California, Oregon, and Washington, along with nine other states in the West are now experiencing record-breaking wildfires. According to experts, there are a number of reasons: climate change is creating the underlying conditions for more extreme weather events. Heat waves over the summer dried out much of Western forests, which were already impacted by years of drought and bark beetles. Unusually high winds have spread embers. And human activity in the wildland-urban interface keeps creating new sparks: downed electrical lines have set many blazes, while, infamously, a gender reveal party with a “pyrotechnic device” created a massive conflagration.
Amid the continuing devastation, an interactive map from ESRI, which creates geographic information system software, enables users to track active fires by name or location in near real time and sort by timeline and magnitude. The map indicates each fire’s estimated start date and its current level of containment. Another layer provides a smoke forecast for any given location.
Smoke forecast / ESRI
According to ESRI, the sources of fire data in the map are the Integrated Reporting of Wildland-Fire Information (IRWIN) and the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) — both of which are updated every 15 minutes. Smoke forecasts are incorporated from the National Weather Service and show 48-hour forecasts updated every hour. ESRI adds that when zoomed-in, users can see additional fire data from NOAA/NASA satellites, which detect the locations of recent “thermal activity” that indicates fire direction. (ESRI also has a map with local disaster response data).
The National Interagency Fire Center finds that in the western U.S. more than 5 million acres have burned during this year’s fire season, which runs from May through September.
In California alone, more than than 2.5 million acres have gone up in flames. According to The New York Times, that is 20 times more than what was burned last year and a modern record. In Oregon, 900,000 acres have caught fire, causing half a million people to evacuate, which is more than 10 percent of the state’s population. And in Washington state, an unprecedented 480,000 acres have burned just in one week. There are currently 100 large active fires across the West.
Beyond the incredible loss of life and property, breathing in wildfire smoke can cause serious health issues. Blazes that consume homes and garages filled with household cleaners like Drano release other dangerous particles into the atmosphere.
According to researchers at Stanford University, the risks of toxic wildfire smoke are especially high for children, the elderly, and those with asthma. Studies have shown that after five days of major wildfires, the number of hospital visits for asthma attacks increased by 400 percent, and the number of visits for strokes by 42 percent.
For those out West, please take every precaution by closing windows and doors, running air purifiers, and regularly checking the latest evacuation orders.
In a useful primer, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions outlines the many connections between climate change and wildfires. The organization states: “climate change causes forest fuels (the organic matter that burns and spreads wildfire) to be more dry and has doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western U.S.”
Planners with Cal Fire see wildfires primarily as a land-use problem. Many communities in western states are at high-risk of wildfires because they were developed in the wildland-urban interface, which the U.S. Forest Service describes as places where “humans and their development meet or intermix with wildland fuel.” State and local governments can discourage development in fire-prone areas. This can reduce the risk of human-caused sparks and also prevent property and lives from being destroyed by fires that spread increasingly rapidly through these vulnerable areas.
Other solutions identified by communities out West are early warning systems coupled with remote sensing technologies, defensible space landscape design for homes and communities, and prescribed burns that can help clear out dead trees and accumulated biomass before they become a dangerous source of fuel for fires.
While Americans are focused on the pandemic and racial injustice, the vast majority still think climate change is a critically important issue. Americans increasingly believe climate change is real, happening now, and caused by human activity. They believe it will negatively impact their lives and those of future generations if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to a new survey, a large majority of Americans want to see some form of action from governments and businesses to reduce emissions. And 25% of Americans have become an “issue public” on climate change, meaning they consider the issue of “great personal importance” and are likely to “vote based on candidates’ climate policy platforms.” The issue public for climate change is at an all-time high.
The representative survey of 999 respondents in the U.S. was conducted by Stanford University, Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental research organization, and ReconMR, a survey research firm. The survey, which has been conducted since 1997, offers a unique perspective on changes in beliefs over time.
Some key findings from the survey:
The vast majority of Americans believe the planet has been warming and will continue to warm
In 2020, 81% of Americans believe that the Earth has been warming over the past century, the largest percentage since the survey began. Furthermore, 76 percent believe the planet will continue to warm over the next century if emissions aren’t reduced. Of that group, 68% feel very certain about this.
According to Alan Krupnick, a senior fellow at RFF, this is a promising development for those seeking greater action on climate change mitigation and adaptation. “That this percentage is so high is indicative of bipartisan support, as the fraction of Americans who are Republicans is higher than 20%.”
Americans blame human activity for climate change, which they think is “bad”
The survey found that 82 percent of Americans believe human activity is the primary cause of climate change, approximately the same as in 1997. There has also been a notable increase in the number of Americans who think climate change is “bad”: 67% of respondents said it was “bad” in 2020 in comparison with 51% in 2012. And when asked a question about a hypothetical future warming of 5°F by 2095, 70% of respondents said that too would be ‘bad,’ an increase from 61% in 1997.
More Americans than ever before think they are knowledgeable about climate change
Since the survey began 23 years ago, Americans believe they have “become more and more knowledgeable about global warming.” This year, respondents who said they knew a moderate amount about climate change was 75%; in 1997, it was just 42%.
The vast majority of Americans think they have seen climate change happening
75% said they have “personally observed the effects of global warming.”
The researchers found that local climate impacts — such as drought, wildfires, flooding, extreme heat, severe storms, and sea-level rise — are indeed changing opinions about climate change.
“In eastern North Carolina, 30 inches of rain fell and major highways were turned into rivers. After the storm, a poll from Elon University noted that 52% of North Carolinians believed that a negative impact to coastal communities from climate change was ‘very likely,'” an increase over 45 percent from the previous year.
A slight majority of Americans think climate change will directly hurt them, and a large majority think it will hurt future generations
Interestingly, just 53% of respondents believe global warming will hurt them, at least by a moderate amount, which is down from 63% a decade ago. Another 28% expect “global warming to help them personally at least a moderate amount,” an increase of 15 percent since 2015.
This indicates that greater communication efforts about the expected impacts of climate change on communities are needed. Any perceived benefits — such as milder winters in colder climates, or extended agricultural seasons — are more than offset by expected negative impacts.
When asked about future generations, 74% of respondents, a clear majority, agree that global warming will hurt them a “moderate amount.”
The vast majority of Americans think government and businesses need to take at least “moderate action” to fight climate change
In 2020, 82% of respondents agree that the U.S. government “should do at least a moderate amount about global warming,” which is an all-time high in terms of public opinion on climate action. Between 35-45% of respondents think the U.S. government, foreign governments, businesses, and the average person are currently accomplishing even a moderate amount.
25% of Americans consider climate change their #1 issue
The researchers found that for most policy issues, there is a group of people who form the “issue public” and consider the issue of utmost importance. “These are the people who pay careful attention to news on the subject, think and talk a lot about it, and give money to lobbying groups to influence policy.”
In 2020, the global warming issue public make up an “all-time high” of 25% of Americans, a large increase from 9% in 1997. This demonstrates that a “growing body of people care deeply about climate change and may be likely to cast their votes based on candidates’ climate policy platforms.”
In an article in The New York Times, Jon A. Krosnick, professor of communication, political science, and psychology at Stanford University and lead researcher on the project, explained that an issue public is the “people who make things happen on the issue.”
Dr. Krosnick told the Times that climate change, with an issue public comprising 25% of the U.S. population, is now only second to abortion, which has an issue public of 31%. The group of people who are very passionate about gun control is around 17%, and capital punishment, 14%. (The researchers didn’t state the percentage of Americans who form an issue public for ending racial injustice).
The research team concluded that “considerable and sometimes huge” majorities of Americans hold “green” views on climate change and related issues that cross party lines. Where contention remains: the exact policies and regulations — the carrots and sticks — to be used to combat the climate crisis.
Transforming Landscapes: Michel Desvigne Paysagiste / courtesy of Birkhäuser
The French landscape architect Michel Desvigne isn’t well-known in the U.S. but a new monograph of his firm’s work from the publisher Birkhäuser should help change that. Transforming Landscapes: Michel Desvigne Paysagistebeautifully conveys Desvigne’s simple yet striking parks, plazas, and master plans. There is a sense of clarity in his work that emerges as you look through the book’s many rich color photographs.
The book is entirely focused on Desvigne’s public projects, which is where his passion lies. As he explains on his website, his firm’s goal is “to play a part in the formation of common territory, transforming landscapes produced by society. Past and present traces of society’s activities inspire and help foster the design.” Desvigne aspires to “give an area meaning, at least legibility.”
At the same time, he does so with great restraint. He says his landscape designs have an elementary, even dumb composition. The landscapes “do not entail any heroic feats of execution or any extravagance.” These places are distinguished by a “certain poverty” or rustic quality. The landscapes are a bit austere, even just under done.
The purposeful minimalism perhaps enables people to more easily inhabit these landscapes and bring their own meaning. But he adds that his firm brings rigor to the design of these seemingly simple landscapes. In reality, simplicity takes hard work to achieve.
Transforming Landscapes begins with a photographic essay by Patrick Faigenbaum that immerses the reader in Michel Desvigne Paysagiste (MDP)’s landscapes. At first, it’s hard to tell what is a natural or agricultural lansdcape and what has been designed.
As Francoise Fromonot explains in the introduction, “the ditches and ponds, roadbeds and rubble, paths and valleys sometimes merge to such an extent that the current earthworks are no longer distinguishable from the agricultural land from which the work has molded the contours of a new public space.”
In Fromonot’s introduction, we get a sense of the intelligence of Desvigne’s landscapes, how he works at an urban scale, combining different strategies. Desvigne wants intersecting layers of landscape design at different scales to accrue into a landscape-driven urban design.
These layers include large park systems like the Emerald Necklace, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in Boston; new parks and recreational areas that bring back nature to the city; and tiny pocket parks that give a city “its porosity and comfort of daily use.”
The 10 case studies in the book feature master plans in France, the Middle East, and the U.S. that are realized through multiple scales — bigger parks and boulevards, and smaller parks, plazas, and green streets. Desvigne himself describes how the pieces cohere.
The first case explores his firm’s work in the Old Port and public spaces of Marseille, France. As part of a team with Foster + Partners, MDP created a framework plan for adding green public space to Marseille’s city center through multiple layers.
The plan envisioned a “chain of parks” to complement the remodeling of the port landscape, which was to be “uniformly mineral,” meaning without greenery. Desvigne explains that the space is “treated like a vast stone plateau, simple and homogeneous. Proposing vegetation here would have made no sense historically. It would have almost been a desecration!” Unfortunately, that means the space is blazing hot during the day time in summer.
A new landscape for the Old Port of Marseille removed parking and brought people up to the water. / MDP, courtesy of Birkhäuser
Before, 75 percent of the quays were used for parking and just a third accessible to the public. The design team made the entire perimeter of the port open to the public.
New landscape brings visitors up close to maritime life in the Old Port of Marseille. / MDP, courtesy of BirkhäuserNew landscape at the Old Port of Marseille focuses on the “mineral nature” of stone. / MDP, courtesy of Birkhäuser
Green spaces surrounding the port act as a counterpoint to the expansive stone quays. Further into the interior of the city, MDP created a plan for creating or revitalizing many small green spaces and boulevards.
Plan for Old port of Marseille and surrounding green spaces. The Old Port is at the center right of this image. / MDP, courtesy of Birkhäuser
In another case, Desvigne explains his work in Lyon since 1999 with various partners, including urban designer Francois Gerther and architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron. Over more than a decade, a succession of projects at the confluence of the Saône and Rhône rivers transformed a peninsula. An abandoned industrial area, crisscrossed by railway tracks and once rife with prostitution and drug dealing, became a new green, livable urban district. MDP accrued green spaces by “progressively establishing ‘filaments’ of vegetation running toward the interior of the peninsula.” The peninsula became a “ramified park” — ramified meaning branched.
Ramified park elements green the inside of the the Lyon peninsula, found at the confluence of two rivers. / MDP, courtesy of Birkhäuser
As described in the Bordeaux Rive Droite case, MDP also created green filaments extending from the City of Bordeaux into the Garonne riverfront. What is amazing though is that he persuaded the mayor, local policymakers, and developers to abandon their plans to urbanize riverfront land that had been set aside for development. Instead, some 50 hectares (123 acres) of land adjacent to the river was “delisted and made unbuildable,” so that those green fingers could terminate at a grand park.
Filaments of green space lead to a new riverfront park (at left) in the city of Bordeaux / MDP, courtesy of BirkhäuserScientific analysis on ecological succession was conducted in the new riverfront park in Bordeaux. The park also included a nursery to grow its own trees. / MDP, courtesy of Birkhäuser
In Burgos, Spain, MDP partnered with Herzog & de Meuron again to create Bulevar del Ferrocarril, a new 9-kilometer (5.5 mile)-long urban boulevard where was once a railway. Abandoned railway infrastructure, including disused warehouses, marshalling yards, and other parcels, became the basis for new neighborhood development. These impactful before and after photos show the range of people-friendly transformations along the length of the project.
Before and after photos of the Bulevar del Ferrocarril / MDP, courtesy of Birkhäuser
And, lastly, in a case that underscores the ambitious city-making scale of MDP’s work, we once again see how small and large green spaces form a new layer of green urban design. MDP created a series of urban parks along the coastline of Doha, the capital of Qatar, in the Middle East. There are striking landscapes around major new museums such as the National Museum, designed by Jean Nouvel, and Museum of Islamic Art, designed by I.M. Pei.
Desvigne’s landscape around the Museum of Islamic Art, designed by I.M. Pei / MDP, courtesy of Birkhäuser
And in the Lusail marina district, the Emir of Qatar first wanted to MDP to design a prototype landscape at 600 meters (1,930 feet) long. Once the prototype was approved, the rest of seafront was developed in the same lush patterns.
Simplicity, Qatari-style in the Lusail maritime district / MDP, courtesy of Birkhäuser
The same sense of clarity as found in Desvigne’s other work can be seen here, but adapted to the landscape forms and native plant palette of Qatar.
Over two days, approximately 500 online participants together set the agenda, formed and dissolved discussion groups, and shared knowledge and resources. With the assistance of an “open space” facilitator, this is how Cut|Fill, a virtual “unconference” on landscape architecture, unfolded.
Organized by the Urban Studio and Ink Landscape Architects, Cut|Fill was meant to “raise questions we all want to discuss,” explained Andrew Sargeant, ASLA, a founder of Urban Studio. One of those important questions: “how can landscape architects design with empathy and end dismissive behavior towards people of color?”
The goal of these questions was to get designers to think harder about how to stop intentionally or unintentionally erasing communities of color, which are often purposefully made invisible, and instead get them to truly see these communities, co-design with them, and empower them.
“Imagine the place you love is erased. This has happened to people of color for generations,” said Justin Garrett Moore, executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission, during the opening panel.
Moore said that erasure, which has taken the form of urban renewal, displacement, and gentrification over the past few decades, “takes work.” Some group of people need to invest time and money to make a community disappear.
He also spoke of the pain of feeling personally erased. A video was produced of a planning and design panel he was on with a number of white speakers. “The organizers cropped the video so only the white panelists remained. It took work to do that — it was done with intention.” He called these erasures, both personal and communal, “death by a thousand cuts.”
For Maria Arquero de Alarcon, an associate professor of architecture and urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, erasures of communities can be combated through new ways of teaching planning and design. One important methodology is “co-creating and co-producing knowledge together in spaces of inclusion.” Online technologies also now offer opportunities to become “radically inclusive” with marginalized communities.
In many places, erasure has been happening for many generations, but there are cultural remnants if you know how to see. For example, “there is so much of Africa in the landscape of South Carolina,” commented Austin Allen, a founder of DesignJones, LLC and associate professor of landscape architecture practice at the University of Texas at Arlington. Slaves brought from Africa also brought their rice farming knowledge, which shaped the southern American landscape. Allen said landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, on his tour of the South, traveled through South Carolina’s rice plantations and wondered, “what is this place?”
Despite erasures, the legacy of marginalized peoples remains waiting to be rediscovered. Allen said this upcoming generation of landscape architecture students is exploring intersectional issues related to race, landscape, and memory with a “new level of openness.”
In the next panel, the discussion moved from erasure and invisibility to empowerment.
“If you inhabit a black body or are disabled, you are so invisible. That is until you’re not. In an instant, anything you do can be the focus of critical feedback. You could be eating skittles or going on a jog and be made very visible,” explained Tamika Butler, director of planning in California and director of equity and inclusion with Toole Design Group.
She added that Black people are used to “sliding in and out of a space invisibly,” but to “stay where we are, we need to claim space.”
For Ulysses Sean Vance, an associate professor of architecture at Temple University, who focuses on universal and inclusive design, the planning and design world has created massive “voids of erasure.” Too often, “involvement is done to a community; engagement is done to them.” He added that places that experienced generations of erasure aren’t ruins, but places to be inhabited and re-inhabited.
In these communities, “we can instead intentionally unbuild disenfranchisement.” To accomplish this, communities must be real participants in the planning and design process, and their input must be reflected in outcomes. Through inclusive processes, the feeling of being invisible and marginalized can be overcome, and “people can feel comfortable and confident.”
Butler elaborated on the concept of intersectionality, which came up a lot during Cut|Fill and is a key framework for creating more empowered visibility. “On streets, intersections are where conflict, friction, and struggle happen.” If there is a poorly designed street intersection that is leading to pedestrian deaths, “we aren’t like, this is just too complicated. No, we go in and solve the problem.” To solve intersectional social and environmental justice issues, diverse designers and planners need to create “brave spaces, not safe spaces” that open up the difficult conversations.
Architect Steven Lewis, a principal at ZGF, offered a meaningful perspective on the entire discussion. “There is self-realization as a young Black person that jars you. You realize you are not like the white characters you watch on TV. You become aware that you are different. You realize that there is a parallel Black universe and you now need to navigate between white and Black universes.”
George Floyd’s death created a “wormhole in which everyone was sucked into the Black universe,” Lewis said. “The walls crumbled, and we’re all in one place right now.” (Butler added that “constantly transitioning between these two universes can be exhausting. We are tired and can make some mistakes.”)
While “white people have work to do and need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable,” Black people can be “sherpas or guides in the Black universe,” Lewis said. “If white people have their heart in the right place, we can be patient and loving.”
He believes “empathy and caring” can lead to “learned and gained familiarity and then love for each other.” But he cautioned that this process of developing empathy and understanding requires life-long effort; there is no quick “prophylactic or therapy.”
As people have retreated to their homes, fish have recolonized Venice’s canals, coyote have been spotted in downtown San Francisco, wild sheep occupied a Welsh town, and deer have started using crosswalks in Japan. And now nature is at least temporarily taking over arts institutions.
The closures of opera houses and museums have offered an opportunity for artists and arts institutions to create charming conceptual works that recognize nature’s new privileges.
Earlier this summer, conceptual artist Eugenio Ampudia partnered with the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Spain, to stage a performance of Puccini’s Crisantemi — The Chrysanthemums. But this time, instead of thousands of Barcelonan opera lovers enjoying Puccini’s melodies, the audience was nearly 2,300 ficus trees, palms, and Swiss cheese plants from a local nursery.
Gran Teatre del LiceuGran Teatre del LiceuGran Teatre del Liceu
Perhaps the flora-themed music performed by the UceLi Quartet appealed to the plants on some vegetal level.
Gran Teatre del Liceu
Ampudia told The Guardian: “At a time when humankind has shut itself up in enclosed spaces and been obliged to relinquish movement, nature has crept forward to occupy the spaces we have ceded. And it has done so at its own rhythm, according to its patient biological cycle. Can we broaden our empathy and bring it to bear on other species? Let’s start by using art and music and inviting nature into a great concert hall.”
Victor Garcia de Gomar, Liceu’s artistic director, called the piece “a visual poem, both a subtle metaphor but one which makes us smile.”
After the concert, all the house plant attendees were donated to Spain’s frontline healthcare workers so they can provide some much needed stress reduction benefits at home.
With both the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Kansas City Zoo in Kansas City, Missouri, closed due to COVID-19, administrators at the museum had an idea: Why not invite Humboldt penguins from the zoo to visit?
In the video, Randy Wisthoff, the zoo’s executive director, said: “we’re always looking for ways to enrich their lives and stimulate their days. During this shutdown period, our animals really miss visitors coming up to see them.”
According to Julián Zugazagoitia, the museum’s director, Humboldt penguins, which are native to Chile and Peru, seemed to “really appreciate” when he spoke to them in Spanish. As they waddled from room to room, they are seen pausing at some paintings but not others. “They seemed, definitely, to react much better to Caravaggio than to Monet,” Zugazagoitia said.
Humboldt Penguin admiring a Caravaggio / Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
LAF Innovation and Leadership Fellows. Clockwise from top right: Nicholas Jabs, Jeff Hou, Pierre Bélanger, Liz Camuti, Diana Fernandez-Bibeau, and Hans Baumann
The pandemic didn’t stop this year’s Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) fellows in innovation and leadership from presenting the results of their year-long investigations. In an online symposium attended by more than a thousand people, six emerging leaders in the field of landscape architecture explained how design can help create a more just world. Each fellow received a $25,000 grant from LAF to travel, conduct research, and build their leadership skills.
Liz Camuti: Bad RFPs Set Back Resilience Planning Efforts
Liz Camuti, ASLA, a landscape designer at SCAPE (and we are proud to say, a former ASLA communications intern) told the story of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, the homeland of the tribe of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians. More than 98 percent of the tribe’s lands have been lost due to rising sea levels and coastal erosion. In 2016, the state of Louisiana received $48 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC) to resettle the Isle de Jean Charles community.
Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana / Liz Camuti
After finding their concerns were ignored during federal and state planning processes, the community eventually decided to forgo resettlement. Camuti blamed the “so-called design solution handed down through the request for proposal (RFP).” This led her to examine the “centuries of problems with RFPs” issued by federal and state governments, and the awful position many planners and landscape are forced into of simply obeying the forms and “checking the boxes.” She called for communities and landscape architects to “uncheck the box” and push back against poorly-conceived RFPs.
As part of the RFP development process, all communities, and particularly indigenous ones, should be better consulted on how they want to be identified. Public participation processes, which are often a requirement, should be designed to air conflicts instead of minimizing them. Ample time should be given to establishing community ownership of a project through the creation of working groups and steering committees. Instead of coming in as experts, landscape architects need to reframe their relationship with communities with which they work and become much more humble about what they don’t know.
Diana Fernandez-Bibeau: Diverse Communities Need Heterogeneous Landscapes
“We design places for diverse species of plants and animals. Why not design spaces for diverse people?,” asked Diana Fernandez-Bibeau, ASLA, a senior associate at Sasaki. By studying ecology, which explores species diversity, and anthropology, which delves into human diversity, landscape architects can partner with communities to design places defined by “landscape heterogeneity.” This process involves weaving diverse social, cultural, linguistic, and environmental systems into a place.
Heterogeneous places are much needed, because there are already “too many homogenized public spaces in the U.S. that were not designed for people of color,” Fernandez said. “Landscapes are not neutral ground but poignant expressions of power.” Homogenized spaces are created by a colonizing power that minimizes difference.
As far as a process for creating heterogeneous landscapes, Fernandez argued that there is “no formula,” and what matters most is having a “state of consciousness” that is based in the “acceptance of the other.” She said diverse communities are more than capable of defining themselves. She pointed to the community design process for the new Frederick Douglass Memorial in Boston, in which an African American spoken word artist helped create a safe space for community sharing and spiritual growth.
Spoken word artist during community sharing process / SasakiFrederick Douglass Memorial design concept / Sasaki
Nicholas Jabs: Climate Change Is an Opportunity to Revitalize Middle America
“Middle America is too often ignored,” argued Nicholas Jabs, a designer with PORT Urbanism in Philadelphia, who gave a centuries-spanning overview of the region, from the Ice Age, which resulted in rich soil deposits, to the establishment of indigenous tribal communities, and the rise of fur traders. Communities like St. Louis, Chicago, and Minneapolis formed on rivers, because rivers were the major transportation system, but by the mid-1800s, railroads began to dominate and manufacturing spread.
Over the next few decades, middle American cities were transformed from “vertically organized” communities in which manufacturing co-existed with housing to “factory warehouse cities” characterized by the rise of “horizontal, specialized manufacturing zones” separated from housing. This led to urban and suburban sprawl, corporate campuses, and science parks. An ensuing multi-decade decline in American manufacturing was in part halted in the 00s by “flexible and urban” manufacturing that creates “high-quality crafts on demand.”
Climate change offers an opportunity for middle America. With its legacy infrastructure, resources, and manufacturing and distribution know how, middle America is poised to play a leading role in the mass mobilization of people and resources to reduce emissions and adapt communities. As communities address climate impacts, “we’re going to need to make and fix lots of things.” Middle America can lead with “craft, cultivation, community, and care,” which can transform the region once again.
Photovoltaic (PV) panel trees in middle America / Nicholas Jabs
Jeff Hou: A New Network to Grow Design Activists
Amid the grave environmental, health, and social justice issues facing the world, how can landscape architects make a difference? Jeff Hou, ASLA, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington, formed a design activism working group across universities and landscape architecture organizations, which resulted in a 50-page framework of action based in a set of principles. There are now 800 professors and students sharing ideas in a collaborative online community.
Principles include: politicize, which calls for “understanding that the built environment is a result of a political process;” hybridize, which involves increasing cross-disciplinary collaboration; and “glocalize,” a new word combining globalize and localize as a way to encourage intercultural learning and connection. Other key principles are: improvise; problematize, which means to re-evaluate complex, interconnected issues; authentize; re-organize; and democratize, which is a call for “re-examining our systems of justice.”
Hans Baumann: The Value of Immersion in the Culture of Indigenous Peoples
Hans Baumann, an independent landscape architect in Santa Monica, California, spent his fellowship with the Torres-Martinez Indians, whose 22,000 acre reservation is adjacent to the Salton Sea, California’s largest body of water. The sea is expected to lose a third of its volume within a decade because of climate change and agricultural water use, with major impacts for the cultural and spiritual practices of the tribe.
The Salton Sea is found within the footprint of the much larger prehistoric Lake Cahuilla. The Torres-Martinez have long had a deep cultural connection to the sea and the lands around it. Baumann partnered with the tribe on a series of slow creative projects, including community workshops and other landscape interventions with the goal of building relationships and trust with the tribe.
Landscape intervention at Lake Cahuilla / Hans Baumann
After two months of coordination, the tribe and Baumann were able to organize a kayaking event for tribal youth out on the sea, so that young people could create a “more positive relationship with the water.” Surveys showed that the tribal youth changed their perspective of the sea to “cool, fun, and awesome” after the event. He concluded that he invested in long-term relationship building and is purposefully not leading the way. “I don’t have the solution.” Baumann encouraged landscape architects to research the many tribes in the U.S., their historic homelands, and get involved, but to also recognize that “work is already being done in communities.”
Tribal youth kayaking on Lake Cahuilla / Hans Baumann
Pierre Bélanger: A Call for Accountability to Indigenous Peoples
Pierre Bélanger, a landscape architect, urban planner, and “settler scholar” who founded the non-profit organization Open Systems Landscape Architecture Lab, turned his screen black and read from an email he wrote to Brad McKee, the editor in chief of Landscape Architecture Magazine. He exhorted the audience to take greater responsibility for their historical impacts on communities and the environment. “Who are we — landscape architects — accountable to?,” he asked.
Bélanger called for greater accountability to indigenous peoples and an end of “settler capitalism,” which he argued still persists. “Since every square inch of land in the U.S. and Canada is treaty land, I wrote ‘No Design on Stolen Land‘ in Architectural Design Magazine earlier this year with a group of close colleagues that I had been working with over the past decade: Ghazal Jafari, Pablo Escudero, Hernan Bianchi Benguria, Tiffany Kaewen Dang, and Alexandra Arroyo.” He explained that “the article may seem foolishly polemical or unnecessarily provocative, or totally impractical as some have shared, but at a time when profound structural and systemic change is needed, we as practitioners and educators can no longer afford to ignore, let alone deny, the inseparable nature of climate change and colonialism to change the present.”
Along 2nd Avenue in St. Petersburg, Florida, an old pier launch built on landfill didn’t offer much beyond lots of parking and a long hot walk 3,000 feet out to a restaurant jutting into Tampa Bay. After a $92 million redesign, a new 26-acre walkable pier district now unites city and pier through a walkable green landscape that features Bending Arc, a sculpture with a social justice message by net artist Janet Echelman, gardens, a playground, and hundreds of newly-planted native Floridian trees.
The pier district project was planned and designed by multiple interdisciplinary teams. Barbara Wilks, FASLA, and her team at W-Architecture led the design of the 23-acre approach that brings visitors from downtown through the park space that features Echelman’s piece, her largest permanent installation to date. Architects at Rogers Partners and ASD/SKY Architect and landscape architects at Ken Smith Workshop designed a 3-acre plaza and pier found at the outer edge further into the bay.
W-Architecture started with a master plan devised by AECOM, which the team then revised by “moving things around,” including roads, bus stops, and parking lots, and then layering in multiple transportation systems. There is now a tram line, bicycle paths, and new circulatory system for pedestrians. Wilks said: “if you use Google Earth, you can clearly see we transformed the space from a car dominated place to a pedestrian park.”
As visitors meander through the new landscape, there’s a gateway lined with palm trees, a marketplace with stalls for local artisans, the striking artwork, gardens with a playground and constructed pond, and a beach. The pier district was “designed as a series of events that draw you in. We choreographed how the experience will unfold.”
Conceptual landscape design was already moving forward when city leaders alerted Wilks that Echelman has been commissioned to bring one of her giant pieces to the park. On the phone over a weekend, they reached agreement on the location for the piece, which is called Bending Arc, in reference to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Bending Arc / Raul Quintana
Echelman named the piece Bending Arc and incorporated multiple arcing forms because the site played an important role in the movement for civil rights. The place was “where local citizens began peacefully challenging racial barriers, leading to the 1957 U.S. Supreme Court case ruling, which upheld the rights of all citizens to enjoy use of the municipal beach and swimming pool without discrimination.” St. Petersburg was also later known for the sanitation workers’ strike of 1968, one of the largest in the country in the wake of the assassination of King.
Echelman’s works are crafted for their specific locations and shaped by their surroundings. Raised in the Tampa Bay area, she was inspired by the colonies of barnacles that grow on the underside of piers and the blue and white parasols that can be found on St. Pete’s beaches. Her studio writes: “The sculpture’s design in aerial view can also be read as three barnacle-like parasols nestled together.”
Bending Arc aerial plan / Studio Echelman
On the ground, Wilks worked with Echelman to fine tune the position of the artwork so it avoided existing trees. Wilks then created circular landscape forms below Bending Arc‘s three apertures where visitors can look up.
Circles are prevalent in the new pier district’s design because the local limestone landscape naturally forms round pools of water, which also result in trees forming circles around the pools’ edges.
A view of the Pier District circular forms before installation of Bending Arc / Marian Flanagan
Under one aperture, a concrete lined circle is filled with oyster shells and forms an outdoor event space.
One of Bending Arc’s apertures, and a circular sitting area below / Brian Adams
Below the two others, there are rounded grass-covered berms so visitors can more easily lie back and gaze at the pleasingly engulfing, undulating nets, which become even more dramatic at night. According to Echelman, the piece is “composed of 1,662,528 knots and 180 miles of twine, spans 424 feet, and measures 72 feet at its tallest point.”
Bending Arc / Brian AdamsLooking up into Bending Arc at night / Brian Adams
Wilks purposefully designed the perimeter of the space with native oaks and pine trees to focus attention on Bending Arc. Diagonal pathways from the gardens direct visitors to the artwork. At some surrounding edges, bioswales with native plants, which are green infrastructure systems for managing stormwater, can be crossed by low wooden bridges.
A view of the bioswales and bridge in the Pier District before the installation of Bending Arc / Marian FlanaganBending Arc, bioswales, and bridge at night / City of St. Petersburg
Once visitors move past Echelman’s sculpture, they encounter gardens that contain a play space overlooking a new pond. Because W-Architecture planted native trees and plants, the site has become a mecca for wildlife, something its earlier incarnation as a parking lot could never have achieved.
Pier district gardens / Marian FlanaganPier district playground / Marian FlanaganPier district constructed pond / Marian FlanaganNew pier district visitor / Marian Flanagan
From there, visitors can either veer towards spa beach or walk further out on the pier designed by Rob Rogers, Ken Smith, FASLA, and team. Pathways at the perimeters enable visitors to loop back to the central spine on bike or foot.
Wilks added that the park itself echoes the social justice message of Echelman’s artwork. “The new pier district is very much for everyone. It was designed to be free and open.”
Urban farm in Braddock, Pennsylvania / iStock Images
We are living where we shouldn’t be living. In more communities across the U.S., climate change is causing flooding, wildfires, extreme heat, and sea level rise. According to a group at the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU)’s Virtual Gathering, one solution is for communities threatened with climate impacts to move to “receiver cities.” The hollowed-out “legacy” cities and small towns of the Midwest could become new homes for displaced climate migrants because they have solid infrastructure, many open lots and empty homes, access to water, and lower risks of climate change-driven weather impacts.
Still, more planning is certainly needed to ready receiver cities for an influx of migrants from coastal communities like Miami, which are experiencing rising sea levels and flooding, and desert communities in the Southwest, which are battling drought and reduced water supplies.
Legacy cities are former industrial communities that have fallen on hard times. Dan Baisden, a midwest urban planner, said these mid-sized cities in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, have experienced population declines, job losses, and increased concentrations of poverty. “Braddock, Pennsylvania has seen a 90 percent drop in population, and Johnstown, Ohio, a 70 percent drop.” While these legacy cities may be good places for climate migrants, they also aren’t “fully ready to accept them.” Through the CNU Legacy Labs project, he is helping these cities devise climate adaptation plans that “build density and social structures.”
There are other planning efforts underway to help guide migrants to safer places. Scott Bernstein, founder and director emeritus of innovation at the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), is developing a series of urban climate action plans, mapping instances of extreme heat, drought, and flooding. He has located the places with the highest and lowest frequencies of severe weather, heavy water events, and bearing winds. His goal is to identify the communities with the lowest risk of climate dangers.
Similarly, architect and urban designer Dhiru Thadani is examining development patterns of 120 communities in the U.S., including dozens of small towns, to determine which could best expand to handle population growth and a large influx of climate migrants. He noted that the U.S. population is expected to grow by 100 million by 2050.
With new urbanists Andrés Duany and Paul Crabtree, Korkut Onaran, principal of PEL•ONA Architects & Urbanists is writing a book on “directives for enabling adaptation” aimed at federal and state policymakers. The book calls for a new federal policy-making framework, an Adaptation Enabling Act in the vein of the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act of 1924 and the Standard City Planning Enabling Act of 1928, which devolved powers to local communities to zone and plan. The proposed Adaptation Enabling Act would give states and local governments the power to generate climate adaptation and migration plans.
Large influxes of climate migrants could happen sooner than expected. Patty Steinschneider, president of Gotham Design & Community Development, asked us to envision 100,000 people moving north from Brooklyn, New York, in the immediate aftermath of some major natural disaster like Superstorm Sandy. Communities near Brooklyn need to plan for emergency receivership as well as a potential long-term permanent influx. Just as many who have fled cities because of COVID-19 will not return, not all climate migrants will be able to or want to return to their original communities.
Baisden noted for a community like Toledo, Ohio, which has a very small planning staff that is already overrun with existing responsibilities, planning for a rapid influx of, say, just 100 families would be very challenging. “They have no long-term planning capacity. We instead need to work directly with communities on the ground.” Onaran said communities could possibly designate “receiving zones.”
For Jesse Carpentier with ICLEI USA, there is a lack of long range climate adaptation planning because its value hasn’t been sold well. “People act on emotions rather than logic. Immediate gratification will always be more appealing than long-term benefits.” So these planning efforts, which have a multi-decade horizon, need to bolster stakeholders through short-term incentives like awards, recognition, and certificates, “which really do work.” Adaptation efforts must also have “tangible co-benefits” for communities in the form of economic gains and aesthetic improvements.
So what can potential receiver communities do to prepare for both climate change and incoming climate migrants? Recommendations included creating comprehensive policies that incentivize migration, developing plans for reusing and adapting existing community assets, and investing in green infrastructure and planting thousands of trees. Communities can also let others know they are open and welcoming of climate migrants.
Prisca Weems, a founding partner with interdisciplinary firm Future Proof, noted that climate migrants will not just be an issue within the U.S. A 2018 report from the World Bank finds that 143 million people are now already migrating in-country each year.
Throughout the Congress for New Urbanism’s Virtual Gathering, landscape architects, planners, architects, and developers struggled to figure out how the pandemic is impacting communities and the built environment — and tried to foresee what changes are coming in the near future.
Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities will experience disproportionate negative impacts in the form of higher mortality rates, illnesses, bankruptcies, and evictions. Some also foresee a significant decrease in public financing for affordable housing developments.
There is also the fear that people are retreating to their cars, which are now viewed as “armored bubbles,” and to the suburbs — a trend that could lead to greater suburban sprawl, increasing transportation costs, and a steep rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
A few optimists argued that dense cities and communities, along with affordable and subsidized housing, multi-family housing, and transit-oriented development, will weather the storm. People will still be drawn to walkable communities and being near one another. Resilient communities will find a way, like during other recessions.
Low-income Communities Are at Greater Risk
In a session that looked at low-income neighborhoods in cities, Kit McCullough, an urban designer and lecturer at the University of Michigan, emphasized the need to protect and invest in communities where hospitality and restaurant workers live — places where COVID-19 is already exacerbating existing economic strain.
Small affordable housing property owners facing financial problems are increasingly at risk of being bought out by large Wall Street-backed development firms. This would result in more “wealth extraction in low-income communities” in the form of higher rents and increased evictions.
Many people who used to rely on transit to get to work must now use a car, which is a more expensive transportation option and “adds economic pressure.”
John Sivills, lead urban designer with Detroit’s planning department, added that “if you can decamp from the city, that says something about your income level.” In Detroit, the community has “rediscovered the value of public spaces” given most don’t have the funds to leave.
COVID-19 Requires New Urban Models
In another session, Mukul Maholtra, a principal at MIG, focused on how COVID-19 is impacting BIPOC communities much more than others.
“Black Americans die from COVID-19 at three times the rate of white Americans.” In tribal lands in New Mexico and elsewhere, “there are much higher fatality rates among Native Americans.” He called for investing in “healthy density” that works for everyone.
Christopher Leinberger, a land use strategist, developer, and author, said correlations between COVID-19 and metropolitan area density are “spurious and unproven.” He said “walkable urbanism has been through this before — crime, terrorism, and now the pandemic.”
There are three challenges to a rebound in cities: “lost jobs in the ‘experience economy’ — retail, restaurants, sports, and festivals — which is what makes ‘walkable urbanism’ special; transit safety; and land costs.”
He blames zoning and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) forces for skyrocketing land costs and gentrification in cities like Washington, D.C. The answer is allowing greater density where land prices are high and making walkable, mixed-use development legal in more places.
Public Financing Will Be Increasingly Unavailable
Andrés Duany, an architect, planner, and one of the most influential New Urbanists, said a total “rethink of New Urbanism is needed,” because the public funds that make many walkable developments possible have disappeared.
The pandemic is expected to have a negative impact on city and state budgets into the near future, which means far less public funds available for transit, affordable and subsidized housing, transit-oriented development, and the public portions of public-private partnerships. “Everyone is broke. There will be no capital budget and no tax credits anymore.”
Demand for walkable communities as currently defined will decrease. “Home deliveries are way up because neighborhood ‘third places‘ [such as coffeeshops, book stores, grocery stores, etc] have become toxic. And transit now equals death.”
Duany also foresees a rise in social instability in the U.S., and perhaps gangs of “marauders.” This is because “110 million Americans have no savings” and are facing rising healthcare costs and unemployment and failing social safety nets.
He proposed rapidly expanding mobile home communities, given they are subject to fewer regulations and therefore lower cost. Abundant and cheap old shipping containers could be used as the base of new modular mobile home reached via a staircase.
Through her research into 2,000 suburban developments that have been retrofitted for other uses, she has found that “urbanism is the new amenity.”
In the suburbs, people increasingly want walkable, mixed-use developments that offer “experiential retail.” Dead malls have meant growth for small town main streets. Dead strip malls are being reused as offices or healthcare centers. Big box stores have been converted into markets with small vendors.
“The pandemic could mean more urbanites return to the suburbs. Office parks could be refilled, instead of infilled. There could also be more experimental suburban public spaces.” In this scenario, the car is an “armored bubble” that offers a sense of safety in a world filled with dangerous viruses.
But ultimately, she thinks the pandemic will mean walkable places will become even more valuable. If you can live and work from anywhere, “the quality of place will matter even more.”
Demand for Different Residential Amenities
In a session focused on how home design may change with COVID-19, Paul Whalen, a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, said with many people cooped up at home, “visual and audio privacy, cross-ventilation, and multiple rooms that provide space for extended family” are becoming more important.
Homeowners and renters also now want separate spaces for making the transition from street to home, a “clear entrance where they can change out of clothes and take off shoes.”
Interior designer Kiki Dennis sees a changing relationship between public and private spaces within homes. Home offices are becoming semi-public domains that co-workers can see on Zoom, so they are being expanded and re-configured.
There is also much greater demand for residential outdoor spaces. “Underused outdoor spaces are being converted.”
“Ultra-luxe residential fixtures” like automatic sliding doors, face and hand readers, and personal elevators may trickle down to the masses, said Brian O’Looney with Torti Gallas + Partners. In some buildings in the Middle East, when an elevator is in use, it is locked and can’t be accessed by others in the building. This technology could become more widespread in denser cities.
Bill Gietema, a developer with Arcadia Realty Corporation, said people are buying homes online without seeing them in person.
“People want double ovens so they can bake more, expanded kitchens, home offices, workout spaces, and porches.” Some are simply lifting their garage doors to create a porch-like environment.
Multi-family housing complex designs are also shifting to include much more outdoor space and larger balconies.
A recent survey of developers that create large-scale community developments found that 16 percent are adding more shade; 22 percent, more parks; 23 percent, more trails; 57 percent, more bike lanes; and 42 percent, more playgrounds, which are now incorporating natural materials rather than steel and plastics. “There is a new desire to create a sense of community.”
In the end, though, Whalen believes many people who have fled cities will return to them. “People all want to be together. That’s why people live in cities.”
Once a vaccine has been developed, “there will be a joy in coming out of this together.”
Walter Hood, ASLA, is the creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. He is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. He is a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, 2019 Knight Public Spaces Fellowship, 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, and 2019 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
What change do you think can result from the killing of George Floyd by the police and the Black Lives Matter protest movement against racial injustice and police violence? The movement has become global and supported by millions of people.
That’s a hard question. My first response is that we’ve been here before. In light of the pandemic and other things, I’m really hesitant to say there’s going to be some major changes in the way black people are regarded and accepted in our society. We’ve had these moments before.
What makes it really hard, as a person of color, is understanding our history. In my short life — I’m in my early 60s — I grew up in a segregated neighborhood. My school was integrated when I was in junior high. For the first time, at age 13 or 14, I started living with other people who didn’t look like me.
That’s the hardest and most difficult thing we’re not talking about: the racial construction of this country. We’ve only had 50 plus years where we’ve actually lived together in an integrated way. We have close to 300 plus years of living separately. So the idea that we can just all of a sudden flip the switch and people will change and accommodate the “other,” it’s a really tough one.
I don’t think we’re asking the right questions. You’ve listed these facts and metrics. Why are these numbers so high? When one looks back, why are we still policed in similar ways? Why are people of color harmed at a greater frequency?
In a country that was “separate but equal,” there had to be an institution to keep that separation and keep people in their place. We have had close to 100 years of the Jim Crow institution, keeping us in a subservient place. This is U.S. culture. Even post integration, we still have to look at these institutions, which go back to the founding and the development of the country. You can’t separate the two. We would like to, but they’re inextricably tied together.
It’s important to allow these issues and histories to come to a greater light and clarity, because now more people are interested in trying to understand this predicament than I’ve ever seen in any point in my life. The pandemic has a lot to do with it. People are thinking about the future. Everything is unsettled at this moment, and all the pieces have come together. It’s the perfect storm.
Black Landscapes Matter, a book you co-edited with Grace Mitchell Tada, which will be published November, came out of a lecture series you initiated in 2016 following police killings. In your book, TED Talk, and other writings, you have called for planning and designing landscapes that allow for a diversity of narratives and perspectives, instead of homogenized landscapes that just say one thing to one group of people. How do you bring out these different memories and histories in a landscape?
After the spree of police killings in 2016, we wanted to bring together people who could articulate different voices in the black community. I wanted the book to articulate what’s missing in how we design for other narratives, which is about difference. I say difference, not diversity — it’s about different ways of interpreting the world. When one puts out multiple narratives, they challenge the singular and its maintenance.
I’m thinking a lot these days about difference and sameness. Colonialism is about sameness. It takes difference and makes it into sameness. It does that to promote and maintain its construction. W.J.T. Mitchell talks about a double reading of landscape, a double semiotic.
Colonization is happening inside the colony, as ideologies are projected outside the colony. Our projection — America, home of the free, and the brave, diversity for all, “all men are created equal” — is sent out to the world. The Statue of Liberty, “give me your tired…” — all of these things. But inside, we’re being re-colonized to keep that narrative intact.
But that narrative is being torn. People are looking for other ways to see themselves and others around them. So in Black Landscapes Matter, we talk about different story lines.
If more people are aware of what is part of their environment, not just today but yesterday, and possibly even tomorrow, we’d have a different way of thinking about the world. In so many spaces in this country, something happened! It has not always been vacant and desolate, places exist! Placemaking is re-colonizing. Something is always there if you are interested in it.
Many of your projects are specifically focused on unearthing hidden layers, creating spaces for multiple consciousness. The International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, tells the story of slaves arriving in the port of Charleston and their descendants. A master plan for the Rosa Parks neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan, explores the history of the movement for racial equality. Double Sights, a public art piece at Princeton University, expands the interpretation of the many sides of former Princeton and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Navigating through all these layers of history, how do you get to the essentials and make planning and design decisions that really resonate?
For me, it’s the willingness to want to unearth. Your previous question had to do with memory and history, which is a little different than unearthing.
Sometimes places are palimpsests, meaning part of the brick and mortar, and some of them are based in memories, the passing of time. For people of color who are marginalized, stories get lost. Each project is fraught with chance. I am not trying to solve a problem, per se. I’m trying to put something out in the world that has been covered up, erased, which might allow people to see the world and themselves in a different way.
Privilege at times only produces singular narratives, which is what happened with the Woodrow Wilson project. The students at Princeton still want his name off the building, so the piece has not resolved the issue. But what I hope the piece does is allow that issue to always be there. If someone at Princeton University said “remove the name of Wilson,” then the piece wouldn’t exist.
Double Sights at Princeton University / Hood Design Studio
With the International African American Museum, there are clear, bold design statements. How do you really focus in on certain aspects of history and tell a broader story through design?
The design decisions for the landscape are very personal and I am consciously having conversations with those before me. I approached the Woodrow Wilson project through the narrative of W.E.B. DuBois, who has always been part of my thinking as a black man, and his idea of double consciousness. That gave me a point of view to criticize Wilson.
As for the International African American Museum in Charleston, the final was not the boldest design. We developed 29 different designs and worked through each one with the community. From my personal point of view, I wanted to put out imagery that had never been put out before. I took it upon myself to push the community. The Black Body in Space is something that really intrigued me conceptually.
International African American Museum / Hood Design StudioInternational African American Museum / Hood Design Studio
For the Rosa Parks neighborhood in Detroit, I approached the project, again through history and identity. I’ve spent years with my peoples’ history. My research and design work has lived with these histories — not just American history but the history of black America.
Master plan for Rosa Parks neighborhood in Detroit / Hood Design Studio
Returning back to your larger question: I could have gone through practice with no interest in black history. I could have just accepted the privileged position of the designer. I could just work in the very homogeneous/standardized manner in which the profession trained me.
In my early years, that was really all I had to rely on, until I got to a point where it felt like something was missing. What was missing was myself. I did not see myself anywhere in landscape architecture, architecture, or planning. At the offices I worked, these ideas just didn’t exist. I had to create a context for my ideas to bear fruit, so I situated myself in the rigorous, intellectual world of academia and developed an art practice. This is what I’ve been doing the last 30 years.
Do you think because you’ve found yourself in your work, people can find themselves in it, too? Is that what creates a sense of resonance, when someone sees your work and connects with it?
No, they actually hear a different voice, which again, is playing off the homogeneous. Early on, I noticed the design decisions I was making were different than the decisions other people were making. I didn’t acquaint them because I’m black. It’s because of my advocacy for and interest in people and the particular places that they live, which comes from my experience of being black.
Very early, one of my projects in a disinvested neighborhood involved planting an allee of a hundred and fifty flowering trees at one time along a decomposed granite walkway. This was 30 years ago, and people weren’t doing stuff like that. To me, I wanted color to manifest in a bold way in a place that didn’t have color.
Those design choices came out of me seeing a black community in need of something. As a person making landscapes, that is what I could give them. I always go back that very simple act — that purity of impulse one has in a place where you’re engaged but also giving of yourself. And this relates to the questions: what are you feeding yourself? Where’s the inspiration coming from?
I try to bring in as much culture as I can to the work, which can offer multiple narratives and layers. I’m really not interested in singular gestures, but multiplicities.
People are yearning for difference. I just recently stopped using diversity and started using difference, because diversity is not really about difference. Difference is about opposition. Opposition is good. Double negatives are good. They exist in our world.
The doubles begin to tell stories we don’t tell. We see it in the language that is manifest over time by culture. You’ll see spaces given double negative terms, like Plaza Park. I was in San Jose, California, when Hargreaves was working on Plaza Park. I was like, “Plaza Park? Oh, this is interesting. Why does it have both?” If you go and look at the history, you know why it has two. These are the kinds of things people create over time through naming, adopting. Landscapes have a language.
If we’re critical enough, we can begin to read the landscape in different ways. Once you do, it changes you forever. There’s no way to go back.
Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the city government have painted “Black Lives Matter” in street-bounding yellow letters down 16th Street, NW in front of Lafayette Square and the White House. This was widely viewed as a response to President Trump’s order to teargas protesters and close off Lafayette Square — a key protest space and site of a former slave market — from public access. How do you unpack everything going on in that space? What is the role of public space in the protest movement?
In the history of this country, streets have been that number one space for protests. We can go back to women’s suffrage and civil rights. The streets are the public domain. In D.C., what’s public and what’s federal? That’s the interesting dichotomy in D.C. Lafayette Square, which is federal, gets acted upon differently than the city public. When I heard that, I was like, wow, I didn’t know the President had dominion over that particular space.
Protesting has always taken place in the public realm. You can go back to Kelly Ingram Park and the Edmond Pettus bridge. These are my first memories: people protesting in the streets. This is nothing new. The marking, particularly with the branding, might be something new, a kind of guerilla tactic. I applaud the mayor for doing it, because she was able to demark a space. People are calling it the plaza, but again, this it is about nomenclature. I applaud her for marking a space that was taken away from her.
Black Lives Matter Plaza / Photo By Bill Clark, CQ Roll Call via AP Images, Assisted by City of DC
Lafayette Square, like a lot of public squares, was among the first public parks in our country. They were also places where atrocious things happened in our country like slavery auctions, so they’re on hallowed ground to a degree. If we’re interested in changing how we think of ourselves, we can also be critical of the places where we’re actually protesting. To me, that could give credence to, or help articulate, issues we’re facing, particularly with the pandemic.
We know most low-income areas have higher cases of COVID, which you could also probably correlate to redlining policies and expulsive zoning, which was an institutional pre- and post-war planning practice. Redlined landscapes are still the same today if we are still in them.
Public safety is important. People should be allowed to use the spaces we have seen over the past few weeks, whether it’s the I-5 in L.A. or bridges in Minneapolis. These are spaces the public pays for.
You have equated the value of environmental diversity with that of social and racial diversity. Just as land comprised of diverse ecosystems are more sustainable and resilient, racially diverse or different communities also increase social sustainability and resilience. How can the fight for racial equality and justice support efforts to combat climate change and vice-versa? What are the connections?
The first connection one might think about is duplication. There really are two Americas, and we’re actually trying to support both of them, not equally though. There’s one America for one group of people and another for the other. It’s just not sustainable, because we’re having to spend more money on communities that are different, which is a result of the after-effect of not investing in these places in the first place. How to make communities more racially diverse is our next challenge.
We’ve been talking recently about a few new mixed-income housing projects in Oakland, California. When we think of mixed incomes, we think race, right? We can think of brown people, low-income; non-brown people, higher incomes. What might allow them to share the same space? That’s the question we’re beginning to ask. It comes back to public space, right?
We can develop parks and other types of landscapes that are more integrated into peoples’ patterns and practices, so they can begin to share space. The architectural question is a bit more difficult, because a lot of that is driven through the market.
As for environmental diversity, I’ve lately returned to reading Olmsted and early Central Park history. In Go Tell It On the Mountain, written by James Baldwin, he describes an experience in Central Park one day. He goes to this hill. It’s his favorite hill. When he gets to the top of that hill, having walked from Harlem to Central Park, with all the white eyes upon him, he’s king of the world. He could do anything. He’s standing there looking out to Manhattan. He’s on this hill in the middle of nature, and he could do anything, and then slowly reality comes back to him. He descends the hill and runs into an older white guy. Immediately, he’s about to apologize, but instead the man smiles. That moment is how I think about what landscape can do. In a certain way, how do we put ourselves together in a place where there is no label or stereotype of the other? That’s really tough to do, as we recently saw with that woman in the Ramble.
Gentrification of urban Black and brown communities most often results in their displacement. Some communities have viewed efforts to add new green space and trees to their communities as a gentrifying agent. So one response has been the “just green enough” design movement, which calls for adding green amenities but not to the extent that they would raise property values. What is your take? What approaches work best to stop displacement? And how do you think the protest movement can change conversations in communities where gentrification is happening?
All communities should be healthy. If we have the opportunity to increase biomass and improve the public-realm facilities in any community, we should do it. The fear of making something better particularly for those most vulnerable — really.
We should look at the issues that create the vulnerability. In many places, you have a high percentage of renters and low ownership. Some places you have little to no tax base. You have these institutional issue that don’t help. The first steps in some places are to figure out new and diverse housing types, increase ownership, and stabilize communities.
When communities were most healthy, successful, richest — whatever word you want to use to characterize them– they were diverse places. West Oakland has the moniker of having always been an African-American neighborhood. If you review its early formation, people came here because it was the western terminus of the railroad. Different communities of people worked and lived here: Latinos, Hispanics, African-Americans, Portuguese, Italians, etc. Post-war we see white flight, and then desegregation. First immigrant and then middle-class African Americans had opportunities to move into the places that whites had left. We then abandoned those redlined neighborhoods and left the most vulnerable.
That’s the dynamic of the city. We have to articulate these dynamics to communities in which we work and help them understand these processes.
I live in an area that was once redlined. There are single-family houses mixed with light industrial. It’s a pretty diverse, mixed neighborhood. Next to my building, there was no green space at all. People reacted to vacantness in various ways, which was to tag the walls, dump garbage or leave abandoned elements. I took it upon myself and started planting trees and shrubs adjacent the building. My little piece is the greenest part of the block.
What’s been refreshing and a reminder is watching how people reacted. Almost every day, the neighbor across the street tells me how great it is to see the green. People walk on my side of the street, and the behavior has changed. These are just little things that I just think we forget.
Part of our job is to help educate communities in which we’re working, based on shared knowledge. We can build an infrastructure to help with change, because change is going to happen. Cities are dynamic.
Very early in my career, I had a conversation with a black family here in the East Oakland neighborhood about moving out of the city. They wanted to move to the suburbs because the schools were better, and the crime was lower. I couldn’t change any of that from my position.
So the issues become more structural. We have to improve these basic infrastructures like public education and environmental factors. In many of the places where gentrification happens, they’re so easy to topple because all of the infrastructure is eroded.
In 2013, ASLA’s member leadership made diversifying the profession a top organizational priority. The number of diverse people entering the profession remains stubbornly low. The high cost of landscape architecture degree programs and lack of alternative degree programs are issues. So is the lack of diverse landscape architects who can advocate for the profession in diverse communities. What do you think are the most important steps that can be taken to bring more black and brown young people into the profession?
Landscape architects: just set the example. Make it interesting for people of color, so they want to come into the profession. This means you have to change the narrative. Reach out, do the work. Approach the way we make things through a cultural lens. Look for difference, so people might get excited by seeing and experiencing something that has them in mind.
Throw away the stereotypical and the feel good tropes — basketball, barbeques, community gardens. It would be attractive for people to say, “wow, this is how I can improve my neighborhood. Look at what they’re doing,” rather than settling. Really dig deep and contemplate these histories, the years of living separate.
How do we talk about living together? If enough of us are out making change and having a different conversation, the idea of attracting a diverse group becomes secondary.
Years ago, I was part of a landscape group that was pushing for diversity. You can’t expect to attract people if there is no interest in change.
I get excited when people of all persuasion get excited by the work we’re doing. It’s not about whether the project gets into a magazine and wins awards. To me, the best reward on any project is to get people excited, empowered, bringing them in, and making them part of the project.
We are currently working for the town of Nauck, Virginia. It’s a town square. Working with the community very early on the discussion centered on the Freedmen’s Village of Arlington Cemetery and the black diaspora that emerged when they were removed. Many in Nauck are descendants.
I had recalled years ago as an undergraduate, I met a black landscape architect, Everett Fly, who had uncovered some of the histories of these towns that were built during Reconstruction. That experience stayed with me, and when I had the opportunity to have a conversation with that work, I immediately began to ponder the semiotics of this term used to describe black and brown people. What does it mean to be F-R-E-E-D!
It took a lot of nerve for me to start this conversation since it was something I had never entered into a conversation with a community about. I can’t describe the kind of excitement and conversation that began from there.
Nauck Town Square / Hood Design StudioNauck Town Square / Hood Design StudioNauck Town Square / Hood Design Studio
We can bring more voices to the table when we discuss, gender, race, and difference. Tell the truth about colonization and its impact not just on native and immigrant communities, but on the black and brown communities as well. If we don’t talk about it, we are reinforcing a post-colonial view.
This will bring difference into our profession, so it’s not simply just about making beautiful things. It can become about what those beautiful things mean. Once we can attach diverse meanings to the things we make, our profession could be much more inclusive.
For maybe two-thirds of my projects, race never comes up. To me, that’s where we should be heading. I don’t want the moniker of “black designer.” I can design for anyone, because I’ve had to learn how to. This skill came from being the “other,” and having to learn about white America and how to navigate, which is what we (others) don’t see happening from white America, right? I don’t see that kind of investment in me.
All I hear is, “Walter, help me. I’m working in a black community. I need you.” No, you don’t need me. You need to do the work for yourself. You need to learn about us. You need to get in there and roll up the sleeves. This is not my (our) problem. Until it changes, we’ll be back in the same position 20 years from now, asking why we’re not a diverse profession.
