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ON SITE r e v i e w
33 No 1 2015 a journal of architecture and urbanism
on land 33
intentional landscapes, inadvertent results
CAN/USA $14 sell until january 2016
Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions Geogg Manaugh Actar, 2013 ISBN-10: 8415391145 ISBN-13: 978-8415391142
Field Studies - The New Aesthetics of Urban Agriculture Regionalverband Ruhr, Udo Weilacher Birkhäuser, 2010 ISBN: 978-3-0346-0260-0
Mines et cités minières du Nord et du Pas-De- Calais. Photographies aériennes de 1920 à nos jours Olivier Kourchid, Annie Kuhnmunch Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990 ISBN: 2859393676
Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape Marc Treib, editor Routledge, 2009 ISBN-10: 0415777364 ISBN-13: 978-0415777360
Taking Measures Across the American Landscape Alex S. MacLean; drawings by James Corner Yale Press, 2000 ISBN: 978-030-0086966
Pamphlet Architecture 28: Augmented Landscapes Allen Smout, Gillian Rose, Neil Spiller Princeton Architectural Press, 2007 ISBN-10: 1568986254 ISBN-13: 978-1568986258
Architecture, Landscape and City: The Design Experiment of the Metropolitan Landscape Clemens Steenbergen Birkhauser Architecture, 2012 ISBN-10: 3034607458 ISBN-13: 978-3034607452
Walkscapes Francesco Careri Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002 ISBN-10: 8425218411 ISBN-13: 978-8425218415
www.onsitereview.ca
Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West Lucy R. Lippard The New Press, 2014 ISBN-10: 1595586199 ISBN-13: 978-1595586193
Green Architecture & The Agrarian Garden Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Rizzoli 1989 ISBN-10: 0847809072 ISBN-13: 978-0847809073
Land and Environmental Art Jeffrey Kastner, editor Phaidon, 1998, new edition 2010 ISBN-13: 978-0714835143 ISBN-10: 0714835145
fall 2015
Stephanie White David Birchall
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introduction Calgary, Alberta Sound drawings Leicester, Skipton, Edale, UK
public opinion, civic uses of land tied to social systems, changing land use definitions as demographics and social attitudes change
Nora Wendl Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei Wang Dustin Valen
4 9 10 14 18 22 24 28 31 32 36 38 43 44 48 50 56 60 62 64 66 67 68
Pruitt-Igoe, tomorrow St Louis, Missouri Pruitt-Igoe now still St Louis, Missouri Bad behaviour in public parks Montreal and lots of other places Chain reaction Vancouver Island, British Columbia Ometepe Island Lago de Nicaragua Castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually Mount St Michael, Cornwall 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 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 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 Oil City Waterton, Alberta Walking and narrative Inner geographies, the Aarhus drawing Aarhus/Copenhagen, Denmark
the remediated landscapes of mining, war and detente – each has left a damaged land which, through sheer necessity, is reclaimed, reforested and brought into the present with great love and hope the vast spaces of deserts, military sites, and national parks. Are these spaces any less complex than our busy urban landscapes? mapping and being: why are some places beautiful, what do we think about them as we draw them, photograph them and document their ephemerality and their sometimes difficult histories
Tim Sharp Novka Cosovic Graham Hooper
Desirée Valadares Matthew Neville Sara Jacobs
Lindsey Nette Dillon Marsh
Leanna Lalonde David Fortin Ruth Oldham Xiaoxuan Lu Mike Taylor
protective infrastructure: it’s a dangerous place out there. How do we make nature palatable, less threatening, less likely to crash down on our heads
Dominique Cheng Michael Leeb Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter Stephanie White
landscapes understood by the foot, which walks them, and by the hand, which draws them
Michael Leeb Alec Spangler Troels Steenholdt Heiredal
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news and notices who we are
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subscription information, calls for articles contributors, comments team, the masthead
calls for articles coming up, subscription information, notes about contributors and the people who put this issue together
On Site review gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of our contributors, our volunteers, our subscribers and the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts through their Publishing Grants to Arts and Literary Magazines.
On Site review also acknowledges the kind support of Calgary Arts Development, City of Calgary.
thank you VJW 1923-2015
writing drawing utility agency sound
on site review 33: on land
introduction | starting points by stephanie white
W hat is landscape? The discussion of landscape, in contrast to land, geology, dirt and soil, is often one of aesthetics. And, conventionally, aesthetics seem to be dissociated from politics, social conditions and most things unpalatable. It is possible that ‘landscape’ is a screen or mask that beautifies a set of ugly exploitations. The greening of oil sands tailing ponds, much advertised as remediated landscapes of grasslands and marshes, presents landscape practices that excuse industrialised extractive industries. The relationship is quantified as surface area: so many hectares of remediated land vs hectares of open pits. I’m not sure it is exactly about numbers. Is there ever a time when landscape is more than a historical record and is not just a panacea, but is a solution? ‘Landscape’ is sometimes understood as a designed condition that mediates between malign forces of nature and the more controllable forces of human settlement. We hold the lines on the map to our hearts and minds, despite their irrelevance to things such as weather, or jihad, or chemical spills: on site there is a different reality, a different ‘landscape’ and it is one we don’t quite understand and certainly can’t control. Very easily one can be in the wrong place in the wrong landscape through sheer bad timing. And then there is the beautiful ‘landscape’ of the Red River that flows through Winnipeg, currently being dragged for murdered aboriginal girls. Or BC Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, a stunningly beautiful landscape across northern British Columbia that is forever blackened, not by fire, but by systemic racialised abuse. These are landscapes of fear.
Landscape is the tag by which we transform land – that mysterious entity of climate, geology and potential resources – into some sort of human endeavour, the unfamiliar made familiar by applying rules which make us feel that we can own the environment. Although the word landscape , like the word architecture, appears frequently as a metaphor for social relations, we would like to look here at actual land and landscape: subversive landscapes, landscapes of exclusion and privilege, landscapes used as social tools for social order, landscapes of intent. What do they look like? How do they work? What is landscape for? This was the call for articles for this issue. In the middle of the process of collecting articles and essays, David Birchall ordered On Site review 28: sound . His website shows a most beautiful collection of sound drawings of landscapes, encompassing so many of the issue themes of recent On Site review s: writing, drawing, mapping, narrative, sound and, importantly for this issue, landscape. Beyond the images, beyond the meaning, the semantics, the manipulation and the machinations behind some of the most innocent-seeming landscapes, especially in our national parks, David Birchall’s landscapes are sweet records of birds, rain, trees; cars, airplanes – a landscape of intention and an inadvertent result.
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noise song thoughts marks maps
drawing | walking by david birchall
Sound Drawing (Leicester, Skipton, Edale) b9, white ink, black paper. 2013
David Birchall
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Made between August 2012 and October 2013, all the drawings in the series record passing of time and sounds as heard from single spots in the midlands and north of England.
R J: quite lovely, the loss of space here, an impossible sound landscape. i love space defined by borders of sound. G H: The look of it, soft lines like chalk, on a slightly mottled grey- black ground, remind me of Beuys’ blackboards, often in themselves both a record of and a spring-board for discussion (sounds). The idea is reminiscent of Richard Long’s walk drawings, which aim, on occasions, to document various sensory experiences, overlaid geographically or spatially.
remediation erasure agriculture community futures
re-visiting a modernist icon
planning | feral sites by nora wendl
figure 1 Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe housing tower.
I n his essay ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, philosopher Tim Ingold writes, “Let me begin by explaining what landscape is not. It is not ‘land,’ it is not ‘nature,’ and it is not ‘space’.” 1 In this simple sentence, Ingold acknowledges that landscapes do not abstractly contain the records of the deliberate interventions and events that transpire upon them – they are the record. From the perspective of the archaeologist and the native dweller, he writes, the landscape is itself the story. For those theorists, historians and designers who would seek to write Pruitt-Igoe’s story, it is difficult, if not impossible, to read the site in its present state as a record of its past – to see in this lush, forested landscape the 33 eleven-story buildings that once towered over it, or the houses that preceded them. It is perhaps easier to read the site cinematically, through a string of iconic images—as a moment that was the symbolic birth of the post-modern architectural movement. ( figure 1 ) “Happily,” wrote Charles Jencks, “it is possible to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time… Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt- Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite. Previously it had been vandalised, mutilated and defaced by its inhabitants and although millions of dollars were pumped back, trying to keep it alive (fixing the broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repainting), it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.” 2 Jencks’ blindness toward Pruitt- Igoe as a federally programmed failure—not one that was hastened to its end by the residents—is evidence of what Pruitt-Igoe has become: a symbol of failure used by theorists to advance specific agendas. Oscar Newman used images of Pruitt-Igoe in its most vandalised, pre-demolition state to argue that its architectural design was the culprit for its failure as it lacked the physical characteristics that would allow the inhabitants to ensure their own security—his theory of defensible space. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter used Pruitt- Igoe in their polemic on postmodern architecture as evidence that the modern architectural movement failed because of its impulses toward social engineering. Charles Jencks used a photograph of the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe building C-15 to dramatically announce the demise of modern architecture and the beginning of the post-modern era. 3 But only Jencks had a vision for the site’s future: “Without doubt, the ruins should be kept, the remains should have a preservation order slapped on them, so that we keep a live memory of this failure in planning and architecture.” 4
United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Public domain.
Though Jencks did not know it, even as he wrote this, the site was a live memory of the towers. When the first edition of The Language of Postmodern Architecture was published in 1977, the demolition of these buildings would have been complete, with local wrecking companies Cleveland and Aalco destroying the remaining 31 towers by wrecking ball between January 1976 and the spring of 1977. Today, the former towers are still present on the site: under thousands of pounds of fill are fragments of the broken foundations, reinforced concrete and stock brick. More prominently, the electric substation is announced by a high-voltage sign and surrounded by barbed wire warning curious visitors to stay out. 1 Tim Ingold. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, in The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. New York: Routledge, 2000. p190 2 Charles Jencks. The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-modernism . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. p9 3 Though Jencks dates the destruction of the towers to July 15, 1972, Pruitt-Igoe tower C-15 was cinematically demolished on April 21, 1972 in a ‘trial demolition’. 4 Charles Jencks. The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-modernism . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. p9 5 www.citylab.com/housing/2014/08/a-failed-public-housing-project- could-be-a-key-to-st-louis-future/379078/
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And yet another live memory, or inadvertent result, of Pruitt- Igoe is Ferguson, Missouri, and the event which gained international attention in the summer of 2014: unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson. Upon the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe towers from 1972-1977, former residents of the project fled north to suburbs of St. Louis County including Spanish Lake and Ferguson, as closer white suburbs blocked the construction of multi-family housing. 5 Though architectural history would reduce the memory of the Pruitt-Igoe site to one iconic photograph of a tower being brought down by sticks of dynamite embedded in its foundation, the “live memory of this failure in planning and architecture,” in Jencks’ own words, is quite well. And those living it are subject to the same cycles of poverty and violence to which the towers bore witness. If the deliberate interventions and events that transpired on the site of Pruitt-Igoe in the past would have consequences far beyond the perimeter of the lot on which the buildings were located and far beyond the lifespan of the buildings, it is tempting to imagine what shape its future might take—and indeed, how in turn that might shape the future of St. Louis. The site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing complex is located a mere two miles northwest of Saarinen’s Gateway Arch, bounded by Cass Avenue, North 20th Street, Carr Avenue, and North Jefferson Avenue. Private developer Paul McKee is currently proposing what he terms his Northside Regeneration Plan for the site, which would place the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency—the eyes and ears of the United States Department of Defense—squarely at the centre of what was once the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. 1,500 acres of
residential, commercial, and office spaces, a school, and 50 acres of parks and trails complete the proposal. While this is not the first proposal for the site – previous proposals have included a golf course, a shopping mall, and for a time, a flirtation with industrial storage – it is a serious one. Mayor Francis Slay is pushing steadily for its inclusion on this site, and architectural studios at Washington University have already explored this notion. While the site awaits its future, it looks largely the same as it did in the summer of 2011, when I formed a non-profit organisation with Michael R. Allen, director of the St. Louis- based Preservation Research Office. Together, we launched the Pruitt-Igoe Now ideas competition: if prompted, how would contemporary architects, designers, urban designers, writers, artists and university students visualise the future life of the former Pruitt-Igoe site? Out of 348 total submissions collected between June 2011 and March 16, 2012, seven jurors—Teddy Cruz (University of California San Diego), Sergio Palleroni (Portland State University, BASIC Initiative), Theaster Gates Jr. (University of Chicago and Founder, Rebuild Foundation), Diana Lind (Next American City), Bob Hansman (Washington University), Joseph Heathcott (New School), and Sarah Kanouse (University of Iowa) — selected 31 finalists and three winning entries: first place, St. Louis Ecological Assembly Line: Pruitt-Igoe as Productive Landscape , Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei R. Wang; second place, Recipe Landscape , Aroussiak Gabrielian and Alison Hirsch; and third place, The Fantastic Pruitt-Igoe! , by Social Agency Lab.
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M H: A common thread in this issue of On Site review is: what do we do with empty space? what do we do with places ‘after the fact’ of what they’ve been – derelict cities, abandoned mines? What is the value of empty space and how do we experience it, and how are current policies and political narratives to rewrite the wilderness limited? An uninhabited (or informally inhabited) land is full of potential and can be read in many ways: moving forward means choosing one narrative over others. When dealing with a site with a complex social and
cultural history (i.e. all sites?) how do you choose to move forward responsibly, shaping what is to come? taking action - especially action on the scale of architecture - seems fraught with responsibility. S W: This is a classic piece of investigative writing: Nora takes iconic moments in American architectural history (she did a project on Philip Johnson’s Glass House in 31:mapping) and interrogates them with considerable ruthlessness. It makes me question all I ever learnt about architectural history,
simply because these simple narratives were written almost like one-liners that were so powerful that hardly anyone thought to look behind them. That she explains the link between Pruitt-Igoe and Ferguson makes more sense out of what to many of us was a senseless act: it has a spatial history.
If these proposals for the site of Pruitt-Igoe are any indication, the Pruitt-Igoe of tomorrow is not architectural – it is agricultural, a nod to the verdant land available on site, and to the dearth of fresh market groceries to serve the northside neighbourhoods. Twenty of the 31 selected finalists proposed phyto-remediation – agriculture or recreational gardening to remove toxins, the by-product of construction and other interventions, from the land, and programs that enable the site to be a catalyst for growth in local infrastructure or entertainment—the brick factory, the construction of an artificial moon ( figures 2,3 ). In a majority of proposals, architecture is negated in favour of utopian systems of agriculture, food production, and distribution—utopias closer to Thomas More’s vision (social, organised, productive), than the formal modern utopian proposals from which Pruitt-Igoe descended. In Recipe Landscape , Gabrielian and Hirsch recreate the site on domestic and ritualistic lines—animal husbandry and apiculture are the primary systems in the ‘31 flavors of Pruitt-Igoe’ , which reuses the Pruitt School as a dairy and a creamery which distribute to stores city wide. ( figure 4 ) Similarly, Dunbar and Wang imagine St. Louis Ecological Assembly Line: Pruitt-Igoe as Productive Landscape , in which the site, the epicentre of an ‘ecological assembly line’, is full of tree and plant nurseries that capitalise on the growing conditions of St. Louis and provide plants to over 13,000 acres of St. Louis parks. ( figure 5 , opposite page) The Fantastic Pruitt-Igoe! by Social Agency Lab proposes a world in which St. Louis schoolchildren would invent programmatic and physical features for the site, working collaboratively with an advisory board of adults to envision the structures, programming and activities that would comprise this new and decidedly un-bureaucratic life for the site. right, from the top: figure 2. Sina Zekavat, Carr Square Brick Yard: an intervention in the cycle of brick theft from vulnerable northside buildings. A brickyard accommodates both storage for salvaged bricks and facilities for the production of new brick. figure 3. Clouds Architecture Office, Double Moon: an illuminated, artificial moon that hovers over the site, beckoning St. Louisans who might otherwise ignore the site.
figure 4. Aroussiak Gabrielian and Alison Hirsch of Foreground Design Agency, Recipe Landscape: the architecture of the site is re-used in the production of ‘the 31 flavors of Pruitt-Igoe’, growing ingredients for ice cream on the site, and creating a city-wide distribution network for the unique product.
Sina Zekavat
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Clouds Architecture Office
Foreground Design Agency
figure 5. St. Louis Ecological Assembly Line: Pruitt-Igoe as Productive Landscape, by Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei R. Wang imagines the site as a producer of trees for parks throughout St. Louis.
Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei R Wang
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replaced the innovative explorations in urban space. This landscape presents a romanticized idea of a park, ‘denaturalizing’ a site which was never natural - a man-made island. See Expo 67 Then and Now at www.worldsfaircommunity. org
AO’C: The story of the site, cultural and political histories and present pressures is very compelling, evidenced in the contrast of the developers proposal and the competition results. At the same time, this story of such a monumental and iconic site being replaced by a ‘naturalized’ landscape with no reference to its past life brings to mind
of the most significant experiments in megastructure and urban design at the time, and was a symbolic moment in the history of Montreal and Canada - the physical structures held the symbolic relevance, rather than their destruction. However, since Expo 67, the site has been stripped of all but three
the story of the Expo 67 grounds on Ile St Helene. In the case of Pruitt- Igoe the symbolism of the site was really in its destruction, and the naturalized landscape is (as far as I can tell) the effect of opportunistic species. In contrast, at Expo 67, the event itself - the pavilions, transportation, and physical site of the island represented one
‘monuments’ from the event, and a park has
figure 6. In Pruitt-Igoe: The Forest of Floating Minds, by Clouds Architecture Office, the 33 footprints of the original Pruitt-Igoe towers are elevated on concrete structures and covered in vegetation, intended to foster the collective memory of the site.
When we first proposed this ideas competition to city officials, they balked. If people knew the site was still empty, they argued, it would be bad publicity – it would make it look as if St. Louis had never ‘solved’ the problem of Pruitt-Igoe. Today, the mayor’s support of the solution proposed by Paul McKee is evidence of a desire to make the site productive in the most literal sense—to put 3,200 Department of Defense jobs at its centre to catalyse new economic growth in the area. But if this is Pruitt-Igoe tomorrow, what of its unintended consequences? Are these jobs for the residents of this community, or are they jobs for educated white men? Will the tall fences topped with concertina wire be removed from the edges of the site, or will this boundary be reified in a new way, by security clearances, economic, racial and social differences? Instead of containing and isolating poverty, as the site did while Pruitt-Igoe stood, will it secure and protect affluence? Ultimately, when we assured the city officials that what we were running was merely an ideas competition, they agreed that ideas were harmless. It was the American Institute of Architects St. Louis chapter that hounded us: “what about jobs?” they asked, concerned that by producing and exhibiting a proliferation of ideas, somehow the possibility of real action on the site would be forever stalled, and architects of St. Louis never invited to take action.
The site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing complex lives still in a liminal space between the idea of action and the enacting of it. (Fig. 6) Minoru Yamasaki’s original proposal, after all, was a series of low-density garden apartments. Its reality, 33 eleven-story towers, was pushed forward at the behest of the political administrators of the site, and forced through Yamasaki’s hand. Perhaps the best inadvertent result that could transpire from Pruitt-Igoe—and indeed, we are still awaiting one—would not be a formal composition of land, or nature, or space, but instead a professional commitment to build a world in which the unintended consequences of architecture’s physical, social, and cultural intervention will not be merely the perpetuation of cycles of poverty and violence that architecture alone cannot solve.
acknowledgements: My deepest thanks to Michael R. Allen, Director of Preservation Research Office and co-organiser of Pruitt-Igoe Now , the competition jurors, our advisory committee, and those who entered the competition. I also thank Stephanie White, editor of On Site review , for the opportunity to reflect on the contemporary condition of the site and its imminent future.
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Clouds Architecture Office
project | landscapes of production by heather dunbar + xiaowei wang
industry forest
factories economy ambiguity
ecological assembly line
T he more one learns about Pruitt-Igoe, the more one is struck by the ambiguity of the site. Layers of scattered history have shaped representation of the site into an ideological tool itself; a representation that serves any one of multiple narratives. From the trajectory of social engineering through design, the death of modernism, the failure of the American city, and the continued, unsuccessful attempts to alleviate inequity in cities, the representation and perception of Pruitt-Igoe itself almost overtakes the physical and material realities of the actual site. This neglect of the physical landscape has left us with a strange and accidental opportunity. Where Pruitt- Igoe, the idea and the building complex, once stood is now a spontaneous forest, a place where vegetation obscures and absorbs history. When approaching the Pruitt-Igoe Now competition we were struck by this accidental forest and thought it needed to be preserved to serve as a memorial to Pruitt-Igoe’s history. What came to our attention with further research was the neglected state of Pruitt’s surrounding areas. Instead of being levelled, the demise of Pruitt-Igoe’s surrounding neighbourhoods took place over time, sometimes one house was left standing on a block where there had been twenty. The shock of Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition spread beyond its site.
As we worked on the competition, we felt strongly that our competition entry needed to connect with the larger discourse on shrinking cities, and how these places could be turned into economic generators without repeating the patterns of boom, bust and inequality that they had experienced before. We were far less interested in a pastoral reclamation of the land, instead we knew we could leverage St Louis’s history as an industrial powerhouse. Abandoned areas surrounding Pruitt-Igoe would serve as economic ecological assembly lines. We imagined nurseries and aquaculture at an industrial level. Abandoned land could be reactivated with the intention of serving the St Louis regional parks system through the growth and distribution of native flora and fauna. Economically stimulating Pruit-Igoe, not through shopping centres and condos but through productive ecological zones, meant embracing the larger relationships between ecology and economy present in Pruitt-Igoe’s history, while departing from the typical attempts for revival that only repeat the past. We proposed a radical response to match the history of Pruitt-Igoe.
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Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei R Wang
social contract subversion lawlessness control exclusion
resistance | public spaces by dustin valen
R ecently , after recommending a walk in Toronto’s High Park to a visiting friend, I was duly informed that large caches of condom wrappers were concealed in the trees and shrubs not far from the park’s well-worn paths. What are we to make of this seemingly non-event? Should we be alarmed or indifferent? How about optimistic? In The Experience of Landscape , geographer Jay Appleton argues that our attraction to landscape is the result of deep-seated psychological and biological urges. 1 In his prospect-refuge theory, the pleasure we take in viewing and entering landscapes (both real and pictorial) comes from our latent animal urge to ‘see without being seen’. We covet both expansive prospects and the intimacy of shady groves, because they elicit feelings of safety. As a way of thinking through contemporary public parks, Appleton’s theory raises several questions. First, besides offering individual enlightenment, parks embody many collective desires, from beauty, harmony and order, to morality and health. Can the prospect-refuge theory include these contemporary values? Second, whereas Appleton’s approach is fundamentally aesthetic, the values placed on contemporary landscapes cover social, political and ecological concerns. Parks are a steadfast institution of the modern city that embody some our most cherished civic values. But they are also riddled with paradoxes: truths and rumours about public parks abound, they harbour an illicit sex-trade, attract petty and violent crime, and are often sites of disorder and unrest. Here the double-edged consequences of a psychological approach are equally clear; where better than in the safety of a refuge
to act out these socially-transgressive behaviours? And where better to transgress than in these value-laden landscapes? Parks attract the same subversive pleasures and civil disobedience that they are meant to literally and symbolically expunge. If parks reflect our Edenesque desires, discovering bad behaviour in parks is like looking into the mirror and seeing a blemish on the face of reality. Not only is bad behaviour in parks inevitable (according to Appleton and the historical record), it shakes us to our psychological core. As landscape studies shift from questions of aesthetics to issues of power, identity, gender and race, the merits of bad behaviour become apparent. In the interplay between individuals who transgress park rules and the social and political consequences, bad behaviour brings our landscape values into sharp and often discomfiting relief. In the past it has also led to social and political change.
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Dustin Valen
opposite, below: Rules posted in Montreal’s Parc Mont Royal, 2015 below: Occupy Toronto camp in St. James Park, 2011
control of the unruly individual Canada’s public parks have long been at the centre of debates over the preservation of a moral and equitable society. In the 1900s, park planners and civic reformers championed landscape as a cure for the degradations of pollution, alcoholism, vice and labour strife prevalent in many Canadian cities. 2 Parks were treated as a social experiment to improve the behaviour and appearance of the working class and the poor. Under vigilant surveillance, strict rules of conduct and composure required park users to adopt acceptable behaviours prescribed by elites who made up civic administrations. 3 Fences and gates, opening and closing hours, a ban on liquor and foul language; sports, gambling and other working-class pastimes were prohibited, and where swimming pools were provided, men and women were separated. Infractions were frequent and often deliberate; justice was meted out swiftly: vagrants were taken away and anyone caught picking flowers or damaging park property was arrested, fined, sometimes even jailed. Disputes over the role of parks were fierce: workers wanted better access, lawns for sports and popular entertainments. Social elites lamented the loss of their parks to delinquents and vagabonds. Public pressure to democratise parks increased in the 1920s and 1930s; authorities yielded to new demands, constructing playgrounds, sports fields and dance halls. 4 In St. John’s Bowring Park, where clashes erupted between wealthy automobile owners and working class pedestrians choked by trailing clouds of dust and splattered by mud, park users successfully petitioned the City in 1931 to ban automobiles from the park on Sundays and holidays.
Decades after these hard-won battles, parks continue to play an important role in struggles over economic and social parity. After a global day of action on October 15, 2011, campers occupied city parks across Canada. Unlike other countries where protesters crowd into city streets and squares, Canadians set up tents in public parks across the country to protest things such as the systematic failure of government to regulate financial systems and curb corporate greed. By reclaiming these ostensibly public landscapes, protesters send a clear message about the corruption of public values by excessive private powers. gentrification of the underbrush The relationship of individuals who transgress park rules and the consequences of actions perpetrated by public officials, is another critical consideration. Like the moralising impulse of early twentieth century reformers, the use of landscape by authorities as a gentrifying force has been persistent, and at times intense. In 1945, the rape and murder of a nine- year old boy in Montreal’s Parc Mont Royal catalysed Jean Drapeau’s political career as a moral crusader. As mayor, Drapeau rallied public opinion against the city’s so-called ‘perverts’ and ciriminals as part of his effort to transform Montreal’s image into that of a world-class city. Known as the morality cuts, underbrush and trees were removed from Parc Mont Royal to improve surveillance and to discourage illicit activities perpetrated by gay men for whom the mountain was supposedly a preferred rendezvous. As erosion and other environmental consequences wrought more devastation on Mont Royal, the mountain’s balding appearance served as a constant reminder of Drapeau’s dictatorial politics, leading to a reforestation campaign during the 1960s. Such cleanups in public parks are not confined to the past; a report by Calgary Municipal Land Corporation in May 2010, cited the long gone-wild St. Patrick’s Island as difficult to police and harbouring undesirable behaviours such as drug use and gay cruising. In 2012 underbrush was removed from the park as part of a 20 million dollar redevelopment plan. Efforts to prevent unwanted social activities in parks represent a different order of bad behaviour, this time committed by institutions against disenfranchised individuals. Individuals, for their part, have resisted and even reversed this trend by defending their park against the regressive actions of public officials. Half a century since Drapeau’s morality cuts, park users remain defiant – the parking lot near Beaver Lake is an after-hours dogging rendezvous, a clear and persistent flaunting of perceived authoritarian rules.
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below:Occupy Toronto camp in St James Park, 2011 Protesters in Christie Pits Park during the Toronto Garden Strike, 2009 opposite: Point Pleasant Park five years after Hurricane Juan, 2008
institutional misrule Many of Canada’s public parks shelter residents forced out of cities by privatising forces and economic pressures. In 2013, The Vancouver Sun interviewed residents of Stanley Park where several dozen homeless people live—some have been there for more than a decade. Toronto’s Don River Valley interconnected park system has long been a refuge for the city’s homeless whose makeshift shelters constructed from recycled clothing and building materials are easily discovered. Often (falsely) linked with litter, promiscuity and crime, the use of parks by itinerant populations recalls depression-era debates as parks became home to many urban unemployed. Not all informal occupations can be ignored: in July 2014 homeless residents of Vancouver’s beleaguered and low-income lower east side constructed a camp in nearby Oppenheimer Park to protest their neglect by city officials. Despite numerous eviction notices and citations from the fire department, 400 displaced residents remained in the park, referring to its relative safety over the squalid condition of city shelters. Over the course of the three-month long occupation, a maelstrom of negative press aimed at past efforts to address homelessness forced the City of Vancouver to announce an additional 100 shelter spaces and 157 interim housing units to meet homeless needs. And in another example in the pursuit of social justice, in June 2009, Toronto residents came to the defence of their public space when 24,000 members of the Toronto Civic Employees Union went on strike and the City used parks as a convenient and free location to open temporary dumpsites. As the smell of rotting garbage heated by high
summer temperatures increased, protesters tried to block contractors from spreading rat poison over the heaps of foetid garbage. After 36 days of strike, 48,900 tonnes of trash had accumulated inside the city limits as media and public debate centred on the City’s misappropriation of public space.
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R J: subversion and pleasure are not mutually exclusive - the kinds of pleasure afforded by natural (or at least naturalistic) landscape are not necessarily an opposition between civil pleasure and uncivil behavior. Is it possible to reconcile the pleasure of enlightenment that city parks sell to citizens and the subversive pleasure of concealment and rule breaking that those same citizens find in the wooded glades and behind the ornamental shrubs meant to add depth and structure to a phantasm of natural repose? Post-Sandy waterfront
redevelopment projects in New York are an example of landscape manipulation, as well as various ‘unbound’ park initiatives and contemporary art engagements to get a more complex idea of the issue of changing approaches to park space that are more flexible to different social and ecological condition. Cary Wolfe’s essay on the Downsview Park redevelopment, ‘Shifting Ground’, shows an alternative view on park design, its relationship to architecture, and the formal aspects of the social issues discussed here.
Monica Gupta
Finally, as an aside, did you know that squirrels did not find their own way into American cities? they were introduced in the 19th century as a possible way of pacifying unruly city youth by encouraging their engagement with a particularly pacific sort of natural creature.
Dustin Valen
global indifference Climate change may be the next test of the extent to which people are willing to defend their parks against bad behaviour. Parks have become potent symbols of our environmental attitudes. New values placed on parks also challenge us to expand our understanding of bad behaviour as new forces both individual and institutional in origin threaten our landscape values. Climate change, the sum of many bad behaviours, impacts our public parks and their appreciation: invasive species perpetrate new kinds of vagrant activities, rising temperatures that affect precipitation in turn affects the migratory patterns of animals and shifts the geographical boundaries of many plant species. Warmer temperatures elevate the risk of attack by insects and pathogens: many northern tree species are becoming vulnerable to disease. Dutch elm disease, an infectious fungi spread by beetles who make their home beneath the bark, has devastated millions of hectares of Canada’s woodlands, including almost 80 per cent of Toronto’s street and park elm population. In Winnipeg’s historic Assiniboine Park, a 200 year old elm, affectionately known as ‘Grandma’ and connected to Lord Selkirk, was felled. In 2013 alone some 5,600 elm trees were destroyed across Winnipeg. Add to this devastation the damage wrought on Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park by Hurricane Juan in 2003, and to St. John’s Bowring Park by Hurricane Igor in 2010 where a century-old linden tree planted by the Duke of Connaught was torn from the ground—the effects of climate change on our public parks are difficult to ignore.
2014 was the warmest year on record. Rising global temperatures will increasingly bear on our landscape values. Although action has been slow, the ability of parks to mitigate the effects of climate change has also been recognised. In the six decades since Hurricane Hazel inundated much of Toronto, the re-naturalisation of the Don River Valley through a series of ecological parks has been made a priority to protect against future extreme weather events. the litmus of bad behaviour As surrogates for our social and sustainable goals, public parks are key players in the ongoing negotiation of our cultural and political values. By throwing a spotlight on these values, bad behaviour forces us to confront their instability and the often unseemly paradoxes of our actions and institutions. Bad behaviour and its consequences also assert the ability of landscape to affect social and political change. The merit of bad behaviour in public parks is that we must ask ourselves how we reconcile unlikable, challenging, dangerous, tragic intrusions? From High Park’s condom wrappers to Hurricane Juan, all bad behaviours that affect our parks should be recognised as signposts for change.
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1 Jay Appleton. The Experience of Landscape. New York: Wiley, 1975 2 Geoffrey Blodgett. ‘Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architec- ture as Conservative Reform’ The Journal of American History 62, no. 4,1976. pp 869-889 3 Dorceta E. Taylor. ‘Central Park as a Model for Social Control: Urban Parks, Social Class and Leisure Behaviour in Nineteenth- Century America’ Journal of Leisure Research 31, no. 4, 1999. pp420-477 4 Galen Cranz. The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Park in America . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,1982
S W: sites of transgression such as carnival are where individuals are given anonymity, either by mask or costume, to transgress social norms. These are licenced because they are in a festival. What is being proposed here is a continuous state of transgression in our
wilder the transgressive reaction. The Calgary Stampede comes to mind; not a public park, but a public event complete with costumes, the mythos of the lawless west borrowed from Hollywood, much bad behaviour all around - and this in very much a law and order city. St. Patrick’s Island, mentioned by Dustin, has been transformed into a riverine ecology centre: anywhere natural is increasingly groomed. I think the Stampede and its annual blow-out of bad behaviour legitimises the manicuring of nature throughout the city. Somehow the social
contract has been assumed to be broken. No longer are we allowed to live and let live, trusting that diversity in society is kind of self-regulating in terms of ‘bad behaviour’. Such regulation and indeed tolerance has been taken out of our hands and put into those of a police mentalilty.
public parks. The degree of
transgression, and this is from Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, has a direct relationship to the degree of oppression in general society: the more clamped down it is, the
opposite, top: Gunter’s chain: 66’, 1/10 furlong or 1/80 mile, divided into 100 links of 7.92”. Coincidentally, one of the main companies for producing the chains was situated not far from where I went to school in Birmingham, England. I found out that they also produced chains for convicts and fetters for slaves. Nowadays one of the company specialities is handcuffs for police forces. opposite below: Installation of Chain Reaction in the former Kartographisches Institut in Vienna. It was he headquarters where the survey infor- mation from all over the Habsburg Empire came together to be made into maps, military and civilian. The rectangle, marked by red chalk at its corners, is where one of the heavy printing presses stood.
Tim Sharp
mapping | land grants by tim sharp
surveys measurement possession resources commodity
a real estate
H istorically , accurate surveying required precise measurement over long distances; incontestable borders require surveying on a large scale using triangulation. Starting from a known position, a line of sight measurement of angles is made to two other points – a mountain top, a rock, a tower, and repeated at those other points. One of the side of the triangle must be measured on the ground, in the past using some form of chain. The combination of all these measurements allows position and distance to be calculated. The survey is extended using one of the sides of the previously measured triangle as the baseline for the next in what becomes a tessellation of interconnected triangles, a triangulation network. Early Canadian surveyors were often soldiers; in British Columbia it was a detachment of the Royal Engineers. Their main task was to survey and fix the 49th parallel which, according to the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, was the border between two empires, one declared, the other de facto . Apart from spending time organising property deals, they also laid out New Westminster which was intended to be – and for a time was – the capital of British Columbia. They also built the road to the thriving settlement of Vancouver on the ice-free Burrard Inlet situated slightly to the north-west. But even civil surveyors were imperial foot soldiers with lack of long-term political clout (with notable exceptions which serve
to underline the contemporary possibility of taking a more differentiated and sensitive position with regard to the original inhabitants of the country). Matthew Edney, acknowledging the active agency of surveyors and mapmakers in the imperialist scheme of things underway on the other side of the planet, involving the other Indians as it were, pointed out: “In short, triangulation-based surveys are rooted, like all other cartographic practice, in cultural conceptions of space and in the politics of manipulating spatial representations.” 1 In India the issue was not about individual settlers acquiring title to plots of land, but rather about rationally defining and standardising land ownership in order to make tax assessments based on the estimated level of agricultural production, the administrative foundation for revenue extraction in its purest form. Many regions of India had a long-established, functional (and functioning) agricultural system which, prior to British annexation and the arrival of a ‘free market economy’, included communal grain storage as an emergency back-up for periods of drought, an institution Vattel explicitly approved of for European governments. 2 One of the main differences between east and west was that the inhabitants of North America were hunters and gatherers and, when they engaged in cultivation, were not solely dependent on their produce. It was a difference with dire consequences.
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Tim Sharp
replicating structures It is tempting to leave the story here, just another story about a colonial elsewhere, distanced in space and time, a story that, as Herman Merivale of the Colonial Office in London saw clearly, consists of a series “of wretched details of ferocity and treachery”. 3 However, since I remembered reading a quotation from Thomas Spence’s A Lecture read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle on Nov. 8th 1775, for the printing of which the Society did the Author the Honour to expel him , I wanted to find out if there were relevant patterns already present in the initiating colonial culture. Landowners, says Spence, criticising the status quo: …can, by laws of their own making, oblige every living creature to remove off his property (which to the great distress of mankind, is too often put in execution); so of consequence, were all the landholders to be of one mind, and determined to take their properties into their own hands, all the rest of mankind might go to heaven if they would, for there would be no place found for them here. 4 Spence was not engaged in idle philosophical speculation. What he asserted was written in historical circumstances and conditions which continued into mid- nineteenth century England. He offered a way of considering the background of those colonisers who were so adamant about their racial superiority, fitness to inherit the earth and security of tenure – in other words those, whose instrumentalised racism was, as Hugh Brody puts it, ‘relentless and purposeful”. 5 Spence’s concerns were directed to the commons in England, communal rights of use of land – the grazing, hunting, brick-making and firewood collecting which had been enjoyed by cottagers and villagers from time immemorial, and which were being systematically abrogated by privately-introduced parliamentary legislation — passed, in the main, by the beneficiaries themselves wearing different hats. At times the changes took place quietly and at others, as E P Thompson has shown, it needed all the force of draconic
laws creating innumerable new capital offences (in at least two sense of the word) to establish the new regime. He points out, ‘The Hanoverian Whigs …were a hard lot of men. And they remind us that stability, no less than revolution, may have its own kind of terror’. 6 With many traditional-use rights curtailed and a campaign of systematic enclosures of common land underway, many of those who lived on and from the land lost their independence and were forced into wage labour. For the beneficiaries, this made for more ‘rational’ land use while having the added ‘benefit’ of creating a tide of emigration to the cities to service the growing industries there. It also started a stream of emigration to the colonies that was to last into the twentieth century. Scotland exhibits parallels: after the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 had been quashed, the military potential of the clan system was dismantled. Clansmen were disarmed, the kilt forbidden and clan chiefs were turned into the sole and absolute legal owners of clan estates. The potential increase in wealth represented by lucrative sheep farming and selling wool to the rapidly expanding and well-protected textile industry, proved too great for most clan chiefs leading to the Highland Clearances, the precondition for profitable business and the coercive motivation for many to leave their homeland in search of land and security elsewhere. Looking at those events from the other side of the Atlantic, Lewis Hyde summarises: it was, he says, the same war the American Indians had to fight with the Europeans, a war against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found there were individuals who claimed to be owners of these commons. The basis of land tenure had shifted. 7 In short, the commodification of land and its concentration in a few hands was a qualitatively different way than before.
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