Landscapes driven by the narrow-focused domination of nature and other humans. The good contemporary left-urbanist stuff tries to cooperate with nature and inject socioecological reproduction into the space that grows more enriching with time. The plaza I’m working on now conserves and purifies stormwater to hatch fish to teach kids about the river a few blocks away, the fish offsetting the fertiliser needs of the plants. It’s systems reinforcing systems with as much of an intersectional focus as possible to maximise the ecocentric utility of the space. The public art, from cisterns to benches to mosaic tiles, connect people to native materials and flora/fauna as the societal beauty standard they’re supposed to replicate at home. Horticulture is critical pedagogy is social history is environmental activism is municipal messaging is art is community is infrastructure, with a blurred delineation between 1st/2nd/3rd space.

A fascist plaza is pure function. You have a grey path framed by 90 degree angles that leads you to stores and parking lots. Maybe there’s a straight row of sickly ornamental trees or a planter full of greenslop annuals or a shrub from halfway across the planet, but there’s no connection to the landscape beneath the plaza. If there are benches you can sit on them but not sleep on them and there’s nothing to look at but architectural simulacra of what Rome or Paris did at some point and meant to signal that the current authority is a legitimate heir to their authority.

american lawns

That’s the academic project (technically two) that I’m working on. Re-Enchanting the World is a really good book for countering right-modernist thinking. Even though I’m a materialist, I like animism a lot. A landscape you know through stories and relationships is one you love and feel a sense of interdependence with. That’s built through active community, moments of wonder, and spaces that centre human/animal families. To restore the historical commons, the social language that gets the masses on board is meeting their needs in friendly, blurred spaces that connect them to larger systems.

Federici says that these can’t be fragmented islands and I totally agree with that, so I try to connect the plaza to the biogeography by finding some mutually beneficial way of bringing nature into the city. The location the plaza is based on is right next to one of our big stormwater collection projects, water scarcity is a huge issue here that makes rainstorms near-religious events on local subreddits, and the only fish hatcheries are a 20-60 minute drive away. There’s a river a couple blocks away, but nowhere you can go and see native fish and no spawning grounds for them in a straightened urban section of it.

Because of the drought, water features like fountains are tacky and terrible for public messaging. Stormwater diversion though is good. You don’t want it flowing too fast into the river. With the plaza the central feature is a naturalised pool for young fish fed by two large cisterns framing the other end of the plaza. The pond is enclosed by a bench along three sides of it and a riparian garden at the bottom. Wastewater from the pond is recirculated through that, shade trees, and mesic/xeric gardens down the length of the plaza. The cisterns capture/clean roof water, take overflow from the existing stormwater pipes, and use rooftop solar to run the pumps where gravity isn’t doing the work. A small channel enclosed with acrylic panels over the top exits the plaza to pipe the fish to the river when mature.

Now the public beauty standard is set around a whole new value system. Even at a small demonstration scale, the fish act as bioindicators for the water we’re releasing into the river while their healthy reproductive cycle is the core attraction of the space. It’s all-ages educational and provides an accessible way to see habitat you otherwise can’t in a wheelchair or without a car. People can see a practical application of aquaculture and other sustainable systems, have a direct visual connection to water scarcity that highlights it, and infrastructure is something aesthetically celebrated instead of invisible. All of the plants are what I would professionally use if contracted by a homeowner wanting the best ecocentric options for the widest spectrum of wildlife families. As the space becomes more endeared to the public and they get more attached to the spectacle of the fish success/release, it can take on an enchanted identity through something like a local Fat Bear Week for your named wildlife pets you’ve been eating lunch next to for months. Local wildlife agencies/academic biologists can rally the community around a healthy river with a charismatic species being celebrated somewhere you otherwise can’t transport them. People viewing that connect the greenspace to its larger systems and have a more holistic view of the region, with an idea of how to replicate best practices at their home or community garden. It’s inherently political by connecting to living systems and works as an autonomous forum for those issues in a space people want to bring their kids to.

Here that kind of design philosophy has been loosely followed since the 1970s. The result is that the residents overwhelmingly vote for any tax increase that funds public lands. They’re super supportive of parks workers and biocentric redevelopments in the parks. Our parks that do it really well- a bird sanctuary and arboretum, community garden/orchard/hopyard supporting local food banks, and demonstration livestock farm protecting a riparian area- are core parts of the city’s identity that residents steward much more than degraded parks that don’t centre socioecological reproduction. I’m trying to figure out how to turbocharge that and spread it throughout daily life.