Here is a little piece on landscape, technology, and nationhood (or the lack thereof) I wrote for the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Unit Eleven publication for 2018. It’s part of the thinking I’m doing towards our upcoming ‘Landscape Citizenships’ symposium. https://landscapecitizenships.wordpress.com

Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we going? How will we get there? These are all questions lurking within the idea of national progress, and progress always implies a forward direction towards a goal, a telos, and technology is usually the tool to get us there. William Morris, in his utopian novel News from Nowhere, imagined this goal to be a withering away of the state (he was a socialist, but not necessarily always a state socialist), and a mutual and pleasurable management of all affairs without the domination of government. Famously, he envisioned the Palace of Westminster in the future would be used for storing dung: clearly a punitive downcycling form of adaptive reuse, and, of course, a symbolic home for what he saw was the primary product of governments. 

If we see technology in its broadest terms, as the application of a system to a task or set of tasks, then it is possible to see both nations and buildings (including those at Westminster) as technologies or means. Systems and technologies are mesmerising, and mastery of them deeply satisfying and engrossing. Thus it is easy for them to become worlds unto themselves, bounded and complete, ends rather than means. Questions of government become questions of procedure and policy rather than equality and emancipation, and questions of architecture are framed in terms of practice and construction rather than the classic Vitruvian ideals.

The ideals Morris and others of his time were cooking up (including Ebenezer Howard, Peter Kropotkin, Edward Carpenter, Emma Goldman, Patrick Geddes—not all of them architects or landscape planners) were dreams of whole life economies; how whole community and individual lives could be wholly lived in whole, flourishing places. The task was to bring together head, heart, hand, and land: Geddes sought the encouragement of ‘insurgent life’. Before the hard political boundaries of the twentieth century had formed as ideological schisms and concrete walls, the anarchists, socialists, and a broad range of other radicals were discussing an insurgency in which they all had a stake. The Paris Commune, author of its own unique form of socialism and victim of massacre in 1871, had not died without releasing the ideal of communal luxury into the world, and this was the egalitarian, emancipatory framework for shared human and planetary flourishing in which the forms of garden cities and green belts as planning tools (or technologies) would emerge. 

The green belt is an example of how these grand dreams have progressively been stripped down. From the view of a planner’s, politician’s, or developer’s map, it is merely empty space. From both a radical perspective and a landscape perspective, with a goal of insurgent life and life economies, it is empty not of buildings and development, but of all the rich layers of use, belonging, and conviviality it might contain. And what is humanity’s great project if not conviviality? Green belts are not just technologies, tools, or mapping strategies. They are also landscapes that demand convivial practices of dwelling and meaningful, productive, interesting use. They need life to surge up within them. 

All technologies, from smartphones to planning frameworks to buildings, need to be detached from the worlds they create unto themselves and reconnected with larger practices of dwelling. Our lives have become arenas of permanent destructive revolution (‘disruption’, restructuring, ‘flexibility’ meaning precarity, gig economies), and instead we need insurgencies that rise up from within, holding together those things which are truly of value while transforming all that is malign. Technologies must be bent upon the convivial, upon belonging, upon connecting to landscape. And national progress? The technology of the nation should always be working to minimise its own self-absorption and to prepare us all for finding conviviality in the substantive landscapes in which we dwell: the real towns, cities, countrysides, watersheds, bioregions, and continents to which we belong. The technology of nations should drive progress toward landscape citizenships and towards their own obsolescence. 

Ed Wall and I, along with the amazing Jane Wolff from the University of Toronto, are organising and hosting a conference this autumn that seeks to explore interrelations with landscapes as the foundation to citizenships. Please see details here: https://landscapecitizenships.wordpress.com

…and follow on Twitter @Citizen_Land

We have an amazing advisory group that includes:

• Jill Desimini, Harvard Graduate School of Design
• Shelley Egoz, Center for Landscape and Democracy (CLaD), NMBU
• Peter Hobson, Centre for Econics and Ecosystem Management
• Jane Hutton, University of Waterloo
• Ann Lui, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Jala Makhzoumi, American University of Beirut; President, Lebanese Landscape Association
• Don Mitchell, Uppsala University
• Kenneth Olwig, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp
• Amy Strecker, University of Leiden
• Ed Wall, University of Greenwich; Politecnico di Milano
• Tim Waterman, University of Greenwich; UCL Bartlett School of Architecture
• Jane Wolff, University of Toronto

The following is an excerpt from my essay, ‘Making Meaning: Utopian Method for Minds, Bodies, and Media in Architectural Design’ published by the Open Library of Humanities. The full essay is available to all, delightfully, as a completely free and open access publication here: https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/10.16995/olh.109/

The imaginative ‘play’ that we call design has a special space—the studio. It is a physical space that is particular to the act of design. Like the theatre, the stadium, or the pitch, it has a particular construction that marks the space out for a particular role. Like ‘once upon a time’ and the set-ups it elaborates, the studio is a physical space that corresponds to a specific space of the imagination. While, as with other species, play can take place anywhere, there is still a particular role for this special place, which is the setting for a ritual that triggers the flow of creativity. When entering the studio this frame of mind takes over, and any interruption to the atmosphere can be catastrophic—or at least it feels catastrophic. It is certainly detrimental to the creative design process.

As I write this, I am sitting in the British Library in London, as I often do, and I am reminded that here is a special place for imaginative play as well. I am also reminded how much I resent any intrusion upon my space of solitary play here. As if to prove my point, a woman has just walked in and is unpacking and rustling around just opposite me; and a young man has followed right behind and sat to my right, wearing too much perfume. I note, looking up at the continuing noise, that the woman is plugging in and setting up three (!) laptops in her space. The space of creativity and play is mental, physical, multi-sensual (as the scene above shows), affective, and particular, and is also marked by prohibitions and restraints—‘rules’—that are often internally imposed:

One generally finds, even in animals, “rules” of play: special signals (such as wagging the tail or not using claws), postures, facial expressions, and sounds that mean “This is make-believe”. Often special places are set aside for playing: a stadium, a gymnasium, a park, a recreation room, a ring or circle. There are special times, special clothes, a special mood for play—think of holidays, festivals, vacations, weekends. (Dissanayake, 1992: 43)

The studio is the particular place where make-believe is enabled in design. Kyna Leski addresses the role of the studio as a space of experimentation (just as the space of the library allows critical experimentation), brilliantly and poetically speaking of the individual experience of material reasoning within it. Her narrative is a modernist one—with roots in the methods of the Bauhaus—in which learning to trust the senses, to trust the materials, involves an initial un-learning (though not a total un-learning: the student does not become a tabula rasa). All the prejudices and preconceptions of the future designer are stripped away, and a newly built Homo faber steps forth. This is a useful narrative with which to encourage the student to trust in the process: We are taking a portion of yourself away, but replacing it with something much better. The importance of that trust cannot be underestimated.

Leski’s methods and interpretation, however, are often too focused on the personal. The studio is not merely a space of trust and a space for the interaction of the teacher, the student, and the media they will employ. It is also an intensely social space. The imaginative work that takes place in the studio is part of a larger process of co-making, co-working, co-imagining; and the studio is part of the larger world of associations, professions, families, etc., all of which inform and support the individual. The musician Brian Eno calls this larger process the ‘scenius’, a portmanteau of ‘scene’ and ‘genius’. This concept helpfully reminds us that even for the seemingly solitary ‘genius’ painting or writing poetry in a garret, that invention emerges from a shared background of teaching, conversation, making, exploring, and feeling together: an ‘ecology of talent’ (Eno, n.d.). It posits a play-space/design space of situated, mediated, and intercorporeal social connectedness—a space of what Elaine Scarry calls ‘aesthetic fairness’—that ‘creates in all participants a state of delight in their own lateralness’ (Scarry, 2000: 114). When I sit and create a space of intellectual experimentation and play for myself, alone in the library, I bring along all that has contributed to my current self, and I am reaching out laterally into other intellectual worlds with every book I open and every connection I make. Then I carry that back out into the world with me, in my own text, my teaching, my engagement with my profession, and so on.

For the architectures, particularly landscape architecture, the awareness of a ‘scene’ must include not only those people involved in co-invention, but they must enter into a constructive dialogue with all the processes and forces that comprise a landscape: biological, geological, climatic, cultural, social. The landscape architect needs to employ a mode of thinking and acting that Lorraine Code calls ‘ecological thinking’ (2006). I prefer a term I’ve borrowed from ethnology: ‘toposophy’ (see Kockel, 2014), thinking that is about place, grounded in place, not just about objects, but about vast arrays of intersecting and interdependent processes and forces. Unlike philosophy—‘beautiful thinking’—toposophy is thinking that is always about somewhere. The term ‘ecological thinking’, useful as it is, seems to direct us too much towards preconceptions of the natural world, while toposophy engages both nature and artifice. Toposophy is a perspective, allied to what Tim Ingold calls the dwelling perspective, which treats people as organisms immersed in their lifeworlds, as opposed to what he calls the building perspective, which supposes that ‘people inhabit a world—of culture or society—to which form and meaning have already been attached’ (Ingold, 2000: 153). This posits that the individual must ‘construct’ their world in order to act on it, rather than being, from birth, an actor in concert with the landscape in which he or she dwells. These simultaneous and interdependent actions and interactions are described well in theories of practice, which hold that practices ‘should be treated as involving thought and action together, and in so far as this is the case, embodied theory, as it were, is a part of practice itself’ (Barnes, 2001: 20). ‘Making a scene’ is connecting with and learning from others as practice; and as intercorporeal, embodied, emplaced sociality. This ‘scene’ contains conversations immersed in their lifeworlds. It makes connections with past realities; past dreams and ambitions; past constructions; and incorporates them as parts of possible futures. Thus it resists tendencies within modernity to clean the slate—where past forms and meanings may be expunged and new ones written upon a tabula rasa. Here an unlearning of the past is necessary for total invention. In a scene, though, ‘[t]hinking means venturing beyond. But in such a way that what already exists is not kept under or skated over’ (Bloch, 1986: 4). What already exists probably contains fragments and relics of past utopias, ready to be called into the future as part of the next scene. To those fragments are pinned satisfaction, fulfilment, beauty, and love; qualities deserving of continuity.

This October 10th, the London office of WATG released this image of a ‘greener future’ for London’s Fleet Street in support of the ongoing proposal to make London a ‘National Park City’. Dan Raven-Ellison, the proposal’s key protagonist, has a flair for PR and has effectively repackaged the worthy, but duller-sounding project to improve London’s green infrastructure (worthy, but dull) through the All London Green Grid (ditto). Just to show how much beneath notice all this earnest work was, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced his support for the National Park City (NPC) idea despite the fact that the All London Green Grid (ALGG) had been in development since Ken Livingstone was in office, and is already in place as Supplementary Planning Guidance. Granted, the National Park City initiative overwrites the whole conception of the city: the ALGG is about creating green space in the city and for the city, while the NPC is about making the whole city green, or at least this is I think what its message is.

There is, indeed, great value in conceiving of the city as a landscape, especially because that is what it is, whether green or not. London, like all landscapes, is made collectively by people, and it also shapes its inhabitants. Because a landscape is shared, it cannot simply be thought of as parcels of property.

So why am I so disturbed by the WATG’s image? Is it not churlish of me to object to something that is “designed for visualisation and conceptual purposes only”? Actually that’s already part of the problem. London is still reeling from the vast waste of public money perpetrated by another totemic visualisation, that of the Garden Bridge, which is thankfully now defunct. Visualisations have immense power to shape expectations, and this image is raising some false ones.

It has clearly been constructed to show the maximum possible use of street space and building envelopes to accommodate greenery. That, however, is a drastically oversimplified project. Cities provide us with a vast range of goods, from industry to entertainment to education and more. They provide general togetherness and proximity to one another. They give us things to do, including work. Cities also need to be maintained. Most of the things we like about cities, especially if they’re well-maintained, require big, heavy vehicles that could possibly be downsized, but not by much. Those vehicles require infrastructure that is decidedly grey rather than green.

Like many, I think the city would benefit from containing fewer cars, and from vehicles better designed for the city, but cities will still need to be served everywhere by vehicles, and by industry where it’s needed, not exiled to the margins. That’s the first false expectation, that we can wish vehicles away, or do everything by bicycle, and the second is that the ‘green’ city could or should resemble a garden.

Then there is a list of other problems, a few of which I’ll list here:

• There’s plenty of outdoor seating shown in the image. While it’s nice to sit out on the street, it’s not always a good thing. It can make sidewalks difficult to negotiate, it often encourages the use of deeply unsustainable patio heaters, and it expands restaurant floor areas, which might lead landlords to raise rents based upon capitalising upon public space as additional floor space.
• While a heavily planted streetscape might look appealing, it creates more obstacles for the blind and partially sighted and for wheelchair users. Wheelchair users, in particular, can become trapped in the space of the street by high curbs or planters.
• Greening of streets diverts our attention from improving existing green open spaces, which are desperately underfunded and neglected due to austerity–especially in the rest of Britain outside London.
• Property developers are always looking for excuses to build on open space. If streets are like parks, then who needs other open spaces?
• Extensive use of containers for planting requires extensive irrigation, and uses large quantities of potting mix, which often contains unsustainable peat.

The urge to create clickbait for papers like the Evening Standard can be overwhelming, and the creators of this illustration have succumbed. It’s not that we don’t need to envision what a greener city might look like. We do! Very much! But those visions need to value the city for all its goods, even the tough, messy, dirty (often fun) ones created by work. Suburbanising the city in the way that this image does empties it of much of its vital meaning and purpose.

WATG (Wimberley, Allison, Tong, and Goo) specialises in ultra-high end luxury developments and resorts, which may explain why they might think such a high-maintenance streetscape would be feasible for London. Here is their proposal: http://www.watg.com/london-national-park-city-green-block/

Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays is forthcoming from Routledge in October 2017

This is an excerpt from my chapter in Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays, due out this October, which I co-edited with Ed Wall. My writing is in superb company in our book: Ross Exo Adams, Camillo Boano, Paul Cureton, Jill Desimini, Murray Fraser, Maria Guidici, William Hunter, Jane Hutton, Katya Larina, Don Mitchell, Peg Rawes, Douglas Spencer, Amy Strecker, and Jane Wolff. More information about the book is available here.

Manners and civil society

The misunderstanding or misapplication of public manners – the set of customs that eases people’s negotiation of public spaces – creates problems for the design of public landscapes such as streets and squares. In Britain in particular, much pressure has been brought to bear on design for the public landscape to provide visual cues for behaviour, usually with very mixed results and a preponderance of signage. Despite the British reputation for politeness, the relative absence of customs for appropriate public behaviour creates problems not just for design but for the comfort and safety of individuals, and also for civility, recognition, and democracy in society as a whole.  I don’t wish to imply that public manners have necessarily been eroded over time – in many places the public landscape is a more civil place than ever before in history – however it is important to address what should or could be in order to provide most fully for democracy and human flourishing.

The first value of the public landscape is that it should be equally accessible to all, regardless of any individual’s membership in any minority group and regardless of any person’s class. Equality does not automatically confer justice, but in this case the link is fairly clear, as I shall discuss below. This particular equality is primarily guaranteed by manners rather than legal enforcement. Manners, the expression of virtues, are the first and most basic expression of morals as applied in everyday life – and indeed form the ground from which many moral judgements are constructed. Peter Johnson concurs, noting that “without civility as a minimal condition of human contact … principles of justice and welfare would have little permanence and reliability” (1999, xi), and John F. Kasson in his study of American manners writes that manners “are inextricably tied to larger political, social, and cultural contexts and … their ramifications extend deep into human relations and the individual personality” (1990, 3). The construction of public manners is also highly relational, contingent upon place, time, and what actors are engaged in a situation. The word ‘situation’, in and of itself, is telling, and points to the fact that our moral lives are always situated. Here it is important to stress that this is not a position of moral relativism; in fact it is quite the opposite, as what is sought is a condition of public interaction that assumes certain universal moral goods, such as the avoidance of harm and/or pain, and the aspiration to human flourishing.

Democratic public life depends upon a customary compact between citizens; an agreement as to what is proper in a public context. The notion of propriety has long been associated with sanctimoniousness, of ‘polite society’. When manners are constructed of hierarchical relationships, they inevitably involve deference and condescension as well as inflexible and possibly harmful codes of honour. When manners are seen as the foundation of just relations in civil society, then ‘polite society’ might be seen as simply the mutual regard necessary to ensure the movements necessary to society, a structure in which we are all inevitably embroiled. Put simply, propriety is a form of ownership; individual ownership of the self and its relation to the public world at large. Propriety is defined by custom, and custom, at its best, is not a dogmatic and inflexible framework, but rather it informs and is formed by everyday life and everyday practices. Further, what is proper to society is the mutual recognition in the public realm that is the first gesture of reciprocity – a sort of gift from one person to the next, however small. The anthropologist Stephen Gudeman is one of our finest commentators on this. He writes, “Strictly a secondary and composite phenomenon, reciprocity is not the core of society but its expression. Anthropological theories have it backwards: reciprocity is neither a primitive isolate nor the atom of society but its badge” (2001, 92). Reciprocity also takes us outside of our communities, into realms of exchange outside of the exclusive bounds of community. Gudeman, to some extent, indicts the construction of communities: “A commons is regulated through moral obligations that have the backing of powerful sanctions. But communities are hardly homes of equality and altruism, and they provide ample space for the assertion of power and exploitation from patriarchy to feudal servitude” (2001, 27). Much political rhetoric has stressed the importance of community, but civil society is a broader realm than mere community and requires broader consideration. What happens on a sidewalk reflects our understandings of public engagement beyond the bounds of community.

References

Gudeman, Stephen (2001) The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market, and Culture. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.

Johnson, Peter (1999) The Philosophy of Manners: A Study of the ‘Little Virtues’. Bristol: Thoemmes Press.

Kasson, John F. (1990) Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang.

This article first appeared in the January 2017 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine

“I really want to make the whole city like this,” says Martí Franch of Estudi Martí Franch (EMF), speaking of his vision of designing the green infrastructure of Girona, Spain, through a process of enlightened and engaged landscape management. We are sitting in his office, among shelves full of models and a table full of drawings. With us are Marc Rosdevall, a landscape architect with the City of Girona and the project’s director, and Marta Costa-Pau, a reporter from the local newspaper who is eager to report on the most recent transformations EMF’s work has wrought on Girona, and, in an amusing bit of journalistic circularity, to interview me to find out why this work is of interest and important to an American journalist and his landscape architecture audience.

Girona is a city in Catalonia with a population of roughly 100,000, situated in the rocky green foothills of the Catalonian Coastal Ranges at the confluence of four small rivers. The landscape is typical scrubby Mediterranean maquis, studded with stone pines (Pinus pinea), holm oaks (Quercus ilex), and the inevitable and omnipresent formal Italian cypresses (Cupressus sempervirens), which have an air of nervous, attendant stiffness in the loosely informal Catalonian landscape, like butlers at a barn dance. When I visit in late spring, there is a festival of flowers in the central city called the Temps de Flors. It’s a mix of floral installations that range from the highly professional and artistic to the desperately tacky. However, in the spirit of spring, with the soft air at skin temperature, the rivers full of water, and the maquis replete with shades of fresh and fleshy greens on the hills above the honey-colored stone of the old town, the exuberant bad taste is forgivable and welcome, even charming.

The Can Colomer meadow during its periodic mowing and maintenance. Image courtesy of Estudi Marti Franch.

The town’s generous web of green spaces reflects its topography, with concentrations of agricultural terraces on the hillsides, and the valleys between full of lush and wild plants all pushing into the densely built fabric of the town. It gently pushes back, curving into the green. All this gentle beauty belies a much less idyllic history of the landscape’s continual mistreatment. Girona’s citizenry has not recently had a virtuous relationship with the land: “The forest is for violation and for dropping fridges,” says Franch, referring to the long-standing problem of the regular dumping of building and household waste and appliances willy-nilly on the city’s fringe. His goal is to reveal the beauty of the whole of Girona’s landscape, opening up strategic views, providing access to the rivers, installing pathways and resting places, and, in doing so, encouraging the populace to value its surroundings more and creating a new relationship between the city and its surroundings. Even in the early stages of his project, he notes, there has been a visible reduction in the amount of dumping.

Beginning in September 2014, Franch embedded himself in processes of management across Girona, working closely with the city’s landscape maintenance teams, known locally as “brigades,” in particular with Jordi Batallé, the charismatic and energetic lead (comisari) of the brigades. Rosdevall describes the early stages, in which his superiors decided they would humor Franch in what they assumed was a quixotic journey. “My boss didn’t expect much from Martí. ‘Leave him alone and don’t spend any money,’ he said.” Franch, inspired by the approaches exemplified by the work of Gilles Clément in France, wanted to generate design from a direct engagement with site. He doesn’t see himself as a lone practitioner or a “master”; rather, he works in an informed conversation with the ecology of his practice, the ecology of the site, and the ecology of ideas in the world of landscape architecture.

Clément, when describing his approach in his 2015 book, The Planetary Garden and Other Writings, could be speaking for Franch, too: “For a long time I gardened without clarifying my ideas. Nevertheless, there were plenty of standpoints: to conserve the diversity already present, to increase it, to utilize the energy inherent in the species, not to use opposing energies unnecessarily, and to end up with a pledge that I repeat as often as necessary: to do as much as possible with, and as little as possible against.”

An annual diagram of maintenance including mowing and planting, growth of vegetation, sunlight hours, and other variables. Festivals, when maintenance brigades are busy, are shown as red sunspots. Image courtesy of Estudi Marti Franch.

Franch’s work in Girona is healing, connective, and narrative. The project can only loosely be called a master plan. What he has created is a series of walking loops, itineraries that knit Girona’s neighborhoods together, but these come together on the ground more than in the plan. “The final drawing is almost the as-built,” Franch says. The work begins on site, to understand the topography, hydrography, and viewsheds. With the maintenance brigades, he begins an active process of clearing, mowing, pruning, and cleaning. “The main thing we do is subtraction,” he says. Bearing in mind a framework of green infrastructure coaxed into presence by following the existing topography and river corridors, sites are cleared, trees are limbed up, and connections are made apparent. Only then, for the future management practice, is the work transferred to plan and section. In essence what is created is an action plan, not a master plan.

View from a terrace on the Torre Gironella itinerary. In the foreground is the barrel arch of the water mine roof. Image courtesy of Estudi Marti Franch.

A striking example of the approach is the “shore edge” project, on the bank of the River Ter opposite the historic center of Girona. The district has had shady associations, appropriate to its formerly overgrown character, but it is now part of a legible riverside itinerary. Limbing up and clearing trees and shrubbery pulls the eye and the walker along the path with cool and luscious glimpses of the burbling river glinting in the sunlight. Where the path once followed a ruler-straight maintenance road, glaringly paved in white gravel, there is now a parallel route that brings people into the space of the river. It is palpably cooler, shaded. The river becomes audible, a balm to the senses.

This path leads to a newly created beach. Since the river was dammed, the natural scouring action of the river ceased to expose it, but through a process of clearing and rototilling, a gentle forest beach, softly shaded, allows ample room for play and relaxation. For the festival of flowers, the Temps de Flors, a lifeguard’s chair has been installed, a gleeful marker of the new mood introduced here, and a sprinkling of beach chairs adds color and life. Many are occupied, even on our weekday visit. They’re examples of what Franch calls “confetti,” small, irregular site interventions that give visitors occasional reminders of the fact of design. These can be sculptures, furniture, stumps left for climbing, almost anything. Visitors themselves become confetti in this setting. We approach a man in a motorized wheelchair, which has negotiated the sand successfully. He greets us with pleasure, and speaks of his pride in how the space has been transformed and how his daily excursions here have been improved. Equally important is his influence on the site, in which his regular presence serves as a daily marker of safety and comfort for others.

Girona green infrastructure and walking itineraries.

As we leave the shore edge, we pass a nightclub (“Pandora”) advertising exotic dancers, indicative of the uses to which this neighborhood had previously lent itself. The nightclub had opposed the improvements to the site, which included some loss of unsightly parking spaces along the river, but this year for the first time it’s decked its balcony with flowers for the festival.

Franch’s understated approach is not geared toward big wins—spending concentrated on visible central sites with sculptural and photogenic results, which are so often what politicians prefer to support, but it has captured the imagination of the area’s politicians. We have lunch with Narcís Sastre, the Girona city councilman responsible for landscape and urban habitat, on the terrace at the El Cul del Mon restaurant just outside town, and he tells us his reaction to Franch’s quiet, covert work. “When I first saw the meadows, I wondered what was happening. Once I knew, I wanted to spread it around the city.” Since then, the city’s mayor, Marta Madrenas i Mir, has also become a supporter. The “big win” with Franch’s designs is across the whole city and on every constituent’s doorstep, or at least it will be once all the looping landscape itineraries are created. What politician could resist such immediate, inexpensive, and widespread impact? When I talk about how many small projects can add up to big things, Franch grins and corrects me: “This is not a series of small projects. It is the biggest project in Girona ever.”

Martí Franch in the EMF office, Girona. Photo by Tim Waterman.

After lunch we climb from the valley to a hilltop overlooking Girona to see further interventions of this biggest project ever. Past a well-established and comfortably eclectic former favela, we come to signage indicating we are at the head of a “water mine.” Franch has created an itinerary that includes its edge. The water mine is a curiosity—it is a horizontal well that follows the contour of an agricultural terrace. Along our route, the edge of the terrace is marked by the barrel-arched roof of the tunnel, punctuated with chimneys which I speculate may work in the manner of a qanat, using air pressure to push water along to augment the sluggish movement caused by the infinitesimally slight gradient.

Postcard-worthy views open to the city and cathedral below as we move from an olive orchard abutting the water mine up to higher terraces. A steely blue-black thunderhead has filled the sky on the other side of the valley below, so we enjoy the view for only a moment, and hurry back through a tunnel of holm oaks formed by yet more judicious pruning. Thunder and lightning and the crepuscular light of the tunnel draw attention to how the nature of the itinerary is shaped not merely by place, space, and movement, but also by shifts of time and weather that animate the space. Fat, cold raindrops begin to slap down on us.

The drawings for the shore edge project serve first as plans for action and maintenance, and then only later add up to a master plan. Image courtesy of Estudi Marti Franch.

Franch’s management-based, hands-on methods have led him to try to find a new term analogous to genius loci that speaks of a deep understanding of diurnal and nocturnal cycles, weather, the seasons, and cycles of work and play framed by such markers as harvests and festivals. He suggests genius tempi, and I venture that zeitgeist fulfills at least part of that sense. We both like that each term contains time, presence of mind, spirits, and ghosts in their etymological derivations. Later, to find the right term, I ask the help of a friend, C. A. E. Luschnig, a classicist and etymologist. “Well,” she tells me, “tempi is not correct. The genitive of tempus is temporis, tempus being a neuter noun of the third declension. Maybe temporum (the genitive plural) would work better. Tempus has a full range of meanings including season, lifetime, the times.” This seems to crack the problem and to improve on it beyond our expectations—the term we were looking for was “the genius of time,” but conceiving of time as plural and nested is even better. Thus to add to genius loci, we now have genius temporum, the genius of times.

There is genius, too, in Franch’s propensity for action first and reflection alongside and after. He knows action is necessary, and his project is to learn by doing. There is no possibility of “analysis paralysis” because analysis, evaluation, design, and action are all part of the same impetus and bound up in the same nexus of energy. There is generative genius (or perhaps what Brian Eno calls “scenius”) in the collaboration, in the fact that the project’s ownership, design, and management are distributed and shared. The collaboration and co-creation mean that the design is not a totalizing one, but that it is a set of ways of acting and shaping in accord with changing uses and ecologies over time, perhaps beyond the lifetimes of all concerned. There is genius, finally, in the project’s tacit insistence that we must rethink the timescales, budgets, and commissioning of projects to embrace much more embedded and long-term practices of landscape management and design. Beyond the “big win” there is something at once softer and sweeter and more rich and grand that can develop in the sets of relationships through which we build great cities. In Girona, the genius of the place and of times—genius loci and genius temporum—are conspiring to create the city as a work of landscape art for the ages.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has switched off the public life support to London’s embattled Garden Bridge, a tempestuous, contested, and deeply symbolic idea that will die tightly clutching a sheaf of contemporary perversions of the civic good, a cautionary portfolio of design’s worst addictions.

Its life charts a course through the sordid world of politics and displays how the ambitions of the nation–state and the re-emerging city–state have uncoupled from democracy and attached to unplaceable global flows of power and money. The people are left helpless in a muddle of endless doubt, misinformation, threat, and the magical thrall of consumer glamour and celebrity pull. All this is held within the fading body of the Garden Bridge.

City skylines have become trophy cabinets of branded building concepts (Witold Rybczynski has written compellingly of this here), increasingly greenwashed to pull the heartstrings of a populace that still largely wishes to see good done in the world. Although the Garden Bridge design lacked the space of the sky as isolating backdrop, it made up for it with the clean plane of the River Thames in a site chosen not for its dearth of transportation opportunities but for its eminently Instagrammable setting.

Its protagonist was the former mayor Boris Johnson, for whom it was another high-profile vanity project, like his cable car to nowhere (the “Dangleway,” as it is known), and the awful red loopy thing at the London Olympics. Johnson’s habit is to say truly horrible things that represent his sinister ambitions (or prejudices), and then to chortle at them as if they were jokes, in a chummy, conspiratorial way that makes his audience feel like insiders (though they’re clearly mugs). Thomas Heatherwick uses the same trick: “It feels like we’re trying to pull off a big crime,” he said to the Guardian critic Olly Wainwright in the early days of the design, “with a twinkle in his eye.” He has compared his design to guerrilla gardening, dubiously recruiting an edgy, idealist grassroots urban practice into his globalized brand. Heatherwick has been called the “Leonardo da Vinci of our times”by Terence Conran, which is tragic not for what it says about Conran’s judgment, but for what it indicates about our times. Cultural appropriation, high-concept gimmickry, branding, and spin are the new hallmarks of genius, as is whom you know, of course, but that, at least, has probably always been the case with genius.

Heatherwick and the English actor and bridge booster Joanna Lumley have both hastened to the Garden Bridge’s deathbed to declare the injustice of its consignment to the Tomb of the Unbuilt Project and to register their shock at its passing. It did not die a natural death of public disapproval! No! It was killed by naysayers and philistines! And it was loved by a silent majority!

In reality, it was a show of exuberant wastefulness against the black cloth of a cruel, calculated national policy of austerity. It also helped to bolster suspicions outside London that the city draws in wealth like a drain and spews it out again in showy geysers to the delight of a sweetly wettened metropolitan elite.

How will the Garden Bridge die? It will die a despot—unaccountable to opinion and the needs of the people. It will die a martyr—a symbol to the wealthy and powerful of how ungrateful the little people are for their benevolence and thus how, perhaps, they ought to disregard their feeble desires. It will die a fool—a leering Punch and Judy show to the sweeping drama of genuine and necessary civic endeavor.

But what can we learn from all this foolishness—so that this is not a tragic life lived in vain? That the whole debacle came this far shows that we might have a human predilection for showy waste, and that channeling it fruitfully and beautifully rather than damagingly is an important job for designers. That greenwash might be losing its power to persuade people of the environmental worthiness of projects, which means designers had better get serious quickly about building deep ecological value into their projects. That there is a growing public distaste for signature projects as urban baubles, and that civic and public value must be considered as a priority. That the architectures must work together to identify, create, and promote worthwhile projects, even to become their local developers. And, finally, that design education and practice must strive immensely to work with building projects not just as objects and concepts, but to embrace, understand, and value context while striving for spatial justice.

This article first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine’s website on 12 May 2017.  

“A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Autumn 2016  issue I talk about the importance of telling a good story. The Autumn issue contains an extensive section featuring the winners of the Landscape Institute Awards. 

This year’s Serpentine pavilion, by Bjarke Ingels Group, was welcomed with descriptions in the architectural press of Ingels as ‘the king of one-liners’. A good one-liner (in comedy, that is) involves a pithy statement, usually that skews a simple situation or idea with a pun, a non sequitur, or perhaps that exotic-sounding bit of wordplay, the paraprosdokian: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” A good one-liner in architecture, presumably, would remix spatial tropes surprisingly, perhaps to comic effect.

There is good reason to believe that the architectural one-liner is most suitable to an ephemeral building such as the Serpentine pavilion. Once uttered, a one-liner doesn’t stand up very long. One-liners are hardly ever appropriate to landscape, with the exception of very ephemeral landscapes such as those of the major flower shows at Chelsea, Chaumont, or Métis. True landscapes – the ones that people live in – offer layered, nuanced, complex narratives with plots, subplots, and sub-subplots. Apologies for the pun on ‘plots’. That’s clearly enough with the one-liners.

A one-liner goes down well these days, though, especially in social media, where a single arresting image and 140 characters of text are absolutely key to communicating and promoting a project. But what works for buildings is simply too reductive for any landscape project worth its salt. We need to find a ‘narrative hook’ to jar the reader and engage them with a complex act of storytelling that will follow. ‘Septimus, what is carnal embrace?’ is the opening line of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. We want to know more – and any Stoppard fan will know that what follows is layered, nuanced, complex, probably carnal, and will require their full attention.

If there is one characteristic that the award-winning projects represented in this issue of Landscape display, it is the quality of storytelling, and probably also the employment of a narrative hook. Judges need to understand the story of a project and why it is worthy as quickly and efficiently as possible. The practices that consistently win also happen to be consistently good storytellers who use words and images together most effectively. Now, some of them (though not as many as one might suspect) also have PR people to help with this, but this should not deter those without such resources from giving it their best try.

The awards are not just about communicating our best work as a profession to the world, but also serve as a moment when we can all communicate with each other. Furthermore, they offer an opportunity for us all to sit down and figure out what important messages from our work need to get out to the rest of the profession and the world at large. This is really crucial for everyone to ask at least annually – what is the year’s story? That time to take stock and communicate what we do is particularly important when justifying our work from day to day. Everyone, particularly those in the beleaguered public sector, which needs good storytelling more than any other field, must figure out how to find the time to enter the awards. The reward will be greatest in everyday work, and in everyone’s understanding that it is part of a necessary story.

This is published in the new journal Testing-Ground, by the Advanced Landscape and Urbanism research group in the Department of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Greenwich, London.

Detail of Old London Bridge on 1632 oil painting “View of London Bridge” by Claude de Jongh. Image from Wikimedia

Nearly sixty years ago, J.B. Jackson wrote one of the most insightful essays about landscape ever written, “The Stranger’s Path”. Jackson’s warm, gentle, and wise voice and keen observation have been constants in my career as a landscape architect and writer, and I offer the following piece as a kind of fugue, a flowing together of Jackson’s voice into mine, in the way that so many stories flow together in the city along the Stranger’s Path. Our dearest hopes for the future will always evolve from the places and the voices of our past. The city is a cosmopolitan story we write together, and so many of us have come there to write it as strangers.

Spokane, Washington, 1986

In what was, I think, the spring of 1986, my good friend Lisa and I ran away from the small town of Moscow, Idaho where we lived and went to high school together, and spent the day in Spokane, Washington. Spokane in the 1980s was a city only in shape, hollowed out by suburban expansion as well as an economy depressed over most of the twentieth century, though it had briefly stuttered into faltering recovery in the late 60s and 70s. For youngsters like us, with sarcastic anti-establishment attitudes, vertical hair-sprayed hair, and cassettes of obscure German industrial music in our Walkmans it was precisely Spokane’s grittiness that gave us both something to sneer at and to revel in. In Moscow, my friends and I would spend hours mooching around by the railway tracks, and exploring abandoned grain elevators and empty farmhouses, participating in the birth of an aesthetic based in the blasted remnants of rust-belt style decline and the demise of the small farm and farmer’s cooperative.

In Spokane these same forces were writ slightly larger, and the modern and postmodern buildings and landscapes produced in its short recovery were also empty and decaying. Spokane possesses one of the most extensive ‘skywalk’ systems in the USA, built around the time it hosted the environmentally-themed World Expo of 1974. Presumably grown from the Corbusian ideal of the ‘death of the street’, but also in defence against the area’s frigid winters, this shopping-mall-in-the-sky had first killed the streets below, then slowly killed itself. Lisa and I wandered its empty corridors eating chocolate-covered espresso beans and contemplating a seemingly post-apocalyptic cityscape from which all the citizens had simply disappeared.

A few streets away, at the Greyhound bus station, which was full, not of travellers, but of people trapped by permanent transience and precarity, and the smell of urine and fear, we wondered together whether bus stations, once planted, would spread their black tendrils of decay into the neighbouring soil; bad seeds that would ensure a continuously poisonous urban harvest for an area. Lisa and I sat on the pavement and sang a comic jingle together from the Sex Pistols movie Sid and Nancy, “I want a job, I want a job / I want a good job, I want a job / one that satisfies / my artistic needs.” We laughed together at the irony of the postmodern condition, savvy, world-weary punks.

“We are welcomed to the city by a smiling landscape of parking lots, warehouses, pot-holed and weed-grown streets, where isolated filling stations and quick-lunch counters are scattered among cinders like survivals of a bombing raid.”

No matter how blasé we pretended to each other to be, though, this was one of our first, rare moments of escape from home without our families. Rather than being swept solicitously past the iniquitous and ubiquitous head shops and adult book stores of the Stranger’s Path, we were now free to stand and stare at them, even enter them. Though we pretended we’d seen it all, we hadn’t really seen anything yet, certainly not in Moscow, Idaho. We were both making a time-honoured exchange with the city of Spokane; its secrets and lures for our inquisitiveness and invention. But poor Spokane—where Jackson’s ideal Stranger’s Path would lead us from potholes to a clean, bright city centre, Spokane’s Path at the time only led to a gaping absence where that centre should have been.

“[I]s it not one of the chief functions of the city to exchange as well as to receive? … These characteristics are worth bearing in mind, for they make the Path in the average small city what it now is: loud, tawdry, down-at-the-heel, full of dives and small catchpenny businesses, and (in the eyes of the uptown residential white-collar element) more than a little shady and dangerous.” 

London, England, 2015

It’s Saturday the 14th of November 2015, and there is a steady rain. I’m starting a short walk from the base of Christopher Wren’s monument to the great fire of London, just at the intersection of London’s two most venerable Stranger’s Paths: London Bridge, for 700 years the only dry crossing of this reach of the Thames, and, of course, the River Thames itself. London has many Stranger’s Paths, which now include some routes oddly distended by public transport. Heathrow Airport, for example, sits amidst a vast terrain of potholes and parking, but travellers smear quickly across the suburbs via the Piccadilly Line or the Heathrow Express to eventually rejoin the Stranger’s Path in Earl’s Court or Paddington, each place raffish and lightly sleazy. The Borough High Street and London Bridge are still part of continuous Stranger’s Paths that, from Borough, fan out into Kent, Surrey, and East and West Sussex. I’m walking the stranger’s path out of the city, because now I’m a long time resident here, a Londoner as much as any other, it doesn’t make sense to me to walk the Stranger’s Path from the view of one entering. I will walk from the civic centre, that which absorbs, towards the periphery and beyond, from which the Path flows.

“The simile was further that of a stream which empties into no basin or lake, merely evaporating into the city or perhaps rising to the surface once more outside of town along some highway strip; and it is this lack of a final, well-defined objective that prevents the Path from serving an even more important role in the community and that tends to make it a poor-man’s district.”

Vistas in the City of London, with its tangled, medieval streets, are tightly enclosed. As one approaches London Bridge from the City of London along King William Street, the view expands dramatically. It is possible, here, to quickly comprehend the topography; the high north bank and the once-marshy south bank. The surface of London Bridge, a very clean plane, emphasises the horizontal and draws the eye out over the river. The water is shining as the sun breaks through the day’s dark, moist clouds. To the east, the Tower of London with flags waving. When London Bridge was crowned with its twin walls of houses, shops, and chapels this experience would have been very different. Before 1760-61, when the bridge was cleared of these habitable encrustations, and at the height of British naval power and transatlantic shipping, it must have been possible to catch glimpses from the crowded bridge, between the buildings, out to countless masts and ship’s decks forming an unbroken but uneven ground where now there is open water. Out the gate to the south, one would have passed under the cautionary severed heads of the executed, held aloft on pikes, signifying, perhaps, that the rule of order was rather weaker outside the gate than it was inside. Outside we would find the petty criminals, hucksters and whores, bishop-pimps, betting, drinking, and theatrical acts of all scales. On the south bank I reach the Borough High Street, its narrow footpaths jostling with people and its streets full of cars splashing through puddles gurgling up onto the curbs.

“The sidewalks are lined with small shops, bars, stalls, dance halls, movies, booths lighted by acetylene lamps; and everywhere are strange faces, strange costumes, strange and delightful impressions. To walk up such a street into the quieter, more formal part of town is to be part of a procession, part of a ceaseless ceremony of being initiated into the city and of rededicating the city itself.” 

The Borough High Street and the myriad alleyways feeding into it are a writing and rewriting of the dialogue between congestion and commerce. A succession of narrow courts and alleys open up with only a building’s width between them. On a map, they appear like the teeth of combs, and they echo the parallel streets that once thronged perpendicular to the Thames, pulsing with a constant flow of people and goods from across the heaving seas. This whole place Jackson might have described as ‘honky-tonk’, and despite recent attempts to Manhattanise the area, I have hopes that it will retain its rough-and-tumble demeanour. The incredibly fine urban grain here reminds us that not only would these streets have been congested, but so would the commerce itself, with many businesses not wider than a person’s girth—and the prostitutes, of course, themselves commodities—‘commodity’ even being a name for their most private parts. The prostitute’s business fits precisely the space of her body. The carts drawing goods into the city to discharge in its markets would have been constantly clutched at and called to from these many stalls, perhaps most when the carts were returning empty and the purses were full; bellies filling, balls emptying; the city’s carnal and pecuniary tides are one.

The George, down one of these narrow side streets, is a rare survivor from the seventeenth century, and its history is longer—its original building was burnt. It is a galleried coaching inn, decked with balustrades on all levels from which to watch the comings and goings of horses and carriages below. Its interior is as intricately wrought as the streets outside. There are grand rooms and snug corners and stairways that allow glimpses of action above and below and which carry snatches of laughter from floor to floor. It’s full, loud, and friendly today with big groups crowding around tables filled with food and ale. It’s a dry spot to wet the innards, and my glass of Southwark Porter goes down a treat as I write, perched on the edge of a high bench with my notebook on a sticky table. The men next to me are talking about women, then about smoked meats.

“For my part, I cannot conceive of any large community surviving without this ceaseless influx of new wants, new ideas, new manners, new strength, and so I cannot conceive of a city without some section corresponding to the Path.” 

When I leave The George, the beer has gone cold in my belly and rainy day melancholy has begun to take hold of me. Just to the south a hoarding has gone up around a large building site. Signs show images of the excavations that preceded the construction; foundations and walls closely stacked parallel and perpendicular layer after layer, generation after generation. Somewhere they begin in the silty ooze this part of the city is mired in. They are a reminder that the trajectories we inscribe have been written over centuries. As a species we don’t simply leave trails on the surface, but also below and above. When I look through the windows cut in the hoarding, I see all that is now gone, and sheet pilings line the edge of a vast, clean pit with freshly poured concrete curing at its bottom.

At last I arrive at the Marshalsea Prison wall, a place I have brought numerous visitors and guests because it is a place where you can feel the full weight of London’s terrible past. This blackened and dreadful high wall, studded with occasional spikes and rings, was the outer wall of the prison in which Charles Dickens’ father was incarcerated, amongst many others of London’s wretched. A site redolent of woe. Today, as the rain falls, I arrive to find the wall ‘restored’ and almost completely rebuilt, still solid and massive, but clean and crisp and regular. I knew I would find it this way, as I had caught a glimpse of this atrocity of cleansing while it was underway, again behind hoardings, but I’m still unprepared for the magnitude of the loss now that the hoardings have been removed. All its presence, its meaning, has been washed away, scrubbed away, normalised. That cruel history that called out to every visitor, “Never again!” has been whitewashed. What once was chillingly, silently eloquent is now merely mute. I stand in front of the wall and I can’t stop the tears welling up in my eyes.

Afterwards I wander aimlessly through the Borough Market, pushing through the crowds, and then cross the river at the Southwark Bridge, where the tide is high and the river is brimming with water that looks like cold, milky tea. Behind a glass curtain wall in a new restaurant in a new building near St Paul’s, a woman with shining hair and perfect teeth is laughing in a way that shows practiced charm, but that is clearly forced. I find my way back to the narrow streets with brick buildings shouldering in and panes of glass emitting warm, yellow light.

“The Stranger’s Path exists in one form or another in every large community … preserved and cherished. Everywhere it is the direct product of our economic and social evolution. If we seek to dam or bury this ancient river, we will live to regret it.” 

The work of EMF – Estudi Martí Franch – in Girona, combines techniques of landscape management and architecture with garden design, maintenance, and planning, illustrating the need to conceive of a more ecological relationship between landscape disciplines, urban and rural, in the future. See my upcoming article this summer on EMF’s work in Landscape Architecture Magazine.

“A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Summer 2016  issue I call for a unified voice and fewer petty distinctions between different arms of the landscape profession. 

Last year Monty Don hosted a series on the BBC called ‘The Secret History of the British Garden’. In four parts, it covers the history of British landscape design from the 17th century until the present, with each episode spanning an entire century. Naturally, such a large scope compressed into four hours is inevitably going to involve some simplifications and generalisations, and much is guaranteed to be missed.

In the final episode, some familiar characters from modern and contemporary British landscape architecture appear: Geoffrey Jellicoe (without mention of his wife and design collaborator, Susan), Dominic Cole, and Phil Askew. While Cole and Askew both manage to make articulate plugs for landscape architecture, Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe aren’t alive to insist on identifying the profession, and thus Monty Don refers to their work repeatedly as garden design, even when he is talking about large-scale masterplanning such as their work at Hemel Hempstead. Does this do landscape architecture a disservice, or does it simply highlight a reality of public perception that we can either fight or accept? In the public mind, garden design and landscape architecture are synonymous, and despite a century or so of clever and articulate people championing a difference, this conflation has not shifted at all.

From a garden design perspective, what is conspicuous about Monty Don’s treatment of twentieth and twenty-first century gardens is that, after having checked in at Hestercombe and Sissinghurst, his focus thereafter is strictly upon the work of landscape architects, which may well explain why he felt the need to identify Geoffrey Jellicoe as a garden designer – in order to throw a bone to garden designers who might feel they had been given short shrift. Indeed, where was Dan Pearson or Todd Longstaffe-Gowan or Arabella Lenox-Boyd or any number of garden design personalities who are not, by any means, shy of the lens or press? It’s worthwhile considering that garden designers are going to feel just as aggrieved about Don’s programme as landscape architects are about Jellicoe’s misidentification. Are both professions forever doomed to play second fiddle to each other?

Pearson and Longstaffe-Gowan are both garden designers who employ landscape architects, and both are undertaking large-scale public projects. In the case of their two practices, it is impossible to make a distinction between the two professions, with the possible exception of the fact that garden designers tend to be more visible to the media. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that the two professions, while distinct, are interpenetrating. Perhaps, given that the big issues of our profession, from climate change to water-sensitive design, are being addressed in gardens as much as in public landscapes, we need to treat gardens with the utmost seriousness. Perhaps the British garden needs total reinvention. Perhaps we also need to insist that garden designers are educated as thoroughly and licensed as strictly as landscape architects.

And now that I’ve opened that can of garden- enriching worms, I shall open another. It is not just garden design, but also urban design that is a nebulously defined discipline which is nibbling away perennially at our borders. If we are to increase our visibility and viability as a profession, it will not be by retreating to a well-defined position that is almost certainly indefensible, but by opening up the discussion about how to build a unified voice with other professions and about how to ensure that all concerned are as highly qualified as possible. Opening up this discussion is very seriously overdue. If we can manage this discussion, which we must, then perhaps we can eventually get on to the one about how property developers also ought to have rigorous built-environment qualifications.