One of the functions of landscape is to correspond to, nurture, and provoke exploration of the landscape of the imagination. Space to walk is also space to think, and I think that’s one thing landscapes give us: places to think longer, more uninterrupted thoughts or thoughts to a rhythm other than the staccato of navigating the city.
5
I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for a Virginia Woolf to make up her novels. There is a wonderful anecdote about Seoul, Korea, in Elizabeth Wilson’s The Sphinx in the City:
At night these restrictions were reversed. After the city gates were closed, it was men (save for officials and the blind) who were forbidden to appear on the streets, and the city was turned over to women, who were then free to walk abroad. They strolled and chatted in groups with their friends carrying paper lanterns. Even in this dim light, however, they used unfurled fans to protect themselves from being seen, or held their silk jackets over their faces. So often, this has been women’s experience of the city: to live in it, but hidden; to emerge on sufferance, veiled.
Just before I became a student at UC Berkeley in the early 1980s, some feminists pulled off a wonderful prank. There had been rapes on campus, and the campus authorities had responded the usual way, by telling women to curtail their freedom of movement, particularly after dark, so that all women lost some freedom of access, some public space. A guerrilla group responded with faux-official posters warning men that they would not be allowed on campus after dark—a perfectly reasonable approach to the problem, and one that took away no more freedom than the authorities’ approach did—but men are not used to losing their freedom because of violence, and many of them became outraged. Women, on the other hand, are used to losing their freedom, as long as it stops a little short of where the Taliban cut it off. We’ve heard a lot about driving while nonwhite the last few years, but we need to hear as well about walking while female—particularly walking while young and female. I don’t get harassed on the street anymore, but I think that’s less because the world has changed than because I have; young women still receive lots of that attention that is officially erotic and unofficially threatening, a reminder to know their place and to know that this street or path or plaza is not it.
What would a landscape of equal access look like? I’m not sure, but I think that’s a question for landscape architects to consider. And I think it’s important to remember that parks and gardens are also social space, and social space is always at least potentially political space as well as imaginative space. Talking in San Francisco earlier this week, Mike Davis mentioned working in a poor Latina neighborhood in L.A. where the locals were ready to form a tenants union—or at least the mothers staying home with their young children were—but there was no place to meet. If they had had a public park, that space would have become not only play space for the children but also organizing community space for the adults, Davis said, noting that the ACLU is preparing a lawsuit for equal access to nature and open space in L.A. It’s a right, the right of the people peaceably to assemble, that implies democratic open space, and like most rights nowadays it’s not distributed equally without regard to gender, race, class, or location. Being out in public is being part of the community, and it’s not so far a stretch from those women Davis met to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, demonstrating against the silence and repression of the dictatorship when no one else would—and though the plaza was transformed by the Mothers, the Mothers needed the plaza in which to be in public, to speak as the public, with their feet as well as their signs and voices. Could you have that movement without a highly visible and symbolically loaded public space? I think that the unique task of landscape architects is to design not only space to think but space in which we are in public—the space of democracy.
Again from Wanderlust:
Only citizens familiar with their city as both symbolic and practical territory, able to come together on foot and accustomed to walking about their city, can revolt. Few remember that “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” is listed in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, along with freedom of the press, of speech, and of religion, as critical to a democracy. While the other rights are easily recognized, the elimination of the possibility of such assemblies through urban design, automotive dependence and other factors is hard to trace and seldom framed as a civil-rights issue. But when public spaces are eliminated, so ultimately is the public; the individual has ceased to be a citizen capable of experiencing and acting in common with fellow citizens. Citizenship is predicated on the sense of having something in common with strangers, just as democracy is built upon trust in strangers. And public space is the space we share with strangers, the unsegregated zone. In these communal events, that abstraction the public becomes real and tangible.
So I think that landscape architecture is in part about democracy, but I think that democracy can’t be protected and maintained only by design.
6
Another crisis is facing those of us who care about democracy and public space. I once heard the acerbic critique that the death of the author was announced just as authors were ceasing to be almost exclusively white and male. We are at a paradoxical point in the history of public space: women have made great leaps forward in rights, including rights of access, just as the places to which we might have access are withering away from neglect or being eliminated by design or not even being built. In some situations, like the one Mike Davis identified, it’s a problem of people without public space, and this is a far-reaching problem. But it has a corollary, public space without people. The linked acceleration, mechanization, privatization, and disembodiment of everyday life have removed a lot of people a lot of the time from the public sphere. In my decades in San Francisco, I have seen a profound shift in how people value and use space—a shift toward what I could as shorthand call suburbanization: dependence on cars, busyness, sequestration in controlled interiors, fear of contact with people who are different.
People without public space is a problem we’ve identified pretty well. It’s pervasive in the suburbs, which are intensely privatized spaces and have become ever more so as the super-sized home is expanded to include your own gym, your own home entertainment center, DSL, cable, and other amenities that make leaving home less and less necessary. But you can see in this last example that there’s some slippage—the home is designed to keep you from having to leave it, but choosing not to leave it is not a spatial or design matter so much as it’s a social and political one. The principal alarm that has been rung says that we do not have space in which to have certain kinds of time; but instead nowadays it seems equally likely that we will not have time to accept the invitations such spaces issue—or we think we don’t, or we don’t, as they say, make the time. Equally seriously, we no longer perceive, many of us, our own bodies as adequate to navigate the spaces of everyday life. Quite a lot of people will ski or go to the gym but don’t think they can buy milk or the newspaper without mechanical assistance; I think of cars as prosthetics for the conceptually disabled, disabled in their perception of space and self. We also need to make the case that there are benefits to going out on foot, the only way most landscapes and gardens can be fully experienced.
Much of the rhetoric of the Internet, particularly during the boom years, was that efficiency and convenience were the highest goals humans could aspire to—adios, truth and beauty—and these were best served by replacing face-to-face contact and errands run in public space with online access. In fact, a good many ads implied that actually standing in a line or moving along a street with actual strangers was a sinister and unpleasant business as well as a waste of time. The thoughts that fill your mind when you’re between tasks is like the space that fills our lives when we’re between destinations: this is the open space, the free space, the space in which the subversive an
d inventive and inspired stuff might happen. Open space is space to think. Cell phones, too, are about a withdrawal from public space—the person talking loudly on a cell phone in a park is saying that he or she is not in this communal space with strangers, but in a privileged space with those who are already known to him or her, and is also saying that this time out in public between things is just emptiness to be filled up. The corollary is that phone booths, the public transportation system of conversation, are disappearing—just as public transit vanished in L.A. when the automobile asserted dominance. And car alarms likewise value individual private property over community tranquility. Privatization is not only an economic but a social mandate, though the irony is that the dot-com boom happened in San Francisco because the new high-tech workers prized the public space of streets and nightclubs that was exactly what their technologies were designed to eliminate. And indeed if efficiency and convenience are your demigods, then the minutiae of life out in public—time to think, contact with others, sense of place, neighborliness, community, the minor epiphanies and revelations being out in the world brings—no longer matter. Or at least you no longer have a language with which to appraise and value them.
Another justification for the Internet a few years ago was that in disguising gender and appearance it was democratizing, though my impression was that a lot of that democratizing allowed middle-aged men to go into smutty chat rooms pretending to be nubile lesbians. And if the body of the beloved is nature, the body of Internet porn is a nature that makes Versailles look like the Bitterroot Wilderness Area. The implication of the freedom argument was that the only way to have freedom from oppression based on bodies, genders, races, was to become bodiless, genderless, raceless—another elimination of the very ground on which we sought to succeed, for I think that embodiment—the recognition that consciousness is situated—is a feminist position. It is not efficient to have a body. It is not, by the same criteria, efficient to be alive. Life is inconvenient, but that’s hardly the best measure of what it’s for.
When we’re talking about landscapes and public spaces, we’re talking about space in which people do two things—one is to pass through them, and another is to loiter for pleasure. The rhetoric of efficiency demands that people pass through them as rapidly as possible, and of course it delegitimizes loitering in them: that’s for bums. As Reclaim the Streets put it a few years ago, advancing an idea that I believe could be extended to parks, plazas, promenades, piers, paths:
Vacated, the street seems dangerous, indefensible; sped through, it becomes a haze of fumes and a grating of brakes. But when populated, the street can be a clash of viewpoints, a mess, a morass that can challenge our little orthodoxies and take us out of ourselves. . . . As a communication line between the familiar and the strange, between those we know too well and those we don’t know at all, the street can still be the place where the most important connections are made. In it, we begin to see how our home is connected to that home, this house to that house, this street to that street, this city to all those other cities, my experience to yours.
The phenomenon Jane Jacobs identifies is key here: a place is made safe by having many people in it, so we create or abandon public space together—is a plaza truly public space without a public in it? Recall Roger Hart’s studies on the “geography of childhood” from the 1970s, which I cited earlier, concerning gender disparity in children’s access to their surroundings—by now, I suspect, it’s evened out, not because of feminism but because of fear. That is to say, girls have not gained what boys had; rather, boys are losing what girls lost. The fear of child molesters and child abduction has put most American children in a kind of prison: locked down and supervised at all times. I worry a lot about this because I think that free roaming develops imagination, independence, resourcefulness—and a formative taste for free roaming that’s going to encourage kids to become environmentalists, gardeners, landscape architects, urban designers, civic activists, ethnobotanists, adventurers of all stripes out under the open sky.
The new technologies are marketed to fear: SUV owners, for example, have a disproportionate fear of crime, though their cars themselves constitute a legal form of threat—against other drivers, pedestrians, the environment, and independence from the OPEC nations. (The San Francisco Chronicle reported that SUV drivers have a tendency to run over children—often their own—in the driveway, because they can’t see that space.) And one study demonstrated that the more you stayed home and watched local news, which hypes crime stories, the more afraid you were to go out—so TV news became a self-perpetuating isolation, even as actual crime has dropped in the past decade. It’s become increasingly clear that there’s another corollary to all this staying home with television and advertisements and super-sized sodas and Oreos and Doritos and crème brûlée and the Cooking Channel and microwave popcorn: obesity. The United States is in the midst of an epidemic of obesity and related health problems, and that creates another reason why too many people aren’t going to go roaming around on foot in beautiful landscapes.
I hear the phrase “too far to walk” a lot, and it functions as a kind of perceptual imposition on the ability of the body to navigate space. It’s worth remembering that people can and do walk thousands of miles, that a friend of mine just photographed a manic female athlete running a hundred miles in Yosemite in a thirty-six-hour period. In cities, on foot is the best way to move large crowds, and, to kowtow to efficiency, walking is as fast or faster than driving for short and medium distances, as is walking coupled with decent public transit for long ones.
David Ehrenfeld writes more positively of the suburbs than I do, up to a point, in Orion magazine,
We have built in our suburbs an elaborate new kind of habitat, pleasing to us and to wildlife alike. It is complete with food sources such as bird feeders, succulent ornamental plantings, and garbage cans; and it has open spaces, clumps of trees, and various kinds of shelter under and around houses—the whole area interspersed with stream corridors, forested strips, and vegetated rights-of-way. One might think that we would spend every possible moment outside enjoying the paradise that we have made for ourselves at such great expense. Not so. We have gone indoors to sit in front of our television sets and computer monitors, surrendering the outdoors to the deer, turkeys, crows, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, bears, and others. In the winter of 2001, [a friend] was driving a class along a street with single-family houses bordering on a sixty-acre nature preserve belonging to Rutgers University. It was noon of a glorious sunny day after a fresh snowfall. There were deer tracks everywhere around the houses. But not a single human footprint could be seen.
Paradise on the day before God created man, except that man, and woman, and child are all indoors, microwaving some nachos during the commercial.
7
So, what’s to be done? I think we need to think about the conversation. At this point, there is not a lot of language to value the slow over the fast, the scenic detour over the information superhighway, the many small pleasures over the big convenience, the difficult over the easy, the public over the private, the stranger over the friend, the unfamiliar over the familiar, the risky over the safe, the adventure over the routine—or at least not a lot of language to value these things in daily life as opposed to, say, an Everest expedition or a book about checkbook pastoralism in Provence. There’s not a lot of language to weigh the infinite pleasures and actualities of embodiment against disembodiment, the meanings that arise from difference over homogenization, to find a balance between freedom and being grounded—in the actual ground that is the foundational landscape.
So we need to stake out actual territory, but this territory can be perceived, enjoyed, realized only if it corresponds to the territory of the imagination, where all artists work, whatever their medium. Feminism did spectacular work in addressing and reappraising an earlier set of dichotomies by which experience was organized; it proved that it’s possible to transform the conversation, and I think that it
makes a beautiful foundation for continuing to do so. Some of that language we need now is in the antiglobalization movement, the slow food movement, the organic agriculture movement, the democracy movements, the rethinking of urbanism. But some of it, even more profoundly, is in the landscape itself. For landscape invites and inspires a language of complexity and contemplativeness, and it’s that we need most right now.
Other Daughters,
Other American Revolutions
[2006]
At a dinner table last fall, I mentioned that Women Strike for Peace did some extraordinary things in the early 1960s, not least helping to bring down the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). A well-known political writer sitting across from me sneered that the women in WSP were insignificant and that HUAC didn’t exist by then anyway. He was wrong on both counts, but his remark wasn’t surprising. The way people talk in decades suggests that the 1950s and ’60s never overlapped and thereby blanks out the first half of the latter decade to make the second half into “the sixties,” that era popularly imagined as a revolutionary romp by a bunch of antiwar young men. In fact, those young men took up a revolutionary challenge raised in part by middle-aged women, who launched some of the key ideas and fought some of the first battles in their defense. The radical and powerful Women Strike for Peace did it in the streets (and in the hearings chamber—Eric Bentley, in his history of HUAC, credits WSP with striking the crucial blow in the fall of “HUAC’s Bastille” in 1962). Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan did it in books.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 32
