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.