Unearthed. Karen M'Closkey
a site’s given form and material.
Chapter 1
GEOGRAPHIES
Geographical “place” is today treated as an instantiation of process rather than an ontological given. This way of thinking about spatial scale immediately reintroduces matters of time and history into geography.
—DENIS COSGROVE
LOCAL SPACES ARE TIED TO REGIONAL AND GLOBAL PROCESSES. SPATIAL SHIFTS, INCLUDING THE RECENT AVAILABILITY OF LARGE SWATHS OF DERELICT LAND IN URBAN AREAS, ARE THE RESULT OF INTERSECTING ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL FORCES
that influence a region’s transformation over time. The parks being made on such sites today are implicated in these larger processes in two ways: first, the space for their existence is enabled by the movement of manufacturing to other regions and countries, as well as military base closures, resulting in the so-called postindustrial landscape; second, the funding for their existence is enabled by revitalization efforts that are used to entice capital into city centers—as real estate development and tourist dollars—since parks play a major role in “urban renewal.”1 In other words, the transformation of derelict land into parks is as much a product of shifting capital as was the prior abandonment of the same land.2
Though today’s park landscapes serve similar functions to their nineteenth-century counterparts in that they are infrastructural, combining hydrology, transportation, and recreation, they are radically different in how their social and ecological functions are defined. In an era marked by increased awareness of the global environmental impact of human actions, attention to environmental justice, and mandated public processes for design implementation, the task of developing appropriate proposals for such sites is not easy, particularly because the “public” is not the unified subject or body that it was presumed (or desired) to be in the nineteenth century. Parks are no longer seen as a means to “solve” social ills or educate the “lower” classes by means of bourgeois aesthetic standards; yet parks remain culturally, socially, and ecologically significant. How can the work of landscape architects successfully represent a diverse collective of people who privilege different aspects of a site’s past events or future uses without catering to the demands of a single group or neglecting those whose interests may not be part of the client’s sanctioned agenda? How do landscape architects design for socially diverse groups in a way that can support differences without compartmentalizing public space into exclusive zones that cater to only one group or use the hegemonic approaches that characterized much modern planning? How is “place” recovered or defined in the spaces that have been stripped of their natural features and severed from their surroundings?
George Hargreaves’s response to these challenges is through explicating what he refers to as the “rich history of the ground.”3 The projects highlighted in this chapter show how this notion informs the firm’s work in various ways that allow it to engage the history of sites without sentimentalizing the past on the one hand, or simply ignoring it on the other. This chapter analyzes how Hargreaves Associates responds to the physical and cultural layers that constitute these sites, which includes identifying former uses or events that are deemed significant, and how these are recognized in the designs. Thus, the theme of “Geographies” focuses on how the firm’s design approach reintroduces “matters of time and history” into public landscapes.
REPRESENTING THE COLLECTIVE
Planners, architects, urban designers,—“urbanists” in short—all face one common problem: how to plan the construction of the next layers in the urban palimpsest in ways that match future wants and needs without doing too much violence to all that has gone before. What has gone before is important precisely because it is the locus of collective memory, of political identity, and of powerful symbolic meanings at the same time as it constitutes a bundle of resources constituting possibilities as well as barriers in the built environment for creative social change.4
—DAVID HARVEY
THE PIONEERING MODERNISTS COULD NOT foresee that the shifting location and quantity of manufacturing labor, along with legislation supporting centrifugal development, would lead to an exodus of industry and population from cities, leaving gaps and detritus that would form the sites for future landscape architects. The result of post-World War II urban disinvestment is a landscape that has been described variously as holey, dross, void, terrain vague, and so on, and, as architect Albert Pope notes, is “characterized as where people are not, where the urban collective is profoundly marked or inscribed by its absence.”5 It is well known that these gaps resulted from federal policies. Until the 1970s, numerous federal housing acts supported new construction, rather than rehabilitation, resulting in the destruction of neighbor-hoods that were deemed blighted.6 Moreover, the 1956 Federal Highway Act gave local planners the jurisdiction to cut highway routes through their cities as well as 90 percent of the funds needed for their construction, eroding the building fabric, displacing people, and isolating neighborhoods. We are familiar with the results of these discriminatory procedures because the pattern was repeated throughout American urban environments. Not surprisingly, these late-modern-era clearing operations prompted much skepticism about the efficacy of planning, contributing to current theorizing about the death of the master plan. Many are doubtful of the potential for master plans to do more than kowtow to formalized and traditional notions of creating community: “It is better to suffer the void of abstraction than gratuitous representation, better to be lost than to languish in the ‘objective world’ of closed urban development.”7
Attempts to redress the abuses of modernism’s clearing operations—when it was presumed that the correct spatial form (ordered and clean) equated to a correct social form (ordered and clean)—have been varied. On the one hand is the return to some presumably shared past through the use of historical symbols that cater to a nostalgic idea of “community.” This is seen in much New Urbanist work and is what the above quote by Pope, as well as landscape urbanism in the United States, is positioned against.8 As cultural geographer David Harvey notes, community is a “mythical social entity,” which can be as much a part of the problem as a panacea (as in gated “communities,” or any exclusionary group).9 The other extreme, as suggested by Pope and others, is to adopt an approach of “letting it be,” where the past returns as an imagined form of unmediated nature. Some have suggested that these vacated spaces should remain as they are because their value lies in their lack of definition. Abandoned leftover spaces, where natural processes overtake cultural artifacts, are seen to offer conceptual alternatives to the colonizing forces of the marketplace. Their lack of productivity or purpose results in a “crisis of classification” and in this crisis apparently lies freedom: freedom from the capitalist forces that produced these sites in the first place.10 As noted in the introduction, Hargreaves Associates’ Candlestick Point Park shares some of these qualities of entropy and decay that some find so appealing.
The contrast between these two extremes (exclusionary planning versus lack of planning) reveals two distinct approaches to what Harvey identifies as a perpetual pendulum swing between utopianisms of spatial form and utopianisms of process. Though his example of a utopianism of process is the laissez-faire of the free market (the belief that if the market were truly free from regulation all would be right and well), the “let it be” of the terrain vague and some recent projects within landscape design are equally utopias of process, where design specificity is suppressed in favor of letting projects “naturally” evolve (as seen in OMA/Mau’s winning scheme for Downsview Park in Toronto). An alternative approach is to assume that public space remains vital and to ask not whether we should reconfigure these spaces, but how. If the move toward isolated pockets of urban disinvestment was underwritten by economic and environmental policies, the same should be true of efforts to reinhabit these urban voids.