Alec Spangler: Walking and narrative

The mid-80s to early 90s was a big time for extra dimensions. Superstring theorists proposed an 11-
dimensional universe; digital virtual realities had become possible, and popular culture abounded with
stories of strange, secret worlds overlaid onto our own. It was also the period in my childhood when I
became interested in walking. The kind of walks I liked were mundane and arduous; drawn-out
errands in back-country suburbia. I don't doubt this habit began as a way of playing out my Terry
Gilliam-fueled inter-dimensional fantasies. I enjoyed going to the often seen but rarely inhabited
places I knew from car windows; medians and edges of industrial parks, places where Stephen King
might have said that the boundaries between worlds had grown thin. Had I known the word 'uncanny'
I'd have been able to describe where I wanted those walks to take me. I only knew them as my version
of a magic wardrobe.

Years later I found out about more analytic methods for such spell-casting. Erwin Straus thought that
when walkers become train travellers the phenomenon of space is contracted and systematised. So for
those of us used to mechanised forms of living, walking ought to de-systematise. I think this means
'make-into-narrative'. When I read about Straus's idea of mechanised 'geographic space' vs. bodily
'landscape space' I fully understood what walking means to me.1  Walking is narrative; and narrative is
all about embedded worlds.

I've spent some time thinking about what the expression of walking is in art and design, even in
strategies for living. For me, the answer is that the walking-self creates by telling stories: There is
duration and spatial extent. The body has a place in it. Possible outcomes are multiple and
simultaneous; there are added dimensions. There is meaning. There is no logical necessity. There is no
rightness, because stories don't have to be right. They just have to be good.


1  Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley:The University of California Press, 1986. pp 52-53

Alec Spangler. Greens #2, 2015. Coloured ink on paper, 30” x 41”Alec Spangler lives in Brooklyn and designs landscapes for Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. He has an MLA from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; an MFA from Purchase College, SUNY; and a bachelor’s from Vassar College.

David Birchall: Sound Drawings (Leicester, Skipton, Edale) 2012-2013

Made between August 2012 and October 2013 all the drawings record passing of time and sounds as heard from single spots in the midlands and north of England.

David Birchall lives in Manchester in the UK. His work includes making and playing meta-guitars, circuits, and drawings. He is currently the artist in residence at The National Media Museum in Bradford. 

editor's note:  In the middle of the process of collecting articles and essays, David Birchall ordered On Site review 28: sound. His website shows a most beautiful collection of sound drawings of landscapes, encompassing so many of the issue themes of recent On Site reviews: writing, drawing, mapping, narrative, sound and, importantly for this issue, landscape.  Beyond the images, beyond the meaning, the semantics, the manipulation and the machinations behind some of the most innocent-seeming landscapes, especially in our national parks, David Birchall’s landscapes are sweet records of birds, rain, trees; cars, airplanes – a landscape of intention and an inadvertent result.

David Fortin: Watching Sudbury; focussing the landscape gaze

Landscape Viewing Platform. photograph, Jessica Lam, image courtesy of Laurentian University School of Architecture

The re-Creation pavilion is a collaboration between Dynamic Earth, Sudbury’s interactive science museum, and second-year students at the Laurentian University School of Architecture. Given the geological and mining emphasis of the museum, students designed a pavilion that acts as a lens that captures aspects of Sudbury’s landscape impacted by the mining industry. They are also building the pavilion which is expected to be finished in October of 2015.

Horizontal charred wood slats and benches reference the extensive use of roast yards during Sudbury’s early mining history when an estimated 3.3 million cubic metres of wood were burned to remove sulphur from the ore. Viewlines are established to slag hills, the result of a process whereby molten iron was removed from ore through smelting and then the rock waste was dumped into the landscape.  It also focusses on the iconic 380m tall Superstack built in the early 1970s to disperse sulphur and other smelting by-products.

Signage explains the reclamation of the slag hills by the mining company Vale in relation to the broader re-greening agenda of Greater Sudbury, as well as the Superstack’s role in improving air quality in the city. New trees along sightlines will extend the way the pavilion frames the stack in the landscape, away from its blackened past and towards future smelting processes that negate the need for it. 

 The viewing pavillion in construction, October 2015

David Fortin is an architect teaching at Laurentian University School of Architecture,who has research interests in the crossovers between science-fiction film and architecture, as well as Métis design thinking in Canada.

Desirée Valadares: Dispossessing the Wilderness

the tonic of wildness
Cultural constructs of North American identity have long hinged on wilderness, the mythology of uninhabited nature, and the vastness of a virgin landscape. The idea of national parks as spaces of ecological purity and sources of national pride relate to the search for an authentic and unspoiled landscape. In 1995, William Cronon stirred controversy with his article, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’. He declared the time had come to rethink the very notion of wilderness which had served as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest.

Wilderness environmentalism originated with ideology embedded in two intellectual movements: the Romantic Sublime and the Post-Frontier (Primitivist) philosophy. Western preconceptions of nature underwent sweeping changes in the nineteenth century; environmental philosophers — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopol and painters such as George Catlin from the Hudson River School (1820-1880), were instrumental in shaping cultural values and attitudes toward wilderness conservation. Their collective sentiments loosely informed The Wilderness Act of 1964, a historically important event in American environmental politics —
”A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognised as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

The Wilderness Act of 1964 became a powerful legislative instrument to memorialise America’s wilderness heritage and to enshrine vignettes of a primitive America symbolic of a once-virgin land.

For Canada and the United States, the acquisition of territory for the creation of national parks remains a complex and deeply contested narrative that is virtually neglected. It is often overshadowed by the cultural rhetoric of wilderness, ecological integrity and associated landscape aesthetics – the picturesque, sublime and pastoral.  Park histories often minimise race, class and gender consequences in order to promote national parks as a physical and political construction of the nation-state and as an imagined national unity that further silences alternative and difficult histories, including the bitter, emotional conflict and contentious debates over land use in heritage sites, protected areas and conservation districts.  

dispossessing the wilderness
“The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him…It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia and Siberia should pass out of the hands of the red, black and yellow aboriginal owners and become the heritage of the dominant world races”
          —Theodore Roosevelt. The Winning of the West, 1904

Sociologist Joe Hermer describes the ‘emparkment’ of nature associated with the creation of North American national parks as a vivid paradox. Conservation policy typically excluded the inhabitation of these landscapes and managed encroachment by strict law enforcement.  This ‘pleasure ground ideal’ emerged not only from a twentieth-century tourist culture but was also deeply embedded in the institutions of colonialism and Western power, failing to recognise ‘wilderness’ as ancestral and often sacred homelands for indigenous aboriginal peoples who were viewed as an unfortunate blight and an affront to the sensibilities of tourists.

Policies of aboriginal displacement gained traction in the founding of America’s first national parks, namely Yosemite, Yellowstone and Glacier, from the 1870s until the 1930s. These established precedents for the exclusion of native peoples from other holdings within the national parks system in the rest of North America. The rhetoric of cultural superiority, which stemmed from feudal principles of land ownership, resulted in the placing of differential values on the landscape and consequently, the study of national parks is one way to understand the evolving framework of the Canadian state, conservation thought and practice and its political character.

conservation-induced displacement
While the establishment of national parks in Canada had adverse consequences for First Nations, Inuit and Métis land, hunting, fishing and timber rights, other groups were also affected.  Land exchanges and expropriations of private landholdings as a park-creation tool, particularly in Canada’s Atlantic provinces, was revealed by Boyce Richardson in his 1985 National Film Board documentary For Future Generations which profiled growing opposition to expropriation in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The creation of Cape Breton Highlands National Park (1936), Prince Edward Island (1937), Fundy (1948), Terra Nova (1957) and Kejimkujik (1960) left many landowners with no choice but to accept the government’s meagre financial offers and to relocate to nearby communities. Many were angered by the arbitrary way they were treated and forced removals fostered negative relationships for years, sometimes generations. Particularly contentious was the case of Kouchibouguac National Park in New Brunswick where the 1969 expropriations disrupted and dismantled the lives of more than 1,000 Acadians whose families had fished and farmed the land for generations.  Settled communities and villages were uprooted followed by a swift and violent erasure of traces of human habitation despite organised resistance. A year later in 1970, Québec’s first national park, Forillon, also resulted in the forced displacement of over 225 Gaspésiens. Though most signs of human occupation were erased from Forillon National Park, certain buildings and landscapes in the Grande-Grave sector remain to this day.

Eventually, Parks Canada’s policy was amended to prohibit the use of expropriation to create or enlarge national parks. Parliament subsequently amended the Canada National Parks Act in 2000 with a similar legislative prohibition. Now, land that is required to establish national parks is acquired only on a willing seller-willing buyer basis.  However, policy towards either erasure or preservation of the history of occupation within any national park is not always clear.

peace building and reconciliation
In many countries, state-supported cultural heritage management policies pay little attention to difficult histories, preferring to ignore and selectively edit them to tell more comfortable or self-affirming tales to bolster national and community pride. The violent history of dispossession through forced displacement and expropriation, associated with the establishment of Canada’s national parks, was silenced and ignored to hide the less palatable parts of the national park narrative that involved the systematic exclusion of people from their ancestral lands. These unwanted, dark memories were so irreconcilable with the country’s sense of national identity that they were selectively erased from public consciousness. By default, the material heritage testifying to these unsettling events was often physically removed, neglected and over time, obliterated entirely from public view and civic space. As a result, these distorted narratives and sensitive histories prove to be challenging to interpret and reconcile due to their potential to further constrain, disadvantage and oppress already silenced and marginalised groups.

Parks Canada’s recent nation-wide reconciliation efforts to acknowledge expropriated citizens through official apologies, special access passes and commemorative memorials reflect changing Canadian attitudes toward wilderness. This has been an opportunity for environmental peace-building initiatives that integrate natural resource management with conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution, reconciliation, redress and recovery to build resilience in communities affected by loss and displacement, trauma and conflict.

In 2010, Parks Canada’s national entry fee was waived for families whose land, now inside a national park, had been subject to regulatory takings and expropriations. The entry pass was an important step towards healing community relations and keeping the memory of these communities alive. In 2011, this measure was expanded to apply to all expropriated owners (including land, lumber lot and cottage owners) to give three generations the right to access cemeteries, former family house sites, expropriation monuments and memorials and to take part in commemorative events organised or supported by Parks Canada. In 2010 the federal government allocated 1.3 million dollars to Kouchibouguac National Park for the ‘enhancement of the visitor experience’, and almost a million dollars to Forillon National Park for a permanent exhibition ‘as a record of the life of the families’ who were expropriated. The House of Commons issued a formal apology to Forillon’s expropriated residents and established a Forillon Expropriated Persons Commemorative Committee in 2011 to actively shape the direction of Forillon’s strategic plan and interpretive strategies.

National parks serve as a microcosm of the history of conflict and misunderstanding that has long characterised the unequal power relationships between dominant state-building legislation and more vulnerable native and local populations. To remain both truthful and relevant, national parks must reconsider changing perceptions and frame themselves within the broader canon of social, cultural, political and environmental histories. National parks have the potential to be common ground and an arena to resolve and mend broken relationships with peoples who once inhabited and tended to these lands.  

Desirée Valadares, landscape architect and urban designer, is currently a PhD student in architecture at University of California at Berkeley where she studies reconciliation, redress and transitional justice through the lens of memorials, monuments and commemorations.

Dillon Marsh: Assimilation, from the Landmarks series

In the vast barren landscapes of the southern Kalahari, sociable weaver birds assume ownership of the telephone poles that cut across their habitat. Their burgeoning nests are at once inertly statuesque and teeming with life. The twigs and grass collected to build these nests combine to give strangely recognisable personalities to the otherwise inanimate poles.

Dillon Marsh is an artist and photographer from Cape Town, South Africa. His photographs have been exhibited in three solo shows in Cape Town and several local and international group shows.   www.dillonmarsh.com

Dominique Cheng: Planespotting, the Kai Tak Project

1
Cities are inevitably shaped by historical events and urban phenomena.  This project examines a site’s capacity to resuscitate the memory of a spectacle in the absence of the architecture that generated it, and asks whether or not this can reverse the effects of what Robert Smithson described as the entropic city.  The Kai Tak Project positions the individual as its primary focus by engaging the culture of casual aircraft spectatorship, or planespotting, that once existed in the city of Kowloon, to evoke an alternative reading of the cityscape.

figure 1 : Grand Aviary Schematic Plan. Circuit diagram illustrating the ‘processor’ Chek Lap Kok (current Hong Kong International Airport) hard-wired to the ‘receptor’ Kai Tak (former Hong Kong International Airport). Activity in the form of take-offs and landings occurring at the new airport are fed simultaneously to the old airport to activate a series of staged disturbances in South Kowloon.
2
The history of Kowloon and the evolution of its first airport can be characterised as one of transience and constant change resulting from inadvertent shifts in the political and economic landscape.  During its 73-year long tenure of the airfield (1925-1998), the site, located on an ocean inlet between Hong Kong Island to the south and Kowloon to the north, endured numerous ownership changes and one world war punctuated by a Japanese invasion.1  Its initial formation as an aerodrome was happenstance in nature and its subsequent development was driven by piecemeal urbanism in the absence of a comprehensive master plan. At the point that a transaction between two investors intent on developing the vacant lands dissolved, the government recognised the site’s potential to become an airfield that could be extended and expanded as needed into Kowloon Bay.2  Over the following decades, the site underwent several transformations, from an aviation school in the 1920s to a naval air base modified in the 1950s to suit commercial aviation.3 Inevitably, the growth of South Kowloon was defined by a constant negotiation of space – urban space to air space.  

The approach path to Runway 13/31 in particular left an indelible impression on the urban fabric, inscribing a distinct path of low-rise buildings as a result of both aviation clearance requirements and the city’s natural topography of rugged hills and valleys.  Landings at the airport, which grew increasingly more difficult, were a dramatic spectacle of aerial gymnastics – aviation enthusiasts grew accustomed to watching commercial aircraft sweep across the city at dangerously low altitudes during descent. Planespotting was a term coined to define this culture of casual spectatorship of aircraft, akin to watching birds in an aviary.  Building rooftops and hillside plateaus evolved into makeshift observatories as other buildings and landmarks (designated by checkered signs and beacon lights) served as visual cues for pilots during final descent.  South Kowloon was a Mecca for planespotters up until the airport could no longer sustain the pressures imposed by both population and infrastructural growth.   

By the 1990s, the airport had reached a tipping point, warranting plans for a new replacement airport.  Kai Tak Airport was officially retired in July 1998 in favour of Chek Lap Kok Airport located on reclaimed land 19 miles to the west. The Kai Tak site remained predominantly vacant for over a decade due to extreme levels of petroleum contamination and escalating property costs. Today, it is a ferry cruise terminal with tall residential development filling what was once restricted airspace; the airfield apron and the checkerboard markers are the only remaining relics of the past. The landing approach itself is immortalised in amateur home videos, photographs and recollections gathered from retired pilots and planespotters alike.  

 
figure 2: Sparging Field. In a state of disuse, the landing strip is populated with siphons that release contaminated air back out into the atmosphere through a process of soil vapour extraction and air sparging. The process of remediation is transformed into a performance of sound. 3

The project is a series of urban interventions (or staged disturbances) mapping the trajectory of the former flight path. They make reference to the landing approach via the city as a communicative interface.  A direct relationship is created between the new airport (Chek Lap Kok International Airport) and the old airport, as one is programmed to respond to the other through various transformations in architecture and landscape in South Kowloon (figure 1). Highrises are retrofitted with ‘spotters’, or mechanical oculi that move in unison to scan the city for aircraft during take-off and landing (figure 3).  Street signs momentarily rotate like flapper boards to display the flight codes (airline and flight number) of both outgoing and incoming flights. At the runway, the process of remediation is exhibited as a symphony of air and sound as at regular intervals pipes buried in the soil extract and exhaust contaminants in the form of gas (figure 2). The interventions, deployed in sequential order and triggered by data originating from the new airport, simulate the experience of a phantom airport. figure 3: Spotter. Oculi are appended to highrises all over South Kowloon – their sychronised movements trace the path of phantom aircraft descending into the city at regular intervals.

1 ‘Hong Kong (China) - History’ in T. Ngo, editor. Hong Kong’s History: State and Society Under Colonial Rule. London: Routledge, 1999. p80
2 Choa, G. The Life and Times of Sir Kai Ho Kai, second edition. Sha Tin, New Territories: The Chinese University Press, 2000. pp. 31-32
3 Kai Tak Airport 1925-1998. (2013, October 4). www.cad.gov.hk/english/kaitak

Dominique Cheng is an architect and artist based in Toronto. His illustrations and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Gladstone Hotel.

Dustin Valen: On the merits of bad behaviour in public parks

Rules posted in Montreal’s Parc Mont Royal, 2015Recently, after recommending a walk in Toronto’s High Park to a visiting friend, I was duly informed that large caches of condom wrappers were concealed in the trees and shrubs not far from the park’s well-worn paths. What are we to make of this seemingly non-event? Should we be alarmed or indifferent? How about optimistic?

In The Experience of Landscape, geographer Jay Appleton argues that our attraction to landscape is the result of deep-seated psychological and biological urges.1 In his prospect-refuge theory, the pleasure we take in viewing and entering landscapes (both real and pictorial) comes from our latent animal urge to ‘see without being seen’. We covet both expansive prospects and the intimacy of shady groves, because they elicit feelings of safety.

As a way of thinking through contemporary public parks, Appleton’s theory raises several questions. First, besides offering individual enlightenment, parks embody many collective desires, from beauty, harmony and order, to morality and health. Can the prospect-refuge theory include these contemporary values? Second, whereas Appleton’s approach is fundamentally aesthetic, the values placed on contemporary landscapes cover social, political and ecological concerns.

Parks are a steadfast institution of the modern city that embody some our most cherished civic values. But they are also riddled with paradoxes: truths and rumours about public parks abound, they harbour an illicit sex-trade, attract petty and violent crime, and are often sites of disorder and unrest.  Here the double-edged consequences of a psychological approach are equally clear; where better than in the safety of a refuge to act out these socially-transgressive behaviours? And where better to transgress than in these value-laden landscapes? Parks attract the same subversive pleasures and civil disobedience that they are meant to literally and symbolically expunge.

If parks reflect our Edenesque desires, discovering bad behaviour in parks is like looking into the mirror and seeing a blemish on the face of reality. Not only is bad behaviour in parks inevitable (according to Appleton and the historical record), it shakes us to our psychological core.  As landscape studies shift from questions of aesthetics to issues of power, identity, gender and race, the merits of bad behaviour become apparent. In the interplay between individuals who transgress park rules and the social and political consequences, bad behaviour brings our landscape values into sharp and often discomfiting relief. In the past it has also led to social and political change.

control of the unruly individual
Canada’s public parks have long been at the centre of debates over the preservation of a moral and equitable society. In the 1900s, park planners and civic reformers championed landscape as a cure for the degradations of pollution, alcoholism, vice and labour strife prevalent in many Canadian cities.2 Parks were treated as a social experiment to improve the behaviour and appearance of the working class and the poor. Under vigilant surveillance, strict rules of conduct and composure required park users to adopt acceptable behaviours prescribed by elites who made up civic administrations.3 Fences and gates, opening and closing hours, a ban on liquor and foul language; sports, gambling and other working-class pastimes were prohibited, and where swimming pools were provided, men and women were separated. Infractions were frequent and often deliberate; justice was meted out swiftly: vagrants were taken away and anyone caught picking flowers or damaging park property was arrested, fined, sometimes even jailed.

Disputes over the role of parks were fierce: workers wanted better access, lawns for sports and popular entertainments. Social elites lamented the loss of their parks to delinquents and vagabonds.

Public pressure to democratise parks increased in the 1920s and 1930s; authorities yielded to new demands, constructing playgrounds, sports fields and dance halls.4 In St. John’s Bowring Park, where clashes erupted between wealthy automobile owners and working class pedestrians choked by trailing clouds of dust and splattered by mud, park users successfully petitioned the City in 1931 to ban automobiles from the park on Sundays and holidays.

Decades after these hard-won battles, parks continue to play an important role in struggles over economic and social parity. After a global day of action on October 15, 2011, campers occupied city parks across Canada. Unlike other countries where protesters crowd into city streets and squares, Canadians set up tents in public parks across the country to protest things such as the systematic failure of government to regulate financial systems and curb corporate greed. By reclaiming these ostensibly public landscapes, protesters send a clear message about the corruption of public values by excessive private powers.

Occupy Toronto camp in St James Park, 2011
gentrification of the underbrush
The relationship of individuals who transgress park rules and the consequences of actions perpetrated by public officials, is another critical consideration. Like the moralising impulse of early twentieth century reformers, the use of landscape by authorities as a gentrifying force has been persistent, and at times intense. In 1945, the rape and murder of a nine-year old boy in Montreal’s Parc Mont Royal catalysed Jean Drapeau’s political career as a moral crusader. As mayor, Drapeau rallied public opinion against the city’s so-called ‘perverts’ and ciriminals as part of his effort to transform Montreal’s image into that of a world-class city. Known as the morality cuts, underbrush and trees were removed from Parc Mont Royal to improve surveillance and to discourage illicit activities perpetrated by gay men for whom the mountain was supposedly a preferred rendezvous. As erosion and other environmental consequences wrought more devastation on Mont Royal, the mountain’s balding appearance served as a constant reminder of Drapeau’s dictatorial politics, leading to a reforestation campaign during the 1960s.

Such cleanups in public parks are not confined to the past; a report by Calgary Municipal Land Corporation in May 2010, cited the long gone-wild St. Patrick’s Island as difficult to police and harbouring undesirable behaviours such as drug use and gay cruising. In 2012 underbrush was removed from the park as part of a 20 million dollar redevelopment plan.

Efforts to prevent unwanted social activities in parks represent a different order of bad behaviour, this time committed by institutions against disenfranchised individuals. Individuals, for their part, have resisted and even reversed this trend by defending their park against the regressive actions of public officials. Half a century since Drapeau’s morality cuts, park users remain defiant – the parking lot near Beaver Lake is an after-hours dogging rendezvous, a clear and persistent flaunting of perceived authoritarian rules.  
    
institutional misrule
Many of Canada’s public parks shelter residents forced out of cities by privatising forces and economic pressures. In 2013, The Vancouver Sun interviewed residents of Stanley Park where several dozen homeless people live—some have been there for more than a decade. Toronto’s Don River Valley interconnected park system has long been a refuge for the city’s homeless whose makeshift shelters constructed from recycled clothing and building materials are easily discovered.  Often (falsely) linked with litter, promiscuity and crime, the use of parks by itinerant populations recalls depression-era debates as parks became home to many urban unemployed.

Not all informal occupations can be ignored: in July 2014 homeless residents of Vancouver’s beleaguered and low-income lower east side constructed a camp in nearby Oppenheimer Park to protest their neglect by city officials. Despite numerous eviction notices and citations from the fire department, 400 displaced residents remained in the park, referring to its relative safety over the squalid condition of city shelters. Over the course of the three-month long occupation, a maelstrom of negative press aimed at past efforts to address homelessness forced the City of Vancouver to announce an additional 100 shelter spaces and 157 interim housing units to meet homeless needs.

And in another example in the pursuit of social justice, in June 2009,  Toronto residents came to the defence of their public space when 24,000 members of the Toronto Civic Employees Union went on strike and the City used parks as a convenient and free location to open temporary dumpsites.  As the smell of rotting garbage heated by high summer temperatures increased, protesters tried to block contractors from spreading rat poison over the heaps of foetid garbage. After 36 days of strike, 48,900 tonnes of trash had accumulated inside the city limits as media and public debate centred on the City’s misappropriation of public space.

Protesters in Christie Pits Park during the Toronto Garbage Strike, 2009

global indifference
Climate change may be the next test of the extent to which people are willing to defend their parks against bad behaviour. Parks have become potent symbols of our environmental attitudes. New values placed on parks also challenge us to expand our understanding of bad behaviour as new forces both individual and institutional in origin threaten our landscape values.

Climate change, the sum of many bad behaviours, impacts our public parks and their appreciation: invasive species perpetrate new kinds of vagrant activities, rising temperatures that affect precipitation in turn affects the migratory patterns of animals and shifts the geographical boundaries of many plant species.

Warmer temperatures elevate the risk of attack by insects and pathogens: many northern tree species are becoming vulnerable to disease. Dutch elm disease, an infectious fungi spread by beetles who make their home beneath the bark, has devastated millions of hectares of Canada’s woodlands, including almost 80 per cent of Toronto’s street and park elm population. In Winnipeg’s historic Assiniboine Park, a 200 year old elm, affectionately known as ‘Grandma’ and connected to Lord Selkirk, was felled. In 2013 alone some 5,600 elm trees were destroyed across Winnipeg. Add to this devastation the damage wrought on Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park by Hurricane Juan in 2003, and to St. John’s Bowring Park by Hurricane Igor in 2010 where a century-old linden tree planted by the Duke of Connaught was torn from the ground—the effects of climate change on our public parks are difficult to ignore.  

2014 was the warmest year on record. Rising global temperatures will increasingly bear on our landscape values. Although action has been slow, the ability of parks to mitigate  the effects of climate change has also been recognised. In the six decades since Hurricane Hazel inundated much of Toronto, the re-naturalisation of the Don River Valley through a series of ecological parks has been made a priority to protect against future extreme weather events.

Point Pleasant Park five years after Hurricane Juan, 2008
the litmus of bad behaviour
As surrogates for our social and sustainable goals, public parks are key players in the ongoing negotiation of our cultural and political values. By throwing a spotlight on these values, bad behaviour forces us to confront their instability and the often unseemly paradoxes of our actions and institutions. Bad behaviour and its consequences also assert the ability of landscape to affect social and political change. The merit of bad behaviour in public parks is that we must ask ourselves how we reconcile unlikable, challenging, dangerous, tragic intrusions?  From High Park’s condom wrappers to Hurricane Juan, all bad behaviours that affect our parks should be recognised as signposts for change.

Dustin Valen is a doctoral student in architectural history at McGill University.

Graham Hooper: Castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually

Psychogeography, fractal landscapes and the ephemeral built-environment

Back in 1967 Jimi Hendrix recorded 'Castles Made of Sand'1 for his Axis: Bold as Love album. Lyrically it is quite unusual in its autobiographical reference to the transience of life and ephemeral nature of existence (family, love, loyalty etc.), and to Hendrix’s life inparticular (moving home in his youth, maternal attachment issues etc.)

In America it seems as though the idea of castles made of sand (better known as sandcastles to those living in the United Kingdom) is otherwise an altogether alien idea. Beaches are for surfing maybe? Whilst Big Sur has the sand it lacks the medieval architecture. Likewise whilst Bavaria might have better castles, other locations boast superior beaches.

Similarly buckets (pails to the North American reader!) are for carrying water I guess. Many reading this might also be unfamiliar with the small plastic primary-coloured buckets, used as moulds for making sand forms on beaches, in the shape of castles; those fine stately homes of the past that dot the English landscape. Once (in some cases still) owned by rich landowners or monarchs, these properties, now often under the management of the likes of The National Trust 2 are opened to the public so that we others may marvel at their interior splendor,  fine furniture and opulent upholstery. Other castles, left to fall into disrepair as a result of the prohibitive costs involved in their upkeep, and at the mercy of the elements, become mysterious, mythical ruins.


For the British, on our sandy beaches, of a sunny, summer's day, filling a bucket with sand, upending it, and tapping its bottom with (matching coloured) spade to release the sheath of plastic, will reveal a cast. These sandcastles, traditionally, are then decorated with paper flags, moats and seaweed foliage, according to taste and time.


In the mid-90’s I took a photograph whilst on a beach in Cornwall (Marazion, UK) looking out at St. Michael's Mount.3 The vantage point I had chosen allowed for a view of The Mount in the background as well as a sandcastle ‘replica’ in the foreground.

I say replica - but I have emphasised the visual rhyming myself, in my choice of framing. If the child (or adult) making the sand structure was aiming to build a facsimile of the mount behind, then it is crude and inaccurate. But it can hardly of escaped their notice that the sandcastle is sited on a beach in front of a mount that looks a little like a sandcastle. Around the same time I had seen a collection of photographs by the British photographer and scientist, Bill Hurst, the Untitled Gallery in Sheffield who had drawn visual comparisons between the self-replication of patterns in scale in various constructed and ‘natural environments.4  It had resonated clearly.

This mount has always been paired (and formally since the 11th century) with Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, France.5 It has the same tidal island characteristics and the same conical shape. In this sense the sandcastle I saw that day and photographed, reflects this pairing. They are sisters, separated in space and size, but connected in spirit, material and form.

When the tide is out it is possible, for a limited period of time at least, to walk to it from the shore. Many tourists and locals - the 35 of them who live on The Mount - do just that. It’s a strange sensation, to make that 5 minute crossing along the man-made causeway. That may be due in part to the fact the mount was once surrounded by trees; a now long-submerged hazel wood. The historic local name for the mount is literally "the grey rock in a wood”. One is put in mind of Robert Macfarlane’s walk across The Broomway 6, (nicknamed “The Doomway” as it is allegedly Britain’s deadliest path 7) though in reality walking to Saint Michael's Mount is neither isolated or dangerous. As I understand it is one of 43 tidal (unbridged) islands around the United Kingdom accessible on foot from shore.

I’m not entirely sure whether it is it a mount or an island really. The word ‘mount’ is suggestive, as a verb, of an ascent, of fixing to a support, or of organising, preparing, and setting in motion an event (such as a walk); one mounts a horse, mounts an attack and mounts a play. Islands, on the other hand, feel as though they not only are, but should have always been, surrounded by water, whilst a mount at least feels as though it would be situated on (or in)land. There is a risk that this mount, like much of the Cornish coast, is vulnerable to flooding (or even submergence) with rises in sea water level, and natural erosion.

Sand doesn’t make the best building material precisely because, even on quite small scales, it is so easily washed away. However, the quality varies greatly from beach to beach, some being sharper or more gritty for instance. But by far the greatest determinant in successful sandcastle construction is the moisture level of the sand itself - too dry and it risks dispersal in the wind, too wet and you precipitate the inevitable collapse-under-its-own-weight. Sandcastles - scaled up versions of the beach variety - would never work as human dwellings, though they would be fun and cheap presumably. We could all be kings and queens, build our own homes and even live with a sea view. Imagine entire office blocks, built by their own work force, communally and all in a day. Would we behave as we do on beach holidays (playful and carefree) or just in fear imminent structural collapse? The fact that these structures are so ephemeral is their magic and their tragedy. That said, the architect (of the The Shard 8) cites sandcastle-building as a formative influence and inspiration in his career. 9

Oddly enough constructions created in sand on beaches are called castles regardless of whether or not they are citadels. Structurally pyramids or even volcanoes would be better; more effective and efficient in form. Often ‘sandcastles’, it’s true, have a medieval-looking and fortified-form with their moats, keeps and towers, but that is the result of the buckets used as a molds by and large, which are invariably tower shaped with crenelations. The slightly conical design allows for the sand form to be easily released from the bucket mold, and that form then is better able to sustain its own weight. The forms that still maintain the mark of their builders hands (sandcastles made without buckets but instead through the action of scooping) are especially pleasing I think, where the little hands have patted the surface solid and smooth. I am touched by the ones whose forms have softened in the wind, mid-demise, but still retaining their paper flags and seaweed decorations.

Castles have associations in the imagination and references in history; knights in shining armour, stranded princesses and dragons are the source of many a child's fantasies. They allow for the mental investigation of escape and capture, safety and risk, alongside learning about tides and flows, depth and height, modelling and construction.

The sandcastle I recorded on film that day will no longer exist, washed away by tide, if not already destroyed under a child's foot first, hours or even minutes after my photograph was taken. But it will be have been replicated, time and again, by countless others since then, all under the shadow of its big sister, just 500 metres away, or its topographic counterpart, 200 miles away, across the sea.

As Jimi sang, “so castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually”.


1   Jimi Hendrix "Castles Made of Sand (lyrics) - YouTube. 23 May. 2015
2   National Trust: Home. 12 Aug. 2015
3   St Michael's Mount near Marazion in Cornwall. 7 May. 2015
4   Bill Hirst - Fractal landscapes from the Real World. 2012. 12 Aug. 2015
5   The Mont Saint Michel - Normandy. 2015. 7 May. 2015
6   The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot: Robert Macfarlane  2013. 7 May. 2015
7   Walking the Doomway | Bradley L Garrett. 2014. 7 May. 2015
8   The Shard: Inspiring change | The Shard. 2008. 12 Aug. 2015
9   Renzo Piano: how to build the perfect sandcastle | Life and ... 2015. 12 Aug. 2015

Graham Hooper is an artist, educator and writer living and working in the United Kingdom. He runs the Felpham Psychogeographical Association (felpham.ishappynow.com and @FelphamPA). He also writes for a number of international publications and exhibits widely.

Leanna Lalonde: Under cover of green

Impressions of Sudbury are intimately linked to landscape.  Like an archive, the ground is a repository of the events, both geologic and anthropogenic, that transform it. The most significant work operates at the surface in what can be discerned, most explicitly through sight.

Once a trackless wilderness of tall red and white pine, quick and successive waves of human activity stripped Sudbury of its vegetation revealing extensive rock surfaces, stained black by sulphurous smog.  Negative perceptions of these surficial qualities obscured the complexity and value of affected communities as ‘lived in’ places, reducing them to icons of dereliction and decay. These surficial qualities are also superficial, concerned with the immediately apparent, perceived without any depth. When, in 1971, two Apollo 16 astronauts visited Sudbury, the common view was that the landscape was a proxy for the lunar landscape to prepare the astronauts for stark environmental conditions. This misinterpretation solidified a narrative that cast the city as categorically ugly, hostile and unhealthy in the minds of visitor and resident alike.  

As the basis upon which people act and react, narrative and image are as consequential as material reality; environmental crisis is as much a problem of narrative and the imagination as it is technology or science. As a signifying system, landscape and the ground surface is a means of communicating narrative – a medium through which truth is revealed, seeing is believing, but which also is infinitely malleable and susceptible to manipulation. Any given ‘truth’ might be an endeavour in selectivity, narrow and restrictive.

As a beloved narrative, the Edenic garden generally falls into two categories that establish ‘right’ models of behaviour in our relationship with the natural world. The first exhorts people to transform the wilderness ‘back’ to garden by taming and controlling undeveloped unruly and rugged nature into a state of civility and order.  The second condemns humans for polluting and destroying nature. Contemporary environmentalism has grown out of this second interpretation; land reclamation finds its genesis in the admission of guilt for a scorched and endangered earth, and recompense for the loss of an intact and pristine natural environment. Sudbury’s specific recovery narrative begins in 1978, building compelling images of the compensatory value of nature against the harsh realities of the region. Regreening was a  prescription of lime, fertiliser and grass seed that produced a cover of green that relieves – even eliminates, the impression of a devastated landscape.

In 2003 after 25 years of Sudbury’s Land Restoration program, the city asked citizens to say what the regreening program meant to them. The theme and template, a ‘thin green line’, was provided as “a reflection of the ongoing work required to ensure that diverse self-sustaining ecosystems replace barren land” and “of the rather fragile relationship between the regreening hillsides and the physical state of the soil, the air and the water” in the city.1  The commonly used ‘thin red line’ figuratively denotes a point of no return, a line drawn in the sand – a limit beyond which safety is no longer guaranteed’; the thin blue line refers to law enforcement officers who stand between good and bad.  Thus, the thin green line is more than a statement on health, it is the new morality, negotiating the “uncomplicated choice between natural things, which are good, and unnatural things, which are bad.” 2 As a result, conventions of land reclamation have become a master narrative unquestioned by anyone except those who are necessarily aligned with destructive anthropocentric and other opportunistic forces. William Cronon explains that in this way, “Nature becomes our dogma, the wall we build around our own vision to protect it from competing views. And like all dogmas, it is the death of dialogue and self-criticism”.3

Eric Cazdyn has identified an intersection with medicine, relevant to Sudbury’s regenerative image, as a period called the ‘new chronic’. 4  Although regreening and restoration may be perceived as a cure, Cazdyn’s theory relegates it to a prescriptive meantime.  It begins with healing the city’s scars rather than deepening them, but progressively deals with the easier to manage symptoms of a complicated and ongoing relationship between industry, community and environment. Sudbury’s industrial sector remains active and new technology is rediscovering untapped potential at historic mine sites – the narrative of ‘healing’ detracts from these and other potentially meaningful agendas. Abandoned and hazardous mine sites are only just finding their way into current reclamation strategies, while urban brownfield sites, ageing infrastructure, disappearing heritage and below-average human health still negatively affect the city.  Although the community has no independent public accounting of the social costs of the mining industry,5 a declining ratio of barren to recovered land satisfies the city’s narrative that to make green equals health, although this is neither true, nor even representative of the whole truth.

David Leadbeater takes a particularly strong position towards these issues, stating that Sudbury is in a state of chronic crisis deeper and longer term than the usual boom-bust resource town formula. What is at risk by perpetuating the image of regreening is a future of more provocative and radical possibilities.  

Aesthetics are bound up in a battle over the image of society – what is permissible to show, to say and to do in the current social order. A critique of land reclamation methods and the pervasive nature ideologies that drive them would require establishing value in ‘damaged’ sites as a necessary part of an authentic context.  Neil Smith (In the Nature of Cities) states that however perversely, societies make the natural environment in which they live. ‘Nature is manifestly not dead but is incessantly reproduced—in ways we may detest or we may love’.6 What might a spatial strategy not fixated on definitions of health look like?

Constrained by the narrative of the Garden of Eden, society is discouraged from thinking outside or against the basic doctrines which govern its ideology.  For example, in barren and semi-barren areas significant metal content in the soil inhibits plant regrowth. Highly acidic soil contributes to the absorption of metal particulates by plant life, stunting root growth and ultimately killing all metal-intolerant plant species.  In Sudbury’s regreening program, crushed limestone neutralises soil acidity, rendering the metal content insoluble, allowing plants to grow “as if the soil was normal”.7 Where a lack of plant life was once a useful index of contamination, regreening renders this ongoing toxicity invisible. The ‘appearance’ of a convincingly healed landscape suspends criticism that may otherwise generate action.  

As a counter-result, covering up signs of damage can lead to distrust of scientifically-determined ‘acceptable’ risk.  The 2001 Sudbury Soils Study, the largest risk-assessment study ever conducted in Canada, estimated whether people working, living or visiting Sudbury were exposed to concentrations of chemicals with the potential for adverse health effects.8 Although the results released in 2008 concluded that elevated heavy metal content in the soil was within an acceptable range, an informal poll showed that 68 percent of respondents in the community were not assured by the study.9  Risk isn’t always an objective phenomenon; there is almost always an aspect of risk that cannot be reduced to formal identification. A denuded landscape has value as an index of toxicity: where risk is visibly manifest people may be granted a degree of control and responsibility over the risk and their fear of it. Hide this risk, and control is abrogated. For now, synonymous with popular perceptions of health, green is morally upheld while rock, stone and slag heap become morally ambiguous, if not inadmissible.

As a whole other issue, in mourning for the loss of dense pine forests, regreening quickly covers vast areas of bare rock; however while this is going on, a defining characteristic of the northern landscape, its geologic structure, is also being replaced by prescriptive ecological stereotypes.  With blasting technology no longer just confined to mining, hills and channels are flattened and filled to make way for the rigid and hierarchical urban planning strictures of conventional subdivisions. New Sudbury, a neighbourhood northeast of the historic core, is organised into four perfect quadrants, demonstrating by counter-example the difficulty of redeveloping the old bifurcated downtown where houses follow the contours, finding the easiest places to build tucked up against the base of the hills. New hilltop developments blast enormous amounts of rock to make way for new houses with great views. Although the preservation of hilltops has recently become a focus of the city’s Greenspace advisory panel, so far there is no official stance against this erasure of original topography. Instead of encouraging development of abandoned or derelict land, avoiding development on hilltops altogether, the city advocates hilltop condominium development that reduces footprint and preserves views.

Against a background of newly established ‘green’, support for an authentic regional identity could mean establishing connections to contested landforms. Blasted landscapes hold value as authentic places amidst generic (and green) public space. A new ecological paradigm could stimulate dialogue between ecologists, scientists and designers to fully realise a complex human geography that addresses both good and bad processes in a renewed appreciation of historic value.
Reclaimed landscapes are only partial truths, imposing a ‘natural’ heritage on a complex cultural one. Sudbury is often embroiled in contested preservation of its heritage.  With little funding available to maintain its built heritage, there has been no concerted effort to develop a heritage plan for the otherwise ‘invaluable’ abandoned mines and town sites that punctuate the landscape. The preservation of barren sites have been considered – one idea was to declare the O’Donnell roast yard, one of only a few roast yards still visible in North America, a UNESCO world heritage site – but it is currently inaccessible on private company property and tours are increasingly rare. Without any effort to physically draw attention to the site it will soon be completely lost to public awareness.

Happy Valley may have the least well-known history. A fringe development, occupied by farmers and miners who wanted to live outside the planned Falconbridge Mine townsite, it found itself in the path of gas spewed from the smelter – hazardous to both vegetation and residents. To mitigate the effects on the community, compromises were made to reduce days of operation, but when that became unsustainable, the company purchased Happy Valley land, paid for relocation costs, emptied Happy Valley and carried on operations unhindered. Completely abandoned, the site is closed to the public by a large steel fence.

To bring this all full circle, Barbara Misztal (Theories of Social Remembering) states “…without memory…we will have no warnings about potential dangers to democratic structures and no opportunity to gain a richer awareness of the repertoire of possible remedies”.10  The ability to perceive the past is intimately connected to an ability to conceive of the future, only on this basis can a community come to terms with itself, acknowledging both the welcome and the undesirable, the offensive and the satisfying.

Landscape can be reframed to dismantle the exclusionary spatial practices of an either/or attitude – either land reclamation or industrial planning – and to liberate the potential of abandoned or derelict landscapes. The serious integration of nature and culture makes landscape an ‘arena of speculation’ without limitations on what it is possible to say, to hear or to do.11  Changing what can be seen – exposing rather than covering – thus becomes a radical act. 

1  Stephen Monet. ‘City Launches ‘Thin Green Line’ Contest Celebrating 25 years of Land Reclamation’.  Greater Sudbury, Sep. 15, 2003.
2  William Cronon. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: WW Norton, 1995  p52
3  Ibid p25
4  Eric Cazdyn.  The Already Dead, the new time of politics, culture and illness.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2012
5  David Leadbeater. Mining Town Crisis: Globalization, Labour and Resistance in Sudbury. Halifax: Fernwood, 2008. p 21
6  Neil Smith. ‘Foreword’ in Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, eds. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London: Routledge, 2006
7  Aaron Pickard. ‘Regreening efforts taking root’ Northern Life, Jan 21, 2012.  
8  Christopher Wren. Risk Assessment and Environmental Management: A Case Study in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Leiden, Netherlands: Maralte, 2012. p16
9  Bill Bradley. ‘Digging through the Sudbury Soils Study’ Northern Life, June 13, 2008
10  Barbara A. Misztal. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003.
11  An arena of speculation is a term from the literature of the transformation of Israeli structures of domination. In the study of the potential application of physical interventions to open up a horizon for ongoing processes of transformation, an arena of speculation is an architectural tool that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives through the participation of a multiplicity of individuals and organizations. Eyal Weizman, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti have an architectural studio in Bethlehem that employs a range of techniques, using architecture as an arena of speculation to deal with how Israeli settlements and military bases could be reused, recycled and re-inhabited by Palestinians.  See: Hilal, Petti and Weizman, ‘The Future Archaeology of Israel’s Colonization’  Roulotte, Aprill 2011

Leanna Lalonde is a graduate from the University of Waterloo where she completed the thesis Curation: Representation in the Reclamation of Sudbury, Ontario Landscapes, and is currently an intern architect at Adamson Associates.  leannalalonde.wix.com/designportfolio

Lindsey Nette: Lost in the empty

We came to the park to get lost – I wanted so badly to be the people in the poster, our tent pitched at the centre of all that space, nothing around us but sky and grass. I’d been daydreaming of this place where I could pick a point on the horizon and walk, aimlessly, into open space. I wanted the thrill of discovering my own sense of place. Among others, I hoped to find it in the park.

When Grasslands National Park opened in 2001, it set out to return its visitors to the experience of discovery, as unprescribed and unpolluted as possible. They wanted the public, both local and far-removed, to learn to see the grasslands as a place in itself, rich with complexities to be explored. But restoring this kind of emptiness is no small feat. One of the park’s leading staff members explained it like this:
“It’s as if you built a building, something so bewildering people didn’t know how to access it. They couldn’t find the entrance. They think, it’s not for me.”

In that soft-spoken candour I was met with throughout Saskatchewan, she admitted that even she’d struggled with the place. It seems there is some primal human skill we have forgotten — to its guests, the park was empty, and we felt out of place. As a result, park management was implementing a grab bag of interventions, including signage, an expansive network of paths and a new fully-serviced campground. This saddens me – after the landscape is framed, its uses and meaning set in place, there won’t be anywhere left to get lost.

All this has happened here before. The struggle to make and maintain a sense of place has been at the heart of prairie landscape-making since the whole region was (wrongfully) deemed ‘empty’. Grasslands National Park lies deep inside Palliser’s Triangle – a vast wedge of prairie from the Rocky Mountains eastward along the 49th parallel to southwestern Manitoba. In essence, it’s the land that Palliser bypassed in search of more favourable conditions, establishing a void in our historic consciousness.1 He warned of an empty and barren desert, useless and unfit for settlement.2  But only one idea rang in the ears of those pressing west. It was empty.

What followed, in the name of place-making, erased deeply rooted cultures, eradicated entire species and remade one of the largest ecologies on earth. An elaborate spatial and political toolkit to carve up and harness empty space was unleashed on the prairie. The transformation unfolded from something seemingly benign: a post. From east to west, the Dominion Land Survey painfully marked out the prairie in posts – each driven into the ground and left there like a magnet to draw in motion and change. Every two posts drew a line to be staked out with fences and trees, a shoreline where the prairie’s ongoing motion would lap up against a relentless grid. And every four posts made a square – an island to be claimed, absorbed, abandoned, re-made. As an act, to survey is to look closely at something, examine it and understand it. But as a thing, the survey is a rigid and unforgiving geometry laid out over land that will never conform. The survey looks at nothing but itself – blind to the underlying forces that define the place. Over time, its incompatibility with the grassland revealed itself.

We came to the park with our own survey in mind, with a compass for finding our own sense of place — it was a homemade kite camera, an old technology new to us. A compass refers to a device used both to draw geometry and to find direction. Ours did neither; more importantly, it gave us a sense of purpose in our explorations. We went out looking for something, even if it was something as elusive as wind, to which we developed a heightened awareness, learning to distinguish wind from a breeze and gusts from steady gales. Here, against the empty space, wind has a presence that is tangible.

When we arrived, the ranger was retrieving a shredded flag from a puddle some thirty feet from the mast. We parked and started loading up our packs. He wandered over to welcome us. “Ontario eh?” he smiled, looking at our license plate. He told us about a family, also from Ontario, that had set up camp here a few nights back, then packed it in with the sound of coyotes. “They followed me back to town,” he laughed and shook his head, “Couldn’t take the open space.” We talked about the park, about quicksand and fossils and crested wheatgrass. He kicked at the stuff, “We can’t control it. It crowds out the native species.” Crested wheatgrass is an invader from Siberia, a trace of the cattle ranches that had been here before. It is the antagonist to his native prairie, which that morning seemed to disappoint him. Everything was out of place. The grassland wasn’t familiar enough for the young family, and it was looking far too familiar to him. It is a landscape in flux, like the noise between radio frequencies. It isn’t exactly domestic, but not yet all that wild; it isn’t native grassland, but isn’t still a farm. This transformation too, has happened here before.


It didn’t take long for the grassland to infiltrate the grid – to prove how ill-suited it is to an ecology built on motion and change. The lines of the survey are wearing away, trees dying and fences leaning in the wind. And the squares are dissolving, its owners abandoning them to large-scale farm enterprises or near-worthless hay. The park itself is an archipelago of abandoned farms and ranches interspersed with those still in operation. And everywhere the two uses overstep their boundaries. The thing is, grasslands are indivisible.3 It’s like trying to carve an ocean. Grass is a relentless current that floods every isolated vision of place. It grows in every crack, dominates every void. It thrives in the margins between the places we force, and those that evolve. The park, just like every ranch or farm, is fighting the current – nobly trying to throw a net around its vision of prairie.

It  finds itself in a moment where not only its guests struggle to find a sense of place, but it too struggles to hold on to one. It has an opportunity that is hard come by today – to re-survey, rediscover and remake a place.

Our trip lasted a few weeks, and when we returned home we printed 300 photos from the kite camera. Flipping through all those aerial shots, I started to see a landscape very different from the rigid lines of the grid. The camera had been tossed around in the wind, capturing disorienting images at random. There was no horizon, no sense of scale – only texture, colour and motion. You can get lost in this landscape. The photos reveal something else too – something about us. Our little blue tent, which looked so surreal against the open grass, was pitched next to a tree – next to a patch of trees growing in mowed grass. We hadn’t made it to the middle of all that space with nothing around us but sky and grass. We’d held fast to the familiar and hovered at the edge of all that emptiness. The park management had been right. The park does need something to mediate between guests and the place. The question isn’t whether to intervene, but how. How can they make lines that move, paths that change, boundaries that breathe? What are the tools of their survey? I don’t have an answer. But I have a compass. And I think that’s where I’d start.  

1 John Palliser was an Irish geographer that led a western Canadian expedition for the British government in 1857. Palliser’s Triangle is the region roughly outlined by his route.
2 Palliser, John. The Papers of the Palliser Expedition, 1857-1860, edited by Irene M. Spry, Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1968.
3 Manning, Richard. Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Lindsey Nette is an architectural designer based in Vancouver BC, where her studio, The Offsite Project, explores small projects and vast contexts. She holds a BAS and an MArch from the University of Waterloo.  www.theoffsiteproject.com

Matt Neville: Our national landscape. Romanticising the Canadian hinterland

The topic of landscape is overwhelming. Ruminating on the word floods the mind with all of its meanings and applications – far-reaching, often meaningless, always subjective. The  diversity of essays in this issue demonstrates the range of the term. Reading Desiree Valadares’s essay ‘Dispossessing the Wilderness’, I find it difficult to reconcile the landscape images I most often see of Canada – often of our National Parks – and what I experience. I’m left wondering – why is our physical, common – or national – landscape not urban in nature?

Regardless of definition, Canada, as one of the world’s largest politically-defined land masses and culturally-diverse population, is rich in landscapes. From the picturesque wild of our National Parks to the often grotesque results of resource extraction, the Canadian landscape means something to both Canadians and to people beyond our borders. In her essay, Valadares eloquently points out that the “cultural constructs of North American identity have long hinged on wilderness, the mythology of uninhabited nature, and the vastness of the American landscape“1.

Canada is often envisioned as wilderness, yet such representations of a national landscape are vastly different from what most of us experience and inhabit. We are, after all, a country of (sub)urban dwellers, with 80-90 percent of the country’s inhabitants living and working in an urbanised region (and more than half of urban dwellers concentrated in either Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver).

In his 1926 ‘Manifesto for a National Literature’, literary scholar Lionel Stevenson noted that “the primordial forces are still dominant” in Canada; as a result “Canadian art is almost entirely devoted to landscape, Canadian poetry to the presentation of nature.”2 Today, this mythology remains strong, yet our common history is one of nation building, urban migration and urbanisation. Walter Pache, the late German literary scholar, once commented that urban writing in Canada is ubiquitous, yet elusive – an observation as relevant to Canadian literature as it is to the notion of Canadian urbanism.2 It is little wonder why the concept of Canadian urbanism is so weak, when our real and representative landscapes are so far detached from one another.

Less than 20 percent of Canadians live in non-urban environments, yet political discourse, policy and patterns of urban development are often rural-centric, and, in some cases, blatantly anti-urban. Over the past three decades, the trend of municipal amalgamation of towns and villages with large areas of non-urban land, suggests “a denigration of the urban, reflective of the disdain and indifference with which the city and the urban continue to be treated in the Canadian political system and cultural imaginary”3. In Halifax for example, the City of Halifax is part of a municipal unit of nearly 5,500 square kilometres in size. 75% of people within it, however, live within an urbanised area of less than 300 square kilometres. As we are in a federal election year, it is worth noting that a rural vote in Canada continues to count for more than an urban vote. Canada is a nation of urban dwellers who refuse to accept their urban condition, instead we appear to have a national preoccupation with open green space.

Paradoxically, with a mere 3.3 persons per square kilometre, Canada has one of the lowest population densities on the planet – suggesting that it is very much a non-urban nation. With more than 75 percent of Canadian clustered within 150 kilometres of the US border, there is a very real great expanse above – the true Great White North – which only a small percentage of citizens have ever actually experienced. And despite being so far removed from the North, its impact on Canadians and their image of the country cannot be overstated. Perhaps it is this overarching notion of nordicity and of a large empty hinterland beyond the city skyline that makes the truism of urbanity more difficult for most Canadians to accept.

Canadians seem to insist on the “city’s subordination to the natural world”4 and preference for the non-urban, yet in the daily lives of nearly all Canadians, non-urbanism is little more than a myth. But is this sense of identity based on the notion of wild and wilderness – and of nordicity – fading? While immigration to Canada was traditionally dominated by Europeans, today the vast majority are coming from cities in countries that have long experienced a ferocious pace of urbanisation (China, India, Philippines). New Canadians are coming from large cities and settling in a the largest of Canadian cities. Will this change in demographics bring about a new respect for the urban in Canada? Or are they looking for reprieve and will only reinforce the myth?

There is a critical need to “assert the centrality of the city and the urban within the Canadian spatial and cultural imaginaries, to help us see the city as a place of Canadian society and culture”.5 The need for an understanding of the urban as space of possibility, of personal freedom, of opportunity is critical to the overall health of the country. The future of the country is visible in its cities today – our shared physical landscape. This fixation, however, on the non-urban myth may ultimately degrade the overall high-quality of life that Canadian cities are known for today. 

References:
1  Valadares, Desiree, ‘Dispossessing the Wilderness’ On Site review 33: on land. 2015
2  Pache, Walter. ‘Urban Writing’. The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, edited by W.H. New, . Toronto: University of Toronto Pres, 2002. pp1148-1156
3  Stevenson, Lionel. 1926. Appraisals of Canadian Literature. Toronto: Macmillan, 1926.
4  Edwards, Justin and Douglas Ivison. Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. p199
5  Edwards p4

Matt Neville is an urban planner working in Halifax. He has a bachelor degree in Social Anthropology (Dalhousie) and a graduate degree in Human Settlements (University of Leuven, Belgium). PhD dropout. Twitter: @nevwxyz

Michael J Leeb: Flood mitigation. Akamina Parkway, Waterton Lakes National Park

With the catastrophic widespread flooding of June 20, 2013 in southern Alberta, many of the areas within and along the Rocky Mountains and their adjacent foothills on the leeward or easterly slopes of the mountains, experienced significant damage to road and bridge infrastructure. The city of Calgary itself had flood-related damages of about five billion dollars.

One example of this flood damage occurred in Waterton Lakes National Park in the Rocky Mountains at the extreme southwest corner of Alberta bordering British Columbia and Montana. It is an area called 'the Crown of the Continent', a biosphere ecosystem in the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
    
In this area a creek bed is typically dry, however for the past two years (2013-2014) creeks experienced sudden flash floods between late spring (May) and early summer (end of June to early July).  Extensive floods along the Akamina Parkway in June, 2013, washed out a large section of the road to Cameron Lake, a scenic drive popular with park visitors and tourists. This consequently necessitated the closure of the parkway for extensive and lengthy repairs, and for work on a large-scale flood mitigation project.

Construction on the Akamina Parkway Flood Mitigation Project started in 2013, the parkway was reopened on May 31, 2014.  A partial earthen dam lined with large cobble creates a shallow depression or small reservoir.  A barrier screen of steel beams is placed at its centre, angled to tilt slightly backward with the slope of the creek and reinforced by two additional steel beams as structural supports. Gravel and smaller rock debris pass through while the momentum and volume of water is slowed, preventing large boulders and larger rock debris from passing through and damaging the roadway. Water is slowed before it reaches the large culvert that prevents a breach or washout of the road – an effective design since it withstood about 180 mm of sudden rain over 36 hours in mid-June 2014.

A cantilevered rock wall (retaining wall) secured in place by wire mesh has been constructed along the June 2013 washout, just south along the downward slope of the road.  It provides a structural rampart for the eroded shoulder of the road along a sheer drop on the western slope. While the roadway runs south to north, the creek beds are at right angles running east to west; the steepness of the mountainside contributes a swollen torrent of fast flowing water when sudden heavy rainfalls occur.  The re-design and construction of these creek beds to control water and debris is meant to avert or at least limit the impact and damage of a potentially catastrophic flood event within the foreseeable future.

Similar flood mitigation projects have also been constructed in other mountain parks including Banff National Park.  These projects have deeply scarred the landscape; like an open wound with a visceral impact, they are seemingly at odds with the heritage conservation mandate of Parks Canada – the preservation of a pristine landscape. However, these projects do allow for public safety and continued accessibility to several hiking trails, boating and canoeing on Cameron Lake, and winter activities including snowshoeing and cross-country skiing – pragmatic necessity seems to have evolved recently to shape and transform Parks Canada policy towards increased tourism.

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society expressed concern in its 2014 report that infrastructure projects, (including commercial infrastructure such as hotels) have taken precedence over the social, ecological and economic benefits of national parks and designated wilderness areas. The announcement on July 14, 2014 of a five-year commitment and budgetary allocation of four million dollars for Parks Canada earmarks the majority of these funds for the future development of infrastructure within Canada’s national parks, rather than scientific research projects and heritage conservation.

These projects seem to imply that a fundamental shift in the conceptual and policy framework of Parks Canada has occurred, one where flood mitigation projects and increased flood resiliency are regarded as an asset; that flood reclamation and its consequent altering of the landscape does indeed take precedence (in selective circumstances) over the natural morphology of the landscape caused by floods.  Capital investment and commercial development now seemingly trumps former policy goals, with Parks Canada's mandate more closely resembling the US Park Service. Other recent projects such as the Glacier Skywalk in Jasper National Park and very similar flood mitigation projects in Banff National Park would also confirm this shift in policy.

Have these projects on infrastructure therefore become a form of ‘manufactured landscape'? Burtynsky’s 2013 project and film,Water, explores many relevant ideas on similar topics and issues.  These 'manufactured landscapes' represent man-made alterations of the natural environment or landscape through human intervention by constructing infrastructure such as dams that prevent or alter the natural geomorphology of a natural environment. Flood mitigation measures to protect roads that deliver visitors to lovely spots actually freezes the natural changes that occur in mountain ecosystems. In addition, these projects seem to defy the power of water to alter a landscape and are intended to avert the natural process of climatic change and its subsequent changes within mountain geography. The example of the Frank Slide as a metaphor is illustrative here: the early settlers of the Crowsnest Pass ignored warnings from indigenous peoples and defied the natural processes of erosion of unstable rock formations with disastrous consequence. It could well be argued that such a policy shift for the development of infrastructure within mountain national parks will eventually be costly and ineffectual should climatic change and the forces of nature progress rapidly to alter these parks.

The Akamina Parkway Flood Mitigation Project is an impressive one, and an example of innovative engineering and design that has substantially altered the Waterton Lakes National Park’s landscape providing a new visitor experience and attempting to ensure the continued viability of the park’s infrastructure. It is also the advent of a fundamental policy shift within Parks Canada that will most assuredly affect the ongoing viability of Canada’s national park’s landscape.

Michael J. Leeb is a poet, writer, and visual artist in Blairmore, Alberta and a member of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada (SSAC).

Michael J Leeb: Oil City, 1901

Oil City National Historic Site at Waterton Lakes National Park, adjacent to the Akamina Parkway

Oil City was surveyed in 1901 near the first producing oil well in Alberta, on the shores of Cameron Lake.  The townsite was never developed and was eventually abandoned – oil drilling in this area was not economically viable.  This is a remnant of a partial foundation for a hotel within the townsite, progressively, gradually re-colonised by the landscape.

Michael J Leeb is a poet, writer and visual artist in Blairmore, Alberta and a member of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada.

Michael Taylor: Form on the frontier

This is a project set in Cheorwon, the only county on the Korean peninsula severed by the demilitarised zone, diminishing the potential of its Geumwha Valley to be efficiently farmed.  However, its adjacency to the naturalised lands of the DMZ has created an ad hoc nature reserve for migratory birds, a popular tourist destination and a premium market for the organic rice grown here using traditional methods.  
In April 2012, a third nuclear device was detonated by an increasingly belligerent North Korea, while South Korea continues its three-decade trend as the fastest growing economy in the world. Regardless of this polarisation, reunification continues to be pursued. To further this agenda, the peninsula’s extreme economic disparity must be ameliorated using models that push hard currency north and engage the North’s labour force.

With Cheorwon county at the nexus of a fertile agricultural valley, unspoiled lowland habitat, a cluster of tourist sites and the heavily fortified demilitarised zone, this area has the potential to host a model of cross-border economic cooperation that can be catalytic for economic and social progress within the Korean peninsula.

My project proposes a special economic zone for rice production at the interesection of the agricultural valley and the DMZ. The unfarmed areas of the DMZ have the potential to enable access for North Korean farmers to the South Korean market. By leveraging the traditional farming methods of North Koreans – manual land preparation, no pesticides and hand-threshing, against a burgeoning market for organic rice in South Korea, this scheme subverts use of the void border space to increase the buying power of North Korean farmers.

With a landscape organised in strips of adjacent infrastructure, the need for architecture comes at the intersections where farm roads cross the riparian zone, or tourist paths, or military surveillance roads. These intersections are microcosms of the greater condition of the DMZ, which cuts through Cheorwon’s fertile agricultural valley and is a condition in which architecture can be deployed as an allegorical response to the greater border issue.

An architecture based on the need to bridge, layers circulation in section to create a vertical set of adjacencies: a stacked border condition, blurred by an undulating surface geometry.  Architecture is given the agency to organise a miniaturised DMZ, revealing the spatial consequences of already existing and extremely surreal adjacencies. By redefining in section boundaries that are typically fixed in plan, confronting agriculture, the military, tourism and nature becomes necessarily architectural.

This architecture reveals the uncanny juxtapositions that exist within the DMZ, and that confront the economic issues of reunification. These juxtapositions become generative factors for architectural form. 

Nora Wendl: Pruitt Igoe, Tomorrow

In an essay entitled 'The Temporality of the Landscape', philosopher Tim Ingold writes, “Let me begin by explaining what landscape is not. It is not ‘land,’ it is not ‘nature,’ and it is not ‘space’.”1 In this simple sentence, Ingold acknowledges that landscapes do not abstractly contain the records of the deliberate interventions and events that transpire upon them—they are the record. From the perspective of the archaeologist and the native dweller, he writes, the landscape is itself the story. For those theorists, historians and designers who would seek to write Pruitt Igoe’s story, it is difficult, if not impossible, to read the site in its present state as a record of its past—to see in this lush, forested landscape the 33 11-story buildings that once towered over it, or the houses that preceded them. It is perhaps easier to read the site cinematically, through a string of iconic images—as a moment that was the symbolic birth of the post-modern architectural movement. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1 Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe housing tower. Source: United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Public domain
“Happily,” wrote Charles Jencks, “it is possible to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time…Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite. Previously it had been vandalised, mutilated and defaced by its inhabitants and although millions of dollars were pumped back, trying to keep it alive (fixing the broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repainting), it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.”2 Jencks’ blindness toward Pruitt-Igoe as a federally programmed failure—not one that was hastened to its end by the residents—is evidence of what Pruitt-Igoe has become: a symbol of failure used by theorists to advance specific agendas. Oscar Newman used images of Pruitt-Igoe in its most vandalised, pre-demolition state to argue that its architectural design was the culprit for its failure as it lacked the physical characteristics that would allow the inhabitants to ensure their own security—his theory of defensible space. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter used Pruitt-Igoe in their polemic on postmodern architecture as evidence that the modern architectural movement failed because of its impulses toward social engineering. Charles Jencks used a photograph of the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe building C-15 to dramatically announce the demise of modern architecture and the beginning of the post-modern era.3 But only Jencks had a vision for the site’s future: “Without doubt, the ruins should be kept, the remains should have a preservation order slapped on them, so that we keep a live memory of this failure in planning and architecture.”4

Though Jencks did not know it, even as he wrote this, the site was a live memory of the towers. When the first edition of The Language of Postmodern Architecture was published in 1977, the demolition of these buildings would have just been complete, with local wrecking companies Cleveland and Aalco destroyed the remaining 31 towers by wrecking ball between January 1976 and the spring of 1977. Today, the former towers are still present on the site: under thousands of pounds of fill are fragments of the broken foundations, reinforced concrete and stock brick. More prominently, the electric substation is announced by a high-voltage sign and surrounded by barbed wire warning curious visitors to stay out.

And yet another live memory, or inadvertent result, of Pruitt-Igoe is Ferguson, Missouri, and the event which gained international attention in the summer of 2014: unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson. Upon the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe towers from 1972-1977, former residents of the project fled north, to suburbs of St. Louis County including Spanish Lake and Ferguson, as white suburbs blocked the construction of multi-family housing.5 Though architectural history would reduce the memory of the Pruitt-Igoe site to one iconic photograph of a tower being brought down by sticks of dynamite embedded in its foundation, the “live memory of this failure in planning and architecture,” in Jencks’ own words, is quite well. And those living it are subject to the same cycles of poverty and violence to which the towers bore witness.

If the deliberate interventions and events that transpired upon the site of Pruitt-Igoe in the past would have consequences far beyond the perimeter of the lot on which the buildings were located and far beyond the lifespan of the buildings, it is tempting to imagine what might shape its future might take—and indeed, how that in turn might shape the future of St. Louis. The site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing complex is located a mere two miles northwest of Saarinen’s Gateway Arch, bounded by Cass Avenue, N. 20th Street, Carr Avenue, and N. Jefferson Avenue. Private developer Paul McKee is currently proposing what he terms his 'Northside Regeneration plan' for the site, which would place the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency—the eyes and ears of the United States Department of Defense—squarely at the centre of what was once the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. 1,500 acres of residential, commercial, and office spaces, a school, and 50 acres of parks and trails complete the proposal. While this is not the first proposal for the site—previous proposals have included a golf course, a shopping mall, and for a time, a flirtation with industrial storage—it is a serious one. Mayor Francis Slay is pushing steadily for its inclusion on this site, and architectural studios at Washington University have already explored this notion.

While the site awaits its future, it looks largely the same as it did in the summer of 2011, when I formed a non-profit organisation with Michael R. Allen, director of the St. Louis-based Preservation Research Office. Together, we launched the Pruitt Igoe Now ideas competition: if prompted, how would contemporary architects, designers, urban designers, writers, artists and university students visualise the future life of the former Pruitt-Igoe site? Out of 348 total submissions collected between June 2011 and March 16, 2012, seven jurors—Teddy Cruz (University of California San Diego), Sergio Palleroni (Portland State University, BASIC Initiative), Theaster Gates, Jr. (University of Chicago and Founder, Rebuild Foundation), Diana Lind (Next American City), Bob Hansman (Washington University), Joseph Heathcott (New School), and Sarah Kanouse (University of Iowa)—selected 31 finalists and three winning entries: first place, St. Louis Ecological Assembly Line: Pruitt-Igoe as Productive Landscape, Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei R. Wang; second place, Recipe Landscape, Aroussiak Gabrielian and Alison Hirsch; and third place, The Fantastic Pruitt-Igoe!, by Social Agency Lab.

If these proposals for the site of Pruitt-Igoe are any indication, the Pruitt-Igoe of tomorrow is not architectural—it is agricultural, a nod to the verdant land available on site, and the dearth of fresh market groceries to serve the northside neighbourhoods. In the designs of 20 of the 31 selected finalists, agriculture or recreational gardening were proposed as a means of phyto-remediation—removing toxins that are the byproduct of construction and other forms of intervention from the land—as well as the design of programs that would enable the site to be a catalyst for growth in local infrastructure or entertainment—a brick factory, and the construction of an artificial moon, respectively (Fig. 2 and 3).

 Fig. 2 Carr Square Brick Yard, by Sina Zekavat, proposes to intervene in the cycle of brick theft from vulnerable northside buildings by imagining a brickyard that accommodates both storage for salvaged bricks and facilities for the production of new brick.Fig. 3 Double Moon, by Clouds Architecture Office, proposes one novel structure, an illuminated, artificial moon that hovers over the site, beckoning St. Louisans who might otherwise ignore the site.

In a majority of the Pruitt Igoe Now finalist proposals, architecture is negated in favour of utopian systems of agriculture, food production, and distribution—utopias closer to Thomas More’s vision (social, organised, productive), than the formal modern utopian proposals from which Pruitt-Igoe descended. In Recipe Landscape, Gabrielian and Hirsch recreate the site on domestic and ritualistic systems—animal husbandry and apiculture lend the primary ingredients for the '31 flavors of Pruitt-Igoe', produced by re-using the Pruitt School as both a dairy and a creamery, and distributed to stores city wide. (Fig. 4) Similarly, Dunbar and Wang imagine a St. Louis Ecological Assembly Line: Pruitt-Igoe as Productive Landscape, in which the site is the epicentre of an 'ecological assembly line', full of tree and plant nurseries that capitalise on the growing conditions of St. Louis, and provide vegetation to over 13,000 acres of St. Louis parks. (Fig. 5) The Fantastic Pruitt Igoe! by Social Agency Lab proposes a world in which St. Louis schoolchildren would invent programmatic and physical features for the site, working collaboratively with an advisory board of adults to envision the structures, programming and activities that would comprise this new and decidedly un-bureaucratic life for the site.

Fig. 4 Recipe Landscape, by Aroussiak Gabrielian and Alison Hirsch of Foreground Design Agency. The architecture of the site is re-used in the production of “the 31 flavors of Pruitt-Igoe,” a solution for growing ingredients for ice cream on the site, and creating a city-wide distribution network for the unique product.Fig. 5 St. Louis Ecological Assembly Line: Pruitt-Igoe as Productive Landscape, by Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei R. Wang imagines the site as a producer of trees for parks throughout St. Louis.
When we first proposed this ideas competition to city officials, they balked. If people knew the site was still empty, they argued, it would be bad publicity—it would make it look as if St. Louis had never 'solved' the problem of Pruitt-Igoe. Today, the Mayor’s support of the solution proposed by Paul McKee is evidence of a desire to make the site productive in the most literal sense—to put 3,200 Department of Defense jobs at its centre to catalyse new economic growth in the area. But if this is Pruitt-Igoe tomorrow, what of its unintended consequences? Are these jobs for the residents of this community, or are they jobs for educated white men? Will the tall fences topped with concertina wire be removed from the edges of the site, or will this boundary be reified in a new way, by security clearances, economic, racial and social differences? Instead of containing and isolating poverty, as the site did while Pruitt-Igoe stood, will it secure and protect affluence?

Ultimately, when we assured the city officials that what we were running was merely an ideas competition, they agreed that ideas were harmless. It was the American Institute of Architects St. Louis chapter that hounded us: 'what about jobs?' they asked, concerned that by producing and exhibiting a proliferation of ideas, somehow the possibility of real action on the site would be forever stalled, and architects of St. Louis never invited to take action.

The site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing complex lives still in a liminal space between the idea of action and the enacting of it. (Fig. 6) Minoru Yamasaki’s original proposal, after all, was a series of low-density garden apartments. Its reality, 33 11-story towers, was pushed forward at the behest of the political administrators of the site, and forced through Yamasaki’s hand. Perhaps the best inadvertent result that could transpire from Pruitt-Igoe—and indeed, we are still awaiting one—would not be a formal composition of land, or nature, or space, but instead a professional commitment to build a world in which the unintended consequences of architecture’s physical, social, and cultural intervention will not be merely the perpetuation of cycles of poverty and violence that architecture alone cannot solve.

Fig. 6 In Pruitt-Igoe: The Forest of Floating Minds, by Clouds Architecture Office, the 33 footprints of the original Pruitt Igoe towers are elevated on concrete structures and covered in vegetation, intended to foster the collective memory of the site.

Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to Michael R. Allen, Director of Preservation Research Office and co-organiser of Pruitt-Igoe Now, the competition jurors, our advisory committee, and those who entered the competition. I also thank Stephanie White, editor of On Site review, for the opportunity to reflect on the contemporary condition of the site and its imminent future.


1 Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” in The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000), 190.

2 Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-modernism, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 9.

3 Though Jencks dates the destruction of the towers to July 15, 1972, Pruitt-Igoe tower C-15 was cinematically demolished on April 21, 1972 in a “trial demolition.”

4 Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-modernism, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 9.

5 http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/08/a-failed-public-housing-project-could-be-a-key-to-st-louis-future/379078/

Nora Wendl questions the composition of architecture--seeking to expand the perception of what the discipline’s built forms and histories are (and could be). She is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Portland State University. www.norawendl.com

Novka Cosovic: Ometepe Island. A place of gods, alligators, sacrifice and latent destruction

You can feel and hear the buzzing if you concentrate, like the humming of an old fluorescent light in a blank room. Restless for 11,000 years, the Conception volcano outputs a busy waveform all over Ometepe Island. Volcanic power courses through the land like a wave of voltage. Energy is all around you in the middle of Lake Nicaragua.

4000 years ago, the Nahua people travelled from north to south to find their holy land. Their prophets had told them that somewhere there would be an island formed by two (ome) volcanoes (tepelt) – their new place for sanctuary and peace. Yet, the island was circled by piranhas, large-tooth sawfish, alligators, crocodiles and bull sharks, making the Nahuas vulnerable in the food chain.

The taxi driver takes you down a long narrow dirt road. The vertical view is framed with mango trees and billboards, some written in Mandarin, some in Spanish: Hotel! Coming Soon!

At the end of the dirt road, there is a sand pathway. The Punta Jesús Maria is an extension of the land; a narrow one kilometre strip of black sand that stretches into the dark water. The pathway is so narrow that you are nearly walking on water as you get to the middle of the lake. Half way along you hear the taxi driver and some local construction workers screaming. You quickly turn around; they are screaming at you and at a moving object near the beginning of the trail. It is an alligator. This is how the alligators trap their prey. You are its lunch. Luckily, the taxi driver, once a FSLN soldier, pulls out his gun and points it at the predator. Aware, the alligator slowly crawls back into the lake. But you still see its one-metre-long head lurking in the water as you continue to walk down the path.

You kick the sand and see a pink object in mid-air, catching the sunlight. It is a two-inch spearhead made of jade – an ancient weapon – probably used against the ancestors of that exact same alligator. You kick some more sand because you hope luck is on your side. Instead, you find pieces of black clay with red streaks on them. It reminds you of the same pottery made by the Nahua currently displayed in the Ometepe Museum, once a tobacco factory during the Spanish colonial era.

The trail is full of hidden treasures. When you reach the end of the pathway, you take one last good look because you know this will no longer exist. The trail will disappear after they build the canal, the canal that will cut through the lake, split Nicaragua in half and join the two oceans. The alligator may not survive the construction because it only lives in fresh water.

You make your way back to the island, towards the volcano. As you run, you repeatedly turn your head around and frantically hop for fear of the alligator charging at your ankles.

The taxi driver is anxious.  He greets you, but you wonder where he keeps his gun. As he juggles with three cell phones all simultaneously ringing, you notice that his hands are swollen and powerful. His knuckles are permanently disarticulated and do not align. He drives a Toyota 4 X 4. A decal on his rear window says The Punisher.

On the road, going at 100 miles per hour, the taxi driver shouts against the wind: “See that huge brown stain on the volcano? That was the mark of a mudslide a few months back.” On the other side of the road, there is a clear field – no trees, no shrubs, no homes, no life.

The mudflow was man-made.

Ometepe supplies coffee beans and plantains to Nicaragua and Central America from its rich volcanic soil. Demand for food products is always high, so bigger farmlands and plantations climbed further up the slopes, making it almost impossible for the volcano to support such sizeable platforms. Eventually the land collapsed due to a heavy rainfall; the mudflow killed over 50 people in their sleep. Apart from the ravages of Spanish colonialism, Nicaragua has never seen such destruction of the land as this response to capitalism by the natural forces of Ometepe.

You arrive in Charco Verde. It is a nature reserve for howler monkeys, armadillos and a spectrum of tropical birds and butterflies. It is also regarded as one of the most sacred spots of the whole of Central America. The Nahuas thought they could destroy or at least tame the energy of the volcanoes. They would practice rituals, such as human sacrifice, for the volcano gods. As you walk through the forest, you realise that you walk on the exact same path where victims were once dragged towards Concepción Volcano. The path that you walk was once a death row.

You remember, years ago sitting in front of the television watching a Mickey Mouse cartoon on a Saturday morning. Goofy is stranded on a volcanic island. He thinks that he is in paradise; he sways and sleeps on a hammock all day, with an angry volcano spewing ash in the background. Eventually, the natives capture Goofy, thinking that he is a White God whose purpose is to be sacrificed. To appease their gods, the natives swing Goofy and toss him into the volcano. As he falls in, he still has his goofy smile. You laugh so hard that cereal and milk squirts out of your nose. But you are not laughing now. It is plus 35 degrees Celsius and you have goosebumps. And you wonder why Disney sanctioned Goofy being tossed in the volcano as a human sacrifice.

This, at one time, was Ometepe.  Despite the man-eating alligators and erupting volcanoes, the natives never wanted to leave the island – it was a paradise (and still is). They felt they could only survive by gratifying the volcano’s hunger for their people; the role of the most beautiful women and the strongest men of Ometepe was to produce children for sacrifice.

After walking through the jungle, you arrive at Charco Verde’s lagoon. The water is algae-infested and remarkably green. Legends say that this is the place where gods and sacrificers would pee (Xistletoet in Nahuatl) before making their way to Concepción Volcano.

On the shore, you see tourists practising their yoga poses; Ometepe is also known for yoga retreats. While having dinner or taking a stroll, you will always be bothered by expat yogis and their pamphlets: Partake in daily Naam Yoga in beautiful Ometepe, one of Central America’s finest and majestic landscapes!

You take a step back and look at it all. Nodding, you will say: this is perhaps one of the most beautiful places that I have ever been in all of my life. But how could anyone find serenity with the volcano’s humming noise in the background or the subtle creepiness that crawls behind your neck, or a man-made mudslide that will eat you in seconds or an angry Alligator God who is about to latch onto your ankles and drag you into the depths of Lake Nicaragua?  

Novka Cosovic is an architect with Pulp & Fiber, a Toronto-based brand marketing and advertising agency.

Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter: Trollstigen Visitor Centre, Romsdalen - Geiranger fjord, Norway

RRA

Located on Norway’s west coast, the Trollstigen Visitor Centre is in a pass between two deep fjords. The site can only be visited in summer due to severe winter weather. Despite – or perhaps because of – the inaccessible nature of the site, the project became an entire visitor environment from a mountain lodge with restaurant and gallery to flood barriers, water cascades, bridges, paths to outdoor furniture, pavilions and viewing platforms. These elements are folded into the landscape so that the visitor’s experience of place is very intimate.  The architectural intervention is respectfully delicate, conceived as a thin thread that guides visitors from one stunning overlook to another.

The architecture is characterised by clear and precise transitions between planned zones and the natural landscape. Using water as a dynamic element – from snow, to running and then falling water with rock as a static element, the project creates a series of prepositional relations that describe and magnify the unique spatiality of the site.

The Trollstigen plateau is a robust facility, dimensioned for durability with minimal maintenance and large static stresses. The contrast between the seasons (up to seven metres of snow in the winter) is handled by the choice of materials. Structures and details are designed to withstand extreme stress without compromising visual slenderness. Working with resistance felt natural; cast-in-place concrete and cor-ten steel are the main materials. The steel oxidises, developing its own patina over time; the concrete has received several different techniques: polished, steel-trowelled, flushed, broomed, spot-hammered and cast in different types of formwork. With the nuances each treatment gives the material, it is possible to address each micro-context in relation to use and placement. All the materials are carefully chosen to show a clear and precise transition between the architecture and the natural landscape.

diephotodesigner.de

There are always some difficulties in the construction of an installation like this. Because of the extreme weather conditions and the difficulties of access for construction equipment, most of the material was transported by helicopter to the outlook plateau. However, for us as architects it was always the structural challenge to do a structure robust enough to look after the safety of the public, and at the same time appear simple and elegant.

Sustainability of the project is an important factor.  There is durability in all details – the architectural installations have been built to withstand the violent forces of nature. In summer, autumn and spring, major floods cause extensive damage. The amount of snow in the winter months is so large that extraordinary static solid solutions are required. Since the project consists of a number of individual measures, it is organised into a system of sub-site development. As part of the mandate for sustainability, all grey water is filtered locally at the site through a series of sand reservoirs. Black water is reduced using vacuum sanitary systems. Trollstigen is energy self-sufficient through a local mini-hydro power plant which is a part of the project, and the project uses low energy infrastructure throughout.

The Trollstigen plateau is a very comprehensive architectural project, both in program, complexity and extent. It covers an area of approximately 600,000 m2 that from one end to the other takes about twenty minutes of continuous walking. At the same time the complex is staged to receive a lot of people in a short time. Around 600,000 people distributed in 100,000 vehicles visit the site during the summer months. This lays down large demands of infrastructure and logistics.  

diephotodesigner.de 

Location: Rauma – Møre og Romsdal, Norway
Program: National tourist routes project
Client: The Norwegian public roads administration
Commission type: Invited competition (1st prize) in cooperation with Multiconsult 13.3 landscaping (2004)
 

Architects: Reiulf Ramstad Architects (RRA), Oslo, Norway.
RRA Key Architects:
Reiulf D Ramstad - responsible project manager
Christian Skram Fuglset - project manager
RRA team involved in the process:
Kristin Stokke Ramstad, project communication
Anja Hole Strandskogen RRA architect
Ragnhild Snustad, RRA architect
Kanog Anong Nimakorn, RRA architect
Espen Surnevik (former RRA architect)
Atle Leira (former RRA architect)
Christian Dahle (former RRA architect)
Lasse A. Halvorsen (former RRA architect)

Structural Engineer: Dr Techn. Kristoffer Apeland AS, Oslo Norway
Design: 2004-2011
Construction: 2005-2012, official opening 2012
Photographs: RRA, Diephotodesigner.de
Renderings: Reiulf Ramstad Architects/MIR
Building area:     800 m2     Visitor Centre: restaurant and gallery
        950 m2     Flood Barrier Structure
Site:         200,000 m2

www.reiulframstadarchitects.com

Ruth Oldham: Holes and heaps, terrils as cultural artefacts

Mining and quarrying, whether for coal or copper, marble or potash, are activities that necessarily alter the land. A hole is made; a heap of waste is created. The hole might be hidden underground, its presence only felt on the surface through areas of subsidence. In the case of quarrying and open cast or strip mining the hole is at ground level, perhaps shallow and wide, or deep and steeply sloped. The heaps of waste material can be amalgamated into a giant mountain, or dotted around as a series of smaller mounds, or spread as low and flat as possible. The original topography is modified; the original vegetation is lost.

What should happen to the holes and the heaps once the exploitation has finished? For centuries, across the world, they were just left in place, at most fenced off to prevent accidents. But over the past few decades scientific understanding and public awareness of the problems that mining and quarrying leave in their wake has increased. In the face of these problems – erosion, landslides, water pollution, disruption of water tables and local hydrology systems, loss of biodiversity, as well as the aesthetic impact of barren and carved up land, legislation has been passed forcing landowners and mining companies to reclaim the land and make it hospitable. This seems an entirely justified response, and it is vital that companies be held to account for the impact of their activities; that they are not allowed to simply exploit the land and move on to the next site.  

But the debate is complex, and here I will borrow a phrase used in the original call for articles for this issue, as this greening over can also serve as a ‘a screen or a mask that beautifies a set of ugly exploitations… that excuses industrialised extractive industries.’ I would suggest that it can create a sort of amnesia, helping the public forget, or preventing us from ever realising, the extent of our actions, just how much we intervene in the earth in order to create and maintain our way of life.

This debate goes back at least to the 1970’s, the period when public awareness of environmental issues exploded. Robert Morris’ essay, ‘Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation’ (1), outlines some of the principal debates surrounding the reclamation of mining landscapes. Observing how difficult it proved to establish and agree upon a workable definition of reclamation, he notes that in the USA the 1977 Surface Mining and Control Reclamation Act ultimately transferred the responsibility of reclamation upon individual state governments, who define and enforce it with wildly varying methods and means. Whilst this lack of definition opens up possibilities for the mining companies to carry out the minimum of reclamation, it also recognises that each site is unique (whether in scale, the nature of the disruption, or the surrounding environmental context) and that reclamation after exploitation should take into account these differences – there cannot be a universally adapted solution. Morris suggests that mines present enormous scope for artists to create site specific works. Such works might run the risk of serving as public relations exercises for the mining companies, but they also have the potential to engage public attention to the subject of environmental exploitation by doing something other than simply evening out and greening over the landscape.

Morris makes reference to Robert Smithson, whose writing and art work of the early 1970s addressed these issues directly. ‘It seems that the reclamation laws really don’t deal with specific sites, they deal with a general dream or an ideal world long gone… we have to accept the entropic condition and more or less learn how to reincorporate these things that seem ugly. There’s a conflict of interests. On the one side you have the idealistic ecologist and on the other side you have the profit desiring miner and you get all kinds of strange twists of landscape consciousness from such people.’ He believed that the artist had a vital role to play in negotiating this conflict. ‘Such devastated places as strip mines could be recycled in terms of earth art… Art can become a physical resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist.’ (2)

In 1973 Smithson sent the Kennecott Mining Company an unsolicited proposal for a reclamation artwork at the world’s largest open cast copper mine, Bingham Canyon in Utah. His proposal capitalised upon the monumental nature of the site, leaving the vast spiralling ramps untouched, and simply creating a pool of bright yellow (due to the acidity of the site) water in the bottom, with four jetties that would submerge and appear in response to rain and water levels (fig 1). The company never responded to his proposition, as the mine was active at the time and remains so today. But it is interesting to note that the site has since become an important tourist attraction; the visitor centre inaugurated in 1992 has hosted over three million tourists and the sheer monumentality of the mine is an attraction in and of itself. Robert Morris suggested that it ‘should stand unregenerate as a powerful monument to a one-day nonexistent resource’ and he goes on to note that ‘all great monuments celebrate the leading faith of the age – or in retrospect, the prevailing idiocy.’ (3) It is not surprising that the land artists were attracted to mining sites, as the scale of the industrial interventions in the land tended to exceed anything they could hope to achieve on limited arts funding budgets. An abandoned mine could be considered to be a ready-made art work – the artist’s job was to rethink it from mine to artwork, and find a means to communicate this transformation.  

Robert Smithson; notations.aboutdrawing.org/robert-smithson
Keeping in mind the issues raised by the 1970s land art movement, I would like to look at the landscape of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais area of northern France, which has been deep mined for coal for nearly three hundred centuries. The disruption to the surface of the land has been minimal compared to an open pit mine such as Bingham Canyon, where the mine has displaced all other land use, even engulfing the original town of Bingham. In the Nord-Pas-de-Calais some of the now abandoned underground mines have manifested themselves at ground level in the form of subsidence lakes, but the most obvious impact to the topography has been the creation of hundreds of spoil heaps, known as terrils in French, from terre (earth). There are over 300 of these small hills of dark grey rocky waste dotted across a strip of land about 12 miles wide that stretches 120 miles east to west. Their conical silhouettes have created a strong visual identity to this otherwise flat and uneventful part of northern France (fig.2). Alongside the terrils, the area became urbanised. The mines supported a workforce of thousands and attracted immigrants from all over France and Europe. These new arrivals were housed in exemplary workers’ housing estates with schools, churches and other community facilities, all provided by the mining companies. A network of railway lines was created to transport the coal.

The last mine closed in 1990, concluding a slow decline that began in the 1960s. In 2012 the entire area was classed as a UNESCO world heritage site, considered to be a complete landscape bearing witness to the coal mining industry which in turn was a crucial element of the European Industrial Revolution. In all 353 elements (such as pit head machinery, housing estates, schools, railways and terrils) have been listed. They recount many aspects of the rich social and economic history of the area, from the paternalistic management techniques of the mining companies to the workers’ unionisation movement and the struggle for improved conditions and rights. Interestingly, in the inventory of the UNESCO listing, the terrils (of which 51 are listed) come third, ahead of the housing and the social amenities. The inadvertent results that the mining had on the landscape have been recognised as important as the infrastructure that was created to enable it.

But I think there is something more going on. The terrils are loved by the people who live near them: they climb them, fly kites on them, appreciate the wildflowers and butterflies, and enjoy having a high place from which to get a view. And they are also recognised by the thousands of people who pass through the area every day, often at high speed on the motorway or train. I always find myself scanning the horizon looking out for the first glimpse of a terril. A pair of particularly large twin terrils on the edge of the town of Lens were humorously likened to the Egyptian pyramids and featured in the successful campaign to bring the new outpost of the Louvre to the town. The upheaval (mess?) left behind after over three hundred years of mining has become the defining feature of the landscape – it is the landscape.

Mines et cités minières du Nord et du Pas-De-Calais Photographies aériennes de 1920 à nos jours. Olivier Kourchid, Annie Kuhnmunch. Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990At the beginning of this text I asked what should be done with all the holes and heaps left behind once mining and quarrying industries have exhausted their resource. It is an overly simplistic question, as a short exploration of the subject leads one to realise that each site is unique and has to be approached individually, but it is nonetheless the question that has led to the creation of numerous laws and regulations in countries across the world. Were a new seam of coal discovered in France today it would be inconceivable that its exploitation result in the creation of several hundred spoil heaps dotted across the landscape.  

The landscape of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais is interesting because there has been no program to return it to some previous (and now forgotten) state. A natural process of greening over has gradually got underway (some of the terrils are entirely wooded, others remain barren and stony, some have a green fuzz of pioneer vegetation). Overall, in its altered, man-made state the landscape has been left intact and only a couple of decades after the end of the mining it has become highly valued and cherished. The UNESCO listing came about after a nine year campaign, led by local politicians and heritage professionals, and notably underpinned by real support from the local communities. The terrils and the other remains of the mining infrastructure have been incorporated into the identity and daily lives of the local population. In a similar way to the land artists transforming (rethinking) abandoned mines into site specific artworks, here the remains of the mining industry and in particular the heaps of waste that it left behind, have also been rethought - as places of recreation, and as cultural artefacts that tell us an important history.

photo: author’s own
Morris, Robert, ‘Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation’, October, Spring 1980
Flam, Jack (ed), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, University of California Press 1996
Morris, 1980

Ruth Oldham studied architecture in Glasgow and London and now lives in Paris. She is interested in landscapes, waste, and the imagination – subjects she is exploring in an ongoing study of man-made mountains. 

Sara Jacobs: Ghosts

The army didn't contain its tests and training to its own ground. A Department of the Interior study shows about 1,400 square miles of public land in Utah is covered with unexploded ordinance, some of it containing nerve agent and germs.1 When walking or riding on BLM land adjacent to military property, it is wise to stick to the road in front of you. You never know where the chemical ghosts of the Cold War may be lurking.

—  Chip Ward. Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West. Verso: 1999. p101

August 11, 2015

I am in Wendover, Utah for the month. This is my third full day, and I am feeling a little overwhelmed by all the somethings in the nothingness. Today I went to a place called the Blue Lake, an inland salt marsh and lake managed by the BLM that is inside the arid expanse of the Utah Test Range, an active military site managed by the Department of Defense.

There is something to the solitude outside my normal routine that is causing me to think a lot about space and land, but also place and landscape. At first, this place seemed like a blip on the map, empty and only given a name as the result of cartographic engineering. In areas we don't know or can't see, the grid randomly assigns a value without regard for materiality or histories. Tooele County, W1 N18, Grid 16. Virtue on this side, vice on the other.

We created this wasteland, we removed its meaning, its history. We gave it a number and buried its past. We made it a property and then stripped it of its economy. We had the audacity to abandon the ghosts of an unproud history in a place already filled the extractions and disposals that no one else wanted.

There are signs all over warning not to wander off the roads. Within this zone of Cartesian benignity, there is a fence that appears to start out of nowhere. It runs in a straight line as far as I can see, as if to delineate a real boundary between two different places. I had read this quote (above) earlier today in a book about downwind military and chemical testing in Utah, and it all felt very full circle. 

Also, it is just so austerely beautiful here.



1 Nearly one quarter, or 650 million acres, of the continental landmass of the United States is part of the public domain. Located mostly west of the 100th meridian, these lands are primarily managed by the Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture. Nearly 28 million acres, again mostly in the west, are Department of Defense lands. Since 1851 the rectilinear Public Land Survey System (PLSS) has been used to identify and determine land ownership in the United States. Often called the Jeffersonian grid, this system of surveying laid the foundation for city development, but was also applied to distance lands that were unknown and unseen. Public lands management is a contentious political issue, as the administrative boundaries of these lands have been drawn without regard to physical or ecological geographies. The agencies tasked with their management carry a multiple-use mission of simultaneously balancing cultural heritage, productive industry, and ecological conservation to 'best meet the present and future needs of the American people'.

Sara Jacobs is a designer and researcher in Seattle, Washington. She studies the networks between land, people and ecosystems, and how those relationships are represented between digital and analog space.

Stephanie White: listening to landscapes

Disaster tourism, 1962 postcard of Frank Slide, 1903, Crowsnest Pass, British Columbia

Reading about the Akamina Parkway, the engineering project that controls creek beds when they fill with too much water, ‘fingers’ and ‘dykes’ come to mind.  All this work was done to protect a road, and that road is meant to deliver tourists to views that can be photographed.  Leeb points out the shift in Parks Canada’s focus on protection and conservation of vast tracts of land, to tourism. Perhaps the vast tracts of land aren’t working hard enough to make money for the government. Surely they can be mined, logged or dammed, but in the meantime we can mine the tourist dollar. And then it rains, there are floods, there are avalanches if rain comes between snowfalls, skiers and snowmobilers are lost, houses ripped off their foundations, and if it isn’t raining, the forest is burning.  Decades of misguided forest fire mitigation means that the woods are full of tinder, or dead pine beetle stock (no longer controlled by very cold winters), so when they go, they go with vengeance.  Mine, sayeth the lord, or in this case, the climate.  

Controlled slash burning was once a form of fire mitigation – yes, all that burning dumped tons of things into the atmosphere and the air was full of smoke, but now with forest fires the size of small provinces burning all over BC, northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, tons of CO2 and particulate are still being dumped into the atmosphere, whole mountainsides are lost, not to clear-cutting, but to fire. The loss of habitat is gone in both scenarios. The parks were supposed to be immune to all of this; increasingly they are invaded by interference of the human kind, whether it be forest companies or campers who don’t put out their fires properly – easily done, the landscape is marketed as an image, able to be carelessly entered, virtually read without the knowledge of what that landscape actually consists of, how it was made, how it works.  It is a marvellous thing, IMG_10452.

1
Michael Leeb wrote a poem (On Site review 29: geology) about the Frank Slide of 1903 where the side of a mountain sheared away and tumbled over a little town and the railway tracks. A natural disaster, just bad luck. Turtle Mountain, hanging over Frank, was called by indigenous people ‘the shaking mountain’. Would this not give a town builder pause? or the CPR engineers?  Evidently not, what did the natives know, allegedly living in their late nineteenth-century stone age? — quite a lot as it turns out.  The eastern slopes of the Rockies are made up of the western edge of an inland sea, sedimentitious slates, sandstones, lifted up to long ridges by eastern-advancing plate tectonics.  Like the snow conditions that produce avalanches – layers of snow, ice, snow, ice until it is so heavy that upper snow layers slide off buried ice layers, so too the mountains.  So too Turtle Mountain, especially with a couple of decades of heavy coal trains rumbling by at its base: good-bye Frank.  The engineers, geologists and civic entrepreneurs weren’t listening.  

The Akamina Parkway, the site of the flood mitigation engineering, is like the town of Frank. The creeks are shouting that there are problems ahead, but no one is listening; all of a sudden the fans of steel I-beams look pathetically frail.  

2
The inability to listen is both ignorance and arrogance. The belief that living in a modern western society protects us from violence, from disaster, from death is a fallacy: our money is useless.  The 2013 Calgary floods wiped out one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in a very wealthy city. The Elbow floods regularly, every five or so years, but this was an exceptional year, a weather system that slid up the eastern slopes from Colorado and parked itself over the headwaters of the Elbow River, somewhere in the Kananaskis Range 100km away.  The Elbow joins the Bow which proceeds east to the South Saskatchewan River.  East, 100km down the Bow from Calgary, is the Blackfoot Reserve of the Siksika Nation. It too flooded, it regularly floods, the housing is so flimsy that it is uninhabitable even between floods.  The Blackfoot once were nomadic, ranging from the North Saskatchewan to the Yellowstone River, from the mid-Rockies to the Sand Hills. Treaty Seven, 1877, gave them a reserve on the Bow River. Where does the idea come from that to settle, to embed settlements in fixed geographies, to be permanent, is what we need?  Is there not a logic in watching the waters rise and so moving to higher ground, rather than staying in an environmental and behavioural sink, vulnerable and trapped? Or in listening to the mountain above you groan and creak and deciding to move out of its way, rather than shouting at it to shut up?

Lest one think these are wilderness and provincial issues, London is a world city, the hub of its country, yet London had dreadful floods throughout its history, plagues, fires, poverty, epidemics – why were these things considered unimportant in the siting and the development of the city?  And why did the Romans in their founding of Londinium, 47 AD, ignore Vitruvius, 80-15 BC, who clearly said that lowlands were unhealthy, vulnerable places to live and hills were best?  He was a military man, Londinium was a military outpost, who wasn’t listening?  

There were most likely short-term expeditious reasons for overlooking the force of climate, weather events, the development of poverty and social inequity, plus power struggles between individuals, charismatic leaders and the quick buck.  Our belief in power derived from technology and its eternal refinements is proving, two millennia later, to be chimerical.  Flood mitigation does not stop floods; our fingers are in the cracks of a dyke we don’t even recognise, so blinded are we by the beautiful view. 

Stephanie White is the founder and editor of On Site review.