1: 2015
Stephanie White David Birchall
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introduction Calgary, Alberta Sound drawings Leicester, Skipton, Edale, UK
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Pruitt-Igoe, tomorrow St Louis, Missouri Pruitt-Igoe now still St Louis, Missouri Bad behaviour in public parks Montreal and lots of other places
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Chain reaction Vancouver Island, British Columbia Ometepe Island Lago de Nicaragua Castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually Mount St Michael, Cornwall
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Disposessing the wilderness Parks Canada and Forillon, Quebec Our national landscape Urban Canada Ghosts Tooele County, Utah Lost in the empty Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan Assimilation Kalahari Desert, South Africa
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Under cover of green Sudbury, Ontario Gazing at a regreened landscape Laurentian University,Sudbury Holes and heaps Le Bassin Minier, northern France Landscape noir Laos Form on the frontier Korea’s DMZ
Stephanie White
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Planespotting, the Kai Tak project Hong Kong Viable landscapes Akamina Parkway, Waterton Lakes National Park Trollstigen Visitor Centre Romsdalen-Geiranger fjord, Norway Listening to landscapes Crowsnest Pass, Alberta
Michael Leeb Alec Spangler Troels Steenholdt Heiredal
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Oil City Waterton, Alberta Walking and narrative Inner geographies, the Aarhus drawing Aarhus/Copenhagen, Denmark
news and notices who we are
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subscription information, calls for articles contributors, comments team, the masthead
Nora Wendl Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei Wang Dustin Valen mapping and being: why are some Tim Sharp places beautiful, what do we think about them as we draw them, Novka Cosovic photograph them and document Graham Hooper their ephemerality and their sometimes difficult histories
Desirée Valadares Matthew Neville the vast spaces of deserts, military Sara Jacobs sites, and national parks. Are these spaces any less complex than Lindsey Nette our busy urban landscapes? Dillon Marsh the remediated landscapes of mining, war and detente – each has Leanna Lalonde left a damaged land which, through David Fortin sheer necessity, is reclaimed, Ruth Oldham reforested and brought into the Xiaoxuan Lu present with great love and hope
Mike Taylor
protective infrastructure: it’s a dangerous place out Dominique Cheng there. How do we make nature Michael Leeb palatable, less threatening, less likely to crash down on Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter our heads landscapes understood by the foot, which walks them, and by the hand, which draws them
public opinion, civic uses of land tied to social systems, changing land use definitions as demographics and social attitudes change
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On Site review 33: intentional landscapes, inadvertent results
calls for articles coming up, subscription information, notes about contributors and the people who put this issue together
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infrastructure | resource extraction by xiaoxuan lu
w ar photog r aph y ad aptati on r e - use h ar v e st
the unexploded terrain of laos Xiaoxuan Lu
On Site review 33: intentional landscapes, inadvertent results
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I travelled to Laos while working on my thesis project in early 2012. Laos is the most bombed country on earth, a distinction it holds two full generations after the Vietnam War. At the time, American planes dropped 270 million bombs on the landlocked country bordering Vietnam, blanketing the Ho Chi Minh Trail but also indiscriminately unloading ordnance that had not been dropped elsewhere. Today life in Laos is still defined by this fact: nearly a third of those bombs never detonated. By a twist of fate, this same land also happens to contain the richest gold ore concentration in the world. And as outnumbered humanitarian groups continue to remediate places that were once trampled by war, the landscape now faces a new invasion, this time from international gold-mining companies. My investigation of this long-scarred landscape was initially inspired by an odd legacy of the war in Laos. I came across an article by Thomas J. Campanella called ‘Bomb Crater Fish Ponds’.1 Campanella writes, ‘One of the great ironies of the Vietnam War is that the bomb craters left in the wake of American B-52s now provide sustenance to the Vietnamese people.’ American bombs displaced 500 million cubic yards of earth in nine years (UXO LAO). Over the last forty years, B-52 bomb craters have been transformed from hideous manifestations of war in which lives and livelihoods were destroyed, into part of the agrarian landscape. In Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos villagers use the bomb craters as ponds for cultivating fish. These relics of war and symbols of tragedy have been changed into a symbol of sustenance. Untouched and unnatural, these ponds remain as underdiscussed monuments from one of American history’s most controversial eras. This physical evidence of a history haunted me, and I resolved to discover more about this land in turmoil. I want to know more about the intelligence that the people living there have developed — it’s about the art of survival. With that in mind, I travelled to Laos to further investigate its postwar landscape. My journey’s purpose was to reopen a dialogue with local villagers on this traumatic history and to document the scarred landscape in its current state. During my visit, I used infrared film: a type of military film which registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of crimson and hot pink. These infrared photographs of Laotian bomb sites show the difference between organic (pink) and non-organic (grey)
material in the landscape. One of my stops in Laos was at a de-mining site in Xieng Khouang province, where the international humanitarian group MAG operates.2 MAG mentioned that the bigger the bombs, the deeper they burrow. However, I noticed that they were only clearing the topsoil layer. While the largest are sometimes found 15 metres below ground, the regulations specify that if the land is for agricultural use, only the top 25 centimetres need to be cleared – just enough to permit aboveground farming since bomb clearance is extremely time- and cost-intensive. My site investigation also revealed the fact that, in the absence of agricultural production, many inhabitants of Laos have resorted to bomb harvesting as a means of survival. People hunt for unexploded bombs to harvest scrap metal: a highly dangerous activity, and the main cause of bomb casualties today. I have never seen a society that was so impregnated with ordinance. It had been a war against the land, as much as against armies. Through on-site investigation, combined with further research carried out upon returning to the United States, I came to understand the inseparability of food production, resource extraction and a post-war metal recovery and recycling economy in Laos. Bomb craters that were once symbols of death have been transformed into something quite the opposite. Similarly, my thesis project, ‘Mining as Demining’, recasts minefields in a virtuous cycle that could sustain local communities while restoring the land. Resource mining provides the impetus for de-mining, as gold will help pay for it all, and mining companies can be exploited as landscape architects to ultimately turn mined land back over to productive use for local communities.
1 Both the bomb casings and the craters themselves have been made to yield an alternative harvest in an ingenious replacement of the rice fields they otherwise disrupt. In Vietnam some craters have become fish farms. See Thomas J. Campanella, ‘Bomb Crater Fish Ponds’, Places, Vol. 9, No.3: 48. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995 2 Mines Advisory Group (MAG) is an international organisation that saves lives and builds futures through the destruction of land mines, unexploded ordnance (UXO) and other weapons remaining after conflict. Since 1989, MAG has worked in over 35 countries and was a co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.
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On Site review 33: intentional landscapes, inadvertent results
Xiaoxuan Lu