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Sanitation and Power
READINGS Ivan Illich, “The Dirt of the Cities, The Aura of Cities, The Smell of the Dead, and Utopia of an Odorless City”, in H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, (London: Marion Boyars, 1986). Link to book. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art, Proposal for an Exhibition,” (New York, 1969). Link to manifesto. Sara…
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Landscape Narratives
READINGS John McPhee, “Travels of the Rock” in The Princeton Anthology of Writing: Favorite Pieces by the Ferris/McGraw Writers at Princeton, University (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Link to Article. Patricia E. Rubertone., “Lippitt Hill: Homelands of the Hill and Hollows, Unholy Water, and Traditional Knowledge” in Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the…
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Waterfront Assemblages: Absurdity of Billion-Dollar “Solutions”
This week’s readings were quite humourous, and I don’t believe in a way that was initially intentioned until the authors’ found themselves writing about matters that simply were absurd. I read Vormann’s critique as a matter-of-fact academic paper that stated the reality of waterfront infrastructure and its glossed-over practicalities. Paired with both Metcalf’s recount of…
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The Lawn and the Swept Yard- MLV
My experiences with lawns are primarily in public urban spaces. Neither my family nor I have ever lived in the suburbs. As part of a working-class family, we have always prioritized proximity to work and school, so my earliest memories of lawns are public spaces, which brings back great community memories. When I think about…
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Week 8 | Indigenous Embodiment (Industry & Toxicity)
Something that strikes me from both Silvermoon LaRose’s lecture and Elizabeth Hoover’s research is the extension and cultural connection of the physical (indigenous) body to the land. In many ways, this connection stems from the need for resources that the land offers up as gifts, particularly food sustenance. Silvermoon noted that through generational storytelling, and…
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Plurality of Publics
READINGS Aimi Hamraie, “Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design” in Disability Studies Quarterly Vol 33 No 4, (2013). Link to article. George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape” in Landscape Journal 26:1, (2007) 10-23. Link to article. Gwendolyn C. Warren, Cindi…
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Waterfront Assemblages
READINGS Ben Metcalf, “American Heartworm” in The Baffler, 1998. Link to article. Boris Vormann, “Toward an infrastructural critique of urban change: Obsolescence and changing perceptions of New York City’s waterfront” in City 19:2-3, (2015). Link to article. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Down the river” in Under a white sky : the nature of the future, 2021. Link…
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Urban Renewal, Suburbs and Segregation
READINGS Beatriz Colomina, “The Lawn at War: 1941-1961,” in The American Lawn, ed. Georges Teyssot (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). Link to book. Diane Harris, “Where was Jim Crow? Living in Frank Lloyd Wright’s America,” in Segregation and Resistance in the Landscapes of the Americas, eds. Eric Avila and Thaisa Way, (Harvard University Press,…
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Industry and Toxicity
Readings Elizabeth Hoover, “Environmental Justice, Political Ecology, and the Three Bodies of a Mohawk Community” in The River Is in Us, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Link to open access book. Scott Frickel and Jonathan Tollefson “When Environmental Inequality Racialized: Historical Evidence from Providence, Rhode Island” in Socius, Vol 8: 1- 14, 2022. Link…
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Sanitation & Power: Professionalization of Health to Maintain Distance
Illich traces the evolution of an inherited dwelling into a residential commodity through the ideas of odour, aura, and the utopian city. What made places liveable were homes built and maintained by families and tribes, each with their own cultures, traditions, and auras. These “auras” are the inevitable by-products of life’s processes: nasal signals like…
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Multispecies Worlds
Readings/Video The Pursuit of Happiness: An Indigenous View: The Community Speaks, Yoo Nutahkeeun Productions with Route 120 Labs, 2005. Link to videos. Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, “Dump-Heap Naturalists,” in Design With Nature Now, eds. Frederick R. Steiner, Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey, and Billy Fleming (Cambridge, Mass.: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in association with the University…
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ON GRIDS, ROADS AND NODES
READINGS Andro Linklater “The Shape of Cities” in Measuring America (Penguin Publishing Group, 2003). Link to book. Jane Jacobs “The Use of Sidewalks” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961). Link to article. J.B. Jackson, “Roads Belong in the Landscape,” in A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, (Yale…
