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?