https://opsys.cargo.site open systems Mon, 17 Jan 2022 13:18:35 +0000 https://opsys.cargo.site en https://opsys.cargo.site/OPEN-LETTER-TO-REM-KOOLHAAS-THE-GUGGENHEIM-MUSEUM Mon, 17 Jan 2022 13:18:35 +0000 open systems https://opsys.cargo.site/OPEN-LETTER-TO-REM-KOOLHAAS-THE-GUGGENHEIM-MUSEUM EN / ESENDORSE SHARE CONTACT January 17, 2022 &nbsp; Rem Koolhaas AMO/OMA Weena-Zuid 158 3012 NC Rotterdam, the Netherlands RE: THE WRITING ON THE WALL&nbsp; Call to Stop Cultural Appropriation, Race-Shifting, &amp; Self-Indigenization in the Guggenheim’s&nbsp;COUNTRYSIDE, THE FUTURE Exhibition To Rem Koolhaas and the Guggenheim Museum:&nbsp; We demand that you and the Curatorial Team of the Countryside, The Future issue a public apology for the ignorant and racist claims to self-indigenization exhibited on the walls at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum between February 20, 2020 and February 15, 2021. Secondly, we demand that you immediately stop promoting the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge by non-Indigenous architects, artists, and designers that systematically robs Indigenous Peoples of their human rights and cultural sovereignties. The insidious practice of cultural theft is a virus running wild across western spaces of art and architecture that are broadly platformed by non-Indigenous institutions. This is not only an ethical or political demand, but a legal one: under the auspices of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)—originally signed by the Netherlands and later endorsed by the United States—acknowledging, recognizing, and upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples, these practices are unacceptable. Any such forms of dispossession can no longer go unchecked; they must be systematically accounted for and dismantled. &nbsp;Widespread throughout the exhibition and accompanying publication are several strategies of dispossession premised on extraction, erasure, and race-shifting. Not only are they the result of cultural extraction of traditional Indigenous knowledge, but their content is premised on the systemic erasure and evacuation of Indigenous Peoples, and the myth of white supremacy that presumes everyone at some point in time and place was Native. This is settler-colonial tradecraft. &nbsp;WARNING: contains explicit language related to events that some readers may find&nbsp; offensive and references to information that may be triggering. Cultural Appropriation Is Dispossession of Knowledge. &nbsp; Nowhere are these strategies made clearer than in the exhibition's platforming of self-indigenization. The language of the exhibition’s PRESERVATION section is especially egregious: “The second [model] proposes a more intensive sharing/mixing of all our territories, as if we moderns could become ‘indigenous’ again. (In fact, a quarter of the Earth’s surface is still husbanded by indigenous populations.)”&nbsp; That you then reproduce these white supremacist claims with romanticized images of the bloody botanical expeditions of Alexander von Humboldt is cunning and vulgar. The colonial cartographies of the Prussian naturalist in the exhibition not only gloss over Humboldt’s scientific contributions, but uncritically reproduce the historical myth of the dominance of European imperial science across the arts at the expense of Indigenous knowledge. Humboldt rampaged through lands of Kechwa Nations (and many more), stole lifetimes of sacred knowledge from Andean healers and herbalists without any form of consent, and then mapped and sold them internationally with great acclaim across Europe. Financed by descendants of the same Spanish monarchy that funded the genocidal campaigns of Christopher Columbus, Humboldt’s expeditions through the Andes were nothing short of pillage. What happened on the ground was very different than what was reported on paper. The map was never the territory.&nbsp; <img width="1500" height="844" width_o="1500" height_o="844" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/09e41e563bb9ae2e298a62bb4fb1b723fabfc99a9fed3b5c4282a3a51ca196f1/-John-Hill-2020.jpg" data-mid="130486758" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/09e41e563bb9ae2e298a62bb4fb1b723fabfc99a9fed3b5c4282a3a51ca196f1/-John-Hill-2020.jpg" />PHOTO: © John Hill (reproduced by permission) Two centuries later, the pattern is being repeated. Anglo-European reverence for Humboldt at once stems from and obscures the litany of knowledge smuggled from the Americas and then repackaged for the French, British, Dutch, Germans, and later the Americans. Like the Countryside exhibition, Humboldt’s design is a roadmap for continuing the colonial project of resource extraction and looting of Indigenous lands worldwide; the colonial megastructure that originally served for the first slave plantations in European colonies. Your exhibition is another link in the chain, recapitulating Humboldt’s great unacknowledged claim to Indigenous knowledge neither gifted nor granted, but mined and exploited over and over again. Taken without consent, recognition, or royalty, Humboldt’s maps and the knowledge these encrypt are like the collages on the circular walls of the Guggenheim Museum: a rotunda of extracted intellectual ore. Indigenous Erasure is Dispossession of Identity &amp; Humanity. &nbsp; The general failure to recognize the violence and aggression enacted and executed by your acts of cultural appropriation and glib claims to self-indigenization is particularly enraging, and perpetuates the very erasure and extraction animating the exhibition. Carolyn Kormann’s March 9, 2020 coverage in The New Yorker (“Rem Koolhaas’ Journey to the Countryside”) amplifies your claims: “The separation [between preservation and development] would not necessarily be between pure nature and the impure rest,” Koolhaas said, but instead would require the sharing and mixing of territories, and for “people to behave like the indigenous cultures that were able to inhabit spaces without destroying them.” In the Guggenheim exhibition as well as The New Yorker article, you double-down on glorifying Humboldt’s redesign of Indigenous life and land into a colonial “cosmos”: “This [geological, botanical, and hydrological map of Humboldt], for me, represents maybe the most inspiring form of collecting elements of nature, analyzing nature, and loving nature … This is emblematic.” In 1810, “von Humboldt could still ‘discover’ unmolested nature; even when inhabited, indigenous peoples lived lives that depended on nature without destroying it.” And then finally, in the same article, you insist on exploiting Indigenous strategies by slyly repeating claims to self-indigenization and dismissing Indigeneity in the same breath, shamelessly re-authorizing erasure from inside out: “But to impose better behavior on the entire world is equally tough. As if we moderns could become indigenous again.”&nbsp; This practice of self-indigenization dates back centuries to colonial contact, where colonizers and settlers assume Indigenous identity as a method of subsuming their enemies in a way that historian Philip J. Deloria calls “playing Indian.” And yet, you do so without any political connection, community, relation, or kin; as if identity is an interchangeable avatar, or that citizenship can be self-claimed, or that nationhood can be disposed of at will. Self-indigenization is the tip of the spear for European and American conceits of white saviorship and its constitutive hyper-masculinity. It fails to recognize—let alone honor—Indigenous Peoples as living, present, politically-organized nations when they represent over 5% of the world’s population. Five million Indigenous Peoples form part of over 500 tribal nations across what is known as the United States, holding less than 2% of the 5.6 billion acres of lands that were stolen. In essence, the erasure of Indigenous Peoples in your one-year exhibition reveals the centuries-old racist treatment of territorial identities, squeezed out of the countryside and out of the consciousness of settlers. Is it not precisely the Euro-American concept of nature and its trafficking of white nationalism that continually destroys Indigenous worlds? Race-Shifting Is Dispossession of Sovereignty. Furthermore, your casual and careless use of the universalizing ‘we,’ ‘us,’ ‘our,’ (even the qualified use of ‘ &nbsp; ’ as an orthographic alibi, a settler move to innocence) follows the age old mission civilisatrice of architecture: enclosure, assimilation, indoctrination on the one side; incarceration, impoverishment, and eradication on the other. The hegemonic use of a homogeneous ‘we’ is not only arrogant and presumptuous, but also disingenuously assumes a wholesale consensus to fulfil a grand unifying vision. As if ventriloquizing a majority opinion, the ‘we’ establishes a position of cultural and intellectual superiority for the Curator, the Museum, the Publisher, and the Research Universities that produced the content of the exhibition and the book. By what process of community consultation, territorial engagement, or intercultural dialogue do you dare assume this collective position? Did you not stop to consider that your positionality as a self-styled anthropologist was neither neutral nor objective? Worse, did you feel free from all such obligations? Or did you simply not care? Your disengagement from communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communicates purposeful intent and bias. Rather than engaging in a process of consent and consultation—a way of entering into relation with Indigenous Peoples, locally, regionally, or internationally—the exhibition not only excludes Indigenous participation, but completely suppresses two key pieces of international policy of human rights: the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the entrenchment of the 2016 Principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent&nbsp;(FPIC) as a “pre-requisite for any activity that affects ancestral lands, territories and natural resources” and “to guarantee everyone’s right to self-determination” that recognizes the sovereignty of Indigenous lands and traditions. Moreover, not only does the exhibition place Euro-American voices at the peak of an assumed cultural discourse but, at the base of this intellectual mountain of yours, it entrenches Eurocentric views, marginalizes alternative perspectives, and quashes dissenting voices seeking to uproot the unequal distribution of wealth and unjust conditions of labor underlying territorial exploitation. While no doubt the masquerade of the Countryside exhibition serves well as a gigantic love letter to the growing cabal of petty tyrants in tech, real estate, finance, and government to build the next gigafactory, server farm, or mega-prison, the weaponization of knowledge to your own ends is nothing less than greed, manipulation, and exploitation on a massive scale. White skin, white walls, white lies. Let’s be clear: self-indigenization is a direct assault on Indigenous humanities, sovereignties, freedoms, and rights to self-determination. Settler-colonial claims to Indigeneity—through the extraction of Indigenous culture and knowledge—is nothing less than twenty-first century race-shifting: claiming and assuming Indigenous identity through some primitivist proclivities without any historical relations or current ties to Indigenous community or nationhood. Race shifters, explains anthropologist Circe Sturm, are “individuals who have changed their racial self-identification … a form of appropriation, an expression of a desire [by non-Indigenous Peoples] to be something they are not.” When race-shifting is performed for “symbolic, [political,] or material advantage,” it not only fails to confront and challenge toxic constructions of whiteness, but commits “outright ethnic fraud.” The fraud of self-indigenization and race-shifting are predatory practices rooted in a virulent, yet fragile whiteness. Not only do your claims contravene autonomous protocols of nationhood, but they also obviate deep relations of kinship altogether. Not surprisingly, these are the very relations you try to expropriate, sanitize, and resell for your visions of “change.” There’s no way that you can rhetorically distance yourself from the words on the wall, nor outsource the blame, nor hide behind a veil of research to excuse these transgressions. Even if you don’t care, we are here to make you (and the countless architects that mimic you) aware and accountable. This two-pronged strategy of dispossession––suppression of Indigenous rights and race-shifting—is even more bewildering given the affiliation and identity of former Guggenheim Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives, Troy Conrad Therrien. The Canadian-born citizen of the Métis Nation of British Columbia states in his introduction to the exhibition catalog how he invited you to the Guggenheim to conceive and engage in a curatorial partnership at the onslaught of the exhibition concept, back in 2015. What happened in those five years? Did you not witness the countless blockades on Indigenous lands opposing oil and gas pipelines in the so-called countryside? Did you not notice the massive opposition to man-camps that giant mining companies were building? Where were you when refugee children were being unlawfully detained and inhumanely caged as they were being violently separated from migrant parents at international borders? Were you not aware of the exploitation of prison labor and immigrant work forces in the “countrysides” that feed billions of peoples? Are you not paying attention to the leadership of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who are risking their lives on these fronts to stop the racial injustices entrenched in the settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, eurocentrism, and white supremacy that you represent? What more can be stolen? Your 1978 book Delirious New York is longstanding evidence of how urgent this demand is. Relegated to the “Prehistory” section, you both denigrate and ignore the contemporary reality, cultural presence, and political sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples (specifically of Lenape, Shinnecock, and Unkechaug Nations that have inhabited New York since time immemorial, notwithstanding the many Indigenous Peoples who call the city home). Tellingly, you parrot the characterization of Indigenous Peoples as models of “North American barbarism” not in admonishment, but to house your own speculations on the “reenactment— architectural this time— of the New World’s primordial tragedy, the massacre of the Indians,” as an engine for the city’s recursive reinvention. Your cynical rhetoric has not aged well, souring now into the prophecy and pronouncement it has always been. You recognized too that such a narrative expresses a “need to mythologize its past and rewrite a history that can serve its future”—and then, like now, you appointed yourself the new, winking demiurge of settler urbanism. This constitutes more than a mockery or tokenization of Lenape Peoples, it erases—and thereby dehumanizes—urban Indigenous communities at large. Your 1977 Architectural Design article “Life in the Metropolis, or The Culture of Congestion” that you later reproduced in your 1995 book S,M,L,XL, naturalizes colonialism as the metropolitan condition. In turn, it trivializes intergenerational trauma and entrenches territorial dispossession as the precondition for the making of settler-space. Big and small, settler urbanism is Indigenous erasure. So it’s no mistake that the hegemony of spatial violence in settler-colonial space is absent from the entire spectrum of your work, in the same way that Indigenous erasure is omnipresent throughout the Countryside exhibition at the Guggenheim. Even according to your own&nbsp;autobiographical narrative, your motives can only be assumed to be—not unlike those of Humboldt some two hundred years ago— extractive. Now, over four decades after Delirious New York, you persist in normalizing an architectural culture of extractivism shared widely by architects for which they are rarely, if ever, held accountable for. Your alloying of ignorance and impunity, as if a colonial carte blanche, legitimizes injustice. Given the immense cultural platform that the Guggenheim Museum has built with over 1 million visitors per year and the far-reaching social impact that you have from your seventy-year career, the time to end this practice of cultural appropriation is here and now. Cease &amp; Desist Now.&nbsp; Adopting traditional forms of Indigenous knowledge (and platforming them) under the banner of cultural inspiration or innovation is reprehensible. Whether it is in the Vitruvian trope of the ‘primitive hut’ or the modern myth of the ‘noble savage,’ (or in recent compilations of traditional, low-tech, Indigenous technologies by a host of white academics and design professionals), such practices of intellectual and material extraction are not new, but they must unconditionally end. Cultural appropriation exploits oral tradition as well as embodied knowledge, and then consumes and exploits it as commodity. Colonial anthropology and imperial science undressed. Technological red face in plain sight. Legitimating the extractive gaze of white researchers and curators is similarly perverse. The financial and infrastructural support that the Guggenheim Museum has garnered for (and by) the exhibition makes them equally accountable for amplifying and glorifying this white gaze. Your duplicity commits and confirms settler desires for race-shifting and indulges in an age-old colonial fantasy of pretendianism at the very root of US culture, from the Boston Tea Party to the Boy Scouts of America. That systemic pattern not only excludes, but furthers attempts to extinguish Indigenous Peoples as part of the settler-colonial project predicated on a multi-faceted and ongoing program of dispossession. Cultural appropriation by a dominant white majority in a racialized attempt—as you claim, “to become Indigenous again”—upholds the curatorial hegemony of white supremacy. Your exhibition proves that settler-colonialism is not only planned and executed, it is also curated. So this letter is not only about calling out denigrating acts of appropriation, but to bring to an end the dehumanizing practice of Indigenous erasure that is part of settler-colonialism’s strategy of cultural genocide and ongoing dispossession. In the context of so much land and culture that has been stolen and continues to be taken from Indigenous Peoples and Tribal Nations—notwithstanding the widespread use of Indigenous symbols as American mascots—the disproportionate rates of over-representation of Indigenous men and women in prison populations, the intergenerational legacies of Indian Residential Schools, and the alarming rates of Missing &amp; Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), how much more can be taken and extracted from Indigenous People—living and past? The consequences of such actions, when left unchecked, set dangerous precedents for younger settler scholars and immigrant designers trained in the racist design institutions of the so-called civilized western world where this practice is rampant. This is why we are writing to you now. This practice not only perpetuates vicious cycles of domination, it also sanctions white supremacy through financialized resources and applauds it through awards and recognition. Emulating, appropriating, tokenizing, or worse, extinguishing of Indigenous knowledge in exhibitions like&nbsp;Countryside at the Guggenheim or How Will We Live Together at the Venice Architecture Biennale this past year is incendiary, spreading like wildfire in design institutions, schools, exhibitions, and professional associations where protocols of consent and consultation are completely ignored and overlooked in spite of codes of ethics like those of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and affiliated design disciplines represented by the American Planning Association (APA), the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). As a white, non-Indigenous, European curator and Dutch architect whose home country carries legacies of exploitation and colonial violence dating back well over four centuries, you cannot possibly question the future when your patriarchal rhetoric consistently chooses to misinterpret the present; an era that for many communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color represents unending spatial injustices, oppressions, and in some cases, wars. To these ends, we demand your full accountability and immediate apology as head of the Curatorial Team to cease and desist the misrepresentation of traditional Indigenous knowledge and abuse of cultural sovereignty. No more paper-thin plans like the Guggenheim Museum’s Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion Action Plan or any empty promises of decolonizing the institution. What’s put on paper is always different to what’s done on the ground or put up on the walls. The Museum’s own staff even called out some of their own injustices in 2020 during the Countryside exhibition in The New York Times (“Curators Urge Guggenheim to Fix Culture That ‘Enables Racism’”). As Curator, Museum, and Publisher—in all these roles, you encompass the platform and need to take action. Just Fuckin’ Stop. This is therefore a generational call to stop this settler-colonial fraud and to end this culture of dispossession. There can be no more violence and aggression from the vile appropriation of knowledge and race-shifting running rampant in the culture of western art and architecture. The Board of Trustees of the Guggenheim Museum and Taschen Publishers are cc’ed here with the proviso that a different history of the future can be written, should the exhibition travel to Arc-en-Rêve Centre d’Architecture in Bordeaux (France) or anywhere else. In the future, if it is to genuinely reshape its executive and curatorial leadership, the Guggenheim Museum must enroll assistance from, consult with, and receive consent from local Indigenous communities and leading Indigenous rights organizations such as the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Amazon Watch, the Indian Law Resource Center, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and Land Rights Now. To this effect, we’ve attached a summary list of texts on cultural appropriation, exploitation, self-indigenization, and race-shifting that explain in greater depth the terms and concepts referenced here, along with their longstanding histories, consequences, and impacts. Read them, internalize them, engage with them, and act on them while reflecting on how those legacies are exacerbated by current realities, including the disproportional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tribal communities. In the process of your own transformation, you’ll understand that the best place to start is with yourself; with honoring the lands you are on—Lenapehoking—and the retroactive engagement of your roles and responsibilities to the Peoples and Treaties that those lands are privy to. Signed &amp; Authored by: ANGEL A ANGELE, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá Pedro Aparicio Llorente, APLO/Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá Alexander Arroyo, University of Chicago Daphne Bakker, Failed Architecture Rod Barnett (Māori), Aotearoa New Zealand Liz Barry, Public Lab, New York Pierre Bélanger, Boston Hernán Bianchi Benguria, University of Toronto Tiffany Kaewen Dang, University of Cambridge Vineet Diwadkar, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton), Boston Ghazal Jafari, University of Virginia Namik Mačkić, Counterfactual, Oslo Marc Miller, Penn State University Mahtowin Munro (Lakota), United American Indians of New England Jean-Luc Pierite (Tunica-Biloxi), North American Indian Center of Boston Manuela Silva, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá Samantha Solano, UMass Amherst Zoe S. Todd (Métis/otipemisiw), Carleton University cc:&nbsp; &nbsp;The Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Taschen Publishers att:&nbsp; A Primer on Cultural Appropriation, Race-Shifting, Self-Indigenization, &amp; Dispossession in the context of Settler-Colonialism A Primer on Cultural Appropriation, Dispossession, Race-Shifting, Self-Indigenization in the Context of Settler-Colonialism. Rod Barnett, “Designing Indian Country: Suppose Native America is not over, that there is no “after colonialism.” How do we create public spaces that enable true contact between cultures?,” 2016 Nicholas Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid,” 2003 Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism, 2017 Nicholas Brown, Sarah E. Kanouse, Re-Collecting Black Hawk Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest, 2015 Desmond Cole, The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power, 2020 Glen S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, 2014 Dark Matter University, Lessons in Anti-Racist Design Pedagogy, 2020 Marcia Ellen DeGeer, Biopiracy: The Appropriation of Indigenous Peoples Cultural Knowledge, 2002 Design as Protest Collective, You Are Antiracist, 2020 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, 1998 Adam Gaudry &amp; Darryl Leroux, “White Settler Revisionism,” 2014 Erin Genia, “Decolonization and Cultural Responsibility,” 2020 Erin Genia, “The Landscape and Language of Indigenous Cultural Rights,” Arizona State Law Journal, 2012 Mike Gouldhawke, “Building Blocks,” 2021 Aaron Glass and Jolene Rickard, “Met Roundtables: Boundaries in Native America,” 2019 Red Haircrow, “‘Native Hobbyism’ is Modern-Day Colonialism”, Laura Harjo, Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity, 2019 Phineas Harper, “Architects are Experts on Cultural Appropriation,” 2018 Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project, “Think Before You Appropriate: A Guide for Creators &amp; Designers,” 2015 Cole Harris, “How Did Colonial Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” 2004 Adrienne Keene, “Native Appropriations,” All My Relations Podcast, 2019 la paperson, “Settler Colonialism Is a Set of Technologies,” 2017 Ruth Hopkins, “Boycott a Repeat Offender of Cultural Appropriation,” 2019 Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy, 1990 Wanda Lau, “Tammy Eagle Bull: Let’s Reconsider That Indigenous Tattoo,” 2019 Darryl Leroux, Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity, 2019 Darryl Leroux, “'We've been here for 2,000 years': White settlers, Native American DNA and the phenomenon of indigenization,” 2018 Darryl Leroux, “How 'race-shifting' explains the surge in the number of Métis in Eastern Canada,” 2017 NYC Stands for Standing Rock, #StandingRockSyllabus, 2016 Nick Martin “There’s Nothing More American than Native American Mascots,” 2020 Tiya Miles, “Dispossession,” The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, 2020 Dylan T. Miner, “Makataimeshekiakiak, Settler Colonialism and the Specter of Indigenous Liberation,” 2015 Deborah A. Miranda, “Teaching on Stolen Ground,” 2007 Louis Mokak, “Architecture and Appropriation,” 2018 Pierre Moret et al., “Humboldt’s Tableau Physique revisited,” 2019 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, 2015 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992 Patrick Anthony, “Mining as the Working World of Alexander von Humboldt’s Plant Geography and Vertical Cartography,” 2018 Stephen Pearson, "The Last Bastion of Colonialism: Appalachian Settler Colonialism and Self-Indigenization,” 2013 Caroline&nbsp;Picard, “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd,” 2016 Grace Redpath, “Is Mainstream Sustainability Appropriating Indigenous Knowledge?”, 2021 Jolene Rickard, “Absorbing or Obscuring the Absence of a Critical Space in the Americas for Indigeneity: The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian,” 2007 Jolene Rickard, “Indigenous Visual Sovereignty,” 2021 Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense, 2013 Audra Simpson, “Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need,” Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, 2014 Audra Simpson, “From White into Red: Captivity Narratives as Alchemies of Race and Citizenship,” 2008. Michael Slenske, “How Can the Design Industry Avoid Appropriation,” 2018 Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 1999 Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Respect, Responsibility, and Renewal: The Foundations of Anishinaabe Treaty Making with the United States and Canada,” 2010 Gina Starblanket &amp; Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Towards a Relational Paradigm—Four Points for consideration: Knowledge, Power, Gender, Land, Modernity,” Resurgence &amp; Reconciliation, 2018 Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century, 2011 Drew Hayden Taylor, Searching for Winnetou, CBC Hot Docs, 2017 Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” 2015 Owen Toews, Sowing Apartheid: The Export-Agricultural Vision,” in Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg, 2018 Julie Tomiak, “Contested Entitlement,” Settler City Limits, 2019 Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” 2009 United Nations, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Resolution adopted by the General Assembly, 2007 Sócrates Vasquez and Avexnim Cojtí,“Cultural Appropriation: Another Form of Extractivism of Indigenous Communities,” 2020 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, 1999 Yellowhead Institute, Cash Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper, 2021 This letter is available in 3 formats: GOOGLE FORM VERSION:* https://forms.gle/i4HLDbjYhUSBU4Nx6 ONLINE HTML VERSION (English/Spanish): https://whiteskinwhitewallswhiteli.es/ DOWNLOADABLE PDF VERSION (English/Spanish): https://bit.ly/3FwyVft CONTACT: settlercolonialismiscurated@gmail.com *You can lend your support to this effort by endorsing the Open Letter originally published on January 17, 2022 by filling out the form field at the bottom of the page (updated daily) of the GOOGLE FORM VERSION. https://opsys.cargo.site/c1993 Fri, 19 Feb 2021 09:39:49 +0000 open systems https://opsys.cargo.site/c1993 LANDSCAPEas RESISTANCE Pretexts, Subtexts, Contexts in Struggles for Environmental Justice c.1993 &nbsp; Ghazal Jafari&nbsp; Hernán Bianchi-Benguria Pierre Bélanger “Almost alone among the key players of this century’s history, the landscape remains silent. But in truth it may be the most expert witness of all. In its broadest sense, ‘landscape’ is a stage on which struggles occur — where humans extract resources from the earth, suburbs drain people and wealth from cities, and territory is contested between warring groups. Landscape is also a kind of slate upon which the evidence of culture, habitation and labor is written and may be read.” —Rick Prelinger, Our Secret Century, 1993–1995 The 1990s mark an era of territorial and technological transformation whose magnitudes have only recently come into focus for a range of different disciplines. The fall of South Africa’s Apartheid and the rise of the Internet’s Information Superhighway are but a few significant regime changes that signal structural shifts along lines of failing states, ongoing injustices, and emerging media. Closer to the ground, the explosive demonstrations in Los Angeles ignited by the brutal police beating of Rodney King, the bombings in the Siege of Sarajevo, the gendered violence against women and girls either during the Kosovo War or in the #MMIWG Movement, the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on 9/11 as a result of the militarization of the Middle East and ensuing Global War on Terror, as well as the massive transnational mobilization in the blockade against the Dakota Access Pipeline and other ongoing acts of cultural genocide, are but a few of the milestone moments that define a period of extreme and embodied spatial change on the surface and in the air of these changing states. Against this vivid foreground of political events is a background of slow institutional transitions: the spatialization of social sciences through the revival of geography, the racialization of geopolitical studies, the softening of hard sciences through open access, the pluralization of identities across the justice system, and the gradual materialization of economic systems recently revealed in the housing mortgage meltdown and credit crisis of 2008. All this as a backdrop of a social and political uprising manifest in major movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, all which confront longstanding racial, economic, and environmental injustices upheld by the systems of settler-colonialism and the structures of white supremacy. If these changes in thinking about race, class, and gender are rooted in the representation of the spaces of inequality and the environments of injustice, then an understanding of intersectionality and difference is central and important as defined and argued in 1993 by civil rights lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw:&nbsp; “The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination — that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction. […] Through an awareness of intersectionality, [recognizing that identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect, thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about categories at all], we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics.”&nbsp;[1] In hindsight, the changes in thinking of the past twenty-five years through these political grounds are potentially revolutionary. They represent intersectional outcomes that have contributed to a heightened sense and cross-cultural awareness of the geopolitical unevenness and polarizing economies of globalization across borders and boundaries, old and new. With the rise of social activism and proliferation of digital forms of communication, alternative forms of organization (especially women-based, increasingly youth-initiated) made possible in part by real-time information have enhanced patterns of exchange&nbsp;—&nbsp;in sometimes explosive ways&nbsp;—&nbsp;heightening the visibility and spatializing the awareness of ongoing inequalities and injustices. These emerging images&nbsp;—&nbsp;and arguably these new maps&nbsp;—&nbsp;have put into question the walled authority of hierarchical modes of control (police, prisons, carceral systems), communication (media, science, surveillance systems), and production (labor conditions, rights, borders); precisely coinciding with a moment where massive political demonstrations are enabled and even ignited through social media platforms, spreading and swelling across city streets, state highways, or public squares, to culminate in front of police departments, parliaments, embassies, or monuments. If the analog map muted the territory in the past century, then the digital screen (lenses, mirrors, windows) now dominates our filtered perception of those spatial systems of representation — whether we are talking about the incarceration of political refugees, violence against displaced migrants, or the dispossession of climate refugees. Notwithstanding their currency, the recognition of the extensive and dynamic territoriality of these political changes has been largely overlooked&nbsp;—&nbsp;if not dismissed&nbsp;—&nbsp;by institutional establishments. Where bureaucratic power lies, administrative control has been slow to adapt; especially when hierarchical forms of policy, planning, and jurisprudence reign in closed and contained systems of decision making. In turn, the rise of neo-liberalization that has capitalized on this bureaucratic inertia has expanded into massive financial empires and technocratic processes that have taken shape during this time. Tendencies towards the offshoring of production and banking have subsequently produced new financial hinterlands that remain mostly unseen and unmapped. As a result, there is an increasing divide and difference between the center and the periphery. This financial-capital complex clearly points in many cases towards deeper colonial forces rooted in more than three to five centuries of resource exploitation, extraction, and exportation. And while certain forms of resistance to these global and planetary forces have preceded and preempted the turn of the millennium, the strong neo-liberal and neo-Taylorist forces acting in the paper worlds of extraction and exploitation that have marked the past two to three decades remain largely at work today at far greater extents than ever before.&nbsp;[2] For the Millennial Generation and Generation X born during this period, the guise of self-actualization and liberation from exploitative, industrial labor has actually imprisoned them in the colonial metropolis and its forms of consumption and subjugation. Millennials and Gen-Xers remain far removed from means of production, divided more than ever across classes of wealth. Increasingly complex layers of fiscal and financial systems not only support but maintain their strict separation. This socio-economic apartheid and cultural disenfranchisement is also exacerbated and alienated by the distancing from fields of cultivation and territories of extraction; lands and landscapes that support and sustain the contemporary livelihoods of billions of people whom, more and more, are dispossessed from their lands and forcibly displaced to the edge of cities. This ‘geographic degeneration’ is further compounded by the disillusionment of the large-scale grandeur of utopian welfare states that once promised equity, equality, and justice through democracy. This fracture between the state and the citizen (now increasingly users, clients, consumers, drivers) between what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ is now breeding a whole new set of politicized identities and communities working from below. In reaction to the wars between bureaucratic opacity and social transparency, the displaced and the dispossessed now congregate and concentrate around new sites of ideological common ground. Here, counter-cartographies, queer identities, decolonial pedagogies, revived languages, and subversive softwares attempt to decode, deconstruct, and dismantle the strongholds of bureaucratic hardware, heteropatriarchy, brick-and-mortar policy, and state-controlled systems of settler-colonialism.&nbsp;[3] Emerging from an overlooked body of work lying in the dust of the turn of the millennium, the powerful voices of a shadow group of spatial thinkers are brought together in a radical collection of views —&nbsp;drowned out by the noise of Y2K — whose work cuts across the hard core of the sciences, industrial division of labor and gender, as well as the cadre of professional disciplines. They help forge an understanding of the alternative spaces required for change; what comparative linguist Mary Louise Pratt defined as “contact zones” in her critical argument for the reconstruction of institutional knowledge in 1991, in terms of, “social spaces where [disparate] cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power [domination and subordination], such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. Eventually I will use the term to reconsider the models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing and that are under challenge today.”&nbsp;[4] In response to this period of turbulent transformation and wide-sweeping social stratification, the voices from this group of fin-de-siècle thinkers, writers, and activists delineates the contours of a resurgence in geopolitical thought and cultures of resistance from the margins of a dominant center held by the whiteness of institutions. As point of contact and encounter, the racialization of that dominant center and its peripheries — with the systems of knowledge that uphold it — is especially significant and essential. As anti-colonial geographer Katherine McKittrick writes in her incisive 2011 essay “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” &nbsp; “Instead of encounter, in fact, our present system of knowledge, inherited from enlightened colonialism and Eurocentric modernity, repetitively constitutes blackness as a discreet (and hostile) category that routinely ‘troubles’ an already settled whiteness. This paradigmatic perspective on race and blackness, in its denial of an entangled racial history produced through geographies of encounter, normalizes practices of colonization as it naturalizes overdevelopment, accumulation, and land ownership as identifiable-seeable locales of emancipation.”&nbsp;[5] These writings and modes of thinking have been responding to socioeconomic struggles over the past two decades with actionable research while remaining critically aware of the violence, oppression, and hegemony of global capital flow. Bringing together a range of voices — from botanists and arborists, to historians and anthropologists — this project of writings compilation reformulates a politicized conception of urbanization that for the most part emerged prior to the turn of the 21st century as resistance and subversion to the educational institution and political establishment. By grounding social, scientific, and economic knowledge, these voices provide a counter-position for re-assessing the critical relevance and pressing significance of environmental challenges through different senses, alternatives scales, and new lenses. Considered together, they represent a groundswell in political, and ecological thinking. As an unintended collective, they underlie the deep dimensions and dispositions of land as the underlying platform upon which the liberalization of global markets, the colonization of nation states, the racialization of labor systems, the weaponization of technological infrastructures, and the imperialism of transnational corporations are playing out. To be clear, this is a movement of reparation, reconstruction, and repatriation. As writer, historian, and poet Deborah A. Miranda from the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of California writes in her 2007 essay Teaching on Stolen Ground, “this work of repatriation in the academy, is not about victimization or blame games. It’s about the acknowledgement and resolution of real and tangible crimes so that a future truly is worth living.” Furthermore, she explicitly identifies the complicity of the urban design disciplines (from architecture and engineering to planning and policy) in the systems of settler-colonialism across the United States: “You steal the land, build a country on a stolen foundation, construct a cage around it. All that you have — your possessions, your ethics, your history — depends on keeping this land captive. Your cage must grow still more complex: you must construct more restraints. Literature that serves as steel bars, schools that serve as locks, textbooks that are prison guards. What keys are available to us to dismantle this perpetually tightening confinement?”&nbsp;[6] Free from disciplinary strongholds, these voices thus present and represent corresponding notions of land and landscape as emergent, avant-garde, and retroactive theory.&nbsp;[7] Debasing colonial narratives steeped in the suppression or muffling of land by lame surrogates such as ‘site,’ ‘area,’ ‘lot,’ ‘property,’ ‘real estate,’ ‘district’, or ‘jurisdiction,’ the project rethinks professional languages and spatial discourses guarded by the paternalistic practices of architecture, planning, and development. Their wide sweeping reliance on Eurocentric narratives of western theory, city-centric generalizations of the Anthropocene, religiously apocalyptic projections of sea level rise, and chronic IPCC-led climate change catastrophism narrowly confine the complex understanding of built environments, territorial regimes, and their dynamic processes. Cloaked by technological positivism, scientific imperialism, environmental racism, and settler colonialism, these over-engineered and mechanized means serve only privileged populations of well-developed nation states at the expense of others that are often left outside or erased by the neoliberal vacuum of consumption and corporate bubble of accumulation. Transnationalism, in the globalization of the design disciplines of architecture, urban planning, and civil engineering for example, has coincidentally if not strategically slipped through the cracks and cleavages of territorial borders to avoid the boundaries of discourses on the role of the nation state in design; including its role, its extents, its influence, and its historical impact through settler-colonialism. That strategic oversight reinforces the nationalism of the organization of design disciplines themselves (the ‘American’ Society of Landscape Architects, ‘American’ Institute of Architects, ‘American’ Planning Association, or ‘United States’ Army Corps of Engineers to name a few), that normalizes the nationalization of representation, including spatial and environmental discourses. The nationalism(s) of design discourse (from education to professional licensing) is a direct product of white supremacy, of a dominant white majority, whose hegemonic influence has excluded so much and so many at the expense of marginalizing the ontologies of the displaced and the dispossessed — by identity and polity — often, if not always, by force. Reacting to and confronting dominant spatial canons from two former volumes of shared architectural genre, this project of compilation thus draws from the ongoing revolutionary era of spatial change around the 1990s to the present. The format of this 25-year outlook, circa 1993, specifically builds on the legacy of two previous anthologies while providing a distinctive break from their implicit Eurocentric disciplinary predispositions and settler-colonial underpinnings. The first includes Joan Ockman’s Architecture Culture, a documentary anthology published in 1993 in collaboration with Edward Eigen that profiles readings from practicing architects in the postwar reconstructive period of 1943 to 1968. Published a few years later in 1998, the second is Michael Hays’ Architecture Theory since 1968 with readings spanning the turbulent period from 1968 to 1993. Both prompted by Bernard Tschumi, then Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation between 1988 and 2003, Hays and Ockman employ the quintessential year of 1968 as contextual benchmark and mile marker for the respective beginning and end of their collected writings on urbanism expressed through the discipline of architecture. Now well recognized, the end of the 1960s witnessed a period of time that retrospectively saw the dawn of civil rights and rise of labor movements through clashes with the state.[8] Simultaneously, it also coincided with a period of major territorial change, one that was observed in several key writings, namely The New Industrial State (1967) by Canadian-American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, “in the 20th century, capital became more important than land,” a few years prior to the work of French sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s La Révolution Urbaine (1970) declaring that “the urban (urban space, urban landscape) remains unseen.”&nbsp;[9] If then, the revolution in land entailed a revolution in forms and relations of economic and political power, any study of the history of the built environment today must open insights onto claims, constructions, capitalizations, cessions, and surrenders inscribed in the ground and associated with the flow and concentration of capital.&nbsp; Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said observed in 1994 that: “The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future — these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative. As one critic has suggested, nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”&nbsp;[10] The revival in the epistemologies of land as a cultural subject and the emergence of landscape as a political system of representation (or mis-representation) across the urban arts therefore must preclude the study of urbanization in relation to the construction and deconstruction — past, present, and future — of emerging power structures and new empires in the making.&nbsp;[11] Yet, as Anthony D. King observed in the early 1990s about settler-colonial institutions and fields of knowledge:&nbsp; “Considering its impact on contemporary urban, political, economic, social, and cultural life, the historical experience of colonialism and imperialism is greatly under-researched.”&nbsp;[12]&nbsp; Corresponding with the marginalization of architectural theory and planning policy in economic or political spheres during the last two decades, the compilation of these readings thus marks another distinct yet poorly documented period of intellectual transformation that in fact is catalyzed as an inter-generational shift and swiftly enacting actual spatial transformations that have proliferated in the past two decades — from the removal of Confederate monuments to the advent of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The voices brought together here point towards alternative origins that move away from disciplinary canons while at the same drawing different and deeper historical strands of design’s influence. Through an original compilation of texts, images and excerpts, this project therefore presents the agency of landscape as a pretext for current and future practices rooted in the deeply engrained grounds of urbanization (including counter-urbanization and dis-urbanization); grounds entangled in the complexities of land, law, language, life, belief, being, terrain, and territory. By mapping an understanding of land through the political system of landscape&nbsp;representation, this body of thought builds a platform for present-day intervention and establishes alternative precedents that stack up the potential for change in current investments, ongoing methodologies, and future scenarios. As the historically dominant white, Anglo-American majority is decentered, the change and shift for which, we believe, the design disciplines (with their related institutions and professional associations) are wholly unprepared for — pedagogically, structurally, intellectually — considering the unprecedented demographic shift that is occurring now, and for the next 25 years:&nbsp; “The point at which the non-Hispanic White alone population will comprise less than 50 percent of the nation’s total population has been described as the point at which we become a ‘majority-minority’ nation. According to these projections, the majority-minority crossover will occur in 2044… [at which point,] the United States is projected to become a plurality nation.”&nbsp;[13] The ambition of this project is thus to rebase and displace mainstream urban discourse (focused exclusively on cities through the lens of divisive disciplines) by empowering voices of the marginalized, the suppressed, and the impoverished; by reifying the meaning of plurality of identity and of humanity, underscoring difference throughout the living world, as well as casting light on narratives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color that lie outside the center of dominant institutional thought and disciplinary factions. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Seen through eyes of these millennial ghost writers, this collection of work therefore critically positions the vital urgency of ecologic change and prescience of landscape representation with a wide spectrum of peoples and publics whose struggles for spatial justice, infrastructural equity, economic empowerment, and ecologic freedom are premised in the future of existing lands, buried below the surface of states, to be found across emerging territories and scales of influence yet to come. * * *&nbsp; About the Authors Dr. Ghazal Jafari is a designer of Persian and Azeri descent and Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia, traditional lands of the Monacan People. Hernán Bianchi-Benguria is a planner, architect, and PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Toronto, traditional lands of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River, covered by Treaty 13. Dr. Pierre Bélanger is a settler designer, trained as landscape architect, originally from Montréal and Ottawa, now in Boston, traditional lands of the Massachusett Peoples, territory of the Wampanoag and Nipmuc Nations. Background Image: Video still of Rodney King beaten by police officers of the Los Angeles County Police Department, March 3, 1991. Video &amp; Transcript (CW: Violence &amp; extreme Brutality)&nbsp;https://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/march-1991-rodney-king-videotape-9758031. For the significance of this event in relation to the racialization of media, see Brandy Monk-Payton, "Blackness and Televisual Reparations " Film Quarterly 71, no.2 (2017): 12–18. This essay is an introduction to c.1993, a compilation project of multimedia works by authors, artists, and activists.&nbsp;&nbsp; Notes 1. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s early work on racialized and gendered violence (targeting Black Women) contextualizes her extensive scholarship on intersectionality: “Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost, routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of African Americans, other people of color, and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development.” See “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no.6 (1991): 1241 –1242, 1299. 2. Marginalized discourses and peripheral subjects also form their own cores. As anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing observes, “the zones of unpredictability at the edges of discursive stability, where contradictory discourses overlap, or where discrepant kinds of meaning-making converge; these are what I call margins.” See “From the Margins,”&nbsp;Cultural Anthropology 9, no.3 (1994): 279. 3. Systemic injustices are at the core of this 25-year compilation of readings. By no means is this period of revolutionary change exclusively limited to the 1990s. A key milestone, for example, in this compilation of readings is the 1987 Report titled “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites” by the Commission for Racial Justice. Representing 1.7 million members, the United Church of Christ’s Commission addressed and confronted the systemic, spatial, and environmental nature of racism: “Racism is racial prejudice plus power. Racism is the intentional or unintentional use of power to isolate separate and exploit of others. This use of power is based on a belief in superior racial origin, identity or supposed racial characteristics. Racism confers certain privileges on and defends the dominant group, which in turn sustains and perpetuates racism. Both consciously and unconsciously, racism is enforced and maintained by the legal, cultural, religious, educational, economic, political, environmental, and military institutions of societies. Racism is more than just a personal attitude; it is the institutionalized form of that attitude.” (x) 4. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone” Profession (1991): 34. The racialization of knowledge is particularly significant: “Instead of encounter, in fact, our present system of knowledge, inherited from enlightened colonialism and Eurocentric modernity, repetitively constitutes blackness as a discreet (and hostile) category that routinely ‘troubles’ an already settled whiteness. This paradigmatic perspective on race and blackness, in its denial of an entangled racial history produced through geographies of encounter, normalizes practices of colonization as it naturalizes overdevelopment, accumulation, and land ownership as identifiable-seeable locales of emancipation.” See Katherine McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place” Social &amp; Cultural Geography 12, no.8 (2011): 950. 5. See Katherine McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place” Social &amp; Cultural Geography 12, no.8 (2011): 950. 6. See Deborah A. Miranda, “Teaching on Stolen Ground” in Jennifer Sinor and Rona Kaufman (editors), Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity(Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2007): 182, 184–85. 7. In 1992, landscape practitioner James Corner explained the correlation between the meaning of landscape production and the semiotics of spatial effects, at a time that preceded an explosive period of post-modernist landscape projects. See James Corner, “Representation and Landscape: Drawing and Making in the Landscape Medium” Word &amp; Image 8, no.3 (1992): 243–275. As part of a small and emergent body of work in the early 1990s, the readings compiled here respond to the disciplinary exclusion and marginalization of the field of landscape itself, including its attendant urban and environmental relationalities within design discourse. Informing the premise of this project in the wake of two aforementioned anthologies edited in the 1990s, respectively by Michael Hays (Architecture Theory since 1968) and Joan Ockman (Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology), writings involved in the edification of the architect as heroic figure and over-theorization of architecture as central building discipline continue to be sustained even in the wake of a crisis in theory and identity since the 1980s. For example, A. Krista Sykes’ anthology Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009 (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) and Kate Nesbitt’s Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995 (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) in the United States, as well as Arie Graafland and Jasper de Haam’s The Critical Landscape (Rotterdam, NL: 010 Publishers, 1996) in the Netherlands, are but a few of the many attempts to recover some form of significance to the architectural discipline and the role of architects during a period of dwindling cultural relevance, design authorship, and spatial influence. The narrow disciplinary focus of these anthologies not only exclude significant changes in the body of work related to the complexity of the urban environment but also overlook the pluralization of spatial practices that urban environments entail. Yet, by the early 1990s, practicing landscape architects and urbanists alike were engaging in active recovery and reconstruction of the landscape subject; beyond that of the singular, heroic figure of the architect. For example, in 1981, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui published an extensive folio of contemporary urban projects and territorial design by landscape architects from France (with architecte-paysagistes such as Alexandre Chemetoff, Michel Corajoud, and Jacques Simon to name a few), while American book publisher Zone in New York published its first, groundbreaking (albeit hotly contested), 484-page, double-volume edition with then emerging designer Bruce Mau. According to editors Sanford Kwinter and Michel Feher, its focus was on the contemporary metropolis and its political regime, beyond the classical diagram of urbanism seen through the limiting focus of the social sciences confined to the city as object of study. That same year, The Princeton Journal (Thematic Studies in Architecture) published in tow, its Volume 2: Landscape, only a year following the journal’s inauguration, a volume now recognized as a defining moment in design criticism. The incisive words of architectural historian and French urban theorist Françoise Choay clarify the crisis in the discipline of architecture. In a short and terse critique condemning the flawed jury process of a design for the Parc de la Villette in Paris (France), whose 1983 verdict for the winning entry by Bernard Tschumi was reportedly “inspired by fear”, Choay argued instead for the recognition of the “casual, humorous, complex, realistic, and actually innovative” (p.213) entry by then Office for Metropolitan Architecture led by Rem Koolhaas. As Choay deftly pointed out, “innovative because in the present crisis of architecture — a crisis of status, form, and meaning — instead of once more proposing a new model and a new image, it proposes a method, thus exposing the gigantic blank of a gigantic program.” (p.213) Choay concludes her critique by pointing out that OMA’s second-place entry emphasized the contradictory nature of the “over-inflated” program, if not “over-constraining” requirements for the park’s design, unexpectedly resolving the proposal by “[breaking] off with the totalitarianism of form” and “[making] place for the unpredictable,” cleverly locating the proposal between different urban traditions of the French garden; that is between “both the classical and the Haussmannian.”(p.214) See Françoise Choay, “Critique” in The Princeton Journal - Thematic Studies in Architecture 2 “Landscape” (1985): 211 –220. 8. The content of this compilation project is retrospectively informed by two observations from two footnotes respectively by Michael Hays and Joan Ockman. In Architecture Theory since 1968 (New York, NY and Cambridge, MA: The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998), Hays observed in the introduction to his book that “a different, younger audience, whose relation to consumption is altogether altered, whose memories may not include any notions of resistance or negation, may have to produce another kind of theory premised on neither the concept of reification nor the apparatus of the sign, both of which have their ultimate referent in the vexatious territory of reproducibility and commodity consumption. Indeed, since 1993, there have been important developments in architecture theory not covered by this anthology.” In the accompanying footnote to this explanation, Hays further adds that “feminism and identity politics are only the most obvious of themes that have produced massive numbers of studies since 1993 not primarily concerned with reification.” (p.xiv, xvn8) Conversely, in her documentary anthology Architecture Culture 1943–1968 (New York, NY: The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York and Rizzoli International Publications, 1993), Ockman remarked that “naturally, despite the attempt to be as discriminating as possible in such choices, the ultimate compilation represents a subjective and occasionally pragmatic judgment and makes no claim to be exhaustive or ‘correct.’ On the contrary, the reader is invited to argue with both its inclusions and omissions.” To this explanation, Ockman further notes that “it might be stated in anticipation that a few of the latter were owed to the difficulty of obtaining a text efficient enough to accommodate the present format.” (p.23) The disciplinary boundaries of architectural discourse are precisely at issue here, as they are persistently (and uncritically) reproduced at the expense of writings on urbanism, urban planning, and environment. A. Krista Sykes’ anthology Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009 (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); Michael K. Hays’s The Oppositions Reader Selected Readings from a Journal of for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 1973–1984 (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998); or Kate Nesbitt’s compilation Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) are but a few that implicitly and explicitly identify this lacuna yet avoid its complex, discursive, and practical implications in spite of the clear signal and fair warning issued by Bernard Tschumi back in 1976: “Social conflicts increasingly focus on environmental problems that eventually become a pretext for insurgency. The crisis is a consequence of exploitation as well as product of urbanization. The concentration of power and the complexity of urban networks make cities most vulnerable to revolutionary activities. […] Environmental knowledge (not building) can contribute to polarizing urban conflicts and inducing radical change. See “The Environmental Trigger,” in A Continuing Experiment: Learning and Teaching at the Architectural Association,&nbsp;edited by James Gowan (London, UK: Architectural Press, 1976): 89 –99. 9. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967): 494; and Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution translated by Robert Bononno (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010[1970]): 29. 10. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, NY: Knopf, 1993): xii–xiii. 11. In 1991, Dell Upton provides an important, albeit disciplinary characterization and comparison of the distinctive and autonomous histories of the field of landscape in his “Architectural History or Landscape History? Journal of Architectural Education 44, no.4 (August 1991): 195–199. “While architectural history, like most studies of the material environment, focuses on the eye, we experience the landscape through all our senses, and the evidence of our senses, or rather the categories that we use to interpret it, is rarely internally consistent. Our ears, noses, and sometimes even our fingers and tongues make connections, associations, and interpretations that may differ drastically from those our eyes suggest. While our eyes isolate the building as a unit of analysis, the other senses organize the landscape differently. To put it another way, each of the senses may perceive a different landscape in which the individual building is irrelevant. Our experience of the material world is thus a complex, multisensory, constantly changing tangle of relationships that cannot be captured on mylar or film.” (p.197) 12. Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System&nbsp;(London, UK: Routledge, 1990): 2. 13. Sandra L. Colby and Jennifer M. Ortman (US Census Bureau), “Projections of the Size and Composition of the U.S. Population: 2014 to 2060” Current Population Report No. P25–1143 (March 3, 2015): 9, 13. [ published in coordination with&nbsp;2021 LABASH Virtual Conference held at Cornell University, April 9-11, 2021 ] https://opsys.cargo.site/CC_LETTER-TO-MAYOR-MARTY-WALSH Thu, 23 Jul 2020 20:09:10 +0000 open systems https://opsys.cargo.site/CC_LETTER-TO-MAYOR-MARTY-WALSH July 31, 2020 Office of Mayor Marty Walsh 1 City Hall Square Boston MA 02201 Re: Columbus Park: Whose History? Dear Mayor Walsh, In response to the temporary mothballing of the Christopher Columbus statue after its beheading last month on June 10th, we demand its full and permanent removal in addition to the un-naming of the Park. Not only does the figure of Columbus represent racial oppression, but the history of the statue’s placement testifies to the corruption of public process across several municipal agencies of the City of Boston. The following letter (parked at confrontingcolumb.us) summarizes a context of events that have suppressed historical facts, weaponized the public sphere and racialized urban space along Boston’s waterfront in a pattern of deception dating back to events in 1979. Columbianism: Skewed, Distorted Histories &amp; Violent, Racist, Dehumanizing Symbolisms First, from a symbolic perspective, the statue of Christopher Columbus is a glorified eurocentric representation of a genocidal murderer, colonizer, and slave trader; facts that are not only masked by the portrayal of Columbus as a great explorer or skilled navigator, but they are also triggers for intergenerational trauma and racial violence against Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color. Across the Americas (or what should be more accurately referred to as Turtle Island), the figure of Columbus is a longstanding symbol of oppression with over 200 standing monuments across the public realm in the United States alone. Historical facts about the havoc wreaked by the so-called exploits of Columbus have been documented for well over 450 years. Most notably, as early as 1542, Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas reported to the Spanish Crown on the mistreatment of, and atrocities committed against, Indigenous Peoples that started in 1492 when Columbus hit the shores of the Caribbean Islands. Camouflaged by colonial narratives of exploration, those campaigns of violence were funded and financed by the Spanish Monarchy with orders given by then Queen Isabela La Catolica in the mid-15th century, sanctioned by the Catholic Church through papal bulls that formed the Doctrine of Discovery. The accidental landing of Columbus off the Caribbean shores and subsequent violence against Indigenous Peoples and enslaved persons, have been further suppressed by overblown accounts of Columbus’ significance and ensuing veneration in the American imagination. There are at least four distinctive, definitive events to point out in this 528-year timeline of what we call ‘the rise of Columbianism’: —1892: the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (the eve of the 400-year commemoration of the so-called Columbus landing in 1492); —1938-1942: Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s boastful and skewed accounts of Columbus’ exploits in 3 volumes; —1975: National Geographic Magazine’s November issue on Columbus’ Voyages (Volume 148 Issue No. 5) that saw millions of copies distributed worldwide; —1992: International events and statue erections across the U.S. leading up to and marking the 500-year anniversary of the 1492 landing. In response to the edification of Columbus, American historian Howard Zinn has critically challenged the rise of Columbianism. In his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, Zinn underscores the problems and dangers of distorting historical facts by underscoring the significance of accurately depicting the scale and magnitude of the violence that Columbus, and other explorers that followed him, inflicted on Indigenous Peoples throughout the Americas. More specifically, Zinn’s chapter on “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress” debunks the half-truths, factual errors, and gross omissions in the former work of Columbus scholar Samuel Eliot Morison. Zinn’s scholarship is preceded by several other authors namely the work of Indigenous Scholar Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan-Renápe, Delaware-Lenápe) in his 1979 book Columbus &amp; Other Cannibals. A long list of resources and books have been in circulation for decades now to set the record straight on Columbus. Notwithstanding the fact that Columbus never set foot in what is known as the United States today, the heroic idolization of Columbus is a distortion of historical fact, and thus, remains a myth. Corruption of Public Process: A Political Quid Pro Quo Secondly, from a public perspective, the renaming of the park and the placement of the statue of Christopher Columbus are more than just the result of circumvented public approvals. Together, they are deliberate outcomes of the corruption of a democratic institution and public process underlying the municipal governance of the City of Boston. Legitimation by Deception. The renaming of the park itself, from its original 1976 “Waterfront Park” title, was performed through circumvention of public process without due consultation, community consent, or required public approvals by municipal agencies. More precisely, our research shows that the renaming of the park was the result of a political quid pro quo. In effect, it was the mobilization of private interests of one person to leverage and influence public power of another, and vice-versa. The racial motivations of staunch nationalist Arthur Stivaletta intersected with the political aspirations of incumbent Mayor Kevin White (in a close run-up against mayoral opponent Joe Timilty) in late 1978. To do this, Arthur Stivaletta singlehandedly formed the private, ad-hoc, and largely illegitimate Friends of Christopher Columbus Committee in 1978 that is carved in stone at the top of the statue’s granite base (Stivaletta’s committee should not be confused with the current Friends of Christopher Columbus Park, or FOCCP, a legally registered, non-profit organization that programs seasonal events at the park today). As a committee of one, Stivaletta’s deceptive and coercive efforts were aided by two other people, in government and in the media: City Councilor Fred Langone (with longstanding, internal connections to City Council) and Post-Gazette Editor-in-Chief Phyllis Donnaruma (with external cultural connections to the Italian-American élite). For a park that was originally conceived over a 30-year process of planning of waterfront revitalization with over 60 million dollars in public funds (originally dedicated in 1976 to the memory of community advocate Frank S. Christian), the original name and space of the park was suspiciously coopted in a rather expeditious way. The original park planners, Sasaki Associates, led by Stuart Dawson had originally conceived of the park as an urban, multicultural, children’s playground through an extensive, multi-year process of design, planning, and community consultation that led up to its dedication and opening in 1976. Just a few years later in the Spring of 1979, the name of park was officially changed by City Council with an expedited proposal and council order led by Langone on April 25th 1979 and expeditiously approved by Mayor White on May 10th, less than 3 weeks later. That process took place without the proper approval of the Boston Parks &amp; Recreation, nor any consultation with the Boston Arts Commission who normally review proposals for public art submitted for final approval by the Mayor. The rush towards renaming the park prior to the summer of 1979 was the result of the convergence of several events and intended outcomes. The rushed vote was primarily an exchange intended to leverage votes from theItalian-American community to secure the re-election of then-incumbent Mayor White later that Fall on November 6th, 1979. It is for this reason, among several others, that the unveilingand inauguration of Christopher Columbus took place on October 21st, 1979, three weeks before the mayoral election. Furthermore, to prop up the illusion of the significance of the Columbus figure in this effort, Stivaletta commissioned local, self-educated, neo-impressionist painter Diane Leonard to paint the portrait of Columbus as a showpiece for an Italian-owned art gallery in the North End and as propaganda for the park, featured on the front cover of the Post-Gazette a few days before its inauguration. According to the artist’s testimony, her then-boyfriend was used as the model for the life-size painting of Columbus and his hobbyist father lent a hand with the rendering of the Santa Maria, one of Columbus’ ship floating in the painting’s background. Although the artist was never paid for their work, the lackluster painting now hangs in the lobby of the Dante Alighieri Society of Massachusetts, an Italian-American cultural center across the water in Cambridge. To understand the significance of this timeline of events, it is also worth noting that this expedited process strategically coincided with another much larger event: Pope John Paul II’s trip to the United States and visit planned for Boston on October 1st, 1979. Even though the Pope’s planned route did not bring him to Christopher Columbus Park, the Pope’s speech was an accolade for another organization associated with Stivaletta and his ‘committee’: the Knights of Columbus who provided funding (undisclosed and unrecorded) for the Columbus statue (as well as many others across the United States). As the world’s largest Christian brotherhood and Catholic fraternal service organization originally founded in the U.S. in the late 19th century, the namesake and patron of the Knights of Columbus(KoC)—Christopher Columbus itself—was intended as nothing more than a religiously-motivated and politically aimed rebuke at Protestants when they were founded. The Knights’ influence across the United States in the 20th century is extensive. They were not only the original proponents of Columbus Day (the so-called day of national pride observed since 1934), but also regular, financial contributors to the Vatican. Lending the appearance of credibility as a ‘right arm’ of the Pope (‘his Knights’) was sought to bring symbolic legitimacy from the Catholic Church by way of proximity. The strange but strategic enunciation of Columbus’ exploits in the opening lines of Pope John Paul II’s speech in the Fall of 1979 at the Boston Common for example, testify to the extent of the appearance of that influence: “Dear brothers and sisters, dear young people of America, earlier today, I set foot on the soil of the United States of America. In the name of Christ I begin a pastoral journey that will take me to several of your cities. At the beginning of this year, I had the occasion to greet this continent and its people from a place where Christopher Columbus landed; today I stand at this gateway to the United States, and again I greet all of America. For its people, wherever they are, have a special place in the love of the Pope.” Those glorifying words of the Pope came amidst an intensely divisive and racialized atmosphere in the city. The Pope’s speech, and the park’s inauguration later that month, came just days after the shooting of Darryl Williams (1964-2010) in late September 1979. The 15-year old, African-American football player from Roxbury, was shot in the back during a high school football game in the white neighborhood of Charleston, just north of Boston, leaving him paralyzed for life. Illegal Statue on Public Land. If the park’s renaming was a political exchange, the statue was the prize. The privately-funded artifact was unlawfully placed on public land in less than an afternoon by AJ Norwood of Norwood Monumental Works in 1979 that since then, has been maintained and repaired with public funds. According to the chronology we have put together from the Public Archives and Public Records of the City of Boston (see Addendum: “A Chronology of Christopher Columbus Park”), the statue was installed through expedited means without necessary approvals from the City Departments of the Boston Arts Commission nor the Department of Parks &amp; Recreation. In spite of the extensive records, design plans, and construction drawings that Sasaki Associates holds as the original park planners of Waterfront Park, not a single record (financial, architectural, logistical) exists for the purchase, commission, or installation of Columbus statue. Despite the claims made on the plaque of the statue, our research on the original marble source and sculptor further shows that it has little to no artistic merit nor artisanal value. Acclaimed author, urban critic, and landscape architect Jane Holtz Kay even dubbed it “a piece of soap sculpture” back in 1998 akin to cheap statues that are typically of low quality and poor workmanship. In spite of the famed region of Carrara in north-west Italy from where the marble originates, the region had become by the middle of the 20th century a sweat-shop of milquetoast replicas and global factory of exploited labor that annually produced a massive amount of mediocre sculptures like the studio of Professor Nelli who reportedly created the statue in Boston. Information from testimonials of descendants from the marble suppliers (Benedetti &amp; Bonatti) and statue installers (Norwood Monumental Works) commissioned by Arthur Stivaletta confirm this. Ironically, even in the October 21st, 1979 Inauguration Pamphlet, a comparative analysis between the cover image and the actual statue illustrates the extent of lies and consistent pattern of deception of Columbus Park: the public pamphlet displays a completely different image of a famed Columbus statue from the 19th century on its front cover. It was a sculpture from one of the oldest cathedrals in Cuba, Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asuncion, whose image used to make the cheap copy for the park in Boston. The renaming of ‘Waterfront Park’ to ‘Columbus Park’ that took place on Inauguration Day, October 21st, 1979 and the placement of a statue at the very center of the park was thus not only oppressive, it was and still is divisive. It is a contradiction to all the past efforts of desegregation made to integrate diverse cultures and bring communities together, it was a direct affront to the racial justice initiatives that were desperately and urgently needed at the time. Even the original park planners publicly objected to the renaming and were never consulted on the choice or location of the Columbus statue. In fact, Mr. Dawson, Principal Emeritus of Sasaki Associates, stated in a personal interview “that the location of the statue sits precisely in a location of the park that was always intended to remain open and unobstructed, with views to the water. This is one of the main reasons why the historical plaque dedicated to Frank S. Christian sits flush with the ground, off the main pathway…it is completely unobtrusive.” In other words, the central towering statue of Columbus, standing on top of an oversized granite base, was a trophy of Stivaletta’s ‘committee of one.’ The events of 1979 thus trace a deceptive campaign of disinformation, a deliberate covering up of private interest, utter corruption of public process, and contempt for community consent. All this, to impose a figure of Columbus on the City of Boston, in spite of numerous monuments on private and public lands that already existed throughout the region by 1979: a statue at Louisburg Square (c.1849), the Columbus Avenue in Downtown Boston (c.1860), the Young Columbus sculpture at MFA Boston (c.1870), and a statue at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Revere (c.1892, relocated in the 1920s from the South End’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross). These examples, among several others (like Columbus Park in South Boston renamed Joe Moakley Park in 2001), were identified later on and compiled in what we consider to be an important ‘green file’ that was created by then Boston Arts Commission Director Sarah Hutt (BAC, 1995-2007). In this file, the Director raised important questions and considerable concerns about mounting costs associated with conservation and restoration, as a result of the first known beheading of the Columbus statue back in 2002, and again on 2005, notwithstanding countless other incidents. The file on record even includes ideas about the relocation of the statue, raising critical questions about the statue, and its ownership, as private property on public land. Weaponization of Urban Space: White Supremacy &amp; Racial Division during an Era of Desegregation Thirdly, from an urban perspective, the corruption of public process occurred during a period of heightened racial tensions in Boston as mentioned earlier. As you may already be aware, those tensions were largely fueled by white fears of cultural integration and white opposition to social equality during the 1970s; a crisis triggered by the school desegregation program and busing policies that were federally-mandated in 1974 and 1975. According to the Federal Justice system, “desegregation was a long time coming to Boston, a Federal Court Order finally bore through two decades of resistance. Boston was found willfully creating and perpetuating a segregated school system.” Not only did this white boycott lead to a backlash of violence against young Black students by instilling fear and emboldening racism throughout the city, it increased spatial and cultural division across the city; places that were intended to be reconnected with the desegregation of City’s educational infrastructure. As you may also be aware, the intention of desegregation was to achieve social justice and racial equality through just and equal access to public education everywhere. By 1975 and 1979, the social climate of Boston was heated and politically charged. In the absence of any meaningful action to address white aggression by then Mayor Kevin White, Senator Bill Owens from the newly-formed Black Political Task Force&nbsp;went so far as to declare, that “Boston is not safe for People of Color.” Forty-one years later, those same words were similarly spoken by Monica Cannon-Grant, founder of Violence in Boston, during the organized vigil for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at Franklin Park, earlier in June. As you probably know, the grounds of Franklin Park occupy an extremely important part of Boston’s African American community and its Black landscapes. Historically, Franklin Park was also the location where the Black Panther Party rallied in 1969, echoing similar demands in their fight against the chronic urban problems of systemic racism, under-representation, and over-policing. They, too, called for the renaming of that historical space. The renaming of the park and the placement of the statue (including its location and its representation) serve to divide the space and the city politically, ideologically, spatially, and culturally. It goes against everything the city, and arguably the country, have been advocating and fighting for since the rise of the Civil Rights movement. For four decades, the illegitimate park and statue have also legitimized a false understanding of history under the illusion and ideological pretense of political endorsements from the Church, the Pope, the Knights of Columbus, business merchants, news media, all of which are historically tied to a part of the Italian-American community and the Catholic Church. Honoring Indigenous Lands &amp; Black Landscapes The divisive nature and racialization of the park that took place in 1979, although has since remained relatively unquestioned by news media and local scholars, is completely and historically unacceptable. The park’s name and statue are public displays of racist shame. The statue isthe vandalism that tarnishes this space form its imposition in late 1979. It is a stain on spatial democracy now, as it was then. The statue and the base should, therefore, be permanently removed. Renaming the park is paramount. We believe that the acknowledgement and the recognition of historically repressed and oppressed Indigenous Nations must be centered on lands of the Massachusett Peoples, traditional home to Nipmuc and Wampanoag Nations. Not only is this historically important and culturally essential, it is politically vital in the 21st century and it is long overdue. The City of Boston is currently in a period of tremendous change not unlike the 1970s as we have seen before. Extremely visible are racial and spatial injustices that target communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and further marginalize communities of 2SLGBTQIAS+. As we have shown, calls for racial, social, and economic justice are long overdue; they are the frontlines of the movement for change, as they have been for decades, not to mention, Indigenous Peoples’ resistance against white supremacy and settler-colonial violence that are centuries old. Any representation in the public realm that perpetuates the myth of the discovery of America and Columbus’ civilizing mission is not only wrong, it is oppressive and it is dehumanizing. These representations and these monuments trigger the recollection and the embodiment of extreme racial violence inflicted on Indigenous Peoples from these lands that are entangled with Black, Enslaved Peoples from Africa. That’s what the visibly-combined opposition to the Columbus statue in 2015 represents. Across generations, these representations embolden the sense of political self-righteousness and economic domination entrenched by European descendants of Americans, especially those with Italian, French, British, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish imperial descent. These representations in the public realm reinforce the myth of racial superiority i.e. white supremacy. It breeds a climate of hate, much like the way that Arthur Stivaletta burned the flag of Iran in front of the Columbus statue a few days after the inauguration in 1979. These myths privilege the hierarchy of their European history over others, through the distortion of historical facts and truths. These myths favor illusions based on romantic fantasy and racialized ideology that have shaped and formed the founding of this settler-colonial nation. The myth of white supremacy also serves to erase the very real, daily existence and ways of living of Black and Indigenous Peoples (including their histories, ways of living, and patterns of political organization) that have been destroyed or continue to be subjugated by structures of colonization existing to this day; spatial and material structures that are visibly maintained and upheld across the urban landscape of the City of Boston by the descendants of colonial settlers, otherwise known as settler-colonialism. The persistence of the myth of white supremacy in the egregious misrepresentation of Columbus across the United States, must stop. And Boston, of all places, is far behind in that transformative change. It is long overdue for the City of Boston to rethink Columbus (as much K-12 school curricula across the nation already does). The Mayor’s Office and the City Council must take a stand against these dangerous misrepresentations by taking these symbols down. They have to be permanently removed from the public realm, making room for the acknowledgement, affirmation, and actualization of historically marginalized communities and underrepresented nations whose voices have been silenced and existence erased for far too long. If public investment will move away from over-policing and over-incarceration, it clearly needs to center restorative justice that counterbalances and affirms the support, in form of servicing the needs of historically under-serviced and marginalized citizens. Boston is, of course, not alone in this socio-political challenge. We’re all implicated in this important movement of change but we all find ourselves in a unique, historical position to make unprecedented change and transformation. In conclusion, we call upon you, Mayor Walsh, to take this moment, to harness the cultural momentum for social and racial justice, as well as the massive support for change that it represents, to right the wrongs of this park for the past 41 years. Permanently remove the entire statue and rename the park in honor of the Peoples of Massachusett who have not only been marginalized, but have been historicized and dehumanized in so many countless ways, including the state flag and school mascots. Every single Bostonian owes their very existence to the care for these lands and waters by the Massachusett Peoples for thousands of years. We have the human and legal responsibility to honor territorial treaties, to acknowledge and honor these lands in this place and in this time…as the sun rises above the city, the bay, and the ocean every single day. Amidst increasing issues of climate change, these responsibilities unite environmental and social justice so that we can live on this ground not only for the next 40 years, but for the next 400 years. Is there not a better opportunity than the present to leave behind lands for the next generation and to open up a path towards more just, transparent, and humane future? Is this collective future not worth fighting for on the very same day that the State Legislature will be voting on the removal of the racist state flag and the No Mascot Bill in Massachusetts? We implore you to consult with communities of Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color that have been historically and economically marginalized from this space (and who have advocated for change across decades) in order to make the right decision in an open, transparent, and honorable way. Across different communities, your action will help build relations for future generations and leave an important mark on the city. You action will leave a lasting imprint on the water’s edge, and commemorate the plurality of its Citizens and its Peoples, testifying to the hope that the design of the park and the care for these lands originally offered for its children. Because if not now, then when? Dr. Pierre Bélanger, Landscape Architect &amp; Urban Planner (Project Co-Director) Dr. Ghazal Jafari, Architect &amp; Urban Designer (Project Co-Director &amp; Editor) Pablo Escudero, Architect &amp; Urban Designer (Project Co-Director &amp; Archival Research Lead) Hernán Bianchi-Benguria, Urban Planner &amp; Architect (Research Advisorial Board) Tiffany Kaewen Dang, Landscape Architect &amp; Territorial Scholar (Research Advisorial Board) Alexander Arroyo, Environmental Designer &amp; Landscape Architect (Research Advisorial Board) OPEN SYSTEMS (OPSYS) / LANDSCAPE INFRASTRUCTURE LAB info@opsys.netStuart Dawson, Landscape Architect &amp; Urban Planner, Principal Emeritus, Sasaki Associates Addendum:&nbsp;Finding Aid &amp; Document Archive – A Chronology of Events at Christopher Columbus Park 1959-2020(634KB) https://opsys.cargo.site/manifesto Sun, 20 Oct 2019 16:11:30 +0000 open systems https://opsys.cargo.site/manifesto You’ve reached the basecamp of OPEN SYSTEMS. Operating under the moniker and portmanteau OPSYS®, we are a design-based, non-profit, 501(c)(3) research organization of builders, educators, and farmers, dedicated to opening systemic knowledge related to complex, socioecological challenges and geopolitical conflicts—at the intersection of land, water, environmental justice, spatial inequality, climate change, community self-determination, and sovereignty. Focused on transformative change—by goin’ upstream—main activities of our organization involve counter-cartography &amp; retroactive mapping, independent publications, pedagogical multimedia, open access initiatives, public exhibitions, and demonstration projects. Our organization is co-founded by Alexander Arroyo, Ghazal Jafari, Hernán L. Bianchi-Benguria, Tiffany Kaewen Dang, Pablo E. Escudero, and Pierre Bélanger. Here’s what we believe in: 1. Style Sucks. Leave your attitude behind. 2. Raw is Beautiful. It demands and commands attention to process. 3. Seeing from Below. Kill the top down view and start building new grounds, platforms, and supports for others to succeed and for life to grow. 4. Flow, not Form. Effects and impacts are what matter most. 5. Systems, not Style. There is nothing worse than appearance as motivation over structure and organization as guides. 6. Society, over State. Nationalism has nothing to do with freedom or sovereignty. 7. Everyone is a Designer. Heroes blow. Professional design disciplines don’t have jurisdiction over design or authority over creativity. You have to be very smart to be dumb. 8. Prestige is the public dissemination of domination. Resist it at all costs. 9.&nbsp; People—the Power, over Plans. The most renewable resource in the world is human energy. 10. Architecture, without Architects. Builders, contractors, constructors, craftworkers, artisans, are much more trustworthy. 11. Ecology, not Order. Lines serve to divide by class, gender, and race. Build relations and alliances by thickening peripheries, expanding margins, cultivating the unseen, and the erased, to eventually displace the dominant center. 12. ︎ Plants. ︎ Concrete (avoid it at all cost, except for skateparks). Work with Everything that is Live, Living, and Alive. Plants, waters, and everything in between, are sentient, breathing beings. 13. Right angles R 4 square heads. Embrace the non-Euclidean, non-algebraic field. It induces, attracts, illicits gathering and collectivity. 14. A walled-world is not worth living. Instead of the borders and barriers upheld by walls that exclude, engage and enjoy with the transitional horizontality of edges, hedges, perimeters, zones, ecotones, thresholds, transitions. 15. Embrace the unseen and the ephemeral. It can be visceral. 16. Theory is for the Blind. Stop footnoting what others write. Say it for yourself and own what you say. Build a thesis, embody it. 17. Do, What You Say. And do it yourself, tip-to-toe. 18. Contingency, instead of Control. Knowledge and strategy is relational and conditional. 19. Be Open, Imprecise, Uncertain…it leaves room for others to enter and complete your work. At that point, it becomes their own. Let go and don’t be afraid to give your ideas away. There’s an endless supply of them from where they came from. 20. Be Suspicious. Everything is Suspect, including Yourself. 21. “Pick Fights, Work for Free, Break the Law” doesn’t mean giving yourself away, it means being committed to fighting for what is just and harness the privilege we all carry to transform the present. 22. Unbuild the Over-Engineered, and stop adding more shit to the pile. Destroy, demolish, rebuild. 23. Urbanism, without Urbanists.&nbsp;(or, how else do 7 billion people wake up in the morning?) 24. Climate Change is Inseparable from Settler-Colonialism. Fuck Geo-Engineering, Mega-Projects, Techno-Fixes. We don’t need more heroes let alone more widgets. “Change the System,”* not the Climate. (*Clayton Thomas-Muller) 25. Imagine living in a world where you live (literally) above the water that you drink. 26. We are guests on these lands. Our right to stay is (was) never guaranteed. That privilege must be cultivated, renewed, replenished. 27. Undesign the World by Unmapping it. Destroy all the categories of settler-colonial state space even if that means never making a map, let alone a legend, ever again. 28. Fight the Power. Reject Authority. Confront Authority. Defy Leadership, and stop following others. Horizontality breeds so much unpredictable potential. If you’re told not to do something, it’s a good sign that you should do it. Organize. 29. Break the Law. If you’re not transgressing predominant, patriarchal structures of the colonial élite or of white supremacy, you’re not doing anything new. It’s hard labor, but rewarding, retroactive work. 30. Embrace Rejection. The more you fail, the stronger you get. Your mind gets sharper and your body more committed.&nbsp; 31. Love is a Reckoning Force. Design is a gift, not something to monetize. It’s always about giving, always has been. Give everything you have to dish out. There’s no point if there is no sacrifice. Avoid the cliques, clubs, and institutions—the exploiters—who only take. 32. Aim for the Impossible (or sometimes, the Obvious). Without that, nothing can happen. 33. When we Draw, We Fight…so when doing research, ask yourself: what (or who) exactly are you fighting for? Lines connect, as much as they can divide. 34. It takes two to make a Treaty. Acknowledge, embody, and own up to that responsibility because all lands are Treaty Lands. It’s essential for the kind of world you will leave behind for the next generations. That’s who you are accountable to. 35. Be a Trojan Horse, work from the Inside and the Outside. The only way to operate in today’s world, a world of systems of systems, is to be a double agent: an accomplice, a Robin Hood, a Joan-of-Arc. Avoid the savior complex (we shouldn’t have to say this). Work and run within institutions like Run Lola Run, but don’t forget who you are, a resister with a double agenda for the outside. If that fails, turn away. Work from the woods, or in the margins. Find the cracks. 36. If all else Fails, Improvise, and Hack the shit out of it…make it up as you go along, it might actually stick at some point, as long as you’re committed. Know what you don’t want to do, and do something else until it gels and congeals. 37. Just Get Shit Done…stop talking about doing things and make them happen. Start small, scale down, make small models really fast, learn to fail faster, then scale up or scale down. It’s better to count your mistakes in minutes, then in years. Trust that others will contribute, add, modify, revise, inform, and transform what you do. 38. Whatever you do, Be Kind Doing It, and always give thanks to those who help you along the way (even if they’re no longer here). Gratitude is circular and reciprocal. Kindness and care, contagious. ///////// Questions, comments, inquiries? Drop us a line: info@opsys.net &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; <img width="144" height="144" width_o="144" height_o="144" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/858f591db05a28404004d35a6571b66388193dd588b3766d84b08686f7b6ba32/unnamed-1.png" data-mid="57499806" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/144/i/858f591db05a28404004d35a6571b66388193dd588b3766d84b08686f7b6ba32/unnamed-1.png" /> <img width="144" height="144" width_o="144" height_o="144" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b35feb51c8afb19b758dc0243256d185200cc0beef0e91f09ab53277d32bca0/unnamed.png" data-mid="57499809" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/144/i/2b35feb51c8afb19b758dc0243256d185200cc0beef0e91f09ab53277d32bca0/unnamed.png" /> <img width="144" height="144" width_o="144" height_o="144" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/59f07a913be2aa108956cebbdc2fd6b5cbb374971e1281547154a9df9bfed2c9/unnamed-2.png" data-mid="57499807" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/144/i/59f07a913be2aa108956cebbdc2fd6b5cbb374971e1281547154a9df9bfed2c9/unnamed-2.png" /> <img width="144" height="144" width_o="144" height_o="144" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/15d4aedcbf1b7781d41df415c81b2ff76ebd5d962778bb3623fc37310c29ae19/unnamed-3.png" data-mid="57499808" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/144/i/15d4aedcbf1b7781d41df415c81b2ff76ebd5d962778bb3623fc37310c29ae19/unnamed-3.png" /> 2024 Creative Commons. Attribution, yaaass—Share Alike, of course—Non-Commercial, no kidding—No Derivs, got it? Don’t steal FFS, get inspired. Made on Traditional Lands, Airs, and Waters of the Massachusett Peoples, unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wampanoag, Aquinnah, and Nipmuc Nations (Treaty of Casco 1698-1703, Treaty of Portsmouth 1713, Treaty of Boston 1725) https://opsys.cargo.site/media Sat, 30 Nov 2019 21:13:56 +0000 open systems https://opsys.cargo.site/media A BOTANY OF VIOLENCE Across 529 Years of Resistance &amp; Resurgence After 5 years of collaborative research and working through the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re proud to share our new publication with GOFF Books, A Botany of Violence. A small but dense format with over 300 original archival images spread across a visual timeline of five centuries, ending with two essays, the book weaves a revisionist history of the cinchona plant, global pharma, colonial extraction, labor exploitation, and resistance movements in the Central Andes.&nbsp; Back cover:&nbsp; From germ theory to plantation logic, this book tracks 529 years of global, colonial powers in the violent search for the elusive Cinchona plant of South America. Smuggled and stolen by the Jesuits and the Spanish Monarchy in the 17th century, transplanted by Britain and Holland in India and Indonesia during the 18th century, mapped by German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in the 19th century, weaponized by the U.S. in the 20th century, and monopolized by global pharma in the 21st century, the story of the Cinchona plant—the tree called ‘fever’—literally lies at the base of modern civilization. The quest to find the cure for malaria and to control the production of quinine as seen in the corporate monopoly in Africa today also traces deep roots of territorial dispossession and labor exploitation that lie between the Amazon and the Andes. Behind the mask of heritage preservation and resource conservation, five centuries of graphic evidence put into sharp relief the uneven scales of racialized, gendered violence that are rooted in territorial injustices and underpinned by state nationalism. Bringing the map and the territory closer together, state-sanctioned policies of resource extraction and environmental destruction are interwoven with contemporary narratives of sovereignty and self-determination. Like a geopolitical treatise, the archival activism of this book rebuilds relations with the Cinchona plant, by reclaiming territorial histories of its peoples and its ancestral lands to confront the oppressive structures of the settler-state. Overlooked, suppressed, and marginalized, the long history of resistance movements and rebellions led by Indigenous and Afro-Latina women not only reveals the settler-colonial force of the nation-state. Their contemporary resurgence in the 21st century proposes a counter-map: a way challenge to the plague of violence and weaponization of resources of the past five centuries and its transformation into a regenerative flora of the future. “From fact to fiction to fable, the scientific and taxonomic epistemologies of the Cinchona plant are rooted in longstanding forms of imperial conquest and economic appropriation, as well as cultural construction and scientific misinterpretation. And to be sure, the dehumanizing holism of German explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s hegemonic universalism, his trite naturalism, performative humanism, regional romance, equatorial fetish, and missionary lust lie at its very core.” A Botany of Violence is available from the publisher, GOFF Books (an imprint of ORO Editions), independent design bookstores worldwide, and all major booksellers online. The book was reviewed by landscape scholar Rod Barnett (Māori) in Places Journal (March 2023), “The&nbsp;Dog Barks.” <img width="1200" height="806" width_o="1200" height_o="806" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4112d978f5b6dc005a32b0e880f372eecabb7bb62f35345cc3f90d079f104399/BOV_front-cover_s.jpg" data-mid="160914941" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4112d978f5b6dc005a32b0e880f372eecabb7bb62f35345cc3f90d079f104399/BOV_front-cover_s.jpg" /> <img width="1718" height="1465" width_o="1718" height_o="1465" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/daaa49a8ef1b6f22ede06e8d3252ff7bc2ec81b6dbee117b71eaf99b3cf695bb/BOV_GUTS-23_GOFF.jpg" data-mid="160915910" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/daaa49a8ef1b6f22ede06e8d3252ff7bc2ec81b6dbee117b71eaf99b3cf695bb/BOV_GUTS-23_GOFF.jpg" /> <img width="2560" height="1571" width_o="2560" height_o="1571" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ae9555b5ed093608d8204db01f4d25de94e17bc0e93f5d3bccf64e7cb8b721a3/Williams-HCQ.jpg" data-mid="160998641" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ae9555b5ed093608d8204db01f4d25de94e17bc0e93f5d3bccf64e7cb8b721a3/Williams-HCQ.jpg" /> <img width="1422" height="1016" width_o="1422" height_o="1016" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5a97be9fe6f3179423f50002372de2b40c684777663ddcfa0160ae5853dcdf3e/120_1910c_Women-working-on-the-fields-of-the-chinchona-plantation-Ramawatie-in-the-Priangan-region--West-Java_TM-10012775_cr2.jpg" data-mid="160998775" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5a97be9fe6f3179423f50002372de2b40c684777663ddcfa0160ae5853dcdf3e/120_1910c_Women-working-on-the-fields-of-the-chinchona-plantation-Ramawatie-in-the-Priangan-region--West-Java_TM-10012775_cr2.jpg" /> <img width="2681" height="2126" width_o="2681" height_o="2126" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b7688fdb9e581167ace634b683ddd8e5107e17e620677b287f7d6c88a6a6e010/BOV_COVER_1B_back-cover_GOFF.jpg" data-mid="160916440" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b7688fdb9e581167ace634b683ddd8e5107e17e620677b287f7d6c88a6a6e010/BOV_COVER_1B_back-cover_GOFF.jpg" /> <img width="1720" height="1453" width_o="1720" height_o="1453" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ee7f209d624d7bcfaf0f950c89af4629ec9b427c8b4f148374b75a12469af9d9/BOV_GUTS-236_GOFF.jpg" data-mid="160915915" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ee7f209d624d7bcfaf0f950c89af4629ec9b427c8b4f148374b75a12469af9d9/BOV_GUTS-236_GOFF.jpg" /> A pre-launch of A Botany of Violence was accompanied by the exhibition and symposium Towards a Flora of the Future: An Initiative on Forensic Botany, Climate Activism, Territorial Justice, and Liberatory Feminism at University of Virginia School of Architecture in early 2022, following the launch of an online multimedia platform for the book &amp; exhibition archive: floradelfutu.ro. <img width="4005" height="2369" width_o="4005" height_o="2369" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0962ff3e0bd5ab0417b225523210723abb29a55129ca48346cbcbcc252a462c3/Ex_1.jpg" data-mid="181938796" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0962ff3e0bd5ab0417b225523210723abb29a55129ca48346cbcbcc252a462c3/Ex_1.jpg" /> <img width="3113" height="2024" width_o="3113" height_o="2024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2afc8d4f8f6e34e99c039af3e85aa93dffe76b82d52bd7d227325b262516d0a6/Ex_4.jpg" data-mid="181938801" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2afc8d4f8f6e34e99c039af3e85aa93dffe76b82d52bd7d227325b262516d0a6/Ex_4.jpg" /><img width="4392" height="2874" width_o="4392" height_o="2874" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a878d2039eb50eddf5786a7d6ee9a4f7d7364a438c3a3a1ff0c30297d8be02f7/Ex_2.jpg" data-mid="181938797" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a878d2039eb50eddf5786a7d6ee9a4f7d7364a438c3a3a1ff0c30297d8be02f7/Ex_2.jpg" /> THE WRITING ON THE WALL An Open Letter to Rem Koolhaas &amp; the Guggenheim Museum&nbsp; Initiated by a coalition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from the Global South, this Open Letter confronts the curatorial team of Countryside, The Future to issue a public apology for the ignorant and racist claims to self-indigenization exhibited on the walls at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum between February 20, 2020 and February 15, 2021. “Widespread throughout the exhibition and accompanying publication are several strategies of dispossession premised on extraction, erasure, and race-shifting. Not only are they the result of cultural extraction of traditional Indigenous knowledge, but their content is premised on the systemic erasure and evacuation of Indigenous Peoples, and the myth of white supremacy that presumes everyone at some point in time and place was Native. This is settler-colonial tradecraft.” As a call to stop cultural appropriation, race-shifting, &amp; self-indigenization, t he contents of the letter (including the online public petition) released on January 17th, 2022 can be found online in English &amp; Spanish: whiteskinwhitewallswhiteli.es &nbsp; <img width="5100" height="6600" width_o="5100" height_o="6600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7fb2d7ecd1ad3674b8a740a7d2c854eb64bdc0eb3040176bf9f7ce6db631da41/OPEN-LETTER-TO-REM-KOOLHAAS---THE-GUGGENHEIM-MUSEUM--JANUARY-17--2022_Page_01.jpg" data-mid="160917174" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7fb2d7ecd1ad3674b8a740a7d2c854eb64bdc0eb3040176bf9f7ce6db631da41/OPEN-LETTER-TO-REM-KOOLHAAS---THE-GUGGENHEIM-MUSEUM--JANUARY-17--2022_Page_01.jpg" /> c.1993 Pretexts, Subtexts, Contexts in Struggles for Environmental Justice In collaboration with students at Cornell University for the 2021 Landscape Conference, we brought together writings from the past 25 years by authors, artists, and activists whose work is dedicated to environmental justice. Retroactively challenging the focus of design disciplines on the future, these essential readings (organized around the year 1993) focus on grounding design in the present. “this work of repatriation in the academy, is not about victimization or blame games. It’s about the acknowledgement and resolution of real and tangible crimes so that a future truly is worth living.” From Kofi Boone’s “Black Landscapes Matter” (2020) and Rod Barnett’s “Designing Indian Country” (2016), to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “Land as Pedagogy” (2004) and Deborah Miranda’s “Teaching on Stolen Ground” (2007), as well as Austin Allen’s “Claiming Open Spaces” (1994) and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins” (1993), the compilation of multimedia texts challenge the current historiographies, methodologies, narratives, and rhetorical devices of landscape architecture (and its allied disiciplines) as they have been taught since its foundation in the mid-19th century in America and 16-18th centuries in Europe. The compilation purposefully confronts disicplinary histories that deny, erase, and actively suppress the violence of settler-colonialism at the moment that lands &amp; labor were being (and continue to be) stolen from nations and communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Confronting struggles for environmental justice that crystallized in the mid 1980s from the fallout of Anglo-American environmentalism in the 1970s, the readings expose the complicity of settler-colonial heteropatriarchy intrinsic to and denied the professions, disciplines, and institutions of design in preserving histories and maintaining structures of white supremacy.&nbsp; &nbsp; “Almost alone among the key players of this century’s history, the landscape remains silent. But in truth it may be the most expert witness of all. In its broadest sense, ‘landscape’ is a stage on which struggles occur—where humans extract resources from the earth, suburbs drain people and wealth from cities, and territory is contested between warring groups. Landscape is also a kind of slate upon which the evidence of culture, habitation, and labor is written and may be read.” If the fields of design are wholly and utterly unprepared for the massive political change and demographic shift that is underway in this generation, the lens of these authors offer up a core, spatial question for designers: how can you change, shape or influence the future if you consistently misunderstand and misread the present? For an introduction by the curators of the c.1993 compilation, see “LANDSCAPE AS RESISTANCE: Pretexts, Subtexts, Contexts in Struggles for Environmental Justice.” As bibliography, pedagogy, and curricula for this next generation of landscape architects, the entire compilation of downloadable texts and archive of viewwable media can be accessed through linktr.ee/c1993 <img width="1050" height="700" width_o="1050" height_o="700" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c92f77f9f51ac98c7034ffdaff56521c2a6aa892431fca8deef7e06fc8089fa3/1991_Rodney-King-Video_1050x700.png" data-mid="119496001" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c92f77f9f51ac98c7034ffdaff56521c2a6aa892431fca8deef7e06fc8089fa3/1991_Rodney-King-Video_1050x700.png" /> EL TRATADO DEL QUINO Renewing Relations with the Quino Tree at the Center of the World by Decolonizing Quinine &amp; the Global Discourse on Conservation From germ theory to plantation logic, this exhibition charts the 497-year legacy of global, colonial powers in the violent search for the elusive Cinchona plant of South America in the cure for malaria. Stolen by the Jesuits in the 17th century, smuggled abroad by Britain and Holland during the 18th century, mapped by German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in the 19th century, and exploited by global pharma in the 20th century, the story of the Cinchona plant—and of its powerful quinine extract—not only lies at the base of modern civilization but traces the deep roots of Indigenous, territorial resistance back to the Amazon and the Andes. Composed as a geopolitical treatise, this initiative proposes a countermap to rebuild relations with the Cinchona plant—originally known to its peoples as the “Quino tree”—and to challenge territorial destruction and gendered violence that continue to increase amidst state-sanctioned resource extraction, economic inequality, and benevolent conservation. “Since the beginning of our life as a people, this territory has been our supermarket, our pharmacy, our hardware store. Our ancestors were born and buried here. Our connection to this place is deeper than the state’s. We should be managing it and protecting it.” Produced by LA MINGA Collaborative, NOT YOUR AMAZON, and OPSYS Media, this initiative involves a program of events coming in 2021 and 2022 including an exhibition, publication, and conference that coincide with the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy (2021) and the Quito Pan-American Architecture Biennial (2022) in Ecuador. <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e6f8c064ddf788a9342223315d2e089d82c88803859f2d6ab91a6b9d65777208/IMG_1870.jpg" data-mid="160936287" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e6f8c064ddf788a9342223315d2e089d82c88803859f2d6ab91a6b9d65777208/IMG_1870.jpg" /> <img width="1440" height="924" width_o="1440" height_o="924" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ffcb34dc726e59a464533d970ab9c67b55f5319d97c45ada12a8d4e8c3e40e88/3OVO5OHLNEI6TBOAQWQJRZD3G4.jpg" data-mid="86952888" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ffcb34dc726e59a464533d970ab9c67b55f5319d97c45ada12a8d4e8c3e40e88/3OVO5OHLNEI6TBOAQWQJRZD3G4.jpg" /> <img width="2198" height="1694" width_o="2198" height_o="1694" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b2c284972f764c40ad0e7b6b189e7aca7c640c05836939cbc37966f581c1224d/Screen-Shot-2021-05-21-at-2.34.11-PM.png" data-mid="109152277" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b2c284972f764c40ad0e7b6b189e7aca7c640c05836939cbc37966f581c1224d/Screen-Shot-2021-05-21-at-2.34.11-PM.png" /> CONFRONTING COLUMBUS The Weaponization of Urban Space &amp; Racialization of the Public Sphere in Boston In a period of less than six months in 1979 at the height of federally-mandated school desegregation in Boston, a public park originally designed as a children’s playground and built with the intention of reducing social and economic inequalities, nearly three decades in the making between 1949 and 1976—with more than $60 million in federal and municipal funds notwithstanding the involvement of hundreds of people and diverse communities to open access to the water—was coopted by a small committee of private interests whose corrupt efforts resulted in the deceitful renaming of the park to edify a violent, genocidal killer and unsanctioned placement of a statue of that, since then, has fueled 40 years of racial division, historical deception, and socio-political confrontation. See the Open Letter to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh to learn more about the lies and deception that took place in the hot summer of 1979. Launching a multi-year initiative&nbsp;The 1492 Project&nbsp;after more than 5 years of research, this letter comes with a 22-page Archival Resource Guide that comprehensively documents corruption of public process in the renaming of Waterfront Park and placement of the Christopher Columbus statue on October 23rd, 1979. An earlier story and tweet thread, “Confronting Columbus,” was posted online on June 12th, 2020 following the beheading of the Columbus statue on the night of June 10th, 2020, and its subsequent removal from the park, two days later on Friday, June 12th, to Shaughnessy &amp; Ahern’s Warehouse in South Boston. A series of public hearings were subsequently planned over the next few months by the Boston Art Commission to assess what the Mayor of Boston has argued as the ‘historical meaning’ of the statue and park. <img width="1280" height="1383" width_o="1280" height_o="1383" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4dec2a0838de0d0f0562009ab7d901b1c3bcd13aa6566a53806cd15ac76285be/CC44_2015_BlackLivesMatter.jpg" data-mid="79921128" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4dec2a0838de0d0f0562009ab7d901b1c3bcd13aa6566a53806cd15ac76285be/CC44_2015_BlackLivesMatter.jpg" /><img width="1600" height="1504" width_o="1600" height_o="1504" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c65e15935035a4128d06e8ee0326688d45b914e7625faaf1d91df42b8e9ac94e/image002.jpg" data-mid="79921137" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c65e15935035a4128d06e8ee0326688d45b914e7625faaf1d91df42b8e9ac94e/image002.jpg" /> NO DESIGN ON STOLEN LAND Dismantling Design’s Dehumanizing White Supremacy Every single building site – from a house to a highway – benefits from the exploitation of a capitalist property regime built on the back of broken treaties. These sites are not only taken from stolen lands and unceded territories, they are the spatial products of a violent structure and system of settler-colonialism that displaced and continue to dispossess indigenous peoples through more than 500 years of territorial injustices. Mundus Novus. Terra Nullius.&nbsp;Doctrine of Discovery. Manifest Destiny. “...the oppressive system of settler colonialism is now normalised through contemporary urbanism, precisely because of the ‘denigration of Indigenous culture. Basically, it’s racism … systemic, institutional, individual, interpersonal racism.’ As Deborah A Miranda writes in Teaching on Stolen Ground (2007), ‘genocide depends upon the appropriation of the identity of the colonized by the colonizer.’” This special edition booklet features a longform essay originally published in a January 2020 issue of Architectural Design (AD) Magazine titled “The Landscapists.” <img width="4320" height="3024" width_o="4320" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/29af135c0af6f7a6de4c9e7e6afb904dd0a4c0c69e78ccd36d3c33ddff353609/ndsl-cover.png" data-mid="160926123" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/29af135c0af6f7a6de4c9e7e6afb904dd0a4c0c69e78ccd36d3c33ddff353609/ndsl-cover.png" /><img width="2016" height="1512" width_o="2016" height_o="1512" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ecf74f2fb3a905beff847ba447154a04211f40b47c6f3ea695a74833afb62476/8.jpg" data-mid="160918919" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ecf74f2fb3a905beff847ba447154a04211f40b47c6f3ea695a74833afb62476/8.jpg" /><img width="3264" height="2448" width_o="3264" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2bc488816e324da5ff5db645f46b5b4fa74b8f63e73c09d76d140e29ba91c956/IMG_0429.JPG" data-mid="56905462" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2bc488816e324da5ff5db645f46b5b4fa74b8f63e73c09d76d140e29ba91c956/IMG_0429.JPG" /> <img width="2016" height="1512" width_o="2016" height_o="1512" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/69db98fbedf4536e47dd42342afb58f03334eb6fa0970938f62c002b42801884/5.jpg" data-mid="160969251" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/69db98fbedf4536e47dd42342afb58f03334eb6fa0970938f62c002b42801884/5.jpg" /><img width="3127" height="2342" width_o="3127" height_o="2342" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8fbf22aceefbb94d49b9d576f0ebc85c25d103913a42abe4906ff2f102924631/honor-treaties.jpg" data-mid="160970767" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8fbf22aceefbb94d49b9d576f0ebc85c25d103913a42abe4906ff2f102924631/honor-treaties.jpg" /> <img width="2016" height="1512" width_o="2016" height_o="1512" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8ef8bd579aae40c673374143b09606c17c008afe43914c7a30820f4e2e46c7bd/6.jpg" data-mid="160925364" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8ef8bd579aae40c673374143b09606c17c008afe43914c7a30820f4e2e46c7bd/6.jpg" /> DAMN IT! The Beaver Manifesto A counter-colonial proposal for the site of Central Park as retroactive space for the unleashing of the beaver as the quintessential landscape architect of climate change for the 21st century. Here, Central Park—including its Victorian-era vestiges &amp; racist monuments—becomes a boneyard of settler colonialism &amp; blueprint for the imminent retrocession of lands of the Lenape-Delaware Peoples and the Indigenous territories of the once and future legacy of National Parks it camouflages. “Central Park belongs no more to the City—either of New York, or of New Yorkers—than National Parks belong to the State—of America, or of Americans.” <img width="2981" height="2009" width_o="2981" height_o="2009" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/752677c25781cfd621d61aa52626000e26aa32f3171fcb011a40951fb801ecef/damnit-lep_bl.png" data-mid="160971789" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/752677c25781cfd621d61aa52626000e26aa32f3171fcb011a40951fb801ecef/damnit-lep_bl.png" /><img width="3456" height="2406" width_o="3456" height_o="2406" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/caa14fc58b401ff4b4f9a5012b2c22fd457f03d3b7cf3171a1c2cafc45f32d3b/IMG_7298.JPG" data-mid="160928357" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/caa14fc58b401ff4b4f9a5012b2c22fd457f03d3b7cf3171a1c2cafc45f32d3b/IMG_7298.JPG" /> <img width="2531" height="1422" width_o="2531" height_o="1422" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/daec23b698c3b5fa94bae38221056295089aa5a9a4e967b566bfa37657b99607/DP_FINAL-Z_DAMN-IT_01.jpg" data-mid="56647810" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/daec23b698c3b5fa94bae38221056295089aa5a9a4e967b566bfa37657b99607/DP_FINAL-Z_DAMN-IT_01.jpg" /> <img width="2619" height="1472" width_o="2619" height_o="1472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c8a60310c09db545c6cfd80260b62e01bd6ea6cc193f8f960b9d7016c2f55ac3/DP_FINAL-Z_DAMN-IT_02.jpg" data-mid="56647811" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c8a60310c09db545c6cfd80260b62e01bd6ea6cc193f8f960b9d7016c2f55ac3/DP_FINAL-Z_DAMN-IT_02.jpg" /> <img width="2201" height="1236" width_o="2201" height_o="1236" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f4bd2eb0840a6b7a94cb12ffb3fa62dc93992d00f24123e41100b68aef956a01/DP_FINAL-Z_DAMN-IT_03.jpg" data-mid="56647812" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f4bd2eb0840a6b7a94cb12ffb3fa62dc93992d00f24123e41100b68aef956a01/DP_FINAL-Z_DAMN-IT_03.jpg" /> <img width="1048" height="589" width_o="1048" height_o="589" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3adcb94d74dd7f43b5ae414fefd093758299de593026280af7f066e9147380c9/DP_FINAL-Z_DAMN-IT_04.jpg" data-mid="56647813" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3adcb94d74dd7f43b5ae414fefd093758299de593026280af7f066e9147380c9/DP_FINAL-Z_DAMN-IT_04.jpg" /> <img width="812" height="456" width_o="812" height_o="456" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/57b5ea59de95f97143d13f50d65f3afb935d89128517ff27e760c2fdec6cbd4e/Screen-Shot-2019-12-14-at-3.54.12-PM.png" data-mid="56655017" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/812/i/57b5ea59de95f97143d13f50d65f3afb935d89128517ff27e760c2fdec6cbd4e/Screen-Shot-2019-12-14-at-3.54.12-PM.png" /> EXTRACTION EMPIREUndermining the Systems, States, &amp; Scales of Canada’s Global Resource Empire 2017–1217 Extraction is the process and practice that defines Canada, at home and abroad. Of the nearly 20,000 mining projects in the world from Africa to Latin America, more than half are Canadian operated. Not only does the mining economy employ close to 400,000 people in Canada, it contributed $57 billion CAD to Canada's GDP in 2014 alone. Globally, more than 75 percent of the world's mining firms are based in Canada. The scale of these statistics naturally extends the logic of Canada's historical legacy as state, nation, and now as global resource empire. Canada, once a far-flung northern outpost of the British Empire, has become an empire in its own right. Published by MIT Press with funding from the Graham Foundation, this book examines both the historic and contemporary Canadian culture of extraction, with essays, interviews, archival material, and multimedia visualizations. <img width="2580" height="1866" width_o="2580" height_o="1866" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/035160cda7a1fa1509d21c9d11356639b02ba6e5e64df4b8b5ff70acb3edaf99/ex-cover.png" data-mid="160920267" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/035160cda7a1fa1509d21c9d11356639b02ba6e5e64df4b8b5ff70acb3edaf99/ex-cover.png" /> <img width="3264" height="2448" width_o="3264" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/76b73369681655a236c7a49d6ff2f3c4a692998452ee5f4b0c1183a4b89825a0/Photo-Feb-04--10-52-53-AM.jpg" data-mid="56585933" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/76b73369681655a236c7a49d6ff2f3c4a692998452ee5f4b0c1183a4b89825a0/Photo-Feb-04--10-52-53-AM.jpg" /> <img width="3264" height="2448" width_o="3264" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/35010cb040e9de4f8d432c657089eb25fe72293bbbcd6e065be8ce24deb8414c/Photo-Feb-04--10-54-03-AM.jpg" data-mid="56585936" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/35010cb040e9de4f8d432c657089eb25fe72293bbbcd6e065be8ce24deb8414c/Photo-Feb-04--10-54-03-AM.jpg" /><img width="3264" height="2448" width_o="3264" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a351afcf4741b4948968e1fa55b707f08242fbb9b0d2e5407a43b24b7778f754/Photo-Feb-04--10-54-29-AM.jpg" data-mid="56585938" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a351afcf4741b4948968e1fa55b707f08242fbb9b0d2e5407a43b24b7778f754/Photo-Feb-04--10-54-29-AM.jpg" /><img width="3264" height="2448" width_o="3264" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d43ea44b3d79ceb20ac509ffedf474516dc2628a203117e6444a7f8afb54409e/Photo-Feb-04--10-54-49-AM.jpg" data-mid="56585939" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d43ea44b3d79ceb20ac509ffedf474516dc2628a203117e6444a7f8afb54409e/Photo-Feb-04--10-54-49-AM.jpg" /> <img width="3264" height="2448" width_o="3264" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c5a698554cfef075c9667ff7ed1d47591325d112eac34f502491575ce6275541/ex_FullSizeRender-1.jpg" data-mid="160972088" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c5a698554cfef075c9667ff7ed1d47591325d112eac34f502491575ce6275541/ex_FullSizeRender-1.jpg" /> EXTRACTION @ Google Arts &amp; Culture See the permanent online exhibition of the making, research, team, collaborators, and the finale of EXTRACTION and the Canadian Pavilion at the Google Cultural Institute featuring an array of media and materials never before seen beyond the grounds of the exhibition in Venice. <img width="2935" height="2935" width_o="2935" height_o="2935" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a490486a149b502a836e683c780c8c7efd8530eeec1e062ee4397f9c8af68931/EX_GCI_Permanent-Exhibition.png" data-mid="55750182" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a490486a149b502a836e683c780c8c7efd8530eeec1e062ee4397f9c8af68931/EX_GCI_Permanent-Exhibition.png" /> <img width="1407" height="1407" width_o="1407" height_o="1407" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7f5e7111e38ec6e5dfcbdf3eeea5753a57c5ac810da67e72cb125db57621fca1/ore-eye_rs.png" data-mid="160933127" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7f5e7111e38ec6e5dfcbdf3eeea5753a57c5ac810da67e72cb125db57621fca1/ore-eye_rs.png" /> VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE Opening a wider lens on the cultures of extraction, the project intends to develop a deeper discourse on the complex ecologies and territory of resource extraction. From gravel to gold, across highways and circuit boards, every single aspect of contemporary urban life today is mediated by mineral resources. Through the multimedia language of film, print, and exhibition, the landscape of resource extraction—from exploration, to mining, to processing, to construction, to recycling, to reclamation—can be explored and revealed as the bedrock of contemporary urban life. The Extraction Exhibition was part of the 15th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, with archive feed on Twitter and Instagram. “Not only do imperial colonial powers redefine territories, they also breed new empires, replaying their cycles of dissemination and domination over and over again.”&nbsp;—Suzanne Zeller, “The Colonial World as Geological Metaphor: Strata(gems) of Empire in Victorian Canada,” 2001 <img width="2938" height="1877" width_o="2938" height_o="1877" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/71538cf11b09a8e12dfe2e79221d2af3c742e537be574b9caebbd5bf95f3a3dc/ex-booklet-cover.png" data-mid="160920710" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/71538cf11b09a8e12dfe2e79221d2af3c742e537be574b9caebbd5bf95f3a3dc/ex-booklet-cover.png" /><img width="4565" height="1772" width_o="4565" height_o="1772" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f8b0b563907646f20907457def140496faf8e8128fccb5487fa92a7bf6e34b85/2016-05-03_Final_Verona_Cover-1_90.jpg" data-mid="160928627" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f8b0b563907646f20907457def140496faf8e8128fccb5487fa92a7bf6e34b85/2016-05-03_Final_Verona_Cover-1_90.jpg" /> <img width="1398" height="1408" width_o="1398" height_o="1408" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/79b721ef5688389a2e231e152aab03e792adaa1c1f258214b974313341ef22e1/2_EX_Aerial_rs.jpg" data-mid="160933085" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/79b721ef5688389a2e231e152aab03e792adaa1c1f258214b974313341ef22e1/2_EX_Aerial_rs.jpg" /> CANADIAN PAVILION in Venice, recognized &amp; awarded by the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, Azure Magazine, and the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Read the reviews by Robert Enright "What's At Stake" in Border Crossings Magazine, "Confronting our National Demons" by Fionn Macleod in The Walrus, and "The Limits of the Plan" by Maitiú Ward in Foreground Magazine. <img width="2422" height="2022" width_o="2422" height_o="2022" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e7ff89ed017e55520ac9974684765dba831661d458bb30f9544d5758d19f63b5/ex-booklet-2.png" data-mid="160920657" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e7ff89ed017e55520ac9974684765dba831661d458bb30f9544d5758d19f63b5/ex-booklet-2.png" /> NEW GEOGRAPHIES 09&nbsp; Posthuman This 9th issue of New Geographies Journal surveys the urban environments shaping the more-than-human geographies of the early 21st century, as well as spaces, systems, and scales of conflict, violence, and exploitation. This interpretation is fueled by awareness of the historical instrumentality of both geography and design (as disciplinary fields and spatial worldviews) in the delineation and pursuit of new “frontiers” serving the ambition for end­less expansion of the human empire. With this in mind, geographic and design thinking are here mobilized in a different direction: namely, as an interpretive lens through which to trace how those crises and historical circumstances that have destabilized the inherited schema of the human manifest themselves spatially—how they are indexed by the complex geographical formations of the contemporary built environment. Ultimately, posthuman ask: where can sites of resistance and hope possibly emerge? NG09 is published by&nbsp;ACTAR with support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. “Settler States, former metropoles, and postcolonies are all hunted by the specter of colonialism—the geographic, architectural, epistemic, and historical framework of dehumanization, slavery, and extraction. Ruins and ruinations are spatial and temporal. In this epoch, they exist in the more the more-than-human and less-than-nature landscapes, and in the discourses on history and time deployed to justify, challenge, and make sense of them. … Here, the human is not the problem to move beyond. Like the dystopian ruins that has already been the fact of life for Indigenous peoples for centuries, it is a condition that must be inhabited and nurtured so that our voices can carry to the future.”—Eli Nelson, “Walking to the Future in the Steps of Our Ancestors,” 2018 &nbsp;<img width="2352" height="1882" width_o="2352" height_o="1882" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7a5aee75421e4153985b7ff81f88f3d8211a4e82bd37834ae09187be5d62d528/ng09-cover_bl.png" data-mid="160920080" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7a5aee75421e4153985b7ff81f88f3d8211a4e82bd37834ae09187be5d62d528/ng09-cover_bl.png" /> <img width="1250" height="781" width_o="1250" height_o="781" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d12cdba9908caed1775281b8ce6deb94c6c303ddf34f4c679237c11809f4e9c8/NG09_optimized_0.2-secs.gif" data-mid="55750189" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d12cdba9908caed1775281b8ce6deb94c6c303ddf34f4c679237c11809f4e9c8/NG09_optimized_0.2-secs.gif" /> <img width="3264" height="2448" width_o="3264" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ea4113ce4ea5d46bd44ab6d11b0b91b2f31e71d01b0bbef8f061328f7f7fd1c1/NG_03.jpg" data-mid="55750173" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ea4113ce4ea5d46bd44ab6d11b0b91b2f31e71d01b0bbef8f061328f7f7fd1c1/NG_03.jpg" /> <img width="3264" height="2448" width_o="3264" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/500b444d5eedf2cb5e90abea1d7e1d8e3a3901809fd2896f4b2122804939cf67/CLB_Blurred.jpg" data-mid="55750191" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/500b444d5eedf2cb5e90abea1d7e1d8e3a3901809fd2896f4b2122804939cf67/CLB_Blurred.jpg" /> THE MISSING 400 On the Erasure of Women from the Urban Environment&nbsp; An open-source book produced in collaboration with Hélène Cixous. This book accompanies an 8-minute videographic essay that re-examines the institutional structures of sexism and historical roots of racism in architecture that have led to the systematic erasure of women from the design disciplines of the built environment. The multimedia project features a live diagram that maps out the names of over 800 women, whose lives—as designers, builders, writers, historians, photographers, philanthropists, and more—have shaped over 800 years of urban history. Narrated by Hélène Cixous, one of the most influential feminist authors in the world, with Ghazal Jafari. As part of this project, the original list of women compiled since its creation in 2016 has expanded to over 800 names and will continue to grow over time as a live document. An original performance of this project was staged with students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on October 28, 2016. The content of the book is based on an original Open Letter written to Charles Jencks and published on October 7, 2016. The special edition of the book includes a poster that maps out the lives of over 800 women creators and shapers of the built environment across the past 800 years. <img width="3060" height="2448" width_o="3060" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/87fdf7be689818a1f8f80c326bfb6265e633a0bba16a99b4b5f987fbb5389fdd/400.png" data-mid="160920854" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/87fdf7be689818a1f8f80c326bfb6265e633a0bba16a99b4b5f987fbb5389fdd/400.png" /> LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE As ecology becomes the new engineering, the projection of landscape as infrastructure—the contemporary alignment of the disciplines of landscape architecture, civil engineering, and urban planning— has become pressing. Predominant challenges facing urban regions and territories today—including shifting climates, material flows, and population mobilities, are addressed and strategized here. Responding to the under-performance of master planning and over-exertion of technological systems at the end of twentieth century, this Routledge Landscape book argues for the strategic design of "infrastructural ecologies," describing a synthetic landscape of living, biophysical systems that operate as urban infrastructures to shape and direct the future of urban economies and cultures into the 21st century. See Gale Fulton's Book Review in&nbsp;Landscape Architecture Magazine. The book is originally based on a preliminary essay published in Landscape Journal. “The outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape is the dominance of pathways over settlements. … The pathways of modern life are also corridors of power, with power being understood in both its technological and political senses. By channeling the circula­tion of people, goods, and messages, they have transformed spatial relations by establish­ing lines of force that are privileged over the places and people left outside those lines.” —Rosalind Williams, “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Infrastructural Systems,” 1993 <img width="3000" height="2400" width_o="3000" height_o="2400" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c64b35d448592a891ee0aceabf14268592fa593baced182a81880208e533a7f0/li-book-cover.png" data-mid="160919719" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c64b35d448592a891ee0aceabf14268592fa593baced182a81880208e533a7f0/li-book-cover.png" /> <img width="1299" height="845" width_o="1299" height_o="845" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3182724c64b28da75bc8ef46c8b0f1c9b6287cda57f5008519103a1e87b1ed69/Pages-from-2016_LI_Book_spreads-4.jpg" data-mid="160932321" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3182724c64b28da75bc8ef46c8b0f1c9b6287cda57f5008519103a1e87b1ed69/Pages-from-2016_LI_Book_spreads-4.jpg" /><img width="1417" height="2178" width_o="1417" height_o="2178" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5e3221606738d25ce974bf1b91697a399be7461a95af2c54bce3d1426249c85d/Pages-from-2016_LI_Book_spreads-2.jpg" data-mid="160932323" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5e3221606738d25ce974bf1b91697a399be7461a95af2c54bce3d1426249c85d/Pages-from-2016_LI_Book_spreads-2.jpg" /> <img width="3568" height="2654" width_o="3568" height_o="2654" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3d47f29ac9cf650a7decda6c8d2af58d1abcc786f3f83478ca36ffd03111aca3/Pages-from-2016_LI_Book_spreads.jpg" data-mid="160932386" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3d47f29ac9cf650a7decda6c8d2af58d1abcc786f3f83478ca36ffd03111aca3/Pages-from-2016_LI_Book_spreads.jpg" /> <img width="1299" height="845" width_o="1299" height_o="845" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c9aadb9d0a59eb03a4a71cb3c33498e999e7953a33efde554f96ef1f36340a53/Pages-from-2016_LI_Book_spreads-3.jpg" data-mid="160932322" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c9aadb9d0a59eb03a4a71cb3c33498e999e7953a33efde554f96ef1f36340a53/Pages-from-2016_LI_Book_spreads-3.jpg" /><img width="1281" height="881" width_o="1281" height_o="881" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/64f9b3093519de1ef38af778dcbdc8a4fad43e9d107bdf65e869782ab8244efe/Pages-from-20160719_LI_Book_Final.jpg" data-mid="160932320" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/64f9b3093519de1ef38af778dcbdc8a4fad43e9d107bdf65e869782ab8244efe/Pages-from-20160719_LI_Book_Final.jpg" /> ECOLOGIES OF POWER Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense This book is not about war, nor is it a history of war. Avoiding the shock and awe of wartime images, it explores the contemporary spatial configurations of power camouflaged in the infrastructures, environments, and scales of military operations. Instead of wartime highs, this book starts with drawdown lows, when demobilization and decommissioning morph into realignment and prepositioning. It is in this transitional milieu that the full material magnitudes and geographic entanglements of contemporary militarism are laid bare. Through this perpetual cycle of build up and breakdown, the U.S. Department of Defense—the single largest developer, landowner, equipment contractor, and energy consumer in the world—has engineered a planetary assemblage of “operational environments” in which militarized, demilitarized, and non-militarized landscapes are increasingly inextricable. Through a series of critical cartographic essays, the book traces this footprint far beyond the battlefield, countermapping the geographies of U.S. militarism across five of the most important and embattled operational environments: the ocean, the atmosphere, the highway, the city, and the desert. From the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia to the defense-contractor archipelago around Washington, D.C.; from the A01 Highway circling Afghanistan's high-altitude steppe to surveillance satellites pinging the planet from low-earth orbit; and from the vast cold chain conveying military perishables worldwide to the global constellation of military dumps, sinks, and scrapyards, the book unearths the logistical infrastructures and residual landscapes that render strategy spatial, militarism material, and power operational. In so doing, the book reveals unseen ecologies of power at work in the making and unmaking of environments—operational, built, and otherwise—to come. See the review by Rob Holmes at Journal of Architectural Education, Dr. Jack Adam MacLennan at Air &amp; Space Power Journal, by Marion Clare Birch at Journal of Medicine, Conflict and Survival, by Régine Debatty at We Make Money Not Art, or by Christopher Kinsey at International Affairs. Published by MIT Press, Ecologies of Power is the recipient of The 2017 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize. <img width="2788" height="2263" width_o="2788" height_o="2263" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fc3a05227d8137465a6fe455f07b736dc39e9422d92c829264416ad47cd37e07/eop-book-cover-.png" data-mid="160919888" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fc3a05227d8137465a6fe455f07b736dc39e9422d92c829264416ad47cd37e07/eop-book-cover-.png" /> <img width="1200" height="783" width_o="1200" height_o="783" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9975d3f996144461263e4e6cd5a25bb5783a4984033accb600650214b9319a91/ezgif.com-gif-maker-1.gif" data-mid="55867693" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9975d3f996144461263e4e6cd5a25bb5783a4984033accb600650214b9319a91/ezgif.com-gif-maker-1.gif" /> WET MATTER The ocean remains a glaring blind spot in the Western imagination. Catastrophic events remind us of its influence—a lost airplane, a shark attack, an oil spill, an underwater earthquake—but we tend to marginalize or misunderstand the scales of the oceanic. It represents the “other 71 percent” of our planet. Meanwhile, like land, its surface and space continue to be radically instrumentalized: offshore zones territorialized by nation-states, high seas crisscrossed by shipping routes, estuaries metabolized by effluents, sea levels sensed by satellites, seabeds lined with submarines and plumbed for resources. As sewer, conveyor, battlefield, or mine, the ocean is a vast logistical landscape. Whether we speak of fishing zones or fish migration, coastal resilience or tropical storms, the ocean is both a frame for regulatory controls and a field of uncontrollable, indivisible processes. To characterize the ocean as catastrophic—imperiled environment, coastal risk, or contested territory—is to overlook its potential power. The environments and mythologies of the ocean continue to support contemporary urban life in ways unseen and unimagined. The oceanic project—like the work of Marie Tharp, who mapped the seafloor in the shadows of Cold War star scientists—challenges the dry, closed, terrestrial frameworks that shape today’s industrial, corporate, and economic patterns. As contemporary civilization takes the oceanic turn, its future clearly lies beyond the purview of any head of state or space of a nation. Published as the 39th issue of Harvard Design Magazine, Wet Matter reexamines the ocean’s historic and superficial remoteness and profiles the ocean as contemporary urban space and subject of material, political, and ecologic significance, asking how we are shaping it, and how it is shaping us. <img width="1120" height="800" width_o="1120" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/549666825d92bf7437b9624a692f2cd10a60029ed02e4773edeaaf23e6ff9b58/HDM39_Cover-Images.gif" data-mid="55863015" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/549666825d92bf7437b9624a692f2cd10a60029ed02e4773edeaaf23e6ff9b58/HDM39_Cover-Images.gif" /> GOING LIVE From States to Systems If landscape is more than milieu or environment, and encompasses a deterritorialized world, then it is the contested territory, hidden actor, and secret agent of the twentieth century. Stemming from the early work of some of the most influential landscape urbanists–Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Benton MacKaye, Patrick Geddes–this mini manifesto explores underdeveloped patterns and unfinished processes of urbanization at the precise moment when environmentalism began to fail and ecology emerged between the 1970s and 80s. Informed by systems thinking from the modern atomic age, this slim silver pamphlet takes inspiration from Howard T. Odum’s big green book A Tropical Rain Forest and brings alive the voices of a group of influential thinkers to exhume a body of ideas buried in the fallout of the explosion of digitalism, urbanism and deconstructivism during the early 1990s. Catalyzed by Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor meltdown, a counter-modernity and neo-urbanism emerged from the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of South African Apartheid. What happened during this concentrated era and area of change–across design, from architecture to planning–is nothing short of revolutionary. GOING LIVE is published as the 35th edition of&nbsp;Princeton Architectural Press’ Pamphlet Architecture Series. Read Amelia Taylor-Hochberg's Book Review at ARCHINECT. Since the print version of the book is now out of print and only available through used bookstores, the original color version is now available online. For the backstory and the web supplement of the book, see pa35.net <img width="3060" height="2448" width_o="3060" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1dd9fd816a42c082307a6529409dae107581e0e589edc07764108724e190d70d/gl-cover.png" data-mid="160920023" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1dd9fd816a42c082307a6529409dae107581e0e589edc07764108724e190d70d/gl-cover.png" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c8ebb657ea8e2e46a68b09cebfe8c391e6ecc9576f593c6c33ec1d1d3f797278/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_01.jpg" data-mid="160997916" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c8ebb657ea8e2e46a68b09cebfe8c391e6ecc9576f593c6c33ec1d1d3f797278/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_01.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d3af11de56a0dbf3ddb0b7150199e72396ae0e63c85f409600260f4480f7059a/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_02.jpg" data-mid="160997911" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d3af11de56a0dbf3ddb0b7150199e72396ae0e63c85f409600260f4480f7059a/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_02.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e37507be69806d1e7b34ea096ce50cee2b69f74884842a3a27528dd1c25ac204/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_05.jpg" data-mid="160997910" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e37507be69806d1e7b34ea096ce50cee2b69f74884842a3a27528dd1c25ac204/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_05.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/147486c3d15d55182e9c2e07039e51c0b294522e0760f2f6861dd96579faa286/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_11.jpg" data-mid="160997913" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/147486c3d15d55182e9c2e07039e51c0b294522e0760f2f6861dd96579faa286/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_11.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81c12e282dab6b621661993e2fa1d6eee283e2885b8ddf308497f89e3c09cdce/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_10.jpg" data-mid="160997912" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/81c12e282dab6b621661993e2fa1d6eee283e2885b8ddf308497f89e3c09cdce/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_10.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6e32783f66ab0137c15213fdd0b475961ddd85cb2401ad32c7b4dd682b4c1120/Pages-from-PA35_color.jpg" data-mid="160998040" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6e32783f66ab0137c15213fdd0b475961ddd85cb2401ad32c7b4dd682b4c1120/Pages-from-PA35_color.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7867bfac7c95982d704e8f008a4f3db8b306231b541b7984398fd314644280b4/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_06.jpg" data-mid="160997909" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7867bfac7c95982d704e8f008a4f3db8b306231b541b7984398fd314644280b4/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_06.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81d7e2a5e586a140435d9454715d8acd990a566a5e03a96e35fe0e1bc6d046eb/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_09.jpg" data-mid="160997907" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/81d7e2a5e586a140435d9454715d8acd990a566a5e03a96e35fe0e1bc6d046eb/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_09.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8cb85bb6dcfc3fcecf69064af30aebba46337db66be31ba4c52aa6e2695e98a5/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_04.jpg" data-mid="160997914" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8cb85bb6dcfc3fcecf69064af30aebba46337db66be31ba4c52aa6e2695e98a5/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_04.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3eff0c4d0b76ba0bbfa35c489ce0e9aef6be31fcf1ebdcbf34ed3fb76333cc1f/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_08.jpg" data-mid="160997908" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3eff0c4d0b76ba0bbfa35c489ce0e9aef6be31fcf1ebdcbf34ed3fb76333cc1f/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_08.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2550" width_o="4200" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/93cf407fb8ed1b9bcdf7ee7a60807b29b79ab153d13b22b8586cd2d1b7159b0e/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_07.jpg" data-mid="160997915" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/93cf407fb8ed1b9bcdf7ee7a60807b29b79ab153d13b22b8586cd2d1b7159b0e/Pages-from-PA35_color_Page_07.jpg" /> https://opsys.cargo.site/Book_NDSL Fri, 19 Jun 2020 18:28:48 +0000 open systems https://opsys.cargo.site/Book_NDSL NO DESIGN ON STOLEN LAND Special Edition Pamphlet Limited Print Run: 100&nbsp; $25 (incl. US Media Mail shipping) Color print on grey bond Hand tied, thread boundWax sealed, vellum cover 8.5” x 5.5”, 54 pages Order at Venmo: @opsys Please include your full mailing address, telephone #, email for postage tracking. Batch Printing. Allow 2-3 weeks for delivery. For international orders via transferwise, contact: info@opsys.net Proceeds from this limited edition booklet will go towards Massachusetts Indigenous Peoples’ Day Initiative (www.indigenouspeoplesdayma.org) led by United American Indians of New England (UAINE). ♡♡♡♡♡♡ <img width="1239" height="931" width_o="1239" height_o="931" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a7914fb648783256a097f40874eea64585026605fc6fa5ffb029d6d53b0d7cda/NDSL_Limited_01_edited.jpg" data-mid="84829646" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a7914fb648783256a097f40874eea64585026605fc6fa5ffb029d6d53b0d7cda/NDSL_Limited_01_edited.jpg" /> <img width="2048" height="1638" width_o="2048" height_o="1638" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ad61e5a630f71595a5770e16b387a1565d2d86c1743c443fd98c8b4e49730ef0/NDSL_Limited_02_edited.jpg" data-mid="84829647" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ad61e5a630f71595a5770e16b387a1565d2d86c1743c443fd98c8b4e49730ef0/NDSL_Limited_02_edited.jpg" /> <img width="2048" height="1536" width_o="2048" height_o="1536" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ef55bb929950580c8dab6f1165fa42113cc55bb0500e62c8a1ea474943b5ac0a/NDSL_Limited_03_edited.jpg" data-mid="84829711" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ef55bb929950580c8dab6f1165fa42113cc55bb0500e62c8a1ea474943b5ac0a/NDSL_Limited_03_edited.jpg" /> <img width="2048" height="1536" width_o="2048" height_o="1536" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0defb1212ac5d6f0a9f786e0d890637416df3bc33d2e1d774e55a3f5f8a50761/NDSL_Limited_04_edited.jpg" data-mid="84829712" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0defb1212ac5d6f0a9f786e0d890637416df3bc33d2e1d774e55a3f5f8a50761/NDSL_Limited_04_edited.jpg" />