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An important rejoinder to @JooBilly’s widely-circulated @PlacesJournal article. Read @kzhill’s full thread. The contributions of those engaged in purposeful, public projects—many women—is erased when authors in positions of power rhetorically reinvent what land. arch. is/must be.
What’s more @JooBilly has a weak handle on the history of landscape arch., esp in relation to federal projects undertaken during the New Deal. 2/n
He claims that documents like @lafoundation‘s The New Landscape Declaration are propaganda and that his article is not... 3/n
@JooBilly argues that federally-funded pilot projects like @scape_studio’s Living Breakwaters are merely "playful design proposals," while large-scale federally-funded public projects like those built during the New Deal provide an admirable historical precedent. 4/n
It's a weak claim, given that New Deal projects were not all successful, just, or ecologically beneficial; nor did they always involve landscape architects. While many landscape architects worked for alphabet soup agencies, engineers more often held the higher positions. 5/n
During the 1930s-40s landscape architects continually expressed their frustration that landscape architecture was neither valued nor understood by those responsible for structuring/staffing US gov’t agencies. See for example, articles pub’d during this time in Land.Arch.Quarterly
When Fleming concludes, "Now is our chance to re-institutionalize design expertise in government," he neglects to consider that “design expertise” was never "institutionalized" in US government agencies in the first place. 7/n
@billyjoo also overlooks the fact that relying solely on "expertise" at the federal, state, and local levels of governance and planning can alienate and even imperil citizens being governed (not to mention destroy entire living ecosystems). 8/n
The author's irreverence for history and lack of historical knowledge really shows through in sentences like this one: "Whatever the field of landscape architecture has been, from Olmsted to Hutcheson, from McHarg to SCAPE, it must now be something else." 9/n
If we are to look to the New Deal to inform how we situate landscape architectural practice in relation to governance and landscape/climate change, then we must understand first how LA’s participated in New Deal projects and these projects' social/political/material legacies 10/n
Before initiating New Deal-like projects, we need to evaluate and plan for the substantial long-term maintenance, repair & financing that large-scale infrastructural projects require. Such a pragmatic & historical perspective is essential to the success of any #GreenNewDeal 11/n
Re-planting oyster beds w/ community groups & reworking policy (& recognizing women’s work) is a more viable & immediate way to take action than rebuilding institutions around some homogeneous idea of what "landscape architecture" must be in the 21st c, as @JooBilly suggests. 🐢
