It isn’t easy, but most things worth doing rarely are. Consider how science policy – or, really, ANY policy – is made today. The cognitive chasm between a decision maker and a policy analyst is all too often crossed by a flimsy one-page memo. Or, worse, a printed “deck” of PowerPoint slides (see Edward Tufte’s jeremiads against PowerPoint for more on this). All subtlety is drained from the issue as it goes through the analytic steps of defining a problem, creating some possible solutions, and assessing each alternative for cost, effectiveness, equity, etc.

Science policy is no different. Decision makers – both elected and appointed – outsource the process of thinking through the details to someone else. The decision, in a sense, has already been made by the time the decision point arrives. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but this is hardly the stuff of a healthy democratic process. What do you think?

I snapped this a few days ago on Washington Avenue near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Clearly someone got an iPhone for Christmas and decided to purge. I couldn’t help but think of this as a similar arrangement to the sticks in Prospect Heights a week or two ago.

Just before last week’s snow storm, I caught this bit of accidental sculpture on Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It looks an awful lot like Andy Goldsworthy was roaming through the neighborhood.

[image: NYC OASIS map]

Using the 1609 map overlay in OASIS (made possible by the Mannahatta Project), we can see what the West Village might have looked like from above. The dense forest canopy makes it difficult to track the path of Minetta Creek, so in the image above I’ve also activated the layer that shows streams and ponds in 1609. The squiggly blue line shows, more or less, the course that Minetta Creek took through the area, flowing from a spot just a few blocks east of modern-day Union Square down to the Hudson River at Washington Street and Charlton Street.

I was in London recently visiting with faculty in the geography program at University College. Most of the week-long trip was actually a quiet vacation, nestled between taking the GRE in mid-November and the Thanksgiving holiday. I walked around the city looking at bits and pieces of landscape urbanism in between half-hearted visits to the usual list of museums.

There have been plenty of changes since my last visit in 2005, particularly on the South Bank between Norman Foster’s City Hall building and Herzog + de Meuron’s Tate Modern. Here’s a picture of something that really grabbed my attention at the “more london” development just west of city hall. Running along a pedestrian causeway tucked between the complex’s layered glass towers, a little rill stretches from the bank of the Thames to bustling, commercial Tooley Street. It took me by surprise, and I was happy to casually walk along the water with no particular place to go.

This slice of landscape design got me thinking about all of the lost rivers of London, and then about their cousins in New York City. Streams like the Minetta Water, which bisected the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York until the 19th Century. My friends know that I’ve been working on a design project to re-imagine Minetta in the contemporary city, and I was pleased to see that the landscape architect for this site had run so far with a similar idea. I was even happier to see how captivating this little trickle of water could be for office workers passing through on their lunch hour. Men in suits casually stepped back and forth over the gap in the stone paving, and couples held hands across the little chasm.

What would happen if the “stream” were a bit wider? A bit deeper? Could it still be engaging if it were more of an actual water body and less of a simple water feature? Or would the enormity of the thing make people less likely to absentmindedly play with the landscape? Any thoughts?

The folks at the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection have kindly plugged a high-resolution image of the Viele Map into Google Earth, allowing anyone with free time on their hands to figure out whether or not their apartment is built over what used to be a fetid marsh. I’ve been focusing on the area downtown surrounding what the old Collect Pond. Today it’s a maze of government buildings and courts, but years ago this spot was an idyllic retreat for Dutch settlers crowded on the southern tip of Manhattan island. As the city grew northward, The Collect gradually turned into an open cesspool. By the early 1800′s, the pond was all but gone, filled with rubble from nearby excavation projects.
I’m posting four images that resulted from an afternoon of goofing off with this thing. Enjoy!

An accessible writer and capable storyteller, Cronon succeeds in blowing up centuries worth of cultural misconceptions about nature and the environment. Someday I’ll find the time to come back and post about the introduction at length (maybe after class discussion later this month!). In the meantime, pick up a copy of the book at the library or work your way through the first forty pages on Google Books.

Unlike urban planners (who still pine for the all-knowing and all-encompassing Master Plan) and architects (who can hide behind a single building project while ignoring the massive change surrounding the site they’re working on), landscape architects are walking away from the discipline’s old obsession with creating pretty vistas frozen in time that can only be experienced at a distance. Instead, landscape architects are diving right into the muddle of post-modern/fordist/industrial/whatever society and trying to design spaces that can adapt to change. 

When I was working on the development of parks and greenways in the South Bronx, I grew obsessed with the idea of mutable and evolving green spaces. In a city where the Parks Department is chronically underfunded and park maintenance often depends upon the largess of wealthy benefactors, the South Bronx was (and continues to be) ill equipped to receive the hundreds of new acres of green space that will be coming online over the next few years. Lacking the deep pocketed locals that played such a central role in reviving parks in Manhattan and Brooklyn (Prospect, Central, and Bryant parks are the obvious examples), open space advocates in the South Bronx are scrounging around trying to secure a steady stream of funding to operate and maintain the new parks that they so valiantly fought to develop over the past decade. Every few months, a new scheme is proposed, but so far nothing has stuck. In the meantime, a handful of small scale stewardship projects coming out of organizations like Sustainable South Bronx and the Bronx River Alliance help to supplement public funding for operations and maintenance. 

These circumstances would suggest that new parks and greenways developed in the South Bronx need to be designed for a radically different set of constraints from those confronting landscape designers working in Manhattan. A project that has been beautifully rendered on paper will not look the same just a few months after construction is complete. Plants will die, structural elements will be vandalized, and citizen stewards will be forced to create a patchwork of homespun repairs when the Parks Department cannot afford to do the upkeep itself. That is, of course, if a vibrant cohort of stewards comes forward or if a locally based organization can continue to afford to fund a semi-professional grounds crew (as Sustainable South Bronx has done for over two years in the Hunts Point neighborhood). 

On top of the uncertainty associated with spotty funding, landscape architects working in areas like the South Bronx must take into account the community’s evolving relationship with parks and open space. For decades, the only park in Hunts Point was miles away from the peninsula’s residential core and smack dab in the middle of an industrial waste land. The park itself was really just an outgrowth of an ancient cemetery that offered too few opportunities for active recreation or creative re-use. Up until the opening of Hunts Point Riverside and Barretto Point parks a few years ago, folks in the neighborhood were simply not used to having open space within walking distance of home. With crime still a significant concern and local air quality impaired by fossil fuel emissions from nearby highways, spending time outdoors — even in a beautiful new park — can be a daunting proposition. That doesn’t mean that new parks in the South Bronx won’t be used if they’re built. It simply means that the ways in which new parks are used will continue to change as people grow more comfortable with spending time in them. 

This brings me to a great quote by Rem Koolhaas in the Waldheim piece. The quote refers to Koolhaas’ design for a new urban park in Paris that faced some of the same constraints I’ve outlined here (former industrial/commercial site, etc):

“It is safe to predict that during the life of the park, the program will undergo constant change and adjustment. The more the park works, the more it will be in a perpetual state of revision. The underlying principle of programmatic indeterminacy as a basis of the formal concept allows any shift, modification, replacement, or substitutions to occur without damaging the initial hypothesis.”

The quote speaks for itself, though I have to wonder what an open space designed for indeterminacy and change would actually look like, if only because that would be the primary concern for residents in any neighborhood slated for a major landscape redevelopment project. People want to see pictures. Before-and-after pictures, preferably. Show up to a community board meeting with complex (though visually stunning and beautiful) graphs and maps that describe the indeterminate evolution of a new park over time and you’ll end up getting booed off the stage. So how do you work around that contradiction? And is there a bigger role for communication designers to play than landscape architects in that part of the process? That’s something I want to explore.

The passage is from “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes” by James Corner. It’s a chapter in the larger volume titled Recovering Landscapes: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture which Corner edited.

Most of the short passage is actually a quote from Jonathan Smith’s article “The Lie That Blinds: Destabilizing the Text of Landscape” in Place/Culture/Representation.

Here it is:

“As Jonathan Smith writes, ‘When closely observed, every self-image humans have into the landscape will betray its pretensions with ironic affirmations of an order that is both wider and weirder.’ In other words, the landscape construct is inherently unstable, an indeterminate dimension that can be opened up through artistic practices and made to reveal alternative sets of possibility [pp.157-158].”

Corner is dealing with the futility of landscape projects that start by assuming a withdrawn viewer gazing upon an unchanging scene (essentially the core definition of “landscape” according to most people). Those sorts of landscape projects assume a place that is frozen in time, beautiful and uninterrupted and derisive of everyday life in its seeming perfection. His answer to this traditional approach to landscape — as both a theorist and a practicing landscape architect — is to blow up the static scene by highlighting or reintroducing some element that reminds us of the dynamism of the place.

In many instances, this could mean putting humans — specifically, human culture – back in the picture.

I can think of an endless series of activities — “operations,” to Corner — that would accomplish this goal. There are so many ways to play the trickster and destabilize any and all of the totemic landscape images that float around in out culture. That doesn’t mean these activities necessarily have to be playful. You can imagine a shrine for an automobile accident victim on the side of a major highway destabilizing the pastoral pastiche of all those shrubs and grassy hills. The action should, however, be a little unsettling. Or, at least, as Jonathan Smith said in the passage that Corner quotes from, it should grip the viewer and yank him back into an experience of reality that is “wider and weirder.”