Walter Hood will be hosting the topos op-ed column “From the Edges” for the next four issues. In his first article here, the landscape architect and iconic expert talks about how a socially deprived section of the population is directly linked to dangerous urban spaces. We talked with Walter about his article, why he thinks American landscape architecture lacks empathy and why he is less interested in the social factors of landscape architecture.
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Walter, you had this one project in New York City where you worked with G-Unit. What was the rapper 50 Cent’s opinion about landscape architecture?
Working on the project, the G-Unit Foundation was the working partner. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to meet 50, so I couldn’t ask him, but I will certainly give you an update if I get the chance.
Perfect. That might be the topic of your next op-ed column in topos. With topos 106, you have started your career as a topos contributor. You will write four articles for us. Why are you contributing to topos?
It’s a great platform to speak globally. I’m excited to bring a more diverse voice to topos, one where culture is highlighted. topos also provides a platform to speak globally about the more diverse concerns of landscape architecture and the communities that we want to empower and provide services to.
In your first “From the Edges” in our magazine you state that in our current political environment, the demonization of people through race and landscape is at its highest level. What did it used to be like? And, what has changed?
The demonization of race through landscape has always existed. It has only been through various lenses that we’ve been able to talk about the impact it has on communities throughout the world, beginning with colonization, continuing through civil rights, and currently through immigration policies worldwide. The backdrop has become ever more important, i.e. the landscape.
In your projects, you constantly deal with social issues. Is there a time (and place) when landscape architecture should not be political?
Landscape is political. It has always been. Landscapes are never neutral. I am less interested in social factors (the programming and maintenance of particular uses and activities). I am more interested in the cultural settings and the interrelationships and diverse patterns and practices that emanate from people living in a particular environment.
One of your five concepts of creating space is “empathy”. How empathetic is American landscape architecture at this moment?
Not very. At this moment there is more of an interest in solving global issues than dealing with the local ones. At the global level, people and place are seen as abstract, whereas at the local level, they are real. Issues around poverty, homelessness, marginality, and disinvestment pervade our urban landscapes.
You have worked in the field of landscape architecture for over 30 years. Is there still anything you just cannot understand?
I’ve had my own practice for 25 years now, and I’m still shocked at being the only black person in the room.
Where will you be in ten years?
I would love to be on a hilltop somewhere, painting.
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Walter Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA and professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. Hood Design Studio is a tripartite practice, working across art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism.
Order topos 106 in order to read Walter Hood’s first topos article “Let’s go wild”.
As a project from LSE Cities has shown, the value of “super-diverse streets” is often wilfully overlooked by the municipal authorities tasked with planning their future.
The South London borough of Southwark has experienced rapid gentrification in the past decade, a fate for which its municipal council has received plenty of criticism.
Much of the attention has centred on the area around Elephant and Castle, where, following years of likely deliberate under-maintenance, the council successfully sought the demolition of the Heygate Estate and subsequently sold the land to property developers Lendlease, who then replaced the estate’s 1,200 social homes with mostly market rent properties and only 82 social homes.
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A somewhat less familiar but no less significant episode in the council’s ongoing policy to impose top-down regeneration on long-established working-class neighbourhoods revolves around the Rye Lane shopping street in Peckham.
As documented in a recent project led by Suzanne Hall for LSE Cities, Rye Lane is a street that is densely packed, with an incredibly rich network of micro-economies occurring at several scales.
At street level, there is a wide range of different shops, catering to the neighbourhood’s diverse community: barbershops mingle with butchers and grocers, takeaways with restaurants and bars.
Then, at shop-level, things get even more interesting. As one of the reports that arose from the project explains, many shops cannot be defined by a particular retail type and “it is not atypical to find hats, mobile phones, groceries and fresh meat and/or fish all arranged within one long interior”.
Furthermore, some shops are maintained by a single lease holder but inside support several other separate businesses each with a separate till point. As the report explains, demarcations of space range from counter level differentiation, to floor-to-ceiling dry walls, depending on the level of privacy required.
While these arrangements are often mediated by close kinship and ethnicity networks, in several instances, the diversity of goods is also reflected in the diversity of retailers, “one can find a money remittance area run by a proprietor originally from Uganda, adjacent to a seamstress from Ghana, adjacent to a mobile phone and fabric outlet run by a proprietor from Pakistan.”
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This remarkable arrangement delivers the kind of capacity utilisation that companies like Uber and Airbnb can only dream about, with layouts morphing as different businesses expand and contract. In these circumstances, Rye Lane shops are, according to Hall, in the remarkable situation of paying more in business rates per square metre than the shiny new Westfield shopping centres.
And yet, the report suggests that this has all gone completely unnoticed by the municipality:
In formulating a regeneration vision for the street, the expertise within the borough has drawn on planning and economic conventions, highlighting large sites adjacent to the street for market-led development, proposing an expanded offer on cafes and restaurants, as well as increasing chain and franchise retail.
As Hall concludes, the borough was carrying on as if Rye Lane’s economic and cultural diversity was “somehow invisible to those undertaking the planning exercise”. What’s worse, the she found out from an officer of the borough, the municipality had not carried out any research into the existing retail activity.
It’s a story that is repeated again and again in top-down urban redevelopment: cultural, social and even economic value get overlooked because of a dominant idea of what success is supposed to look like and a lazy lack of interest in the places deemed in need of regeneration.
The second edition of the Berlin MakeCity Festival for Architecture and Urban Alternatives dealt with the mixed city and illuminated the role of open space for a diverse city.
While land prices in Berlin have risen by up to 800 percent in recent years, the so-called “Berliner Mischung” (Berlin’s Mixing) is declining. This Berlin-specific, but equally nationally and internationally relevant development was behind the theme of the festival “Stadt Neu Gemischt” (“Berlin Remixing”). MakeCity demands change and presented models for a mixed city:
Openness and Flexibility
The festival focused on the following themes: Architecture/Space, Structures/Processes and City/Nature. Thus, typologies as well as urban landscapes and the materiality of architecture were illuminated. City/nature focused on the possibilities and limits of an open space mixture: What role does open space play for the mixed city? How can architecture and landscape architecture integrate openness for typological overlaps and flexibility for changes in use?
Stepped Building
Possible ways of mixing architecture and landscape were shown with several new buildings. The new stepped building Lobe Block in Berlin-Wedding shows how densification can help to include open space uses. Instead of maximizing profits, the project wants to be part of the open city by allowing for mixed and open space utilization.
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Commissioned by two artists, Lobe Block is one of Berlin’s most typologically exciting new architectural projects. The multifunctional creative center, a step pyramid with 6 meter wide terraces and a roof terrace, is designed by Brandlhuber+ Emde, Burlon with Muck Petzet. Lobe Block combines studios, co-working spaces and an artist residency on 3000 square metres. The maisonnette groundfloor and the floor above it, which amongst others includes yoga rooms, are publicly accessible.
In order to achieve a more common, more public use of the exterior space, the entrances are fitted with two external staircases. The vision behind the building is to turn the concrete into flourishing green and to cover stairs and terraces with plants. Lobe Block is thus an important test case for Arno Brandlhuber’s approach: we can simultaneously densify and cover the city with greenery.
City as a Lido
Nature also plays a central role in the urban development project “Flussbad Berlin”, which aims to transform the Spree Canal in Berlin’s historic centre into a clean water body. The project revolves both around bathing in the largely unused Spree Canal and the design of the adjoining open spaces through open staircases and renaturation.
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Is there a parking lot for the jungle?
“Is there a parking lot for the jungle?,” asked Topotek1 at their Studio Talk about the relationship between city and nature. They wanted to discuss what nature means today and what role it plays in the city. The hypothesis was that common spatial typologies have become more and more interwoven and thus indistinguishable. According to the landscape architects, we must break down the boundaries of conventional definitions to reach an enhanced interpretation and wild, alternative syntheses.
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Colorful Streetscapes
In Berlin, the monofunctionality of the car-dominated streets is to be constricted to return the roadways as a place for public life, in the form of meeting areas. A24 Landschaft who are designing two of these meeting areas – in Maaßenstraße and Bergmannstraße – had a panel debate to discuss visions for a new city. The event showed that it is possible to turn streets into multipurpose space: a social space for exchange and to dwell on, an ecological habitat, an economic area, mobility space and room for political manifestation and representation.
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Welcoming Spaces
MakeCity also took a close look at the flexibility of cities in the view of the city space’s use by migrants. One of the guided tours through Arrival City lead to Thaipark. For more than 20 years, Thai and other people from South-East Asia have been organizing an non-authorized street food market here. By now it has become home to an identity-creating community with a very diverse public. Created by the city’s inhabitants, Thaipark shows how open space can be reinterpreted with relatively few resources. Its flexible use represents a low-threshold, open, social function that would not be possible in a building. This shows that the mixed city can be improvised in the open space from below and can function perfectly.
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Core issues of landscape architects
The examples above show how both buildings and open spaces try to deal with openness. During the last years, Berlin has lost some of its freedom but many free spaces and new forms of nature live on, or are in the process of developing their full potential.
MakeCity Festival illustrates that open structures, easy ways of participation and new social groups can be established more easily in open space than in built up areas. Urban mix requires spatial interpretability and opportunities for conversion – core issues of landscape architecture. Landscape designers should be aware of the fact that open space is not as predisposed as buildings and allows for easier social mixing when considering what is possible in the city.
