explorers set out to create a 27,000-mile survey across Africa in a secondhand military vehicle. It was St. Barbe’s obsession to prove that the Sahara, until recently, was forested and that human pressures were the result of its current form. His expedition, which created much fanfare through radio advertising, sought public participation by asking people to bring their peach pits to Trafalgar Square so that they could be planted in Africa. Leaving Europe to much fanfare through this viral marketing scheme, St. Barbe’s first stop was on the foothills of Ahaggar Mountains in Algeria where the Romans used “slash and burn” to create the breadbasket of their empire.41 It was here that French reforestation projects were taking place and where St. Barbe visited an early experiment, which was starting to establish non-native eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus), widely used in monocultures for reforestation despite actually depleting the groundwater levels.42 St. Barbe’s discoveries of mixed forests in Kenya and Nigeria proved to be a more correct form of reforestation and

* Present day literature often recognizes Indigenous land holdings are often credited as holding >90% of biodiversity and recognizes their importance. Gorbachev’s famous “Earth Charter” does not acknowledge this in the same way as St. Barbe’s “New Earth Charter.”

groundwater retention though water loss remains a problem in desert greening activities.

Traveling across the mountains and into the Sahara, St. Barbe met a Tuareg at the Well of Ekker who confirmed his beliefs after acknowledging that “the last great forest” existed here during his lifetime, but had burned and been destroyed by goats and other ungulates.* Throughout the Sahara, St. Barbe found woodchips scattered throughout the sands, discovered petrified tree stumps, and heard other oral stories which would help support his theory. His book Sahara Challenge (1954) also included neolithic carvings of hippopotamuses and hunters found deep within the modern desert. At Lake Chad, St. Barbe recognized the shrinking of the lake (which was only just beginning to shrink in 1960) and connected it to the felling of forests in the watershed in response to colonial pressures on the native populations and new industries. St. Barbe attempted, in his limited time there, to get the French and British forces together to create an expansive conservation area and promote agroforestry to reduce erosion.43

Traveling through the Congo Rainforest, St. Barbe was delighted to find virgin forest and people who lived in happiness despite not having the conveniences of modernity. He spent a portion of his chapter in the Sahara Challenge speculating on the wastefulness of materialism and the human need to connect with Nature. On his way to Kenya, he was also horrified at the induction of desertification through monocultures of cotton and clearcutting which he recognized over 40 years earlier on the Canadian Frontier. Arriving at his old station in Kenya, he was at first delighted that some of his old mixed forests had grown to maturity and was disappointed with a newly established research station that did not include native inhabitants nor believe that trees prevented erosion or desiccation. The following night, an even more troubling problem surfaced when a loud argument awoke him in his sleep and led to a British colonist shooting a native over a land dispute. The next morning, St. Barbe reached out to his fellow chiefs as a member of their secret society, Kiama. Excerpts from the Sahara Challenge capture this heartbreaking meeting that took place there in 1962 and are as follows:

“Why does everyone look so sad?” I asked them.

[a chief]: “The trouble is that we have no place to go and many men are coming into a small place.”

“you are all farmers,” I exclaimed. “You’ve all got your own farms. Is there anyone here who has no farm?” I looked around at them they were all staring at me in bewilderment. Eighty-four of them held up their hands… I was mystified! Here we were in the middle of a farming community where in the days gone by every family man had land, on which he and his people worked to provide sustenance.

[a chief]: “what I am going to tell you I want you to put in your head. This is the reason why people look so dull. They are left to live in a very small place. They are surrounded by Europeans on all sides, and the Europeans have taken all the land that they could be cultivating now… Children are being born, the population is increasing; and they are like grass which when burned down never grows. Young

* Tracing St. Barbe’s path through Google Maps, the Well of Ekker was used for nuclear testing by the French shortly after destroying any evidence and creating a cancer cluster among the nomadic Tuaregs.

men are not as strong as they used to be in the olden days. In the olden days people used to work their land on rotation. There is no room for that now. They are prevented from using this system of cultivation. They look dull, because they are being chased away from squatting up country, and are coming into a small space, for all large areas of land are full of coffee planted by Europeans. They are closely packed together so that is why are thin.”

I had written it down and I also had it in my head! I was fully conscious of their faith in me, of the responsibility and of the expectation with which they went home.

It should be remembered that three thousand white settlers own over ten million acres. This works out that each white landowner has over three thousand acres, whereas there are over six Africans to share one acre. I was astounded that this sort of thing could have been possible. If it had happened like this, here in th[is] district … what may [sic] have happened in other parts?

Ultimately, St. Barbe’s book and the efforts of expedition promoted his idea of a Green Front where land and supplies would be provided for Africans to stop the spread of the desert through the promotion of agroforestry and sustainable land management projects across the Sahel, up the Nile, and along the foothills in North Africa slowly advancing into the Sahara. With this proposal, he also included a figure which showed that all of Australia could fit within the Sahara, and if the global population was going to continue to grow exponentially, reclaiming the desert the size of a continent should be a key goal of humanity.44

St. Barbe’s Green Front proposal was met with little enthusiasm, as it was often criticized as having little scientific backing, a critique that always bothered him as he was a staunch believer in action and taking risks. Following his Saharan expedition, St. Barbe began focusing his efforts on younger audiences as the more rigid adults frustrated him. 45 Along with his second wife, St. Barbe attempted to retire in 1963 at the age of 74. To celebrate the event his wife gifted him a horse, which after a brief respite, he would then use on a 1,200mile expedition across the country holding tree planting events and talks for children. St. Barbe also briefly moved to China at 91 and was inspired to learn Mandarin because of their work on a similarly ambitious desert greening projects that began in the 1930s and continue to the present day. St. Barbe died in Canada a year later in 1982.46

Discussion

In my PhD research, I had come across St. Barbe’s name by chance when reading books on the topic of large-scale tree plantings, often in the form of single sentence mentions. While there is some popularity around him in Great Britain, he remains an unrecognized figure in the United States, which is unacceptable. When reading about St. Barbe, I am almost immediately reminded of the autobiography of Ian McHarg, of landscape architecture fame. St. Barbe’s contributions and stories are so prolific, far-fetched, and wild, that a short essay does not seem to do them justice, nor do they seem realistic even in books. For instance, on two separate occasions, St. Barbe met both heads of state in Ireland and India, and was successful in getting them to double their tree planting efforts and create a lasting interest in their country’s land restoration policies.47 St. Barbe’s influence is reminiscent of

McHarg, the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration, and his relationship with Lady Bird Johnson.48

Though Richard St. Barbe Baker may not be a household name, he is responsible for attempts to plant well over a trillion trees, aided by the many people that he inspired. His Green Front idea became a reality in 2007 when the African Union pursued his vision with the creation of the Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative (GGW). The GGW was originally proposed as a belt of trees 15 kilometers wide, like the proposed Great Plains Shelterbelt Project, across the continent at the edge of the Sahara Desert through thirteen countries. Seven other African nations have also joined in the effort to stop desertification. As of 2021, the GGW is now financed at over 14 billion U.S. dollars with funding from the World Bank, European Union, France, and others.49 The vision has moved past the idea of a continuous belt of trees, to a more scientific approach that re-establishes grasslands and bushes where they are more appropriate. However, Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK), like Zai holes, boomerang berms, waterbunds, and farmer-managed natural regeneration have only recently been recognized for its more successful implementation rates,50 something that St. Barbe figured out a century ago, in Canada living and among rural African people

Not far from where he resided in Kenya in the 1920s, Wangari Maathai became a Nobel Laureate for her tree planting initiative throughout the country, called the Greenbelt Movement. Her daughter later gave partial credit to St. Barbe’s inspiration many years prior. The Trillion Tree Project, which was in part created by Maathai and the United Nations, was also inspired by Felix Finkbeiner who, at nine years old, wrote a book report on St. Barbe Baker that inspired Finkbeiner’s creation of the Plant for the Planet Foundation. Other big names influenced by St. Barbe are Tony Rinaudo, who helped to plant 240 million trees and restored six million hectares through a new method of forest reclamation in West Africa; Vance Martin of Wild Foundation, who helped push the Half Earth movement; Jane Goodall of chimpanzee fame; former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and many others.51

Conclusion

A little over three trillion trees are estimated to be growing on the surface of the earth. Hundreds of millions of trees have been planted as a result of Richard St. Barbe Baker’s influence, with nearly a trillion more in the works forty years after his death. St. Barbe’s tireless advocacy, prolific writing, and grassroots activism cannot be ignored by the public any longer. His ideas are still inspiring and being rediscovered many decades later. Concepts like bioethics, biophilia, ILK, sustained yield, agroforestry, and the Gaia Hypothesis were all discussed in St. Barbe’s writing, only to become keywords attributed to other authors in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

In this era of runaway climate change and the sixth mass extinction event, only through large restoration projects and regional projects can we restore connectivity and sequester enough carbon to make a significant difference. St. Barbe pioneered these techniques, and his work and preaching must be recognized by all during this time of crisis. Perhaps with greater creativity, less timidity created through the rigors of science, more hope, and with love and respect for other cultures, as St. Barbe extolled, we can help reverse the downward trends of our dying planet.

Notes

1. Hanley, P. Man of the Trees: Richard St. Barbe Baker, The First Global Conservationist. Treaty 4 Territory: Traditional Lands of the Cree, Saulteau, and Assiniboine, and the Homelands of the Metis in Canada, University of Regina Press (2018).

2. Associated Press. “Sierra Club Apologizes for Racist Views of ‘Father of National Parks’ John Muir.” The Guardian. 23 July 2020.

3. Fitzwilliams, J.M.  “St. Barbe Baker: Far-sighted Pioneer.” Environmental Conservation. Vol. 14. No. 2 (1987): 164 - 168.

4. Hanley 2018.

5. Gridley, K. Man of the Trees: Selected Writings of Richard S. Barbe Baker. Willits, CA: Ecology in Action (1989).

6. Ibid

7. Rybczynski, W. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century. New York, NY: Scribner (1999).

8. Anderson, L. Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press (2002).

9. Meller, H. Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner. New York: NY. Routledge (1990).

10. Hanley 2018.

11. Gridley 1989.

12. Hanley, P. “Richard St. Barbe Baker - Man of the Trees.” Willmette Institute, YouTube 2 February 2021.

13. Reisner, M. Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water. London, England: Penguin Publishing Group (1986).

14. Leopold, A. Leopold: A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation. New York, NY: The Library of America (1948).

15. Fitzwilliams 1987.

16. Hanley 2018.

17. Ibid

18. Ibid

19. Gridley 1989.

20. Hanley 2021.

21. Hanley 2018.

22. St. Barbe Baker, R. Sahara Challenge. London, Great Britain: The Camelot Press Limited (1954).

23. Gridley 1989.

24. Ibid

25. St. Barbe Baker, R. “Men of the Trees.” Nature. 23 September 1933, p. 477.

26. Hanley 2018.

27. Ibid

28. Gandy, M. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2014).

29. Ibid

30. St. Barbe Baker, R. Sahara Challenge. London, Great Britain: The Camelot Press Limited (1954).

31. Fitzwilliams 1987.

32. “The Global Vision of Richard St. Barbe Baker.” One Country (1994).

33. Hanley 2018.

34. Gridley 1989.

35. Doherty, G. and Waldheim, C.  Is Landscape…? Essays on the Identity of Landscape. New York, NY: Routledge (2015).

36. Fitzwilliams 1987.

37. Maher, N.D. Nature’s New Deal. New York, NY: Oxford University Press (2008).

38. St. Barbe Baker 1954.

39. Hanley 2018.

40. Lock, H. “Two Nobel Laureates Linked by the Man of the Trees.” Bahai Teachings. 2 June 2017.

41. St. Barbe Baker 1954.

42. St. Barbe Baker 1954.

43. Ibid.

44. Hanley 2018.

45. Gridley 1989.

46. Hanley 2021.

47. Gridley 1989.

48. McHarg, Ian L.  A Quest for Life: An Autobiography. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc (1996).

49. “Great Green Wall Receives over $14 Billion to Regreen the Sahel - France, World Bank listed Among Donors.” United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (2021).

50. Steiner, F., et. Al. Design with Nature Now. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2019).

51. Hanley 2021.

Denby Deegan, Surrounded-By-Enemy

Julian Graybill Brubaker

What’s in a Legacy?

What’s in a name? Is nomenclature, as Shakespeare insists, irrelevant and arbitrary because people and items have inherent qualities irrespective of their names? Or might names have an intrinsic purpose beyond mere signification; do they affect how others perceive and interact with the named person or thing? In this paper, I attempt to open up the possibility of a deeper and more enduring nature of a name, as a signifier of cultural heritage, ancestral remembrance, and even personal legacy. What meaning do names carry, and what memories do names evoke? What does it mean to choose a name oneself, to or to be given a name from others? How do humans name each other, or name the places we inhabit and structures we build? If something has many given names, who decides to call it by which name? The architect I investigate in this paper has many given names, and I have chosen to refer to him interchangeably by his Native name and his “American” one: SurroundedBy-Enemy and Mr. Deegan, respectively. This decision is made out of my own naïveté at “how” to name, but is also meant to blur the line between Deegan’s professional involvement in the field of architecture (at that time, mostly upper middle class and white) and his inheritance, upbringing, and adult life spent giving back to his community (Native, mostly poor, and rural).

Names have meaning, but that meaning is largely metaphorical. More to the point of this paper, I want to investigate what’s in a legacy. Who deserves memorialization, and who gets silenced or overlooked? By examining the legacy of Surrounded-By-Enemy, I aim to question and stretch what belongs in the architectural canon. Like all of society, architecture judges an individual’s impact depends on how prolific they are, yes, but just as often it depends on how well they fit the prevailing mold or who among the molders’ club they successfully networked; in other words, history is written by the winners and the winners’ inner circle. Real life is full of unsung poets whose work goes underappreciated or unnoticed. Structural oppressions, including racism, classism, and xenophobia frequently determine which doors are opened. The projects a person chooses to pursue once those doors open determine their notoriety. Rarely is a person rewarded for remaining local or returning to their roots. In this first paper for the course, I hope to honor one of those underappreciated poets.

Denby M. Deegan, a Native American architect from North Dakota, died in 2018, so while his legacy can still be honored, he will not be materially rewarded for his contributions to landscape architecture and design. His given Sioux name, Surrounded-By-Enemy, seems to hint at the hurdles he would have to overcome in order to excel in his field. During his life, he got minimal recognition for his design projects, though he helped build numerous

For people who have been stripped of their heritage, authenticity can be reclamation: connecting with one’s own ancestors and their traditions, their culture, their art. Deegan ... frequently included art or patterned designs with depictions of animal spirits, the natural beauty of the surrounding environment, and other Native motifs that held meaning for the people Deegan constructed the building for. He was cognizant of the materials used in his architecture and tried to use natural resources that held significance for the local community.

Native historical and interpretive centers. His portfolio is diverse, including constructions with varied functions and aesthetics. His career spans forty five years of design projects, mostly in North Dakota and Montana. He pushed many architecture plans towards new (even postmodern) patterns, shapes, and methods of incorporating the surrounding landscape. Aware of the hurdles that he and his Native colleagues in landscape architecture continued to face, he co-founded the American Indian Council of Architects and Engineers (AICAE), which supports, trains, and mentors rising Native architects and engineers. His impact on the field of architecture is permanent, both the physical permanence of his edifices and the cultural and professional permanence of his trailblazing. What’s in a legacy? What’s in a name?

Legacy: Lineages

Born in 1941, Surrounded-By-Enemy lived to be 77 years old. He lived to see what might be the most important part of his legacy, his five children and many grandchildren, grow up. He lived happily married to Kaye Bell for decades before his death, and spent nearly all of his life in North and South Dakota. He raised his children to become filmmakers, civil engineers, and community leaders.1 Deegan not only continued a lineage, he stayed connected to his own lineages throughout his life. Deegan came from a long line of people who designed and constructed architecture that, for their time, was as unique and ingenious as Deegan’s architecture. In order to fully understand the architecture of Surrounded-By-Enemy, it is necessary to investigate his heritage because his familial tribes hold so dearly the past, ancestors, and time-honored traditions.

Deegan’s mother, Dorothy Gillette Deegan grew up as the daughter of the last chief of the Arikara tribe. The tribe dissolved when it had so reduced in numbers that it joined with two other tribes from the same region, the Mandan and Hidatsa, to form the Three Affiliated Tribes located in present-day North Dakota. Deegan’s father, Peter James Deegan was born in Montana to a Sioux tribe, the Hunkpapa, but as an adult he moved to North Dakota, married, and became a farmer. He died when Deegan was 19 years old. Deegan’s mother died when he was 35, and the occupation listed on her death certificate is “housewife.”2 Deegan had a number of siblings of unknown ages.

Both the Arikara and Hunkpapa Sioux tribes roamed the Great Plains before European settlers colonized the New World. Their original land included all of present-day North Dakota as well as western Montana and Wyoming, including all of the upper Missouri River and surrounding areas. They and other tribes had permanent settlements where they cultivated corn, tobacco, and other crops as well as raising livestock, dogs, and horses. But these tribes also shared the region, nomadically trekking the plains as they followed herds of buffalo on hunts or patrolled their amorphous territory. In the late 1700s, smallpox wiped out four fifths of the Arikara tribe, and subsequent raids by other Native tribes and white colonists caused the Arikara to dwindle in size. The name Arikara is thought to mean “horns” or “elk people,” referring to the tradition of weaving bones into tribespeoples’ hair in a way that resembles antlers.3 At this point, reportedly less than ten people in the world speak the Arikara language.4

The Hunkpapa Sioux tribe was a subsection of the larger Sioux people that traversed from the Teton mountains to the delta between the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. The Hunkpapa name means “at the head of the circle,” referring to their place at the large Sioux tribal council meetings. Hunkpapa warriors were famous for utilizing horses to hunt bison, corral livestock, and fight in battles.5 The Hunkpapa tribe was hit much less hard by smallpox and other diseases than the Arikara or other tribes, partly for reasons unknown and partly because of a more organized smallpox inoculation campaign targeting the Hunkpapa people in 1832.6 At one point, Sitting Bull was chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux. Sitting Bull’s cousin and Sioux elder, Circle of Tents Good Woman, gave Surrounded-By-Enemy his name.7

Before European colonization, the Arikara and Hunkpapa Sioux tribes built durable architecture that supported both village and nomadic lifestyles, using natural resources and materials from the surrounding landscape and often even building structures into the landscape itself. When ease of travel and quick con-/destruction was essential, these tribes erected tipis: portable, lightweight, and flexible structures made from buffalo skin stretched taut over a simple conical wooden frame and affixed to the ground. Tipis were essential to tracking herds of bison on hunts that lasted weeks on end, and the Native peoples of the Great Plains made use of the skin of the very creature they hunted in order to construct architecture suited for the hunt.8 For more permanent architecture, most of these tribes molded earthen lodges into hills along waterways, especially along the northern Missouri River. Lodge frames were built out of wood, but layers of small sticks, woven mats of grasses, and earth on top of one another created a rigid, cool, and camouflaged home base.9

The Arikara people first began to join with the neighboring tribes in the 1940s, in resistance to threats to their ancestral homelands. In the early 1940s, The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had proposed a dam across the Missouri River, the Garrison Dam. Local Native Americans pushed back, and eventually the government agreed to salvage archaeological remnants along the banks of the river before constructing the dam. According to Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, authors of Native American Architecture, “Old earthlodge villages up and down the Missouri were plotted and excavated. Yet this gave little satisfaction to the Indians, who watched as the rising waters broke their reservation into five sectors and flooded townsites along the river where they had lived for nearly a thousand years.”10 Physical remnants of tipis are harder to come by, but archaeological evidence and old photographs indicate that Native tribes often painted and bedazzled their tipis with tribally specific symbols or other items. Interestingly, Deegan grew up near the town of Garrison, ND, where this site of resistance occurred.

At first, Native peoples built their own architecture, modifying the landscape to meet their needs while relying on its resources and balance. Before colonization, private property was not a concept among Native tribes, but each member had a role in the community. Chosen tribal leaders also had the unique power to trade goods or land with other tribes.11 As tribes did just that with European settlers, those settlers simultaneously encroached further into the Great Plains and breached treaty after treaty. During a deadly and racist history that does not bear repeating here, Native Americans of all tribal affiliations were massacred, stripped of their heritage, and forced onto reservations of land; disconnected from the land they once knew.

After the colonial genocide of Native peoples and continued repression under U.S. governments, most Native architecture on reservations, in museums, or elsewhere, began to be built for Indigenous tribes rather than by them. Such projects had little government funding, and designers paid little to no attention to Native cultural traditions, especially tribally specific traditions. Only in the last fifty years has architecture on reservations and in Native communities been built by Native Americans, even built by people with intimate knowledge of the specific tribe the structure is for. This shift is due to a broader societal recognition of the value of Native cultural preservation, and to a few important federal policies that gave Native reservations more autonomy. The first law was the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, passed in 1975, which allowed (federally recognized) tribes to have much more control over how federal funds would be spent. Not nearly all tribes in the U.S. qualified, and many fought for years to be federally recognized, but this policy did empower many tribes to take charge of their own self-determination. The second law was the Indian Gaming Regulation Act of 1988, which allowed federally recognized tribes to disregard prohibitions on gambling in the states that reservations were in, thereby letting Native communities have access to their gambling profits, most of which they spent on cultural enrichment.12 Surrounded-By-Enemy came of age during a restrictive and punitive era of U.S. policy towards Native Americans, but he began to practice architectural design in an era of expanding Native self-determinism. Albeit forced to work within the confines of a wider racist society that continues to uphold a system built on a legacy of cultural and literal genocide, Deegan and architects like him push the discipline of design to brighter horizons.

Legacy: Educations

Deegan attended primary school at the Fort Berthold Reservation inhabited by the Three Affiliated Tribes. As an adolescent he briefly moved to South Dakota to attend the Marty Mission Indian School, a boarding middle and high school run by Benedictine nuns. He did not finish high school there, instead returning to his home reservation to graduate. Interestingly, his boarding school was added to the National Register of Historic Places a decade ago, with one journalist arguing “The school’s buildings embody important historical trends about 1930s school architecture, early twentieth century Sioux artwork, the development of the mission and community around Marty, as well as the history of Catholic missions to American Indian tribes in South Dakota.” For example, 23 large murals depicting Native artwork lined the walls of the school’s gymnasium.13 These design choices at his boarding school may have played a small role in Deegan’s burgeoning interest in design and engineering as he got older. After high school, he earned an associate’s degree in engineering. It took the encouragement of his sister to convince him to enroll in a four-year architecture program at North Dakota State University in Fargo. He graduated from the program in 1965 as the first Native American student to major in architecture at NDSU, and he also obtained a Bachelor of Architecture degree from NDSU.14 In 2021, Deegan’s family donated a number of his architectural drawings to NDSU, and in 2022, the university hosted an exhibit on his designs.15

In his architectural studies, Surrounded-By-Enemy would have been taught about new and emerging design trends, including modernism and postmodernism. He likely learned that modernist architecture is simple and focused on function rather than ornate aesthetic beauty, while postmodernist architecture is complex, original, even whimsical, and yet still highly functional. For modernists, form follows function, whereas for postmodernists, the form indicates the function (or opens up the possibility for a multitude of functions). Postmodernist architecture is more focused than modernist architecture on preserving culture and history while adding something new, connecting past and present.16 Postmodernist designs often include sharper angles, more intricate patterns, and more unconventional materials than previous architectural styles, all of which Deegan took to heart.17 As the paper will highlight later, Deegan incorporated postmodern ideas into his architectural design but gave them a unique and Native flair, fusing his cultural heritage with his academic education.

He went on to educate others, too. In 1975, along with other Native designers, Surrounded-By-Enemy created the American Indian Council of Architects and Engineers (AICAE), a non-profit first incorporated in Albuquerque, NM and currently based in Anchorage, AK. Their stated mission is to advance and promote American Indian designers’ work within their fields, hone their professional skills, and encourage more Native people to join these fields. The AICAE also explicitly aims to increase Native representation in all of these fields nationally, since few American Indian architects receive national acclaim or are even asked to construct large-scale projects with a national audience.18

The AICAE produces a yearly newsletter, hosts 2-3 meetings and conferences a year, and boasts at least 50 members in any given year. They have expanded their base to cover numerous industries including interior design, facility management, land surveyance, construction and equipment management, and computer-aided design & drafting. Deegan helped found the AICAE, but

his involvement did not stop there. He also sought out new Native architects, educated and mentored them, worked alongside them when designing major projects, and joined their voices to amplify advocacy for specific design choices when Native designers received pushback from budget or executive boards. Without this unity and steadfastness, many of the most ambitious and avante garde design projects that Deegan and others constructed would not have become realized.

Legacy: Edifices

Over his 45-year career, Surrounded-By-Enemy designed at least eighteen structures, as well as expansive grounds, ceremonial arenas, or other landscape architectural projects. The most widely visited structure he designed is probably the Minneapolis American Indian Center in Minnesota, which was built in 1972. Deegan designed this building with a few other Native architects, in an attempt to capture the cultural heritages of numerous Great Plains tribes living in and around Minnesota. The Center was designed to encourage its inhabitants to learn from and engage in Native cultural practices through its architecture. For example, the main hall of the center is open, with seating in small circles, structured in a way that accommodates Native social practices of small group dialogues and event viewing. The center has large windows to open the building up to the surrounding natural environment and the entranceway is lined with circular stepped seating, akin to many Native ceremonial circles like that of the Sioux tribes during important meetings.19

Deegan excelled at designing Native cultural centers, and he took care to authentically represent the culture and traditions of the tribe he was building for. His buildings are practical and meant to be engaged with, but Deegan was also drawn to the intrinsic aesthetic pleasure of creative angles (or lack of angles), ceremonial spaces, and Native symbols. He designed the Assiniboine Community Center in Brockton, MT in the late 1970s. He used the motif of the four seasons and the sacred animals that wandered within them, in the main room of the community center. In another building for the Assiniboine tribe, Deegan designed a Cultural and Tourism Center for the tribe in Poplar, MT where he interwove a mosaic of brightly colored inch-long tiles into traditional pattern designs.20 He also designed the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site’s visitors center outside of Stanton, ND in 1992. The design is based off of an earthen lodge, with four main supports and a domed roof with an opening skylight in the center, mimicking the smoke hole of true earthen lodges. Deegan chose wood to line the main room, contributing to the earthen lodge effect by mimicking a wooden frame. But he combines this ancient design with modern innovations, including wide glass windows to view the surrounding landscape dotted with burial mounds, and an open layout for the main room where surrounding conference rooms, administrative offices, and a miniature movie theater for viewing park documentaries are all partitioned from.21

Many of Deegan’s buildings were constructed for his home community, the Arikara people who raised him. He built a school, a dance hall, a cultural interpretation center, a casino & lodge, office buildings, and monuments for Three Affiliated Tribes reservations in White Shield, Four Bears, and on his childhood reservation in Fort Berthold. One unassuming and yet ingeniously creative and sustainable architecture project that he built on the Fort Berthold reservation was a housing complex for senior tribe members. Designed in

1980, this project included raising the ground around the houses to insulate the bottom floors, and constructing covered breezeways dotted with benches that link the houses together and provide shade. As scholar of American Indian history, Carol Herselle Krinsky describes, “Log siding covers the houses and breezeways, using locally available material related to past building tradition. Community space opens at the center of every group of four units. Ten-footsquare cultural emblems introduce the houses from the road, abstracting a Mandan earth lodge, the eagle’s eye and talon for the Hidatsa, and the buffalo and horse for the Arikara. As the plans were not uniquely suited to older people, the units could be allocated to small families when relatives invited their elders to live with them, as is usual in Native American communities.”22

With fellow architects Charles Archambault & Neil McCaleb, Surrounded-ByEnemy helped build Four Winds School in 1983 on the Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota where Sioux tribespeople live. It is shaped like a circular ceremonial lodge, 350 feet in diameter.23 It is meant to reflect the Sioux medicine wheel. Entrances face the four cardinal directions, and the central space has a skylight in order to maximize natural light and orient the structure around the rising and setting of the sun. In the center of the room, there is a two-story tipi where children often gather for groups or individual behavioral counseling with school staff. The tipi “introduces the pupils to meaningful ideas even before they enter the building,” as Krinsky argues.24 The structure’s form informs its function, its experience, its aura, in a very postmodern way. The massive circular design is also postmodern, especially because SurroundedBy-Enemy ensured the circular design had a functional point. The school was divided into pie slices, emanating out from a central atrium featuring the two-story tipi. As architecture historian Leland Roth argues, “The Four Winds School is a good illustration of the work of collaborating Native American architects, who together pushed for the circular form against the wishes of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) review committee; the BIA relented when the Spirit Lake participants threatened to approve no school at all.”25 Alone, a single Native architect’s voice may not be loud enough to convince budgetary or planning decision-makers, but in unison, a few influential voices can amplify new design choices.

Importantly, not all Native voices are the same. Deegan and his colleagues disagreed often when planning projects. Broadly, some Native architects and engineers aim to replicate Indigenous building practices with modern and efficient techniques & materials, while others prefer to use only the time-honored methods of early Indigenous practices, and others still have combined old and new methods of building, such as a ceremonial longhouse doused in flame retardant, or even turned away from their roots in favor of other architectural creative sparks; each approach to being a Native architect can be authentic, since each person should be judged on the value of their uniqueness.26 Specifically, Surrounded-By-Enemy was universally regarded as knowledgeable about his own Native heritage and patient enough to learn the histories of other tribes before working with them.27 I find it more and more difficult these days to determine true authenticity, but I believe SurroundedBy-Enemy exemplifies that type of accurate, honest, and soul-searching authenticity.

Authenticity seems as necessary of a value as ingenuity in a designer’s architectural legacy. What does it mean to be authentic? Authentic to whom, to what, to when? For people who have been stripped of their heritage,

authenticity can be reclamation: connecting with one’s own ancestors and their traditions, their culture, their art. Deegan did just that in his architecture. He frequently included art or patterned designs with depictions of animal spirits, the natural beauty of the surrounding environment, and other Native motifs that held meaning for the people Deegan constructed the building for. He was cognizant of the materials used in his architecture and tried to use natural resources that held significance for the local community; which is an example of both authenticity and sustainability, as Deegan tried to utilize resources that were near to the construction site and less highly processed. Deegan’s entryways often face due North/East/South/West, again a reference to early Native structures which saw great symbolism in the four cardinal directions.

Deegan may be most notable for his vast circular structures, both a postmodern architecture choice and an attempt to connect to Native symbology surrounding circles: as one Sioux elder puts it, “You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days, when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished.” He goes on to describe how all the stars and planets are circles, the seasons “form a great circle in their changing,” birds make their nests in circles, even the wind “in its greatest power, whirls.”28 Circles represent natural features but also more amorphous human values: the circles of life and time, sure, but also egalitarianism, fertility, homeostasis, balance. The Sioux elder also notes that tribal tipi formations were in large circles, in addition to each individual tipi’s conical shape with a circular interior. Conjoining these motifs, Surrounded-By-Enemy creates circular structures that evoke a tipi, or an earthen lodge, or even a tipi within a massive circular lodge as in his famous Four Winds School design. In these ways, Surrounded-By-Enemy adds a creative new flair to postmodern design by looking to the past.

Legacy: Opening Up the Circle

But instead of embracing the symbol of the circle as a message of unity or welcoming the newcomer, myself and other academics are quick to put the legacy of Native architects into boxes, assuming their only artistic contribution can be explicitly Native. I am guilty of what I see as a dangerous trend that overlooks creativity and depersonalizes each Native scholar, treating them as a member of a monolith rather than a uniquely creative individual. SurroundedBy-Enemy can teach us much about new architectural styles only if we allow ourselves to open up to his creations. He can instill values that are both Native and personal to his life, but in the end it may not be a useful strategy to try to identify exactly where each of his design decisions was informed by his Native heritage or not. Deegan embraced edifice designs that built the structure into the landscape, rooting his creations in the natural world as much as rooting them in local cultural traditions. He often made use of nearby natural resources during construction. He preserved ceremonial gathering spaces, usually circular and egalitarian in nature. Deegan was also intentional about making spaces that were accessible to people from varied backgrounds. He infused his spaces with multiple angles to engage, often using new design angles and other postmodern techniques to stimulate visitors’ involvement with his buildings. I found little research on the environmental sustainability of his designs, but Deegan may also be teaching me to open up my own

definition of sustainability: is it sustainable to build enduring structures for one’s community, especially schools and elder housing and dance arenas and cultural centers? Is it sustainable to preserve culture, just like it is sustainable to preserve nature? Is it sustainable to create the conditions for visitors’ engagement with the natural world in a way that allows them to see a deeper value in their landscape and surroundings?

In the final calculus of the legacy of an architect, Surrounded-By-Enemy made it clear where he stood. He valued giving back to his community by focusing his skills locally, creating beauty and complexity out of simplicity and budget constraints, and incorporating structures with the landscape and culture of the people surrounding it. His legacy is long, whether or not architectural elite include him in their canon. He co-founded AICAE, a now-flourishing nonprofit that helps up and coming Native architects find a foothold in a harsh environment. He revitalized his home reservation and traveled to nearby reservations to do the same, by creating lasting and highly functional mementos to the beauty of Native artwork and designs. North Dakota is better for his work, but so is the entire field of architecture. His name, SurroundedBy-Enemy, as well as his most common motifs of circles, tipis, and earthen lodges all hint at his perspective: even when the outside world is unwelcoming, it is vital to create spaces where all are welcome and all are equal. Ultimately, who am I to say what’s in a legacy? But I sure hope that whatever the answer, Deegan’s brilliance is included in that legacy.

Notes

1. Ogden, Eloise, and Dorreen Yellow Bird. “Denby Deegan: One of 1st Native American architects in US & ND.” Minot Daily News, 12 Jan 2019.

2. In order to find some of this info, I searched Ancestry.com for birth, death certificates and social security / Census data. Citing this data proved difficult, but they’re all on the website under the names listed.

3. See pp. 21-29 of Waldman, Carl. Encyclopedia of Native American tribes. Infobase Publishing. Sep 2006.

4. “Fluent Arikara speaker dies – KTIV NewsChannel 4 Sioux City IA: News, Weather and Sports”. Ktiv.com, 2019.

5. See pp. 141 of Culbertson, Thaddeus A. Journal of an Expedition to the Mauvaises Terres and the Upper Missouri in 1850. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952.

6. See pp. 257-264 of Trimble, Michael K.: “The 1832 Inoculation Program on the Missouri River”. In Verano, John W. and D.H. Ubelaker (eds): Disease and Demography in the Americas. 1992.

7. Ogden, Eloise, and Dorreen Yellow Bird. “Denby Deegan: One of 1st Native American architects in US & ND.” Minot Daily News, 12 Jan 2019.

8. The word “tipi” means a “dwelling place” in the Sioux language. Some tipis were heavier and less portable, while others remained as lightweight and easy to disassemble as possible. See pp. 25-28 of Roth, Leland M and Amanda C. Roth Clark. American Architecture: A History, second edition, Routledge, 2016.

9. Though tipis and earthen lodges were the most common structures in the Great Plains, the Arikara or Hunkpapa Sioux tribes may also have learned from other tribes and built longhouses, wigwams, mud huts (or “hogans”), or Yokuts houses (groupings of large and sedentary tipis covered by a sunroof called a “ramada.” See pp. 19-21 of Roth, Leland M and Amanda C. Roth Clark. American Architecture: A History, second edition, Routledge, 2016.

10. See p. 143 of Nabokov, Peter, and Robert Easton. Native American Architecture, Oxford University Press, Oct 25, 1990.

11. See pp. 25, 23-29 of Roth, Leland M. American Architecture: A History, Routledge, 2018.

12. See pp. 26-27 of Roth, Leland M and Amanda C. Roth Clark. American Architecture: A History, second edition, Routledge, 2016.

13. Red Lake Nation News, “State Historical Society lists Marty Indian School Buildings on National Register.” 3 Feb 2012.

14. Ogden & Yellow Bird 2019.

15. “The Architecture of Denby M. Deegan, Surrounded by Enemy.” North Dakota State University, 12 Oct 2021.

16. Special thanks to our classmate in Environmental Readings, Yasmine McBride, for putting me onto this line of thinking.

17. See the article “Postmodernism” on the Royal Institute of British Architects website, 2022.

18. See the AICAE’s website.

19. Herselle Krinsky, Carole. “Contemporary Native American Architecture.” The Center for Public Art History, 7 June 2016.

20. See pp. 54, 56 of Herselle Krinsky, Carol. Contemporary Native American Architecture: Cultural Regeneration & Creativity. Oxford University Press, 1996.

21. Ibid, p. 99.

22. Ibid, p. 197.

23. Herselle Krinsky 2016.

24. See pp. 118-199 of Herselle Krinsky 1996.

25. Roth & Roth Clark 2016.

26. Herselle Krinsky 2016.

27. Ogden & Yellow Bird 2019.

28. See “The First Cure,” Chapter 17 of Black Elk Speaks, Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told through John G. Neihardt (Flaming Arrow).

Howard T. Odum

Itay Porat

Introduction

Howard T. Odum (hence H.T.) was an American systems ecologist who was active primarily throughout the second half of the twentieth century. With a prolific academic career that spanned over five decades, H.T. managed to branch out across conventional scientific disciplinary boundaries and study systems with unparalleled rigor and passion. H.T. came from a successful academic family that nurtured his holistic interests. By studying environmental systems at various scales, he sought to deduce principles that would link the behavior of both living and non-living phenomena. The common theme of H.T.’s work was energetics – the study of energy transfer within ecosystems. He developed several influential concepts derived from his theories of energy transfer that advanced ecosystem modeling and simulation, ecosystem service valuation, and he helped create the fields of ecological economics and ecological engineering. An emphatic proponent of sustainability, H.T. pushed for new ways of valuing our resources and our interactions with nature.

Early life

H.T. was born in Durham, North Carolina in 1924 to Anna Louise Kranz Odum (1888 – 1965) and Howard W. Odum (1884 – 1954), a sociologist notable for his research and writing on race, class and poverty issues in the southern U.S and for his advocacy of southern regionalism. H.W. was born on a small farm near Bethlehem, Georgia, but overcame conditions of poverty and went on to earn multiple academic degrees, including separate doctorates in psychology and sociology. He directed the School of Public Welfare and Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, was president of the American Sociological Society, and held numerous prominent public positions throughout the early twentieth century.1 H.T. has credited his father’s holistic inquiry of social issues and large-scale world view as important to his development as a systems thinker. H.T.’s mother was highly educated for women of that period and was a member of the American Association of University Women. As a feminist, she faced frustrations associated with lack of opportunities and the mundanities of housekeeping.2

H.T.’s older brother, Eugene P. Odum (Gene), was another influential figure in his life. Eleven years his senior, Gene encouraged H.T. to adopt interests in natural sciences, particularly his own passion for zoology and ornithology. While Gene was attending graduate school, H.T. would receive letters about his brother’s studies with detailed tasks for banding birds and journaling observations. The two brothers maintained a fertile academic partnership that spanned their entire lives, one marked by a healthy dose of rivalry and

Odum and Ann Odum, A Prosperous Way Down

drama. While H.T. was prolific in generating novel and contentious ideas, Gene was often better at promoting them. It was later said that when Gene is ready to adopt one of H.T.’s ideas publicly, it must be alright.3

H.T. described growing up as a ‘faculty kid’ in Chapel Hill during the Great Depression. Out of the three social groups in the town, which also included the country people and millworkers who were poor, the faculty kids generally had their needs met. He remembers being stimulated by playing chess and reading in the libraries.4 His earliest memories related to nature trace back to the time when his father was a visiting professor at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. He recalls seeing swamps with turtles, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and the now extinct Carolina parakeet as a five-year-old. This period was influential for the young naturalist, likely playing a role in his affinity for wet coastal landscapes. H.T. would later join the University of Florida faculty, where he spent the rest of his career.5

Academic beginnings and military service

Driven by a passion for wildlife and nature cultivated by his older brother, H.T. began his undergraduate studies in zoology at UNC Chapel Hill. During that time, he lived at home, but joined a fraternity to feel more like part of the school. He found that experience useful in learning how to navigate social situations. As H.T. abstained from drinking alcohol, he was stigmatized by fellow students,

“That the way down can be prosperous is the exciting viewpoint whose time has come. Descent is a new frontier to approach with zeal. The goal is to keep the economy adapted to its global biophysical basis. We have to abandon some of our useless diversions. If everyone understands the necessity of the whole society adapting to less, then society can pull together with a common mission to select what is essential.”

-Howard T.

whom he regarded as having sophomoric attitudes towards women and race. His studies were interrupted by World War II, and with a strong foundation in physical sciences, he decided to apply for the Air Force’s meteorology program.6

H.T. began his basic military training in Miami Beach, Florida, engineering training back in Chapel Hill, and officer training in Urbana, Illinois. As a Second Lieutenant, he spent time forecasting weather in a North Carolina base. Due to his high marks, he was selected for tropical weather school in Puerto Rico and later to teach tropical meteorology in the Panama Canal Zone. During this period, he helped develop models for forecasting hurricanes and spent time with the hurricane patrol in West Palm Beach, Florida, flying into hurricanes in B-25 planes to take wind velocity measurements. He notes this experience as being foundational to his learning about earth processes, but more importantly about large-scale systems.7 Following his service, H.T. returned to UNC to complete his bachelor’s degree where he published two papers about bird migration and navigation.8

At that time, his father was a visiting professor at Yale University and encouraged H.T. to transfer to Yale to pursue doctoral studies under George Evelyn Hutchinson, a prominent ecologist and limnologist. It was there that H.T. began developing his ideas of complex systems. While studying biochemistry, he observed that life is but a subset of complex systems, and that by studying the environment at macroscopic scales he could deduce the principles that should apply universally across systems.9 This theme was evident throughout his life’s work. H.T. completed his doctoral dissertation research on the global strontium cycle in 1950. It is speculated that he chose this topic either because of his mentor’s suggestion, strontium’s relevance in tracing palaeoecological sedimentation processes, or the element’s newfound public significance as a byproduct of nuclear fission.10 Following his dissertation, H.T. aided his brother Gene in writing the Fundamental of Ecology textbook, which was published in 1953 and became a staple of ecological education. H.T. brought new knowledge from Yale and wrote two chapters on energy and population. Forgetting his original promise, Gene left H.T.’s name out of the publication. Following a short feud, where H.T. threatened to take legal action, Gene added his name to the book’s second edition.11

H.T. joined the Department of Biology at the University of Florida, Gainesville in 1950 as his first academic position. During this time, he was encouraged by senior faculty to conduct an experimental study of the Silver Springs ecosystem. The perennial stability in temperature, flow and chemistry of the Spring made it an excellent subject for studying the metabolism of the ecosystem. H.T. used field measurements of dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide at different locations upstream and downstream to compare the productivity of aquatic plants and other trophic players in the system. This allowed him to account for and diagram the system’s energy flows with the direction of gross production and respiration (Fig. 1). His 1957 monograph, Trophic Structure and Productivity of Silver Springs, Florida, became a milestone in the experimental and theoretical studies of ecosystem energy and material flows.12 This perspective – the consideration of system function, evolution and health through the lens of energy – remained the guiding principle of his work throughout his life.

Maximum power

While working together at Yale, Hutchinson introduced H.T. to the work of Alfred J. Lotka, a pioneering biophysicist, who developed energetic theories of evolution. Lotka argued that living systems that can harness the most energy from the environment and use it efficiently are the ones that perpetuate.13 Essentially, it is a formulation of the evolutionary principle of natural selection in terms of power. For example, an organism that is able to secure the most nutritional resources (energy) from its environment, process them efficiently and use the energy in a way that allows it to continue and successfully secure even more resources, will survive more often than organism who fails to secure resources. This idea, later dubbed the maximum power principle, was proposed as a physical law – a fourth law of thermodynamics. H.T. worked with his colleague Richard Pinkerton, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Florida, to develop this principle for all self-organizing systems.

The two argued that a variety of physical, biological, and even social systems operate at an efficiency that produces the maximum power. Their idea was, thus, a reformulation of Lotka’s principle, stating that the emerging system design that is able to maximize the flow of useful energy prevails.14 Figure 2 shows this relationship – a trade-off between a system’s rate of work (energy transfer) and efficiency on the x-axes and the resulting power output on the y-axis. According to the maximum power principle, this occurs at an efficiency of about 50%.15 This description of system behavior provides an almost teleological mechanism for the system’s perpetuation based on purely physical conditions. While these ideas were later contested in the scientific literature,16 they remained foundational to H.T.’s approach to ecological energetics, which took form in his early Silver Springs study and, more prominently, in his further contributions to the fields of general systems ecology and ecological economics.

Figure 1: Energy flow in a “generic ecosystem” (1956) (Limburg, Karin E. “The Biogeochemistry of Strontium: a review of H.T. Odum’s contributions.” Ecological Modelling, Vol. 178 (2004): 31–33.)

Figure 2: Power-efficiency trade-off in energetic systems (Matthew Limbach, based on Hammond, Geoffrey P. “Energy and sustainability in a complex world: Reflections on the ideas of Howard T. Odum.” International Journal of Energy Resilience, Vol. 31 (2007): 1105–1130.)

Ecosystem energetics

As one seeking to understand the fundamental rules that govern general systems, H.T. was captivated by diagrams. Having studied electronic circuits in his youth, he began developing a new language for modeling systems that was based on analog circuit diagrams. This symbol language, later termed Energy Circuit Language, Energy Systems Language, or “Energese”, became a powerful tool for exploring the relationships between the various components of a system.17 Using intuitive, rigorously defined symbols to represent the interrelated parts of a system, H.T. believed that through the act of diagramming, the relationships and processes – and so the mathematical equations governing the system – would be revealed.18 This would produce models of complex systems that would allow for further refinement through continuous cycles of theory, simulation, observation and diagramming.19

H.T.’s thousands of diagrams covered diverse topics that ranged from chemical reactions all the way to cosmic cycles. Early diagrams focused on energy transfer in ecosystems, with the width of lines illustrating the magnitude of energy that is transferred between rectangular compartments of varying sizes (Figure 1). As the language evolved, a vocabulary of symbols materialized, which were meant to convey specific functions. By establishing these symbols across diagrams, and by seeing the ways in which they interconnected, commonalities in system architecture became apparent. H.T.’s drawings would often assume unique forms that provided their interpreter with analogy or symbolism relevant to the subject matter. Later diagrams would expand in scope to include not just energy, but also flows of matter and information –the three fundamental ingredients of our universe. As computer simulation became available, H.T. began utilizing graphic textures to further endow the symbols with meaning.

Figure 3: Energy Network Symbols (1967) (Brown, Mark T. “A picture is worth a thousand words: energy systems language and simulation.” Ecological Modelling Vol. 178 (2004): 83–100.)

Figure 4: The economy of a country shown as a circular wheel driven by its energy sources (Brown, Mark T. “A picture is worth a thousand words: energy systems language and simulation.” Ecological Modelling Vol. 178 (2004): 83–100.)

systems language and simulation.” Ecological Modelling Vol. 178 (2004): 83–100.)

Figure 5: Energy circuit diagram illustrating the tribal cattle system in Uganda (Brown, Mark T. “A picture is worth a thousand words: energy systems language and simulation.” Ecological Modelling Vol. 178 (2004): 83–100.)

Figure 6: Diagram of universal matter and engergy flows (Brown, Mark T. “A picture is worth a thousand words: energy systems language and simulation.” Ecological Modelling Vol. 178 (2004): 83–100.)

Figure 7: Humanity’s role as good stewards of the environment - the system learning itself (Brown, Mark T. “A picture is worth a thousand words: energy

At times, H.T. would venture further than the meticulously analytical representations of system behavior into the realm of more open-ended conjecture. Figure 7 provides such an example. Using a sketch alongside a diagram, H.T. shows humanity’s relationship to our landscape. With an illustration almost reminiscent of the Geddesian valley section, he portrays the feedback loops of humanity as supported by the landscape, stewards of the landscape, and cognizant agents capable of comprehending those relationships – the universe learning itself.

While H.T.’s diagrams provide immense insights into the mechanistic underpinnings of many different types of systems, it is necessary to question whether they provide a truly holistic view. Although adequate in describing physical systems, with relationships shaped by quantifiable fluxes of matter and energy, how do these methods account for causal or teleological issues that have long plagued the biological sciences, and certainly play a role in social interactions? What important information is lost when simplifying complex interactions that may involve consumer behavior, politics, or historical events? Further complications arise when applying ideas from opensystem thermodynamics to such broad contexts. How do information flows associated with a world economy and new forms of social media enter the picture? How does global climate change impact localized system dynamics? In a time when we desperately push for the integration of scientific knowledge into decision-making processes, it becomes critical to assess whether the reductive nature of top-down modeling and simulation is sufficient in informing our path forward.

Emergy – beyond embodied energy

When considering a piece of wood, it is plausible to attach an economic value to it that would correlate to the amount of energy one could get from burning it for heat. However conventional that may seem, this value does not account for all the effort that went into making that piece of wood available to a consumer. In its history, light energy from the sun reached Earth and was used in the photosynthesis of the tree. Nutrients from the environment, broken down by centuries of weathering and biological processes, also went into the tree. Someone had to use mechanical and electrical energy to chop down the tree, haul it, process it and bring the wood to the consumer. To summarize, one cannot equate the energy which the piece of wood provides when combusted to the sum of all energy that went into its creation and transformation.

While it may seem like an obvious matter, this thinking is not evident in our current valuation of resources. Developments in energy analysis during the 1970’s, spurred by prior advancement in ecological energetics as well as the decade’s energy crises, brought forth the notion of embodied energy. Based in economic input-output analysis methods, embodied energy accounts for the solar energy and primary factors of production (land, labor and capital), which were considered independent and traditionally ignored in economic analysis.20 Robert Costanza, a student of H.T., became a proponent of this type of evaluation. He argued that embodied energy could be a common denominator for ecological and economic systems and went on to establish the Journal of Ecological Economics, placing H.T. and other colleagues on its board. Constanza’s consortium with economists became a contentious issue, however, leading to a rift between student and teacher.21

Figure 8: Energy is required at every step in the conversion from solar radiation, to plants, fuels, electricity, computation, and information (Sources in Notes section)

H.T. argued that we must go further and also distinguish between different qualities of energy vectors. Basing his ideas on the maximum power principle, he believed that a more complete embodied energy concept must account for how energy is transformed and aggregated through feedback mechanisms.22

H.T. explains, “It takes a lot of phytoplankton to make a little zooplankton to make a few fishes to make one giant fish. So a joule or a calorie of one level is not equivalent to that of another… It takes a million calories at a lower level to make one at higher level.”23 This concept was developed throughout the 1980’s and given the name emergy by David Scienceman (formerly David Slade) to distinguish from the former embodied energy. Essentially an extension of H.T.’s universal energy language, this idea could be applied broadly to many types

of systems at various scales. This was further advanced during the 1990s to include the notion of transformity – a way to convert between energies of differing qualities.

Ecosystem services and ecological economics

H.T. was contemplating the marriage of ecology and economics prior to fully developing the emergy concept. In a 1973 paper titled “Energy, Ecology, and Economics”, he sets out to explain the role of energy in our economy and the impact on the environment. He points out that much of the work which our society depends on comes from natural sources that do not require additional energetic input or money. H.T. claims that in order to thrive, we must maximize the use of such resources. An example of urban growth is provided, in which he states that after a natural area is developed (paved) beyond ~50%, its ability to absorb stormwater runoff diminishes to the point where new infrastructure must be built at additional costs. Thus, environmental technology that duplicates the work provided by nature is an economic handicap.24 These observations are still being emphasized today in efforts to conserve natural areas and reintroduce natural, or green, infrastructure to cities.

Another economic principle H.T. took issue with is the idea of market price. He contended that market value, the price people are willing to pay for a good, is actually inverse to ecological contribution. In a joint paper with his brother, he points out that when an ecosystem is thriving and resources are abundant, the market value of resources is low, yet when an ecosystem is degraded and its resources scarce, the market value is high. “Economic valuation, as currently practiced, can never be used appropriately to evaluate environmental capital, its contributions, or its impacts.”25 H.T. did not seek to replace market value, however, as some economists apprehensively thought, and believed it to be useful for individuals and businesses.

Seeing this disconnect, H.T. sought to apply his concept of emergy to measure the ‘real wealth’ of an ecosystem and so bring the environment and economics together. Emergy seeks to express all values in one common denominator of solar energy (solar emjoules). The concept can be extrapolated to emdollars, a currency equivalent of emergy intended to help people understand the magnitude of total energetic contribution in comparison to conventional currency. The conversion rate is, according to H.T., 1.16 trillion emjoules per 1997 US dollar.26 While this valuation approach has been expanded upon and used in numerous studies internationally, as well as a few court cases,27 it has not caught on in economic circles to the degree its advocates would like.

A Prosperous Way Down

Many natural phenomena can be seen as occurring in oscillations or pulse - rapid changes in a system’s architecture, behavior or fundamental characteristics followed by a steady state. This can be seen across scales in molecules, cellular function, brain fluids during sleep, predator-prey cycles and earthquakes.28 H.T. developed this pulsing paradigm for ecosystems during the 1980s and later in collaboration with his brother Gene and nephew William Odum. The group compared tidal salt marshes, tidal freshwater marshes, and seasonally flooded fresh-water wetlands, and found similarities in behavior despite differences in biodiversity and structure. They observed that the common

theme – pulses of water inundation – was responsible for driving periods of high production, followed by periods of rapid consumption, then decay.29 H.T. believed this was a general principle of nature that holds larger implications for society’s growth.

In his final book A Prosperous Way Down, co-authored with his second wife Elisabeth C. Odum, H.T. argued that humanity is on its final trajectory of rapid consumption, the information age, and headed towards a downturn. This phase of rapid growth and consumption has been enabled by the production associated with industrialization and fossil fuels extraction. The looming decline will be characterized by humanity’s adaptation to a new way of life – a steady state economy with significantly lower resources and energy use.30

H.T. believed that this decline does not have to be catastrophic if people recognize it in time. The decline can be prosperous. For this he and his wife proposed a policy toolkit for the better valuation of natural resources, based on the emergy approach, that would allow for the economy to come down without loss in living standard. This notion depended on a Malthusian belief in the need for an accompanying decline in energy consumption and population. Following civilization’s weaning off fossil fuels, another cycle of growth will begin, but that time it would be less extreme since the new economy will once again be based on fisheries, forests and agriculture and not highly dense fuels.31

Conclusion

H.T. Odum’s celebrated five-decade career as a pioneering thinker in systems ecology is characterized by a remarkable variety in subject matter as well as the intense pursuit of structures and relationships. With an education that bridges the division among practically every discipline of the natural sciences, H.T. developed his unique methods of inquiry that allowed him to draw connections between the physical, biological and social processes at play in our world. His focus on energy as a foundation for both measurement and valuation of ecosystems has led to the development of a novel and flexible diagraming and modeling language, and to a brand of ecological economics that strives to correct our misaligned value system. Throughout his career, H.T. advocated for the sensible use of resources and a prosperous and healthy progression towards what he viewed as an inevitable downturn in human society. He certainly left plenty of material to decipher and ponder.

1. “Howard W. Odum.” American Sociological Association, November 24, 2020.

2. Barnett, Cynthia. “Howard T. Odum Interview by Cynthia Barnett.” Howard T. Odum Center for Wetlands Publications, University of Florida. 16 August 2001.

8. Ewel, John J. “Howard Thomas Odum (1924–2002).” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, Vol. 84, No. 1 (January 2003): 13-15.

9. Barnett 2001.

10. Limburg, Karin E. “The Biogeochemistry of Strontium: a review of H.T. Odum’s contributions.” Ecological Modelling, Vol. 178 (2004): 31–33.

11. Barnett 2001.

12. Ibid

13. Lotka, Alfred J. “Contributions to the energetics of evolution.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 8, No. 6 (1922): 147-151.

14. David R. Tilley, Howard T. Odum’s contribution to the laws of energy. Ecological Modelling 178 (2004) 121–125.

15. Hammond, Geoffrey P. “Energy and sustainability in a complex world: Reflections on the ideas of Howard T. Odum.” International Journal of Energy Resilience, Vol. 31 (2007): 1105–1130.

16. Ibid

17. Brown, Mark T. “A picture is worth a thousand words: energy systems language and simulation.” Ecological Modelling Vol. 178 (2004): 83–100.

18. Barnett 2001.

19. Brown 2004.

20. Barnett 2001.

21. Barnett 2001 and Brown 2004.

22. Brown 2004.

23. Barnett 2001.

24. Odum. Howard T. “Energy, Ecology, and Economics.” Ambio, Vol. 2, No. 6 (1973): 220-227.

25. Odum, Howard T., and Eugene P. Odum, “The Energetic Basis for Valuation of Ecosystem Services.” Ecosystems, Vol. 3 (2000): 21–23.

26. Ibid.

27. Barnett 2001.

28. Ibid.

29. Odum, William E., and Eugene P. Odum and Howard T. Odum. “Nature’s Pulsing Paradigm.” Estuaries Vol. 18, No. 4 (December 1995): 547-555.

30. Barnett 2001, and Brown 2004.

31. Barnett 2001.

Sources for Figure 8 (from left to right, top to bottom)

1. Sun Emits a Solstice Flare and CME (Courtesy of NASA)

2. Mangrove, Florida (Scan of Cora Olgyay slide, courtesy of Fisher Fine Arts Library Image Collection, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)

3. Coal Hands (Unknown on Rawpixel)

4. USA. Wellington, Kansas. 1990. Oil pump amid the wheat harvest in Kansas (©Hiroji Kubota/ Magnum Photos)

5. Transmission Lines from Bulder, Dam, Mojave Desert, California (Photo by Ansel Adams, courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Ansel Adams Archive)

6. Composite image of the brain from a healthy young adult...(Courtesy of the Welcome Collection, Artstor)

The Seeds of Democracy: Jens Jensen and the Story of the American Garden

Matthew Limbach

In an auspicious start to a long and fruitful career as landscape architect, Jens Jensen transformed Union Park, a then neglected former site of Chicago’s zoological garden, into a microcosm of the American Midwest. In 1888, despite a lack of design experience or formal training, Jensen managed to create, using wildflowers and trees endemic to Illinois, what he considered “the first natural garden in any large park in the country” (Figure 1). This would become known as the “American Garden”.1 While Jensen certainly gives himself too much credit for engendering the trend toward native plantings2 his first project represents a strong break from formal Victorian era gardens, with their focus on gaudy colors and exotic specimens. Such planting regimes dominated Chicago’s West Park System where Jensen had worked as a laborer since 1886.3

Even more inspiring was the effort Jensen undertook to transplant perennial wildflowers from Chicago’s outlands into Union Park. It was an operation that simultaneously foreshadowed his work on the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Park in Springfield, Illinois and harkened back to the pioneer history of the region as part of the early American “West.”

“I had a great collection of perennial wild flowers. We couldn’t get the stock from nurserymen, as there had never been any requests for it, and we went out into the woods with a team and wagon, and carted it in ourselves.”4

“As I wander over the sand dunes or along our rivers or over the prairies, I find hundreds of gardens, each expressing a beauty all its own, where each plant has a chance to speak its own life, just as God meant it to have. The less man interferes with that beauty, the more they express the spiritual value of a great democracy.”

-Jens Jensen

In another decision that would foreshadow later ecological design practices, “Each plant was given room to grow as it wanted to,” and Jensen eventually did away with formal planting beds altogether.5 Little documentation exists of Jensen’s work on Union Park, but, as we will see, Jensen had a deep understanding of the local flora and their ability to thrive and replicate based upon local soil conditions. We can infer that Jensen was experimenting with a prototypical, self-organizing planting regime.

One can take several readings from Jens Jensen’s poetic reflections on the Midwestern landscape or his efforts in Union Park, which laid the groundwork for many projects to come. Therein lie the oft proclaimed American ideals of individualism and self-sufficiency. The classical liberal could draw a metaphorical connection between the constitutional mandate for selfdetermination and the untouched flower “expressing a beauty all its own,” lest

Jens Jensen (Courtesy of The Clearing Folk School)

man interfere. The conservationist among us would turn the same metaphor into a dire call-to-action to preserve the few remaining “pristine” landscapes, untrammeled by man.

Jensen did espouse egalitarian principles through his writing, activism, and design work. He can also be considered a forefather of the conservation, environmental, and ecological movements. Jensen’s work, however, belies strict adherence to a set of principles; rather, it reflects mankind’s fraught, dialectical relationship with the landscape.

Stormy Seas and Safe Harbors

Jens Jensen was born in 1860 in Dybbøl, Slesvig, a southern province of modern Denmark (see Figure 2). A duchy at the time, the area was hotly contested by the Danish King and the Kingdom of Prussia. A formative experience of Jensen’s childhood was a Prussian attack on Dybbøl, which resulted in several of the buildings on his family’s homestead burning, including the barn.6 Jensen recalls, from the tender age of four, a horrific scene in which the fields were soaked in the blood of wounded and dying soldiers.7 One can hardly imagine a more dramatic way to harden a youth against European autocracies.

Jensen’s disdain for autocratic regimes was honed by his three-year conscription into the Prussian army, a requirement for every young man of Slesvig after it ceded to Prussia.8 This experience, however, brought Jensen into contact with many of the Picturesque parks and gardens that dotted the German landscape. Jensen was particularly infatuated with the works of Prince Pückler-Muskau, who was heavily influenced by late 18th century developments in English landscape gardening. The prince’s playful, animated style contrasts heavily with the earlier, formal, geometric style of European gardens (Figure 3). The contrast between a regimented life in the military, and the Picturesque style of Pückler-Muskau bore a direct influence on Jensen’s work. Jensen spent significant time drawing in the prince’s parks, and he carried bundles of those drawings across the sea when he emigrated to the United States in 1884.9 In his memoir, Siftings, Jensen concludes,

“The study of curves is the study of life itself. Curves represent the unchained mind full of mystery and beauty. Straight lines belong to the militant thought. No mind can be free in a concept of limitations. Straight lines spell autocracy, of which most European gardens are an expression, and their course points to intellectual decay, which soon develops a prison from which the mind can never escape. The free thought that produces the free curve can never be strangled.”10

Besides meeting his wife, Anna Marie, Jensen’s study of Pückler-Muskau’s work seems to be the only good experience from his time in the Prussian army. In addition to stylistic concerns, it reinforced the solace that Jensen had always found in natural settings. In Siftings, Jensen describes how his family farm was sheltered from the cold winds of the Baltic Sea by native trees, carefully selected and attended to by his great-grandfather. The trees provided visual markers for homebound sailors and sheltered throngs of migratory starlings. The farm represented a proverbial safe harbor for his embattled “Viking” ancestors.11 He also describes the restorative powers of early spring wildflower walks with his father after the long Scandinavian winter.12

Figure 1: Union Park, Jensen’s American garden, undated. Drawing by Jens Jensen (Chicago Park District Archive, Chicago Public LIbrary, Photograph 102_015_001)

Figure 2: Map showing the contested province of Slesvig around the events of the German-Danish War (Drawing by Robert E. Grese)

wiki/File:F%C3%BCrstP%C3%BCckler-Park_Bad_ Muskau_60.JPG,

Figure 3: Park von Muskau, Bad Muskau, Sachsen, Germany (Courtesy of Dr. Bernard Gross, Wikimedia Commons https:// commons.wikimedia.org/

edited for visual continuity by Matthew Limbach)

Figure 4: Map of Chicago’s West Park System as it was appeared at the beginning of Jensen’s tenure (Drawing by Robert E. Grese)

Jensen’s only formal education consisted of a stint in a traditional Danish folk high school and subsequent time at the agricultural college in Tune.13 In addition to the strong pastoral connections, Jensen was exposed to numerous Scandinavian folk traditions that intimately tied educational and civic experiences to the landscape through his early education and community. Regular outings with the folk high school consisted of traipses through the woods, camping trips, tree plantings, and time spent singing and orating around a campfire.14 The many folk festivals attended by Jensen and his family correlated strongly with celestial or seasonal events, as well as prominent natural landmarks.15 Collectively, Jensen’s formative experiences in Europe fostered an immigrant American who was ever conscious of the connections between the landscape and how people governed themselves.

The Garden(less) City

When Jens Jensen arrived in Chicago in 1886, he found a city in flux. Chicago had earned the moniker the “Garden City” thanks to its motto “Urbs in Horto”, or “City in a Garden”, and the work of designers such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, William Le Baron Jenney, and H.W.S Cleveland. Their work was left somewhat unrealized, but nonetheless created the backbone for one of the age’s leading systems of parks and boulevards. The Garden City expanded rapidly in the years after the Civil War. Increasing urbanization and industrialization brought the attendant issues of squalor, poverty, and sickness - issues that a new generation of planners, activists, and scientists sought to remedy.

After first taking a job as a lowly street sweeper in Chicago’s West Parks district,16 Jensen quickly moved up the ranks to foreman, then superintendent for Humboldt Park (see Figure 5).17 Meanwhile he planned and supervised improvements for the existing parks and gardens in the West Parks system (see Figure 4). In 1900 he was ousted from official duties for a five-year period for refusing to participate in political graft, but he was then reinstated by the reform politician, Bernard Eckhart, who made Jensen “‘Super-intendent and Landscape Architect’ of all the West Parks”.18 Jensen continually impressed his superiors with his inventiveness,19 scruples, and auto-didactic approach.20

Through the first two decades of the 20th century, Jensen designed a number of private estates and gardens in conjunction with his public service, before leaving the parks system in 1920 to focus on his private practice. In addition to his work on numerous public parks and gardens, he designed and consulted for many well-to-do figures of the Midwest, notably Harry Reubens (see Figure 6) and Henry and Edsel Ford (see Figure 7).21 Jensen’s agricultural background did lend some experience to horticultural concerns, such as transplanting and pruning, but his lack of artistic or architectural training makes his design success all the more impressive.

Jensen was not just an accomplished practitioner. Like his contemporary, Charles Eliot, he was a bit of a Romantic, as well as a keen observer of people, customs, and current affairs. And, like the great Olmsted before him, Jensen was at least tangentially connected with seemingly every influential figure in his era. Even more impressive than Jensen’s long list of public and private projects were the social connections he maintained and the number of endeavors who undertook that were not explicitly design related.

Figure 7: Jensen’s clever concealment of a hydroelectic within a naturallooking rock construction at the Eleanor and Edsel Ford Estate, Grosse Pointe Shores, MI (From the Collections of The Henry Ford)

Figure 5: Humboldt Park Lagoons and Prairie Rivers, June 26, 1941, photographer unknown (Chicago Park District Archive, Chicago Public Library, Photograph 044_001_025)

Figure 6: Aquatic gardens designed by Jensen for the Harry Rubens Estate, Glencoe, IL. Photographed by Jensen’s longtime friend, Frank Waugh (Courtesy of Frank A. Waugh Papers (FS 088) Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, edited for visual continuity by Matthew Limbach)

For several years, Jensen was a member of the “Cliff Dwellers,” a group of influential Chicago designers, many of whom, including Jensen, shared office space in a building designed by architect Dwight Perkins. The men would socialize, display their work together, and often collaborate both formally and informally.22 Alongside many of these “Prairie School” Architects, Jensen would develop a style unique to the Great Plains region. Jensen also lent his time and energy as an active member of the Municipal Science Club, the Geographic Society of Chicago, the City Club, and the Outdoor Art League, among others.23

Perhaps most importantly, Jensen developed a relationship with the social reformer and activist Jane Addams. Addams’s civic center, the Hull House, served as a refuge for the immigrants, at-risk women, and the urban poor of Chicago. It also provided hands-on arts and crafts training and various forms of public education.24 More importantly, it was a stage for crosscultural expression and cross-pollination of ideas. It was also a literal stage for community-produced plays, often performed in the various languages and dialects of the immigrant community.25

The social buzz of the Hull House meshed with Jensen’s folk school traditions. It reinforced the narrative of the budding Prairie School architects who were heavily influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement and pre-neoclassical forms of building. Jensen too highlighted the importance of vernacular building, but he peeled back one more layer of the built history. Jensen was heavily influenced at this time by the English planner Raymond Unwin, and the English landscape architect Thomas Mawson. Both were proponents of the contemporaneous Garden City movement in the United Kingdom, and both took inspiration from Europe’s medieval towns. In his introduction for Thomas Mawson’s 1911 address to the Chicago City Club, Jensen suggested that these towns took “inspiration from the landscape by which they were surrounded.”26

Jensen expands on these ideas in Siftings. In his “Towns” chapter, he lays out a vision for (sub)urban planning in the United States, based on the characteristics of “rural towns.”27 He idealizes spacious drives with “overarching branches of century-old trees shading the streets and the homes of the inhabitants a hundred feet or more away from the street.”28 Such cities or towns should be directly influenced by local factors, such as climate and topography. “No two hillside cities should be alike,” he writes.29 For Jensen, this is all part of a common theme. Landscape influences human history and the built environment. This initiates recursive examination of the landscape, with cities and historical artifacts very much an integral part.

As an active member of local organizations, Jensen was introduced to numerous intellectuals and writers who spurred his desire to alleviate what he saw as the social ills produced by urban conditions. Notably, an address at Hull House by the journalist, documentary photographer, and fellow Dane, Jacob Riis,30 colored Jensen’s understanding of early 20th century American cities as places “raging in cunning, trickery, and chaos.”31 Riis laid bare for Jensen “how the other half lives.”32 Of particular concern for Jensen were the children trapped in these squalid conditions without proper play spaces.33 Throughout his writing, Jensen laments that without a daily connection to natural areas, generations of American children would grow up without knowledge of their own landscape. In his mind, the foundations of Chicago’s urban plan, laid out

by Olmsted, Vaux, Jenney,

and Cleveland, were being outpaced by rapid, uncontrolled development.

“Chicago was once called a garden city. What has become of the gardens? Great men and women have grown out of that garden city, but why are there no leaders today? What has happened in Chicago has happened in many other large cities where speculation has been the guiding force.”34

For Jensen, landscape architecture was not just a fulcrum between democratic and autocratic tendencies. It was also crucial for fostering responsible civic leadership.

In 1899, the Chicago City Council formed the Special Parks Commission with the goal of studying urban conditions and producing proposals for the development of playgrounds and recreation spaces throughout the metropolitan area. Jensen became a member by 1904 and joined the subsequent Chicago Playground Association as well.35

In his role as superintendent of the West Parks Commission, Jensen designed playgrounds and recreation areas for implementation by the Special Parks Commission.36 The playgrounds were traditional, geometric play spaces adorned with his signature interpretation of the local environment. He would develop these ideas further in 1916 with Franklin Park and 1922 with Columbus Park. Here, his schemes evolved to incorporate folk school-inspired settings for dancing, music, and storytelling, as well as naturalistic interpretations of recreational features. The children’s swimming pool of Columbus Park bears direct resemblance to the limestone bluffs of the Mississippi Valley the Great Lakes, areas that Jensen had visited on his frequent weekend trips with his family into the Great Plains surrounding Chicago. This was the kind of experience that Chicago’s urban poor were generally denied.

Jensen’s 1918 proposal for A Greater West Park System further codifies his ideas about the needs of a growing urban population. Notably, his plan calls for municipal “kitchen” gardens to be placed adjacent to parks, which in turn ought to be regularly spaced throughout the urban fabric. These were to be built in conjunction with local agricultural colleges and serve as sites for horticultural experimentation.37 Here we can see the clear influence of Jensen’s upbringing, as well as echoes of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision for the United States. Though Jensen did not make any pretense of every citizen becoming a farmer, he thought it paramount that Americans have some experience in the soil and a conscious connection to what was, at one time, a more rustic landscape.38

Taken as a whole, Jensen’s prescription for the declining social conditions in Chicago can be summed up by one of his guiding principles: “If the city cannot come to the country, then the country must come to the city.”39

The Prairie Style

Along with fellow landscape architect O.C. Simonds, Jensen developed what the writer Wilhelm Miller would dub the “Prairie Style” of landscape architecture.40 Alongside their Cliff Dweller friends, Jensen and Simonds crafted a unique regional identity through their designs. Like Frank Lloyd Wright and others before him, Jensen was captivated by the majesty and sheer expanse of the Great Plains. The noble character of the prairie landscape simultaneously

harkened back to Jensen’s Nordic roots and acted as a sounding board for the idealism of his adopted country.

“I was attracted by the immensity of the sea, and in its place came the Great Plains of America. It is the strength of America. The greatest strength we have.”41

Throughout his work, Jensen sought to recreate the expansive feeling of the plains where he could. Many of his designs, especially the public projects, incorporate some type of clearing, and the clearing usually anchors the plan. Throughout his career, these clearings take on many different names and programmatic functions, e.g., “Play Field,”,” “Meadow,” “Pasture,” “Prairie,”42 but the intent is always the same: orient the view towards the seemingly boundless horizon of the Great Plains. Jensen compared industrializing cities to beehives,43 walling their inhabitants off from each other and nature. Open spaces, he believed would reopen paths to nature and give “a feeling of breath and freedom that only the prairie landscape could give to the human soul.”44 This metaphorical concept was so important to Jensen, that, when he founded an experimental folk school after his retirement from practice, he dubbed it “The Clearing.”

Figure 8: The long horizontal lines of the Robie House, typical of the Prairie Style, accentuate the flat, expansive landscape. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Frederick C. Robie, Chicago, IL (Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 9: A hawthorne planted by Jensen at the Eleanor and Edsel Ford Estate, Grosse Pointe Shores, MI (Photo by Robert E. Grese)

Wright and the other Prairie Style architects accentuated the horizontal expanse of the Midwestern landscape through repeated horizontal articulation and sweeping, low-hung rooflines (see Figure 8). Jensen echoed this with repeated forms of his own. He frequently employed native varieties of his favorite tree, the Hawthorn (Crataegus spp.). This woodland border tree served to ease the transition between his designed meadows and woodlots. It also mimicked the expanse of the prairie through its extensive, horizontal crown shape (Figure 9).

“Hawthorns used in the making of a landscape give breadth and bigness to the composition. The American landscaper will always find them in scale with the vastness of the country with which he works.”45

Starting with his work on the “American Garden” in Union Park, Jensen leaned into his predilection for native plants. Though he sometimes incorporated non-native species into his designs, Jensen is recognized today for his early advocacy of native planting regimes. He continually stressed the “fitness” natives had for local soils and climates. This preoccupation was both ecological and symbolic.

“To try to force plants to grow in soil or climate un-fitted for them and against nature’s methods will sooner or later spell ruin. Besides, such a method tends to make the world commonplace and to destroy the ability to unfold an interesting and beautiful landscape out of home environments.”46

To fully appreciate the significance of this statement, one must understand that Jensen, while scientifically prescient in many ways, did not comprehend the complexities of certain things like meadow ecology or plant life cycles within closed systems. As biographer Robert E. Grese notes, many of Jensen’s romantic interpretations of transitional spaces - the shrubby, sunlit woodland borders – have succumbed to incursions of native species and depleted reserves of native seed stock.47 Jensen did understand the threat of invasive species to an extent. Indeed, he compares the introduction of Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) to American forests, with the havoc wrought by the European house sparrow (Passer domesticus) on towns and farms.48 Still, Jensen’s ecological interpretations were mostly limited to the viability of individual plants and groupings that mimicked endemic plant communities.

This is not to take away from Jensen’s presentiment about ecological imperatives; rather, it underlines the narrative that drove his work. For Jensen, plant communities described the character of a place, its own unique story. Indeed, in Siftings, he frequently intersperses native plants with tales of First Nations peoples and pioneers. Individual plants are actors in a continually unfolding story of the landscape. The Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos), or “Farmers’ Wife Tree”, derives its beauty from its “golden-yellow autumn color. Or is it the pioneering wife who imbued it with beauty when she lovingly propagated it from the forest?”49

Contrast this with the violent, almost militaristic language Jensen employs to describe incursions on the native landscape. Plants are clipped into “grotesque forms”,50 creating mechanical and scientific effects. Highway engineers destroy the “romance, daring, and excitement of strong contours.”51 The countryside is “mutilated” through “greed and ignorance.”52 Finally, he concludes:

“Every plant has its fitness and must be placed in its proper surroundings so as to bring out its full beauty….when we are willing to give each plant a chance fully to develop its beauty, so as to give us all it possesses without interference, then, and only then, shall we enjoy ideal landscapes made by man. And is not this the true spirit of democracy? Can a democrat cripple and misuse a plant for the sake of show and pretense? I am asking these questions because there are people on this earth who have used such methods in developing gardens that are admired by many. But these gardens exemplify none of the freedom which every democracy should possess.”53

For Jensen, to displace an area’s native plants is to erase its history. It is an assault on democracy on par with the French gardens he grew to loathe as a young man.

Jensen’s Prairie Style and egalitarian leanings, while intimately tied with the landscape of the Midwest, did not evolve solely in the Great Plains. The deaths of Olmsted and Eliot at the end of the 19th century produced a vacuum of sorts in American landscape architecture. Debate grew between proponents of Olmsted, Vaux, and Downing’s “sylvan” style and formalists, such as landscape architect George F. Pentecost who advocated, if not a return, then inspiration to be drawn from formal French and Italian gardens.54

Figure 10: Formalist Designs, such as the grounds for the Columbian Exposition (bottom), marked a turn away from earlier Picturesque designs like Olmsted’s Plan for Jackson Park (top), upon which the Columbian Exposition was constructed (Space & Anti-Space, by Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg)

In the first few decades of the 20th century, there was a voracious appetite for more traditional, geometric public and private gardens.55 This was spurred by the success of Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, which briefly turned Chicago’s Jackson Park into a sprawling Beaux-Arts paradise, replete with neoclassical architecture and French style boulevards (see Figure 10). The fair’s success in turn led the Chicago Commercial Club to commission the Plan of Chicago

Written by architects Edward Bennett and Daniel Burnham, the plan’s Renaissance-inspired scheme56 contrasted sharply with the more natural “Emerald Necklace” style plans that Olmsted, Eliot, and their adherents had envisioned for American cities. There was swift rebuke from the Prairie School architects. Jensen decried it as “distinctly imperialistic.”57 The rigid geometries he fled from in Europe had followed him to the United States! Jensen characterized the plan as being driven by commercial interests and advocated for a plan that emphasized more “home-like” qualities.58

“The American home is the foundation upon which the world’s greatest democracy rests. It is the unit, of which the city is made up, and in it should center the whole force of city planning, in order to foster the highest ideals in its people, and to be an expression of the best in mankind.”59

It is hard to reckon with Jensen’s conception of the “American home” as a basis for design. His ideas could be classified as a simple reaction to commercial interests or traditionalism. Reflecting on the plan in Siftings he wrote,

“To import to our cities plans from monarchial countries with their pompous displays, is a fad reflecting on the American intellect. Such plans can never fit us with our love for freedom.”60

Jensen’s longtime friend and pioneering landscape architect, Frank Waugh, likewise correlated the formal designs of French and Italian landscapes with the aristocracy and their desire for the accruement and social display of wealth.61

But Jensen disdained other imported styles, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s orientalism, not for the attitudes they expressed, but for their incongruity with local conditions.62 He also seemed to understand something about the ecological and social fabric of the American landscape. Writing in a 1911 article entitled “Regulating City Building” he says,

“It is too much to assume that our cities can be transformed as quickly as the paper receives the ink of the enthusiastic designer, nor is it to be expected that the lines so cleverly laid down by the rule can as readily cut through the physical complexities of a great city.”63

Though Jensen was a prolific designer, he advocated a slow and steady, interdisciplinary approach to planning. He proposed a “department of civics,” for the city of Chicago, to be staffed by “an engineer, an architect, a good businessman, a sculptor, and a landscape architect.” In his vision, the department would advise on all planning matters in “a sane and natural manner.”64

Jensen also argued for the overlapping of interests based on underlying socio-economic and environmental factors. In his plan for A Greater West

Park System, he foresaw the city expanding ever westward. To avoid potential shortfalls, he proposed the merger of the West Parks with the boards of suburban Oak Park and Berwyn.65 Later in his career, when pushing conservation efforts in the “palisades” of the Mississippi, Jensen proposed the formation of an “interstate park.”66 This park and bird sanctuary would tie together a network of bluffs and canyons, which were interlinked, not through municipal or political interest, but their shared set of unique ecological conditions.

Jensen was not just wary of monarchial tendencies, he really understood that there were innumerate environmental and social factors that could not be squared with a formalist plan. For Jensen, there is no direct line through democracy. If we pair his planning approach with his layers of historical and ecological references, it becomes clear that Jensen had a certain intuition about a multiplicity of forms undergirding the American landscape.

Symbol, Iconography, and Trace

Though Jensen balked at historicism, his work was continuously influenced by historic precedent. Jensen wrote constantly about the history of local landscapes, notably the settler and pre-colonial eras of the Midwest. At “The Clearing,” (a folk school ifounded by Jensen n Ellison Bay, WI) old “Indian trails” helped to organize the forms of Jensen’s gardens and outdoor spaces.67 Similarly, his plan for A Greater West Park System sought to highlight local sites of historic significance, lest their stories be lost to development.68

As his career developed, historic concerns took on more overtly symbolic meanings. The most explicit example is his work on the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Garden in Springfield, Illinois. His exclusively native planting regime was designed to represent environments that shaped Lincoln’s life, from his birthplace in Kentucky to the disparate parts of Illinois he inhabited as a young statesman (Figure 11).69 Of particular importance was the “Lincoln Council Ring,” a fire circle surrounded by circular stonework, set in a grove of White oak (Quercus alba). The council ring, a hallmark of Jensen’s designs, places occupants in level, equidistant seating. It reflects his and Lincoln’s shared enthusiasm for egalitarian principles. The grove of white oak, one of America’s most enduring trees, was to serve as a self-seeding, that is self-perpetuating, living monument to the president.70 This monument was built during the height of the Great Depression. With public funds in short supply, Jensen took a meagre payment of $500, and the Boy Scouts, as well as local garden clubs, supplied plant materials in the form of acorns, seedlings, and material transplanted from nearby sites.71 Local residents from all walks of life took part in a kind of constructive pageantry that reflects Jensen’s conception of the landscape as a continuously unfolding story (Figure 12).

An earlier, more elusive example is the conservatory Jensen built in Garfield Park. In 1913, Jensen decided to consolidate all West Park conservatories into one, large building in Garfield Park.72 At first glance, the building is reminiscent of every other early 20th century glass conservatory, albeit a little obtuse and bloated (Figure 14). This was intentional. In a move that would have impressed architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Jensen, determined that “In order to fit them into a prairie landscape I thought they might well take the outlines of the great hay-stacks which are so eloquent of the richness of prairie soil.”73 This proverbial “duck” contained more than prairie soil though.

Figure 11 (above): Jensen’s Plan for the Lincoln Memorial Garden, Springfield, IL (Courtesy of Lincoln Memorial Gardens)

Figure 12 (right): A procession lead by scout troops through the Lincoln Memorial Garden (Courtesy of Lincoln Memorial Gardens)

Figure 13: Interior of the Garfield Conservatory showing Jensen’s interpretation of Chicago’s “prehistoric” landscape (© Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Foundation for Landscape Studies, New York)

Figure 14: In the design of the Garfield Conservatory, Jensen mimicked the shape of hay bales, which punctuate the Midwestern landscape (Chicago History Museum; ICHi-17002)

Jensen, informed by his ecological history of the region, implemented his interpretation of a prehistoric prairie landscape (Figure 13).74

Jensen’s ecological background was largely formed by his relationships with pioneers of the field like Lewis Mumford, Aldo Leopold, and Henry C. Cowles, with whom Jensen conducted a study on plant “sociology.”75 Jensen’s knowledge informed his vision for the developing American landscape, and in A Greater West Parks System, Jensen put this knowledge to brilliant use. Having noticed the decline of trees planted in the early days of the West Park System, Jensen realized that large, woody plantings are simply not viable in the mostly tough, clay-heavy soils of the area. There are, however, ancient “beaches” throughout the Chicago region - traces of the prehistoric lake that birthed Lake Michigan. These pockets of sandy and more nutrient-rich soils served as Jensen’s guide. In the plan he advocates for the siting of parks and forest preserves in relation to the ancient relics (Figure 17).76 Jensen’s method of overlapping urban planning with traces of ecological history is a rudimentary version of the influential “layering” technique Ian McHarg would pioneer in the second half of the 20th century.

Out of Jensen’s ecological concerns were born his preservationist endeavors. With many of his designs no longer intact, it is easy to let his conservation work and advocacy define his conception of the landscape.

Through his social connections, Jensen formed the Prairie Club and the Friends of Our Native Landscape. These groups shared many members and spent time reliving Jensen’s folk school days, hiking, camping, singing, dancing, and performing masques in local parks and natural areas (see Figure 15).77 Through the clubs, Jensen ingratiated himself with middle class Chicago and its influential actors. With their help, he managed to successfully advocate on behalf of state parks, forest preserves, and conservation areas across the Midwest region. Most notably, their work to save the sand dunes of northern Indiana stalled the development of heavy industry along the southern shores of Lake Michigan (see Figure 16).78 In 2019, their dream of establishing an Indiana Dunes National Park was finally realized.

Taking today’s common conception of conservationism, it is easy to frame Jensen’s work as a simple preservation of restorative spaces or struggle against development or a loss of local character or unique biological features - a man vs. nature dichotomy. But the natural resources Jensen was most interested in conserving were the instructive historical and ecological relationships of these natural areas, elements that would continue to influence urban planning. Indeed, Jensen explicitly negates the notion of preservation in service to mere escapism.

“No man can love two homes, and it is neither natural, nor sound for a city dweller to divide his interest between city and country. He becomes a useless resident of both. If our cities had plenty of open spaces for fresh air and sunshine and trees, they would be a fitting home for their people twelve months of the year, and more time and money would be de-voted to the one spot the city dweller calls home.”79

“What will become of our cities?” asks Jensen in Siftings. If some ideas come to fruition, we might fully realize the possibilities of his conception of the American landscape. “Our country is one complete garden.”80

Figure 15: Hikers on a cliff during a Prairie Club outing (Courtesy of The Prairie Club)

Figure 16: The Historical Pageant of the Dunes, May 30, 1917. Jensen and the Prairie Club assisted other conservationists in staging a pageant to advocate for the creation of a national park to project the Indiana Dunes (Prairie Club Archives, Westchester Township History Museum)

Figure 17: Jensen’s plan for A Greater West Park System notes the location of ancient “beaches,” i.e. pockets of sandy soil left in the wake of the retreating Lake Chicago. This early example of environmental planning served as the guiding framework for the layout of Chicago’s West Park System (Courtesy of The University of Michigan, Bently Historical Library, Jens Jensen drawings and papers)

Notes

1. See p. 8 of Grese, Robert E. Jens Jensen: Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1998).

2. Ibid, p. 9.

3. Jens Jensen The Living Green, directed by Carey Lundin. Lake Forest, IL: Amazon Prime Video (2018). Viewed in 2021.

4. Grese 1998, p. 8.

5. Ibid.

6. Jens Jensen The Living Green 2018.

7. Ibid

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid

10. See p. 34 of Jensen, Jens. Siftings. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1990).

11. Ibid., pp. 13-14.

12. Ibid., p. 14.

13. Grese 1998, p. 4.

14. Jens Jensen The Living Green 2018.

15. Jensen 1990, p. 15.

16. Grese 1998, p. 7.

17. Grese 1998, p. 63.

18. Grese 1998, p. 69.

19. See p. 7 of Weeks, Harvey T. “Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the West Chicago Park Commissioners for the Year Ending December 31, 1895” § (1896).

20. Grese 1998, p. 62.

21. Ibid

22. Ibid., p. 45.

23. Ibid., pp. 10, 62.

24. Ibid., p. 42.

25. Ibid

26. Ibid., p. 41.

27. Jensen 1990, p. 89.

28. Ibid., p. 90.

29. Ibid, p. 99.

30. Grese 1998, p. 53.

31. Jensen 1990, p. 96.

32. Jens Jensen The Living Green 2018.

33. Grese 1998, p. 43.

34. Jensen 1990, p. 94.

35. Grese 1998, p. 43.

36. Grese 1998, p. 44.

37. Jensen, Jens. A greater west park system: after the plans of Jens Jensen. Chicago: West Chicago Park Commissioners (1920).

38. Jensen 1990, p. 90.

39. Ibid., p. 83.

40. Grese 1998, p. 45.

41. Jens Jensen The Living Green 2018.

42. Grese 1998, p. 62.

43. Jensen 1990, p. 89.

44. Grese 1998, p. 82.

45. Jensen 1990, p. 52.

46. Jensen, Siftings, 42.

47. Grese 1998, p. 195.

48. Jensen 1990, p. 60.

49. Ibid., p. 48.

50. Ibid., p. 37.

51. Ibid., p. 29.

52. Ibid., p. 49.

53. Ibid., p. 41.

54. Grese 1998, p. 25.

55. Ibid.  56. Ibid, p. 39.

57. Ibid

58. Ibid 59. Ibid

60. Jensen 1990, p. 90.

61. Grese 1998, p. 27.

62. Ibid., p. 48.

63. Ibid., p. 40.

64. Ibid

65. Ibid., p. 58.

66. Ibid., p. 130.

67. Jensen 1990, pp. 65-66.

68. Jensen and West Chicago Park Commissioners 1920.

69. Grese 1998, p. 112.

70. Ibid., p. 117.

71. Jens Jensen The Living Green 2018.

72. Ibid.

73. Grese 1998, p. 71.

74. Ibid

75. Ibid., p. 52.

76. Jensen and West Chicago Park Commissioners 1920.

77. Jens Jensen The Living Green 2018.

78. Ibid.

79. Jensen 1990, p. 93.

80. Ibid., p. 102.

PART 2: Examination of Environmental Theories

Opposite: Point Udall on St. Croix, USVI (Helen Lea)

Landscape Urbanism

Dingwen Wu

Landscape Urbanism has been one of the most important concepts in landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, and planning for the last 30 years. It is a theory arguing that the city is an interconnected and ecologically rich field. Putting the words “landscape” and “urbanism” together breaks the architectural essentialism and provides landscape the lens of observation, representation and construction of the contemporary city. As Charles Waldheim wrote in the book The Landscape Urbanism Reader, “landscape urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism.”1

The Origin and Genealogy of Landscape Urbanism

As Charles Jencks and others argue in their criticisms of postmodern architectural culture, landscape urbanism traces its origins to postmodern critiques of modernist architecture and planning. These critiques indicted modernism for its failure to produce a “meaningful” or “livable” public realm, for its inability to acknowledge cities as historical constructions of collective consciousness, and for its inability to communicate with multiple audiences.2 In the second half of the twentieth century, with the adjustment of the industry under the global economy, and the upgrade of the transportation as well as the communication technology, cities have undergone drastic changes. As the Ghent Urban Studies Team (GUST) concluded in their book The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis, urban space has undergone a sea change as the result of suburbanization. Suburbanization strips the traditional hierarchy between center and periphery, giving rise to a discontinuous urban landscape full of voids, and radically, often chaotically mixing the functions.3 Moreover, the crisis of the industrial economy in the United States has resulted in a shift toward a diversification of consumer markets, which caused the “death of modern architecture”.4

The postmodernism approach also failed to reconcile the trend of decentralization which continues today in North America. While aware of social and environmental challenges, it looks back to the European tradition of pursuing a more stable and comfortable form of urban arrangement. In the early 1980s, there was a rise of an urban design movement known as New Urbanism. New Urbanism encompasses basic principles such as developing more walkable neighborhoods, invoking an absent context through individual buildings, and Transit-Oriented Development. All of these concepts have something in common: building a sense of community and developing ecological practices as an alternative to urban sprawl.

Following up New Urbanism, Landscape Urbanism first appeared in the mid-1990s. In April 1997, a three-day conference was held at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. The conference attracted many scholars and designers from the field to give speeches under the topic of landscape urbanism. The event benefited from the presentation of a number of leading professionals and rising stars, including Ian McHarg, James Corner, Mohsen Mostafavi, Linda Pollak, Brigitte Shim, Adriaan Geuze, Joan Roig, Grant Jones, and Kathy Poole. It was the first time landscape urbanism was discussed at a public forum for the discussion and presentation of new ideas and practices. The follow-up exhibition was an even larger success for the spread and public acknowledgment of contemporary practices dependent upon the work of landscape architects and firms. Started from Storefront Among others, James Corner / Field Operations, Julia Czerniak and Timothy Swischuk, Alex Wall, and Adriaan Geuze / West 8, supported the exhibition with their works. The Chicago conference led to the establishment of many academic programs and the formalization of Landscape Urbanism studies at universities and colleges including the University of Toronto, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Oslo School of Architecture Urbanism and Landscape, and London’ s Architectural Association, among others.

Overture: Parc De La Villette

Parc De La Villette in Paris was one of the earliest and most critical projects to reveal this potential for landscape to operate as a model for urban process. In the 1982 competition for Parc De La Villette, 470 entries from over seventy countries were received for an “Urban Park for the 21st Century.”5 Among them, the office of Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas from the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) were awarded the commission and commendation. Both proposals of La Villette saw landscape as the key to transforming an area of the city which had been left neglected by shifts in economies of production and consumption.6 In this case, not only did the architects lead the design of a park, but more importantly, the park played an important role in organizing the city and people’s behavioral experience. The landscape here is not an independent “park” itself, but an open space structure and catalyst that organizes urban form and function. Parc De La Villette also shows up very often in the writings of James Corner, Charles Waldheim, and others, as they describe the ideas of Landscape Urbanism.

In the early 1980s, after President Mitterand took office, there was an urban redevelopment in Paris as part of city beautification and to make Paris more tourist-friendly. The design competition was a public project of a 125-acre site, which used to be the city’s largest slaughterhouse. Bernard Tschumi was chosen for the commission prize. He did not treat the park with a traditional landscape design approach. Through this proposal, Tschumi continues to explore the idea of events and programs as legitimate architectural concerns, in place of the stylistic arguments dominating architectural discourse in the postmodern era. Instead of forming a picturesque park that connected to the history and urban context, he sees the design as an opportunity of open expansion into the city. Tschumi wanted the park to be a place of activities and events, where people can come to visit and explore freely. Tschumi categorizes the three principles of organization in the Parc De La Villette as points, lines, and surfaces. The site’s 135 acres are organized spatially through a field of 35 points that Tschumi calls follies. The series of follies are informal in programs, but just designed to harbor activities and interaction.

Figure 1 (right): Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, Le Case Vide, Paris, France (Axonometric of folly) 1984 (© Bernard Tschumi Architects)

Figure 2 (below): Competition entry for Parc de la Villette, Paris, by OMA, 1982 (Image courtesy OMA)

The commendation prize entry by Rem Koolhaas and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture is equally significant. The scheme proposed parallel strips as the juxtaposition of various park programs. As conceived by Koolhaas/OMA, “the infrastructure of the park would be strategically organized to support an indeterminate and unknowable range of future uses over time.”7 Koolhaas believes that the program will undergo constant change and adjustment, while the park should keep adapting and evolving to meet the changing demand and environment.

The concept of layered, nonhierarchical, flexible, and strategic urbanism was signaled in Tschumi and Koolhaas’s projects for Parc De La Villette. As an early form of landscape urbanism, both schemes offered horizontal infrastructure which could accommodate all kinds of urban activities, imagined and unimagined over time. It is not about form and space anymore, but about activities.

Superstudio has not received much credit in the development of Landscape Urbanism, however, if we look at both Tschumi and Koolhaas‘s work, we might also find there might be a clue of affection. As an important part of the radical architectural movement in the 1960s, superstudio’s use of strong symmetric line work, as well as a flair for designing enormous, aspirational megastructures has affected a generation of architects. Many of Koolhaas and Tschumi’s drawings can be traced from superstudio’s movies and collage.

Collaborative Influences: Critical People and Theories of Landscape Urbanism

The terms and concepts of Landscape Urbanism are under collaborative influences. In Parc De La Villette, Tschumi and Koolhaas have forecast the coming of an open-ended, responsive, and indeterminate urbanism, which also brings landscape as the central medium that accommodates the contemporary organization of the city. As Koolhaas put it in 1998: “Architecture is no longer the primary element of urban order; increasingly urban order is given by a thin horizontal vegetal plane, increasingly landscape is the primary element of urban order.”8

American-Canadian architect and urbanist Charles Waldheim is one of the most important figures in Landscape Urbanism. He is currently a professor in Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and chaired the Department of Landscape Architecture from 2009 to 2015. Received his Master of Architecture degree from University of Pennsylvania in 1989, Charles has been pushing forward the ideas and discussions of Landscape Urbanism based on a collection of ideas and practices of James Corner, Terrence Harkness, George Hargreaves, and others. Waldheim is also the editor of Landscape Urbanism Reader (2006), which presents a wide range of perspectives and a collection of theories on landscape urbanism. It was his claiming of landscape as urbanism that first provided landscape the lens which is usually held by planners and architects. His theory about autonomy, indeterminacy, self-organization is clearly affected by Tschumi and Koolhaas. Waldheim’s advocacy of landscape urbanism is often based on a comparison with New Urbanism, which is still prevalent in the curriculum of many urban design schools. In the last chapter of his book, Landscape as Urbanism (2016), he thinks New Urbanism is nostalgia for traditional urban forms, while incorporating continuity with the

aspirations of ecologically informed planning practice, landscape urbanism offers a counter model of urban design.

The idea of landscape as a model for urbanism was also articulated by landscape architect James Corner. James Corner studied landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with Ian McHarg, and received courses that treat landscape ecology as applied science and tools for environmental management. Corner was greatly influenced by Rem Koolhaas’s radical and avant-garde theories in his early years. In his essay “Terra Fluxus,” James Corner has categorized the recent landscape urbanism practices into four main themes: ecological and urban processes overtime; the staging of horizontal surface (field of action), the operational or working method, and imaginary. In his view, the formation of the contemporary city would not be possible until we imaginatively rearrange the design disciplines and their study objects.

Practices of Landscape Urbanism

In the past decades, a series of public landscape projects has been implemented in North American cities like New York, Chicago, and Toronto. In New York, for example, the city began a decade of landscape-driven urban development projects of international significance.9 Among them, James Corner and the Field Operations designed Fresh Kills Park as a remediation of the landfill as well as serving ecological functions. The High Line designed in collaboration of Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Piet Oudolf view the abandoned elevated urban infrastructure as an asset, transforming it into an eventful landscape promenade. The riverfront designs, such as the development of Hudson River Park and the Brooklyn Bridge Park by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, are also notable cases of landscape urbanism.

In Chicago, Millennium Park was the earliest case of landscape urbanism. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), it transformed the abandoned railyard within Grant Park into a Beaux Arts public park. Michael Van

Figure 3: Chicago’s Millennium Park - Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), pictured in 2012 (Vito Palmisano on vitopalmisano. com)

Valkenburgh Associates is reimagining the Bloomingdale Trail, which can be considered Chicago’s High Line, and is also the longest greenway project in the United States. The elevated linear park touches neighborhoods and has easy access to the local communities. The Chicago Riverwalk designed by Sasaki reconfigures an industrial and underutilized waterfront into a bustling urban destination. Similar projects with equal importance can be found in James Corner Field Operations Chicago’s Navy Pier, which considers landscape as a medium for the city’s public lakefront.10

The practice of landscape urbanism also emerged in other cities. The Olympic Sculpture Park by Weiss Manfredi is located on Seattle’s last undeveloped waterfront property – an industrial brownfield site sliced by train tracks and an arterial road.11 As the centerpiece of the project, a folded z-shape pedestrian spine is designed to follow a significant grade change between the upper and lower portions of the park/urban interface, connecting Elliot Bay and adjacent Belltown seamlessly. Toronto is another hotbed for Landscape Urbanism. There are a number of Toronto examples showing landscape architects taking the role of urbanist with mostly the waterfront and brownfield remediation designs and competitions. The Waterfront Toronto initiative consists of several projects designed by firms associated with landscape urbanism. Among them include the Lake Ontario Park by James Corner and Field Operations, the Central Waterfront project by West 8 in association with DTAH, and the Don River Park by Michael van Valkenburgh Associates. The Central Water project, for example, is outstanding by its ecological argument of urban form, which includes fish habitat, zero carbon transit, and spatial legibility.12 In Washington D.C, OMA and OLIN’s proposal of 11th Street Bridge Park is turning the aging freeway structure over the Anacostia River into an elevated park and new civic space for the city with dynamic structures.

While the landscape urbanism projects are birthed in North American cities, it has now become a trend all over the world. The Yangpu riverfront renovation in Shanghai, China by TJAD Original Design Studio triggered the 42-kilometer waterfront public space design in Shanghai as a catalyst. The Bat Yam Biennale, for example, provides the city with an array of installations of public art, architecture, and landscape as catalysts for its growth and transformation.13 Equally significant cases can be found like Taichung Gateway Park in Taiwan by French architects Catherine Mosbach and Philippe Rahm; Yongsan Park in Seoul by West 8; and others.

Critics of Landscape Urbanism

As Landscape Urbanism is garnering influence, there is also an increasing criticism of the theory. The main criticism is the vagueness of the concept. Based on a series of writings and practices of landscape architects, lexical ambiguity and intentional vagueness are the main causes of conceptual vagueness in Landscape Urbanism.14 It is a structural dilemma when a concept must be redefined through the expansion of its meaning in order to be understood.

Some critics are concerned about the possible gentrification after the projects are implemented. Rising housing prices will drive the current inhabitants out. The High Line, for example, has been widely discussed for its gentrification, and called on to ensure a certain percentage of affordable houses around the projects while planning. Landscape Urbanism has not contributed to social

justice, as its proponents have argued.15 As most of the investment is flowing into the development of the central public space or big cities like New York, large parks in poorer areas are facing a decline because of dwindling public investment.

Conclusion

Landscape Urbanism arose with the reconfiguration of industrial economies in the west, the rise of postmodernism, and the ongoing transformation of industrial cities by flexible production and consumption, global capital, and decentralization.16 It breaks the limit of different design professions, providing a new medium and framework which is capable of responding to temporal change, transformation, and adaptation of contemporary cities.

Notes

1. Charles Waldheim, “A Reference Manifesto” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Waldheim, C. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006): 13.

2. Charles Waldheim. Landscape as Urbanism. (New York: Princeton University Press, 2016): 14.

3. Ghent Urban Studies Team, D. De Meyer, and K. Versluys. The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis. (010 Publishers, 1999): 9.

4. Ibid

5. Waldheim 2016, p. 15.

6. Anthony Vidler. “Trick-Track,” in La Case Vide: La Villette, by Bernard Tschumi (London: Architectural Association, 1985).

7. Waldheim 2016, p. 17

8. Rem Koolhaas, “IIT Student Center Competition Address,” Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture, Chicago, March 5, 1998.

9. Waldheim 2016, p. 56.

10. Ibid., p. 60.

11. Minner, Kelly. “Olympic Sculpture Park / Weiss Manfredi.” ArchDaily, 6 January 2011.

12. Waldheim 2016, p. 61.

13. Dgans. “Biennale for the People: Landscape Urbanism in Israel.” The Architect’s Newspaper, 1 March 2011.

14. Kim, Youngmin. “Criticism of Landscape Urbanism - Focused on Internal Structures of the Discourse.” Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture, Vol. 43 (2015): 87104.

15. Morenas, Leo A. “Critiquing Landscape Urbanism: A View on New York’s High Line.” Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 47, No. 7 (2012): 19–22.

16. Waldheim 2006, p. 16.

The Origins and Practice of Restorative Urbanism

Helen Lea

Introduction

What is Restorative Urbanism?

People are central to the work of urban designers, planners, architects, and landscape architects. People activate the spaces we design and utilize them to improve their own quality of life. Restorative urbanism is an emerging theory grounded in sociology, planning, and design that seeks to challenge the way we design places and use them to optimize the potential of people. The theory centers around mental health, wellness, and quality of life to inspire new approaches to placemaking.1

Compared to the other “urbanisms” that have preceded restorative urbanism, this concept is the “quietest.”2 Restorative urbanism does not aim to be futuristic or novel, but rather draws on established ideas and research to encourage design solutions that are formulated for the benefit of people. The range of restorative urbanist practices touches everything from social interactions to aesthetics, ultimately working to improve the social resiliency of cities in the face of wellness challenges.3

The Impact of COVID-19

The development of the restorative urbanism theory was influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing and isolation mandates brought new stress and mental health challenges to people around the world. In a CDC survey of adults in 2020, rates of self-reported behavioral health symptoms, such as feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as substance use, were roughly double pre-pandemic figures.4 Isolation, loss, and fear of the unknown were all common stressors in the first months of the pandemic that had significant impacts on mental health and quality of life.5

With these new stressors, one common response was to seek the outdoors. As we began to spend more hours inside avoiding infection, the recreational, social, and psychological benefits of spending time outside became clear. Many people fled to suburban neighborhoods to get into nature and away from the health challenges posed by high densities. However, many were able to find respite in public spaces within the city.6 Studies indicate that park usage skyrocketed during the pandemic’s onset, and even after park visitation declined due to stay-at-home orders, the new average volume of park visitors is higher than pre-pandemic figures.7 People sought out parks and open spaces for relief.8

Mental Health

In the wake of COVID-19, discussions of mental health are more common than ever before. Mental health, as defined by the World Health Organization, is “a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.”9 Individuals with good mental health live meaningful, balanced, and productive lives. However, mental health is not defined as being free from mental illness.10 Mental disorders and illnesses may impact mental health but can also be managed in a way that still allows the individual to achieve good mental health.11

The distinction between mental health and mental illness is critical in the context of restorative urbanism because its priority is not to “fix” people. It uses a salutogenic, or health-promoting, approach that does not single out specific diagnoses but rather looks at how to create a healthier society overall.12 As mental health issues become more prevalent – as much as two or three times as common now as compared to 50 years ago – the need for restorative environments that enhance our quality of life is increasingly apparent.13 Restorative urbanism uses planning and design to create environments where people can thrive and builds a foundation for the actualization of good mental health.

Foundational Ideas

Though restorative urbanism is still an emerging theory, the foundational ideas it builds on are already well-established in the fields of design and planning. Practitioners and academics around the world are contributing to the discourse of restorative practices across cultural contexts. Additionally, theorists from urban sociology, urban planning, and sustainability have all contributed ideas that have informed restorative urbanism, showing the interdisciplinary nature of the theory.14

Urban Sociology

Jane Jacobs and William “Holly” Whyte were pioneers of urban sociology. Their research has influenced the way designers utilize space to create desirable interactions between people and the environment. The way we engage with a space is heavily dependent on the physical conditions and characteristics of that space. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs illustrates the importance of sidewalks in defining public spaces, creating interaction between neighbors, and fostering safe neighborhoods.15 Jacobs’ detailed observations of Greenwich Village and other neighborhoods around the United States has led to theories like placemaking, crime prevention through environmental design, and bottom-up planning, all of which contribute to mental well-being and restorative practices in cities.16

In the 1980s, Holly Whyte introduced his theories of urban sociology for plazas and other small spaces that further developed the discourse started by Jacobs. For The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Whyte utilized many observational research methods, including the use of time lapse cameras and interviews, to better understand the ways people chose to interact with space and the reasoning behind their actions. For instance, Whyte concluded that the ultimate magnet of people to a space is other people.17 The opportunity

to meet and interact or just observe from a distance creates an undeniable attraction to public spaces and helps create a setting of mental stimulation conducive to restorative environments.

Urban Planning

As theorists of urban planning, Kevin Lynch and Jan Gehl have made major strides to define the way we perceive public space and the kinds of activities and interactions that occur within those spaces. The frameworks established by planning professionals can determine the success of restorative environments. Lynch’s theories presented in Image of the City in 1960 highlight the importance of wayfinding and perception within urban settings. Being able to identify key landmarks, nodes, paths, edges, and districts can determine a person’s sense of safety and belonging as they orient themselves to their surroundings.18 The identity associated with landmarks and districts can also reinforce inclusion and positive social interactions within cities, which foster restorative environments.

Similarly, Jan Gehl’s theories on the types of activities that occur within public spaces illustrate the different perceptions of behavior within various urban contexts. In his 1971 work Life Between Buildings, Gehl defined three types of activities that occur in public space: necessary activities, optional activities, and social activities.19 These different types of activities focus on essential tasks, enjoyment of the environment, and the resulting social interactions, respectively. Gehl’s definitions build on our understanding of urban sociology and help planners identify spaces that serve each need in order to maximize human potential.

Sustainability

Environments cannot restore people if they do not first restore themselves. One example of sustainability in the context of restorative urbanism is the Omega Center for Sustainable Living in New York. This facility capitalizes on the duality of people and nature by promoting wellness within a wastewater treatment facility. The water treatment process at the Omega Center uses completely natural methods and recharges the aquifer after the water is purified.20 Meanwhile, yoga and other wellness activities can be hosted in the center’s main building. By eliminating harmful equipment and chemicals and promoting natural processes, this system of green infrastructure protects environmental quality and reduces the impact on human health. This juxtaposition of people and environment creates a restorative space that builds resilience for both people and nature. The natural environment is all-encompassing, but within it the built environment has power to influence societal, social, and economic processes that contribute to a sustainable and restorative lifestyle.21

Practicing Restorative Urbanism

Contemporary urban theorists have built on these foundational ideas and grappled with the context of COVID-19 to develop the practice of restorative urbanism. Theories of urban sociology have informed the ways in which space can be manipulated to improve social well-being. The concepts that have shaped urban planning and the identity of public space have influenced the theory’s framework for physical interventions. Sustainability remains at the

heart of it all to promote the longevity of the idea and enhance our physical health.

While there are many academics and practitioners investigating restorative principles, the two main works informing this analysis are Restorative Cities by Jenny Roe and Layla McCay and Happy City by Charles Montgomery. These two books investigate the ways in which cities can be designed for people and promote restorative principles that can lead design and planning to more wellness-focused outcomes. Through a synthesis of Roe, McCay, and Montgomery’s ideas along with other contributions to the discourse of restorative urbanism, six components of restorative urbanism become evident: design process, nature and biophilia, water, mental stimulation, social activity, and mobility.

Design Process

Restorative practices begin at the very start of the planning or design process. Community engagement is a critical part of restorative urbanism that is too often skimmed over or underutilized. Interacting with communities builds trust between residents and planning professionals and helps uncover local knowledge not available through online data portals. By gathering community input through surveys, interviews, or workshops, planners can better understand the needs of a community and build places that serve and restore the people who live there.22 Planners who seek to create restorative cities are charged with using their professional expertise in tandem with community input to create a positive outcome.23 When the process itself is restorative, the mental health benefits can be felt through participation alone, before any design is implemented.24 This is a just model of planning and design, and it is a prerequisite to the development of restorative spaces for everyone within the city.25

Nature and Biophilia

Once a restorative process is established, manipulation of physical characteristics of the city can begin. One of the primary techniques for implementing restorative urbanism is the use of nature and urban green space. Access to nature is critical to promoting good mental health and well-being.26 The impact of nature on mental health can occur directly through cognitive responses or biochemical mechanisms.27 Nature can also be used indirectly, serving as a setting for wellness activities, or by providing physical health benefits.28 Direct and indirect benefits of biophilic cities can be seen in all ages, and the earlier the exposure to nature, the more likely people’s resiliency and well-being will improve throughout their life.29 Nature helps sustain mental and physical health, enabling urban environments to serve the fundamental needs of residents for generations.

Water

Water is another element of restorative cities that is essential for its healing and calming properties. “Blue spaces” are places where visual or physical access to water is available and can be oriented around natural or man-made water features, such as coasts, rivers, lakes, canals, or fountains.30 Interacting with water can improve mental health through cognitive benefits, physical contact, and by providing a setting for social and recreational activities. Water can be

a unifying element that brings people together around a common activity or respite from urban heat islands. It is also commonly used in memorials for its healing qualities, and the symbolism of water has been shown to improve mental well-being in older adults.31 The stress-reducing and social benefits of water make it an important component of restorative urbanism, as designers seek to create environments that soothe the senses and promote healthy living.

Mental Stimulation

Restorative urbanism also promotes ways in which the built environment can stimulate the mind to enhance mental health. Studies show that experiencing new places and diverse environments daily can improve mental well-being.32 Restorative principles can be used to enhance cognitive awareness of environments and improve mental function as described in Lynch’s theories of the city image. The diversity, interest, and sensory aspects of cities are therefore critical to improving mental health as they facilitate positive mental stimulation. This stimulation can occur through any sense, but it is primarily sight and sound that evoke interest and curiosity about our surroundings. Soundscapes of cities such as birdsong or moving water can stimulate the senses through hearing, while public art or distinct building facades can stimulate senses through sight. Ambiance, instinctual sensory evocation, such as the negative reaction to traffic noise, and sleep quality, are all ways mental stimulation can play a pivotal role in creating environments that sustain our well-being and encourage cognitive development.33

Social Activity

Social interactions are a critical aspect of restorative urbanism, drawing from the ideas of urban sociology discussed by Jacobs and Whyte. There are two categories of social activity, impromptu and formal. Restorative urbanism creates spaces that facilitate both, from informal conversations that result from bumping into neighbors on the street to planned gatherings with friends or family in public space.34 Building social networks is an important step in advancing mental health as it gives people systems of support in their community.35 It is also important to include social interactions for all ages. For children in particular, play is a necessary consideration of restorative urbanism. Play fosters learning and cognitive development, builds resilience, encourages curiosity, and promotes physical activity.36 These benefits build up their potential to live healthy and meaningful lives, consistent with the fundamental goals of restorative urbanism. Ensuring that people have equal access to these social and restorative settings is critical. Making sure that the city fosters inclusion will ultimately determine the success regardless of previous efforts.37

Mobility

The final component of restorative urbanism is mobility. The way people move in and around cities can have a significant impact on quality of life for urban residents. Gehl’s analysis of activity in cities supports this component of restorative urbanism, as his categories of activities were largely based on how people move along streets.38 Commuters who travel by car are reportedly the least happy, while pedestrians and bicyclists are the happiest.39 Restorative environments promote freedom in mobility, and that freedom is easier to find

Figure 1: Design process - a community engagement meeting (Emily Vogler, RISD)

Figure 2: Biophilia - people immerse themselves in nature at Central Park (Stefan on Adobe Stock)

Figure 3: Water - canals are central to life in Venice (Dan Novac on Unsplash)

Figure 4: Mental Stimulation - “We the Youth” mural by Keith Haring, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Photo By A. Ricketts for Visit Philadelphia, courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation)

Figure 5: Social ActivityChildren playing in parks is an impromptu social use of public space. (Jay Chen on Unsplash)

Figure 6: Mobility - cycling in Copenhagen (william87 on iStockPhoto)

in flexible systems like walking and biking. People of various ages and abilities should all have equal opportunity to move safely and efficiently through cities.40 The success of cycling infrastructure in Copenhagen has been partially due to its convenience, but, more critically, design interventions have worked to make cycling feel safe.41 Multimodal, safe, and navigable mobility networks within cities help residents fulfill their daily needs and achieve the freedom they need to find restoration in their environment.

Conclusion

Restorative urbanism is a new theory with a long history within the professions of planning, landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design. It is a concept that is constantly building on new research and technology that enables cities to better serve the needs of their residents. The six components of design process, nature and biophilia, water, mental stimulation, social activity, and mobility only begin to describe the depth of concepts that support this theory. As we move into a new normal in the wake of COVID-19, restorative principles will only become more relevant as planners and designers seek to create environments that optimize quality of life, support mental health, and uplift the value of wellness in 21st century contexts.

Notes

1. Jenny Roe and Layla McCay, Restorative Cities. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts (2021): 2.

2. Ibid

3. Gagne, Derek. “What should cities look like after COVID-19?” The Hill, 16 June 2020.

4. Gordon, Joshua. “One Year In: COVID-19 and Mental Health,” National Institute of Mental Health, 9 April 2021.

5. Javed, Bilal, and Abdullah Sarwer, Erik B. Soto, and Zia-ur-Rehman Mashwani, “The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic’s impact on mental health,” International Journal of Health Planning Management, 22 June 2020.

6. Gagne 2020.

7. Volenec, Zoe M., and Joel O. Abraham, Alexander D. Becker and Andy P. Dobson, “Public parks and the pandemic: How park usage has been affected by COVID-19 policies,” PLoS One, 19 May 2021.

8. Andy Olin, “In the COVID-19 era, a renewed appreciation of our parks and open spaces,” Rice Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 10 April 2020.

9. World Health Organization, “Health and Well-Being,” 2022.

10. Ibid

11. Roe and McCay 2021, p. 5.

12. Ibid., p. 7.

13. Montgomery, Charles. Happy City. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2013): 11.

14. Jenny Roe and Layla McCay, “Restorative cities: urban design for mental health and social interaction in the COVID-era,” The Forum Network, 8 October 2021.

15. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House (1961): 30.

16. Center for The Living City, “Jane Jacobs and the Center,” 2022.

17. William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. New York: Project for Public Spaces (1980): 19.

18. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press (1960): 46.

19. Gehl, Jan. Life Between Buildings. Washington D.C.: Island Press (2011): 9.

20. Lis, Paulina. “Designing cities for sustainability, resilience and happiness,” filmed October 2017 in San Diego, USA, TED Talk video, 12:39,

21. Ibid

22. Ibid

23. Fainstein, Susan. “Planning Theory and the City.” Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2005): 121.

24. Roe and McCay 2021, p. 202.

25. Fainstein 2005, p. 122.

26. Gagne 2020.

27. Roe and McCay 2021, p. 20.

28. Ibid., p. 21.

29. Ibid., p. 23.

30. Ibid., p. 42.

31. Ibid., p. 48.

32. Samuelsson, Karl. “The Topodiverse City: Urban Form for Subjective Well-Being,” Frontiers in Built Environment, 15 December 2021..

33. Roe and McCay 2021, p. 66.

34. Ibid., p. 120.

35. Ibid., p. 89.

36. Ibid., p. 139.

37. Ibid., p. 164.

38. Montgomery 2013, p. 151.

39. Ibid., p. 181.

40. Ibid., p. 198.

41. Ibid., p. 219.

3 Urbanisms

David Wangkyu Kim

Cities are growing; according to the US Census Bureau, “Eight of the 10 million-plus cities bested their early 2000s growth, including New York, which registered a 7.7% gain.”1 Given such conditions of growth in our cities and urban environments, several approaches and theories have been formulated, applied, and challenged throughout history to either control, contain or expand the urban fabric. It is getting increasingly difficult to find blank slates in our urban environments. Cities stand as grand palimpsests; history, fluctuating culture, economy, development, and redevelopment, are all part of the dynamic which we have come to define as a “city.” Planners, architects, and urban designers are now faced with challenges to review, reform, and readdress existing forms and systems within urban environments that call out for change, but also resist it. Within this context, the practice of urbanism plays a key role in guiding and planning urban environments. Theories such as landscape urbanism, ecological urbanism, and new urbanism are terms that most, if not all, planners and urban designers are familiar with, especially when considering approaches to planning for ever-urbanizing environments. However, I would like to bring attention to a set of three types of urbanism: New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, and finally Post Urbanism. These three categorizations of Urbanism are introduced by Professor Douglas Kelbaugh of the University of Michigan in his publication: Three Paradigms: New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, Post Urbanism

Why is urbanism important? Urbanism, by definition, according to IGI Global, is the study of how inhabitants of urban areas, such as towns and cities, interact with the built environment.2 Within this practice, the New Urbanism movement, established and popularized in the 1980s, sought to set a paradigm of building and developing cities while being sensitive to human scales, physical and historical context, and community.3 Kelbaugh, a self-identifying New Urbanist, draws attention to New Urbanism for its strengths, but also its flaws, highlighting the additional paradigms of Everyday Urbanism and Post Urbanism and juxtaposing them to the theories of New Urbanism. “New Urbanism enjoys little and often begrudging respect in academia…where poststructuralist and avant-garde theory continue to dominate.”4 Kelbaugh claims that these three paradigms “cover most of the cutting edge of theoretical and professional activity in these two [urbanism and architecture] fields.”5

So how does Kelbaugh describe New Urbanism? According to him, New Urbanism is defined by its qualities of being utopian, inspirational in style, and structuralist in conception.6 He describes it as utopian because it “aspires to a social ethics that builds new or repairs old communities in ways that equitably mix people…”7 Such examples of New Urbanist developments can be found right home here in Philadelphia, the MLK Hope VI plaza development

being a prime example of a development that strove to integrate public and private housing, supported with pedestrian amenities and a coordinated, but not contrived streetscape and architectural style. Kelbaugh continues that New Urbanism holds an inspirational quality through its sponsoring of public architecture and public space—a quality that attempts to “make citizens feel they are a part of, even proud, of both a culture that is more significant that their individual.”8 This inspirational quality is certainly a valid point, and a quality that is often on the forefront of planning endeavors that require a sensitivity to urban, social, and historical context—in a sense New Urbanism seeks to establish a healthy and self-sustaining urban community tied together by identity, meaning, and purpose. However, it is important to note that “there is a direct, structural relationship between social behavior and physical form,” within New Urbanism practices.9

Figure 1: The MLK Hope VI Plaza in South Philadelphia (Payton Chung on Flickr)

Figure 2: Fairview Village, Oregon (©Tim Griffith)

“The physical model is a compact walkable city with a hierarchy of private and public architecture and spaces that are conducive to face-to-face social interaction, including background housing and garden as well as foreground civic and institutional buildings, squares, and parks.” -Douglas Kelbaugh10

New Urbanism’s rather normative nature—the tendency to highlight “good” and “bad” qualities to guide development, can sometimes be a double-edged sword, and New Urbanism, ideally, relies on accurate research and well-backed insight in order to be successful. Additionally, New Urbanism, especially in the case of East Coast New Urbanism, which is described as having more neo-traditional values11 and considered “boring, and uncool in architecture schools,” may not always serve as the best model for development, especially in a highly urban environment that would have trouble supporting its utopian ideals of prescribed architecture, streets, and parks.

Figure 3: Street in Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal (Erik Törner on Flickr)

Figure 4: Tactical Urbanism can be seen as an evolution of Everyday Urbanism, reflecting its decentralized and spontaneous quality with specific and often impromptu solutions in urban spaces (Tactical Urbanist’s Guide)

If New Urbanism introduced a holistic and precedent-based approach to urban design, Everyday Urbanism offers an alternative, albeit less structured, form of urbanism. Everyday Urbanism can be considered an approach that challenges the carefully planned and normative nature of New Urbanism; Kelbaugh defines Everyday Urbanism as a practice that “celebrates and builds on the richness and vitality of daily life and ordinary reality,” and has “little pretense about the perfectibility of the built environment.”12 Examples of Everyday Urbanism can be found throughout all communities across the world. In a sense, one could even consider that Everyday Urbanism occurs where there is no set guideline or aesthetic structure, but a strong ideal shared by those living in said locales and spaces. Having personally grown up in Kathmandu, Nepal during the 2000s and early 2010s, most urban spaces outside of government buildings and wealthier neighborhoods were amalgamations of the intent of shop owners, street residents, and street peddlers. Small Hindu temples could be found in small nooks in the street, and the streets were battlegrounds absent of traffic lights, where pedestrians, cars and motorcyclists had to be ever vigilant of each other. Utility poles and lines composed a chaotic but functional spiderweb of cables above storefronts with gaudy signs battling for attention. Streets here reflected the values, aspirations and interactions of its residents, with conventional design more often than not absent—“a sort of community capitalism without much capital.”13 This informal nature of Everyday Urbanism, according to Kelbaugh, finds it place in developing cities, as well as ethnic communities within cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. Philadelphia, with its many distinct neighborhoods and distinct states of development, urbanization, and social fabric, could benefit from the actions that Everyday Urbanism would entail.

“Everyday Urbanism delights in the spontaneous and Indigenous; in the ways that migrant groups, for instance, appropriate and adapt to their ad hoc conditions and marginal spaces.” -Douglas Kelbaugh14

If New Urbanism offers an approach that is precedent-based, based on the past for inspiration, Everyday Urbanism introduces an approach that focuses on the present—looking to existing conditions and identifying the value of what is already happening. However, what about the future? This is where Post Urbanism makes its entrance. By far the most distinct of the three paradigms of urbanism introduced by Kelbaugh, “Post Urbanism is viewed in the academic world and the media as hip, avant-garde, or post avant-garde.”15 By far the most architecturally-based of the paradigms, Post Urbanism bases its core values upon eschewing conventional design practices found in New Urbanism. In the words of Kelbaugh, Post Urbanism “is heterotopian, sensational, and poststructuralist.”16 Kelbaugh refers to Post Urbanism as “Koolhaasian Urbanism,” a nod to Rem Koolhaas, a Dutch architect known for his embracing of modernity within his designs and philosophy. Koolhaas, in his publication “Whatever Happened to Urbanism,” outlines the notion that urbanism has been severely weakened by the rapid and often architecturebased development of our urban environments.17

“Now we are left with a world without urbanism, only architecture, ever more architecture. The neatness of architecture is its seduction; it defines, excludes, limits, separates from the “rest” -but it also consumes. It exploits and exhausts the potentials that can be generated finally only by urbanism, and that only the specific imagination of urbanism can invent and renew.”

-Rem Koolhaas “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?”18

Figure 7: The LUMA Arles Art Center in Arles, France (Adrian Deweerdt/LUMA)

Figure 5: The Bundeswehr Military History Museum by Daniel Libeskind (Hufton + Crow)

Figure 6: The Heydar Aliyev Center by Zaha Hadid Architects (Hufton + Crow)

Some parallels can be drawn between Post Urbanism and Modernism; both gravitate towards the need to create spaces and architecture that reject conventional practices, and both place importance into creating an experience that “wows.” There is also, at present, an attitude towards embracing the future and pushing the limits of what can be achieved architecturally and spatially.19 However, Post Urbanism diverges from modernism in the sense that it does not look to science or technology, and both components take a back seat to the individual architect’s vision and expression. Subsequently, Post Urbanism depends on the prowess of “star architects” to lead the charge in creating something truly novel. However, Post Urbanism is not without its flaws. It cannot be implemented everywhere, as it “is stylistically sensational because it attempts to wow an increasingly sophisticated consumer in and of the built environment with ever-wilder and provocative architecture and urbanism.”20 The keyword here being “sophisticated,” as the audience that Post Urbanism best serves is one that value the endeavors it is attempting to achieve with its “avant-garde shock tactics or to inspire genuine belief in the possibility of changing the status quo and of resisting controls and limits. Post Urbanist designs hold power in that they are different from the status quo, so different in fact that they do not seem to find a place to “fit in” the urban fabric, subsequently making them instantly recognizable and easy to attribute to the urban environment which houses them, whether they result in good publicity or bad publicity. Such examples can be seen in the architectural works of Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and Zaha Hadid.

The three paradigms of New, Everyday, and Post Urbanism are not perfect concepts, nor can they be applied to all urban areas. New Urbanism, with its value of history, culture, and both physical and social context starts to show weaknesses when it comes to its inevitable structural limitations; “accept the walkability but reject the narrow lots; mix uses but mix them gently, and upscale; keep the overall coherence but dilute the symmetry in town plans.”21 New Urbanism flourishes in environments such as North America, where development is established and growing at a moderate rate, which allows for gentler approaches to development within cities that can allow it to happen. Conversely, Everyday Urbanism thrives and succeeds in developing or growing urban areas, especially those of the Global South, where the favelas of Brazil serve as prime examples of Everyday Urbanism. Post Urbanism, according to Kelbaugh, shines the brightest in European cities, where “a wealthy citizenry has the luxury of fine-tuning coherent maturing urban fabric.”22

So how do we as planners and designers, learn from these paradigms? Certainly, the tenets of New Urbanism still echo today within the practice of planning and urban design; neighborhood plans, redevelopment, and new development strives to take in as much information about the urban context as possible to create urban fabrics that do not feel fragmented from the city. However, New Urbanism, or urbanism in general, continues to evolve. Kelbaugh offers three methods of approach to urbanism: all valid, but all lacking. Perhaps his outlining of these theories belies a need for them to meld together, and extract from one another the best practices that would most benefit the urban contexts that they would be applied in. As technology evolves, so will the city. As urban populations grow and methods of communication, mobility, land use, and social interaction subsequently evolve to match that change, planners and designers must start to address issues such as post-pandemic cities, the mega city, and other emerging typologies of urban environments.

Perhaps we need the sensational ideas of Post Urbanism to revitalize and galvanize lost identities of aging urban fabrics. Perhaps we need the spontaneity and social energy that Everyday Urbanism encourages, to find and give meaning to the smaller, less noticed spaces of city. And perhaps we must reconsider whether New Urbanism, with its utopian ideals, is truly what is necessary for cities and urban environments that have become multifaceted, fragmented, and polarized by reckless development and poor policies. Without a doubt, we are facing an urban future that requires us as planners and designers to place-make, adapt, and challenge what it means to understand our cities.

Notes

1. Fey, William. “2020 Census: Big Cities Grew and Became More Diverse, especially among Their Youth.” Brookings, October 28, 2021.

2. “What Is Urbanism.” IGI Global, Dictionary. 2022.

3. Fishman, Robert. “New Urbanism: Peter Calthorpe vs. Lars Lerup.” Michigan Debates on Urbanism, University of Michigan, Vol. 2 (2005): 1–74.

4. Kelbaugh, Douglas. “Three Paradigms: New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, Post Urbanism— An Excerpt from The Essential COMMON PLACE.” The Essential COMMON PLACE (200): 286–89.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid

7. Ibid

8. Ibid

9. Ibid 10. Ibid

11. Mehrotra, Rahul. “Everyday Urbanism.” Michigan Debates on Urbanism Vol. 1 (30 January 2004): 2–72.

16. Kelbaugh 2000.

17. Koolhas, Rem. “Whatever Happened to Urbanism.” Design Quarterly No. 164 (1995): 28-31. 18.

Probing the Theory “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design”

Julian Graybill Brubaker

While planners have attempted to reduce crime in towns and cities for centuries, a theory of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) only formally entered the architecture and design canon in recent decades. CPTED in the United States originated in the 1960s and 1970s, partly as a backlash to the failed urban planning initiatives of the 1950s and before. Two female city planners provided the theoretical arguments backing CPTED. Journalist Jane Jacobs’ famous 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, critiqued the urban planning of the previous decade, which rested on the idea of slum clearance and haphazard neighborhood beautification. Instead, Jacobs advocated for community investment into public spaces and public housing projects, providing residents with a sense of ownership and empowering them to watch over their own communities rather than rely only on law enforcement.1 Jacobs was the first scholar to truly capture the nuances of the urban landscape, according to the architectural father of CPTED, Oscar Newman. Jacobs argued that the more action a street had, the more diversity of possible legitimate uses, and the more the hustle and bustle would discourage crime.2

The second scholar to contribute the theoretical underpinnings of CPTED was Chicago Housing Authority director Elizabeth Wood, who advocated for more enriching architectural solutions to the instability and stigma inherent in living in a housing project. Importantly, Wood argued for more places to play and loiter, and her designs aimed to create a more natural, homey feel to the brash and anonymous public housing design of previous decades.3 Both Jacobs and Wood honed in on the natural human surveillance of the already existing residents within a community, and tried to create design solutions that maximized this natural surveillance.

The direct precursor to CPTED was the architectural idea of “defensible space” first coined in the early 1960s by a working group on inner city crime hosted by Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Sociologists, police officers, and architects/planners (including Oscar Newman and Roger Montgomery) came together to brainstorm how to solve the problem of urban crime. They focused on an infamous public housing complex with high crime and higher vacancy - the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex built in 1956 in St. Louis.4 Newman went on to publish works on defensible space in 1972 and beyond, arguing that designers could construct spaces in ways that encourage some activities while deterring other, usually criminal activities.5

Newman’s publications could not have spread so widely without a few popular theories of crime prevention at the time, namely “broken windows policing” and the “routine activities theory” of criminal behavior. By policing the most minor

misconduct and aesthetic displeasure such as cracked or broken windows, many law enforcement officials believed they could limit more serious crimes, which they saw as a result of unclean, unkempt neighborhoods. Routine activities theory, on the other hand, focused on repetitive human interactions within public spaces that increased the likelihood of criminals brushing with innocent civilians while feeling emboldened by the routine nature of those interactions and the lack of guardians ready to intervene.6 These theories, combined with the growing prevalence of geographic information systems (GIS) technology, allowed criminologists to pinpoint hot spots of crime. This then allowed landscape architects/designers to compare hot & cold crime spots and analyze what structural features of hot spots might predispose them to criminal activities.

CPTED was becoming popular within some US architectural and city planning circles, but had not yet caught on at a national or international level until it began to intermix with theories of national security and counterterrorism. After WWII, private defense contractors began to get articles published in planning and administration journals arguing for infusing city and regional planning with military, counterterrorism measures. States and major cities began employing defense contracting companies to shore up their defenses during the onset of the Cold War.7 Then, a number of bombings of US embassies abroad in the 1980s, followed by terror attacks on US soil in the 1990s and 2001, motivated the US government to urgently pursue permanent architectural solutions to the risk of bombings and terrorism rather than the government’s previous “guards, gates, and guns” approach.8

At this point, most defensive design was clunky but highly visible (with the aim of overpoweringly deterring criminal attempts).9 Much of this first wave of defensive designs, especially in the nation’s capital, were semi-temporary structures that detracted from the aesthetic pleasure of Washington DC’s monuments and architecture, thereby prompting criticism of its uncreative approach to crime deterrence. Similarly, the first wave of CPTED aimed at preventing petty “crimes,” like sleeping on public benches overnight or skateboarding, relied on ugly armrests, spikes, and other outwardly hostile architecture that prompted backlash.

Lack of creativity was not the only issue that initially held CPTED back. Visibly secure structures populated with preventative blockades, fences, or unattractive spikes and other anti-homeless architecture had the unintended effect of making everyday passers-by feel less secure. As a pedestrian, being reminded of the ever-present risk of a terrorist incident or the city’s attitude towards the homeless population put safety in the front of people’s minds, making them shifty and uncomfortable. This first wave of defensive design actually ended up creating liminal spaces that people preferred to pass through quickly rather than stop and socialize in.10 It turns out, people want to feel safe without having to think about it.

Public and architectural backlash to blocky, unimaginative “first-generation” CPTED techniques prompted a reevaluation and refinement of the theory, according to criminologists/designers Paul Cozens and Terence Love.11 Upon reflection, architects and landscape architects began to infuse their designs with more of an emphasis on social cohesion and community connection to the space, not only giving them ownership over their public spaces but encouraging them to collectively support those spaces in a positive way,

rather than just negatively preventing certain criminal activities. This “secondgeneration” CPTED also tried to rely more on “soft” and less obviously anticrime architectural and landscaping techniques. Some second-generation CPTED advocates pushed for natural landscape solutions to design, rather than man-made structures. Other, more counterterrorism-focused CPTED scholars argued for an integration of strong, reinforced or “hardened” manmade structures with the natural environment in ways that made defensive structures less obvious.12 Still others stuck to their guns, advocating for the age-old value of impressive defense that awes and discourages potential criminals through outright deterrence rather than the more subconscious shifts away from crime and towards legitimate behavior that softer, secondgeneration CPTED measures aimed to accomplish.13 Each of these visions of CPTED became popular in different regions across the world as the idea of defensible spaces and what I call behavioral architecture spread outside the US. Now, CPTED is a strategy adopted and encouraged by the United Nations, and much research on the topic has been conducted by researchers from the UK or elsewhere in the EU, China, Canada, and Australia.14

These varied approaches to CPTED and defensive design techniques had different end goals that I believe are important to spell out clearly, for their differing motivations create widely disparate solutions to similar problems. For simplicity’s sake, I will consider two main camps of CPTED. The first is prevention of petty crimes like homelessness in public spaces, skateboarding and parkour, or graffiti and minor vandalism. The second type of architectural crime prevention tries to meet the threat of more serious criminals, who are assumed to carry malicious intent and resources capable of largescale attacks. This more militant, counterterrorist strain of CPTED employs a fortress mentality, forgoing most aesthetic design choices for practical deterrents. The former version of CPTED tries to inconspicuously infuse crime-prevention into the most minor aspects of planning and design, while the latter type of intense CPTED is unconcerned with creating a locked-down, battle-ready aesthetic.

The central tenets of the more traditional and softer approach to CPTED include a mix of natural surveillance, maintenance of a positive image, access control, activity support, and territoriality.15 Natural surveillance, outlined previously in this paper, means opening up spaces in order to make them more visible for everyone. That way, everyone is in full view of the other people present in the space and will act accordingly. Second, by maintaining a positive aesthetic within a space, designers believe that they will reduce the desire to vandalize or otherwise act illegally within the space. This central tenet of CPTED is pulled directly out of the playbook of the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention discussed earlier. Third, CPTED aims to control access to the space, thereby heightening the risk of entering a space with ill or unauthorized intent. Access control can look very different, however, ranging from no-nonsense fences and gates to creative landscape features meant to funnel visitors into specific access points. Fourth, CPTED attempts to not only discourage certain uses but encourage intended uses of the space, through the use of signage or intentional design that indicates how to engage with it. Finally, CPTED creates the conditions for a shared territoriality of the space, investing in each resident with a piece of ownership and connection to the physical space. In this way, defensive designs can enlist residents to cultivate, monitor, and protect their own public spaces.16

A similar CPTED approach towards serious violent crime upholds some of the same tenets but approaches them differently, emphasizing the importance of preparation and deterrence more than a shared community feel. Often, this type of CPTED is dedicated to spaces containing “critical infrastructure,” which rarely evokes the community’s ethos. It would not make much sense to invoke a sense of territoriality among laborers at a chemical laboratory or electrical plant, since they are already tasked with preserving the integrity of the space. “Hard” CPTED designs often split up a space into concentric spaces, becoming more defensible moving inward (closer to the valuable asset). For a large public space meant to be a community hub for social interaction, this regimented and fortified approach would detract from socialization.17 But for a space dedicated to smooth industrial operations, a shared territoriality is nonessential. Relatedly, hard CPTED measures are less worried about creating a hostile aesthetic than softer CPTED, which aims to blend defensive designs into the natural environment. Instead, hard CPTED employs a sort of reinforced windows theory of crime prevention, where the more hardened a space appears, the less likely it is to be targeted with crime.

Of course, it is not very illuminating to speak only in the abstract about CPTED, and it may be difficult to see the distinction between soft and hard versions of CPTED theory without specific examples. In the following paragraphs, I will provide architectural and design choices that fall under soft and hard CPTED. Many have multiple uses though, as soft CPTED measures especially aim to create defensive designs that double as engaging edifices or landscapes and are not solely constructed for crime prevention. The most obvious and ubiquitous example of this multiple use is benches that are meant for sitting but discourage sleeping, known as “anti-sleep” or “bum-proof” benches.18 In recent decades, many high-profile design projects have used benches along the curb or perimeter of a space not only to provide convenient seats, but also as blockades against vehicles trying to approach the base of a building.

Examples of softer CPTED measures include surreptitiously bolting down all furniture to prevent theft or even temporary relocation of furniture that could be used to jump a fence or wall. Plants and bushes should be designed in a way that discourage defacing blank, open walls. Plants are a good option for less overt CPTED design choices; choosing see-through plants can increase a space’s natural surveillance, for example.19 Common targets of vandalism can be invisibly glazed with anti-vandal paints or coatings that are non-stick or cheap enough to peel off after an incident of graffiti or other petty vandalism; this type of cheap reinforcement is broadly known as “target hardening.”20 Skatestoppers (also known as “pig ears”) can be installed in ways that camouflage them in plain sight, while commonplace garbage and recycling bins can be retrofitted to prevent sifting through the receptacle, again meant to prevent petty or subsistence crimes like dumpster diving. Strategically placed and timed sprinkler systems that run at night can discourage congregating or sleeping within the range of the sprinkler’s spray.21 More insidiously, many city governments, including Philadelphia, have installed sound output systems that emit a subtle and high-pitched squealing that can only be heard by young people who have not lost many of the hairs and cells required to hear highpitched sounds. Called the Mosquito, these devices are currently in over 30 Philly parks, and the city began installing them in 2014. The technology is usually quite unpopular once residents find out about it. In 2010 these devices were installed in Washington DC along Gallery Place, but were quickly dismantled due to swift public backlash.22

Lighting can also be used in creative ways to deter crime, including by playing with intensity or hue to discourage loitering and group congregation.23 In dark areas, bright lighting can illuminate hot spots for crime. Accompanying brighter lights with a reflective sign outlawing certain activities, or just as commonly, explicitly encouraging other uses, can further drive away potential criminals.24 Fencing is just as crucial as lighting, with perimeters around important or outlawed spaces, even cordoning off access to unused spaces under bridges or overpasses where homeless people tend to congregate during inclement weather. CPTED would advocate for transparent fencing, maximizing the openness and natural surveillance of the space, thereby discouraging any sneaking around.25 Many cities also use fences or cages around hot air and steam vents with the purpose of discouraging sleeping, a common practice among homeless people when it is cold outside.26 Unsurprisingly, another common and cheap tactic for controlling access to defensible spaces is the proliferation of locking and other accessibility mechanisms which can usually be remotely opened or closed.27

Some soft CPTED measures require a fundamental reorganization of a space or integrating defensive designs into the preliminary plan for a new space. Oscar Newman, the first architect to outline how to defend a space, advocates for spacing out public housing into smaller complexes, each with its own small public space. “A family’s claim to a territory diminishes proportionally as the number of families who share that claim increases. The larger the number of people who share a territory, the less each individual feels rights to it.”28 Even though the public spaces will be split up into smaller divisions, each subspace is frequented by fewer people who feel more like the space is theirs, and they will more often recognize their neighbors (or so the theory goes). Newman also believes that each sub-space should have a dedicated “captain” or leader from among the residents who will communicate with neighbors and monitor the space to ensure it says well-maintained.29 Newman even argues for another mechanism of shared ownership: requiring public housing renters/homeowners to pay for roughly 50% of the costs of renovating a neighborhood. He believes this will increase the community’s commitment to public spaces since they are forced to financially contribute.30

The distinction that I am drawing between soft and hard CPTED is an artificial one, to be clear. Different design choices have a multitude of goals, which rarely fit into easy categories. For example, some design techniques could be characterized as both soft and hard. While bollards or large boulders are overtly hostile, replacing them with oversized planters, reinforced benches, statues or sculptures, etc. along a curbside or perimeter can beautify a space while deterring many uses: homeless tents, informal merchant carts, or vehicular attacks.31 Similarly, University of Pennsylvania researcher Eugenia Catarina South argues that in order to prevent gun violence in cities, we need to start by cleaning them up and making them more green.32 All of the aforementioned examples of defensive design in this paragraph can fit nicely with the harder CPTED technique of creating “stand-off spaces” that jut out from the base of a building to block or slow a vehicle trying to reach the building. These wide spaces, usually set at a minimum of 82 feet away from the base of buildings, are opportunities for landscape design and beautification.33

While some examples could be considered both soft and hard CPTED, sometimes the two sub-theories conflict. For example, softer CPTED measures that aim to prevent petty crime call for large windows on the first

floor of buildings, with the purpose of allowing those inside to surveil those outside and vice versa, increasing the space’s natural surveillance.34 However, a hard CPTED approach aimed at shoring up a building against a major vehicular explosive device would mandate no windows on the first floor, to increase the building’s ability to withstand a bomb blast. Other floors should have windows that will blow out during an explosion, absorbing some of the impact, but the first floor must be fortified. Therefore, depending on the end goal of defensive design and the risks of various types of crime, architectural solutions might look very different. In a nutshell, all CPTED is context-specific and crime-specific.

Most hard CPTED techniques are clear in their objectives. Spikes over spaces where homeless people often congregate sends them a loud and clear message of their unwelcomed status. Replacing plants with thornier, thicker bushes is an unambiguous attempt to deter vandals and trespassers. Installing grates with openings just small enough to prevent a human body from squeezing through might actually require more costs in installation and maintenance and decreased flow from the pipes that grates cover, but prevent passage through them.35 Removing transit station furniture, and displaying signs that read “see something, say something” is annoying, yes, but it also creates an aura of suspicion and scrutiny, making anything out of order stand out.36 Hardening a perimeter with increased fencing, checkpoints, triggered alarms, and automatic surveillance systems can only be interpreted as an effort to more closely control access despite added time and money.37 The purpose of overt CPTED is to consciously deter criminals who give up in the face of overwhelming defensive measures. As FEMA argues, in the modern era, “Now, the community must learn to live with security.”38 However, as this paper outlined earlier, such stark defensive design can have unintended consequences in aesthetic appeal or public perception of safety. Conspicuous security measures in design creates an aura of ever-present risk, suspicion, and even insecurity. Architecture communicates something subconscious to its inhabitants, and overtly secure landscapes convey a message of an always-watching, distrustful institutional power.39

Because of these unintended, often unpredictable effects of harsher and more conspicuous design, even hard CPTED measures are sometimes disguised or created with multiple uses in mind. For example, plants near entrances can decorate and soften a highly defended structure, but should be chosen with care; plants with underbrush close to the ground could be ripe hiding spots for a bomb or other risk, so only tall plants should be placed near building entrances.40 But the best and possibly most impractical example of surreptitious hard CPTED is a new technology called the Tiger Trap, which is a trapdoor covered with sod and plants but ready to open up at the press of a button and drop a speeding vehicle through the false bottom and into a hollowed-out ditch, thereby foiling a grand terrorist scheme. In other examples of preventing a rare vehicular attack, many roads and other access points to critical infrastructure sites are designed at a sharp angle from the feeder streets that lead to them, to prevent high-speed approaches via vehicle.41 Designing contoured outer landscapes dotted with divots, ditches, drop-offs, hills, berms, steppes, and other changes in elevation can impede vehicles approaching a building, as can canals, ponds, and watering holes.42 As mentioned before, landscape architects creatively use decorative bollards, sculptures, planters, notice boards, reinforced streetlights, or benches that all double as barriers against vehicles.43

Similarly, outdoor walkways under a hard CPTED design plan are much longer, as a way to monitor pedestrians: “creating strata of buffer zones between the publicly accessible areas and the important areas of the facility by means of obstacle course, a serpentine and curvilinear path and/or a division of functions within the building will all slow a potential criminal intent on destruction.”44 Within a building’s interior, CPTED designers create distinctions between high-traffic, public-facing spaces and the internal, more functional spaces of the building. If at all possible, many CPTED architects argue that any hightraffic area that cannot be well-protected (like a loading dock, parking lot or similar) should remain external to the main part of the building, as should fuel storage containers and even trash receptacles.45 The best defensive design against terrorism or other acts of mass violence and sabotage is redundancy, especially in the energy generation sector. Surprisingly, hard CPTED design even advocates for placing not just structures but humans in high-risk spaces, in order to discourage the more ethical and ecological saboteurs who try to avoid loss of human life when planning attacks.46

CPTED may currently be in a time of transition. Soft and hard versions of the theory are blending together as all of society becomes more oriented around risk and public safety. CPTED measures are fusing with other theories of architectural defense, namely designing resiliency to the climate crisis and the more intense natural disasters it will bring. Defensive design is now morphing into a more integrated risk management ethos of a landscape architecture/ design that is responsive to multifaceted threats, including terrorism, sabotage, vandalism, and the impending climate crisis. This type of holistic design includes counterterrorism and defensive design measures in the initial conceptual plans for a landscape or structure, not as an afterthought.47 This third generation of CPTED requires outside-the-box thinking from architects who must create spaces that are flexible in their defense, able to respond to numerous threats while remaining inviting spaces for pedestrians to engage with.

In conclusion, I want to briefly critique a few essential aspects of CPTED. The main criticisms of today’s manifestations of CPTED, whether hard or soft, focus on how defensive designs create sterile spaces that are secure but lifeless. Places of gathering become places of scrutiny. Loitering and spontaneous interactions are discouraged. Rather than socialize, pedestrians only pass through. Further research is necessary for any CPTED project to evaluate whether it does what it says. CPTED should be “means tested” to ensure it does indeed reduce crime (or at least reduce the perception of crime and increase feelings of safety). As this paper outlined, a CPTED measure that is too conspicuous or heavy handed can actually alienate the people it is designed to protect, even making them feel like a space is less safe than it was before. CPTED measures always have trade-offs, with added costs for added security. And in the broader trade-off between safety and human dignity, what is the role of the designer or architect in creating spaces that treat people with respect? One particular stakeholder in public-facing CPTED structures who is often overlooked is people without homes: their existence has become not only criminalized but designed against and constructed against. CPTED is also a paternalistic view of planning, which approaches human behavior as largely unthinking and easily swayed. However, crime is not so unilaterally caused by external factors. A person’s individual lived experience is a far better predictor of crime than the architecture of criminal hot spots. Finally, if designed without a contextual understanding of how the community in question operates,

CPTED will feel forced or fake, and therefore may risk driving away or excluding those it spends so much time and resources trying to secure.

Notes

1. Seung Lee, Jae, and Sungjin Park and Sanghoon Jung. “Effect of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) Measures on Active Living and Fear of Crime.” Sustainability (2016), Vol. 8, Iss. 872.

2. See pp. 126-7 of Newman, Oscar. “Architectural Design for Crime Prevention.” Institute of Planning & Housing, New York University, March 1973.

3. Ibid, pp. 119-22.

4. Ibid, pp. 7-9.

5. See p. 7 of Khan, Lauren. “The Aesthetics of Counterterrorism.” Journal of International Relations, Vol. 20, Spring 2018.

6. For more on routine activities theory, otherwise known as “lifestyle theory,” see Gruenewald, Jeff, and Kayla Allison-Gruenewald & Brent R. Klein. “Assessing the Attractiveness and Vulnerability of Eco-Terrorism Targets: A Situational Crime Prevention Approach.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 38: pp. 433–455, 2015.

7. See Quirk, Patti. “Fortress America: The Aesthetics of Homeland Security in the Public Realm.” Masters’ Thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School. Sept 2017.

8. Khan 2018, p. 9.

9. Ibid

10. See Cozens, Paul, and Terence Love. “The Dark Side of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED).” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 29 Mar 2017.

11. Ibid. See also an article from two years prior, by the same authors: Cozens, Paul, and Terence Love. “A Review and Current Status of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED).” Journal of Planning Literature 2015, Vol. 30 (4), pp. 393-412.

12. Quirk 2017.

13. See Okeke, F.O., and I.G. Chendo & C.G. Sam Amobi. “Resilient architecture; a design approach to counter terrorism in building for safety of occupants.” IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering Vol. 640 (2019).

14. Cozens & Love 2015.

15. See Seung Lee et al. 2016; see also Cozens & Love 2017.

16. Seung Lee et al. 2016.

17. See p. 2 of Newman 1973. It is important to note that Newman did advocate for splitting public housing into smaller housing units, which he thought allowed for smaller, more authentic communities to develop and gave residents a better sense of control over their public spaces, since fewer people controlled each space (even though the public space was split up into smaller units as well).

18. Rosenberger, Robert. “On hostile design: Theoretical and empirical prospects.” Urban Studies 2020, Vol. 57(4), pp. 883–893.

19. Project for Public Spaces, “Preventing Graffiti.” 31 Dec 2008.

20. Ibid. Coatings usually include tough chemicals like polyurethanes, especially fluorocarbonates, which are not environmentally-friendly.

21. Rosenberger 2020.

22. Winberg, Michaela. “Can You Hear It? Sonic Devices Play High-Pitched Noises To Repel Teens.” National Public Radio, 10 July 2019.

23. Ibid.

24. Cozens & Love 2017.

25. Rosenberger 2020.

26. Cozens & Love 2017.

27. Cozens & Love 2017.

28. See p. 17 of Newman, Oscar. “Creating Defensible Space.” Institute for Community Design Analysis, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and Research, April 1996.

29. Ibid., p. 45.

30. Ibid., p. 42.

31. Rosenberger, Robert. “On hostile design: Theoretical and empirical prospects.” Urban Studies 2020, Vol. 57(4), pp. 883–893.

32. South, Eugenia Catarina. “To Combat Gun Violence, Clean Up the Neighborhood.” The New York Times, Oct 2021.

33. Cozens & Love 2017.

34. Licht, Karl de Fine. “‘Hostile architecture’ and its confederates: A conceptual framework for how we should perceive our cities and the objects in them.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research; Winnipeg Vol. 29, Iss. 2, (Winter 2020): pp. 1-17.

35. FEMA, “Site and Urban Design for Security: Guidance Against Potential Terrorist Attacks.” Vol. 430, 2020.

36. See p. 307 of Bolz Jr., Frank, and Kenneth J. Dudonis and David P. Schulz. The Counterterrorism Handbook: Tactics, Procedures, and Techniques, fourth edition. 2012, Taylor and Francis Group. In a space with little furniture, any unattended baggage is hypervisible.

37. Gruenwald et al. 2015.

38. See p. 98 of FEMA 2008.

39. Quirk 2017.

40. FEMA, “Site and Urban Design for Security: Guidance Against Potential Terrorist Attacks.” Vol. 430, 2020.

41. FEMA, 2020.

42. See p. 10 and p. 13 of Okeke et al. 2019.

43. Quirk 2017.

44. See p. 10 of Okeke et al. 2019.

45. Okeke et al. 2019; see also Gruenwald et al. 2015 for mention of trash receptacles and fuel containers as high risk structures in an event of a terrorist incident.

46. Gruenwald et al. 2015.

47. Khan 2018, p. 14. The next frontier for defensive design is cybersecurity and network architecture design.

Clean and White: Environmental Racism & Spatial Policy in the United States

Yasmine McBride

Environmental racism is a subject that has been gaining visibility and momentum in the last 40 years. It can be generally defined as a form of systematic racism where people of color are disproportionally exposed to health hazards through direct government policymaking. This can take many different permutations in architecture, landscape, and planning environments, but is typically seen through toxic waste, sewage works, power stations, major roads and infrastructure, or mines. Often these elements are deliberately planned to cut through low-income neighborhoods, often disproportionately Black and Brown neighborhoods, in America.1 While there are many causations for these policy decisions, and perhaps many chicken and egg arguments to be made, one theory is that much of modern-day environmental racism stems from a particular idea of “clean and white.” In other words, ideas of race as related to hygiene. This theory is outlined in Carl. A Zimring’s book Clean and White, A History of Environmental Racism. In order to understand its inception and thesis, we can look to the history of environmental racism discourse and some examples of its physical manifestations.

Benjamin Chavis, a civil rights leader and now president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, first introduced the term “environmental racism” in 1982. He described it explicitly as “racial discrimination in environmental policy making, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the ecology movements.”2 Chavis wrote a report entitled “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” in which he investigates and challenges the presence of toxic substances in residential areas across the country that house primarily Black people. He calls out the presence of toxic waste as an “insidious form of racism.”3 Forty years after Chavis’ claim, we see studies showing that Black and Hispanic children are more likely to develop asthma than their white peers.4 We also know that COVID-19 disproportionally affects communities of color.5

Examples of environmental racism in the United States take a variety of different manifestations. The South Bronx, for example, has been nicknamed “asthma alley” due to its disproportionately high cases of asthma, particularly among children. It is estimated that 20 percent of the children in the South Bronx have asthma.6 The Cross-Bronx Expressway directly cuts through a residential neighborhood, and many other industrial sites have been deliberately planned on the edges of communities of color. Activist groups like South Bronx United are protesting the government and corporations such as food delivery organization Fresh Direct, who is building a distribution center in

the South Bronx that includes wastewater transfer and sewage treatment. Its construction and activation will greatly impact the area’s air quality and lead to more asthma and asthma related illness.7

An infamous example of environmental racism is the case of Flint, Michigan. According to Paul Mohai, professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, Flint is one of the most “egregious examples of environmental injustice.”8 The crisis occurred around the city’s failure to treat its municipal water system after a change to the source water. This led to elevated lead levels in the city’s water and an increase in lead levels in children’s blood. Most residents are low-income people of color, and the city management failed to adequately respond to the crisis.

In Philadelphia, the Grays Ferry neighborhood currently shows disproportionately high cancer and asthma rates compared to the rest of the city. The Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery takes up 1,300 acres of land around the area on the banks of the Schuylkill River. By 1891, half of the world’s lighting fuel came from this refinery. Decades later, in 1934, South Philadelphia was redlined and given a “D” rating, leading to disinvestment and decay in the area.9 It is no coincidence that the refinery was stationed here, in a Black community, and that the deliberate redlining policy further scarred the neighborhood. In the 21st century, environmental rights organizations like “Philly Thrive” are organized around these principles and work to dismantle the systems that lead to pollution disproportionately affecting Black communities in Philadelphia. The politics, economics, and health hazards are all intricately linked in this location and in many others across the country.

Figure 1: Image from South Bronx United’s protest against Fresh Direct (South Bronx Unite)

One explanation for why this might be is the theory “clean and white.” Carl A. Zimring makes a case for much of the environmentally racist policy making having ties back to ideas related to cleanliness and hygiene. Zimring is an environmental historian interested in attitudes concerning waste, and how they shape society, culture, institutions, and inequalities. He is also a professor at Pratt School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies. In his book, Clean and White, Zimring explains that the policy decisions that have led to these now obvious and ubiquitous attacks on people of color through the design of our cities are tied to certain ideas around cleanliness. Perhaps the racialized ideas of hygiene are theories creates to justify racist policy, or perhaps it is in and of itself a generator of the policy, but regardless, the ideas in Clean and White call out a history of both the individual and systematic racism that create a negative feedback loop.

Zimring begins the text with Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, a farmer himself, saw American as a society of farmers. He discusses the role as an “equilibrium of agriculture, manufactures and commerce… essential to our independence.”10 Jefferson felt strongly that cities in Europe were unhygienic and dirty. Conversely, he tied certain concepts of virtue to the rural and pastoral life of American farming. Jefferson believed that poverty and filth were closely tied, in what he called “vice and wretchedness.”11 Jefferson chose to spend his last days in Monticello, a pastoral home that he designed and built in the countryside, the epitome of what he thought to be clean and virtuous.

As cities in America grew during Jefferson’s time, it appeared that his ideas of vice and wretchedness were being exemplified. In 1771, Philadelphia only had 120 public wells for water, and the public water system carried many contaminants and diseases throughout the city. The Architect of the U.S. Capitol, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, found the now obvious link between poor city sanitation and yellow fever outbreaks in 1798.12 Concurrently with city development in America and the increase in squalor, Jefferson grappled with his own justifications for slavery, which, for him, were tied to dirtiness and the city. Jefferson grew obsessed with color, as references to “white” and “black”

Figure 2: Philly Thrive demonstration for clean air and water (Joe Piette)

were becoming increasingly popular.13 Jefferson began to openly admit his beliefs in white supremacy, for which he supposed there must be some type of “natural” or environmental reason. He writes, “this unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”14

According to Zimring, “the economic inequalities and filth Jefferson saw in European cities came to America as poverty became unavoidable on the streets of Boston and New York and was eminently visible.”15 In the 1850s, the United States began to see slum development outside New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. As urban populations dramatically increased, urban sanitation decreased. In the 1830s, the middle class begin to attribute the high mortality rates in cities to character flaws and moral defects in the residents, not to the diseases spread by poor municipal waste management.16 In many minds, cleanliness was next to godliness, and unclean conditions also equated to low moral character of citizens.

Around this time, the notion of a pastoral ideal also begins to take hold in popular culture. These representations, seen in the paintings of Thomas Cole or in Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” hearken back to a romanticized notion of the countryside and the “natural.” They are in some ways reminiscent of the virtue and morality that Jefferson placed on Monticello and farming culture. This conflation of the natural, the clean, and the moral, once again began to be twisted into justifications for slavery. In 1859, physician S. A. Cartwright disseminated exaggerated claims to the scientific defense of slavery. He invented entire diseases he claimed to be linked to darker skin, such as “dysesthesia,” or a disease of inadequate breathing, and “drapetomania,” or the “insane desire to flee.”17 Slavery-era policy decisions, including those having to do with space planning, land use, and waste management, were tied to these racist ideas of biology and cleanliness.

Figure 3: Thomas Jefferson;s Monticello (©Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello)

The idea that non-white skin is unhygienic began to take more of a foothold in formal and spatial relationships in the early 20th century. Zimring writes, “the urban response to industrial waste was far less aggressive than biological wastes.”18 Residential development, as facilitated with transportation development, began to site houses in “cleaner” areas outside of the city. And yet by the 1920s, the U.S. Census recorded more Americans living in urban spaces than in rural ones. In the cities, no perfect sanitation existed, although cars began to displace horses for transit, greatly reducing waste issues and improving sanitation. However, industry primarily relied on coal for energy, making the air far more polluted. Those living near these industrial sites, the centers of the polluted air, noxious odors, and dirty water, were again blamed for the issues rather than the industrial giants who were producing the toxins, namely, the working-class immigrants living near industrial sites and Black people living near stockyards. The sanitary burdens in these neighborhoods therefore increased, but the idea that their darker skin somehow made them more unclean in the first place only exacerbated the neglect and disinvestment in these communities.19 Simultaneously, the pastoral ideal, tied to both cleanliness and whiteness, was becoming crucial in marketing suburban subdivisions. Zoning ordinance began to take place, which are theoretically created for the health and safety of people and designated industrial zones as separate from residential ones. However, the enforcement of these regulations did not practically eliminate the exposure to waste and pollution, it just tended to racially segregate it.20

Zimring writes, “waste is a social process, and waste management practices in the United States reveal the constructions of environmental racism. Since the end of the Civil War, American sanitation authorities, zoning boards, real estate practices, federal authorities state and municipal governments, and makers and marketers of cleaning products have all worked with an understanding of hygiene that assumes that “white people” are clean, and “non-white people” are less than clean.”21 For a century, waste management has been organized primarily around keeping white communities, clean, and often non-white people are the ones keeping the waste and pollution out of

Figure 4: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow (Thomas Cole)

sight and out of mind. When considering the aforementioned examples of American environmental racism, it is therefore important to remember that it is not merely political or economic structures driving these crises, but also psychological and cultural ones. Clean and White shows the underbelly of American psychology that has influenced so many of the decisions that create racial inequities in our city and space planning.

When speaking to a New York Observer reporter in 2007, then presidential candidate Joe Biden described Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”22 Clearly these issues of race and hygiene are still very much a part of our subconscious and explicit prejudices. They are prejudices that have directly led to environmentally racist planning and zoning policies in our cities.

Notes

1. Beech, Peter. “What Is Environmental Racism and How Can We Fight It?” World Economic Forum. 31 July 2020.

2. “Environmental Racism Killing People of Color.” The Greenlining Institute, 20 November 2019.

3. Chavis, Benjamin. Rep. “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” Commission For Racial Justice, United Church of Christ (1987).

4. Parshley, Lois. “The Deadly Mix of Covid-19, Air Pollution, and Inequality, Explained.” Vox, 11 April 2020.

5. “Covid-19 Racial and Ethnic Disparities.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed 25 March 2022.

6. Rauch, Molly “South Bronx Fights Air Pollution in ‘Asthma Alley.’” Moms Clean Air Force, 24 April 2019.

7. Ibid

8. Campbell, Carla, and Rachael Greenberg, Deepa Mankikar, and Ronald Ross. “A Case Study of Environmental Injustice: The Failure in Flint.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health Vol. 13, No. 10 (2016): 951.

9. Villarosa, Linda. “Pollution Is Killing Black Americans. This Community Fought Back.” The New York Times, 28 July 2020.

10. See p. 10 of Zimring, Carl A. Clean and White a History of Environmental Racism in the United States. New York, NY: New York University Press (2017).

11. Ibid, p. 12.

21. Ibid, p. 217

22. Tapper, Jake. “A Biden Problem: Foot in Mouth.” ABC News, 31 Jan 2007.

Urban Complexity: An Evolving Science of Cities

Itay Porat

Introduction

Cities are physical entities: they transform landscapes, compress soils, divert rivers, and alter atmospheric composition; their growth requires materials and energy; their form evolves in time and space. Cities are biological entities: they are super-organisms composed of countless forms of life; they are sites of mass reproduction and mass extinction; they drive evolutionary change. Cities are cultural entities: they act for millennia as incubators of human interaction; in them we invent technologies, governments, art and science; in their name we go to war. The incredible variety of activities and opportunities that exist in cities is perhaps only matched by their disastrous impacts on all other parts of the world. Declining biodiversity and wildlife habitats, loss of arable land, overextraction of resources and excessive cycles of consumption and waste are the products of a largely urbanized, postindustrial civilization. While people throughout the world continue to move to urban regions, we have yet to develop a clear understanding of how cities evolve, why or when they may fail and what types of interventions work best. The issue stems from our inability to cope with the overwhelming complexity associated with urbanization.

The interdisciplinary study of urban complexity has developed over the past six or seven decades as a valuable framework for making sense of the unpredictable, emergent structure of cities. This framework offers insights into the properties of cities which give them not only their order and comprehensibility, but also their chaotic nature, and which allow them to evolve and adapt to changing conditions. Studying these properties and those of similar systems that exhibit complex behaviors can inform decisionmaking and help create cities that are more diverse, interesting, and resilient. This paper introduces the developments that have led to the formulation of urban complexity as a modern science of cities and offers a glimpse into the current state of the art. It provides historical context for the study of complex systems, a discussion about what complexity is, examples of early influential thinking about urban complexity and a reflection on how these concepts are relevant to planning and design.

Part 1 – Scientific Thought

Advances in scientific thought predate written history. Across cultures, early civilizations used observational and rational techniques to comprehend, predict and shape their environments. Blending myth with reality, thinkers were able to devise explanations for the changes they saw taking place in the night sky above them, the ground beneath them and the waters around them. Passing down this knowledge from generation to generation allowed people

to create accurate astronomical calendars, domesticate crops, distribute land, and heal the human body. The entangled cultural history of science grew to involve developments in mathematics as a language of measurement, deduction as a method of knowledge creation and experimentation as a means of validation.

The search for patterns in natural phenomena has been a key component of scientific exploration. Early scientists, or natural philosophers, looked for patterns to validate their models of nature, which could be used to predict the physical behavior of their surroundings. The moon waxes and wanes ad infinitum; water always flows on the path of least resistance; birds migrate seasonally; animals exhibit various types of symmetries; plants and crystals form fractals. These predictable patterns have, in turn, produced corresponding patterns in human behavior – we wake up as the sun shines, sow our fields in the springtime and build our homes away from low-lying valleys and rising tides. While the search for patterns as an organizing epistemological tool is very much a part of complex systems science, it is the shift from the reductionist approach that distinguishes the growing field from centuries of scientific tradition.

Scientific Reductionism

The ability to recognize natural patterns requires the isolation of certain elements of nature in order to devise simple models of their behavior. One cannot see that ice crystals are symmetrical by looking at a pile of snow, and only a deeper investigation of the atomic structure of water molecules reveals how this pattern occurs. Similarly, it would be very difficult to deduce the laws of gravitation by considering the motions of all celestial bodies, but the models of our isolated solar system developed by astronomers like Copernicus, Kepler, and Galilei, allowed Newton to formulate his law of universal gravitation. From ancient Greek atomism to modern particle physics, the idea that a better (and perhaps ultimate) understanding of nature can be achieved by considering isolated phenomena at ever decreasing scales has been dominant in shaping science for millennia. It is thus a common belief among scientists that phenomena at various scales can be simplified, idealized, and reduced to fundamental physical laws – physics explains chemistry, which explains biology, which explains psychology, which explains sociology, otherwise seen as the hierarchy of atoms, molecules, cells, individuals, society1

While this approach has been tremendously successful in expanding the extent of human knowledge and forming the basis for much of our current technology, it also faces limitations. Fundamental questions such as the

Figure 1: Natural Patternssymmetry, fractals, repetition (Left: CK12, CC BY-NC; Right: Zane Lee on Unsplash)

origins of life, agency, and consciousness, as well as pragmatic ones regarding economics, human conflict, and urban growth cannot be reduced to and explained by the behavior of their simple components. This is not only due to the immense number of individual elements that make up these systems – statistical mechanics explains how macroscopic properties of matter arise from the random interactions of countless microscopic entities. Issues with the reductionist scientific approach arise when attempting to explain systems that exhibit complex behaviors.

Limits of Prediction

Although humanity has long been studying, coping with, and drawing inspiration from the complexity of our world, the study of complexity as a unifying concept for scientific investigation has its roots in modern systems theory. A view of the universe as a machine whose parts obey universal laws had proliferated since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. It was believed that once these laws were known and sufficient computational resources made available, all events in the universe could, in theory, be predicted from selected starting conditions. This deterministic perspective was challenged by scientific discoveries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The introduction of quantum mechanics, particularly Warren Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” contradicted scientific determinism by showing that a particle’s position and momentum cannot be exactly measured simultaneously. This fundamental limitation of prediction had profound practical and cultural consequences, making the observer an inseparable part of the observed system, ushering in the skepticism and subjectivity of postmodern thought. Another contribution came from the recognition of chaotic systems by nineteenth century mathematician Henry Poincaré. These are systems in which very small uncertainties in measurement can lead to great errors in prediction. Such ideas were later developed by meteorologist Henry Lorentz’s study of computational weather prediction in the 1960s.2 Additional early motivation for complex systems research came from a wide range of blossoming mid-twentieth century academic disciplines such as cybernetics (Norbert Weiner), cognitive science and artificial intelligence (Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Marvin Minsky), information theory (Claude Shannon), computer science (John von Neumann, Herbert Simon), anthropology (Gregory Bateson, Margarete Mead), systems ecology (Howard and Eugene Odum), and systems biology (Ludwig von Bertalanffy).3

Figure 2 (left): Fritz Kahn’s “Man As Industrial Palace” (Fritz Kahn, Philadelphia Museum of Art: The William H. Helfand Collection, 2010, 2010-124-15)

Figure 3 (right): Standard Model of Particle Physics in Lagrangian form - the search for a unified theory of physics (Philip Tanedo)

Part 2 – What is complexity?

The historical discussion of scientific thought and the modern repudiation of complete predictability brings us to the topic of complexity. With the acceptance of certain levels of uncertainty in the prediction of system behavior, one can look for unifying qualities that unpredictable systems have in common and raise questions regarding the relevance of this framework: What is a complex system? How is complexity defined and measured if it is to be a guiding scientific principle? And further, how is this perspective relevant to the planning and design of cities and landscapes?

The initial question offers a good starting point. While there is no formally agreed upon definition of a complex system, there is a shared set of qualities or behaviors of systems which can be said to make them complex. Complex systems have many interacting components at multiple scales; the interactions of their components lead to emergent macroscopic properties which are different than those of the individual components; they tend to selforganize without centralized control; they incorporate feedback mechanisms between components; they are able to adapt to environmental conditions.4 These interrelated qualities will be expounded for more clarity.

Many Interacting Components

A complex system is one in which many interconnected parts interact. It may appear intuitive that a system with very few elements would not be considered a complex system, but this designation also depends on scale. An atom can be abstracted and treated as a simple point-like particle, which obeys certain mechanical laws. A living cell composed of several thousand atoms exhibits complexity in the interactions of its many atoms and molecules. A human being is a complex system composed of many interacting cells, each of which may be treated as a simple component. A city is composed of many interacting

Figure 4: Chaotic motionlong exposure shot of double pendulum with light source fixed at end (Cristian V., CC BY-SA 4.0, on Wikimedia Commons)

humans, where each human can then be treated as a simple agent. A global economy is a complex system composed of many interacting cities, and so on. Hence, a trade-off exists between complexity and scale, where large-scale complexity will reduce individual complexity, but bring a new order.5

Emergent Properties

As noted above, interactions of system components at one level can lead to new properties at higher levels, often phrased as “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” The behavioral differences between ice, liquid water, and vapor cannot be observed at the scale of individual molecules, but only as a collective and are an example of emergence in a physical system (this is not to say that an ice cube is therefore a complex system). Similarly, the physiological study of the human body is concerned with emergent properties of organs beyond the scale of cellular function and is an example of biological emergence. Certain cultural qualities can emerge in a city neighborhood, which cannot be explained just by the types of residents, housing, streets, and businesses within the neighborhood, but only by their shared existence and interaction. This is a form of social emergence.

Self-organization

A lack of centralized control and the ability to organize into ordered states is another common feature of complex systems. Many examples of cooperative group behavior exist within distributed forms of organization, where decisions are not made by a localized, concentrated organ. These include ant colonies, animal flocks and swarms, markets, and group performance art. The autonomous organization constantly responds to new information with decisions made based on input from the environment or programmed behavior. Interesting questions arise about the magnitude of interactions or components required to achieve such organization – how many ants are needed to productively work as a colony?6

Feedback

The term feedback is commonly used for a situation where one provides information in response to some action, with the intention of altering future actions. Feedback mechanisms exist in many types of systems, both simple and complex. A thermostat regulating temperature inside a house is a common example – the device senses the temperature and activates a cooling fan to bring it down to a desired state. This is a negative feedback loop since the thermostat works against changes in the environment and continually brings the system closer to equilibrium. It is a simple feedback loop since it involves a single variable – temperature.7 Global warming is an example of a positive feedback loop. As temperatures warm, ice caps melt, leading to lower reflectivity of earth’s surface and further warming. In the case of a global system, we must also consider greenhouse gas emissions and natural warming cycles, among other factors, that make this a more complex problem. Feedback mechanisms allow for systems to maintain important properties and achieve higher levels of organization in response to disturbances, such as the case of homeostasis, the ability of an organism to perpetuate the rather important property of living.8

Adaptation

For a system to perpetuate, it must be able to alter its organization and maintain critical properties. Adaptation is intimately linked to feedback mechanisms and the interactions between system components. In the face of a drought, people can coordinate and change their water consumption behavior to conserve resources. While the decision and timing may be mandated by a central agency, a robust public response is only achievable through a complex chain of social interactions that transmit information. While adaptation is a desired quality, it comes at the cost of efficiency. Highly efficient systems are less adaptable because their components operate in concert to perform more specific operations.9 A train moves people more efficiently, but is bound spatially to certain locations with tracks, whereas cars can move on many types of surfaces. Complex systems are often called complex adaptive systems.

Measuring Complexity

If a collection of system qualities is to be sufficient in defining complexity, the question of measurement remains elusive. Various disciplinary approaches have offered perspectives on the task of quantifying the complexity of a system. A summary of approaches indicates three categories:

1. The difficulty of describing a system as a measure of information, entropy, and code length (measured in bits).

2. The difficulty of creating a system as a measure of computation, logical depth, thermodynamic depth, and cost (measured in time, energy, currency).

3. Degree of organization as a measure of the difficulty of describing the organizational structure or the amount of information shared between components as a result of that organizational structure.10

More specific examples may consider the complexity of certain types of systems. Studies of complexity in spatial systems like cities attempt to quantify complexity based on information and entropy as they relate to density and spatial distribution,11 while others consider temporal, spatial, visual, scaling and connectivity aspects of urban form.12 These attempts intend to instrumentalize the idea of complexity so that the planning and design disciplines can engage with it in a more formal and methodical fashion. However, such a formal measure remains vague since complexity can be observed in such a wide range of phenomena at many different scales.

The City as a Complex System

Based on the definitions discussed, a city, or any type of human settlement for that matter, can certainly be identified as a complex system. It is a conglomeration of many interacting individuals that share resources and information; it exhibits emergent behaviors in its culture, innovation, politics and environmental change; it self-organizes spatially and socially without direct control from a central body; there are many feedback mechanisms (social, economic, environmental, bureaucratic) that regulate its growth and perpetuation; its organization evolves and adapts to internal and external conditions through its feedback mechanisms.13 Recognizing that such properties exist in cities, or that cities exist due to these properties, is crucial to moving away from the view of cities as mechanistic, controlled, deterministic systems. We can then move into a better understanding of cities as organic,

evolving, unpredictable systems that exhibit many levels of uncertainty that we must cope with. As the world’s urban areas and populations continue to grow and global climactic conditions become less predictable, we must adopt theoretical and practical frameworks for planning, engineering and design that are informed by and celebrate the physical, biological, and social complexity of our world. The remainder of this paper is devoted to developments in the understanding of urban complexity and how those are exemplified in research, planning, and design.

Part 3 – Early Thinking In Urban Complexity

Thinkers from disparate fields began adopting a view of cities as complex systems following the mid-twentieth century developments in general systems theory, systems ecology, and cybernetics, with increasing concern over patterns of urban blight, suburban sprawl and environmental degradation. These varied perspectives were influential in shaping contemporary thought and practice from activism and preservation to spatial analysis and urban design. Several of the prominent voices that helped establish this view during the 1960s are discussed.

Ballet Of The Street

In her monumental work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jane Jacobs describes the intricate social interactions that take place daily in New York City streets. Criticizing modernist planning tendencies that devalue communities and the urban fabric, Jacobs calls attention to patterns of social activity that allow for higher order and meaning to emerge. Her observations of street culture provide insights into what she calls problems in organized complexity as opposed to simplicity and disorganized complexity (terms borrowed from the scientist Warren Weaver). Jacobs looks to scientific ideas about complexity, particularly in biology, and bridged the gap to everyday urban experience with direct social observations and commentary. Providing an example from city parks she notes:

“No matter what you try to do to it, a city park behaves like a problem in organized complexity, and that is what it is. The same is true of all other parts or features of cities. Although the interrelations of their many factors are complex, there is nothing accidental or irrational about the ways in which these factors affect each other.”14

Since the organization of the city is not random and meaningless, but causal and comprehensible, we can attempt to study its patterns and flows with scientific tools like the life sciences. Jacobs’ work was influential for modern activism in its opposition to urban renewal policies, particularly in the cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have run through her Greenwich Village neighborhood. Although criticized at the time for a lack of formal expertise, and more recently for perceived NIMBYism and libertarianism, Jacobs showed that an understanding of the city’s complexity can, and must, be achieved through observation and close familiarity with the urban realm. Ignoring such emergent order leads to destructive interventions that degrade our quality of life.

Figure 5: Tel Aviv’s Shuk HaCarmel (market) - people exchange smell, sustenance, discovery (ChamelonsEye on Shutterstock)

Figure 6: Second Line street parade in New Orleanspeople, sound, heritage, movement, evolution (Jamell Tate)

Figure 7: Downtown Houston after Hurricane Hareypeople, water, concrete, housing, comfort (Texas A&M Agrilife)

A City is Not a Tree

Architect and theorist Christopher Alexander helped promote new understanding of patterns in environmental design. Alexander’s background in mathematics and architecture allowed him to explore the organizational structure of urban space and develop computational techniques for solving common sets of problems and dealing with the complexity of urban form. His influential 1965 essay “A City is Not a Tree” addresses the oversimplified conception of urban form and social interactions within cities by asserting that the city should not be viewed hierarchically as a tree, but as a semilattice (Figures 8 and 9). Alexander defines “units of the city” as overlapping parts of the urban experience that work together to make a complex whole. Sidewalks, storefronts, newspaper stands, traffic lights, and pedestrians form an interactive system in space. Alexander points to the simple structure of a tree as inadequate in describing such overlapping interactions, showing that semilattices offer much greater variety:

“Still more important is the fact that the semilattice is potentially a much more complex and subtle structure than a tree. We may see just how much more complex a semilattice can be than a tree in the following fact: a tree based on 20 elements can contain at most 19 further subsets of the 20, while a semilattice based on the same 20 elements can contain more than 1,000,000 different subsets.

This enormously greater variety is an index of the great structural complexity a semilattice can have when compared with the structural simplicity of a tree. It is this lack of structural complexity, characteristic of trees, which is crippling our conceptions of the city.”15

Alexander distinguishes between natural (spontaneous) and artificial (deliberately planned and designed) cities. He claims that newly designed artificial towns and suburbs exhibit a “compulsive desire for neatness and order” exemplified in the tree structure and are restrictive. The separation of labor from housing, art institutions to specific districts and child play to enclosed playgrounds are given as physical examples of such compulsion.16 Alexander’s work at UC Berkeley has led to the development of pattern language as a tool used to group architectural and urban patterns (e.g., promenades, old people, health centers, road crossings, the family, holy sites, etc.). By assigning hypertext words and other media to such patterns, one can understand relationships among patterns and design for complexity. This approach has been instrumental to the development of wikis, the influential tool for organizing, sharing and modifying information patterns.17

Urban Dynamics

Engineer and systems scientist Jay Forrester’s 1969 work on urban issues, Urban Dynamics, grew out of discussion with MIT colleague and former Boston mayor John F. Collins. Applying concepts from industrial engineering and management, Forrester looked at interactions as feedback processes with specific orderly structures which give rise to system behavior. He employed novel computational capabilities to model urban scenarios and assess the effectiveness of programs and interventions. His conclusions emphasize the need to shift efforts from short term gain to long term action for revitalization and self-sufficiency. Forrester’s work takes a highly rigorous, analytic approach to issues such as housing, labor, land distribution, zoning, and

development, and makes recommendations for urban revival. This presents useful computational techniques but is problematic in its characterization of social conditions and interactions. Forrester considers the environment limitless, provides three categories for economic class (i.e., managerialprofessional, labor, and underemployed), and introduces a concept of area attractiveness to evaluate economic, demographic, and spatial changes. This oversimplification of society falls back into the reductionist trap. The modeling is also highly subject to cultural and professional bias in what it deemed important. Forrester assumes the perspective of the upper managerial class which was able to implement large scale programs of urban renewal. The subchapter on slum-housing demolition offers a strikingly cold calculation of the effectiveness and scope of slum clearing with no commentary on issues of poverty, class, or race, looking instead for optimal values and ratios:

Figure 8 (left): Semilattice structure - exhibits overlapping units (as circular sets and ascending magnitudes (Jenny Quillien, CC BY)

Figure 9 (right): Tree structure - contains no overlapping units (Jenny Quillien, CC BY)

Figure 10: Slum housing demolition that removes 5% of underemployed housing each year (JW Forrester, courtesy of the System Dynamics Societysystemdynamics.org)

“To change the city toward having more industry and away from being an economically ineffective concentration of underemployed housing and underemployed population, one measure might be the demolition of slum housing. This could provide area for industrial expansion and might help to rebalance the population proportions so that the city could escape from its stagnant condition.”18

The detachment from the vernacular city, the city of laborers and the underemployed, is still an issue that must be addressed within the smart cities and technological urbanism movements that abstract ever larger datasets for the purpose of communication and decision-making.

Design with Nature

Planner and landscape architect Ian McHarg drew on developments in ecology and other natural sciences to invent methods of design that acknowledge and reinforce the complexity of the environment. McHarg sought to reveal how different properties of the landscape are shaped by physical, biological, and social processes over time, and he called upon planners and designers to make decisions informed by these interactions. He achieved this through his research and teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, his practice in his office Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd (WMRT) and his writing. McHarg’s seminal 1969 publication Design with Nature describes his methods and provides specific examples from research and practice. McHarg looked at complexity from the lens of variety and ecological diversity. Comparing a dune to a forest, he asks:

“What are the attributes of these two systems, the first primitive in an evolutionary scale of which the other is the climax? The dune is simple, dominated by a few physical processes; it consists of a few physical constituents, mainly sand; it contains few inhabitants and the relations between these can also be described as simple. When the forest is examined in these terms, it is seen to be inordinately complex. The physical processes that occurred, the number of species, the variety of habitats and niches (which is to say the roles which were performed), could only be encompassed within the term complex.”19

Speaking of highways, McHarg points to the reductive analytic approach of modern engineering and planning as the antithesis of ecological design:

“If one seeks a simple example of an assertion of simple-minded single purpose, the analytical rather than the synthetic view and indifference to natural process – indeed an anti-ecological view – then the highway and its creators leap to mind... In highway design, the problem is reduced to the simplest and most commonplace terms: traffic, volume, design speed, capacity, pavements, structures horizontal and vertical alignment.”20

McHarg developed a broader value system and theoretical framework for how humanity must interact with nature through the concept of creative fitting. Based on a synthetic approach that combined local observation, data analysis, representation and reasoning, McHarg’s design method helped in establishing the optimal, or fittest, geographic forms for human settlement. The resulting landscape would be more adaptable and stable for both people and all other species. His work has been criticized, in part by his own students, for its autocratic tendency, attempts to establish itself as a hard science, claims of objectivity, and disregard for cities.21 Nonetheless, McHarg’s understanding of

complexity as an intrinsic and necessary part of design has been foundational for the development of modern ecological planning and landscape urbanism.

Part 4 – An Evolving Science Of Cities

The growing body of research on complex systems and their relevance to urban problems continued to gain momentum throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Concurrent developments in sensing and computation have allowed for the rapid collection and analysis of vast amounts of environmental and social data. New representational techniques have emerged to visualize and communicate these data. With these tools at hand, designers and planners are better able to understand the complex behaviors of socio-technical systems, explore new realities through modeling and simulation, and integrate this knowledge into projects. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, we begin to see the maturation of the complex systems view. This section highlights advancements and current efforts across disciplinary lines of inquiry and practice.

Representing Complexity

The ability to communicate complexity – what it is, how it manifests, why it matters to us – is of prime significance to scientists, designers, and planners. While these individuals that study complex systems may very well be familiar with their behavior, they must often convey their knowledge to nonexpert colleagues, decision-makers, and the public. Addressing paramount societal challenges such as climate change mitigation, waste reduction and pandemic response relies heavily on the effective distribution of information that can communicate why individual actions matter to large scale outcomes. The development of representational techniques for conveying complexity has transformed the ways in which we operate as both creators and consumers of information products.

As previously discussed, Ian McHarg’s concept of designing with nature has been highly influential for modern ecological planning and landscape design. He promoted informed decision-making through representation of environmental conditions. While McHarg’s overlay mapping built on techniques formerly introduced by landscape architect Charles Elliot and the Olmsted office they offered a novel perspective of ecological complexity.22 Maps produced for studies like Staten Island and the Woodlands development in Texas utilized overlays to reveal patterns of ecologic and physical interaction and emphasized the temporal sequences of environmental conditions.23 Described as a “layer cake”, McHarg’s composite overlays inventoried physical, biological and social conditions of the site (usually in that ascending order) and were used to weight the suitability of certain areas for development. This approach to layering geographic information formed the basis for modern computerized geographic information systems (GIS). Other important contributions made by McHarg were the refinement of the transect and cross-section diagrams to show time-dependent ecological processes beyond the conventional static image, as well as the use of drawing, sketch, and photography as tools of storytelling and representation.24

Recent graphical works employ similar techniques to convey complexity, often combining several representational modes to produce sensations of temporality, movement, subjectivity, and change. “Mumbai in an Estuary”

by Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha uses stacked vertical layers of photography of different sections of Mumbai’s coastline to form a horizontal transect.25 The product exhibits the gradient of physical and cultural forces that shape the city and offers the viewer a feeling of the dynamism and intricacy of the estuary and its inhabitants. Current work at the University of Pennsylvania makes use of new technologies like drones, satellite imagery, and field surveys to represent changing landscape conditions. Modeling of Stone Harbor, New Jersey conducted by the Environmental Modeling Lab (EM-Lab) is offering a window into the fluctuating landscapes of coastal ecosystems.

Figure 11 (left): Composite map of Staten Island with areas most suitable for conservation/recreation/ urbanization (Ian McHarg)

Figure 12 (right): Layer cake Diagram from WMRT Woodlands study (1996 © Ian L. McHarg)

Figure 13: “Mumbai in an Estuary” - SOAK - section, horizon and time (Mathur and da Cunha)

Figure 14: Spectral analysis - supervised classification DEM/Sentinel 2/SLAMMStone Harbor, New Jersey (PEG)

Machine learning is used to classify land cover from satellite imagery, which provides important information to agencies working to protect coastlines with nature-based infrastructure.26

Cells and Agents

Mathematicians and early computer science innovators speculated whether the complexity of living systems could be simulated artificially. Borrowing ideas directly from biology, they looked to cellular growth as an example of emergent complex structures built from relatively simple building blocks. The concept of cellular automata (CA) was developed in the 1950s simultaneously by Alan Turing and John von Neumann, with von Neumann’s approach yielding the first successful demonstrations. CA are computational objects built of cells that assume specific states and evolve in space and time based on simple rules that govern neighbor interactions.27 CA are thus well suited for simulating a wide variety of phenomena that depend on localized spatial configurations – the morphology of urban form is a prime example. CA have been used to simulate urban growth patterns in rapidly developing metropolitan regions, mediumsized towns and suburban areas, as well as for more nuanced spatial problems like spatial economic processes and segregation. Figure 15 shows how as the cellular automata plays out, each cell reacts and rearranges its state based on the rule and its neighbors’ conditions. A near equilibrium homogeneous state (a), where only 0.01 percent of cells do not obey the homogeneity, results in a state of total segregation (b) due to the initial rule of slight preference for self-segregation. This may be counterintuitive, as one may expect such a slight deviation from equilibrium to be corrected locally and the original homogenous state restored. Even a random initial spatial configuration with gaps (c), representing a somewhat more realistic configuration tends towards segregation (d)28. Although these simulations are intrinsically simplistic and not nearly able to represent the full complexity of cities, they are valuable tools for studying the impacts of specific factors on urban evolution.

A more advanced way to look at urban simulations is through the interactions of agents. Instead of considering spatially defined fixed cells which assume certain states, agent-based modeling (ABM) allows for more fluidity and dynamism in simulation. Agents are mobile cells that follow specific rules defined at the beginning of a simulation but can interact with each other and with their environment in more sophisticated ways. Each agent is defined by their environment, sensing capabilities and actions and can range from purely reactive to having an imbued intelligence that guides its behavior.29 ABM is widely used for simulating a wide range of spatial interactions such as mobility networks, forest fires, infectious disease spreads, and economic activity. When coupled with new developments in GIS, ABM provides much more flexibility in modeling large-scale complex behaviors that arise from many individual interactions.

Urban Ecology

For centuries, humanity has thought of itself as separate from nature. Our houses, extractive industries, and systems of food production all serve to distance people from the natural world, which we perceive as erratic, vile, and dangerous. On the other hand, many environmentalists see nature as pristine and wholesome, while blaming human landscapes for nature’s destruction. Thus, the city, with its origin in the fortified citadel, has become

completely segregated spatial distributions from near ordered and random states

Figure 15: Cellular automata - adding a slight probabilistic preference for self-segregation to each agent produces

(Michael Batty)

Figure 16: Rule 30 - one of the elementary cellular automaton rules carried to 15 steps (Nonenmac at English Wikipedia)

the cultural antithesis of nature – a utopian haven from disaster, sickness, and predation, as well as a hellish industrial landscape of death and degradation. This disconnect has become so prevalent that, for many urban dwellers, interactions with nature are restricted to gardens, parks and planned outdoor excursions. Many people have lost any daily contact with the organic world –the surfaces we touch, walk and drive on are all synthetic. The emerging field of urban ecology counters such deep seeded beliefs and reminds us that the city is not without its own evolving ecological complexity, and the effects of urbanization do not end at a city’s limits.

New research in urban ecology is examining the coupling of human and natural systems and the impacts of urban development on regional ecology. Effects of urbanization on biodiversity, often used as a proxy for ecosystem health, have taken the forefront. Some of the key drivers that shape biodiversity and species evolution include habitat modification, changes in spatial connectivity, spatial and temporal heterogeneity caused by human activities, novel disturbances (fires, floods, mudslides, construction) and changing biotic interactions.30 The Hotspot Cities Project, conducted at the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania, looks at cities whose development threatens critical wildlife habitats, and proposes ambitious and innovative approaches to conservation. The project began by mapping biodiversity hotspots, continued by mapping projected urban growth of cities near hotspots, and is now in the phase of developing design and planning case studies in selected cities.31 The World Park project takes these investigations a step further and proposes a contiguous trail and park system that will connect biodiversity hotspots and provide a reactional resource by connecting to existing trails, while distributing responsibility and engaging people in restoration work globally.32 Such efforts are central to maintaining and restoring the diversity, and hence complexity, of ecosystems that support human and wildlife habitation.

Figure 17: A selection of agent-based modeling application areas of interest (Andrew Crooks)

Planning and Designing for Complexity

Establishing the historical context for theories of urban complexity and reviewing some of the modern advancements in representation, modeling, and ecology brings us back to the question of praxis raised in the beginning – how is this perspective relevant to the planning and design of cities and landscapes? How does this understanding help us create healthy, equitable and resilient places? How do we reconcile our myopic compulsions with what is unpredictable, emergent, and evolving?

First, we must acknowledge that planning and design efforts that neglect variety will be less successful. Strict control based in top-down hierarchies prevents variety by dictating goals, methods, and outcomes, and is prone to significant errors in judgement that propagate from seats of power. Decisionmaking based in bottom-up hierarchies (or some combination of the two approaches) makes room for the feedback and self-organization mechanisms that create more robust management structures. Thus, complexity theory makes a strong case for public engagement as part of the planning and design process. Similarly, siloed disciplinary efforts suppress a variety of opinions and instead multiply dogmatic tradition. Professional planners and designers must consult, collaborate and cooperate with other experts such as scientists, artists, healthcare workers and technicians so that a diverse set of perspectives can inform the process and outcomes. Furthermore, the planning and design disciplines should welcome such a variety of perspectives into their own ranks.

Second, we must use our expanding body of knowledge on the behaviors of complex systems to inform our planning and design work. The example of Freshkills Park is useful in illustrating how a project can draw on both theory and tools of urban complexity to restore a landscape of desolation into one of beauty and vitality. The park is being built on the site of New York City’s former Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, once the world’s largest landfill. The 2,200acre site (Figure 19), comprised of 45 percent landfill and 55 percent creeks,

Figure 18: World Parktrail system connecting endangered habitats (Courtesy of Richard Weller)

wetlands, and fields, is being gradually transformed into open grasslands, waterways, recreational facilities and learning centers.33 The park’s plan was designed by the firm Field Operations and involves continuing public engagement with residents and a host of community groups. This process allowed the community to express their desire for a mix of programming such as large tracts of scenic open space, habitat creation, waterfront recreation,

Figure 20: Sequence - park components laid broken down phasing scheme (© James Corner Field Operations, courtesy of the City of New York, Department of Parks)

Figure 19: Plan - proposed design for Freshkills Park in Staten Island (© James Corner Field Operations, courtesy of the City of New York, Department of Parks)

and educational opportunities, as well as traffic mitigation for nearby neighborhoods.34 Branded as “lifescape,” the park’s design emphasizes growth and regeneration rather than beautification and place-making typical of landscape projects. Speaking of the design and restoration process, James Corner, head of Field Operations, says:

“The site demanded a more strategic and time-based approach that would allow for natural processes to “grow” a new park over time… Manufacturing new soil in situ through organic farming, growing new seed and young trees onsite, and orchestrating a process of adaptive management over time are key moves in evolving a new ecosystem. This method is instrumentally precise and technological at its core, essentially describing the infrastructure necessary to grow a more complex site plan over time.”35

The elaborate phasing sequence (Figure 20) illustrates the designers’ engagement with the site as an evolving and adapting organism. Using layering, section, diagram, and text, the image represents the emergent, multidimensional, and time-dependent process of transformation. This approach encompasses the full ecological complexity of the site and the desired product in that it builds up through physical, biological, and social functions in a systematic way. The result is a large-scale evolutionary program. Initiated with a set of rules (or guiding principles) established by the public and refined by designers and planners, the program propagates in time and space to morph, heal and animate the landscape – an ecological automaton.

Conclusion

Building a world view of cities as complex systems seems intuitive and almost obvious, like a return to some ancient wisdom that has been lost and must now be regained. Of course life is complex. Who ever thought it was simple? But these developing theories are still at odds with how much of modern planning and design operate. We continue the reductionist project by zoning cities for specific uses, building inflexible infrastructure that serve only singular purposes and endlessly repeating the same destructive patterns of construction that degrade the environments we rely on for sustenance. If anything, our actions continue to ignore the interdependence of all life, its feedback mechanisms, and emergent order to establish dominance through stubborn oversimplification.

To create cities that are healthy, nurturing, exciting, and resilient, we must move beyond the distortions of anthropocentrism, seeing nature as something to be controlled, cheap short-term solutions, and misguided politicizations, and we must embrace a perspective of interconnectedness and cooperation. For planners and designers, this means looking to nature for inspiration, thinking backwards and forward in time, and building from the bottom up. Historical and current work on the complexity of cities offers evidence (e.g., representational techniques, modeling capabilities, profound observations), but also pitfalls (e.g., over-abstraction, technocratic agendas, detachment from urgent problems). As planners and designers, we must continue to investigate the complexity of the world around us and use our insights as guiding principles rather than ultimate truths about the structure of cities. Doing so will help us accept, and even appreciate, the inevitable uncertainty of life.

Notes

1. Kauffman, S. Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred. Zygon Vol. 42 No. 4 (December 2007)

2. Mitchell, M. Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2009).

3. Mitchell 2009, and Holland, J.H. Complexity: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2014).

4. Mitchell 2009 and Holland 2014, as well as Siegenfeld, A.F, and Bar-Yam, Y. “An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and Its Applications.” Hindawi Complexity. 27 July 2020.

5. Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam 2020.

6. Mitchell 2009.

7. Bar-Yam, Y. Concepts: Feedback. New England Complex Systems Institute (2011).

8. Simon, H.A.“Can there be a science of complex systems? Proceedings from the International Conference on Complex Systems” in Unifying Themes in Complex Systems, ed. Y. Bar-Yam. Perseus Books (March 2000).

9. Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam 2020.

10. Lloyd, S. “Measures of Complexity: A Nonexhaustive List.” IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Vol. 21 No. 4 (September 2001).

11. Batty, M, and R Morphet, P Masucci, and K Stanilov. “Entropy, complexity, and spatial information.” Journal of Geographical Systems, Vol. 16 (2014).

12. Boeing, G. “Measuring the Complexity of Urban Form and Design.” Urban Design International (2018).

13. Portugali, J. “Self-Organization and the City.” Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, ed. R.A. Meyers (2017). See also Batty M. “Cities as Complex Systems: Scaling, Interaction, Networks, Dynamics and Urban Morphologies.” Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, ed. R.A. Meyers (2017).

14. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House (1961).

15. Alexander, Christopher. “A City is Not a Tree.” Architectural Forum (1965).

16. Alexander 1965.

17. “An Introduction to A Pattern Language.” Center for Environmental Structure (CES).

18. Forrester J.W. Urban Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1969).

19. McHarg Ian L. Design with Nature. Natural History Press, with the American Museum of Natural History (1969).

20. Ibid

21. Herrington, S. “The Nature of Ian McHarg’s Science.” Landscape Journal, Vol. 29 No. 1 (2010): 1-20. See also Spirn Anne Whiston. Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, ed. Frederick R. Steiner, and George F Thompson and A Carbonell. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (November 2016): 51-68.

22. Steiner, Frederick R. “Representing Complexity.” Landscape Architecture Frontiers Vol. 1, No. 6 (December 2013).

23. McHarg 1969.

24. Herrington 2010, and Steiner 2013.

25. Mathur Anuradha, and Dilip da Cunha. Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary. Bombay, India: Rupa and Company (2009).

26. VanDerSys, Keith, and Sean Burkholder, Michael Luegering, Michael Tantala. “Sensing & Sensibilities at UPenn.” Remote Sensing Seminar conducted by PEG Office of Landscape and Architecture, in collaboration with the Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, NJ (Fall 2019).

27. Batty, M. Cities and complexity: understanding cities with cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2015).

28. Batty et al. 2014.

29. Ibid.

30. Alberti M, et al. “The Complexity of Urban Eco-evolutionary Dynamics.” BioScience, Vol. 70, No. 9 (September 2020).

31. “Hotspot Cities Project,” website run by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania (2022).

32. Weller, Richard, and Misako Murata. “World Park: Landscape for a Planetary Culture,” project run by Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania (2022).

33. “The Park Plan,” website by The Freshkills Park Alliance (2022).

34. “Fresh Kills Park: Draft Master Plan.” Fresh Kills Park Plan, Field Operations (March 2006).

35. Corner, J. Chapter in Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, ed. Frederick R. Steiner, and George F Thompson and A Carbonell. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (November 2016): 3-30.

Reconciling the Grid: De|Constructive Metaphors for Ex|Urban Planning

Matthew Limbach

“In the park, the city is not supposed to exist.”

-Frederick Law Olmsted

Figure 1: Manhattan’s Street Grid (David Springmeyer)

Frederick Law Olmsted’s axiom1 about the relationship between parks and cities is perhaps best illustrated by his work as a chief planner for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. The fair took place on yet unrealized portions of Chicago’s South Park system, which Olmsted had planned alongside Calvert Vaux two decades earlier.2 Architects Daniel Burnham, Charles Atwood, and John Root imposed, in the words of Jens Jensen, a “formal show city”3 on the barren marsh next to Lake Michigan. Meanwhile, Olmsted labored to construct remedial landscape features of “apparently natural scenery.” These artificial lagoons, dotted with wooded islands and native prairie grasses, would serve as a “quieting influence…counteractive to the effect of the artificial grandeur, and the crowds, pomp, splendor, and bustle of the rest of the Exposition [read: city].”4 For all of the fair’s success, the design was only temporary, and, in the following years, Jackson Park returned to something that more closely resembled its original plan.5 For a brief moment, however, the park had become the most literal manifestation of Chicago’s motto, “Urbs in Horto” (“City in a Garden”).

This significance is not lost on architects Barbara Littenberg and Steven Peterson, whose recent manifesto, Space and Anti-Space: The Fabric of Place, City, and Architecture, examines what the two deem to be regressive ideas about public space that took root in 20th century American planning. On Jackson Park they write:

“It would have been perhaps easier, cheaper, and more poetic, historically, to have built a formal landscape based on the exposition plan. But the powerful vision of a public park, as antidote, was to prevail here.”6

Though Littenberg and Peterson do not attempt to grapple with the nuances of Olmsted’s plans or his influence on ecological movements (the book offers scant mention of ecology), they are correct in their characterization of Olmsted’s parks as “antidotes” to urban life. As Witold Rybczynski writes with regards to Olmsted’s design for Central Park, “Illusion lay at the heart of Greensward.”7 Amidst the chaos of the city, Olmsted sought to create an exaggerated sense of ruggedness and expanse denoted by the rural American landscape.8 The aim of picturesque parks was to provide, in the words of Olmsted,

“The feeling of relief experienced by those entering them, on escaping from the cramped, confined, and controlling circumstances of the streets of the town; in other words, a sense of enlarged freedom [sic].”9

The linear boulevards, iconography, and ornamentality of the Chicago Plan certainly ran counter to Olmsted’s sylvan aspirations; however, this notion of freedom was more than an experiential metaphor for American designers at the turn of the century. Chicago’s Prairie Style architects saw in Burnham’s work a “contaminating” influence spreading westward from Europe.10 Similarly, Jens Jensen was appalled by the “distinctly imperialistic” plan.11 Their fears were embodied by Burnham’s solidly rectilinear street forms. For some time, architects like Frank Lloyd Wright had been attempting to “break the box” of European forms. Likewise, Jensen, who had firsthand experience with violent European autocracies,12 continuously equated straight lines and rigid geometries with imperialistic tendencies, while he viewed the English Garden tradition as more compatible with democratic norms.13 To him, Burnham’s street grid was an outright attack on American values.

“To import to our cities plans from monarchial countries with their pompous displays, is a fad reflecting on the American intellect. Such plans can never fit us with our love for freedom.”14

American inheritors of the English Landscape Garden tradition were not wrong to associate gridded plans with deleterious influences. Indeed, the grid as a formal element has a long history with imperialist endeavors in North and South America dating back to the Treaty of Tordesillas, when, in 1494, Pope Alexander VI effectively divided the “New World” between the Spanish and Portuguese empires along a longitudinal axis.15

Figure 2: Jackson Park and Jackson Park with the Chicago Plan superimposed (Space & Anti-Space, by Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg)

This proto-Cartesian move was carried a step further by the Spanish empire in the “Laws of the Indies,” a set of rules for regulating the settlement of their newly conquered territories and interactions with the indigenous populations therein. The laws stipulated consistent, replicable standards for town planning across the domain. At the center of each town was to be a sizable Plaza Mayor (main square), capable of incorporating the needs of a burgeoning population, from social gatherings to livestock grazing. From this main square emanates a network of rectilinear streets. Notably, the laws emphasize the importance of a gridded plan “leaving sufficient open space so that, even if the town grows, it can always spread in the same manner.”16 This codified pattern simultaneously reinforced instrumentalist philosophies about the world and created a kind of pre-existing urban condition for town planners when the United States wrested its southwestern territories from Mexico.17

Figure 4: Plots of land in Fernandina, Florida Province (City of Fernandina)

Figure 3: The Tordesillas Line (Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena)

In a serendipitous instance of rationalist design, the three main geographic features of the United States, the Appalachian Mountains, the Mississippi River, and the Rocky Mountains, all share a distinct north-south orientation, at least in their imaginative, abstracted forms. It is no coincidence that Americans are apt to use definite articles before terms like the West(Side) or the South(Side) when describing their regions or cities, unlike their English forefathers with their Highlands, Lowlands, Midlands, and Lake Districts. This cardinal predilection was reinforced by the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). In the wake of the American Revolution, a series of ordinances drafted by Thomas Jefferson laid the groundwork for incorporating new territories and, eventually, states into the young nation. New territories were based off longitudinal meridians and latitudinal baselines and were then divvied up in a rectangular grid of townships measuring six miles across. These townships were further divided into rectangular parcels of various, even lengths, to be sold off or awarded as land grants. Once a township reached a population of 20,000, it was to be afforded political power in the form of one congressman.18

This large-scale version of America’s “Laws of the Indies” did little to ensure that the country “spread in the same manner.” In fact, Jefferson’s grid system codified country-wide divisions over the institution of slavery, beginning with the Northwest Ordinance, which effectively concentrated slavery south of the Mason-Dixon Line and south of the upper Midwest. This concentration was reinforced by the 1820 Missouri Compromise, and the Compromise of 1850, and attempts at popular sovereignty, such as the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, had little time to take effect before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.

As Heather Cox Richardson describes in How the South Won the Civil War, these sharp, arbitrary geographical distinctions manifested an antebellum society in the southern United States that was founded exclusively upon a singular, capital-intensive industry.19 With the collapse of Southern society at the end of the Civil War, the vacuum of the “unsettled” American West was filled by the vestiges of the Southern slave-holding class, for the early Western economy, with extractive industries at its fore (i.e., mining and drilling), was a lit match,

Figure 5: The Public Land Survey System (United States Digital Map Library)

ready to rekindle Southern elitism and class distinctions. These “cowboy reconstructionists,” as Richardson calls them, created an instrumentalist template for milking the land of its resources through cheap [read: slave] labor, all the while eschewing attempts at government oversight.20 This legacy can be seen in both the water crisis that continues to plague the American West, as well as the layout of many Southwestern cities like Phoenix; its streets extend in perfect Cartesian form towards the horizon, while individual buildings sit back from the street, avoiding confrontation with one another and destroying any sense of congestion, a prime example of what Littenberg and Peterson dub “anti-space.”

While the large-scale formation of the United States remains an immutable mix of Jefferson’s grid system, interceded with river sections that run along north-south or east-west axes, America’s cities and metropolitan regions tell a much different tale. A 2020 study by Geoff Boeing of the University of Southern California’s Department of Urban Planning provides a quantitative analysis of what he calls “griddedness”, a discrete measure of orthogonal planning in American cities. Unsurprisingly, his study tracks a sharp drop in “griddedness” beginning in the 1940s, which bottomed out in the 1990s, before designers began to revert to more traditional forms of urban planning.21

Figure 6: Littenberg and Peterson Contrast Rome, New York, Paris, and Phoenix (Space & Anti-Space, by Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg)

What Boeing’s study truly reveals is the form American cities began to take in the abandonment of “griddedness” in the middle of the 20th century: sprawl.

For Littenberg and Peterson, there is a direct link between sprawl and the picturesque. Landscape architecture and city planning have historically taken a back seat to architecture in design culture; therefore, it is interesting to see a landscape design trend dubbed as one of the progenitors of a socio-political movement, but it is not surprising on the architects’ part, given the deleterious consequences that stemmed from the abandonment of traditional modes of city planning. Their criticism of the picturesque hinges on their distinction between “space” and “anti-space”:

“Space is conceived as a differentiated volume, identifiable in its configuration as form, discontinuous in principle, closed and static, but also capable of plastic form. It is serial in composition. Anti-space is the opposite. It is undifferentiated and ideally formless, continuous in principle, open and flowing. It is controlled, directed, or temporarily captured, but never composed.”22

As an example, Littenberg and Peterson highlight the anglicizing of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris:

“When the Bois de Boulogne was converted to an English park landscape, it supplanted a forest of geometric space [sic]. A wandering circulatory system replaced the taut linear allees that form the spatial relationships between the edges. Nature is reestablished as sacred, tamed by its association with antispace.”23

Their correlation between the picturesque and “anti-space” is indicative of the supplantation of a “broad cultural framework” with Romantic notions of individualism.24 Unlike Jensen and his ilk, Littenberg and Peterson celebrate the grid, in the form of Manhattan’s street plan, as an embodiment of such a cultural and constructive framework. Paradoxically, the argument goes, the rigidity of the grid creates a stable spatial fabric, which encourages renewal25 and generates cohesive areas of vernacular expression. They dub this concept “real-estate logic.”26 This is certainly not the monarchial monster that the Chicago Exposition’s detractors feared, and it contrasts sharply with the mobile, personal, and individualized spatial framework they associate with the picturesque.27

As Robert Beauregard discusses in When America Became Suburban, there was indeed an individualistic bent to the growth of sprawl in 20th century

Figure 7: Boeing’s analysis of street patterns (Geoff Boeing, “Off the Grid...and Back Again? https://doi.org/10.108 0/01944363.2020.1819382)

America. As the United States began to transition from a mostly industrial to a financialized economy after the Second World War, city/town planners began to latch on to notions of domesticity and the household as a planning concept.28 Littenberg and Peterson tie this rise in individualism, somewhat dubiously, to the picturesque, and draw a straight line to city planners, like Le Corbusier,29 whose influential utopian designs, notably Le Ville Radieuse, and his idealized “tower in a park” schema influenced a generation of city planners. The disparate and disconnected forms that Modernist city planners attempted to foist upon cities like Manhattan threatened to destroy the figurative spatial qualities that Littenberg and Peterson so idolize. Thus, Modernism became as antithetical to the notion of the city as Olmsted’s parks.

Littenberg and Peterson are no doubt referring to the painterly origins of the picturesque as highlighted by Vittoria di Palma in her essay “Is landscape painting?” In her essay, di Palma does demonstrate how the individualized experience, in the guise of landscape paintings or the “Grand European Tour,” influenced the construction of the picturesque as an aesthetic ideal. Indeed, for William Gilpin and Thomas Whately, two of the foremost contributors to the movement, landscape gardens boiled down to a “sequence of encounters with a set of composed scenes or pictures.”30 What Littenberg and Peterson fail to grapple with, however, is the importance of close juxtaposition inherent in picturesque compositions.

Figure 8: Manhattan in the 19th and 20th centuries (Space & Anti-Space, by Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg)

“…Whately concludes that the term ‘picturesque’ should only be applied to ‘such objects in nature, as. . . are fit to be formed into groupes, or to enter into a composition, where the several parts have a relation to each other; and in opposition to those which may be spread abroad in detail, and have no merit but as individuals.’”31

This power of juxtaposition was not lost on Rem Koolhaas, who is likewise an admirer of the stability of Manhattan’s grid plan, laid out by the city commissioners in 1811. In his retroactive assessment of Manhattan’s plan, Delirious New York (1978), he writes,

“In terms of structure, this book is a simulacrum of Manhattan’s Grid: a collection of blocks whose proximity and juxtaposition reinforce their separate meanings.”32

Indeed, Delirious New York and Koolhaas’s later work, S,M,L,XL, as well as OMA Rem Koolhaas: A Critical Reader (not written by Koolhaas per se, but it bears his contributions and influence) all share striking similarities in their non-chronological narratives. Blocks of text start, stop, and leap from one page to the next. Authorial voices intermingle. Text and images are spaced out in regular yet disjunctive patterns. The reader is encouraged to peruse with a wandering eye; to find relationships amongst the disparate forms. For Koolhaas, the form of the city itself became a metaphor for thinking about the city. In a review of Delirious New York, Richard Munday describes the work as being “enmeshed in irresolution,”33 perhaps a better description of Koolhaas’s Manhattanism than the author himself provides. Koolhaas elaborates further on juxtaposition with regards to Central Park,

“Central Park is not only the major recreational facility of Manhattan but also the record of its progress: a taxidermic preservation of nature that exhibits forever the drama of culture outdistancing nature. Like the Grid, it is a colossal leap of faith; the contrast it describes – between the built and the unbuilt – hardly exists at the time of its creation.”34

The contrast is clear. For Koolhaas, Central Park is not an antidote to the city. Rather, the park and city are beautiful and sublime objects, respectively, reinforcing the view of New York City as a singular, picturesque construction.

Far from the stifling influence Jensen feared, Koolhaas views Manhattan’s grid plan as a catalyst for multitudes of expression, a notably anti-imperialist operator. It is not antithetical to democracy, but perhaps the purest expression of it.

“The Grid’s two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.”35

Delirious New York seeks to describe the architectural and sociological benefits wrought by a “culture of congestion,” a sentiment shared by Littenberg and Peterson in their criticism of contemporary city planning.

“They [new city plans] have density, they are bigger, more populous, and taller than ever before but lack extensive cores of dense urban fabric that enable a legitimate active public realm.”36

Though “culture of congestion” was coined by Koolhaas, he was not the first to discuss the democratic potential of dense urban cores. Writers like Jane Jacobs had been documenting such possibilities for several decades, while offering more reasonable explanations for suburban flight and catastrophic city improvement projects.

As Jacobs writes in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), the movement towards more spacious and sprawling forms of planning was not a purely aesthetic push. It was a reaction to the perceived ills of the “cramped and confined” city streets Olmsted wrote about. While Olmsted sought to create the sylvan antidotes to confined city living, influential 20th century Garden City designers like Sir Raymond Unwin strove to build alternatives to inner city slums, which were perceived to be disease and crime ridden because of overcrowding. In Jacobs’s estimation, the detractors of dense urban environments had mistakenly conflated overcrowding with density of built form,37 and as a result threatened to undermine the diverse array of city services that sustain a robust community.38 In her discussion of John H. Denton’s survey of American suburbs and British “new towns,” Jacob’s finds company with Littenberg and Peterson in stating, “such places [suburbs] must rely on ready access to a city for protection of their cultural opportunities [read: public realm].”39 She elaborates how population dispersal is intrinsically tied with diversity of cultural opportunities and conveniences. Quoting Denton:

“…the only effective economic demand that could exist in suburbs was that of the majority. The only goods and cultural activities will be those that the majority requires…”40

Contrary to the notion of the “imperialistic” grid, Jacobs demonstrates how attempts to escape from compact urban forms can reinforce monocultural ideologies and lifestyles, the long-feared tyranny of the majority. One can see how, despite the multitude of dendritic settlement patterns that compromise the suburbs, they are often described as “monotonous.”

Similarly, Jacobs cautions against the monotypic programs in otherwise dense and diverse urban enclaves, noting how single-use spaces, which usually break the mold of the grid’s regularity, can spell ruin for surrounding neighborhoods.

“It is curious too, how frequently the immediate neighborhoods surrounding bigcity university campuses, City Beautiful civic centers, large hospital grounds, and even large parks, are extraordinarily blight prone, and how frequently, even when they are not smitten by physical decay, they are apt to be stagnant – a condition that precedes decay.”41

Jacobs reasons that the point at which a single-use entity breaks the grid acts as a kind of “border vacuum.” Essentially, city [democratic] life ends at the terminus of a robust street network. Residents generally have no need to cross into the single-use space, resulting in a dead zone.42 For Jacobs, the answer is always more intermingling of services, more intermingling of people, more streets, and more connections.

The counterbalancing forces of a robust street network are echoed in Delirious New York. Koolhaas writes:

“With its [the grid’s] imposition, Manhattan is forever immunized against any (further) totalitarian intervention. In the single block – the largest possible area that can fall under architectural control – it develops a maximum unit of urbanistic Ego. Since there is no hope that larger parts of the island can ever be dominated by a single client or architect, each intention – each architectural ideology – has to be realized fully within the limitations of the block.”43

Koolhaas demonstrates the great irony inherent in the grid. Its formalism and totalitarian regimentation have, in theory, the capacity to thwart truly serious threats to vibrant civic life. Rather than paving the way for the importation of contaminating and all-consuming influences, it can act as a safeguard for diversity in form and representation.

In recent years, the power of the grid and the civic virtues inherent in dense urban fabrics have worked their way into real design practices. Since the 1980s, the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU), a loose network of like-minded planners, architects, landscape architects, and community leaders, has sought to mitigate and reverse the trend of sprawl that proliferated in the United States in the decades after World War Two. Their name and charter, which was officially “ratified” in 1996, and signatories thereto embody the democratic import with which they imbue their approach to metropolitan planning.

In the vein of Ian McHarg, the adherents of New Urbanism frequently mention ecological processes and often reference transects as a model for design. These transects can bridge a range of built conditions from the dense “Urban Core Zones” to “Natural Zones,”44 or they can serve as models of transition between functions within neighborhoods.45 Despite the ecological connotations, however, most of the movement’s focus is on the definition of built form. In language reminiscent of Littenberg and Peterson’s conception of space, the Charter for New Urbanism begins:

“Metropolitan regions are finite places with geographic boundaries derived from topography, watersheds, coastlines, farmlands, regional parks, and river basins. The metropolis is made of multiple centers that are cities, towns, and villages, each with its own identifiable center and edges.”46

Strict, identifiable dichotomies and spatial typologies, in the form of city blocks, permeate the philosophy of New Urbanism. Like McHarg, the movement is intensively focused on where exactly this figurative and plastic space should be constructed. The Smart Growth Manual, a meta study, primer, and guide for New Urbanism planning, places regional consideration at the forefront of any metropolitan planning project. Through mappings of the “Greenprint”, the “Rural Preserve”, and the “Rural Reserve”, followers of this design philosophy are instructed to map out a multimodal network of areas, which, in consideration of their ecological value, should be off-limits to development.47 After construction of this anti-space, the metropolis is free to extend, in a sensible manner, all the way up to the terminus of buildable acreage, thus fulfilling the New Urbanist prescription for a “tightly drawn urban growth boundary.”48 This is where the grid comes back into play.

Planning firm SimpleCity’s design for Bastrop, Texas, a fast-growing suburb of Austin, won the 2020 CNU Charter Award through their reconceptualization of the grid as a resilient framework to guide metropolitan planning. Working with the city’s planners, SimpleCity designed a new building code that eschews traditional standards of setbacks, square footage ranges, and zoning

requirements, in favor of the grid as the “primary mode” of organization.49 Taking advantage of Texas’s unique laws regarding extraterritorial jurisdiction,50 SimpleCity extended the grid’s cultural and constructive framework beyond the current limits of Bastrop and into surrounding areas that can serve as conduits for the city’s growth, thus recapturing the “courageous act of prediction”51 Koolhaas recognized in the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan.

Most of what Jane Jacobs addresses in The Death and Life of Great American Cities has to do with the experience of metropolitan denizens on the personal level, that is, at the street scale. She writes mostly about her own experiences in New York, particularly Manhattan. She does not take the long view that Koolhaas does in his examination of Manhattan’s four-hundred-year progress as a work of “urban science fiction.”52 She does, however, engender her own meta-cognitive metaphor for city planning through nearly six hundred pages of dense examination of mostly contemporary and recent history; itself a celebration of the egalitarian possibilities in well-designed, dense urban fabrics. Furthermore, her examination of urban life has served as a springboard for cultural metaphors that have come to impact fields beyond the realm of the architecture of dense urban cores.

While Jacobs never takes quite the macro view of the grid that Koolhaas does, she is no less staunch of an advocate. In fact, she even argues for more “griddedness.” In her chapter, “The Need for Small Blocks,” Jacobs considers the habits of a hypothetical resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which, through permutations of planning and architectural coincidence, took the shape of longer blocks relative to other parts of the city. As Jacobs writes, longer blocks have the potential, like single-use entities, to not only isolate residents, but to restrict their daily movements to predictable patterns.

“In the case of these long blocks, even people who are present in the neighborhood for the same primary reasons are kept too much apart to permit them to form reasonably intricate pools of city cross use.”53

Figure 9: The grid deployed over Bastrop, Texas (City of Bastrop)

As Jacobs demonstrates in a series of simple diagrams, long blocks that stretch the grid also limit possibilities of urban exploration. For reasons of convenience, residents are encouraged to always take the same path, thus avoiding opportunities for discovery, interpersonal experience, and crosspollination of ideas. She proposes a kind of urban intensification through the introduction of new streets and the creation of smaller blocks, which would encourage residents not to change course, but to deviate and meander slightly from their usual path. The result is a simulacrum of the grid itself: a dense, recursive network of overlapping and intermingling pathways that construct opportunities for the interchange and expression of ideas.

Similarly, landscape architect and urbanist, James Corner presages his essay “The Agents of Creativity” with a painting “The Bewildered Planet” by Max Ernst. In Corner’s words,

“The painting depicts an overlay of endless elliptical orbits invoking cyclical but indeterminate wandering. The orbits are neither perfect nor equally repetitive, but instead they show slight shifts and variations in each turn. They err.”54

While Corner’s topic is ecology, and landscape is his medium, the similarities between the Ernst painting and the wanderings of Jacobs’s hypothetical city dwellers is uncanny. Indeed, Corner distances himself from any conceptions of parks or landscapes as antidotes to, or something separate from, the city. Writing in “The Ecological Imagination,” he relates to

Figure 10: Commuting patterns illustrated by Jane Jacobs (Jacobs, Random House)

“current and, perhaps, long-persistent issues of the city and, in particular, to life in the city. I use the term ‘life’ here quite broadly, referring not only to natural processes and human health, but also to the pleasures of social life and interaction in urban public spaces.”55

Clearly, Corner is not simply bent on improving city life through the practice of ecological urbanism; rather, he is guided by metaphors of the city and metaphors of conceptualizing the city. Echoing Koolhaas’s admiration for the grid, Corner writes:

“…the Manhattan grid, initially a very systematic and autonomous plot of organization that, over time, facilitated and evolved complexity. Its effects are both instrumentalist and bewildering, breeding novelty and unpredictable outcomes.”56

Like Koolhaas, Corner recognizes the innumerable possibilities afforded by the grid: the paradoxes of predictability and irresolution, regimentation and indeterminacy.

Corner takes the grid’s lessons and applies them to his landscape work in the form of robust matrices. This is most legible in his work on Toronto’s Downsview Park and Fresh Kills Park in New York. In both parks, Corner constructs spatial frameworks that are not strictly orthogonal. They are, nonetheless, rigid and serve as the ultimate drivers of site ecology and program, what Corner refers to as “instrumentalist routing systems.”57 These “routing systems” mirror the creative and democratic “de-control” of the Manhattan grid in two significant ways. First, as Corner notes, the indeterminate possibilities afforded by a regular, yet simple system, “set the stage for life to evolve.”58 Just as Manhattan’s grid strips away “urbanistic ego” in service of “three-dimensional anarchy,” Corner’s “routing systems” yield to natural variation and enable ecological processes to express themselves to their greatest extent. More importantly,

Figure 11: Max Ernst’s “The Bewildered Planet” (© 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris)

says Corner, the predictive yet indeterministic structure of the matrices favors phased investment and construction, which can transcend economic cycles, political administrations, cultural trends,59 and, most importantly, the designer himself. Littenberg, Peterson, Jacobs, and Koolhaas all demonstrate how Manhattan’s grid, far from holding the city back, has encouraged growth, renewal, and democratic expression throughout its existence. Why could the same not be expected of landscape interventions?

At the heart of Jane Jacobs’s writing is a desire to reconcile city planning with democratic representation. Neighborhoods, as she discusses in her chapter “The Uses of City Neighborhoods,” whether they take the form of streets, blocks, isolated communities, or coherent city districts, act as a conduit between the people and City Hall. Modern cities, she points out, like our country at-large, are too big to be comprehended by one person or a single planning commission. Solitary streets or isolated communities, neighborhoods of granular size, are too small to hold elected officials or interest groups accountable. She writes:

“To plan deliberately, and physically, on the premise that separated city neighborhoods of less than district size are a worthy ideal, is to subvert selfgovernment; that the motives are sentimental or paternalistic is no help.”60

As she elaborates in “Governing and Planning Districts,” a lack of sizable, coherent, and distinct districts within a city inevitably leads to a kind of top-down governing structure, wherein authority and responsibilities are organized vertically. Officials within these kinds of organizational structures sit on one rung of a ladder with only a fraction of the city’s issues before them. She details the deleterious effects of such vertical planning on services like policing, welfare, preservation, waste disposal, etc. Alternatively, Jacobs promotes further investigation into experimental ideas of horizontal organizational schemes. She offers the success of New York’s settlement houses as an example:

“Among the most telling precedents for horizontal administration and responsibility are the settlement houses of big cities, which have always organized themselves with a piece of territory as their prime concern, rather than as a disembodied collection of vertical services. This is the main reason why settlement houses have been so effective, why their staffs usually know a place as thoroughly as they know their jobs, and why settlement house services, as a rule, neither become obsolescent nor work at cross-purposes to one another.”61

In an audacious exploration of such horizontal administration, landscape architects Laurel McSherry and Rob Holmes submitted a winning entry into the Arid Lands Institute’s 2012 “Drylands” competition. Their work is part of the flourishing ecological design movement, and it is indebted to the work of geologist John Wesley Powell, who, in the late 19th century advocated an alternative method to planning Western states based on watershed configurations.62 Powell presciently recognized the overall scarcity of water in the American West and the precarious position that created for burgeoning population centers. To the “cowboy reconstructionists” he was the much derided “Washington man.”

In following Powell’s simple directive to plan settlement according to water access, McSherry and Holmes’s proposed reconstitution of the United States

Figure 12: Time-based implementation in Fresh Kills Park (© James Corner Field Operations, courtesy of the City of New York, Department of Parks)

Figure 13: “Instrumental Routing Systems” in Downsview Park, Toronto (© James Corner and Stan Allen, courtesy of James Corner Field Operations)

does not reconcile Jefferson’s grid system, it obliterates it. Their proposal would have the fifty states reorganized into 18 territories based on the major drainage basins of the United States’ rivers. These territories would be further divided into eighty-six commonwealths, based on 2nd order United States Geological Survey (USGS) Watershed Units, to reorient political geography with the presence and movement of surface water.63 At the heart of their plan is a “horizontal accountability structure,” defined by the territorial capitals, i.e. existing cities within each territory that represent the “driest” parts of the territory.64 Their proposal does not divvy up water resources in an egalitarian manner; rather, it intersperses watersheds and underground aquifers amongst neighboring commonwealths, creating what they dub “useful difficulties,”65 and forcing commonwealths to cooperate towards a shared end. Likewise, under their proposal, the departments of the federal government would be interspersed amongst the territorial capitals, finalizing the horizontal dispersal of resources, accountability, and attention. In essence, what they propose is not a slice of the pie for everyone, but intermingling, an intensification of interaction as embodied by metropolitan networks.

While farfetched, McSherry and Holmes’s proposed reconstitution of the United States is indicative of a radical shift in conceptualizations of the American landscape. Buoyed by scientific advancement and the pioneering work of ecological thinkers like Aldo Leopold, Lewis Mumford, and Ian McHarg, planners and designers are beginning to see the ghosts in Jefferson’s grid. Cutting straight lines through mountains, plains, rivers, and peoples has the tendency to sow discord and leave the land open to rapacious influences.

On the other end of the spectrum, students, and philosophers of metropolitan life have begun to recognize the unintended, anti-democratic consequences that accompany the push towards singular, radical modes of individualistic expression. It is understood that we have an urgent need for a shared cultural framework. For it to be successful, this framework cannot just be metaphorical, spiritual, or even legalistic; it needs to take on tangible and constructive forms.

Figure 14: The Commonwealth Approach (McSherry and Holmes)

The solution, then, is not to simply to reverse the polarities of our urban and intra-state fabrics, i.e. bring the grid back to the city and throw Jefferson out with the bathwater. If we are to learn anything from some of the great interlocutors of built form and planning practices, it is that the most instructive (and constructive) lessons come from studying what Corner calls “life in the city.” As urban populations continue to swell, the city offers the most pressing insights on how we govern ourselves and relate to one another. Jens Jensen visualized the United States as “one complete garden.”66 Perhaps it is time we start to think about our country as one complete city.

Notes

1. Nicholson-Lord, David. The Greening of Cities. London: Routledge and Kegan (1987): 23.

2. Rybczynski, Witold. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster (1999): 441.

3. Grese, Robert E. Jens Jensen Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens. John Hopkins University Press (1992): 39.

4. Ibid

5. Peterson, Steven, and Barbara Littenberg, Space and Anti-Space: The Fabric of Place, City, and Architecture, edited by Jake Anderson. ORO Editions (2020): 85.

6. Ibid.

7. Rybczynski 1999, p. 185.

8. Ibid., p. 308.

9. Ibid., p. 307.

10. Grese 1992, p. 39.

11. Ibid

12. Grese 1992, section: “Jensen’s Early Background.”

13. Jens Jensen, Siftings. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press (1990): 34.

14. Ibid., p. 90.

15. “Treaty of Tordesillas,” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Accessed 1 April 2021.

16. Mundingo, Axel I, and Dora P Crouch, “The City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies Revisited. Part I: Their Philosophy and Implications,” The Town Planning Review, Vol. 48, No. 3 (July 1977): 254.

Figure 15: Manhattan as illustrated in Delirious New York (The City of the Captive Globe, Rem Koolhaas, courtesy of MIT Libraries)

17. Nina Veregge, “Transformations of Spanish Urban Landscapes in the American Southwest, 1821-1900,” Journal of the Southwest, Vol. 35, No. 4 (1993).

18. “Northwest Ordinances,” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. Accessed April 1, 2021.

19. Richardson, Heather Cox. How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2020).

20. Ibid

21. Geoff Boeing, “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design,” Journal of the American Planning Association. Vol. 87, No. 1 (19 October 2020): 123–137.

22. Peterson and Littenberg 2020, p. 52.

23. Ibid., p. 54.

24. Ibid., p. 53.

25. Ibid., p. 227.

26. Ibid., p. 265.

27. Ibid., p. 57.

28. Beauregard, Robert A. When America Became Suburban. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press (2008): 41.

29. Peterson and Littenberg 2020, p. 55.

30. di Palma, Vittoria. “Is Landscape Painting?” Essay in Is Landscape ...?: Essays on the Identity of Landscape. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge (2016): 56.

31. Ibid., p. 57.

32. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. New York, NY: Oxford University Press (1978): 8.

33. Van Gerrewey, Christophe (ed.). OMA/Rem Koolhaas: A Critical Reader. Basel, CH: Birkhäuser (2019): 59.

34. Koolhaas, 1978, p. 17.

35. Ibid., p. 15.

36. Peterson and Littenberg 2020, p. 254.

37. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, NY: Random House Inc. (1993): 268-269.

38. Ibid., p. 188.

39. Ibid., p. 261.

40. Ibid., p. 262.

41. Ibid., p. 337.

42. Ibid., p. 338.

43. Koolhaas 1978, p. 15.

44. See section “The Region: 1.4” in Duany, Adres, and Mike Lydon and Jeff Speck, The Smart Growth Manual. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill (2010).

45. Ibid., section “The Building: 12.5.”

46. “The Charter of the New Urbanism,” CNU Congress for New Urbanism, 3 March 2021.

47. Duany, Lyndon, and Speck 2010, section: “The Region: 2.1-2.3.”

48. Ibid., xvi.

49. Steuteville, Robert. “Texas City Adopts Street Grid and Code,” CNU, 19 December 2019.

50. Steuteville 2019.

51. Koolhaas 1978, p. 13.

52. Ibid., p. 10.

53. Jacobs 1993, p. 236.

54. See p. 4 of Corner, James. “The Ecological Imagination: Life in the City and the Public Realm,” Essay in Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, ed. by Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell. Cambridge, MA: The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2016): 3–30.

55. Ibid., p. 3.

56. Ibid., p., 11.

57. Ibid., p. 14.

58. Ibid

59. Ibid

60. Jacobs 1993, p. 167.

61. Ibid., p. 547.

62. Worcester, Donald A. A River Running West: The of John Wesley Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2002).

63. “Drylands Design Conference: Laurel McSherry and Robert Holmes, Drylands Design: A Commonweatlh Approach,” Drylands Design Conference: Laurel McSherry and Robert Holmes, Drylands Design: A Commonweatlh Approach | Arid Lands Institute, Arid Lands Institute, Accessed 31 March 2021.

64. “Drylands Design: A Commonweatlh Approach”.

65. “Drylands Design: A Commonweatlh Approach”.

66. Jensen 1990, p. 102.

“Chinese, Also New”: Rural Ideology and Environmental Planning in Revolutionary China, 1924-1976

Charles Starks

Introduction

The question of how to maintain a distinctive national, cultural, and environmental identity has loomed over environmental planning in China from the early 20th century to the present. In part, this question has involved an effort to redefine Chinese cultural identity at a landscape scale in the face of unprecedented social change; to move from, as Patricia Buckley Ebrey has put it, “the elite culture of the past to a mass culture of the present.”1 Where and how the process of modernization should work has also been deeply debated and contested. One of the ways in which this debate over cultural identity and modernity has been manifested is a contest over the appropriate function and importance of urban and rural landscapes, respectively, and the relationship between them. In an overwhelmingly agrarian land with a very large rural population, reluctance to urbanize and a strong attachment to agrarianism became especially pronounced during the struggle to unite the country in the middle decades of the 20th century. Even today, rural-favoring attitudes in the personal and professional backgrounds of practitioners and the public shape Chinese environmental planning thought and practice, notably in Kongjian Yu’s “peasant’s approach.”2

In the decades since enacting Reform and Opening policies in 1978, China has undergone rapid urbanization as the economy has expanded by over 10 percent in many years and severe poverty has strongly contracted, a development success story that has led to a strong contemporary association of modern landscapes with great cities.3 But before Reform and Opening, urbanization was largely rejected as a planning framework for the Chinese landscape. Before the Communist Party took control of the Chinese state in 1949, intellectuals of various backgrounds left cities to develop and implement models of rural modernization intended to empower the peasants who made up the overwhelming majority of the country’s population. Then, during Mao Zedong’s rule from 1949 to 1976, the state deliberately suppressed urbanization, and in environmental planning, the distinction between cities and the countryside was blurred as all kinds of landscapes were both reshaped and neglected as landscape values were sacrificed to an intensive, decadeslong drive to increase industrial production.4

The rural bias of Chinese environmental planning in the mid-20th century cannot be explained only by the infusion of foreign ideas such as Marxism or garden cities. Although such ideas from abroad were influential in shaping what would become the People’s Republic, they were modulated through homegrown ideals from the Chinese agrarian past to develop a distinct approach to environmental planning that blurred boundaries between city and country. In

this essay, I first describe various ideologies, both imported and of domestic origin, that informed the modernization of urban and rural landscapes in the 1920s and 1930s when China was fragmented. I then discuss the politicized, peasant-oriented ideology that came to dominate Chinese environmental planning in the post-Liberation period.

When planning histories of East Asian countries are written, there is a tendency to emphasize one-way borrowings and colonial impositions of planning ideas that originated from foreign countries. Carola Hein points out this tendency in English-language writing about Japanese planning history, which she attributes to of the inaccessibility of the Japanese language to planners outside Japan.5 Complicating this emphasis on importation, however, have been discussions of how the foreign ideas, once imported, were adapted and transformed by home-country planners in response to local conditions. In his history of Japanese planning, André Sorensen notes that while the Japanese themselves have understood their own planning history as consisting of a succession of modern ideas adopted from America and Europe, the Japanese implementation of those ideas to meet particular needs modified them almost out of recognition.6

In China, the mixing of foreign and local ideas has also been an important part of the narrative of planning history. Focusing on three contemporary metropolises that also happen to have been extensively shaped by foreign influence in modern times—Beijing, Shanghai, and the Pearl River delta cities of the south—Campanella explains the present-day dynamism of these cities as resulting, in part, from borrowing and mixing European, American, and Soviet ideas.7 The mixing, even when influenced by foreign professionals, was transformed and adapted by local Chinese in response to locally felt needs. For example, as Wu Hung explains, Russian ideas about how to build a national capital were chosen in the 1950s because they served Mao Zedong’s need to build a revolutionary political space; the new center of Beijing, Tiananmen Square, was conceived by Mao to open an explicit dialogue with China’s past.8

Moreover, attention to foreign ideologies can obscure the enduring influence of local culture on planning. Although she was not writing with Japan or China specifically in mind, Leonie Sandercock has argued that the writing of planning history has been moving from “the official story,” which she characterizes as one of modernization and progress, “to planning’s contested and multiple histories” wherein the progress narrative is complicated by competition among plans and interest groups.9 In East Asian nations challenged by foreign colonial powers, the demand for modernization and progress was urgently felt in the late 19th and 20th centuries and continues to echo into the present, especially in China. Unlike in Japan, where the national historical narrative of successful modernization and rapid rise to modern-power status clearly aligns with the progress narrative of planning, China’s modernization is usually characterized as haphazard and stillborn, with foreign ideas not fully adopted or implemented, leaving the country ultimately vulnerable to being carved up by foreign entities, including an expanding Japan.10

As Sandercock points out, however, the modernization narrative of progress is subject to multiple interpretations. The expansion of state power to impose urban order has been interpreted by postmodernists as a means of regulating and disciplining bodies in a way that reinforced unequal power relationships. The modernization process can also be read as a continuation of a longer,

global colonial settler project that included the European-led genocide of indigenous people in the Americas and also inspired resistance from colonial subjects in places like China and India.11 These alternative explanations of modernization suggest that a closer look is needed at the ways in which ideas about progress were adapted to planning needs in China, where the modernization story, until very recent times, is conventionally narrated as a failure and even a national humiliation when compared to Japan. In China, the extent to, and means by, which foreign ideas should be adopted and should interact with homegrown and older traditions were and are deeply contested. At times, this contestation has become the subject of great national angst.12 Perhaps it is not surprising that China has periodically turned away from urbanization, so strongly associated with Western industrialization in the progress narrative, to an alternative narrative that emphasizes the strength of an idealized agrarian past and future.

The City and the Country in Early 20th Century China

The sense of a new–old dichotomy permeated many areas of national life in early 20th century China, from literature and the arts to science and technology.13 In the urban built environment, this divide took place within and among cities as they adopted new technology and took on newly specialized roles, such as treaty port, transportation hub, and industrial production center.14 But the dichotomy also made itself felt in the changing relationship between cities and rural areas. Through much of the history of imperial China, Joseph Campanella writes, “city and country were part of a shifting continuum, and not the binary opposites they became in the West and America.”15 While historians have struggled with the proper way to characterize and differentiate Chinese cities within this continuum (or as John Friedmann prefers to call it, “interweaving”), there is evidence for the lack of a sharp division between city and country in the political structure of imperial Chinese states, which treated cities as administrative centers controlled by appointed scholar-officials who moved back and forth between urban and rural areas. These officials were charged with administering both cities and surrounding hinterlands, all of which were fully subordinate to the imperial center.16 Near the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1900, the proportion of the population that lived in urban areas was around 7 percent of the total, a figure that had actually declined from previous centuries as population growth had been faster in rural areas than in cities.17

New forms of administration, with more local authority, were created to manage the changes in urban areas in China. Colonial powers established their own regimes in the districts of urban treaty ports that they controlled beginning in the 19th century, but these administrations were badly fragmented, making planning difficult.18 In the early 1900s after the fall of the Qing, consolidated municipal governance under the control of Chinese also began to appear in Chinese cities. In Guangzhou, a municipal council was created in 1918 separate from the county administration, and in 1920 it was replaced by an Office of Municipal Administration with a mayor. The new administration enacted sweeping policing, hygiene, and education reforms.19 But while modernization involved the importation of new ways of thinking about and acting on the landscape, it has also intersected and coexisted with pre-existing traditions and ideas about how to use the land and organize society within it. David Strand has discussed the enduringness of urban institutions, including business, charitable, and criminal organizations, in early 20th century Chinese cities, which he characterizes as hybrids of old and new.20 Hybridity was a

matter not only of institutions but of infrastructure and landscape. In Tianjin’s Japanese concession, Chinese night-soil workers continued to remove waste even after a modern sewer system was built, while West Lake in Hangzhou was transformed into an urban park intended to evoke China’s literati past for middle-class tourists.21 Thus, China’s adoption of Western environmental planning ideas in the early 20th century was not entirely revolutionary, but rather added new layers to a set of existing cultural and social practices. The fragmentation of the country’s governance during this time allowed for a great deal of experimentation and mixing of Western and Chinese approaches. Notably, this experimentation occurred in rural areas as well as in cities.

The Pre-Liberation Rural Reconstruction Experiments

Chinese intellectuals led a significant wave of experimental rural revitalization movements in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of state fragmentation that followed the urban-focused New Culture Movement and paralleled the rise of a Communist Party that would itself become increasingly rurally based and anti-urban. Three significant intellectual leaders in the rural movement, each of whom implemented back-to-the-land principles in an agrarian county, were Tao Xingzhi, Liang Shuming, and Yan Yangchu (also known as James Yen). All developed theories linking the transformation of society to the reform of the countryside, where the vast majority of Chinese still lived. In retrospect, each of their theories was a mixture of traditional Chinese ideas and reactions to the contemporary situation in China, based in part on these scholars’ understanding of Western, particularly American, theories about education. Liang, born into an official family, had no formal education beyond high school but was informally trained, first at the behest of his father and, later, by himself in collaboration with teachers, in a mix of practical education, Buddhism, Chinese classics, and Western philosophy.22 By contrast, Yan studied politics at Yale and Princeton, while Tao studied government at the University of Illinois and education at Columbia Teachers College, where he encountered the educational philosopher John Dewey.23 Their different educational backgrounds led them each in somewhat different directions, but all created working models of rural reform that were highly visible as the ascendant Communist Party itself ruralized.

Tao Xingzhi converted to Christianity in 1913 and then went to the United States to study.24 In the 1920s, after returning to China and publishing a dictionary intended to promote literacy among the rural poor, Tao opened a normal school in a rural area outside Nanjing where he intended to reform rural society by educating farmers. Although conceived as a teacher-training academy, it actually performed many governmental functions, including “village management, defense against bandits, agricultural research, and economic planning.”25 In 1929, he adopted the motto “Life is education,” which was a reversal of his teacher John Dewey’s motto “Education is life.” Where Dewey’s motto emphasized the recreation of an ideal society in the classroom (or so Tao interpreted it), Tao’s reversal of the motto signaled bringing the classroom outside into the lives of the people to create an ideal society with the people.26 Strongly influenced by the Progressive movement during his time in the United States, Tao identified its impulses to improve society with the Confucian emphasis on education. Combining contemporary Western and traditional Chinese ideas about education, he believed that education could be the basis for reforming rural Chinese society politically, socially, and culturally.27

Like Dewey, Tao pragmatically believed strongly in science and cooperative work to solve practical problems while denigrating esoteric learning, and he “encourag[ed] students to make friends with horses, oxen, sheep, and other farm animals, and not merely with books.”28 At the same time, he did not advocate for blind imitation of Western methods; instead, he saw a precedent for his reform approach in the early Chinese philosophers, who, he contended, had derived their great insights by learning directly from the world since they did not have access to books. Adopting a circular vision of history, Tao therefore believed that, rather than simply imitating the West’s progress, China could utilize progressive educational reform to return to its early glories.29 The Xiaozhuang experiment was closed by Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Party in 1930, and Tao subsequently forged an affinity with the left-wing Communist movement. By 1939, he was operating a school for the children of Communist cadres.30 Tao’s ideas about the possibilities of rural education to generate wisdom among peasants thereby helped adapt Marxist ideology, which emphasized linear progress, to a culture that prized respect for the past.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Yan Yangchu and Liang Shuming each ran institutes situated in rural counties, especially in northern Hebei Province, which was controlled by warlords who were partially independent of the central, nationalist government based in Nanjing. Buffered from national ideological contests, these circumstances gave them a political space for experimentation. Yan began work in Ding County, Hebei, in 1926, while Liang worked on reconstruction projects in other provinces until arriving in Zouping County, Hebei, in 1931.31 Yan first came to know and identify with Chinese peasants when he worked as a translator for Chinese coolies in France during World War I. “I was one of them,” Yan said later to the American author Pearl Buck, stating that he “did not know our own people until I was … thrown into their midst there [in France].”32 He contended that there were four main problems with the Chinese peasantry: ignorance, poverty, weakness, and self-centeredness. Reforms, he believed, would have to take place in three formats—school, society, and the family—and education in four respects: literature and art, life skills, sanitation, and citizenship.33 At the core of Yan’s ideology was the belief that China’s largely illiterate peasant class should become “farmer-scholars” who could read and write and thereby govern themselves. This idea built on the vernacular language movement championed by Hu Shi—the urbane intellectual who, like Tao Xingzhi, had studied with John Dewey at Columbia Teachers’ College—that was associated with the New Culture Movement of the early 1920s. But unlike the language reforms of Hu Shi, which emphasized the development of native Chinese vocabulary to address Western concepts such as technology and democracy, Yan’s idea of the vernacular took as its basis the existing spoken language used by rural, peasant Chinese.34 His notion was that the peasants would remain rural, but become empowered through development of a kind of native literacy. So, while Tao had stressed the possibility of constructing an idealized version of China’s early philosophers out of twentieth-century peasants, Yan looked to reform modern-day peasantry on the terms of their own, contemporary vernacular customs.

Liang Shu-Ming, champion of a rural revitalization concept that has been translated into English as “rural reconstruction,” did not travel abroad or even attend university, but his father’s connections gave him extensive contact with intellectuals in China. Liang’s synthesis of Buddhism with Western

philosophical concepts made such an impression on credentialed scholars that he was offered a professorship at Peking University in 1917.35 He “abandoned Buddhism for Confucianism” while at the university, a switch that had been percolating in his thinking even before he took up the lectureship, but which seems to have been reinforced by his reaction to the May Fourth demonstrations in 1919, a mass urban uprising among students associated with the New Culture movement. Liang, channeling Confucian morality, called for the demonstrators to be good citizens, refrain from violence, and obey the police. In 1920, he gave a famous series of lectures calling for a synthesis of Western progressivism and Eastern spirituality. (Perhaps not coincidentally, John Dewey, then visiting Peking University, issued a similar call at the time.)36 In 1924, disillusioned with the violence of urban political contention between the Communists and the Nationalists, Liang left the university and began to look to rural areas as a base for reform. There was more political space for experimentation in rural provinces outside the urban party intellectuals’ orbit, and as a practical matter, most of the Chinese population still lived in rural areas.37

Like Yan and Tao, Liang sought to put cooperative organization and science into practice in rural areas, but he viewed the problems with Chinese peasants as having been generated by unhealthy contact with Western spiritual ideas since the time of the Opium Wars in the 1800s. If Western individualism could be expunged, he contended, then intellectuals could organize peasants on a cooperative basis and teach them progressive ways of solving problems.38 But these peasants would also need to become capable of self-organizing. Liang envisioned peasants creating cooperative organizations he called a “village covenant” that would “meet their common economic, educational, and military needs outside of the official governmental structure.” Through education, cooperation, and mutual moral monitoring, the peasants would develop in themselves a sense of morality akin to that of the traditional Chinese officials idealized in the writings of Confucius and later scholars.39 The principal institutions of these covenants would be schools, and they would be economically organized as cooperatives that would reorganize landownership and ensure efficient production. Perhaps most telling of the ambition of Liang’s rural vision is that he also envisioned these covenants as a network that would grow and bring land in remote areas into cultivation in order to redistribute the population more evenly throughout the nation’s land area.40

The Rural Success of Mao Zedong’s Mass Line Approach

The fragmented, isolated experiments in rural reform of the 1930s occurred in parallel with the development of the Communist Party and its Red Army, which was finding a secure base of support in more remote rural areas during the same period. Ruralism became especially embedded in Chinese Communist ideology after 1934, when the Communists embarked on the soon-to-be legendary “Long March” through remote terrain from southeast China to Yan’an in the northwest, where they established a base of operations. The most important Communist leader in shifting the party’s focus to the peasantry was Mao Zedong, who had grown up in a rural county where he received a classical Chinese education. Mao and the rural reconstructionists were aware of each other. In 1938, Liang Shuming visited Yan’an and found an audience with Mao, whereupon the two discussed the idea of reforming peasants as a basis for national reconstruction. There was a core philosophical

difference between the two, in that Mao believed that reform depended on class struggle and conflict, while Liang, skeptical of the relevance of European ideas about social class to Chinese society, favored Confucian harmony. The disagreements between Mao and Liang also revealed a tension within Chinese politics between the universality of Marxist-Leninist ideas and the particularity of China. But what they agreed on, for reasons of inclination as well as circumstance, was the importance of rural transformation to reform.41 Liang himself ultimately “accept[ed] the Communist regime.”42

In part, the Communists’ development as a rurally focused movement was an accident of history. In 1927, the Communists’ coalition with the Nationalist Party, known as the United Front, collapsed. To rebuild their power base in a country where the cities were controlled by the Nationalists and various regional warlords, the leaders of the Communist movement, who had mostly been urban intellectuals, decided to move into rural areas where they could raise militias. In these so-called rural Soviets, mostly located in hilly areas of provincial borderlands beyond effective control by the state, Communist organizations classified residents by social class and carried out property rectification in accordance with theories advocated by their Russian advisors, partly through tax reform that shifted the burden from poor peasants to wealthier ones and landlords, and partly through land redistribution that reassigned the worst land to so-called “rich peasants.”43 In order to carry out these economic and social reforms, Mao Zedong developed an educational system known as the mass line, whereby the peasants “deserved trust and must be involved in administration and political campaigns.”44 The mass line system implied that the urbane intellectuals who had been in the vanguard of the party in the 1920s had much to learn from peasants.

After 1937, when Japanese forces invaded China and the Communists formed a second United Front with the Nationalists, the heightened state of warfare prompted further organization in the “bases” the Communists controlled in marginal rural areas. In these locations, relatively unmolested by interference from domestic rivals and foreign enemies, the Communists had the freedom to undertake reforms that gradually deepened the peasants’ class consciousness. Landlords were ridiculed and their property was subject to expropriation at public struggle sessions, emboldening peasants to make further demands and withhold rents. Beginning in 1941, Mao ordered upperlevel cadres to move to rural villages and engage directly in the work of producing food and materials and bringing land into production. Consistent with the mass line approach, this was intended to educate urbane intellectuals in the ways of the newly empowered peasantry.45 The army also participated in these campaigns. As the tide of the war turned against the Japanese forces, the Communists successfully held their base areas and were able to contemplate expansion into the cities by 1944. Now firmly in command, and firmly committed to the ideologies of peasant education, class struggle, and the mass line with which he had achieved success, Mao resisted a return to the urban-oriented Communist ideology of the 1920s.46 The party would remain committed to the rural empowerment with which it had found success during wartime, which would have significant implications for the shaping of both China’s cities and its countryside after the Party took control of the state in 1949.

Figure

Buildings,

left: Beijing Railway Station (CC BY-SA 3.0), Minzu Hotel (Wwbread - CC BY-SA 4.0), Chinese People’s Revolution Military Museum (Tyg728 - CC BY-SA 4.0), Worker’s Stadium (Andre Kiwitz, Uploaded by BaldBoris - CC

BY-SA 2.0), National Museum of China (Nagyman - CC

BY-SA 2.0), Diaoyutai State Guesthouse (rahuldlucca- CC BY 2.0), Cultural Palace of Nationalities (Wwbread - CC

BY-SA 4.0), Great Hall of the People (Diego Delso - CC

BY-SA 4.0). Not pictured: The National Agriculture Exhibition Hall and Overseas Chinese Hotel

Ten Great Buildings: The City in Service to the Country

Although it would become necessary to operate in cities once the state apparatus was under its control, the Communist Party would remain rural in outlook, as can be seen in its approach to land reform in both cities and rural areas after it took control of the Chinese state and proclaimed the beginning of a “New China.” The conflict, or dialogue, between traditional Chinese values and the more universal value of newness would also continue during this period and become intertwined with the question of the proper relationship between rural and urban. In 1958 the architect Liang Sicheng coined the phrase “Chinese, also new,” to describe the “ten great buildings” that were being hurriedly constructed in Beijing to commemorate the 10th anniversary

1: The Ten Great

clockwise from top

of the foundation of New China in 1959. Intended to serve the entire country, these buildings included museums, exhibition halls, guest houses, a central train station, and a large assembly hall, many constructed in hybrid Chinese, Soviet, and Western European styles. Along with the creation of Tiananmen Square and the reorientation of central Beijing from the traditional north–south axis to an east–west axis, the new buildings symbolized the transformation of the old imperial center by the new ideology. The new Beijing, which would be symbolically reorganized to emphasize its service to the vast rural nation beyond its walls (which were torn down), was a representation of the mass line approach that Mao had been practicing in the countryside.47 The adoption of the mass line in cities was “also new,” as was the buildings’ foreign-influenced architectural styling.

Besides the retention of some Chinese architectural themes, an aspect of the Ten Great Buildings that was “also Chinese” was that Mao recreated the blurred relationship between city and country of imperial China by turning cities, including Beijing, into “cities of production.” No longer would China be led from “cities of consumption,” as the Communist Party disparagingly characterized China’s early 20th-century modern cities, with their trading, consumerism, and concentration of wealth.48 Under Mao’s regime, determined as it was to raise the rural masses out of poverty through self-empowerment, cities were to be transformed into sites of production that served the rural majority. Further, this transformation was to occur quickly as a demonstration of the superior power of Chinese Communism. The rapid construction of the Ten Great Buildings, all of which were completed within a year, was a demonstration of this new level of productivity, which was described as “unprecedented in history.”49

Productive Landscapes for a Revolutionary Rural Nation

Perhaps the most overwhelming fact looming over decision-making about land planning was that, for both political and ideological reasons, the nation would remain mostly rural under the socialist regime. The Communists’ policies held back the rate of increase in urbanization so that by 1978, the urbanized proportion of the population was still only about 18 percent, just a little more than double what it had been in 1900.50 In contrast to Western countries that had boosted productivity by urbanizing their labor forces and creating an industrial working class, New China would strive to retain the pre-industrial population balance between urban and rural areas. Most people lived in rural villages, as had been the case prior to Liberation. The reason for this was that the state, informed by Soviet practices that promoted heavy industry, which were inherently suspicious of bourgeois consumerism yet determined to catch up with advanced economies as quickly as possible, suppressed the consumer-serving sectors of the market economy. The government also underinvested in publicly provided housing and social services because it returned the surplus generated by production to industry in order to stimulate more production. This created an artificial condition of scarcity, whereby industries accumulated excess manufactured products, and the surplus was not made available to the people.

With economic policy so heavily skewed toward production, urban dwellers’ everyday consumption needs had to be taken care of by the industrial work units to which they were assigned rather than being made a responsibility of general government or left to the open market.51 This had the effect of stifling urban growth since a considerable portion of urban employment is dependent

upon services to households and consumers—services which were simply withheld under Mao’s rule. Ironically, Mao’s New China economic policies extended the conditions of scarcity and want among the common people that had been generated in old China by the imperial economic system, which was characterized by large populations of laborers that never earned enough surplus income to induce the growth of a consumer economy.52

With urban growth limited under the new system, most people had to remain in rural areas, and had to promote production there because the state had decided to extend industrialization to the countryside. This would not take the form of the self-contained work units and factories that characterized China’s socialist cities, but rather the extension of mass line principles to the promotion of rural productivity. Mao’s plans for rural areas therefore manifested the dialogue and conflict implied by Liang Sicheng’s slogan “Chinese, also new.” Two years before Liang invented that slogan in 1958, Mao himself coined the slogan “Making Green the Motherland,” echoing the National Program for Agricultural Development 1955-1967, which called for mass tree planting in previously uncultivated areas and “near houses, in villages, and along roads and rivers,” a strategy that became known as “foursided greening.” In keeping with the mass line approach, this greening was to be undertaken by the peasants themselves. Landscape plans designed and implemented by experts were regarded as elitist and suspect.53

As Mao continued to exert strong personal influence over policy, his disdain of expertise and desire for quick results came at the expense of planning, and the country was subjected to a series of policy shifts that sacrificed designed landscapes for production, or at least the appearance thereof. During the Great Leap Forward in 1958, Mao’s rhetoric emphasized rural beautification, the reduction of the proportion of cultivated land, and largescale landscape change with land reclamation and the creation of lakes.54 But large-scale infrastructure projects could not be completed quickly enough, and expedience dictated that on the ground, rural greening be deprioritized in favor of widely distributed small-scale steel production. Thus, many forested areas were denuded for fuel by the same peasants who had planted trees just a few years earlier in the “Making Green the Motherland” campaign.

The emphasis on rapid production embedded in the policies of the Great Leap Forward also profoundly impacted China’s urban landscapes. Economically, the efforts to build productivity in the countryside through small-scale, widely distributed industrialization failed, and this policy failure, along with natural disasters, led to widespread famine from 1959 to 1962. But the need to deal with the resulting poverty only reinforced the productivity-oriented direction of national policy toward landscapes. As a result, urban parks were closed to public use and converted into productive landscapes of fruit orchards, livestock pens, and tree farms. As Zhao Jijun points out, this policy of converting urban landscapes of consumption into landscapes of production, however haphazard and expedient, further blurred the distinction between cities and the countryside.55 Urban dwellers were subject to the same pressures for production and social transformation that their rural counterparts had been experiencing since the 1930s.

The landscape policies of the Great Leap Forward and its immediate aftermath continued during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, which intensified the class conflicts and the accompanying anti-intellectual and anti-urban

attitudes with which Mao had earlier found success in winning peasants over to Communist ideology and unifying China. By the early 1970s, not only were urban parks being used in food production, a trend that began during the Great Leap Forward, but some of them were even allocated to state industries, which built factories on the alienated parkland.56 Subsequently, scholars and practitioners assessed the impacts of these short-term, production-focused policies on cities quite negatively, and they were eventually reversed. In 1986, the policy that explicitly tied the concept of landscape greening to production was officially repealed by the central government.57 By then, the government had come to accept that consumption was necessary for the economy to grow, and planned landscapes not devoted to agriculture or industry could become symbols of growth and development.

The Ideology of Point, Line, and Plane

The restraints on urbanization and consumption, extreme and unpredictable policies, anti-professional political environment, and unrealistic demands for rapid results all militated against consistent execution of environmental planning in China from the 1950s to the 1970s. The exceptional cases in which large-scale environmental planning was contemplated and executed show the challenges and limitations of long-term planning in an era when the demands of political theory dominated professional discourse. Jijun Zhao’s research and criticism of several of the projects from this era can help us understand how the landscape architecture profession responded to political demands biased toward the empowerment of peasants. These include landscape plans for residential compounds during the 1950s and the reconstruction of the poor, rural village of Dazhai as a model agricultural settlement in the 1960s.58

Zhao’s critique begins in the early 1950s, when highly formalistic design ideas from the Soviet Union were influential in the landscaping plans of urban projects in China. Residential compounds, often within an industrial work unit, were constructed in superblocks, and due to the emphasis on production and the idea that landscaping was a frill, greenery was relatively sparse. Further, the orthogonal networks of paths and streets were not well adapted to residents’ actual movements and desires for the use of open space, nor did they account for natural light and air circulation, with the result that even the sparse plantings were ruined. Consistent with mass line ideology that disparaged professional management, the authorities expected that greenery would be cared for on a volunteer basis by residents, and the lack of central organization for this purpose also led to the neglect of the landscaping.59

By the time of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, a looser greening ideology of “point, line, and plane” had been adapted from Soviet theory, whereby “points” could be trees, yards, or sometimes parks, “lines” were roads and paths, and “planes” could refer either to parks or to general greening over a widespread area. In the “point, line, and plane” framework, plantings were to be tailored for each category.60 During the Great Leap Forward, the supervision of landscaping in cities was also assigned to official bodies rather than being left purely to self-organizing volunteers, although these agencies still expected that the work-unit employees would perform the service. The first large project that implemented the point, line, plane framework was Caoyang New Village, a residential compound in Shanghai. In this project, trees planted in the front and back yards of the residences were considered “points,” the

streets and unbuildable stream banks “lines,” and a park and nurseries were considered “planes.” In another such compound, Pengpu New Village, yards adjacent to residences were considered as points, streets as lines, and small parks and nurseries as planes.61

The point, line, and plane framework was flexible enough to be subject to multiple interpretations. However, it was politicized by the application of several national slogans of the Great Leap Forward era, including “general greening, with focused improvements”; “greening before beauty”; “ubiquity first and improvement later”; and “strive for the basics before striving for the best.” Interpreted through these slogans, urban parks were generally considered “points” rather than “planes” as in the “new village” residential developments, and because points were considered “focused” improvements and therefore a lower priority than “general greening,” they were deemphasized in favor of

Figure 2: A Soviet-inspired design for a residential compound, based on a plan provided by Li Jianwei, a Dazhai villager (Jijun Zhao and Jan Woudstra, Taylor and Francis)

productive landscapes such as nurseries and greening throughout residential areas. The prioritization of “general greening” in cities under this political framework is considered by Zhao to be the urban counterpart of the “foursided greening” that was to be implemented by peasants in rural areas.62 Although a number of new parks were built during the Great Leap Forward year of 1958, as the political climate became even more anti-professional during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the number of new parks decreased drastically and existing parks were either neglected or, as discussed above, appropriated for productive uses such as factories.

Although urban landscapes were neglected and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese state nevertheless did not completely abandon the “focused improvements” part of the “make everywhere green” slogan. One rural village in particular, Dazhai, was repeatedly cited in Party propaganda during the Cultural Revolution as a model for the reconstruction of productive

Figure 3: Aerial image of residential compound (Ren Zhimin, courtesy of Jijun Zhao)

agricultural landscapes. In this village, the Communist Party leader, Chen Yonggui, a member of a local peasant family, ignored the central state’s directive to produce iron during the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and instead had the villagers continue to do agricultural work. Beginning early in the 1950s, they had been creating terraces of a unique design out of eroded slopes, building an irrigation system, and planting trees and shrubs to prevent erosion. Chen cultivated a spirit of self-sufficiency among the locals, rejecting outside assistance and insisting that the villagers feed themselves. Unlike many other parts of China, Dazhai did not experience famine after the Great Leap Forward, and when the village flooded in 1963, destroying many of the earthworks, the villagers quickly rebuilt under Chen’s direction. They also constructed new, communal housing in a terraced design with shared kitchens, bathrooms, and other common facilities, thereby echoing the design of the productive land while facilitating a collectivist lifestyle in keeping with the revolutionary spirit of New China.63

The rapid recovery from the devastating floods of 1963 made Dazhai nationally known for its productivity and collective spirit. In 1964, Mao Zedong introduced the slogan “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai.” This referred to both Chen’s specific designs, which were seen to have originated from peasant wisdom rather than professional expertise, and the spirit of self-sufficiency and self-direction among the villagers which embodied Mao’s mass line approach. However, by the early 1970s, demands for continued increases in production led the villagers to level mountains and construct artificial fields with poor soils that they could not irrigate consistently. A slogan painted on an aqueduct serving the new fields, “With self-reliance and hard work, re-arrange mountains and rivers,” reflected the image of Dazhai by the late 1970s. This nature-conquering image of Dazhai, spread via heroic propaganda posters depicting Chen Yonggui and the villagers reconstructing the landscape, had, in politics and the popular imagination, overwhelmed the intangible “Dazhai spirit,” which had emphasized self-sufficiency and sustainability in accordance with the limitations of the environment.64

Figure 4: Idealized view of Dashai from a 1970s propaganda poster (Zhang Yuquing, courtesy of Jijun Zhao)

Each of the projects that Zhao has critiqued demonstrates the contradictions that hindered the development of environmental planning in Maoist China. The demand for fast results to catch up with the West, the overwhelming emphasis on production at the expense of consumption, and the rejection of professional management in favor of mass-line organization by peasants and workers all militated against large-scale management and comprehensive planning. Instead, the notable projects of the era are scattershot in nature, reflecting the ingenuity of dynamic local leaders such as Chen Yonggui. Wedded to a political ideology that distrusted expertise, the central state never developed a consistent and coherent ecological vision for the country, its cities, or its rural areas.

Conclusion

This essay has contended that it is possible to identify an ideology in Chinese environmental planning in the mid-20th century that largely rejected urbanization and instead privileged a rural, peasant-oriented ideology. This ideology was based on political, social, and, at times, design ideas about the ideal society that had considerable foreign influence but were also explicitly linked to China’s own agrarian past and present. This ideology privileged peasant empowerment and, when it became activated by the Communistcontrolled state after Liberation, ultimately blurred distinctions between cities and country. While foreign ideas were influential in this history, contests of ideas about environmental planning occurred within a local context. The main leaders, such as the intellectuals Tao Xingzhi, Yan Yangchu, and Liang Shuming in the 1930s, the national leader Mao Zedong in the 1950s and 1960s, and local party leaders like Chen Yonggui during the Maoist period, did not view themselves as transforming rural China with foreign ideologies. Instead, they adapted foreign ideas to their own sense of Chinese identity that had been formed by their own educational experiences, or in the case of Chen, by his peasant background. For all of them, the agrarian ideal rooted in the Chinese past loomed large, and the question was how to adapt it to the demands of industrialization.

After a period of partial urban transformation in the early 20th century, the focus shifted to rural areas in the 1920s and 1930s, where there was freedom to experiment away from the often violent political struggles in urban areas and where the vast majority of the population actually lived. The ruralizing of the Communist Party and Chinese Communist thought during this time was of signal importance because it demonstrated the overwhelming success of Mao Zedong’s mass line approach in mobilizing peasants. In hindsight, only a rural organization could unite the masses in a deeply fractured country that was overwhelmingly poor and agrarian. Mao continued this revolutionary approach and even applied it in cities after the Communists won control of the state in 1949. Though the results have been criticized for degrading urban landscapes during this period, the subordination of cities to national needs and the suppression of urbanization was in line with party goals to focus on the production side of the economy and suppress the consumption side. While there was an effort to adapt Soviet principles of landscape design to new residential compounds, there was a fundamental conflict between professional practice, on the one hand, and the mass-line approach’s empowerment of peasants and workers, on the other. The result was neglect and destruction as landscape design, especially in focal points such as urban parks, became considered ideologically suspect. But the efforts at greening

in rural areas lacked central direction and were also unsuccessful. Dazhai was a notable exception where a visionary leader, Chen Yonggui, developed what became self-sufficient, sustainable agricultural community that was eventually held up as a national model. However, Dazhai became lionized not for working within nature’s constraints, but rather for overcoming them. The contradictory desires to maintain China’s historical agrarianism while exploiting nature to accommodate industrialization, so much in evidence during the period covered in this essay, would continue to result in contests over environmental planning and urbanization after 1978. However, the flowering of professional practice that was permitted to occur in the Reform and Opening period also gave rise to new possibilities for reconciling them.

Notes

1. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2010): 7.

2. Yu, Kongjian. “Creating Deep Forms in Nature: The Peasant’s Approach to Urban Design.” In Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, edited by Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell. Cambridge, MA: The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, with University of Texas at Austin; George F. Thompson Publishing (2016): 95–117.

3. Knight, John B., and Sai Ding. China’s Remarkable Economic Growth. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2012): Chapter 1. See also Yu, Kongjian, and Wei Li. “Continue the Legacy of the New Culture Movement: Vernacular Cities and Vernacular Landscape.” In Letters to the Leaders of China: Kongjian Yu and the Future of the Chinese City. New York: Terreform (2018): 42, 78–93.

4. Zhao, Jijun, and Jan Woudstra. “‘In Agriculture, Learn from Dazhai’: Mao Zedong’s Revolutionary Model Village and the Battle against Nature.” Landscape Research, Vol. 32, No. 2 (April 2007): 171–205, 318.

5. See p. 7 of Hein, Carola. “The What, Why, and How of Planning History.” In The Routledge Handbook of Planning History, ed. Carola Hein New York: Routledge (2017): 1–10.

6. Sorensen, André. The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the TwentyFirst Century. Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series. London ; New York: Routledge (2002): 6-7.

7. See pp. 30-31, 58-61, 98-100 of Campanella, Thomas J. The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press (2008)

8. See pp. 7-9, 21-35 of Wu, Hung. Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2005).

9. Sandercock, Leonie. Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century. London: Continuum (2003): 57.

10. Lu, Duanfang. Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949-2005. Planning, History, and Environment Series. London: Routledge (2006): 5.

11. Sandercock 2003, pp. 49, 52-53; see also p. 83 of Hosagrahar, Jyoti. Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism. The Architext Series. London ; New York: Routledge (2005).

12. Yu and Li 2018, pp. 82-85.

13. Ibid., pp. 82, 88-89.

14. See p. 211-13 of Strand, David. “New Chinese Cities.” In Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950, edited by Joseph W. Esherick. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2000): 211–24. See also pp. 2-6 of Esherick, Joseph W. “Modernity and Nation in the Chinese City.” In Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950, edited by Joseph W. Esherick. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2000): 1–16.

15. See p. 163 of Campanella, Thomas. “The Bucks Stopped Here: From Yeoman Lung to Kongjian Yu.” In Letters to the Leaders of China: Kongjian Yu and the Future of the Chinese City. New York: Terreform (2018): 154–169.

16. Friedmann, John. China’s Urban Transition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2005): 8; Esherick 2000, p. 6.

17. Xu, Yi, Bas van Leeuwen, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. “Urbanization in China, ca. 11001900.” Frontiers of Economics in China, Vol. 13, No. 3 (September 2018): 322+.

18. Esherick 2000, pp. 2-4.

19. See p. 23-29 of Tsin, Michael. “Canton Remapped.” In Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2000): 19–29.

20. Strand 2000, pp. 212, 220.

21. See pp. 44-45 of Rogaski, Ruth. “Hygienic Modernity in Tianjin.” In Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2000), 30–46. See also pp. 116-119 of Wang, Liping. “Chapter 7. Tourism and Spatial Change in Hangzhou, 1911–1927” In Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press (2000): 107-120.

22. See pp. 25-30, 52-62 of Alitto, Guy S. The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-Ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press (1979).

23. Zhao Jijun 赵纪军, “‘Xiandai Shijie Zui Ju Geming Xing Gongxian de Shi Da Weiren Zhi Yi’ de Yan Yangchu ’现代世界最具革命性贡献的 十大伟人’之一的晏阳初.” Jiaoyu Jia 教育家, No. 7 (2015): 60–63. See also pp. 26-27 of Brown, Hubert O. “Tao Xingzhi: Progressive Educator in Republican China.” Biography, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1990): 21–42.

24. Brown 1990, p. 26.

25. Ibid., p. 34.

26. Ibid

27. Ibid., p. 27.

28. Ibid., p.p 29-30.

29. Ibid., p. 36.

30. Ibid., p. 37.

31. See p. 51 of Lamley, Harry J. “Liang Shu-Ming, Rural Reconstruction and the Rural Work Discussion Society, 1933-1935.” The Chung Chi Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May 1969): 50–61.

32. See p. 56 of Zhang, Yu. “Visual and Theatrical Constructs of a Modern Life in the Countryside: James Yen, Xiong Foxi, and the Rural Reconstruction Movement in Ding County (1920s-1930s).” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2013): 47–95. Emphasis in the original.

33. “Xiandai Shijie Zui...” 2015, p. 62.

34. Zhang 2013, pp. 52-55.

35. Lamley 1969, p. 50.

36. Alitto 1979, pp. 72-77.

37. Lamley 1969, p. 51.

38. Alitto 1979, pp. 193-99.

39. Ibid., p. 206.

40. Ibid., pp. 206-212.

41. Ibid., pp. 215-25, 283-92.

42. Ibid., p. 225.

43. See pp. 183-91 of Ch’en, Jerome. “The Communist Movement 1927–1937.” In The Cambridge History of China: Volume 13: Republican China 1912–1949, ed. by Albert Feuerwerker and John K. Fairbank, Vol. 13. The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1986): 68–229.

44. Ibid., p. 178.

45. See pp. 650-52, 694 of Van Slyke, Lyman. “The Chinese Communist Movement during the Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945.” In The Cambridge History of China: Volume 13: Republican China 1912–1949, ed. Albert Feuerwerker and John K. Fairbank, Vol. 13. The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1986): 609-722.

46. Ibid., p. 710.

47. Wu, 2005, pp. 108-16. See also Jin Lei 金磊, and Li Chen 李沉. “‘Guo Qing Shi Da Gongcheng’ Hou Shi Lu ‘国庆十大工程’ 启示录.” Beijing Gui Hua Jian She 北京规划建设, No. 6 (2005): 182–85. See also p. 103 of Zhao Jijun 赵纪军, “Xin Zhongguo Yuanlijn Zheng Ce Yu Jian She 60 Nian Hui Mou (Yi): ‘Zhong Er Xin’ 新中国园林政策与建设60年回眸（一）：’中而 新’.” Fengjing Yuanlin 风景园林, No. 1 (2009): 102–105.

48. Zhao 2009 (“Yi,” No. 1), p. 104.

49. Jin Lei 金磊 and Li Chen 李沉 2005, p. 183.

50. See p. 31 of Wang, Xiaolu, and Guanghua Wan. “China’s Urban Employment and Urbanization Rate: A Re‐estimation.” China & World Economy, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2014): 30–44.

51. Lu 2006, pp. 7-11, 82-85, 89-94.

52. See pp. 383-84 of Elvin, Mark. “Why China Failed to Create an Endogenous Industrial Capitalism: A Critique of Max Weber’s Explanation.” Theory and Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1984): 379–91.

53. Zhao and Woudstra 2007, pp. 14-16.

54. See pp. 56-57 of Zhao Jijun 赵纪军. “Dui ‘Da Di Yuanlin Hua’ de Lishi Kaocha 对 ‘大地园林 化’ 的历史考察.” Zhongguo Yuanlin 中国园林 26, No. 10 (2010): 56–60. See also pp. 54-55 of Zhao Jijun 赵纪军. “Representations of Beautiful China 图像化 ‘美丽中国’.” In Beautiful China: Reflections on Landscape Architecture in Contemporary China, edited by Richard J Weller and Tatum L Hands. Los Angeles: ORO Editions (2020): 54–59.

55. Zhao and Woudstra 2007, pp. 314-16. See also Zhao Jijun 赵纪军 2010 (“Dui...”), p. 58.

56. Zhao and Woudstra 2007, p. 319.

57. Zhao Jijun 赵纪军 2010 (“Dui...”), pp. 58-59.

58. See pp. 92-93 of Zhao Jijun 赵纪军. “Xin Zhongguo Yuanlijn Zheng Ce Yu Jian She 60 Nian Hui Mou (San): ‘Lü Hua Zuguo’ 新中国园林政策与建设60年回眸（三）：’绿化祖国’.” Fengjing Yuanlin 风景园林, No. 3 (2009): 91–94. See also pp. 99-101 of Zhao Jijun 赵纪军. “Xin Zhongguo Yuanlijn Zheng Ce Yu Jian She 60 Nian Hui Mou (Er): 苏联经验 新中国园林政策与 建设60年回眸（二）：苏联经验.” Fengjing Yuanlin 风景园林, No. 2 (2009): 98–102. Finally, see Zhao and Woudstra2007, pp. 175-79.

59. Zhao Jijun 赵纪军 2009 (“Er” No. 2), pp. 99-100.

60. Zhao Jijun 赵纪军 2009 (“San” No. 3), p. 93; also Zhao and Woudstra 2007, pp. 319-20.

61. Zhao Jijun 赵纪军 2009 (“San” No. 3), p. 93.

62. Ibid.

63. Zhao and Woudstra 2007, pp.177-86.

64. Ibid., pp.171, 188-195.

Half Earth Now?

Robert Levinthal

How we shape the environmental crisis matters. Excess carbon in the atmosphere cannot be reversed.1 Where the rise in warming stops, whether at 1.5oC or 6.4oC by the end of the century, is entirely up to how we design, plan, and govern the planet.2 Furthermore, human activity has led to the rapid extinction of other lifeforms, rivaled in speed and intensity by only the five other major extinction events before it.3 Opinions on how to properly address these crises differ. At one end of the spectrum, the anthropocentrists want the world to be reimagined and dominated entirely by humans. They believe that only through humankind’s ingenuity can the Earth be saved. At the other pole, the deep ecologists speculate that this attitude is naïve and would continue the unabated destruction of all other species present.4 Toward this latter end, they suggest that 50% to 75% of the biosphere must be reserved for natural processes to survive and prosper. Leading this charge is the late E.O. Wilson and Tony Hiss, who helped popularize the term “half-earth” as a rallying cry to protect half of the planet’s land and oceans for life to flourish, persist, and as a tool to combat both interrelated crises simultaneously.

Edward Osborne (E.O.) Wilson’s six-decade career as a biologist, naturalist, and writer, is among the most prolific in the United States and the world. Few hard scientists, if any, have had as great of an influence on design disciplines as Wilson. Those who have best articulated Wilson’s theories into practice have been catapulted into interdisciplinary relevance and renowned acclaim. Environmental planner Tim Beatley took Wilson’s book Biophilia (1984), which expounded on the psychologist Eric Fromm’s concept that humans are linked to their environment and prosper when it is healthy and abundant, and turned it into a worldwide initiative to “green” our cities. Beatley published three books on the topic: Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning (2011), Handbook of Biophilic City Planning and Design (2017), and Biophilic Cities for an Urban Century (2020). Landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn credits Wilson as a significant influence in her founding of the discipline of urban ecology.5 Additionally, landscape architect Richard Weller quotes Wilson first in his 2015 article “World P-Ark,”6 which has best capitulated the half-earth theory into a design proposal. In 2016, Wilson wrote Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, one of his last masterpieces before his death in late 2021.

Author Tony Hiss’s book, The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing with Our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside (1991) still resides on the University of Georgia’s landscape architecture program’s reading list thirty years after its publication. Like Wilson, Hiss has also inspired multiple generations of designers with his work and insight. Despite Wilson’s famous call for a greater movement to preserve open spaces beginning in

2002, it was Hiss who first coined the term, “half-earth,” in a 2014 Smithsonian article.7 In 2021, he wrote Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth, a 10-year effort which looked to provide insight into how achieving this sweeping vision may be accomplished. Wilson provided this book’s introduction, an important seal of approval.

This essay examines the half-earth theory in three parts. First, there is a review of Wilson’s (2016) book, which examines his ideas and reasoning for protecting half of the planet into preserves. Following this, I look at the contributions of Hiss, focusing on his newest book and offering a critical perspective of Hiss’ examples of inspiration for how he believes the idea may be best achieved. In the third and final part, I provide a short discussion and conclusion in which I critique this theory and discuss how landscape architecture and planning are disciplines that are well situated to contribute toward fulfilling the halfearth vision. In this section, I reiterate the belief that the half-earth model is a feat worthy of pursuit but that some of its current inspiration is flawed and will flourish only through greater focus from the design disciplines. Ultimately, this essay and the final section discuss my Ph.D. research and my proposed theory for the final paper of this course.

Wilson’s Half-Earth

As a myrmecologist, Wilson spent most of his life in the dirt looking at the minute world of ants, but his research and the focus of his writing often expanded into biodiversity, ecosystems, and the entire biosphere. Alarmed that the background extinction rate (the rate at which species become extinct without the presence of man) that is roughly 2-3 species a year is much lower than the modern-day extinction rate which is closer to 150-200 species every day, Wilson began writing about expanding reserves at the beginning of the twenty-first century.8 However, it was much earlier in E.O. Wilson’s career that he provided the theory needed to show that retaining biodiversity is a product of connectivity and the size of a species’ environment. Wilson cowrote the “Theory of Island Biogeography” in 1967 with Robert MacArthur, which established that the diversity of life on islands was determined by proximity to a larger land mass and the area of the island.9 This would later be expounded upon by others to include inland landscapes and protected areas, and to this day the study serves as the foundational work to the greater study of biodiversity and ecology.10

Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life serves less as a rigorous study than as a rallying cry to the general public to protect the species that remain and to safeguard against the extermination of those on the brink. Over his long career, Wilson wrote thirty books, often geared to a wider audience and to persuade young academics towards becoming naturalists, while also writing rigorous studies on ants. It was from these disparate interests that the 2016 book seems to get its organization. Half-Earth begins with a discussion on the source of the problem. This section does not go deep into detail about global warming or land use change, but instead focuses on what he perceives to be the problem that humans are unable to recognize how much we receive from the culmination of the diversity of species on Earth.11 His argument takes a biophilic stance, for human health benefits, as well as from an ecosystem services standpoint, that a healthy environment provides clean water, air, and food at an inexpensive price that cannot be replicated easily by human interventions, as a reason for half-earth. By focusing exclusively on animals

and microbes rather than the landscapes, Wilson fails to mention that in preserving half of the planet, these areas will act as better carbon sinks to help mitigate climate change.12

The second part of Wilson’s book seems to revert to his specialty in pointing to different species and detailing their evolution from a common ancestor with humans billions of years ago. In highlighting these species, he points to unique in their life cycles, body compositions, and relationships to other species. Wilson provides beautiful examples of plants, animals, fungi, and amoebas relatively unknown to the general public and how there are millions more species that have yet to be discovered and categorized that are worthy of protection. He provides the salient, if not overused, example of the removal of wolves from Yellowstone and their impact on their tree composition, while asking whether it is worth removing species whose impact on the larger environment is not yet clear. In this section, Wilson relies heavily on ethos, and the idea that because something simply exists it has the right to live, to bring people to respect other life forms. While this is an effective tactic for some, it has been well documented that not all people see other species in this light and perhaps will never do so.13 Over five methods for viewing the natural world have been formulated, from Wilson’s stance on deep ecology on one side to Erle Ellis’s stance as a cornucopian or anthropocentric on the other. Reaching out to these other groups would have made for a stronger argument to promote this theory, but instead Wilson attacks these groups, as seen below.

“Writers and spokespeople favoring Anthropocene philosophy are focused on ecosystems and by training seem innocent of the nature and meaning of biodiversity at the species level. Researchers in species-level biology are the equivalent of neurobiologists in their finely detailed study of the brain, while those Anthropocene enthusiasts who see species as interchangeable parts that fill up ecosystems are little more than nineteenth century phrenologists, who studied mind by the shape of the skull.”

“Another problem is the claim by Anthropocene enthusiasts that there are no more wildernesses, that the Earth is already a used planet, and unfettered nature is dead or dying. The time has come, they say, to bring people more fully into the picture, mingling people and wild species in a manner that benefits the two symbiotically. So just how many species, and how much nature, would survive? Anthropocene supporters have no idea, and qualified scientists are struggling to find out.”14

Wilson’s polemic against environmental scientist Erle Ellis and other anthropocentrists often seems to divulge into unnecessary personal attacks (phrenologists were often racists who used pseudoscience to attempt claims at the supremacy of European races – not to dissimilar to naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace who used evolution for this same debunked argument). Ellis’s groundbreaking work indicated that over half of the terrestrial surface of the Earth is already being used by humans through agricultural means and few places remain unaltered by humankind.15 This is an important insight, especially when considering that the Earth’s population is expected to continue to grow from roughly 8 billion presently, leveling out to 10.9 billion by some of the most conservative measurements by the end of the century.16 How will these people be fed and housed, while many more people strive for greater comfort and middle-class lifestyles that are exemplified by the wasteful United States? Wilson may have used Ellis’s work to provide greater evidence for his stance

and creating an argument around the need for greater restoration of certain areas not just preservation to achieve the half-earth vision. Furthermore, while Wilson establishes that a growing population will consume less based off an argument around gains in technological storage, this may not be as congruent with the human condition as he alludes to in reducing our ecological footprints. This is especially true as we continue to see the rapid growth of ever larger single-family homes in the United States,17 where the suburbs expand by an area equal to the size of Rhode Island every year.18

Half-Earth concludes with the third and much smaller section called “the solution.” In this part, Wilson provides some detail into why half-earth is the penultimate goal. He points to the theory that preserving half of the Earth should save roughly 90% of biodiversity on Earth, while the current protected areas at roughly 15-17% will result in extinctions of greater than half of all known and unknown species. From this point, Wilson does little to suggest how these protected areas will be formulated and does not mention the need for connectivity, the importance of which he helped to provide the evidence for in the late 1960s. He offers more of a piecemeal approach to preservation rather than a connected and strategic one. Following this, he illustrates how the hard sciences should lead the charge for this effort, without providing a coherent argument as to why. This is a great divergence from his stance in The Diversity of Life (1999) in which he alludes that, “if it is granted biodiversity is at high risk what is to be done? The solution will require cooperation among professions long separated by academic and practical tradition.”19 This quote appears to be more embracing of other disciplines and is therefore a better position to accomplish such an unlikely goal. Wilson’s weakest argument in his solution section is his belief that setting up cameras across these protected areas and allowing for virtual reality to let people inside and experience biodiversity will be enough to save it and leave it unfettered by humans. Through the poor reception of Facebook’s metaverse in 2021, it seems that this technology is still a long way away from having the impact Wilson believes is possible.20 Finally, while mentioning invasive species in earlier chapters, Wilson’s neglects to recognize good stewardship and the presence of humans as ecosystem engineers in the fight for our planet and in protecting species, relying on the antiquated view of preservation pushed by Muir in the late 1800s. While Wilson’s book pushes the case for half-earth to a wider audience, it does little in rallying dissimilar philosophies and diverse professions to its cause.

Hiss’s Half-Earth

Tony Hiss does a great job in filling in the gaps of Wilson’s views of how halfearth may be implemented. He begins his book by placing Native Americans and their land management systems as an example of historic and presentday preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Hiss immediately recognizes that “rescuing the planet” will require human intervention as part of the effort in preserving half of the planet. In riveting detail and clarity, Hiss also describes for his audience, which is intended for a lay public, what the biosphere is, who was the first to recognize its presence, and how life exists in this thin “envelope.” In total, he writes, the biosphere is, “32 miles tall and 24,901 miles around, is 800 times wider than it is high,” and “if the earth were the size of a grapefruit… [the biosphere is] no more than a coat of paint [on top],” and that from this small area, all known species are known to exist in the expansive universe.21 A powerful image, though Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, and others’ idea of the “critical zone,” may push the conversation further.

Following this, Hiss explains the importance of photographs of Earth from space such as Earthrise and the Blue Marble in the 1960s and 70s, and the Pale Blue Dot in the 1990s. Legendary landscape architect, Ian McHarg, wrote of a similar sentiment in his Design with Nature in 1969 to his widereaching audience at that time.22 However, it is my opinion that contemporary photographs will not have the same effect in the present day. In today’s environment of special effects, ultra-realistic video games, rovers on Mars, and the James Webb Space Telescope, attention has turned away from Earth to distant planets unlikely to ever be colonized by humans. Equally troubling, the Bush administration delayed and significantly reduced the capability of a satellite that was intended to make a continuous image of Earth available to the public,23 and the Trump administration similarly attempted to decommission the DSCVOR satellite that monitored climate change.24 In this era of extreme polarity and synapse overload, unaltered photographs of our sick planet with an overload of space debris may still not be enough. Instead, creatives may be the best option at reaching the general public rather than photographs captured by the hard sciences.

In Hiss’s “The Science of 50 Percent” chapter, he lays out the reasoning and history behind the half-earth threshold. In doing so, he also points out the historic makers of big plans and drawings which helped to formulate this vision including Warren Manning’s National Plan, Lucy and Anette Braun’s conservation work in Ohio, Reed Noss’s contributions in Florida, Howard and Eugene Odum’s work on ecosystems, James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, Victor Ernest Shefford as the first to make a science-based protection target of protection 50% of the Earth over half a century ago, Norman Myer’s hotspots, and Wilson and MacArthur’s Theory of Island Biogeography, among many more, both obscure and well known. These thought leaders are all from the United States and Europe, with some lesser-known thinkers in Russia, but Hiss fails to recognize the contributions of a much larger portion of the planet. This regional focus continues into the next few chapters as the examples Hiss highlights are only from Western countries and primarily the United States. The only non-North American example he gives is in Argentina where the white owners of the outdoor clothing apparel Patagonia bought millions of acres and donated it to the government as part of a larger initiative.

Unlike Wilson, the projects that Hiss highlights are often the work of planners and landscape architects. He begins with regional planner Benton MacKaye’s Appalachian Trail, then continues with Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Eliot’s work in Boston and the Emerald Necklace. He then briefly highlights green belts, though never mentions by name “the father of modern-day planning,” Ebenezer Howard,25 who made this land management form popular in the early 20th century.26 Following this, Hiss highlights Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty with a newly digitized map by planner Dana Tomlin. After this example, he examines the work of environmental planner Ann Satterthwaite, who looks to extend the Appalachian trail area with a much larger greenway.

Though not all projects are directly related to the design fields, he also illuminates the work of biologists from Yellowstone to Yukon and the wildlife crossings that landscape architects and planners like Nina-Marie Lister helped to design and popularize. He finishes the book with citizen contributions and stories, though the majority of these examples are from privileged and affluent individuals. In the final pages, he offers his view of what a future project of halfearth may look like. He examines landscape architect Nick Pevzner’s research

on greening new transition lines, while offering the idea of making a concerted effort to connect the three long distance hiking trails in the United States and Canada: Appalachian, Continental Divide, and Pacific Crest.27

Whether Hiss was aware of the work of Richard Weller is unknown, but Weller and his students (including myself) worked on establishing plans for continuous hiking trails that connect from Patagonia to Alaska and Morocco to Australia. In the last few years this work has become increasingly popular and is to be presented formally to the World Bank and large non-government associations in the coming months. Hiss also missed many other forms of projects around the world that are large-scale restoration projects that intend to take the areas that Ellis alluded to as being degraded by humans and restoring them for both human and other species.

While 50% preservation can and should be the ultimate goal, humans must play a more significant role in restoration while also providing a buffer and “greening” the other 50% of land that is dedicated to greater human activity. With each passing decade, 50% by 2050 seems to become more of a reality, with 193 country members of the U.N.’s Convention of Biological Diversity pledging 20% by 202028 and similar commitments from 70 countries like the United States, and leaders like Bhutan and Costa Rica pledging 30% or greater by 2030.29 Whether this trend will continue to 50% by 2050 is important for how the other land is managed in the present day. Currently, many of the protected areas in economically developing countries are under immense pressure from local communities leading to degradation.30

In this era of decolonization, it will be important to include examples from all around the world. While Hiss was right to include Native Americans, there are many other examples of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color contributors that must be shared and highlighted. It is important that the entire world and all its people can see the half-earth process as something that they can contribute to and receive benefits from. While Hiss’s book illuminates the importance of landscape architects and planners in the restoration of the planet, no such declaration of design being a key component in this fight to restore the planet was made in his book and certainly not Wilson’s book. It will be important to continue to promote and center landscape architecture and planning as a key contributor to this work.

Discussion

Half-earth is a grand aspiration as well as a glorious compromise. E.O. Wilson has done much over his long career to influence the practice and focus of designers, and while he brings great attention to this theory and vision, his book leaves much to be desired in how to achieve its vision. Partially filling in this gap, Tony Hiss explores how half-earth was conceived, the background to its creation, and what projects and people best articulate half-earth into becoming a reality. While his first chapter does well to acknowledge Indigenous peoples, his book is too focused on North America and Europe. Additionally, Hiss does little to talk about the discontinuity of freshwater bodies and waterways, while ignoring the ocean almost entirely. His grand aspirations for continuing the half-earth vision have already been conceived of and expanded from a North American focus to Richard Weller’s World P-Ark project and his speculative trails that connect disparate protected areas from Patagonia to Alaska and Morocco to Tasmania.31

It is my opinion that some of the inspiration of Hiss and Wilson will not be effective with the current generation, like pictures of Earth from space or the use of virtual reality to promote preservation, and that doing so will require greater creativity and honesty. Furthermore, the restoration of degraded landscapes and ecosystems to make half-earth a reality is largely ignored by both authors. To fulfill the half-earth vision, greater designs and planning with some insight into how it may be managed by humans is of critical importance. Finally, to sell the half-earth concept, it will be important to explain its other benefits to an audience that looks more favorably towards human ingenuity and human worth over a singularly focused biodiversity argument.

A greater range of landscape-scale environmental restoration and construction endeavors featuring a half-earth mentality already exist; Richard Weller and I have coined them, “mega-eco projects.” The nearly 200 identified works from around the world serve as an inspiration and launching pad from which to achieve this vision. These works engage human health and wellbeing, biodiversity, and climate change. They also commonly address and even remove bad infrastructure, work with cities and their peripheries, and improve working landscapes for better cohabitation of the planet. Whether they are effective in reaching their goals and how they are perceived by local stakeholders will be the focus of my dissertation. While half-earth is a beautiful and necessary vision to aspire to, it needs greater focus. Half-earth must include examples like mega-eco projects that engage a greater area, rather than a piecemeal approach that keeps people out and prevents engagement.

Notes

1. IPCC, 2018: “Summary for Policymakers.” In: Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Editors: Masson-Delmotte, et al. 6 October 2018.

2. Daniels, T. The Environmental Planning Handbook for Sustainable Communities and Regions: Second Edition. Oxfordshire, England, UK: Routledge (2014).

3. Kolbert, E. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company (2014).

4. Wilson, E.O. Half-Earth: The Planet’s Fight for Life. Cambridge, MA: Liveright Publishing (2016).

5. Steiner, Frederick R., G.F. Thompson, and A. Carbonell. Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2016).

6. Weller, R.J. “World P-Ark.” LA+: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture. Vol 1 (2015): 10 – 15.

7. Hiss, Tony. “Can the World Really Set Aside Half of the Planet for Wildlife?” Smithsonian Magazine. September 2014.

8. Hiss, Tony. Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth. New York: NY: Knopf Publishing (2021).

9. MacArthur, R. H., and Wilson, E. O. “The Theory of Island Biogeography.” Princeton University Press (1967).

10. Hilty, J. et al. (2019) Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation. Washington, D.C.: Island Press:

11. Wilson 2016.

12. Daniels 2014.

13. Ibid

14. Wilson 2016.

15. Ellis, E.C. “Anthropogenic Transformation of the Terrestrial Biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Vol. 369 (2011): 1010 – 1035.

16. Cilluffo, A. and N.G. Ruiz. “World’s Population is Projected to Nearly Stop Growing by the End of the Century.” Pew Research Center. 17 June 2019.

17. Covington, T. (2021) “Supersized: Americans Are living in Bigger Houses with Fewer People.” The Zebra. July 6.

18. Beatley, T. and K. Manning. The Ecology of Place. Planning for the Environment, Economy, and Community. The University of Chicago Press (1997).

19. Wilson, E.O. The Diversity of Life. New York, NY: W.W. Norton Publishing (1999)

20. GlobalData Thematic Research. (2021) “Why have People Stopped Talking about the Metaverse?” Verdict. December 22. https://www.verdict.co.uk/metaverse-hype-zuckerbergmeta/.

21. Hiss 2021.

22. McHarg, I. (1969) Design with Nature. American History of Natural History Press: Garden City, NY.

23. Freidman, T. (2008) Hot Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How it can Renew America. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, NY.

24. Fernholz, T. (2017) “Donald Trump Wants to Shut Off an Orbiting Space Camera that Monitors Climate Change.” Quartz. March 16. https://qz.com/934141/donald-trump-wantsto-shut-off-dscovr-the-orbiting-space-camera-that-monitors-climate-change/.

25. Hall, P. Cities of Tomorrow: And Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880. Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley-Blackwell (2014).

26. Beatley, T. Handbook of Biophilic City Planning and Design. New York, NY: Island Press (2017).

27. Hiss 2021.

28. Ibid

29. Taylor, M. “Analysis: Nature-Pact Goal to Protect 30% of Land and Ocean Hangs in Balance.” Reuters. 8 November 2021.

30. Geldmann, J. et al. “A Global-Level Assessment of Effectiveness of Protected Areas at Resisting Anthropogenic Pressures.” PNAS, Vol. 116. No. 45 (2019): 23208 – 23215.

31. Weller 2015.

Figure 1: The Half Earth Concept (Matthew Limbach)

PART 3: Emerging Environmental Theories

Opposite: Waterfall (Itay Porat)

Stories as Design

David Wangkyu Kim

Stories play a vital role in our lives. As children we encounter them through picture books, TV shows, and bedtime stories. During adolescence, the stories turn inward: finding one’s identity and place, why parents are so unreasonable and unfair, and the unimaginable stress that is the life of a 15-year-old teenager. During adulthood, the stories play out in the form of relationships, careers, and hobbies. Designers encounter these stories, individual and collective, when tasked with designing for a site or planning for a city; these are stories that cannot be ignored, for they hold the values which have either resulted in the current state of a site or represent an incomplete story where designers must find and reconnect the components to restore its value. The “Story” is a vehicle of meaning, a generator of vision, a lens and structure for design, and vital approach that is needed moving forward into designing for the future.

Stories as Communication

“Processes connect, literally, physically, and figuratively; if we can read them, they make sense of event apparently unrelated; blazing wildfire, whipping wind, fleeing people, pouring rain, oozing mud, slumping hillsides; burning tissue, dying, then spouting, flowering, animals returning, people rebuilding.” -Anne Spirn, The Language of Landscape1

Stories can be considered the most universal form of communication we have at our disposal. Whether it is a movie with its blur of pictures and sounds, a play with its vibrant and dynamic cast, or a love song, they all tell a story. The use of stories in design is not a foreign concept; a story is often used as a tool to reach a specific audience, sometimes done through the creation of personas that are relatable and can capture the attention and emotions of its audience. Narratives have spurred designs, aesthetics, and programs, and remain as a vital component in crafting design intent and vision. Of course, we cannot ignore the importance of establishing a narrative in the design process—it serves as perhaps if not the most effective vehicle in which to structure, research, and communicate a design or plan.

“The stories we tell literally make the world. If you want to change the world, you need to change your story.”

- Michael Margolis

Storytelling is speculated to have existed as far back as 50,000 to 2 million years ago,2 I would go as far to claim that it probably existed as long as humans have existed. The cave paintings in Chauvet and Lascaux in France are a prime example of the earliest forms of storytelling; depictions of people, and animals are arranged in a way to imply a narrative flow of events—a hunt. To those who question just how powerful stories can be and the extent of influence that a story has, one only needs to look at religious texts and the enormous influence they had on human civilization, even to this day. Narratives have started and ended wars; pushed people to innovate, explore, and rally to a cause but at the same time also pushed to perform unimaginable deeds of malice as well. Environmental destruction, industrialization, and socio-economic issues are all framed by their own narratives and stories. As designers, it is vital to understand, reconstruct, and reconstruct these narratives into stories of success, progress, and meaning.

Stories as a Lens

“Narratives make us feel alive…we find liberation in movies and novels, for they show us what is possible in life. We reinvent our own identity and self-narratives over and over. When we encounter failures, we remind ourselves of the narratives that had always motivated us: to share knowledge, to bring peace, to think the unimaginable...”

-Chi-Jui Wu “Storytelling and Scientific reasoning”3

Too often (and appropriately so) when we are tasked with design, we immediately delve into the research, we gather and we process what is relevant, and depending on the object of design—a site, a building, a neighborhood— we immediately default to understanding the site through the data. We cannot deny that this method of design approach has led to success in design implementation and longevity. In the planning field (or to be more accurate, my academics so far here at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design), and on the scholastic endeavor that is the pursuit of a city planning degree, we, as to-be-planners, were tasked with improving neighborhood conditions of select areas within the city of Philadelphia. Immediately we jumped into action, with an unwavering sense of purpose that we were going to

Figure 1: The Lascaux Cave Paintings (D V on Flickr)

make things better. Our data research, site visits, and discussions with select community members allowed us to paint a portrait of the neighborhood—a flawed portrait, that needed fixing. Our data showed aging infrastructure conditions, an aging population, a general apathy towards managing aspects of the neighborhood, and overall, a neighborhood that had seen better days. What ensued after was a flurry of approaches to improve conditions, integrate parks, bring community together, all based within an overly optimistic assumption that the budget would be there. We had the perfect package of what we thought was the best version of the neighborhood. However, there was a catch: it just wasn’t compelling. We had the data, but the data had no personality.

Data is not compelling without the appropriate vehicle. Evidence of this can be seen through mass media outlets—the evening news being a prime example. Facts and reports are crafted together into compelling, convincing, and sometimes (unfortunately) divisive narratives, and it works. People are drawn to stories and are familiar with them, they do not need special knowledge or a degree to understand data. I would go as far as to say that designers and planners must address their sites and urban environments by observing them as a complex web of stories, whether it is the elderly couple complaining about loud construction, oblivious to the changing city around them, or the story of the savvy businessman looking to invest, but not finding enough opportunities. Our job as designers should be to address these stories, understand them, and form new stories, or augment those that are already strong influences on the site/city. We must consider perhaps, that sometimes when addressing sensitive sites, there is not a problem, but a story that is playing out. If we as designers can identify the key characters, plots, conflicts, a resolution (or lack thereof), we can tell a cohesive narrative through how we design.

Stories as Structure

“Landscape materials, phenomena, and forms are in emphatic, Paradoxical, analogical wind is an exaggerated Breeze water is yielding yet erosive, roses bloom and wither, so do humans” -Anne Spirn, The Language of Landscape

Figure 2: Central Park, New York City (Photo by Jermaine Ee on Unsplash)

There are five key components that make up every story: the characters, the setting, the plot, the conflict, and the resolution. Any designer, in my opinion, should see this list of components and immediately draw parallels to the design process. The characters—the users/client; the setting—the site; the plot—the design narrative; the conflict—the constraints; and the resolution— the success (or failures) of the design. It is now the task of the designers to address all these components and form them into a cohesive structure or a design. Given these conditions, designers are now not only problem solvers, but crafters of experiences, and more importantly meaning. This implies that the problem-solving approaches of designers must, like a good book or story, must be compelling, composed, and nuanced.

Place and space can be a story just as much as a well-written novel can be. Olmsted’s vision for Central Park, a bastion of nature and beauty in the middle of a concrete jungle, can be considered a story, with the character—the dense city of New York; the setting—a period of time when the image of nature, popularized then by Alexander von Humboldt, was highly demanded; a plot— the large spaces and sinuous paths as a counterpoint to the cities’ dense and cramped streets—the building of a relationship between urban and natural; the conflict—the challenge of retaining a cross-town thoroughfare, among many spatial and logistic challenges; and a resolution—a world-renowned oasis of greenspace within one of the world’s largest economic hubs.

Stories in Action: Nepal and Earthquakes

“It was chaos, I had never in my life ever see or felt anything like it. Powerlines were not just waving back and forth, they were jumping up and down, almost like a jump rope you would see kids playing with on the playground. I was able to make it outside without the house collapsing, but it was hard to keep my footing, as I relied on the shaking banister to lead me down the stairs that could have come down on me and killed me. Once, I got outside, all I could hear was rumbling, and then suddenly a crash and a scream—someone had just been crushed under a falling brick wall. It was chaos, I prayed, because it was all I could do.”

-Siddhartha

Man Shakya, recollections of the 2015 earthquake

Landscapes as well, designed or undesigned, urban or natural, all follow the narrative of their own stories. Take for instance, the landscape of Nepal: located within the vast foothills of the Himalayas, the country has its own unique story to tell. The relationship between nature and people has manifested itself in the form of vast expanses of rice fields carved into the foothills, cities filled with rich history and diversity of cultures, and an underlying fear of major earthquakes due to its location on the fault line between two subcontinents. 2015 saw the devastation of the country by a deadly magnitude 7.5+ earthquake northeast of the capital city of Kathmandu; over 9,000 casualties were reported.4 However, this was not the first time the country had seen an earthquake. According to researchers, the region suffers from a major earthquake almost every 100 years. The onset of the 2015 earthquake saw almost one-third of the country’s national population affected.5

There are many stories to unpack here, beginning with the story of negligence; of corrupt government officials approving non-earthquake safe building practices for a bit of compensation, the “disaster amnesia” of the citizens, more concerned about their livelihoods over the looming threat of a devastating event, continuing to build unsafe buildings and informal settlements, often

Figure 3: “The rooftop of the world” Nepal (Photo by Giuseppe Mondi on Unsplash)

Figure 4: Aftermath of the 2015 earthquake (USAID US Agency for International Development on Flickr)

because of a lack of options due to government apathy. There is also the story of the event itself, a horrendous call to action for the people of Nepal to wake up and address whether the resolution of the country’s story will be of repeated destruction or that of a people ready to mobilize and defend their way of life from mother nature’s inevitable processes. By addressing these stories, designers, aid workers, and planners have common ground to reach the people, to relay to them a different story where the victors are not the corrupt government officials but the local citizens, who are often touted as the heroes of the disaster, providing resource support, rescue efforts, and vital communication to foreign aid entities to affected areas and resource and logistic needs.

Stories as Value

“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.” -Terry

Pratchett

Stories are probably the best vehicles for meaning, and meaning is the best vehicle for design. Often as designers and planners, we are plagued by the inevitable monsters of project maintenance and uncertainty about the longevity of implemented projects. One of the major barriers that city planners, in particular, face is the challenge of retaining the implementation of complex systems and plans where communities play a key role in the maintenance and continuation of the project’s vision and goals. Most successes are seen when communities can adopt the proposed plan and vision and make it their own. However, this is difficult without the establishment of value and meaning for the community members. One such approach to adding meaning is the introduction of a vision for the community that is in the form of a story—a shared story that is understood, told, and retold until it finally becomes an identity.

“Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” -Daniel

Kahneman

According to Charles Montgomery in his book Happy City, “Humans do not perceive the value of things in absolute terms…the brain constantly adjusts its idea of what we need in order to be happy.”6 This quote calls to attention the adaptability of people to their surroundings, and it has both good and bad connotations. The ability of people to adjust to challenges and negative environments is just as strong as their ability to become complacent in good ones. A new park in a neighborhood where no parks were previously would be actively appreciated, but given a couple of years, it becomes the norm, and the park is no longer special, it is just part of the of the neighborhood. Without a special meaning to the community, the park will eventually lose value as disinterest leads to apathy, which eventually sets the stage for deterioration and lack of maintenance. By addressing the park as a collective story for the neighborhood however, there is an increased potential to add more meaning and ideally, preserve value and care given to said park. This can already be seen in the form of memorials; spaces that are of so much value to people that they are protected and upheld as culturally significant locations.

Conclusion

We as designers are faced with an insurmountable number of challenges—we are challenged with the looming concerns of energy crises, climate change, and an increasingly polarizing socio-political climate. We as designers, are tasked with creating meaning that can transcend the frivolities of personal convenience and spur change in communities. We as designers have at our disposal, the opportunity to tap into not just solving the problems that are visible, but also the underlying narratives that gave birth to such problems. We must understand and learn to read the landscape, the people, and the environments that we live in and must take care of to push towards new visions, new futures, and new stories.

Notes

1. Spirn, Anne Whiston. The Language of Landscape. Yale University Press (2000).

2. Parkes, Daniela. “A Brief History Of Storytelling: How Long Has It Existed?” Daniela Parks Accessed 26 April 2022.

3. Wu, Chi-Jui. “Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, on Storytelling and Scientific Reasoning.” Medium, 1 September 2019.

4. Ibid

5. Reid, Kathryn. “2015 Nepal Earthquake: Facts, FAQs, and How to Help,” 3 April 2018.

6. Montgomery, Charles. Happy City. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2013).

Interdisciplinary Illumination: Design, Planning, and the Use of Light in Cities

Helen Lea

Introduction

An artist’s eye is trained to see the world in light and shadow. Values and colors interact to form the composition of our environment . These building blocks of our perception are fundamental to the human experience of space. We seek to bring light into our parks, homes, and streets. The Impressionists chased light as their subject, capturing the ways in which it affected the quality of the landscapes, stages, and people.1 These paintings are just one example documenting the ways light has continually influenced the environment throughout history, from the light of the stars to the glowing skylines of modern cities.

Light is important to people. It is a common good shared among numerous stakeholders, each who manipulates and utilizes light in their own way. For some, addressing light is a professional obligation. For others, light may serve mainly as a visual inspiration or a means to navigate the environment. In the scope of environment-related professions, there are three main stakeholder groups with distinct ways of perceiving light. First are the planners, who take a pragmatic and systems-focused approach to manipulating light for the benefit of society. Second are the designers, who prioritize the visual qualities of light and the effects it can have at a site-specific scale. The final group, clients, can overlap with the previous groups but are primarily the beneficiaries of the work of planners and designers and let light inform the way they read the landscape.

Each set of stakeholders bring valuable insight to the lighting designing of functional, beautiful, and restorative places. Their unique perspectives emphasize specific attributes of light in the built environment. Their methods and motivations behind their use of light create unique settings for people to explore, live, and grow. Working together, these three approaches have the potential to unlock the optimal application of light to enrich society.

The Planners

Light has informed the layout and function of cities for centuries. Planning in response to the light of the sun can be traced back to ancient civilizations such as the Aztecs, who utilized their understanding of astronomy to site significant buildings and temples.2 The use of light in planning extends beyond natural sources. The invention of the gas lamp, electrical systems, and, finally, the light bulb have revolutionized the way a city operates. Today, planners include city planners and engineers in government or consulting agencies as well as representatives from law enforcement, political leadership, and healthcare.

Each of these Planners advocates for the use of light for the advancement of safety and health.

Safety

Illumination of public spaces is closely linked with actual and perceived safety in cities. The presence of light may determine the side of the street you walk on or where you choose to sit in a park. Jane Jacobs’ concept of “eyeson-the-street” relies on light to illuminate the street and allow neighbors to keep watch, creating a sense of personal safety.3 Today, Jacobs’ theory has evolved into the practice of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). Lighting is one tool within CPTED that falls under the arm of natural surveillance. It facilitates planning public spaces that reduce opportunities for crime and build community.4

In addition, light can simply make places safer to use. Plans such as the New York City Department of Transportation Street Design Manual call out required levels of illumination that vary depending on the use of a space.5 By manipulating color temperature and light intensity, lighting designs can respond to specific needs of users in context. Busy areas like commercial corridors call for larger, brighter lights, while residential neighborhoods and walkways need a more intimate and comfortable level of illumination. Light is a tool used by Planners to accommodate the programmatic needs of a city and create safe, usable spaces for people.

It is also possible to have too much light. Light pollution and glare cancel out the positive effects of lighting in cities. Organizations such as the International Dark-Sky Association advocate and plan for minimizing light in the urban environment in order to reduce the harmful effects of light pollution. Glare from streetlights can be detrimental to pedestrians, but also interrupts natural cycles of the environment that are based on light.6 Lighting for visibility is the goal.7 New lighting technologies, strategic placement of fixtures, and human behaviors can all mitigate the effects of light pollution when properly planned. Balancing light levels is necessary to create healthy cities and is a critical consideration in the work of Planners.

Health and Wellness

Light can also be used to improve the health and wellbeing of citizens. As cities grow and more buildings are constructed, the right to light becomes an essential consideration for Planners. This tension between light and the city’s form became especially apparent during the late 1800s. Poor housing conditions in New York City among the working class and immigrant communities inspired action and led to the founding of the Tenement House Commission. Reports from the Tenement House Commission condemned the unhealthy units and called for a law to protect light, water, and air.8 The New York Tenement Act was passed in 1901 to regulate light, air, and fire safety and led the transition from unhealthy dumbbell tenements to newly constructed “New Law tenements.”9

New York City’s 1916 Zoning Resolution is another example of planners advocating for healthy lighting. This planning document laid out regulations on building height and setbacks in relation to the width of the street.10 This was to ensure that light and air could penetrate streets, public spaces, and other

Figure 1: Illuminated street in Rome, Italy (Helen Lea)

Figure 2: Buildings blocking light in New York City (Khara Woods on Unsplash)

buildings to create a healthier urban environment.11 Regulation of building footprints and the relationship between built space and open air in the city has helped protect access to pure light and fresh air. Planners were able to identify the value of light back when the city was rapidly developing.12

These policy interventions have shaped planning for decades and continue to protect our health through regulation of light. Planners have the power to shape the built environment with legislation, codes, and ordinances that create opportunities for light to enter urban spaces. Preserving places for light to touch cities at a municipal level ensures the subsequent work of designers and interpretation by clients can occur.

The Designers

Value, the relative lightness or darkness of a subject, is one of the foundational elements of design. Designers have always drawn on light for its visual character. They investigate the specific contexts and qualities of a site or project and harness light to bring out a beautiful composition. All the design professions collectively make up this group of stakeholders – landscape architects, architects, interior designers, and fine artists. United by an appreciation of aesthetics and a common language of design, the designers promote the value of light in defining appearances and creating beauty.

Form Giving

Light gives form to elements in the natural world and the built environment. The sun shining on a rocky cliff defines its edges and creates a display of light and shadow that we can interpret and admire. In the words of Louis Kahn, “All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.”13 Materials are made to receive light and become forms. The same is true for human-made forms and artificial light. A building can be defined by light hitting its faces, just as a streetlamp can define a bench or a sidewalk. Designers can control the orientation of objects in a space to capture light to create these experiences of material, light, and shadow.

Light also fills volume. In the voids between objects, light can create welcoming, illuminated spaces for activity. Plazas attract visitors by the warmth and beauty of sunlight that fills them, inviting people to gather, eat, perform, or stroll. Objects and open spaces rhythmically frame and filter light and shadow to compose a design.14 This can be seen in the columns of Greek architecture, grand plazas of Italy, or a row of homes on a suburban street. Building a foundation of light and form gives urban design its structure.

Emphasis and Artistry

Beyond the foundational design attributes, light can also be used as an artistic element or a means of conveying emphasis. Light draws the eye to points of interest, especially at night. During the day, artistic lighting relies more on shadow or strategic framing of illumination. When designing for artistic qualities, light can be experimental and bold, and helps define the identity of a place.

Figure 3: Canyonlands, Utah (Helen Lea)

Figure 4: Piazza de Popolo in Rome, Italy (Helen Lea)

Designers can employ either artificial or natural sources when working with light for art and emphasis. Modern lighting technology makes it easier and more energy efficient to integrate light into architectural projects. Bridges, statues, and cathedrals in Rome all utilize artificial light designed to celebrate their monumentality. Even the Trevi Fountain has been given a new significance with the addition of LED lights that cast dramatic shadows on the statues and illuminate the water from within.15 When utilizing natural light for artistic purposes, patterns of shadow can be used to create interest and rhythm across a plane or object. Structures like pergolas and trellises or natural features like trees and grasses create rhythmic patterns along the ground and can be strategically placed to create interest for a walkway or plaza.

The environmental considerations of light for designers can be seen by taking a step up in scale. Light creates life. The trees and plants that comprise our beloved landscapes could not survive without photosynthesis. Harnessing light to promote growth ultimately becomes an aesthetic concern for designers as it enables the use of plants in for their visual qualities. Plant communities vary by environmental conditions, including light, creating a diverse array of physical appearances and distributions of species.16 In mountainous ecosystems, two drastically different plant communities can exist within feet of each other due to the contrast of environmental conditions on northand south-facing slopes. Similar manipulation of light can be harnessed in design to support plants of a desired appearance and encourage greening of the environment. Promoting a natural aesthetic through horticulture lets Designers connect beauty to the environment in their work.

The Clients

While the Clients are mainly the beneficiaries of planning and design interventions with light, they also play an important role in utilizing light in the environment. Light can carry unique significance to different people depending on their interpretation of natural and built systems. Clients include all people across diverse identities and demographics. Children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly all experience light in the environment differently. People of different nationalities and cultures will also experience light in unique ways depending on their background. However these experiences unfold, the clients will always utilize the work of the planners and the designers to uncover additional value of light within cities.

Finding Meaning

Lighting, both natural and artificial, can communicate messages from designers and planners to the clients.17 A well-lit park may convey a message of safety, while the same park in darkness may appear foreboding. Visual cues of safety in the language of design are important, but light carries additional significance when symbolism is applied to natural and built environments. Light is a common motif and source of spiritual reflection in the world’s religions. Major religious holidays including Hanukkah in the Jewish faith, Advent in the Christian faith, Diwali in the Hindu faith all center around light as a representation of the divine.18 In landscapes and architecture, portraying the symbolism of light, whether intentionally or unintentionally, can create meaningful experiences for people of faith. Light builds bridges between people and place through the values of their religion. Spiritual messages

Figure 5: Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome, Italy (Helen Lea)

Figure 6: Allee at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina (Helen Lea)

related to nature and light can be conveyed through the form of cities and can help promote shared values of a population.

Mental Health

Light has a direct impact on mental health and can be addressed through the work of both Designers and Planners. Exposure to natural light has a proven correlation to mood and behavior, which can be manipulated to produce positive mental health outcomes when paired with the context of a space and the needs of each client.19 Access to natural light can boost productivity and improve energy levels, allowing people to live happier lives and reach their full potential. In addition, principles of restorative urbanism call out the importance of light in creating opportunities for mental stimulation. Movements of light and shadow draw our attention and by doing so stimulate the mind and improve cognitive function.20

Light’s value to people has grown significantly due to its relationship to mental health in a world recovering from the effects of COVID-19. When isolation was overwhelming, people sought parks and fresh air to improve their mental and physical health. Restorative cities build up clients and maximize the healthproducing potential of the environment. Harnessing light to ensure the continual growth of mental health discourse and work towards the design and planning of restorative spaces should be a priority for Planners and Designers as we look to the future of our professions.

Interdisciplinary Illumination

Bringing together the pragmatic methods of Planners, the aesthetic concerns of Designers, and the interpretive approaches of Clients, the value of interdisciplinary strategies for lighting in cities becomes clear. The synthesis of stakeholder concerns surrounding urban lighting points to the importance of a method of interdisciplinary illumination, where the voices of Planners, Designers, and Clients are equally valued and lighting solutions are functional, beautiful, and restorative.

Working between disciplines ensures that light creates function in a city. While a Planner’s work is the most clearly functional with the policies and top-down methodologies it employs, Planners are not the authorities on function. Reading and interpreting landscape meaning is essential to function, which draws on the role of Clients. Wayfinding and placemaking are crucial to making a working design and can only be achieved at the level of the individual observer. In addition, places that are not aesthetically pleasing betray their function. Designers contribute to function by influencing the way places look, creating attractive and innovative places that inspire pride and stewardship in a community.

The beauty of light communicated by Designers is an essential foundation to the aesthetic character of cities. Bringing in interdisciplinary perspectives to the development of beauty only strengthens this foundation. Clients find a quiet form of beauty that is often unseen, but they can influence the visual qualities of a place through symbolism and emotion. Clients create a narrative that tells the story of a place and its beauty. Planners create beauty through management, setting standards for sanitation, illumination, and diversity of use that is essential to the longevity of beautiful spaces.

Finally, the restorative approach to light in the landscape is by nature interdisciplinary. Collaboration and transparency in process that brings together clients, planners, and designers facilitates the creation of places that serve all people. Planners advocate for restorative spaces through policy and legislative power not available to other stakeholders. Designers utilize visual elements and sensitive responses to context in projects to elicit restorative responses from people viewing their art. Combined with beautiful and functional light, restorative principles unite Planners, Designers, and Clients to maximize human potential through interdisciplinary illumination.

Notes

1. Samu, Margaret. “Impressionism: Art and Modernity,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2004).

2. Smith, Michael E. “City Planning: Aztec City Planning.” Encyclopaedia of the History of NonWestern Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2nd ed., Vol. 1 (2008): 135.

3. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House (1961): 30.

4. “CPTED in Brief.” The International CPTED Association website, 3 January 2022.

5. “General Guidelines,” in the New York City DOT Street Design Manual, 3rd ed. New York City DOT (2022).

6. “Light Pollution.” International Dark-Sky Association website, 2015.

7. “Lighting, Crime, and Safety,” International Dark-Sky Association website, 2015.

8. Veiller, Lawrence. Tenement House Reform in New York, 1834-1900. New York: The Evening Post Job Printing House (1900): 7.

9. “Tenement House Reform.” Social Welfare History Project website, with Virginia Commonwealth University (2018).

10. City of New York, 1916 Zoning Resolution, 25 July 1916.

11. Dunlap, David W. “Zoning Arrived 100 Years Ago. It Changed New York City Forever.” The New York Times, 25 July 2016.

12. Ibid.

13. Schielke, Thomas. “Light Matters: Louis Kahn and the Power of Shadow,” ArchDaily, 23 April 2013.

14. Ibid

15. “Trevi Fountain.” Acea website (2015).

16. Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, “Plant Communities,” Pennsylvania Government website (2022).

17. Schielke, Thomas. “The Language of Lighting: How to Read Light and Shadow in Architecture.” ArchDaily, 16 May 2021.

18. “Christmas Around the World and Holidays of Light,” Museum of Science+Industry, Chicago (2022).

19. Michaelidou, Katerina, “Natural light in learning environments.” Thesis at University of Nicosia (2012): 12.

20. Roe, Jenny, and Layla McCay. Restorative Cities. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts (2021): 20.

Doing the Most Good: An Urgent Call to Address America’s Suburban Landscape

Matthew Limbach

As I write this essay, our country finds itself on the tail end of the initial battle against a zoonotic plague, the likes of which we have not seen for generations. Our public health experts warn us that, given the current trend of environmental degradation coupled with exponential population growth, COVID-19 is likely to be the first of an increasing number of such calamities to completely upend our way of life. In the words of Winston Churchill, “It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”1

There is no shortage of writing about how COVID-19 has shaped and will continue to reshape our daily lives, but fourteen long months in the slowly boiling pot of indoor living and political turmoil made it easy to become inured to the way our daily landscapes are shifting. I may be fortunate, in that regard, to have gotten a sobering sneak preview of pandemic living several years ago when one of my roommates decided to cloister themselves in their room. In a puzzling set of decisions, enabled only by twenty-first century supply chains and technology, they managed to completely invert the pattern of living common to nearly everyone else. My first roommate and I shifted daily between school, work, stores, supermarkets, parks, and parties following a pattern of indeterminate yet recursive wanderings, like two colorful little pieces on a bead and ball maze. Meanwhile, the second, shut-in roommate did all their socializing in their room via Skype. They had all their groceries delivered, and even took the mental meandering out of the process through pre-packaged meal kits. Any impulse buy was negotiated in the dark confines of their room and arrived at our door in a little Amazon box. As a child, this fellow Millennial undoubtedly received the “world does not revolve around you” lecture, yet everything seemed to suggest otherwise. So infrequent were

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

- Aldo Leopold

“Form is the diagram of force.”

- Christopher Alexander

my second roommate’s forays out of their room that my first roommate’s dog seemed to forget that there was a third person in the house, and the husky would recoil at rare sightings of roommate number two.

I do not know what happened to the second roommate, but I am sure they were better prepared for the pandemic than anyone. I do know that the seeds of new daily lifestyles were planted well before COVID-19 struck, and that the vigorous rhizomes are just starting to protrude from the ground. Ecologists are apt to discuss landscapes in terms of regimes, disturbance, and successional states. I believe that the trend towards my second roommate’s way of life, exacerbated by the pandemic is a kind of final disturbance, ushering in the highest successional state of the United States’ post-urban condition. It may not be the beginning of the end for global challenges, but it is certainly the end of traditional conceptions of planning. One of the few upshots of COVID-19 is that we are finally starting to question some basic assumptions about our healthcare, economic, and social models. My hope is that designers, amidst the death throes of traditional lifestyle and commuting patterns, will also start to seriously contend with the suburban reality of the American landscape.

Losing Our Edge

America’s transition from an urban/rural society to a post-urban society has been well documented, yet somewhat misconstrued. Long before the disastrous urban renewal projects of the mid-20th century, planners and reformers recognized in the city its attendant problems of crime, squalor, and pollution. They addressed these issues in designs for utopian Garden Cities, as well as “uptowns”, i.e., peripheral urban enclaves. Places like early Midtown Manhattan, with a healthy distance from Hell’s Kitchen and the wharfs of lower Manhattan, became an attractive city outside the city;2 an early forerunner to what would later be dubbed “edge cities.”

As Jon Teaford relates in his book The Metropolitan Revolution, office real estate is an important element in understanding how our built landscape has been structured. Indeed, the end of World War II marked the final step in the United States’ transition from a mostly agrarian economy to an industrialized

Figure 1: Sprawl (Avi Waxman on Unsplash)

economy with a bent towards financialization and speculation. The primacy of office buildings is a key indicator of this shift, and, as Teaford writes, their concentration in downtown Central Business Districts (CBDs) marked the overriding urban makeup of mid-century America.

“The preeminent symbols of the office culture were the soaring skyscrapers. These behemoths not only reminded observers of the monumental egos of their builders, but also were tangible evidence of the inflated property values in the urban core. So many people desired to do business in the hub of the metropolis that downtown land values far surpassed those elsewhere in the city….Vertical growth became a necessity and visibly marked downtown as the real estate mother lode of the metropolis.”3

The skyscraper, however, was not to represent the final regime in the successional trend of the new American economy. As Louise Mozingo discusses in her essay “Campus, Estate, and Park: Lawn Culture Comes to the Corporation,” increased specialization resulting from managerial capitalism presaged the eventual movement of corporate offices outside of traditional CBDs.4 During the 1970s and 1980s, this trend began to radically reconfigure the distribution of the built landscape in America. Between 1981 and 1986 alone, the United States’ share of office space within traditional CBDs dropped from 57 to 43 percent,5 and, by the 1990s, the CBDs of major cities like Boston, Miami, Kansas City, and Denver were barely clinging to one third of the office real estate within their metropolitan orbits.6 To take a more fine-

Figure 2: Center City, Philadelphia, a typical CBD (Alejandro Barba on Unsplash)

grained sample, New York City - the socially imagined version of which still symbolizes dense urban form – saw its share of metropolitan office space drop from 83 to 59 percent from 1970 to 1988. As Teaford relates, “In 1989, 52 percent of the six hundred largest publicly held companies based in the New York region had their headquarters in the suburbs.”7 Though some of this movement was ostensibly in response to the longstanding issues of pollution and poverty that had been associated with downtowns, it was tied chiefly to larger societal trends. In the words of Mozingo, “The differentiated corporate offices were a parallel manifestation of the specialization and decentralization that marked the suburbs as a whole.”8

This idea of decentralization is key to the way many came to view America’s shift to a post-urban society. A group of planning scholars known as “Centrists” are attuned to a dramatic shift in polarities between CBDs and outlying business districts. As Teaford writes,

“By the late 1980s, the centripetal pull of the historic hub was simply a faint tug, drawing some outlying residents to periodic visits to central-city sports stadiums, museums, and concert halls and perhaps to an exploratory foray to see a heavily hyped festival marketplace. An increasing number of suburbanites were tourists in the central city, visitors sampling the attractions, but with no ongoing stake in the life of business of the hub.”9

Centrists, like Christopher Leinberger and Charles Lockwood, are known as such because they continue to place stock in the concept of an American landscape served by commercial centers.10 In their view, however, CBDs and the dense urban cores of the past no longer take primacy; rather, these historical amalgamations have been shattered, and the broken pieces have crystallized around the old cores into disparate yet identifiable urbanistic enclaves or “urban villages,”11 i.e. smaller, more specialized versions of the city. This way of thinking was best exemplified by Washington Post journalist Joel Garreau in his influential 1991 book, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier Garreau traveled the country, surveyed the major metropolitan regions, and catalogued the kind of urban villages that Centrists had been identifying. He dubbed these supposed, new, smaller, and disparate iterations of the traditional city “edge cities.”

After the second half of the twentieth century, no serious observer of the American landscape would argue that traditional downtowns hold the same sway that they once did. The question, though, is exactly what kind of form the country’s metropolitan regions are taking. In the view of the Centrists, the nucleic structure of the old metropolis is being supplanted by a more dispersed yet recognizable system of organization. Where the old metropolitan center took the form of a grindstone – a pivotal center around which evenly distributed, nonurban forms turned – the new metropolis is starting to resemble something akin to a wagon wheel. For the Centrists, the CBD is still important, although in a way more specialized and concerned with spectacle. Just as important are the surrounding and evenly distributed contact points of the wheel (“edge cities”) and the spokes that connect them all back to the center. This is a romantic conception, and one that can lead to seriously misguided approaches to planning.

Robert Lang’s 2003 book, Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis, puts him decidedly in the “Decentrist” camp. He does not subscribe to the

Centrist model; rather he sees American metropolitan regions taking a much more amorphous shape. His book is more of a meta study, and it compiles analytical observation with statistical analysis of the very edge cities that Garreau had identified. Lang defines the new metropolitan landscape through proliferation of “edgeless cities,” the “unremarked phenomena of the metropolis.”12 These represent a superfluous “form of sprawling office development that does not have the density or cohesiveness of edge cities… ”13 Lang finds through his own work and careful analysis of previous studies that most new construction is taking place in these non-discrete environs. In fact, at the beginning of the 21st century, “edgeless cities” accounted for two-thirds of the office space outside of downtown areas. More to the point, in major office markets investigated by Lang, “edgeless” developments accounted for more than twice the area covered by the fabled “edge cities.”14 Clearly, “edge cities” do not have quite the centripetal pull that the Centrists would claim.

More critically, “edge cities” themselves are not quite the distinctly urban offshoots that the Centrists suggest. Lang notes that many “edge cities,” like their “edgeless” counterparts, are cities in function but not in form.15 Quoting the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU), Lang relates that “an Edge City is equivalent but not equal to a city…. a term which implies urbanism but is in fact only the statistical agglomeration of housing, subdivisions, shopping centers, and business parks.”16 It follows, as Lang notes, that the only thing really separating “edge cities” from their “edgeless” surroundings are higher levels of aggregation.17 The Centrists have simply conflated statistically significant levels of city services, housing, and commercial interests with actually identifiable urban forms.

This confusion likely has to do with the history of “edge cities” themselves. A number of “edge cities” did sprout from the “uptown” or suburban precursors to “edge cities.” One such example is Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. Bellevue was already a thriving suburban town before rapid commercial development migrated from Seattle at the end of the 1980s. Building upon the preexisting streetscape, Bellevue’s planning staff “decided we’re going to be an urban place.” The newly minted “edge city” was to develop its own smallscale, pedestrian-oriented version of a CBD.18

Developments such as Bellevue certainly fit the narrative of “edge cities” as smaller, urban cores in their own right, and it would elate the CNU to see more of them; however, as Teaford notes, many if not most “edge cities” arose not from early 20th century suburban enclaves, but from areas adjacent to shopping malls, like Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, or areas that had been devoid of development altogether19 - a trend that will certainly intensify as the population of the United States shifts into undeveloped portions of the South and the Sun Belt. This lack of preexisting urban or town form translates directly into the lack of density or cohesion Lang and the CNU recognize in most of our landscape. Relaying the experiences of one office tower worker in Perimeter Center, one of Atlanta’s alleged “edge cities,” Teaford writes,

“The view from the top floor…was ‘mostly trees and lawns, not other office buildings.’ Moreover there were not sidewalks connecting the disparate structures; instead, one was expected to drive from building to building in this suburban space. The pedestrian life and unremitting concrete of the traditional urban core was missing. The new world was one of trees and towers…a world with seeming opposites juxtaposed to form a markedly untraditional mix.”20

Figure 3: Typical conceptualization of CBDs with their orbiting satellites of “edge cities” (Matthew Limbach)

Figure 4: Bellevue, WA (Pixabay)

Figure 5: Tyson’s Corner, VA (La Citta Vita on Flickr)

Contrary to the Centrists’ claim, our urban world has not shifted into a web of interconnected parts; rather, in many instances, it is being supplanted by something completely new.

What then, if anything, has been driving the development of our “edgeless” landscape? According to another Decentrist, Robert Fishman, we have been living for several decades in a kind of post-geographic landscape, one in which planning structures no longer constitute a “knowable and generalizable spatial pattern.”21 Lang concurs, writing that “a region’s focal point is no longer located at its geographic center, nor has it been redistributed among several peripheral centers. It is now the person, or more precisely, the household.”22 This concept of “household networks” holds that most people now derive their sense of the metropolitan region not from universally agreed upon landmarks or core districts, but from the individual’s “daily use of space.”23 Naturally, these movements are fueled by three key factors: “personal contacts,” “consumptive desires,” and “productive requirements.”24 We are driven to make daily rotations between disparate endpoints wherein we can fulfill these personal and public obligations. It creates the familiar pattern of recursive and disconnect loops known to my first roommate and me.

As evidence, Lang and Fishman offer the planning predilection for population analysis over the past half century, noting that planning has begun to favor a flat, statistical analysis of demographic and population dispersal over more traditional structural forms.25 In each region, a certain number of needs must be met for a certain number of people, but the locations that fulfill these requirements must not necessarily interact with nor complement one another; it is simply a question of proximity and mechanical resolution. For anyone who has lived outside of our nation’s dense urban cores, Fishman’s description of technoburbs – a kind of specialized, yet “edgeless” suburban enclave – is perhaps the best evidence that the Decentrists have properly characterized our contemporary metropolitan landscapes,

“…it is divided into a crazy quilt of separate and overlapping political jurisdictions, which make any kind of coordinated planning virtually impossible…..It has no clear boundaries; it includes discordant rural, urban, and suburban elements; and it can be best measured in counties rather than in city blocks. Consequently, the new city lacks any recognizable center to give meaning to the whole. Major civic institutions seem scattered at random over an undifferentiated landscape.”26

The Decentrists’ proper diagnosis of “household networks” as the main driver of contemporary metropolitan conceptualization is important for two reasons. First, it begs us to consider the stability of these networks beyond the end of the current pandemic. Certainly, COVID-19 is not the death knell of individualized movement through the landscape. Like 99 percent of the population, I will be moving around as much as possible once I can do so responsibly; however, the pandemic has certainly accelerated preexisting movements towards what once seemed to be far-off ways of life. Prices for commercial office and retail space are on a steady decline. People, such as I, have quickly grown more comfortable with the idea of working or attending school from home. I even started with the delivered meal kits that earned my shut-in roommate a bit of an inquisition. Just as “household networks” supplanted more traditional urbanistic structures, we must consider the form our metropolitan regions will take as we spend less time moving through the landscape, and our goods, contacts, and requirements start gravitating more towards us. With many people seeing work-from-home approaches as

liberation from middle management, and as Amazon kills what remains of the retail industry, we must consider what will replace office and retail space as a key factor in the identification and success of regional districts.

The potential loss of “household networks” as a structural framework compounds the other significant takeaway from the Centrists’ diagnosis. That is, our regional frameworks have become increasingly more amorphous than previously thought. This was perhaps disguised by the fact that populations in dense metro areas have indeed been increasing, although population levels overall have been increasing in the United States. Furthermore, new immigrant populations are more likely to cluster around major metropolitan areas in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles,27 over-inflating the perceived cultural weight of dense urban cores.

This conflation of rising inner-city populations with a rabid desire for reurbanization is belied by the prevalent “back to the city” myth. Buoyed by posh eateries, successful Landscape Urbanist projects, and snide representations of Brooklyn, the myth holds that people of my generation, Millennials, prefer the kind of dense, walkable neighborhoods esteemed by the likes of Jane Jacobs, and that we are well on our way to “killing” the suburbs, just like we allegedly killed every other sacred cow from disposable napkins to Applebee’s.28 While these preferences amongst Millennials are generally true, in reality Millennials are likely to follow similar migration patterns as previous generations, if not to a lesser extent. A 2016 study by Dowell Myers of the Sol Price School of Public Policy dubbed 2015 as the year of “Peak Millennial,” i.e., when we would see the highest concentration of Millennials in dense urban areas. The study predicted that, by 2020, increased household independence along with a surging housing market would result in a statistically significant movement of my generation back to the suburbs whence we came.29 The real events of 2020 certainly were not forecast in Myers’s study, so the results remain to be seen, but his prognosis follows an all too familiar anecdotal pattern: people my age flock to places like South Philadelphia for work or grad school, they have a lengthy urban adventure mixed with some guilt about gentrification,

Figure 6: Centrist (left) vs. Decentrist (right) conceptions of metropolitan space (Matthew Limbach)

and then, as soon as a dog and/or child arrives, they find themselves back in the suburbs with a nice yard.

A number of studies by the Brookings Institution likewise conclude that, contrary to popular belief, suburbanization is on the rise in America. Indeed, while cities are growing, their rate of growth is outpaced by the rate of growth in the suburbs.30 Rural populations are indeed shrinking rapidly. Unfortunately, most casual observers still operate with a rural vs. urban dichotomy in mind, and a much more nuanced approach is required. Those fleeing the decimation of rural communities are more likely to find themselves in areas classified by Brookings as “Small metro,” “Emerging suburb,” or “Exurb.” In the period from 2000 to 2017, annual growth rates in these areas frequently tripled that in “Urban core” areas.31 To put a finer point on it, Brookings dubbed 2012 as the “peak year of the ‘back to the city’ movement,” noting that in the years since, growth rates in dense urban cores have halved, while overall suburban growth rates have quadrupled.32

If, as designers and planners, we are as committed as we say we are to addressing large-scale issues of resilience, equity, and beautification, then we would be derelict of duty to continue to ignore the acceleration suburbanization of the United States. Ought we not leverage our knowledge and talent where they could benefit the most people? Indeed, much has been made of the systemic injustices and blight wrought by mid-20th century urban renewal projects, and rightly so, but poverty is increasing in the suburbs at an even faster rate.33 Moreover, continued ignorance of suburban development could spell ecological disaster. Alarm bells have been ringing about rising seas and

Figure 7: The bead and ball maze, endemic to every suburban pediatrician’s office, symbolizes most American’s daily movement through the landscape (Reddit)

unprecedented weather patterns that threaten coastal, metropolitan areas, but uncontrolled suburban growth could presage an even more urgent crisis.

Life on the Edge

While America’s metropolitan regions have been growing increasingly more amorphous in a formalist sense, a more elusive type of edge has been expanding in fractal like patterns. If you were to take an aerial view of the American landscape, and zoom in slowly, you would notice that this specific type of edge gives way, like the fronds of a fern, to even smaller, similarly composed edges, and this process will repeat, ad infinitum. Edges beget edges beget edges beget edges.

In our “Environmental Readings” class we have discussed countless possible definitions for the word landscape. None, however, are as primed for operation as the definition Richard Forman proposes in his book Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions. In Forman’s words a landscape is “a mosaic where a cluster of local ecosystems is repeated in similar form over a kilometers-wide area.”34 While it may lack the poetic qualities necessary to rekindle public consideration of landscape or really capture the import of such dialogues, it provides a constructive framework for identifying and assessing threats.

Forman continually works up from small to large scales, which is important when considering the superfluousness of suburbanization in America. While

...the myth holds that people of my generation, Millennials, prefer the kind of dense, walkable neighborhoods esteemed by the likes of Jane Jacobs, and that we are well on our way to “killing” the suburbs, just like we allegedly killed every other sacred cow from disposable napkins to Applebee’s...

...contrary to popular belief, suburbanization is on the rise in America. Indeed, while cities are growing, their rate of growth is outpaced by the rate of growth in the suburbs.

his work is steeped in rigorous ecological calculation, he does not shy away from anthropogenic considerations, and human land-use patterns are given equal consideration as ecological units. To understand Forman’s mosaic, one must delve into its three constituent parts. A mosaic, writes Forman, is “a pattern of patches, corridors, and matrix, each composed of small, similar aggregated objects.”35

Matrices, as Forman defines them, are “the background ecosystem or landuse type in a mosaic, characterized by extensive cover, high connectivity, and/or major control dynamics.”36 Forman outlines a hierarchical analysis for determining just what constitutes the matrix in each landscape. Foremost is a simple calculation of area.37 For instance, if a given landscape can be assumed to be 65 percent suburban development and 35 percent secondgrowth forest, then the suburban development is deemed the matrix of that landscape. If forested and suburban areas are roughly equal or cannot be conclusively determined, then one proceeds to the second determining factor, connectivity.38 Connectivity, in Forman’s analysis, refers to the ability of biotic components, e.g., humans, animals, seeds, aerosols, contaminants, nutrients, etc., to traverse either of the competing background types. This could be a person traveling from one suburban enclave to another, or a hare cautiously navigating between disparate strands of shrubbery. Whichever background type offers the least resistance to navigation between its constituent parts ought to be considered the landscape matrix. Finally, if greater connectivity cannot be determined in one background type or the other, one must consider “control over dynamics.”39 If a background type exerts greater dynamic control, that means it will play a larger role in determining ecological outcomes in the wake of disturbance, e.g. climate change, fire, construction, a hurricane, etc.

Given increasing rates of suburbanization across the country, it is safe to assume that suburban background types will play increasingly more critical roles in large swaths of the country, especially through the latter of the three attributes. Forman even places the most emphasis on the third measure of background types, noting that the first two considerations are generally “surrogates or indirect measures of the third attribute.”40 It is easy to comprehend ecological devastation when picturing a logging crew deforesting a landscape to make way for yet another exurban development, but to understand the true ecological threat suburbanization poses in the aggregate, we must delve deeper into the other two components of Forman’s mosaic.

“Patch: a relatively homogeneous nonlinear area that differs from its surroundings. The internal microheterogeneity present is repeated in similar form throughout the area of a patch…”41 Consider a healthy swath of the second growth forest. The perimeter of the forested patch differs significantly from its interior. The interior is dark, even at midday, and seemingly undifferentiated. A consistent kind of landscape form composed of upright tree trunks and sporadic undergrowth spreads in all directions, masking the subtle ecological differences within the patch. Unskilled human navigators could easily get lost. Meanwhile, the trees along the perimeter exist in a kind of edge condition, i.e., a transition between two different types of patches, corridors, or matrices. In this case the forest abuts our previously considered suburban development. The trees along the edge have less competition for sunlight, water, and nutrients, and therefore we can expect thicker yet more uniquely twisted and gnarled growth from the trees as compared to the forest interior.

This forested edge can itself act as a kind of corridor, or “a strip of a particular land type that differs from the adjacent land on both sides. (Corridors have several important functions, including conduit, barrier, and habitat.)”42 Even animals native to the forest can have an easier time navigating the clearly differentiated boundary between forest and suburban development. In this way, corridors, which can take the form of roads, train tracks, pipelines, waterways,

permission)

Figure 8: Forman’s mosaic: an assemblage of patches, corridors, and matrices (Courtesy of USDA, NRCS)

Figure 9: Patches at different scales as they relate to the larger landscape mosaic (“Scale in Ecological Investigation” by Courtesy of Encyclopædia Brittanica, Inc., copyright 2013; used with

abutting mosaics, patch boundaries, etc., tend to accelerate movement of biotic components, increasing connectivity.43 This can be beneficial, allowing certain species to navigate between landscapes that meet their different needs. It can also be quite deleterious, as pollutants and invasive plants or pests can rapidly spread through corridors. More importantly, all corridors increase the prevalence of edge conditions, for they generally exist at the confluence of two matrices, or they bisect a particular matrix, creating varying degrees of interior conditions within themselves, dependent upon their width. The relatively narrow width of most corridors, especially in suburban and exurban landscapes, means that most corridors will exhibit edge conditions on both sides or even throughout the width of the corridor.

Taking this ecological framework of patch, corridor, and matrix back to the aerial view of the American landscape, one starts to see shifting patterns in density and form. Large scale patches and matrices of different ecotypes, e.g., wetlands, forests, grasslands, etc., are continuously ploughed under or greatly reduced in size to make way for uncontrolled suburban development. Total losses of large patches are sad, but easier to comprehend. While reduced patches are not total losses, they tend, in general, to exhibit much different characteristics than their larger parents. As patch size decreases and the overall proportion of small to large patches increases, there is an equivalent rise in edge conditions, for the overall ratio of interior to edge is greatly reduced. To put it simply, as suburbanization sprawls, there are more boundaries and less interior space within the patches that remain.

Meanwhile, corridors of all types are increasing at a rapid pace. While suburban sprawl does not cut a clean profile, its attendant roads, bridges, parking lots, and mosaics of intensely manicured lawns cut hard lines into the landscape at an exponential rate. Each one of these elements introduces a new regime of edge conditions where spacious patch interiors once stood. Thus, the great irony of sprawl in America is that while metropolitan regions grow increasingly “edgeless,” ecological edges are spreading like a virus through the landscape. Masking the aggregate consequences of this edginess are the short-term consequences of increasing edge conditions within landscapes. Ecological edges generally coincide with corridors, meaning you will often find different species navigating them. Indeed, it is well understood by ecologists that generalist species favor edge conditions, for they encourage movement, allowing the generalists to take advantage of different, separated ecotypes that could potentially fill their needs.44 It follows, that edge conditions also generally increase local biodiversity.45

While biodiversity is typically a good thing, the biodiversity in edge conditions usually only reflects the prevalence of the very generalist species that favor edges. The diverse array of animals and plants present in one edge condition is often comparable to all the nearby edge conditions. That is why suburbanites everywhere have grown accustomed to such a small snapshot of the animal kingdom (rabbits, deer, raccoons, robins, house finches, etc.). We can infer that, as the proportion of ecological edges to patch interiors increases, biodiversity in the aggregate will decrease. Indeed, as Forman notes, specialist species, i.e., species that require specific climactic or meteorological conditions, food sources, nesting sites, etc., usually can only thrive in stable patch interiors.46 The loss of patch interiors is particularly deleterious for one group of incredibly important species, insects.

In his book Bringing Nature Home, Douglas Tallamy demonstrates the irreplaceable ecological role that insects play. Central to understanding this role is the trophic pyramid. The pyramid is a simplified diagram that measures the movement of energy through biological systems. Whether you are considering one landscape, or the entire earth, the base of the pyramid

Figure 10: Edge conditions along a rural roadway (Randy von Liski on Flickr)

Figure 11: The Energy Pyramid (Wikimedia Commons)

is always comprised of photosynthesizers. In terrestrial systems, these are almost exclusively plants, which convert the sun’s energy (the earth’s only input of usable biological energy) into consumable biological tissue, making energy available to every other organism on the planet. The second level on the pyramid is composed almost entirely of herbivores that convert this plant tissue into proteins. As Tallamy notes, arthropods, namely insects, make up the bulk of the second layer.47 Furthermore, insects are far and away the most efficient species at converting plant tissue into other forms of consumable tissue,48 which may explain why herbivorous insects comprise 37 percent of all species worldwide.49 It also explains why a myriad of species depend heavily on insects as a food source. Indeed, as Tallamy notes, 96 percent of all terrestrial birds rely exclusively on insects to feed their young.50

Losing substantial insect populations is equivalent to losing substantial portions of the pyramid’s second layer. To do so would be like karate chopping at the lower levels of a Jenga tower. It would have cascading repercussions that would affect countless species that depend on insects as sources of food and the multitude plants that depend upon insects for pollination and secondary sources of food tied to insect behavior; not to mention the number of potential pests that are kept in check by insect predation. In her book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert documents just how many species can be intrinsically linked to the success of just one species of South American army ant, Ectiton burchellii:

“Army ants are famously voracious; a colony on the march can consume thirty thousand prey-mostly the larvae of other insects-per day. But in their very rapacity, they support a host of other species. There’s a whole class of birds known as obligate ant-followers. These are almost always found around ant swarms, eating insects the ants have flushed out of their leaf litter. Other birds are opportunistic ant-followers and peck around the ants when, by chance, they encounter them. After the ant-following birds trail a variety of other creatures that are also experts at ‘doing exactly what they do.’ There are butterflies that feed on the birds’ droppings and parasitic flies that deposit their young on startled crickets and cockroaches. Several species of mites hitch rides aboard the ants themselves; one species fastens itself to the ants’ legs, another to its mandibles. A pair of American naturalists...came up with a list of more than three hundred species that live in association with the ants.”51

Clearly, the effects of insect loss would reverberate up and down the trophic pyramid, and it would even have disastrous consequences for human life. Indeed, in some areas of China that have already seen substantial declines insect populations, farmers are forced to pollinate crops by hand, an incalculably costly alternative to natural pollination.52

Most insects, as Tallamy notes, are specialists, and are generally adapted to eat only a handful of specific plants.53 This means that they are uniquely threatened by the mounting losses of large landscape patches in suburban America. Furthermore, given their specialist bent, insects are often not adapted to eat, nest in, or thrive on nonnative species. As discussed earlier, corridors, which continue to multiply in increasingly suburban landscapes, are prime conduits for invasive plant species. These invasive species are colonizers, akin to the generalists of the animal kingdom, in that they take advantage of the connectivity afforded by corridors and edge conditions. Like the trees of the forest boundary, they also benefit from little competition for light, nutrients, or water. Their survivability is also enhanced by lack of herbivore consumption.

As Forman notes, corridors, and the frequently coinciding edge conditions, are subject to increased herbivore browsing, likely because of connectivity.54 Given that most native insects, as well as native non-insecticidal herbivores, ignore invasive plants, native plants are subject to ever increasing biological pressure as the proportion of nonnative plants increases in this ever-edgier landscape. Meanwhile, local insect populations deplete what remains of their food sources.

These two intersecting negative feedback loops are further compounded by lack of human attention. As Forman observes, edge conditions are likely to occur in oft neglected places, like roadsides or parking lots or riparian zones, or at the boundaries of anthropogenic edges, be they property lines, political boundaries, or edges of housing subdivisions.55 To truly address the threat of invasive species and the closely related decline of insect populations would require the ecological version of Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street.”

Over the Edge

Unfortunately for the insects and their native allies, and unfortunately for us, humans have a habit of ignoring what is happening right in front of their eyes. Given the understandable allure and legitimate successes of movements like Landscape Urbanism, it is easy to get drawn into prevailing myths about the shape our landscape is taking. Like design culture, so much of our media landscape is anchored in dense urban enclaves hugging the coasts, and, except for the intermittent safaris into the exurban heartland to “engage” Trump voters, it reflects to us the same myths of the old rural vs. urban dynamic and the unquestioned draw and success of the remaining dense urban cores.

While I have assessed suburbanization from the point of my own suburban American upbringing, it is undoubtedly happening in different parts around the world, and no doubt ecological edginess is increasing at unprecedented rates. One need only look at the Brazilian rainforest as it is desiccated and dissected further and further to make way for suburban development and soybean

Figure 12: The American landscape: simultaneously “edgeless” and replete with edges (La Citta Vita on Flickr)

farms to feed livestock and unrelenting carnivorous appetites. For every army ant species and its 300 followers, there are thousands upon thousands more that are threatened.

That is not to say suburbanization is irreversible or irredeemable, nor is it to say that suburbanization is necessarily a bad thing when done right. I only contend that it is happening, and it is happening more quickly than people would like to think. I am sure that many, like me, who have recently entered the design or planning fields, did so with noble intentions of combating climate change, alleviating poverty, inspiring through design, and simply helping people all around. Where the people go, we must follow.

Notes

1. “The Lord Mayor's Luncheon, Mansion House, ‘The End of the Beginning’, November 10, 1942,” The Churchill Society London.

2. Lang, Robert E., Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Illusive Metropolis. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press (2003): 8.

3. Teaford, Jon C., The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America. New York, NY: Columbia University Press (2006): 11.

4. Mozingo, Louise A., “Campus, Estate, and Park: Lawn Culture Comes to the Corporation” in Cultural Landscape Studies After J.B. Jackson. Berkley, CA: University of California Press (2003): 257.

5. Teaford 2006, p. 190.

6. Ibid., p. 191.

7. Ibid

8. Mozingo 2003, p. 257.

9. Teaford, The Metropolitan Revolution p. 190.

10. Swallow, Wendy, “Growth of 'Urban Villages' Creates Planning Problems,” Washington Post, 18 October 1986.

2003, p. 5.

2006, p. 193.

Ibid., p. 193.

20. Ibid., p. 198.

21. Lang 2003, p. 17.

22. Ibid

23. Ibid

24. Ibid., p. 18.

25. Ibid

26. Ibid., p. 19.

27. “U.S. Immigrant Population by Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), 2015-2019.” Migration Policy Institute, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's pooled 2015-2019 American Community Survey.

28. Taylor, Kate, “'Psychologically Scarred' Millennials Are Killing Countless Industries from Napkins to Applebee's - Here Are the Businesses They like the Least,” Business Insider, 31 October 2017.

29. [1]Myers, Dowell, “Peak Millennials: Three Reinforcing Cycles That Amplify the Rise and Fall of Urban Concentration by Millennials,” Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 26: No. 6 (25 April 2016): 928-947.

30. Frey, William H. “City Growth Dips below Suburban Growth, Census Shows.” Brookings, 18 March 2019.

31. Frey, William H. “US Population Disperses to Suburbs, Exurbs, Rural Areas, and ‘Middle of the Country’ Metros.” Brookings, 28 March 2018.

32. Ibid

33. Kneebone, Elizabeth. “The Changing Geography of US Poverty.” Brookings, 15 February 2017.

34. Forman, Richard T.T. Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press (1995): 39.

35. Ibid

36. Ibid

37. Ibid., p. 277.

38. Ibid 39. Ibid 40. Ibid

41. Ibid., p. 39.

42. Ibid., p. 38.  43. Ibid., p. 147.  44. Ibid., p. 61.  45. Ibid 46. Ibid., p. 58.  47. Tallamy, Douglas W., Bringing Nature Home. Portland, OR: Timber Press (2016): 21.

51. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: an Unnatural History. London: Bloomsbury (2015): 184.

52. Williams, Casey, “Photos Capture The Startling Effect Of Shrinking Bee Populations,” HuffPost, 7 April 2016.

53. Tallamy 2016, pp. 50-52.

54. Forman 1995, p. 58.

55. Ibid., p. 93.

(Bru)baker’s Dozen Principles of Civilly-Disobedient Camp Design

Julian Graybill Brubaker

Introduction

The first protest camp I saw seemed, above all, fun. Granted, I was twelve years old at the time. My mom had made a point to take me by the small satellite Occupy camp at the center of my hometown, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. People were frolicking in the streets, according to my memory, and music came from multiple corners of the small encampment in the center of the city. It seemed like camping, but upgraded and urban. Just a child, I soaked in the spectacle of the whole thing without a thought to the spatial design that made such a sight possible. Truthfully, many of the impromptu satellite Occupy protests in small urban areas had much less planning and design than the main occupation in Zuccotti Park, a few blocks from Wall Street in NYC. But any protest camp that lasts more than a night or two must have an internal logic that regenerates it, or else it will fizzle and its inhabitants will disperse. The encampment in Lancaster did not last longer than a few weeks, as external and internal pressures rendered the camp nonfunctional, and it imploded. But the camp made an impact on my young self by planting a seed that a new way forward was possible. Now, I realize that protest camps can only propel society towards a better future if they are designed in thoughtful, ingenious, inclusive ways.

Figure 1: Real photos of the Occupy Lancaster encampment. (Occupy Lancaster)

As I will contend in this paper, fun-making is an essential part of a successful protest camp. When done right, a camp can reframe and enliven an environment, turning the built infrastructure into monuments of a new social revolution. Social theorist Judith Butler argues that “the collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and organize the architecture.”1 Good design of a protest camp can give new meaning to structures that were built for a different purpose. In this way, protest encampments “re-function” a location by offering a fresh, counter-narrative to the hegemonic power structure and the physical structures that uphold it.2

Formulating a theory of protest camp design involves fusing or extending multiple sub-disciplines within landscape architecture and design. Many scholars have discussed “everyday urbanism”3 and “informal urbanism”4 as ways to describe the vernacular, organic, small-scale urban design that occurs every day. “Tactical urbanism” is another term, meant to evoke creative design techniques to quickly assemble and disassemble portable architecture, and “modular architecture” refers to a similarly flexible architectural design that can be easily added to when scaling up a structure, and easily collapsed when deconstructing.5 Modular designs are intimately tied to philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory of constantly evolving urban spaces (“assemblages”) as a postmodern reformulation of urban planning. Postmodern designs, Deleuze argues, should see the city as a cohesive, living organism.6 Another related field of design is emergency architecture, which follows a natural disaster and allows a community to provide essential services quickly and cheaply, before long-term rebuilding can begin.7 Research on refugee camp design also provided some insights into my development of the following baker’s dozen principles of protest camp design. Finally, I borrowed some insights from the social science idea of Actor-Network Theory, which stipulates that humans, other organisms, and the natural environment (including landscape architecture) exist in networks of relationships that influence our actions.8

It must be noted that a few studies on this topic exist; even a book, The Design of Protest: Choreographing Political Demonstrations in Public Space, written by designer Tali Hatuka.9 Social movement theorists Frenzel et al. have already identified four main areas of key protest camp infrastructure: “(1) domestic infrastructures (food supply, shelter, sanitation, maintenance of communal and private space); (2) action infrastructures (direct action tactics, education, police negotiations, legal aid, medical support, transportation networks);

(3) communication infrastructures (media strategies, distribution networks, production techniques); and (4) governance infrastructures (formal and informal decision-making processes, rules and procedures).”10 Butler has also written numerous reflections on protests and other public assemblies.11 While I draw on these sources for my theory of protest camp design, I have also tried to fuse in ideas from other disciplines, including human ecology, indigenous studies, political science, biology, and more.

To be clear, I will highlight a number of high- and low- profile occupations in this essay, not all of which are climate-related. Two main examples that appear many times in the ensuing pages are the U.S.-based Occupy protests that began in Zuccotti Park in NYC in 2011, but were soon replicated nationwide, and the more recent 2019-2020 Hong Kong pro-democracy occupation of the city’s financial district. Neither protest had environmentalism as an explicit ideal. I also take examples from two explicitly eco-conscious movements: the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Reservation in North

Dakota in 2016-2017 and a few climate protest actions led by the burgeoning Ende Gelände movement over the past few years. Similar in ethos to Extinction Rebellion, Ende Gelände has organized many nonviolent direct actions within the European Union in the last decade. Other historical examples have provided indirect evidence, including a 2013 political revolution at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt;12 a 2011-2012 Indignados occupation of various public plazas and avenues in Barcelona, Madrid, and elsewhere in Spain;13 the 2015 occupation of Finland’s Hanhikivenniemi cape to protest a nuclear power plant;14 ecooccupiers in 2013 at Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey to prevent its demolition;15 Resurrection Park in 1968 on the National Mall in Washington D.C. with the Poor People’s Campaign; a 1989 democratic revolution at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China; and more.

Figure 2: San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza inhabited and decorated by climate activists at the Climate Action March on September 8, 2018. Thousands of marches and rallies around the world all occurred on the same day, many of them taking place in plazas like this. (Photo courtesy of Fabrice Florin. ©CC BY-SA 2.0)

Figure 3: The pro-housing, anti-homelessness protest encampment in Philadelphia in the fall of 2020, after a summer of protests nationwide. (Joe Piette on Flickr)

Even Philadelphia has seen its fair share of protest camps, most notably in Center City and North Philadelphia in the summer and fall of 2020. The largest was “Camp Maroon”’ within Fairmount Park’s Von Colln Memorial Field, which was occupied for a few weeks by a few hundred people in the fall of 2020. The camp’s mission was mainly focused on housing homeless people in the city, but came out of an extension of Black Lives Matter protests during the summer. Demands ranged from abolishing the Philadelphia Police Department to the Philadelphia Housing Authority providing more affordable and transitional housing, and from the establishment of a community land trust for Logan Square’s vacant lots to a repeal of anti-camping laws on public parks.16 The organizers won a land trust of fifty vacant lots, plus the city’s promise to fund two villages of tiny homes. However, the city has thus far dragged its feet on building tiny homes and donating properties to the land trust.17 As the following principles will show, protest designers can plan for such all-too-typical reactions to protest. An encampment’s location, spatial layout, and internal architecture can create the conditions for a more durable action. Deliberate design choices can ensure an occupation’s longevity and impact, whereas design that is too dense or imprudent can cause a protest to fizzle.

But first, a brief word on my own background and motivations. The 2010s saw a global struggle against authoritarian government leaders, and in the U.S., the beginning of the 2020s contained the biggest summer of protests in decades. Protest is somewhat “in vogue” now in the U.S., especially in the woke, leftist circles I run in. While I assert that this essay is a good faith attempt, I recognize my own hubris in penning a manifesto of protest camp design principles, having only attended a few protests myself, and none overnight. Thus, while I punnily call this essay “Brubaker’s dozen principles,” many of these ideas are not my own. Instead, this essay is my attempt to mull over, combine, and reformulate the existing literature on how to plan and design a successful protest occupation. If it helps no one else, I hope to personally employ these ideas in the future protest occupations I aim to participate in, for I know that such occupations will increase in frequency and necessity as the climate warms and our Earth cries out louder and louder.

Principle #1: Context-Specific

Possibly the most important consideration in a protest occupation is a precursor to the protest: where to occupy? What physical space provides both necessary amenities and symbolic power? In order to support a longterm encampment, a space needs to be able to meet the needs of human life, but also provide a symbolic inspiration that keeps the protest fire burning. Social movement researcher Pijatta Heinonen stresses the importance of breaking with the intended use of a space by occupying it: “protest camps strive to create autonomy from the status quo through claiming space: through occupying and controlling territory…or visual landscapes that disrupt the surrounding environment.”18 The very act of occupation creates this autonomy; but in order to preserve the autonomy, protest organizers must thoughtfully plan out the design of the occupation. In the early stages of planning, organizers must physically visit the site rather than rely on maps and theory. Organizers should engage in what renowned landscape architect Christopher Girot described in 1999 as the “landing” and “grounding” phases of design: respectively, putting aside one’s preconceptions to meet the site without bias, and mapping the deeper ecological and cultural systems of the

site in a way that illuminates contesting narratives of space.19 These strategies of landing and grounding are not unlike University of Pennsylvania landscape architect Ian McHarg’s “layer cake” of ecological processes that designers must incorporate into their plans.20 Without studying and physically standing in the space that will become an encampment, organizers cannot hope to design a realistic, rooted protest.

Deciding on which space to occupy must be context-specific: will the protest take place in an urban setting, a remote reservation, a government base, or a corporate fossil fuel extraction site? The type of action, and the specific idiosyncrasies of the space protesters plan to occupy, will be unique and must be met with unique design decisions. Because of the inherently singular nature of each protest, I will try to speak as plainly and abstractly as possible about protest camp design principles. But readers should be aware that each tactic must be tailored to the situation at hand. The protest’s mission should always inform the design of the encampment.

When deciding on a site for protest action, logistics are crucial. Protesters must have access to clean water, sanitary and sustaining food, clean bathrooms, some amount of electricity, and protection from the elements. Simply put, without these amenities, people will leave. Just as important as keeping people at an encampment by making it livable and inviting is ensuring people can easily access the site. Designers must ask: will protesters arrive via public transportation? Will there be parking for cars? If the action will take place in a remote area such as a resource extraction site or environmental demolition site, will shuttles take people to the location? The importance of the occupation’s proximity to essential social services cannot be overstated. And the logistical design does not stop once people have arrived; protest organizers must consider the number of children they expect to attend in order to provide childcare and playgrounds for kids to play at. Organizers must provide shade if the weather is too hot, or heat if the climate turns too cold. If the encampment plans to subsist long-term, where will food be grown? Where will protesters sleep, eat, and gather? Will encampments be set up in large circles, small groupings, concentric layers, or along a line? Practical questions and constraints must dictate the design choices of location. However, this does not mean organizers cannot be creative with design layout.

Logistical considerations are not the sole factor in picking a place for a protest. The locale must also symbolically align with the ideas of the protest movement; a convincing narrative must be spun. Social movement researchers Frenzel et al. argue that “The symbolic role of protest camp can serve to mobilize protest campers, validate their cause and/or enlarge the scope of the issue at hand.”21 By occupying the space, protesters infuse it with a counter-meaning to the existing purpose (or colloquially, the “vibe”) of the space. In Deleuzian terms, the camp’s protesters “reterritorialize” the location through their presence and their restructuring of the space with tents, banners, grills, and gardens.22

A good example is the reclamation of Hong Kong’s streets by pro-democracy protesters: in the city, less than one in twenty residents own a car, so by blocking car traffic and preserving pedestrian (and proletariat) access to the streets, the protest sent a clear message to Hong Kong’s elite.23 If organizers cannot access the site where the objectionable action is occurring or the target of protest exists, they should pick a symbolic hub to represent it. For example, the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires became the gathering spot for

Figure 4: An Ende Gelände (meaning “here and no further”) action, as part of a weekend-long climate camp and nonviolent direct disobedience. (Friends of the Earth Europe)

Figure 5: Another Ende Gelände action in the Rhineland, Germany, this one more celebratory and less gritty than the previous figure. (Ende Gelände)

Figure 6: One of the walking bridges that speakers stood on to shout down at their fellow protesters. (Ohconfucious on Wikimedia Commons)

mothers of people detained or disappeared during Argentina’s 1970s military rule. The mothers have marched every day since 1977.24 Their commitment infused the plaza with new meaning.

The vital point when reading a symbolic narrative into a space-to-be-occupied is how to weave that narrative into the surrounding environment. Why here? Why now? The narrative should determine the aesthetics of the action as well as its location.25 Hatuka describes three common protest sites: a public square, a street boulevard, and a public park.

Squares and plazas are enclosed spaces that already hold symbolic power of governance or history.26 These sites are highly visible, but therefore often overpoliced; the space can quickly become politically charged since it has a sort of “potential” energy that can easily be converted into “kinetic.” For this reason and the reality of spatial confinement, plazas are good locales for smaller-scale protests that are well-planned, tightly-coupled, and theatrical by design.

Streets and boulevards, however, are spaces that are good for larger, traversing protests, since the streets are more spread out and can accommodate growth in the number of protesters. Depending on which boulevards are blocked off, these protests can be quite disruptive and visible. The snake-like spatial pattern of a street protest provides many opportunities for onlookers to engage with protesters.27 While most street protests are only a few hours long, the Hong Kong protests are a recent example of a street occupation for multiple weeks.

Third, public parks are good locations for a crowd of indeterminate size. Since parks have fewer spatial boundaries, it is easy to expand the protest. Park-based protests are often festive, while also being less threatening and disruptive to the hegemonic status quo.28 Some parks are more conducive to overnight camping, but others may not have easy access to necessary amenities. Choosing a park over a street or a plaza should be narrative-driven: why does this specific protest challenge this specific locale: does it continue and add onto its legacy, or reconstitute its legacy by reclaiming lost history, or negate its legacy? Designers must tell a story of past struggle and reimagine a post-hegemonic future.29

Principle #2: Flexibility

Related to the decision of an encampment’s location is ensuring that the location is flexible to predictable and unpredictable fluctuations. Population growth and spatial expansion are predictable design needs. As a protest swells with people, will everyone still be able to access necessities? Can the camp extend beyond its borders, or will it be forced to crowd rather than expand? Here, logistical questions must dictate initial camp design in order to best accommodate growth. Studies on refugee camp design argue that camps should be designed and constructed “as a process not a product,”30 allowing for smart growth rather than uncontrolled expansion. The more designers can predict levels of growth, the better they can plan for a scaling up of operations at a protest camp. Essentially, if the encampment is indeed an organism, it should be able to learn and adapt, as well as evolve over time as a species does over generations. As the successful camp grows and regenerates, it not only preserves its systems but improves upon them. Here again, protest camp

designers can take inspiration from McHarg, who advocates for “creative fitting” when designing, beginning with a simple conception and building up towards more complex, diverse, almost entropic designs.31

Already existing architectural subgenres have taken up the question of easyto-assemble, “modular architecture.” For example, some Extinction Rebellion protests have made great use of simple plywood box structures that can be bolted together into any shape: a platform, seats, tower, and more. The boxes can be built in a few minutes with a few parts, and only weigh a few pounds to allow for quick set-up. In one protest, three activists chained themselves to one of these towers, which took the police all day (and heavy machinery) to dismantle.32 Adaptability is a key value for direct actions. Any confrontational occupation should be ready for defense and a rapidly escalating situation; architecture that is easily assembled and disassembled is key. Many lessons can be learned from indigenous architecture, built for the hunt and other nomadic camping. The Standing Rock anti-pipeline protests made use of

Figure 7: Simple yet infinitely useful boxes, designed and built for protests. (Dezeen Magazine)

Figure 8: The very same boxes used to construct stages, benches, and tables can be used to create roadblocks that can delay environmentally destructive projects and can require heavy machinery to dismantle. (Dezeen Magazine)

Native designs for teepees, huts, ceremonial circles, and many other quickto-erect structures.33

A final related note on flexibility is that while each protest should indeed be contextual,34 the more adaptable a protest design is, the more conveniently it can be reproduced in other protest contexts. Replicable designs are useful for concurrent satellite protests of support (i.e. the nationwide Occupy pop-up camps) or for future iterations of a similar protest movement (i.e. the numerous Land Protector and Water Protector protests at reservations in the U.S. and Canada that led up to the occupation of Standing Rock).

Principle #3: Openness and Inclusivity

The design of a protest camp must be inherently inviting to inquisitive newcomers. Organizers must offer frequent trainings, opportunities for volunteer work and other engagement, and even buddy systems to strengthen interpersonal relationships among protesters. Relatedly, protesters’ expertise should be encouraged. The more varied the experience of the camp’s inhabitants, the more breadth of experience that organizers can tap.35 This value of diversity is the same rationale used to justify affirmative action in education and the workplace in the U.S., and the same justification for preserving the world’s biodiversity by limiting climate change and extinction; diversity is good for the collective. For example, The anti-DAPL protests in North Dakota on Standing Rock land had “250 tribal flags out there,” according to local Ton Johnston, plus many non-Native protesters who traveled from afar to support the occupation.36

Because diversity benefits all, camps must be as inclusive as possible, even “radically” so. Radical inclusion, the term that many encampments—ranging from eco-protests to Burning Man festivals—espouse, mandates that everyone should be included regardless of background.37 Of course, radical inclusion does not tolerate those who reproduce harm, a real (if irregular) occurrence at protests. Occupy encampments dealt with frequent thefts and fights, altercations with “grifters,” and even some sexual harassment.38 Radical inclusion does not (or should not) require organizers to accommodate violations of the community agreements, akin to a Lockean social contract. Participants who violate the protest’s ideals must be asked to rectify their violation or leave the camp, in order to preserve the integrity of the protest’s message as well as the rest of the protesters’ wellbeing. Truly inclusive design should plan for accommodating poor or unhoused people, many of whom want to participate in good faith alongside all the other protesters. Similarly, all gender identities must be included and accommodated for. The second caveat to watch out for is localized exclusion within a broadly inclusive camp. Many encampments, after an initial phase of community and interconnection, begin to congregate off into groups correlated by race and class; this happened to the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park, during which some protesters began to describe the two ends of camp as “downtown” and “uptown.”39 Organizers must employ design choices—in layout of sleeping arrangement, working teams, affinity groups, and more—to combat this sort of human non-entropy; the social tendency to go from integration to segregation. Therefore, inclusion is a ritual that must be encouraged, practiced, and reproduced.

Principle #4: Accessibility

This principle stems from the previous principle of inclusivity, but deserves its own section because of its traditionally overlooked status within protest movements and wider society. It is not enough to merely passively allow people to access a space, but to actively create spaces that invite the people who are often prevented or discouraged from accessing spaces within society. Protest signage at the camp must be clear and repetitive so nobody gets lost. Necessary amenities like food, water, and bathrooms should be easily accessible or brought to those who are slow to access them on their own. Sign language should be available, wheelchairs provided, walkways left clear, spots reserved at events for the physically disabled, and a buddy system are all important steps organizers can take to make the camp enjoyable for all.40

Being intentionally accessible to those who society overlooks does not just benefit the overlooked person, it benefits everyone—just like the values of diversity and inclusion benefit all.41 The more open and inviting the environment is, the more likely people will stop and get involved. The Hong Kong protest designs exemplify this: by creating inviting libraries, art-making stations, and more, the organizers encouraged people who had no place in the financial district to feel welcome, even useful. “The occupations provided a home, a study-space and a place to relax for students and employees after-hours, so the contrived spaces themselves ensured the Movement lasted far longer than government officials had expected.”42 By offering safe and welcoming spaces for people of all backgrounds and abilities, protest camp design can

Figure 9: The protesters knew who was watching down on them. (Paige Anderson)

make oft-overlooked individuals feel seen. If designed exceptionally well, such spaces can become trampolines for people to take on leadership or other creative projects in unique ways that would otherwise never have been uncovered.

On the other hand, if the protest overly inconveniences people not involved with the action, it restricts their access to where they want to go in ways that may be counterproductive to the movement. Civil disobedience that blocks traffic, public transportation, or other public services may well have a place in the climate movement, but protest organizers should be extremely sure of their intentions; the protest narrative must be compelling enough to justify the inconvenience. As I have seen with my own eyes, blocking traffic rarely goes well for the protesters, and often turns people against the cause; plus, it is the surest, quickest way to get the police involved.

Principle #5: Visibility

As a way to bolster a camp’s open invitation to newcomers, protest design should be visible both to the public and particularly to the actors whom the protest targets. Taking the recent Hong Kong occupation as an example again, many protesters seized and occupied Causeway Bay, Hong Kong’s equivalent of Wall Street. The richest residents run the largest corporations from the tallest buildings in Causeway Bay, overlooking the ground far below their penthouses.43 As a well-researched Pitt undergrad thesis by Anderson argues, protesters were symbolically and visibly below their overlords. “By inserting themselves, their modest lifestyles and their hand-made architecture at the feet of these buildings, the protesters made the distinction between themselves and these elite few undeniable.”44 Importantly, protest design should resist the trend that some have dubbed the “ghettoization of protest,” where protests are occurring (or allowed to occur) in politically neutral, less disruptive spaces rather than in the more visible town square, plaza, or park.45

A second, related value of visibility is that it provides the protest with natural surveillance. If protest design takes this into consideration by planning openair landscapes, small group sleeping arrangements, and other innovative spatial patterns to encourage group social interaction rather than one-on-one socializing, organizers can construct cohesion. Such design choices are not only useful for social cohesion; by allowing for a sort of community watch, they can also limit the amount of untoward activity that occurs, thereby keeping all protesters safer. Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park found that the best formation of sleeping arrangements was in small communal groupings rather than a mess of individual units, since the safety risks of the latter were so high. As one organizer, Sean McKwoen, described it, “privacy equals risk.”46

While there may be less private space or personal autonomy in a protest camp, there is still a group autonomy from the outside world. Part of the power of an occupation is in its creation of an “autonomous space” separate from the norms of the wider society;47 or in the words of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “spaces of exclusion” that are liminal, transitory, and mostly ungoverned—or ungovernable. 48 Camp design should strive to be visibly exceptional, a stark break from the hegemonic regime of the surrounding territory. The borders of this autonomous space are crucial to preserving its autonomy by creating a symbolic bubble around it. Borders are also practical: at many occupations, police often demand the camp have clear borders, while in others, protesters

must fight tooth and nail to delineate borders. That said, the value of inclusivity49 does not cease to apply. Borders should be inviting rather than excluding. Spilling out into the surrounding area outside a plaza or square, for example, can actually be an effective strategy in local engagement with neighbors, winning some of them over to the cause.50 This strategy is how many Occupy encampments grew so much in the weeks after the initial occupation. Some border exceptions must be made for the press, and often for law enforcement as well. Allowing press is important for the ideal of visibility in the digital realm, and communicating with law enforcement can de-escalate many protests. Press and police are also two of the main vehicles for communicating the protest message to the corporate or governmental elites that a protest may be targeting, making the protest visible to the key players that it needs to reach. Of course, if a protest narrative does not villainize a specific actor or attempt to change a decision-maker’s mind, it might not need to engage with the state. Here again, the level and type of visibility should be informed by the protest mission.

Finally, visibility of peaceful, inventive, non-hegemonic action is a really good thing! Frenzel et al. describe the aesthetics of practicing domesticity within the autonomous space of an occupation: “protest campers’ performance of the rituals of daily life, from cooking and bathing to parenting and displaying affection, presented an ‘alternative aesthetics’ to those of the surrounding geography.”51 Therefore, those that are willing and brave enough should, essentially, show face. Camp design should encourage glimpses into camp life, in thoughtful and inviting ways. It is especially important that the protest organizers are visible and approachable, so that police and fellow protesters alike feel more comfortable engaging with them.

Principle #6: Option of Invisibility

Briefly, camp design should also include provisions for those who, for fear of criminal charges or other reprisals, wish to remain anonymous. Organizers should be clear about rules on no photography unless protesters have given consent. Small choices in camp design can also go a long way in preserving the option of invisibility. Providing masks is not only an accessibility issue for the immunocompromised52 in a post-COVID world, it can serve the double purpose of allowing protesters to walk anonymously. Providing face paint can be a fun activity for kids, plus a quick strategy to avoid being personally identified by surveillance cameras, including high-tech facial recognition software. Harmless laser pointers can be used to nonviolently force surveillance helicopters to land.53 A can of spray paint can quickly shroud a surveillance camera, as Hong Kong protesters showed the world during their occupation of the financial district.

Related to the ideal of visible domestic life with camps54 is the other side of the coin: making the dirtier, less glamorous parts of life less visible. Bathrooms should be easily accessible but need not be the first thing newcomers see when trying to foray into a protest camp. Trash and food waste should be kept very contained. Camp agreements on talking to the press should be enforced by protest organizers, to best control the protest’s unified message (and hide those participants who might intentionally or unintentionally subvert it). By using design to regulate which aspects of a camp are most visible to the outside, designers can amplify (and simplify) the protest narrative.

Principle #7: Ingenuity and Effectiveness

The first consideration when trying to be as resource-efficient as possible is to analyze the existing spatial layout. How can the surrounding environment be sustainably repurposed to support the camp? The easiest method is to re-form the existing landscape. Hong Kong protesters used the city’s famous walking bridges between skyscrapers as speaking platforms, as a way to be seen and heard by the crowds of protesters below.55 Many protests have made use of police barricades and other governmental equipment, such as repurposing police riot fences into protest borders by zip-tying fence segments together.56 Cars can become quick barriers in a pinch.57 In these ways and more, Butler describes how, in some protests, “police power is overcome, especially when they [protests] become too large and too mobile to be contained by police power, and when they have the resources to regenerate themselves.”58 It is this regeneration that is at the heart of ingenious, crude-but-effective design: reproducing one’s own existence with the resources scavenged and the labor spent repurposing them. This principle evokes a “peasant’s approach” to design, in the language of landscape architect Kongjian Yu—or in the context of many protest camps, a proletariat’s approach to design.59 Very little at a protest camp is glamorous or glitzy, but nothing is impractical.

Practicality, however, should not become un-creativity. If barriers, towers, or other structures are large and eye-catching, they can serve as a symbol of the movement, and make for great photo ops—crucial in a social media age where the perception of a protest can make or break its success on the digital stage.60 A wonderful example is the do-it-yourself (DIY) ”tensegrity” structures, with Ende Gelände and Extinction Rebellion protesters clambered onto them. These ingeniously-designed tensegrity structures are rapidly deployable, cheap, built from sustainably-sourced materials, and strong enough for activists to clamber up.61

“Regeneration...is at the heart of ingenious, crude-but-effective design: reproducing one’s own existence with the resources scavenged and the labor spent repurposing them. This principle evokes a “peasant’s approach” to design, in the language of landscape architect Kongjian Yu - or in the context of many protest camps, a proletariat’s approach to design. Very little at a protest camp is glamorous or glitzy, but nothing is impractical.”

This type of makeshift, “survival-mode thinking” is essential for protest design, especially environmental protests—which should live out their espoused ideals of sustainability and a circular economy.62 Trash can be repurposed into statues or other structural art. Stationary bikes can power phones, laptops, and electronic speakers.63 Common materials include wood, straw, clay, recycled waste, tires, pallets, scrap metal, tarps, zip-ties and other small plastics. These materials are valuable not only because of their abundance; “using such materials also enables construction processes that are not dependent on access to machinery or new, industrially produced, and often expensive materials, nor on the presence of professionals.”64 In this manner, camp designers should encourage participatory design in the planning for the camp.65 Let protesters construct the world they envision, relying on their untrained labor or their surprising expertise. Any seasoned protester will describe how frequently they are surprised by the unique skill sets protesters possess. Protesters have jimmy-rigged solar-energy stoves, simple fired grills and ovens, and other practical solutions to life’s problems. An eco-protester describes her account of a French occupation of a forest:

“In one residential place at the edge of a forest in La Zad, one of the inhabitants invited me in to their dwelling, and we sat down to drink coffee and chat. The two inhabitants had built the dwelling themselves with the help of their friends. They had collected branches and thin trunks from the adjoining forest and used them as the supportive structure for the house. To this structure, they had added a mix of clay and straw to fill the walls. The clay had been dug from the ground nearby and the straw collected from the fields of La Zad. The roof of the dwelling was covered with recycled corrugated iron that was partly held in place by car tires. On the southern wall, colored glass bottles had been stuck through the wall to provide light and decoration.”66

DIY solutions might even solve issues of sanitation, if designed carefully. One protest used “scaffolding parts, tarpaulin, and a gravity-based water system that led the water from a tank” for outdoor showers, which is rustic but better than no place to bathe!67 Many protests, including Occupy protests in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere, choose to use food that would have otherwise been

Figure 10: A woman cooks a stew at an Ende Gelände protest. (Ende Gelände)

thrown away, in what some have called the “paella approach” or “bricolage approach.”68 Notably, this behavior requires a good working relationship with local businesses (many protest camps may have no businesses in the locality; naturally, each protest is context-specific). Yet more, food preparation is complicated by health considerations; camp hygiene is complicated enough to get its own principle, directly below.

Principle #8: Non-contamination

In order to maintain the long-term livability of the protest encampment, cleanliness must be prioritized. Hygiene is a crucial design consideration; poor hygiene can sink a camp as surely as any police eviction. In part, poor hygiene is a clear justification that government officials use to evict a camp, in the interest of public health and safety. But hygienic eating, living, and sleeping conditions are important on a deeper level because they signify community respect. If protest participants feel they can dispose of trash freely, or fail to clean up after themselves, it reflects poorly on their attitude towards respecting the space they inhabit. If such disrespect becomes visible (and a good protest should be visible69) to outsiders, especially the press, it runs the risk of delegitimizing the entire protest. Non-contamination is especially important in food preparation. It may seem admirable to scavenge and forage for sustenance, but state officials need little provocation to raid a protest camp, and unsanitary food preparation is a widely acceptable reason for a forced eviction. Kitchen design should prioritize sanitation despite the conditions and lack of resources. While protesters’ dietary restrictions do need to be considered, sanitation should ultimately dictate what food is served and how it is prepared.

Part of a commitment to non-contamination includes limiting viral contagion as well. In a post-COVID world, protest designers will need to make public health a priority with explicit design choices meant to limit the spread of viruses, bacteria, and other minuscule pathogens. Masks should be available, handwashing and sanitizing stations should be prevalent in conspicuous spaces and remain well-maintained throughout the protest’s duration.

Figure 11: Community-led clean up led by adolescents in Tahrir Square (Sherif9282 on Wikimedia Commons)

Designers should accommodate for safe spaces that immunocompromised people can feel comfortable interacting within. The goal is not for merely performative hygiene, but an honest effort made to promote basic public health measures while making the most vulnerable feel safe and welcome.70

Finally, the last but not least important aspect of the principle of noncontamination includes the physical cleanup of a space during a protest and after an encampment packs up and leaves. Eco-friendly protests would violate their protest ideals in the final hour by leaving the space littered with evidence of human occupation. Variations of a principle of “leave no trace” dot the existing literature on camp design. Burning Man has an entire tenet dedicated to cleaning up the desert after the festival. The famous occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt in 2011 provides one of the best examples in the last decade of cooperative clean up: led by young people, Egypt cleaned up the entire occupation in a symbolic event that made headlines. Protesters returned to rebuild the walls and walkways using the stones they had thrown at the police who attempted to raid the square. They hauled off massive amounts of trash that reeked of urine and other acrid smells, thereby purifying the square. Many Egyptians wore signs reading, in Egyptian and English, “Yesterday I was a demonstrator, today I build Egypt.”71 There is something deeply profound about living on, but refusing to scar, the land. Occupying a space without extracting from it, poisoning it, or harming its people is inherently anti-colonialist.72 Subsistence is anti-capitalist if it deemphasizes commodification of society in favor of collective enjoyment and cleanup of the space so that future generations can share in the space’s enjoyment.

Principle #9: Cooperation

An authentic occupation will be inherently organic and grassroots. Heinonen argues that “organizational models in protest camps are often built from the bottom up in a non-hierarchical, direct-democratic, and decentralized way that aims to combine individual autonomy, collectivity, and mutuality.”73 Each protester should share in the responsibility of camp regeneration, in some capacity. Without working together, no semi-complex social structure can survive. In the face of the many challenges a protest camp faces from without, internal squabbles or laziness from within will tear a camp to shreds. Practically, sharing in the labor is the only way to meet the needs of the collective. Sharing responsibility also makes everyone feel useful, despite the lack of experience or physical prowess that might make some protesters feel self-conscious or excluded. Actively contributing to the group is also a fundamental value of democratic participation in society and politics. In this way, cooperation lives out a fundamental ideal of any protest movement.

The design of architectural layout, as well as the design of how to construct such a layout, can incorporate the ideal of cooperation, first and foremost by conceiving of physical structures that can be built by teams of unskilled civilian protesters, or service systems that can be manned by squads of volunteers of all ages and abilities. Successfully erecting improbable and DIY structures, or serving hot food made by one’s own hands, is one of the most empowering feelings a protester can feel. For example, when building a treehouse in a protest camp occupying a forest set to be cut down, one protester describes the massive group actions:

“The purpose of the day was to hoist up the other trunk that had been carried to the site, which required many people to move the trunk on the ground and many others to climb a rope, their combined weight acting as a leverage that would hoist the trunk upwards. The effort took us hours, and some people left in the middle as some new ones joined in, bringing food with them for everyone.”74

While all should contribute each based on their talents and interests, shared responsibilities at a protest camp will be smoother if certain values are adopted. First, ensure cooperation is equitable. Identity groups whose ideas are silenced in wider society should have greater say in leading or maintaining the camp. The best example of this is when women lead. Many protest scholars, Judith Butler included, have written think pieces on the differences between traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” roles within society and protest dynamics. While the more traditionally “masculine” activities of confronting the police or maintaining security will be widely publicized by the media, it is the traditionally “feminine” activities that keep a camp running. Many of the protest necessities that must be designed for will, in practice, be run by women. This is not to say that there is no place for men in domestic life. To the contrary, protest camps provide unique opportunities for men to participate in the housekeeping of daily life. Any system of protest camp cooperation should resist gendered splits for activities. Instead, protest camps should lead equitably, and one effective way to subvert hegemonic organizational structures is to ensure places of leadership for the women of the encampment. For example, an Apache woman from North Dakota, Adrianne Chalepah, described the reason why the Standing Rock camp was so sustainable and durable: “Women are leading the effort.”75

Second, cultivate creativity. Cooperation should be, above all, fun!76 The more protesters feel empowered to experiment and tap into their creative juices, the more life-giving the work will be, and the more enthusiastic they will participate in it. Designing protests to include frequent changes in work shifts, intermingling of affinity groups for different activities, and multi-generational teamwork has the potential to ease the heavy lifting of encampment maintenance. Part of the ideal of cooperation includes design to make things engaging: organizers should assign work and study sessions in small groups, and provide the architectural layout for co-creative activities, always with an

Figure 12: Zuccotti Park working group schedule for the week. (Ed Yourdon on Flickr)

eye towards inviting the newcomer. Cooperation can even involve play. Social movement researchers Frenzel et al. describe the unique “playfulness of autonomy” that one finds at a protest encampment; there is even a whimsical, anticapitalist ethic inspired by make-shift, DIY solutions when living in a protest camp.77 Play is also a practical consideration, because childcare will be crucial to any cross-societal protest. Childcare must be written into any design of job roles, and it is a great example of a role that should not be performed by only the women of the camp. Design considerations can alleviate these burdens as well, by providing safe and entertaining spaces for children, teenagers, or nursing mothers—think accessibility.78 It takes a village to raise a child…luckily, a protest camp can be a mini village. Many renowned landscape architects (including University of Pennsylvania’s own Anne Spirn) have theorized on designing for play, especially in sustainable ways that engage with the landscape.79

Lastly, a word on consensus decision-making as a way to meet the ideal of cooperation. The protest movements discussed in this essay differed on whether to fully commit to total consensus, or to embrace “dissensus” and contestation, or to encourage debate but rely on decision-makers to finalize actions in the event of irreconcilable disagreement. Overall, this decision is a political question more than a design question. But suffice it to say that certain design configurations for group discussions, plenary sessions, and educational events can encourage debate while others stifle it. In general, more open and honest debate should be welcomed while at a protest, in order to stay true to the protest’s counter-hegemonic purpose.

Principle #10: Ceremony

Famed psychiatrist and social theorist Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, argues that the land will bring colonized people both bread80 and dignity. For colonized people throughout history, tradition and ceremony has been a source of that dignity. Through its ritualistic, repetitive nature, ceremony can create and celebrate the inherent dignity of a people despite their oppression. Many indigenous ceremonies are deeply rooted in the land, and some people groups would travel hundreds of miles to return to the specific site for a ceremonial practice. All human cultures have ceremonies: from religious to environmental, from birth to death, from planting to harvesting to baking bread to refusing food in hunger strikes. Ceremony is a simultaneously celebratory and humbling experience, and is inherently social, thereby strengthening community bonds with its rituals. A ceremony does not only connect people to each other, it connects them across time to their ancestors, their future progeny, and the ever-evolving landscape surrounding them.

Designers of protest camps should consider the many values of ceremonial practices when planning for a protest. By infusing these values into the space and providing ample spatial opportunities to engage in mini-ceremonies, designers can increase the social bonds and symbolic power of an encampment. By making the mundane activities of camp logistics and daily regeneration more ceremonial, designers can almost make the ubiquitous “holy.” This is not unlike the deliciousness of a bowl of scalding hot instant ramen after a long day hiking on the trail; the act of cooking and eating together with campmates, after a long and arduous day of toiling together, can make even the cloudiest days rosy. The more repetitive and rhythmic a ceremony is, the more symbolic power it can have and the more durable it will be in

people’s minds long after the camp has been deconstructed. Designers can encourage rhythm even in mundane tasks, through the spatial construction: short walks to get water, communal mealtimes, group meetings, morning and nighttime rituals, and any other natural process can be infused with the ethos of ceremony. Recent examples of camp ceremony include techniques borrowed from Quaker meetings used at Occupy protests in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere;81 strategies of discussion incorporated from Central American political movements or from the Spanish Indignados movement a decade ago;82 the new idea of “festive architecture” put forth by designer Julian Beller when creating Roma village designs or plans for refugee camps;83 or crowdbased communication tactics, such as the “mic check,” where the audience echoes small statements made from a central speaker.84

Finally, ceremony forces humans to slow down and notice the environment and organisms around us. When designed well, ceremonies are inclusive and cooperative, inviting all participants to join together in the ritual at hand, however humdrum. Good design can not only encourage informal, watercooler social interactions, but also human connection on a deeper level. Ceremony is vital to convincing camp participants to be open to communitybuilding. Good design can foster relational accountability, where all participants become more aware of their role in the protest or their relationship with the land beneath their feet. In this vein, good ceremonial design should be informed by the natural landscape in ways that elicit participants to slow down and notice the beauty of nature. By encouraging those who interact with a space to slow down, protest camp designers can challenge the hegemonic, hypercapitalist logic that they have disavowed. Rather than plan only for growth and expediency, designers should preserve the sanctity of the surrounding environment and invite protest participants to engage with the environment for the environment’s sake, not for the sake of production or monetization. The growth of the camp is one goal of many,85 but a symbolic recognition of the camp’s context, through ceremony, is just as important to creating a cohesive protest narrative.

Figure 13: Attendees hold ceremonial candles honoring the victims of the 2016 Orlando mass shooting, during a vigil held in Harrisburg, PA. (Governor Tom Wolf, CC BY 2.0)

Principle #11: Nonviolence

It is not within the scope of this paper or the expertise of its author to evaluate the benefits of nonviolent direct action versus eco-sabotage, monkeywrenching, and other property destruction in the name of planetary health. Practically speaking, for virtually all protest occupations, nonviolence must be the modus operandi or else the camp will be violently squashed by law enforcement. Many nonviolent camps are violently squashed by law enforcement, to be sure. Judith Butler argues that the power of nonviolent occupation lies in the fact that “the existing public space is seized by those who have no existing right to gather there, and whose lives are exposed to violence and death in the course of gathering as they do.”86

Designers can and should plan for peaceable camps, and should use design decisions to encourage nonviolence as opposed to antagonistic clashes with police. Choose borders carefully. Make peaceful and domestic activities visible, to reduce how dangerous the police perceive protesters to be— thereby resisting the dehumanization of protesters by the police.87 This is not to say that designers cannot take a leaf out of the book of military tactics. Professor Andreas Malm describes the feeling of a nonviolent direct action:

“There is a militaristic quality to this form of non-violence: the officer corps positioned right behind the front banners, communicating with the command through headphones, infantry pressing on from behind. Contingency planning for different scenarios, scouts reporting movements of policy and situation at target. Names of lawyers and phones of the legal team are scribbled on arms (no one here wants to get arrested) to the sounds of spray cans tinkling as the coveralls are adorned with the logo of the two crossed hammers. Someone struggles to fix a banner with the words ‘Put up a fucking fight for what you love’.”88

The strict and militant hierarchy that Malm describes in the quote above may well be counterproductive and contradictory with the narrative or mission of a protest. But his emphasis on regimented, highly trained, and necessarily cooperative89 actions should inform any protest design. Collecting intelligence on law enforcement is a vital defense tactic. Choosing a well-designed logo or banner is an effective communication and visibility strategy.90 And the violence/ nonviolence line gets blurrier in instances of self-defense. For some, property destruction crosses the line. But is spray-painting surveillance cameras as a way to remain invisible91 and prevent violent police crackdowns considered violence, as the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters did? Is throwing back tear gas canisters violent? Many eco-saboteurs argue that, in order to prevent the violent maiming of the planet, monkeywrenching construction and destruction equipment is reducing net violence. Halting extractive industry plant infrastructure in the name of protecting Mother Earth is an act of selfdefense, for some leftists. The questions of how to define violence, and how to encourage nonviolent protests with spatial design decisions, must be soulsearching, context-specific, and carefully tactical questions for protest camp designers.92 Political organizer Saul D. Alinsky disavows violence, but admits simply, “Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.”93

Principle #12: Victory in Defeat

No protest camp will live forever. All protest camps die. But just like the Earth needs death and decay in order to provide fertile soil for new life, so too do protest ideologies (and camps) need to combust, reevaluate, and reform. Under the Dynamic Ecosystem Model studied in our Environmental Readings class with Dr. Steiner, the penultimate step in an ecological cycle is a period of death, creative destruction, and release.94 Death or ”defeat” may be inevitable in nature, but on a high level, defeats need not turn into failures. To borrow violent language for a nonviolent protest design guide, we may lose the battle but win the war. Malm argues that “Defeat also has a pedagogical function, including for the climate movement: without COP15 and the disappointments of early Obama, there might have never been no turn towards mass action. Climate fatalism is for the jaded and defeated; it is a ‘bourgeois luxury.’”95 Vitally, each lost battle should be visible 96 It should sting. But it should also motivate more people to action and rekindle the protest flame rather than extinguish it. By preparing for the dismantling of the physical encampment, protest designers can combat fatalism and doomerism. The epitome of protest camps’ ephemeral nature can be found at the (in)famous Burning Man festival, where every year artists create temporary art installations that they tear down at the end of the festival. One year, a team of artists constructed a trio of makeshift lighthouses four stories tall that people could climb, each dedicated to a different religion’s goddess. The entire project was burned at the end of the festival week.97

Protest designers should bake this defeat into their plans, orienting the camp around its inevitable end from the very beginning. One of the most iconic examples of this is the Goddess of Democracy statue erected over the course of three days in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by art students. With just $2,000, students collectively built a tribute to the democratic ideal and placed it, symbolically, in front of Mao Zedong’s portrait. For a brief moment, this statue united and attracted protesters under the symbol of democracy, only to be destroyed by the government’s brutal response. Its destruction was equally as symbolic as its construction.98 In this way, by designing a beautiful martyr, Tiananmen Square occupiers created an enduring image that could last longer than any protest occupation. They infused the square with a counternarrative through their inventive, shared architectural creation, a symbol that could not be squashed with tanks. Sometimes, especially in today’s digital age, a moment is all a protest needs.

There is an inherent danger in these types of dying breath symbols. Once the protest movement has dissolved, it loses most control over the narrative it created. The conversations it started ripple outwards but, like the game of Telephone, the conversations may lose their meaning or the meaning may become misrepresented. The warping of a protest message is not only an unintentional inevitability, it is also a strategic move by the hegemonic power structures that the protest has taken aim at.99 Therefore, protest design must not only plan for defeat but plan for intentional co-opting of the protest narrative. The narrative must be simple, provocative, forceful, but unambiguous.100 Wherever possible, the protest narrative must be designed to be future-proof. Designers can also limit the state’s ability to co-opt the protest narrative by engineering iconic and memorable moments captured on social media. By planning for an almost theatrical level of visibility,101 protest organizers can design a spectacle that is unambiguously anti-hegemonic. If a

camp is protesting fossil fuel extraction, for example, it becomes hard for oil or gas corporations to co-opt the protest’s narrative of self-sustenance using sustainable energy if protesters are cooking from solar stoves and charging their phones with solar batteries.

Principle #13: Enduring Ambition

From the earliest stages of planning a protest camp, organizers must design the narrative with an end goal in mind. The first, more amorphous goal is to change hearts and minds by creating networks of social exchange. Protesters at a camp share in a unique bond by living in squalor together, against all odds.

Figure 14: Hong Kong pro-democracy student protesters erecting The Goddess of Democracy statue. (Jacques Langevin on Getty Images)

Figure 15: The trio of lighthouses built and then burned a week later. Wasteful? Yeah, probably! Cool? At least in this photo, heck yeah! (Curtis Simmons on Flickr)

Although the camp itself will fizzle or be forcibly evicted, and the physical infrastructure will crumble, the “human infrastructure” of new connections and partnerships will endure. As one protester reflected upon the protests at Standing Rock and other indigenous land movements, “However long the lodgepoles stand at each location before they are packed up—or burned in the face of raids—they have already gathered energy, teachings, and skills that do not dissipate.”102 Just as designers can prepare for defeat, they can soften the blow by encouraging new social networks to form that will continue the narrative begun at camp. Protest camp design should always have an eye to the horizon beyond the immediate, physical camp. By spatially inviting protesters to cooperate and learn from each other, such connections will form naturally, from the bottom-up, in a manner that is durable and authentic.

So, the abstract point of a protest is to change the conversation, yes, but practically, protests are measured in political wins and losses. Can the protest successfully drive public policy forward, or force an issue on the political stage? Protest camp design should facilitate group discussion and educational events for participants, teaching them about the policy process. Pithy slogans should be printed on clothes, banners, or skin. Unfortunately, as a backlash to recent occupation camps, policymakers in the U.S. and Europe have begun to change the laws around how to protest, making it illegal to protest in certain ways and thereby streamlining the state’s ability to squash dissent. In reality, these types of anti-demonstration laws have been around for decades in many countries in the Global South. However, the U.S. has a unique power to enforce these laws, with its overfunded local police departments and massive national military budget. And state-sanctioned violence is not the only enforcement mechanism of anti-protest laws. Geographer and social theorist Taru Salmekari argues that “the state uses licensing and policing to control the use of urban space. In some cities, the state uses licensing to keep challengers out of sight.”103 Therefore, designers must be thoughtful and legalistic when choosing a location, type of action, and narrative; designers must carefully craft their plans within or beyond the legal limits. Lastly on this topic, protest design must be aware of how state actors may not act in a trustworthy manner when negotiating policy. In the famous 1977 book Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, authors Piven and Cloward argue that government officials promise easily publicized but meager

Figure 16: A lone statue overlooks the plains of North Dakota following the protests. In a ceremony of sorts, departing protesters left small trinkets or cigarette butts as homages to the movement. (Minnesota Daily Press)

concessions, and then rarely follow through after the protest movement’s momentum has diffused.104 Philadelphia city authorities have followed that playbook during their negotiations with organizers in wake of the housing encampments in the fall of 2020. Few concessions that the city agreed upon have been implemented a year later.105 Protest designers should not solely be satisfied with the word of city officials; by designing for defeat, organizers can ensure that the city never forgets the occupation’s narrative.

In conclusion, despite the inevitable end of all protest movements, the issues they force can be regenerated within the public sphere—if protest planning continues beyond the camp’s end. If designers have an eye towards the future that exists after the protest, they can control the narrative longer than the life of the physical protest camp. First and foremost must be leveraging social media, which has become a staple of any political campaign. Protest movements should (and have) made use of the internet’s democratizing potential to support protests. Any good protest design will include a wellplanned social media engagement campaign and snappily designed graphics. The most impactful protests will produce new designs not just of the policy landscape, but the physical landscape of the space on which the protest occurred, and spaces like it. Will urban space be reorganized to better serve the people it is built for? Will resource extraction sites plug their greenhouse gas leaks, or cease operations altogether? Protest camps inherently offer an alternative way of setting up the world, a non-hegemonic power structure and social structure and economic structure. Drawing from the protest camp’s successes, designers can continue the reimagination of the space and the symbolic relationships it upholds. The epitome of this future-oriented design process is the Green Mong Kok plan, directly inspired and informed by the Hong Kong occupation. Mong Kok is one of the districts where the main spatial disputes in Hong Kong occurred, and architects have taken the insights they gleaned from firsthand experience at the protests to create designs for public projects in the district. The Green Mong Kok proposal includes, for example, revamping the district library to create a feel that encapsulates the DIY, ramshackle-but-inviting street libraries that popped up on Hong Kong’s streets. These endeavors are a brave start. On the horizon, I envision exponential increases in the number of people ready to join in a counternarrative against extraction, the profit motive, and “limitless” growth. May good design help to ensure such a future becomes our reality.

(Avoid

After seeing Nathan Road filled with tents and various activities, we ask ourselves, how can we apply this idea to the entire area of Mong Kok? How can we create a sustainable Mong Kok?”

(Avoid Obvious Architects)

Figure 17: A photograph of one of Hong Kong’s popup protest libraries, where students congregated to study, community members came to read or to chat, and small educational sessions would welcome newcomers. This design and methodology informed the Green Mong Kok plan’s recommendation to revamp the district library.

Obvious Architects)

Figure 18: One of the Green Mong Kok architects holding the design plans for the city center. The design firm Avoid Obvious Architects created this blueprint, in their words, “inspired by the Occupy Movement in Mong Kok, Hong Kong in 2014.

Notes

1. Butler, Judith. “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics (2011).w

2. The idea is mentioned in Butler 2011 above, but it was originally a Brechtian term meaning a repurposement of typical hegemonic functioning.

3. See p. 3 of De la Llata, Silvano. “Open-ended Urbanisms: Space-making processes in the protest encampment of the Indignados movement in Barcelona.” Urban Design International, 11 Nov 2015.

4. Lutzoni, Laura. “In-formalised urban space design. Rethinking the relationship between formal and informal.” City, Territory, Architecture Vol 3 No. 20 (2016).

5. Patton, Zach. “What Cities Can Learn From Burning Man.” Governing: The Future of States & Localities, 29 Jul 2019.

6. See p. 6 of Araabi, Hooman Foroughmand, and Alex McDonald. “Towards a Deleuzoguattarian methodology for urban design.” Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability Vol. 12 No. 2 (2019).

7. Shen, Yiling. “10 Inspiring Examples of Post-Disaster Architecture.” ArchDaily, 28 May 2018.

8. Theory cited in Frenzel, Fabian, and Anna Feigenbaum and Patrick McCurdy. “Protest camps: an emerging field of social movement research.” The Sociological Review, Vol. 62 (2014): 457–474.

9. Hatuka, Tali. The Design of Protest: Choreographing Political Demonstrations in Public Space, University of Texas Press (2018).

10. See p. 470 of Frenzel et al. 2014.

11. See Butler 2011 for one example.

12. el-Terk, Noor. “Remembering Tahrir Square, 10 years on.” Al Jazeera News, 20 Jan 2021.

13. White, Sarah. “Spanish protests swell as jobless march on Madrid.” Reuters, 22 Jul 2012.

14. See p. 651 of Heinonen, Pijatta. “Constructing autonomy: the significance of architecture in creating and manifesting autonomy in protest camps.” Social Movement Studies, Vol. 18, No. 6 (2019): 647–666.

15. See p. 39 of Hatuka 2018.

16. Brey, Jared. “Philadelphia’s Encampment Summer.” Next City on Housing Equity, 17 Nov 2020.

17. Allen, Taylor. “PHA and housing activists to show first homes from encampment deal.” Axios Philadelphia, 21 Dec 2021.

18. See p. 650 of Heinonen 2019.

19. Girot’s ideas are referenced in pp. 58-60 of Langhorst, Joern. “Recovering Place: On the Agency of Post-disaster Landscapes.” Landscape Review Vol. 14 No. 2 (2012): 48–74.

20. McHarg, Ian. A Quest for Life: An Autobiography. John Wiley & Sons Publishers (1996).

21. See p. 460 of Frenzel et al. 2014.

22. See pp. 6-7, 11 of Araabi & McDonald 2019.

23. See pp. 61-2 of Anderson 2016.

24. See p. 251 of Salmenkari 2009.

25. Empowering Nonviolence website. “How to shut down a coal mine: how Ende Gelände organise mass actions.”

26. See pp. 33-6 of Hatuka 2018.

27. Ibid, pp. 36-9.

28. Ibid

29. See pp. 41-2 of Hatuka 2018.

30. Gouverneur 2015 and Katz 2022.

31. McHarg 1996.

32. Block, India. “Modular boxes used by Extinction Rebellion are ‘protest architecture.’” Dezeen, 17 Oct 2019.

33. Matossian Hoover, Elsa. “‘Standing Rock Lives’: On the Persistence of Indigenous Architecture.” Architexx, 15 May 2017.

34. See principle #1. Designers must not only visit the site of a planned protest, they must map out its ecology. See McHarg 1996.

35. See p. 120 of Gouverneur 2015.

36. Mimiaga, Jim. “Standing Rock protesters share stories in Cortez.” The Durango Herald, 16 Nov 2016.

37. Burning Man Project website, “The 10 Principles of Burning Man,” first drafted by Larry Harvey in 2004.

38. See Massey 2012 for one organizer’s account of dealing with safety risks.

39. Massey, Jonathan, and Brett Snyder. “Occupying Wall Street: Places and Spaces of Political Action.” Places Magazine (2012).

40. Poynter, Rikki. “Op-ed: How to Make Protests More Accessible.” IndyWeek, 9 Dec 2020.

41. See principle #3. The more inclusive a protest camp is to people of varied backgrounds, the more potential for learning, sharing across cultures and traditions, and a wide range of expertise.

42. See p. 64 of Anderson 2016.

43. Ibid., pp. 40-4.

44. Ibid. p. 43.

45. Salmenkari 2009, pp. 246-248.

46. Massey 2012.

47. See p. 3 of De la Llata, Silvano. “Open-ended Urbanisms: Space-making processes in the protest encampment of the Indignados movement in Barcelona.” Urban Design International, 11 Nov 2015.

48. See p. 5 of Katz, Init. “Camps by design: Architectural spectacles of migrant hospitality.” Incarceration Vol. 3 No. 1(2022): 1–19.

49. See principle #3. Inclusivity and visibility go in tandem. A truly inclusive community must be fully open to scrutiny or skepticism, because anyone can enter into the community as an observer. A good community turns observers into participants.

50. See p. 138 of Gouverneur 2015.

51. Frenzel 2014, p. 462.

52. See principle #4. Accessibility in a post-COVID world will need to consider those with vulnerable immune systems or other pre-existing conditions that make it riskier to congregate in groups.

53. See p. 113 of Malm, Andreas. How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Verso (2021).

54. See principle #5. It is important to strategically choose which activities are most visible to outsiders and which can remain tucked away. Nobody minds kids playing hopscotch. Nobody wants stinky dumpsters.

55. See pp. 58-61 of Anderson 2016.

56. Ibid., p. 55 .

57. Ibid., pp. 53-4.

58. Butler 2011.

59. Referencing and repurposing ideas from Yu, Kongjian. “Deep Forms: Nature Based Solutions.” Turenscape, and Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape. 17 Dec 2019.

60. See pp. 65-9 of Anderson 2016.

61. Harper, Phineas. “Extinction Rebellion’s tensegrity structures have rekindled the spirit of early high-tech.” Dezeen, 16 Sep 2020.

62. See pp. 138-9 of Gouverneur 2015.

63. See p. 131 of Malm 2021.

64. See p. 657 of Heinonen 2019.

65. See p. 6 of Katz 2022.

66. See p. 657 of Heinonen 2019.

67. Ibid., p. 652.

68. See pp. 14, 22 of De la Llata 2015.

69. See principle #5. Cultivating a culture of clean up and recycling with spatial design choices might seem difficult or dubious, but sometimes it can be as simple as providing opportunities to recycle throughout the camp, organizing a clean-up crew with rotating job roles, and more.

70. See principle #4. It is important to identify when a good faith effort is enough (i.e. trash clean up, hand-washing) versus when it is vital that the protest get it right (food allergies, sanitary food preparation).

71. Contenta, Sandro. “Cleanup in Tahrir Square, a symbolic gesture for Egyptians.” Toronto Star, 12 Feb 2011.

72. Kaewen Dang, Tiffany. “Decolonizing Landscape.” Landscape Research, Vol. 46, No. 7 (2021) 1004–1016, 2021.

73. See p. 649-50 of Heinonen 2019.

74. See p. 657 of Heinonen 2019.

75. Ibid

76. See this essay’s introduction. The thing I remember most from that Occupy camp more than a decade ago was how fun it seemed. Not carefree, far from it. But the protesters seemed to be genuinely, visibly, enjoying themselves.

77. See p. 465 of Frenzel et al. 2014.

78. See principle #5. If these people feel welcome, they will bring their friends, parents, and children with them.

79. See, among other sources, Spirn, Anne Whiston. The Language of Landscape. Yale University Press (1998).

80. If the land’s occupiers have green thumbs.

81. Massey 2012.

82. See p. 6 of De la Llata 2015.

83. See pp. 11-2 of Katz 2022.

84. Malm 2018, p. 131.

85. See principle #2 on flexibility.

86. Butler 2011.

87. Police officers.

88. Malm 2021, p. 131.

89. See principle #9. No protest can have an impact if its participants do not cooperate. No movement can be successful with only lone wolf protesters.

90. See principle #5.

91. See principle #6.

92. I know I said I would not give my own opinion due to lack of expertise, but I do want to question the current “spin” of nonviolent direct action as the civilized way forward. Humanity may need a maturation, or a rebalancing of the books, as to what we consider violence and the many other types of violence that society allows by turning a blind eye.

93. Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Vintage Books (1971).

94. Discussed in Dr. Steiner’s class on April 15, 2022.

95. Malm 2021, p. 151.

96. See principle #5. If a tree falls in the forest and a treehugger was on that tree, but nobody was there to film it and post to social media, did it really happen?

97. Basulto, David. “Building Burning Man: The Unique Architectural Challenges of Setting Up a City in the Desert.” ArchDaily, 18 Apr 2018.

98. See p. 223-5 of Hatuka 2018.

99. See p. 257 of Salmenkari 2009.

100. For all its criticisms, the recent “Defund the Police” slogan is a good example: snappy, clear, actionable. Even former President Barack Obama critiqued the slogan for the opposite, which surprised me given the slogan’s clear policy proposal.

101. See principle #4.

102. Matossian Hoover 2017.

103. See p. 257 of Salmenkari 2009.

104. Fox Piven, Frances, and Richard Cloward. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Vintage (1978).

105. File, Nate. “Philly’s Housing Encampments of 2020 Led to a Nationally Celebrated Deal. Then It All Began to Unravel.” Philadelphia Magazine, 9 Oct 2021.

Are Landscape Architects Narrators?

Dingwen Wu

“Conveyed variously by way of language, image and gesture, human narratives are ubiquitous. They are to be found in myths, legends, fables, tales, novels, epics, histories, tragedies, dramas, comedies, mimes, paintings, films, photographs, stained-glass windows, comics, newspapers and conversations. Humans may be said to dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, believe, doubt, plan, gossip, revise, remember, anticipate, learn, hope, despair, construct, criticize, hate and love by narrative …. Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.”

- Rapport 2000, 283

In this essay, I trace back to the history that, in early days, humans established common visions of the future through narratives. I argue that landscape architects are introducing stories not only about representing projects, but also about the discipline itself, and the common well-being of the world. However, narratives could also be dangerous if we do not have a clear consciousness of the land, the events, and the tools we use and we create. I further argue that landscape architects are in the position to have the ability and a new role of building narratives about our relationship with the planet.

We Are All Storytellers

Humans are connected by stories. In A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari argues that Sapiens became dominant on the planet because they are the only animals capable of cooperative behavior in large numbers. The capacity of Sapiens to cooperate in large numbers is a result of their ability to believe in things that exist purely in the imagination, such as gods, nations, money, and human rights. How did it happen?

The success of Sapiens lies in its unique language. While language is not the only thing, it is the narrative that gives them the power to make a distinction. Almost every animal has its language and ways of communication. In the world of monkeys, language is often used to alert them of danger. The human language is distinct because it is amazingly flexible. We can construct infinite numbers of sentences, each conveying distinct meaning by connecting limited signs and sounds. Thus, instead of a short yelling to warn of danger, humans are able to depict the whole story of when, who, what, how and why. The unique language enables us to share information about the world. Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction.1 Humans are so vulnerable to live in this world as individuals that it is important to know who is the enemy, and who is the ally through gossip, which can be treated as the first kind of narrative. However, the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and danger. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. Only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.2 That even seems like the definition of design.

We have the ability to speak of fiction and believe in things that do not really exist. Fiction, or narratives, gives us the ability to imagine, share a common vision, and do things collectively. Throughout history, people have created an incredibly complex network of stories. The kinds of things that people create through a network of stories are known in academic circles as “fictions,” “social constructs,” or “imagined realities.”3 It sounds so familiar to the profession of design, which landscape architects, architects, city planners, stakeholders create fictions of the future world, while through these narratives, money is collected and landforms are reshaped. Narrative is the magic power to redirect the world.

Landscape Architects as Narrators

Before talking about landscape architects as narrators, we might ask the question, is landscape narrative? To quote Anne Spirn in The Language of Landscape: “The language of landscape can be spoken, written, read, and imagined. Speaking and reading landscape are by-products of living — of moving, mating, eating — and strategies of survival — creating refuge, providing prospect, to express ideas and to influence others. To read and write landscape is to learn and teach: to know the world, to express ideas and to influence others.”4 Landscape itself is such a well-choreographed literature that it has so many layers to reveal. As narrative is a series of events positioned in a meaningful sequence, the landscape also has its own language.

“The power to read, tell, and design landscape is one of the greatest human talents; it enabled our ancestors to spread from warm savannas to cool, shady

forests and even to cold, open tundra.”5 In shaping the landscape through design projects, narratives already exist in what we think and how we express. Every student in the field learns to present their designs from the first day of school. Experienced teachers might tell you to let the design speak on its own, while learning how to communicate and how to deliver your thoughts properly are still crucial to a career. Landscape architects are expected to tell the stories of their projects, drawing attention to the design and purpose of the space. Building narrative is a familiar skill set to landscape architects, and it is the key to catching the public's attention. However, the narrator's history of landscape architects is far beyond simply introducing a project, there is also a history of landscape architects who keep introducing new narratives about themselves, and pushing forward the boundaries of the discipline.

Is Landscape… is a whole collection of narratives that distinguishes landscape from the traditional understanding, while adding new values and perspectives of ecology, literature, gardening, urbanism among others. In the 1756 edition of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language defines landscape as “1. a region; the prospect of a country,” and “2. a picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it.”6 However, nowadays, the definition of landscape has greatly expanded, and the profession of landscape architecture is far beyond designing gardens and parks, but also about covering multidisciplinary topics as planning, ecology, urbanism, risk management, public engagement among others.

Additionally, the hot topics discussed in landscape architecture are shifting over time, which is also showing a continuous establishment of new narratives in the field. We all know that Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. is the first landscape architect, who set the foundation for the discipline. Ian McHarg published his Design with Nature in 1969. When the book was first written, there was no enabling legislation that required ecological understanding and planning.7 However, the success of the book and Ian McHarg’s ethos opened the environmental decade in the 1970s. From the late 1990s, Landscape Urbanism has provided landscape architects with the lens of urbanism, investments, and fundings has been pouring into the urban public realm with the success of a series of projects like the High Line. While in the past decades, climate issues, disasters, and resilience became the common ground in western academia. We see risk as metanarrative, and there are more and more discussions of the understanding, communicating and managing risk as a landscape architect. We cannot predict what's going to be next, but one thing is for certain: landscape architects will continue to grow and develop new narratives.

A Double Consciousness of Narrative

Although narratives enable us to have the power of shared vision and give direction to our understanding of who we are as well as what we are doing, narratives can also be abused. Some narratives come with notions of privilege or norms connected with inequity. For instance, in Banister Fletcher's "The Tree of Architecture," which is a schematic diagram detailing what Fletcher identified as the "branches" of architectural style beginning with five periods (Peruvian, Egyptian, Greek, Assyrian, and Chinese/Japanese) and culminating in the Modern American style. According to Fletcher, architecture evolved across cultures and over time, with branches terminating before the Modern period, while other lineages can be traced through successive generations to the final apex of Modern style. However, the narrative built by the tree also

puts Western European architectural traditions in the center and establishes its legitimacy by its hierarchical emphasis.

Black Landscapes Matter, a collection of essays, reminds us that the American landscape is a product of its colonial institutions and practices that have never been reconciled and resolved. An exclusivity in American narrative narrows cultural interpretations. A double consciousness is necessary to read landscape places and places with multiple meanings and have a way to construct an aesthetic of truth.8

“Black landscapes matter because they are prophetic. They tell the truth of the struggles and the victories of African Americans in North America. The landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins: from the plantation landscape of slavery, to freedman villages and new towns, to agrarian indentured servitude. To northern and western migrations for freedom, to segregated urban landscapes, and to an integrated pluralist society. Black landscapes illuminate the diaspora of free Africans from the Southern Hemisphere to North America. These landscapes are the prophecy of America; they tell us our future.”9

There should be an awareness of how the person, and the landscapes, have multiplicities: the landscape narrative needs to include elements that all people can see reflections of themselves. The documentation and representation of a place should highlight the memory and stories of the events that happened and create consciousness in the place with narrative.

Building narratives needs an awareness of the tools and instruments we use. In recent years, the world is more and more frequently under the threat of hurricanes, earthquakes, sea level rise, floods, wildfires, water crises, and other extreme climate disasters. While for every disaster, there is always a public need for a narrative. We are surrounded by new reports, social media, and government agencies, and everyone is presenting the story of what happened. As landscape designers and planners, we address the contemporary challenges of where to locate human settlement to minimize the consequence of natural disasters. However, before diving into the global data and mapping out strategies, we might need to be cautious, and explore such questions about the events like: When the official story of the disaster was told, who told it? Who collects the data and evidence? Who is, and for what reason, collecting these data? Is it the only resource of evidence and data we could get?

As the practices of landscape architecture nowadays heavily rely on geographic information systems and databases, we are sharing and using the public data created by institutions and agencies that we do not actually know who they are and where all the data come from. Even if the data we use is scientifically and factually recorded, we also need to watch out for spatial biases that negatively influence how we create and interpret them to build our own design narratives. Through an unconscious taken what is presented and given to us, we might build narratives that are full of ignorance, arbitrary and bias.

Telling A New Story of The World

In this last section, I want to argue for a growing role of landscape architects and the profession, in order to introduce and reveal new narratives of humanity and the earth. The argument of landscape architects as narrators gives designers

the lens of investigation, observation and representation of our living planet. Landscape architects can compile a variety of events, historical information, and data and combine it with evidence, analysis, and history derived from a landscape sensitivity.

Our investigation of the human-nature relationship can be reflected in a synthesized analysis of topography, hydrology, land use, infrastructure, vegetation, policy decisions, and any other factors uncovered during our research. The challenge of introducing new narratives of our living environment nowadays is either because of a lack of communication and visualization methods, or the failure to establish awareness through personal experience. Taking climate change as an example, weather is felt locally, while understanding climate change globally would require us to have a sense of the world as a whole.

How could we tell the story of the Earth? How to build narratives in this epoch that environmental risks and consequences have been felt on a planetary scale as a result of widespread industrialization?10 The most challenging thing to arouse an awareness of climate change is that it is hard to grasp through abstract weather forecasts. As landscape architects, we are equipped with the design skills of aesthetic representation: to visualize, draw diagrams, make videos, and present them. We could use our geographic imagination of the world and introduce new narratives, both spatially and visually. In 1972, the photo of “Blue Marble” changed our perspective of human and earth, when for the first time people looked down upon themselves and their terrestrial environment and could see them as one.11

Considering the big influence of images like “Blue Marble,” drawings, videos, exhibitions, and artifacts could be used to craft, reveal, investigate and introduce stories of us and the earth. Even for us to understand and respond to climate change, we need a new worldview, to address public attention and awareness. The stories and narratives we tell may set a new common ground to re-envision our relationship with humans and the planet.

Notes

1. Harari, Yuval Noah, and John Purcell and Haim Watzman. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper (2015): 25.

2. Ibid., p. 26.

3. Ibid., p. 32.

4. Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press (1998): 15.

5. Spirn 1998, p. 25.

6. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: In which the Words are deduced from their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the best Writers, Vol. II, 2nd Ed.(London: 1756).

7. McHarg, Ian L., A Quest for Life: An Autobiography. New York: John Wiley & Sons (1996): 206.

8. Hood, Walter, and Grace Mitchell Tada, eds. Black Landscapes Matter. University of Virginia Press (2020): p 1.

9. Ibid., p. 175.

10. Comaroff, Joshua. “Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment,” The AAG Review of Books, Vol 8, No. 2 (2020): 68.

11. Steiner, Frederick R., George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell eds. Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2016): 43.

Looking for Love in Hybrid Places: The Values of Our Commercial-Natural Landscape

Charles Starks

After entering a lottery for affordable housing and sitting on a waiting list for 10 years, we got an unexpected phone call in spring 2021. The COVID pandemic accelerated turnover and they had a one-bedroom, subsidized apartment for us to live in. Midtown West. Elevator building, 37th floor, security, balcony. In New York, heaven is made of brick, glass, and steel.

In the social sciences and related disciplines like city planning, the mental map of the world is fundamentally a social construction.1 By and large, it is human society, with its endless pursuits and conflicts, that is deemed central and important. Contestation and cooperation ensue as individuals and groups strive to enact their desires, shaping the physical and social structures of the world to meet them. To most of us contestants and co-operators, landscape is a resource, sometimes loved, sometimes lost or conquered, sometimes misunderstood or ignored, ever exploited.

Figure 1: Below my feet are Gilded Age row houses, tenements, French flats, settlement houses, limited-dividend housing. None higher than six floors. This has all been preserved by zoning for 50 years. Looking down on it, I realize that our walk-up past—decades of climbing stairs in tenements and rowhouses— is our neighbors’ present. Is it right for them to live this way in the middle of Manhattan? Do these buildings, creaky configurations of brick, stone, tar, and wood, have meaning and life? Or, as politicians and city planners here increasingly think, and developers hope, should they be torn down and replaced with modern, accessible towers like mine?

Figure 1: View of Hell’s Kitchen (Charles Starks)

For me, landscape is indeed something to be loved and savored. I recognized from childhood that this made me look at the world differently than most other people I knew. They were interested in social relations, technology, and, as we grew older, the acquisition and allocation of resources. Somehow, even when I became a city planner, these were not my primary concerns. I was interested in learning from and about the landscape itself. Sometimes this interest made me a haughty planner, so absorbed with my own sense of what was important to the land and the earth that I quarreled with members of the community. But it also gave me a perspective and - I believe - insight that other planners did not have.

While my feelings about society have ranged over time from ambivalence to deep interest, humans and our works and pursuits have always been very much within my sense of what landscape is. Nature without humans seems to me to be unknowable, even impossible. So, I find myself deeply engaged in cities, skeptical about the notion of “wilderness” separate from humanity, and drawn to writers and designers with points of view in which landscape is something material that either encompasses humans or transcends us. Like me, these theorists, including Kathryn Moore, Rachel Delue, Ann Whiston Spirn, Charles Waldheim, Kongjian Yu, and others, want to assign values, and sometimes even agency, to landscape itself. They disagree on questions of what those values are and what it is that landscape, if given values and perhaps a sense of selfhood or agency, represents and means to humans. But—or so it appears to me—they also love the materiality of landscape, which I am drawn to.

Figure 2: Often, I gaze from my balcony northwest, past the suburbs to where, 30 miles away, the horizon is marked by a grey-blue megalith of forest-covered gneiss and schist, a billion years old, as tall as the Empire State Building, and a hundred miles long. That’s the rim of the Highlands, New York’s greenbelt in all but name, a mountainous puzzle of parks, state forests, and reservoir lands that put a firm border on urban spread and cradle the Appalachian Trail. Hardly anyone in this city ever thinks about these mountains and what they mean for us. Seeing them in the distance daily has changed me, I think.

Figure 2: Harriman State Park, NY (Jason on Flickr)

When theorists, designers, and planners start thinking of landscape as a material construct with values and agency, we plant a stake outside the daily discourse in the disciplines, the academy, politics, and policy. Economically focused on behavior, production, and the distribution of resources, participants in daily discourse make moral judgments of means and ends based on abstract values of efficiency and equity.2 Extending our gaze to the landscapes beyond the immediate concerns that animate daily life opens designers, planners, and preservationists up to a well-worn and increasingly sharp line of attack: that it is an error to care about materials for their own sake, when, for all practical purposes, they too are merely social constructs, deeply implicated in systems of power and oppression that we have blithefully, and insensitively, ignored.3

In spite of the moral undertone of this criticism and whatever truth lies in it, there are reasons for the design professions and the academy to make a place for those of us who, by inclination and values, think, feel, and act at the pace and scale of landscape. When we, as humans, open ourselves to thinking in the beyond-human scales that landscape offers, we can create alternatives to typical human pursuits, respites from endless human struggles, and second thoughts about all-too-human conflicts and judgments. In what remains of this essay, I try to give some form and content to these alternatives and second thoughts, as I see them, by engaging with the ideas of theorists—and by looking at, from, and with landscapes I know.

Figure 3: Beyond the Highlands, not visible from the city, lie the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, a low sedimentary formation that snakes from the Mohawk and Hudson valleys of New York to the Coosa and Cahaba valleys of Alabama. At the front of the Ridge-and-Valleys is the Great Valley, a chain of wide, rolling basins and plateaus; I spent much of my childhood in the Tennessee part of it. Past the Great Valley, long, high ridges alternate with equally long, narrow valleys. In the Paleozoic, when mountains were first lifted here, today’s valleys were high peaks, and today’s ridges were low points. Differential erosion has lowered and flipped the topography. The dramatic Shawangunk Ridge, marking the northern edge of the Great Valley in Ulster County, New York, would have been a valley floor millions of years ago.

Figure 3: Shawangunk Ridge in New York State (Charles Starks)

Kathryn Moore unabashedly calls for a renewed emphasis on materiality as the foundation of landscape theory. But the material of landscape, she contends, is not separate from the material of humanity. She argues that people and all the other elements of landscape are perpetually engaged in mutual relationships, forming and reforming the same world. She objects to designers and planners who throw up rhetoric and jargon that conceal this seemingly simple truth. Viewing the landscape and everything in it as a whole and as grounded in materiality renders unnecessary the distinctions between analytic and transcendent ways of knowing which, Moore contends, have obscured materiality in favor of abstraction. She calls this idea “the new definition of landscape.”4 In contrast to the jargonistic explanations of architectural theorists, a material landscape would be accessible, and its design would be pragmatic.

Figure 4: Hundreds of miles northeast of my childhood home, the stretch of the Great Valley closest to New York City is sandwiched between the Highlands on the south, the Shawangunks on the north, and the Taconics on the east. Here, a maze of conservation lands, small towns, and housing subdivisions tells the careful observer that the metropolis has leapfrogged the Highlands belt. Bedroom communities of varying character punctuate the valley floor, for example: Warwick (gracious), Middletown (middling), Woodbury (shopping), Kiryas Joel (religious), Beacon (artsy), Wappingers Falls (sprawling), and my favorite, Poughkeepsie (complicated). The Great Valley in New York is an edgeless city, one of the few places in the NYC region where land can be had at a reasonable cost, and where all kinds of American dreams collide and coexist.

Rachel Z. Delue suggests that what Moore calls a “new definition of landscape” is, in fact, a well-theorized conception that has already become commonplace in contemporary thought.5 In making this assessment, Delue might have had in mind Ann Whiston Spirn’s decades of work integrating social and natural processes in urban ecology. Spirn herself contends that this work is incomplete, and that what is now needed is a comprehensive evaluation and integration of the florescence of knowledge that her work and others have inspired. Still lacking integration, Spirn contends, planners and designers are “wandering in a vast terrain” without adequate maps.6

Figure 4: Poughkeepsie, NY (Charles Starks)

Delue might have also had in mind the landscape urbanists and their chief interpreter, Charles Waldheim. According to Waldheim, the most adroit landscape architects of the age, who are uniquely able to perform the integration of nature and culture in fragmented contemporary polities, have displaced planners and urban designers as the masterminds of city design.7 But their integrated landscapes are not as accessible or pragmatic as Moore hopes. Waldheim disdains the openly populist, emotive style of Ian McHarg, associating it with irrationality and inefficiency. He sees success in methods that are detached, analytical, and conceptually abstruse. Waldheim calls this landscape architecture’s postmodern turn, but to me, it is more reminiscent of Corbusian pre-World War II modernism. Whatever their private feelings, the entrepreneurs at the pinnacle of the profession give no appearance of being bewildered by information overload or overcome by the wickedness of environmental problems.8 Like their canny and adaptive forerunner, Le Corbusier, who deftly navigated the political whiplash of the 1920s and 1930s, today’s landscape architects position themselves as clear-eyed sophisticates who possess the tools, the knowledge, the institutional backing, and the intellect to point the way from the chaos of the times to an enlightened future.9

Figure 5: West of the Hudson River valley, the Ridge-and-Valley reaches across the Delaware, Schuylkill, and Susquehanna drainage basins. The lower valleys here host a chain of post-industrial, back-office, exurban cities fringed with gleaming Amazon warehouses: Allentown, Hazleton, Reading, Harrisburg, Carlisle. The ridges above them harbor anthracite coal deposits, laid down in the Paleozoic, that once fueled these cities and bigger ones: Philadelphia was once built of coal shipped down these mountains. Now? Much of the upland is a beautiful disaster of brick-and-stone towns, grey-green hills, muddy creeks, strip mines, and hunting grounds. Here, the male residents of Ashland, Pennsylvania, once commissioned a full-size, three-dimensional effigy of Whistler’s Mother. She retains a place of honor and pride on the face of a steep anthracite ridge. Just a few miles from here, an underground coal fire started by a careless mining company burns out of control. It will smolder for many human lifespans.

In their separate appeals to the values of knowledge accumulation and individual genius, both Spirn and Waldheim run the risk of eliding a political question that defeated the architectural modernists of an earlier age: just whose ends are these concepts, maps, designs, and plans made to serve? By whatever method knowledge about the landscape is produced, it is put to use by specific humans who exploit the landscape in service of their beliefs, desires and emotions. If we use landscape to answer only material questions, then perhaps the moral criticism I raised earlier is indeed warranted.

Returning now to Delue’s assessment of the integration of society and nature, we can begin to see why she thinks that more social integration with landscape is not necessarily the key to landscape’s redemption. Having adequately theorized the relationship between society and landscape, we human beings need to get outside ourselves, she thinks. We need to start looking at landscape from non-human points of view: animals, plants, the land, and our increasingly autonomous machines. Delue finds historical inspiration in the works of the naturalist John Bartram and the painter Winslow Homer, who both created views made as if from beyond the human perspective. A 21st-century Winslow Homer might show us the landscapes that computers perceive, Delue’s argument implies.10

Figure 5: Ashpland, PA, Mother’s Memorial (Charles Starks)

Figure 6: Skyline DriveShenandoah Valley (m01229 on Flickr)

The non-human perspectives that Delue examines do not withstand scientific scrutiny, but they were always intended to be empirical, not fantastical. In making them, their creators broke through or ignored whatever barriers there were that separated the analytical from the transcendent. This is reminiscent of McHarg’s heterodoxy, risky because it involves trial-and-error. Mistakes are unavoidable on the way to genius, and if made at landscape scale, they have real and costly effects. Delue herself arrives at a place of doubt, noting that historically, alienating the human from the landscape was a component of the ideologies that justified colonialist and imperialist devastation.11 Perhaps it is too dangerous to hope that landscapes separated from human entanglements could solve human problems.

Figure 6: In the Shenandoah basin, the towns of the Ridge-and-Valley get sparser, less industrial. Once you get far enough south, away from the exurban spread of the national capital region, the valley takes on its classical form: the downslope of the Blue Ridge, then a high, wide farming and forest area, then a crush of steep ridges backing up into West Virginia. Few travelers on congested I-81, the valley’s interurban highway, realize that this apparently unchanging, yet very accessible, territory is being fought over by conservationists, seeking to preserve views and habitat, and developers, selling a piece of the countryside to retirees.

Kongjian Yu proposes detachments and separations too, but within the context of human–nature integration. First, he separates design from planning, insisting that the former is artistic and transformative, the latter scientific and configurative. Designed landscapes blend ecology and society; planned ones separate town and country. Both schemas have their place in shaping the built environment, says Yu, who himself has engaged extensively in largescale planning and design at all scales.12 This distinction seems to me to be culturally determined, reminiscent of the New Urbanist transect ideal, and not at all descriptive of the landscapes I know, where drawing a boundary between town and country is not especially helpful or even possible.

What seems to have caught the attention of the disciplines, though, is Yu’s distinction between subsistence peasantry and market agriculture. Selfreliant rural peasants know how to live sustainably with the landscape, he says, while trader-farmers exploit the landscape, destroying it.13 This contrast aligns to some degree with socialist rhetoric and “noble savage” stereotypes that appeal to the political leanings and longings of many people in industrial and postcolonial societies. But by detailing how specific techniques of peasant land management work and integrating them into design, Yu takes the concept beyond mere rhetoric. He designs and builds places that learn from peasant knowledge to restore or create living ecosystems. It is creative, effective, and materially transformative. But in admiring these works, we should be cautious not to think they are dredged-up relics of the past or mysteries of another culture. Sustainable and picturesque as they may have been in history, nearly all peasant landscapes in industrial nations have already been transformed into commercial ones, a process that began centuries before industrialization in China, where Yu works. There is every reason to think that commercialization will go on as long as urbanization does. When we lift our gaze, we encounter the landscapes of the hybrid natural–commercial world, whether we are fully aware of what we are seeing or not. The hybrid landscapes now include Yu’s designs, demonstrating their wondrous flexibility.

Figure 7: For me, any romantic notions of contemporary peasant landscapes I once harbored have been dispelled by years of visits to my husband’s family’s small farm in Taiwan. It sits on a marginal plain between coast and mountains, divided into small plots, where people draw on generations of farming knowledge, maintain irrigation ditches built by their great-grandfathers, and propitiate the local land gods. The farmers are the descendants of colonists who have arrived from China since the 17th century. They share this land with aboriginal people— Pacific Islanders more culturally akin to Hawaiians and Maoris than to the Chinese settlers—who maintain their own societies. Eventually I came to read this landscape as industrial as much as pastoral. Tropical enough for multiple harvests each year, the land is leased to whoever will work it, and whether rice, bananas, or betel nut palms are grown depends on the market price that season. The farmers’ cooperative and the county government provide access to labor, technical assistance, and marketing. Machines replaced draught animals when my husband was a small child in the 1970s. In the front yard, the family members now keep a hobby garden, growing whatever suits their fancy. Otherwise, food comes from the well-stocked, chain-operated supermarket. Memories of economic and social isolation, acute in past decades, haunt dreams. In a place like this, integration is practical and wise, self-reliance foolhardy. When a massive typhoon wrecked this landscape a few years ago, flattening everyone’s crops, tearing roofs off of houses, and knocking out running water and electricity, no one was in danger of starving since most food comes from elsewhere. Peasant knowledge informs the landscape, as it always has. But for reasons of human ambition, desire, and comfort, transformation, if it occurs at all, goes toward integration and commerce.

A return to materiality in landscape, then, does not imply a return to the material conditions of the past, or, for that matter, even a transition to any material conditions substantially different from what we have now. We humans have gotten ourselves into a deeply institutionalized path dependence that, I suspect, has rendered radical transformation too disruptive and difficult to seriously contemplate.14 Even climate change seems unlikely to drive transformation unless, perhaps, things become intolerable for those who dominate public life and the public discourse. These men and women— business entrepreneurs, lawyers, militarists, and professional demagogues— have their own values and concerns. All planners and designers can do is prepare and advise, a grim business.

Figure 7: Rice paddies in eastern Taiwan (Charles Starks)

All this makes me feel cynical. But the landscape urbanists had already arrived at a similar view 40 years ago, when I was a child entranced by my quasisuburban surroundings in an obscure corner of industrial Tennessee. When environmentalism began to seem like a political dead end, these urbanists discovered the configured landscape of the commercial world that we had

Figure 8: West of Roanoke, Virginia, through a gap filled with small cities and an army ammunition plant, the New River flows backwards, north toward West Virginia and Ohio; Blacksburg’s huge university bills this the Tech Valley, a hopeful boomtown. Then the Clinch River rises, creeping south and west through the upper ridges, past old coal towns, down to the stunted New Deal utopia of Norris and the moldering atomic terror-domes hidden in the forests of Oak Ridge. Below and parallel to the Clinch roam the forks of the Holston and the French Broad, rolling through the broad valley of my youth, watering and collecting waste from its anodyne pasturelands, smelly factories, and chamber-of-commerce towns and cities: Marion, Abingdon, Bristol, Johnson City, Kingsport, Greeneville, Morristown.

Figure 8: Long Island, Kingsport, TN (WorldIslandInfo.com on Flickr)

built, its soaring ambitions and beauty, and its magnificent depravity and terrifying waste.15 Seeing in this landscape a way to fulfill their own ambitions, and perhaps to do some good, they came to make it their own and built an ideology around making it work ecologically. And I suppose I identify with it too, growing up in this sort of landscape at a bleak time when the bloom of industrialization had long faded, the old parts of cities were abandoned and decaying, even in the Holston Valley, and HIV and drugs were plaguing city people. Amid tragedy and decline, there was, and is, still plenty of landscape to observe and even to love.

And so, I now advocate for looking closely at these changing, hybrid landscapes, finding patterns in them, describing them, seeing what changes and what stays the same, and explaining why and how change happens, and then applying this knowledge, to the extent that we are granted the agency to do so, to the design and planning of the human societies within these landscapes. Our hybrid commercial-natural landscapes change much faster than geological processes allow, and, increasingly, faster than biological processes can adapt to them, but they still move more slowly than individual humans do. If we are a part of these landscapes, we all are capable of observing them, developing complex thoughts and feelings about them, and sharing them with one another. In the long term, learning with and from our landscapes may be the only way we can get enough people to know and love them well enough to be willing to save them.

Figure 9: Eventually, all roads in the Ridge-and-Valley range lead to the Tennessee River basin, which was flooded and industrialized by the vast TVA dam system and numerous smaller dams built to power factories. This landscape, karsty and flooded but still bounded by long and steep mountain ridges that impede travel east and west, fills with the stuff of past times and our time: caverns, trees, pastures, lakes, parks, camps, mines, quarries, sanctuaries, megachurches, paper mills, furniture factories, speedways, car factories, nuclear reactors, weapons factories, cities, suburbs, exurbs, junkyards. From Kingsport to Knoxville to Chattanooga to Dalton to Talladega to Birmingham and Alabaster, here, in the Upland South’s watery industrial basin, a giant, half-planned, halfurban configuration rises, barely self-aware: a ridge-and-valley, river-and-dam megalopolis.

Figure 9: Plaque at Chickamauga Lock & Dam, TN (Lee Robers, US Army Corps of Engineers)

Notes

1. Creswell, John W., and J. David Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, Fifth Ed. Los Angeles: SAGE (2018): 7.

2. Corner, James. “The Ecological Imagination: The City and the Public Realm,” in Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, ed. Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2016): 3.

3. Avrami, Erica. “Preservation’s Reckoning,” in Preservation and Social Inclusion. New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, (2020): 9.

4. Moore, Kathryn. “Is Landscape Philosophy?,” in Is Landscape...? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, ed. Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge (2016): 293.

5. Delue, Rachael Z. “Is Landscape Theory?,” in Is Landscape...? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, ed. Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge (2016): 273.

6. Spirn, Anne Whiston. “The Granite Garden: Where Do We Stand Today?,” in Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, ed. Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2016): 64.

7. Waldheim, Charles. “The Landscape Architect as Urbanist of Our Age,” in Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, ed. Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2016): 71-73.

8. Meyer, Elizabeth. “Sustaining Beauty: The Performance of Appearance,” in Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, ed. Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2016): 128-29.

9. Benton, Tim. “Urbanism,” in Le Corbusier, Architect of the Century. London: Arts Council of Great Britain (1987): 200–207.

10. Delue 2016, pp. 278-280.

11. Ibid., p. 281.

12. Yu, Kongjian. “Creating Deep Forms in Urban Nature: The Peasant’s Approach to Urban Design,” in Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, ed. Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2016): 96-97.

13. Ibid., pp. 98-105.

14. Sorensen, Andre. “Taking Path Dependence Seriously: An Historical Institutionalist Research Agenda in Planning History,” Planning Perspectives Vol. 30, No. 1 (2 January 2015): 19.

15. See Waldheim 2016, p. 72. See also Almiñana, Jose, and Carol Franklin, “Creative Fitting: Toward Designing the City as Nature,” in Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, ed. Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2016): 161.

Human-Nature Relationships Influenced by Technological Evolution: How the Internet Reshapes Cities

Huiyou Ding

In the 21st century, human beings have been eager to explore the city-nature relationship, responding to global climate changes and all sorts of challenges. Examining this relationship evokes numerous philosophic thoughts and practical understandings about nature. When we are struggling in changing the relationship between human and nature from opposition to harmony, the Internet inadvertently begins to reshape our cities. Remarkably, this evolution is reshaping cities in many ways that offer a great new opportunity for us to remold the relationship between cities and the natural world.

Historic Gradient of Human-Nature Relationship

For our earliest ancestors, nature was everything surrounding them. It was danger. It was resource. It was wilderness.

After civilization, especially architecture, appeared, we were no longer immersed in nature. We lived in city-states – we set a distance between us and nature. Nature was still resources and wilderness, but less danger.

When culture, art and aesthetic showed up, nature represented beauty in poems, in paintings, and in all kinds of artworks including gardening/ landscape. For example, French landscapes were built in geometric forms to show human beings’ dominance on nature, like Vaux-Le-Vicomte Chateau, Versailles, and so forth. English landscapes tended to reshape nature in their original way but with aesthetic modifications, such as William Kent’s gardens. Chinese designers combined their gardens tightly with exquisite architectures, exhibiting delicate control of all the natural elements to create harmony. Such designers include Liu Yuan, Yihe Yuan, and West Lake.1

So far, nature itself, affected by people, experienced the transition from one layer to three layers. “First nature” was called wilderness - the realm of the gods, but also the raw material for second nature. Ten thousand years ago, “second nature” - agriculture occurred. In De natura deorum, Cicero wrote “We sow corn, we plant trees, we fertilize the soil by irrigation, we dam the rivers and direct them where we want. In short, by means of our hands we try to create as it were a second nature within the natural world.” Around 16th century, gardens were defined as “third nature.”2

The attitude to treat nature as somewhere within which our bodies and mind can find peace, pleasure, and health seems to have been consistent since culture originated. We have always had the willingness to embody nature. Nonetheless, “willingness” is not sufficient for us to sustain nature’s health.

“Ignorance” happened when we were boosting technological and economical advance.

City Organization shifted by Industrial Revolution

Industrial Revolution reshaped cities with its aggressive approach, triggering the global environmental crisis, which is criticized profoundly in Design with Nature. 3

After the first Industrial Revolution, it is critical to notice how the automobile reshaped cities.

In 1913, Henry Ford invented the first moving assembly line for automobiles, which greatly decreased the cost for producing automobiles. Thus, automobiles became affordable goods for common people. After that, automobiles, which showed up in cities in significant numbers, shifted cities from those with tight, crowded, dense forms to those in huge dimension and with the motor vehicle being dominant. These high-speed vehicles enabled cities to be planned in zoning strategy, such as those advocated in the Athens Charter.4

During the last century, or even into this century, many cities followed the urban zoning principles in Athens Charter – it required the separation of residential regions and working areas, the reduction of commuting times, the location of industrial zones close to residential ones and buffering them with wide parks and sports areas, the suggestion that street widths and requirements should be scientifically worked out to accommodate the speed and type of transport, and more.5 All these principles did help improve the sanitation systems and living conditions at the time. But that also allowed cities to expand infinitely without worries about accessibility to places. Cities, then, especially those with super dense grids, have become massive divisions among all kinds of ecological flows of nature, like black holes emerging on the earth.

This kind of urban form no longer works as human habitations sparkling in nature. Modern cities are so large and dense that they break up the flows of ecosystems.

Explorations on Better Human-Nature Relationship

During recent decades, we saw the “eagerness” to bring nature back or improve our relationship with nature. This “eagerness” was no longer merely for aesthetic pursuit but was the desire to sustain the survival of our globe and ourselves, facing all sorts of climate challenges.

We tended to rethink about “nature” in philosophical, aesthetic, or even linguistic ways; contemporary people are trying their best to understand “nature” in how the ecosystems work, how they kept balance, and how nature could inform urban planning. A great example is Nature and Cities – a collection of many intelligent explorations of our new relationship with nature.6

Nonetheless, I suppose there is something missing when we think of this discourse from the perspective of a designer or planner. There is potentially another chapter that could join this conversation – technology revolution.

This time, however, it is the Internet that reshapes cities, opening up more opportunities for a better human-nature relation, rather than automobiles doing the opposite.

Internet Reshapes Cities

Functionally Invalidating

In cities themselves, the densely populated city spaces set the basis for high efficiency. We always see cities as networks, containing numerous social spaces as urban units. These urban units operate way more efficiently than flat spaces in rural areas. The gathering of these efficient units makes cities become social networks, from which we create powerful and systematical civilizations.

Nevertheless, the development of the Internet, especially after 2010 with the rise of mobile Internet, shows us another network that in many aspects works way more efficiently than city spaces. It also iterates considerably faster than cities. The Internet iterates in months compared to cities, which iterate in decades. Thus, a lot of functions of the Internet like social media, banking applications, and many kinds of online recreations are replacing or invalidating certain urban spaces.

The fading of urban space and loss of vitality tend to appear frequently in many traditional urban central regions. The fading of cities also happens in urban public space. In contemporary China, we find that youngsters are disappearing from urban open fields and squares. Except when elder groups occupy squares to dance, those spaces are desolate. In 2015, CME Group (Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group Inc), which had 167 years of history, closed almost all the trading floors. Banks around the world are facing this challenge. Traditional retail stores as well are declining in their revenues.

Concurrently, we see a very obvious and interesting phenomenon – we see more and more odd buildings in cities, which means they are trying to bring us massive sensory stimuli other than just being functional.

The main purpose of these odd structures is to give us excitement, which is dopamine. Some designs are greatly adding to the workload of engineering in order to be exciting. Actually, the dense social network, the lighting infrastructures, the decent restaurants, and a plaza in cities all give us the benefit of producing dopamine. That is why many people love cities rather than rural areas.

However, with the birth of the Internet, the amount of dopamine it gives us greatly outnumbers our original range. Our requirement for excitement has increased and altered. We used to be very angry and unbearable with traffic jams, we complained and hooted. But now people are more peaceful facing a traffic jam because it becomes the chance to look at our Facebook and Instagram. To some extent, we do not care that much about the unsatisfactory condition of real spaces like bad streetscapes, and concurrently we see those excitements of city spaces not that important as before. Internet makes us require more dopamine and gives us certain “drug resistance.” Cities are trying hard to give us stimulus in high price, while the Internet is giving us more straightforward and intense ways for us to produce dopamine.7

This is sending us a signal – the Internet society is invading cities globally. Many traditional city spaces are being abandoned.

Fragmentation

The second way Internet reshapes cities is the fragmentation of space, which means those in-between crevices and folded or hidden spaces are becoming the most charming and valuable resources. Taking Beijing as an example, we may actually find it horrible if we follow the principles of Athens Charter, because it is not a city with clear zoning or integrated planning. It is sliced into fragments by various walled compounds. People would never manage to enter, find, or know of many places in Beijing, not to mention the numerous alleys in old Beijing. However, in the time of Mobile Internet, this criticized fractured formation abruptly becomes appealing. Cafes in modern Beijing, for instance, tend to seek those hidden, weird, and seemingly unsuitable places to locate, even including worn-out houses and deep compounds. That is because nowadays we have applications like Yelp or Instagram to recommend or share those places. Virtual space on the Internet takes over the informative function of real urban space. Public and open spaces like cafes, bars, theatres, parks, and so forth, don’t need to stay on the streets to be found. The information retrieval problem is addressed by the Internet. Cities can be more and more complex.8,9

Urban form is shifting from integrated masses to complicated but connected fragments. The value of those traditional big chunks of prime spaces along main streets are weakening in certain cities.

Micromation

The third change - micromation of communities - is also an aspect that cities are imitating nature, which meanwhile brings about specific spatial opportunities to landscape. In the last century, people had no other way to communicate, but had to be in a real space to complete their communicating

Figure 1: Hutong café in Beijing (Mitch Altman, CC BY-SA 2.0 on Wikimedia Commons)

like dating, or just chitchatting. But now, they go through virtual space, on the Internet, on Facebook. They have sufficient information communicated online, not anymore in need of public space. So, the space they are now seeking is a relatively private and safely controlled space, a space they can turn the light on or off, a space where they can have slightly intimate contact. Public spaces in the future are likely to become relatively tiny and private, and each of them is occupied by a minority of people, like a small organization, a couple of friends.

An excellent pattern for the future city is Barcelona. Barcelona contains hundreds of micro squares, forming a web of public spaces. Each square may occupy a space of around forty feet, sufficient for a dozen people to sit. Small corner spaces of streets and blocks are also carefully planned and designed. Other cities are as well witnessing more pocket parks, continuous small pieces of waterfront spaces, linear streetscape transformation, and so on.

That is, cities in the future are to complete such a fission, shifting from huge, centralized public spaces to diverse tiny public spaces. No more dumb big square plaza would be organized as a whole, like in Athens Charter.10 This trend gives cities more resilience versus straightforward zoning.

Intelligence

To think more into the further future as well opens up more hopeful opportunities for the city-nature relationship. Once unpiloted cars become mature and broadly used, the sure thing will be the redundancy of vehicular roads and traffic facilities, because only 20 percent of existing cars will fulfill people’s need for traveling, and there won’t be any need for parking lots since all the cars are continuously circulating. Massive spaces will be released.11

There are also imaginative but rational expectations of future cities like IoT (Internet of Things) giving brand new intelligence to cities, which means cities are really becoming “machines for living in.”12 The machines would be a new type of brain, where humans live in. Cities would be the most ultimate and fundamental artificial intelligence. Those “brains” would even evolve into a certain phase with a flowing, decentralized and flexible organizational mechanism.

Figure 2: Barcelona (Logan Armstrong on Unsplash)

Conclusion

All the aspects that Internet are reshaping cities, including invalidation of many traditional urban spaces, fading of prime spaces, more diverse tiny public spaces which generates better resilience, and the release of parking lots and many roads provide great potential opportunities and spaces for us to reinvite more nature into cities and explore their relationship.

This is opening up another path to look at the relationship between nature and cities, in terms of how technology revolution especially automobile and Internet have been shaping and reshaping cities and how the affected cities have new relationships with nature.

Notes

1. Ning, Zhu Jian. Western Landscape History. Zhong Guo Lin Ye Chu Ban She (2013).

2. Hunt, John Dixon. Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory. Thames & Hudson (2000).

3. McHarg, Ian L. Design with Nature. Doubleday, Natural History Press (1971).

4. Corbusier, Le. The Athens Charter. Grossman (1973).

5. Ibid.

6. Steiner, Frederick R., George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell, editors. Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture (2016).

7. Weinstein, Aviv, and Michel Lejoyeux. “New Developments on the Neurobiological and Pharmaco‐Genetic Mechanisms Underlying Internet and Videogame Addiction.” The American Journal on Addictions Vol. 24, No. 2 (2015): 117–125.

8. See p. 5 of Zhou, Rong. “Critical Expectation of ‘Reurbanization’ Process in Contemporary China.” Urban Spatial Design, Vol. 5 (2009).

9. Zhou, Rong. “How Internet Changes Cities.” De Dao (2018).

10. Bausells, Marta. “Barcelona’s Unloved Planner Invents Science of ‘Urbanization.’” The Guardian, 1 Apr 2016.

11. Zhou 2018.

12. Corbusier, Le, Giovanni-Maria Lupo, and Paola Paschetto. Vers Une Architecture. Bottega D’Erasmo (1983).

A Story of Community Engagement and 10 Learned Lessons

Yasmine McBride

Let’s start with a story

A very typical architecture office decides that they need to, in some way, participate in a form of community engagement. Their client, a developer, knows that this needs to happen because they have a legal requirement to hold a certain number of town-hall style meetings. They have experience with this. They know what to ask and how to ask it. They care about what the community has to say, because of the success of the building relies on their buy-in. But they also know to not get too controversial or to have too many cooks in the kitchen, because at the end of the day, the building is getting built. They can’t afford the time or the money that it would take to start from scratch, and they are already in Schematic Design phases of the project and need to hold this meeting, quick, and keep moving forward.

It is the week before, and one of the architectural interns sends out an email to some people in the neighborhood alerting them of the fact that they are designing and constructing a new apartment building. They have drafted up a flier for the meeting and are eager to hear some of the voices of the people that they are building for. The intern takes the extra step to drive to the site during work hours, even though it is 3 hours away, and put up the fliers in a few areas around town to get some extra interest.

On the day of the meeting, a few people from the architecture office and a representative of the developer drive up and gather in a community meeting room in a local church. With them they have brought some finger food and bottled water for the people they expect to show up. An hour later, the meeting starts, and apart from the design committee, there are 10 other people in the room.

The architect starts by showing exterior renderings of the building. “As you see here, we are interested in bringing together both the traditional architecture of your neighborhood and the modern design aesthetic that we believe represents the future of the town.”

After a short lecture, the architect opens the forum for questions and comments. An older woman in the crowd stands up. “Where are the balconies on this building? There is no place to be outside.” The question is met with a series of plan drawings that the architect uses to explain that the outdoor space in the building is communal. They have studied the neighborhood and decided that a lot of the ways that people experience the outdoors is through public parks and playgrounds. People in the neighborhood, according to the architect, even sit on their front stoops rather than in their backyards

when they have access to private outdoor space. It is clear, according to the architect, that the people care more about shared outdoor space rather than having their own private area.

There are a few more questions, and the meeting ends, and nothing about the design changes. The developer rep offers to take the architecture team out for a coffee and a sandwich before they all embark on the drive home.

“Well, did you have fun in there today?” the developer asks the intern as the more experienced architects laugh. “I know those meetings can be a drag. There is always someone who has one too many opinions and they seem to show up to every meeting. Do you have any questions about how it went?”

The intern thinks for a moment and then asks about the balconies. “Why can’t we put them in?” “Trust us, last time we did that, these people just littered their balconies with cardboard boxes and bags and all sorts of other junk. They use it as storage and it’s just an eyesore.”

This is a story that is not historically or technically accurate, but it is completely true. Most people in the design profession have a story like this, and they are so commonplace that we hardly think about the actions of the design professionals or the consequences to the community. Let us take the time to take this made-up, yet plausible story apart, and think about what went wrong.

1. “They know what to ask and how to ask it.”

Often, designers see community engagement as a box to fill. They may have a technical requirement to fulfill a certain number of hours or meetings for the project engagement in general. Sometimes, the design firm shares a genuine common ethos in making the community needs a priority. But in this case, the design firm is not being creative or curious about the opportunities that the community engagement poses. Ask open-ended questions and be genuinely curious about their answers.

2. “At the end of the day, the building is getting built.”

Sometimes, no project is a better project. As exemplified in some of Lacaton and Vassal’s work, not demolishing or building new when something is already functioning well can be something of an act of resistance. When the drivers of a project are merely economic and not about a different type of value -- for example, cultural, environmental, or social -- the project does not allow in its framework even a moment to pause and think: is this the best version of what we could be doing?

3. “They are already in Schematic Design.”

This is an enormous impediment to genuine community engagement and one that tends to occur frequently. Rather than taking a co-designing approach where stakeholders are brought in at the beginning of the design, they are introduced at the end. This often pigeonholes the engagement sessions into talking about somewhat minute details like materials and does not allow the public opinion to affect larger issues that are foundational to the project. When it comes to engagement, begin earnestly and start early.

4. “It is the week before…”

Community engagement meetings are hard work. They take a lot of preparation. When designers do not allow enough time to structure these meetings and get the right participants in the room, they are doing themselves and the community a large a disservice. People have busy schedules, and it is already asking a lot of people to come out on their own time and share their thoughts. Give people plenty of warning and make it worth their while.

5. “They have brought some finger food and bottled water.”

At the very least, bring real food. Or better yet, pay people for their time. Engagement meetings should not be viewed as obligation or lip service. They are opportunities to question experts and for people with lived experience to share their knowledge and opinions. Compensation creates trust and respect.

6. “We are interested in the traditional architecture of your neighborhood.”

Even though it sometimes may seem like a good idea to incorporate what you assume to be the valued aesthetic of a place into a final design, it is not always clear what significance that aesthetic holds. Sometimes that can be intertwined with trauma or a collective memory that people want to move past. Sometimes it holds such significance for a place that replicating it or alluding to it may be considered disrespectful. The only way to know is to ask, and that must be done early in the process.

7. “It is clear, according to the architect, that people care more about shared outdoor space rather than having their own.”

Sometimes, designers can unwittingly misconstrue and misrepresent a community’s desires. People may spend time in public parks because they do not have private outdoor space. They may be sitting on stoops to keep eyes on the streets while their children play because families must pool resources, such as childcare. They may not have a culture of private outdoor space, but maybe it is a desire of theirs. Or maybe the architect is right and private space is not a priority, but the only way to validate these assumptions is to hear it directly from the people you are designing with.

8. “Nothing about the design changes.”

The point of engagement meetings is to hear input that affects or, better yet, informs the design. When they are conducted too late or they are not organized enough, or not enough people participate, they can have little to no impact on the outcome. On the contrary, they can create significant distrust between the design team and the community. Do not ask people to spend their time and energy if the project is not able to be altered due to schedule or budget.

9. “I know these meetings can be a drag.”

If community engagement meetings are boring or unproductive or in some way difficult, designers ought to see this as a design problem. It is not an inevitability of the community engagement process, and the first assumption should never be to blame the community members. Making the process more

interactive, exciting, and meaningful is something that can and should be built into the design of the meeting itself.

10. “These people…”

The question of the balconies essentially ended due to an observation made by the developer: when people have the balconies, they use them as storage. It was assumed that it was in the very nature of the residents to not care about the aesthetics and upkeep of their balconies. In the meeting, the design team was not honest about this concern. Instead, they used “observations about the neighborhood” or spatial constraints to justify this decision. Sometimes skirting these issues comes out of a place of fear. The architect does not want to say “well, last time we had balconies, they were mostly used as storage.” That may make them sound prejudiced in front of the community members. But forthrightness allows people to say their truth. “Well, architect, that’s because we live in these apartments in larger families, and you just don’t give us enough storage on the inside, so we have to use the balcony. We would love balcony space! But sometimes storing our stuff just becomes a practical priority.” These problems are not solved by ignoring them or erasing them. Sometimes the answer is just as simple as more closet space.

Let’s end with another fake, true story

A very typical architecture office decides that they need to, in some way, participate in a form of community engagement. Their client, a developer, knows that this needs to happen because they have a legal requirement and a moral obligation to hold a certain number of town-hall style meetings. They care about what the community has to say, because the success of the building relies on their buy-in. They know that in order to get honest, productive input, they must start the engagement sessions early.

An architectural intern who participated in the design of the first engagement meeting has drafted up a flier and sends it out to relevant stakeholders well in advance.

On the day of the meeting, a few people from the architecture office and a representative of the developer drive up and gather in a community meeting room in a local church. They have brought pizza, drinks, and other snacks. An hour later, the meeting starts, and apart from the design committee, there are 30 other people in the room.

The architect starts by talking about the site and sharing some of their dreams for the building. “What we really want to know is not only how you how you would this apartment to look, but also how you would like it to function.”

After the discussion, the architect opens the forum for questions and comments. An older woman in the crowd stands up. “What is really important to us is to have private outdoor space. Especially during the pandemic, we felt trapped in our apartments and need room to breathe.” The architect bravely asks, “to be honest, we had questions about the outdoor space. Do people really use it? It seems like in past project they have become storage areas.” The question is met with laughter in the room. “That’s because we don’t have enough storage space! We need our closets to be a bit bigger to hold all that stuff that comes with having kids.”

There are a few more questions, and the meeting ends, and the ideas for an initial design are beginning to take shape. The developer rep offers to take the architecture team out for a coffee and a sandwich before they all embark on the drive home.

“Well, did you have fun in there today?” the developer asks the intern as the more experienced architects laugh. “I know those meetings can be long, but they are so important to even starting a project. Do you have any questions on how it went?”

The intern thinks for a moment and says, “I’m sure I’ll have a lot back in the office. For now, I think that meeting was a success.”

Figure 1: Community engagement work from the author’s thesis research (Yasmine McBride)

Contributors

Editors

Julian Graybill Brubaker (2022)

Julian Graybill Brubaker is a student in Penn’s Master of Science in Social Policy program at the School of Social Policy & Practice, and is also pursuing a Certificate in Energy Policy from the Weitzman School of Design. He currently resides in Philadelphia, and spends his time studying how to improve life in this wacky city and wackier country, stressing about the climate emergency, playing sand volleyball, or tending to his community garden plot.

Helen Lea (2022)

Helen is a master’s student in City Planning with a concentration in Urban Design. Pairing planning with her background in landscape architecture, she seeks to understand the relationship between the two disciplines and how it impacts health and well-being. Helen aspires to utilize creative design methods, socially impactful planning, and innovations in sustainable systems to create places that serve communities to their fullest potential. Outside of studio, Helen is an avid pianist and painter.

Matthew Limbach (2021)

Matthew is a master’s student in Landscape Architecture. He firmly believes that the design fields cannot, nor should not save the world. He does, however, find hope in design methodologies, whereby a more equitable future is made discrete for agents of bottom-up change. When he is not working, he enjoys hiking, gardening, and playing the saxophone.

Authors

Huiyou Ding (2021)

Huiyou has studied landscape architecture for seven years in China and the United States. He is now practicing landscape design as a designer at OLIN.

David Wangkyu Kim (2022)

David is a master’s student in City Planning with a background in landscape architecture. He is interested in the many forms of the city and the design of urban landscapes.

Robert Levinthal (2022)

Rob is a Ph.D. student in City and Regional Planning with a background in landscape architecture and environmental science. He is interested in largescale environmental restoration and construction endeavors.

Yasmine McBride (2022)

Yasmine is a Masters of Architecture graduate with a particular interest in community driven design and development. Her thesis, entitled “Unpacking and Re-Imagining the American Dream,” investigated personal stories and created co-designing workshops with high school students in the city of Orange, New Jersey.

Itay Porat (2021)

Itay is an engineer, designer, and musician currently based in Philadelphia. He is a Master of City Planning candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and interested in ecology, complex systems, and climate change adaptation.

Charles Starks (2021)

Charles is a doctoral candidate in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He is researching the conservation of Pacific Rim Chinatowns as historic urban landscapes.

Dingwen Wu (2022)

Dingwen is a graduate student in landscape architecture. Before studying at Penn, he was trained as an architect at Tongji University. He is interested in being a designer for people’s everyday life, creating social and cultural resilience by designing space for social interaction.