“when it’s done, it’s just going to be a big, dumb wall,”

January 31, 2020 1:17 PM

Design and the Green New Deal
Billy Fleming in Places Journal: "If landscape architects want to remake the world, we can start by remaking our discipline."

Fleming writes in reaction to The New Landscape Declaration - "Inspired by LAF’s 1966 Declaration of Concern, we crafted a new vision for landscape architecture for the 21st century."

Designing a Green New Deal - "Close to 1,400 attendees and several thousand online viewers watched the day-long Designing a Green New Deal conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, which brought together for the first time the policy experts and activists driving the Green New Deal (GND) with landscape architects, architects, and planners."

The Green New Deal is really about designing an entirely new world

The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal - [FastCompany writeup]

This Atlas for a Green New Deal is a product of our own milieu—the overlapping crises we find ourselves living through in 2019. For New Dealers, it was the environmental crisis of the Dust Bowl, the economic crisis of the Great Depression, and the political crisis of fascism that forced the window for bold, national action open. For Green New Dealers, we find ourselves living through the ecological crisis of climate change, the economic crisis of capitalism, and the resurgent political crisis of rising fascism across the globe, even here in the United States.

We’re constantly told to go slow, think small, and tweak systems rather than transform them; that we are doomed, and all that’s left to decide is the extent of our collective destruction. But the Green New Deal offers something more—a chance to go fast, to think big, and to transform the structures that gave us climate change and inequality; and an opportunity to imagine a world in which things are, we promise, better than you think.

posted by the man of twists and turns (3 comments total)

This is long, but so good. (only read the main link so far)
posted by sepviva at 4:28 PM on January 31, 2020

Thanks twists and turns. Too much to read and answer to briefly and maybe too US-centric to mean anything in the World; most countries are IMO just much less politicised than USA.

Overall I agree only LAs (and other holists) have a wide-enough view for Earth repair but almost no-one is teaching\implementing Planetary or even trans-national solutions. And many LAs IMO dislike robust discussion and pushback is sometimes the only way ahead.

Landscape architecture has a resistant Utopian strand, evident in this piece; happy tropes "hope for the future"; assertions like "we vow" - hard to practice in the face of power, tradition and hatred of the natural - these jar my kiwi sensibilities. My anecdata shows a sudden lift from engineers\BAU types but we have a non-denialist government now - and the changes are very apparent here.

If I knew what I now know now I'd focus on machines, not landscapes "on landscapes, not machines - para 1". It is so, so difficult to get councils, governments and corps to 'get' new ideas to change the world, whereas if you make one machine that makes a real-difference and sell a million of 'em you CAN change the world - Industrial Design for my next time round please.

I can save a developer 10 to 30+% on their site capex, handle all stormwater onsite and shorten resale times etc, but power and money are so fixated on tradition and stiff-neckidness, where doing something 'new' is an acknowledgement that what went before is flawed.
posted by unearthed at 8:34 PM on January 31, 2020 [2 favorites]

Thanks for posting this, it is very relevant to my current interests. And though it is very US-centric, totally parallel things are happening here.
When I was in landscape school during the 1980's, there was a professor who foresaw all of what is happening now, and did some research on how to deal with it too, but unfortunately, she died young. At the time she was seen as an "old" hippie, since the department head was focusing on a purely esthetic approach at the time. I won't say I wish I'd listened more to her, because I did listen. But I wish I'd made more of an effort to archive her work in my student job as department secretary. I do have an interview with her widower in a drawer somewhere.
She designed the park that was the beginning of what transformed a tired old industrial and donutted Copenhagen into the succes it is today. It isn't a beautiful work of art, her mastership was engaging all the locals and persuading the politicians that a public space there is more important than high-end apartment buildings. Being a good landscape architect is more than drawing beautiful projects, and she was able to give all stakeholders a sense of ownership to the project.
posted by mumimor at 1:21 AM on February 1, 2020 [3 favorites]