Thread by @lscapeisaverb

re: Design and the Green New Deal, I'd like to take a moment to be the grumpy old man. It's a great challenge and made me do some (more) thinking. So I'd like to push some of the points even father. placesjournal.org/article/design… 1/11

1- "We seem to have forgotten an important lesson about Olmsted: his eagerness to enter the political arena and challenge the status quo."

Yes, Olmsted was eager to change the status quo + part of this was framed by debates about industry and “technologies” of the time. 2/11

Technology meaning- slaves or machines. (or industry)

Granted, he fell on the side of machines but wasn’t all that benevolent. If you look at what he wrote as a journalist, it’s evident that he had no sympathy for enslaved peoples, but disagreed with the agrarian labor. 3/11

Why is this important? Well, his is a (the?) defining landscape vision for how we describe “good design.” Landscape Architecture done through the New Green Deal will always be evaluated through that (single) lens. So what is another point of view, one of leisure. 4/11

Thaisa Way recently asked “What if W.E.B. Dubois were the Landscape Architect we looked to (we kinda know the answer here)?
OR- what if we considered how we produce landscapes from a fundamentally broader and more complex perspective of labor(ers) and leisure. 5/11

So his was valuable view, but not the only -especially when looking at a New Deal and infrastructural/productive landscape of work. 6/11

2 Re: McHarg. “He pioneered the “layer cake” model underlying the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) framework that today dominates the field.” 7/11

GIS is a powerful tool, but we can’t forget the core assumptions built into it.
It’s based on the idea that you can optimize land with maps at a remote location more efficiently than being local. But that also means you forget who is occupying that ground. 8/11

If you look at the project that was the impetus for GIS, you see a delineation of land for in Africa for paper production. If you look at the 1st project that the acronym is applied to we see an overlay being applied in central Canada to optimize land use. 9/11

Both of application are questionable when you consider who is living there, their relationship with the land, and how they are expected to reorganize their behaviors once the maps become policy and their new imposed relationship with the land (labor?) 10/11

Point being, in embracing the New Green Deal Landscape Architecture needs to interrogate the “inspirations” and the tools to accurately reflect the people and places that will be impacted today. We need to dig deep.

I will now get off my soapbox in the corner… 11/11

Sidebar: We kinda know because of our current fascination with data doesn't consider of the work Dubois pioneered with his research and work- (or his way pre-GIS mapping of Philadelphia). smithsonianmag.com/history/first-…