This year’s ASLA Conference examined the US identity in turbulent times. A congress report

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The expression “the elephant in the room” is delightfully ambiguous. On the one hand, it refers to something important that everybody knows about, yet nobody addresses explicitly. On the other hand, however, it implies a huge, blundering something that can break down existing structures without being particularly sensitive about it. In terms of this ambiguity, the current US president Trump represented precisely that elephant at this year’s annual conference of the ASLA, the American Society of Landscape Architects, in San Diego. Although not much was explicitly said about the Donald and his, at times, elephantine politics, their consequences for present day America, however, played an implicit role all the time.

This certainly applied most directly to the numerous panels and talks on the consequences of climate change. The environmental politician and researcher Gina McCarthy laid the atmospheric foundation for this as it were. In her rhetorically brilliant talk, she clarified that the Obama government launched many specific legislative initiatives. Not all of these have been revised so far – and it is hardly possible for all of them to be revoked either. “The train is running”, was her ultimately optimistic message. The audience acknowledged the speech with standing ovations, while McCarthy’s preacher-like style required some getting used to for a fact-orientated European.

It’s a matter of spatial, but also historical integrity

Events such as the ASLA Conference almost inevitably transmit a kind of mitigated, fundamental ecological optimism, as they are dealing with concrete improvement steps. One field session, for instance, presented the regeneration of the “San Diego River” ecosystem. Other panels introduced solutions for areas in the hot and dry southwest of the USA, which are becoming partly uninhabitable due to global warming, as well as approaches for better air through landscape architecture. The impression: The field of landscape architecture recognises and assumes its responsibility even though the political climate may be rough.

This socio-political climate however also played another role. Many discussions addressed the identity-forming and negotiating role of spatial planning. The United States of America (and others) certainly appear to be a country in search of its “identity”. A kind of existential uncertainty prevails as far as society as a whole is concerned. This means that it is possible for the space in which we live to assume an orientation-providing function – for entire societies, for smaller cultural entities, but also for individuals and their direct social environment. Highly interesting in this context was a panel on US-American postwar sites.

The head of the “Parks Conservancy” of Pittsburgh presented the sensitive restructuring of the Mellow Square in Pittsburgh. The landscape architect Ken Smith, who is very well known in the USA, presented three different new designs from New York and San Francisco, including the exterior space in front of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Seagram Building in Manhattan. All of the presented projects involving outdoor spaces showed that these are a negotiation of the US-American collective memory. Post-war modernism shaped the US culture – and accordingly needs to be treated with care. According to Charles Birnbaum, head of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, it’s a matter of spatial, but also historical integrity.

The elephant “La Frontera”

Of course, the question here is, who assigns integrity or who does it apply to? The idea of society as a homogenous entity is falling apart at the moment, not just in the USA. Accordingly, different perspectives need to be brought together in landscape planning or at least listened to. Permitting heterogeneity was quasi the main subject of many panels. This would allow for the emergence of “Landscapes with an edge”, according to the tenor of a discussion on the significance of subculture in planning. The plea of planner and podcaster Michael Todoran (who runs the podcast “LArchitect”) was to allow for provocation and create space for subversion. The question here being where subculture and provocation end, and where mere commercialisation begins. It could for instance be discussed whether eScooters, which also fill the streets in the USA, can be considered a subculture, as was suggested in the panel.

Nevertheless – the cultural sensitivity of this year’s ASLA Conference was high. One culturally charged topic, however, which would have been obvious, given that the event was held in San Diego, was unfortunately largely left out: Mexico and the planning challenge of the border. While there was a (quickly booked up) field trip to Tijuana, the border almost never came up in the content considered by the panels. And that despite the new ASLA president Wendy Miller stating in an interview with Garten + Landschaft that the planners are certainly aware of the planning dimensions of “La Frontera” in mind (you can read the full interview at www.topos-magazine.com). But perhaps this border, too, represents some kind of elephant in the room in the thinking space of US culture. It’s there, it’s huge, but it gets blanked out tenaciously.

Over a series of 10 episodes, USA Today’s “The City” podcast unpacks the complex web of racial and class injustices which have ensured that waste disposal in America has always tended to impact more on people of colour.

Waste disposal may not seem like the spiciest subject matter for a podcast. But in USA Today’s recent series “The City”, reporter Robin Amer and her colleagues have managed to tell a gripping story of the various forces which led to the emergence and persistence of an illegal dump in Chicago. Covering themes such as political corruption, grassroots activism, racial and environmental injustice and criminal enterprise, it is a brilliant dissection of contemporary urban politics.

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The story starts in the early nineties, when the residents of Chicago’s predominantly African American neighbourhood of North Lawndale began to notice hundreds of trucks coming to dump construction waste in an empty lot in their neighbourhood. The lot had formerly been occupied by a factory that had long since closed, a casualty of the deindustrialisation of a once fairly prosperous neighbourhood.

Chicago was no exception

At this point, Amer proceeds to explain the wider context in Chicago at the time. The early 90s was a moment when many cities were beginning to start reinvesting in their downtown neighbourhoods after years of disinvestment, “white flight”, and urban blight. Chicago was no exception. In the previous four decades, the city had lost nearly a million inhabitants and hundreds of thousands of jobs, in a process which had seriously impacted on neighbourhoods like North Lawndale. Yet in 1989, Chicagoans elected a new mayor, Richard M. Daley, who campaigned on a promise to spark a renaissance in the inner city.

The whole dumping operation was shady from the start

As the series website explains, “highways are rebuilt, old buildings demolished, new parks and skyscrapers erected.” But, it continues, “all that rubble has to go somewhere, and its destination isn’t a landfill or a recycling centre. It’s a pair of vacant lots in a black, working-class neighbourhood called North Lawndale.”
As Amer explains, the whole dumping operation was shady from the start. Trucks were coming to dump their waste as late as 3am, some had altered license plates, and the man running the operation, John Christopher, drove around in a shiny Limousine.

John Christopher plays an important yet elusive role throughout the series. A lifelong associate of the Chicago mob, he had spent much of the 1980s in prison after he was caught defrauding the city of Chicago by issuing fake invoices for snow clearing work carried out during the famous blizzard of 1979.

This alone should have ended any career he might have had planned in waste disposal, legitimate or not. But after leaving prison, Christopher became a mole for the FBI, after feeling abandoned by his mob associates, for whom he had kept quiet during his time behind bars. He was then quickly identified as a highly valuable informant due to his many connections to corrupt Chicago city officials. As such, he was able to proceed to develop a criminal dumping enterprise with relative impunity.

“Environmental racism”

As the series proceeds, however, the story deepens and widens, until listeners are left in no doubt that the scale and importance of this problem is beyond the responsibility of one man. Rather, this problem, which Amer refers to as “environmental racism”, is characterised by the widespread and continuing abuse of impoverished and disempowered communities of colour across America.

If there is one drawback of the podcast it is that it stops short of condemning the economic system which clearly enables the kind of environmental racism seen in North Lawndale. Amer instead attributes it to “the overlapping layers of corruption and apathy, the failures of individuals and institutions, the deep-seated legacies of segregation and racism…” She’s right of course, but the fact that these things impact much more acutely in America than other developed countries is left unexplored. This is perhaps expecting too much from an mainstream news organisation like USA Today, and it’s enough that its choosing to pursue these sorts of stories in such sharp detail.

A second series has been announced, to be broadcast later in the year. This time the city in question is Reno and it looks set to be another excellent exploration of the conflicting forces that are always in constant battle for a city’s soul.

Hit 2017 video game A Night in the Woods offers the small-town rust belt representation we need if we’re going to understand how Trump won in 2016.

Possum Springs is a town that most indie video game players will be very familiar with. Providing the setting for the hit independent side-scrolling platform game A Night in the Woods (2017), it’s an essential backdrop to the story of the game’s main character Mae Borowski.
Mae is a college dropout who has moved back into her parents’ home for reasons that go undisclosed at the beginning of the game. She returns to find her group of friends somewhat distant, old beyond their years and generally worn down by the pressures of having to make a living, in work that offers little intellectual stimulation and no chance of career advancement.

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Exploring Possum Springs

Day by day, the player as Mae explores Possum Springs, talking to her friends, parents and old faces on the street and gradually builds up a picture of a town in terminal decline. One afternoon, she goes with her friend Bea to the mall (much to Bea’s bafflement, since she’s long grown out of this kind of frivolous activity). When they arrive, Mae is immediately taken aback by the fact that all the good shops have gone and only one-dollar stores and third-rate clothing shops still remain. Unsurprisingly, the whole place is practically empty (to the extent that Mae casually climbs to the roof and commandeers the controls for the central fountain, with amusing results).

A walk through a neglected city

This sense of decline is also echoed in the town centre: Mae’s favourite pizza parlour (and the only one in town) has just closed down, there’s a big derelict building at one end of the main street and in the very centre there’s underground passageway which was once meant to serve a wider underground trolley car system (with fancy trolley cars apparently imported all the way from some place in Europe) but which now serves as a hangout for a group of youths. The tunnel system itself has flooded and at one point in the game Mae encounters one of her old teachers, who looks for salvage in the flooded trolley car tunnels as a side-job (in addition to teaching and another side-job landscaping).

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Meanwhile, you occasionally get echoes of a once proud, prosperous town. In the underground passageway there’s a mural, depicting a group of miners proudly setting off to work. The town has a grand library built by the town’s rich patrician mine boss, which is now hardly used at all (incidentally, when Mae visits, she at one point spots a CV left up on one of the computers, clearly written by an ex-miner, whose only skills relate to mining, a short but incredibly revealing moment) and many of the older folks, including Mae’s dad, speak with nostalgia about the community established through gainful work. Now, the adults too are left demoralised and beset by financial precarity, with Mae’s parents themselves revealing to her that they had to re-mortgage in order to pay for her college tuition and now owe more money than the value of the house.

How much reality is in the video game?

Possum Springs is the picture of the American rust belt that we need, presenting a much more nuanced idea of the kind of places that were so influential in Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election victory. Cutting through the bad media narrative about an uninformed, white working class who didn’t know any better, A Night in the Woods depicts its rust belt setting as a place suffering from chronic disinvestment, job flight and a completely demoralised working class, whose unions are long since defeated and whose young people are completely alienated. It’s a sad picture, but one that ought to help outsiders grasp what drove these places to choose either to vote Trump or, more likely, not vote at all.

The whole world is talking about borders. Whether or not globalization is to blame – border spaces and the politics of bordering dominate current political debates and have done so for quite a while, even before Donald Trump came along. Alexander Gutzmer, editorial manager of the monthly architecture magazine Der Baumeister wrote a book on the topic. He describes the different ways in which borders are reflected upon, mediatized, and instrumentalized in political ways, with the border between Mexico and the USA as prime example. He demonstrates that borders are not only misused for implementing subversive policies but also enable the creation of art with political relevance. Gutzmer will read from his book and in follow discuss his findings with Anja Koller, editor of the urban landscape magazine Topos. The recent issue of Topos is dedicated to the topic of borders, too.

Important Facts

Where: Architekturgalerie München im Bunker, Blumenstraße 22, 80331 Munich

When:  15 October 2018, 7 pm