Opposite poles

I went to two very inspiring talks this week, that are both conflicting and complementary. The first was by Thomas Woltz, one of the principals of this firm. Super hotshot, wildly successful rigorous Environmental Design, and I capitalize both because the firm does the most gorgeous science-based design work I've ever seen. The catch is that he does this by milking a set of unbelievably rich client-friends and corporations, and convincing them to let him experiment on their land. The 22000 acre network of Virginian gentlemen farmer properties he has turned into warm-season prairies, for instance, or the network of defunct granite quarries he is talking the stone mining company into donating to the government to use as reservoirs, or, stunningly, the chunk of New Zealand he's gotten his buddy to start a 50 year restoration project on, from a 2 species sheep/grass ecosystem back to something like the original temperate rainforest.

Now, the model of enacting change where you get excited at people until they give you money to experiment definitely has a place, maybe a huge place. The land area you are working with is going to be enormous compared with what you can do on many public or smaller scale projects, for instance. But I find the power dynamics in this model very problematic. Design is sort of inherently a top-down process, and I am absolutely not a top down sort of person. Emphatically not. I don't like being controlled and my know-it-all tendencies notwithstanding, I don't have desire, not to say the social skills, to be a controller.

The talk I heard tonight was by Teddy Cruz, a UCSD professor who works on community-engaged design. His methods are theoretically complex yet highly practical. Of greatest interest to me were his redefinition of urban density as human interactions per acre, rather than units per acre. A high rise with no community gathering space is by nature low density compared to an area that has less people but more tiny businesses and card games and secret playgrounds. This is certainly socially true, and probably environmentally true too. A community where everyone has their patch of beans and you buy your tamales from the lady down the street instead of leaving the area by car to get your dinner is much more sustainable. I asked him if he had any thoughts on the legitimizing of illicit land uses (like the illegal tamal operation and gardening in vacant lots) and the implications that has for social control, and he actually had a set of cohesive answers! He stressed the importance of working with local organizations as intermediaries between citizen and government as a way of empowering disenfranchised people while insulating them from scrutiny, among other things. He also talked about designing flexible spaces--affordable housing with specific groups in mind, interspersed with public space with flexible 'programming,' to make space for spontaneous uses.
He spoke directly to the top-down vs bottom-up problem that I have been struggling with, which I have been trying to talk to all of my professors about without being able to get them to even understand my question.

So my next challenge, now that I have a discourse for how to talk about bottom-up design, is how to apply it to creating environmental change.

Agency, activism and place

So one of the main premises of my interest in landscape architecture is that the built environment effects the way people move, interact with each other, travel, and is generally central to quality of life. I certainly believe this to be true. But none of the academic discussions of 'place-making,' as we so arrogantly like to call it, has included a coherent discussion of how the people that inhabit a place can effect it, change its use spontaneously, shape its growth or degradation. I'm interested in this for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, a few thoughts on illicit use of public spaces. A great deal of thought goes into how to 'program' the uses of public areas. Parks and squares are obviously designed to be gathering places, for a lot of complicated reasons which include relief from the pressures of urban life through exposure to 'nature', recreation, health and social activities, profitable ventures such as music festivals, licit political gatherings. They are also loci for illicit use, for instance living in if you are homeless (oh noes!), and for protests. Spaces that are, by and large, designed to facilitate good social order are subverted. For a little while, we can make good on the fiction that the 'public' in public spaces is literal. I would be fascinated to study the ways that occupied spaces do or do not facilitate protest movements, and even more excited to incorporate some of these principles in design...

I am even more interested in what I consider to be a more durable form of action. How can we facilitate culture-wide behavior change? "I suspect that it's more important for me to get dressed and go downtown while the protest is going on than to stay home and make a giant pumpkin curry. But it would be a lot easier to be sure about this if I hadn't spent a decade so far using food as my preferred mechanism for social change," said a friend of mine on Facebook. This pretty much sums my feelings on OccupyWallstreet up. Small daily behavior changes, in aggregate, can make radical social and environmental changes in the long run. Here's one I have been thinking about, that doesn't seem like such a stretch: what if Americans could be persuaded to grow prairie instead of turf in their front yards, and lavish the kind of attention they now give grass on growing beans? Same behaviors, same level of effort, slightly different values. How many acres of prairie could we restore, that way? How many tons of vegetables? A book I'm reading for class, World on the Edge by Lester Brown, says that in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, they grow 80,000 tons of veggies a year within city limits, enough to provide 65% of the city's produce. Surely we could could do that too.

If we are going to thrive as a species, and I use the term 'thrive' here to mean 'avoid billions of people dying of thirst and hunger,' every person needs to support the particular ecologies which support them.

So how do we design for that? Design is such a top down process. How do we build a world where growing veggies, living with twelve other people, caring for your big and little bluestem, or your cedar trees, is more fun, more appealing, more normal than living in a suburban house with a lawn and a car per person?