In the summer of 2019, I was promoted to Head of Operations for the river parks alongside the Mississippi River in Memphis, TN. As a young woman taking over a man's role, I knew I was stepping into unknown territory. It did not stop me from feeling excited to manage the fantastic Ranger team and make some changes to how things were done in the parks.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was the rising and falling of the river. In the Spring, the snowmelt from the north would create considerable swells in the river, changing the water levels drastically. The north section of our parks was below the bluff, low enough to get flooded as the river would rise. The beautiful thing would be what the river left behind when the water came down. While it would drench the soil, massive pieces of driftwood would be left on the park lawn and wedged between the giant trees that lined the river's edge.
Previously, these driftwood pieces would be removed, and the park would be pristinely mowed, but this year we wanted to try something new. The large amounts of driftwood made for potential benches that park users could sit on or children could play on. So we left them, mowed pathways rather than flat lawns, and created a meadow-like landscape in a traditionally dull park just by stopping a process.
The experiment did not go so well, though. The wealthy homeowners that lived above the park began to get angry. The residents did not usually use the park but still perceived it as their "front lawn" since it was between their houses and the river. The users of the park loved the new natural pathways and flowers that started sprouting through the lawn, but in the end, we had to resort back to the way it had been done before because the City became involved since the homeowners' voices were so loud.
What does a balanced approach to the garden look like in contemporary landscape practice? Some designers, artists, and gardeners have embraced an approach that seeks to understand and act rather than act before listening.
Marti Franch of EMF balances by using management as a design tool. He says, “Through the choreography of its regimes of care, design by differentiated management facilitates ecological diversification; citizen appropriation; and, ultimately, the exploration of new forms of beauty.” (Franc, 2021) Maintaining a garden can be a way of conversing with the natural systems - the tool by which one can understand what is already happening. That is the tool Franc uses. Before making any moves, “...he begins an active process of clearing, mowing, pruning, and cleaning. ‘The main thing we do is subtraction,’ he says.” (Waterman, 2022) Franch’s method works at different scales. Sometimes when speaking about gardening, the focus is on small areas. However, Franch is working at a city scale in places like Girona on action plans based on what already exists, constantly reacting to what is happening.
Franc also outlines the difference between an “action plan” and a “masterplan”. This difference defines his method based on balancing feminine and masculine energies. He describes the masterplan as an image, a key moment when the project is completed. While an action plan seems more appropriate in his mind as it describes something happening - a process over time - rather than a set goal. (Waterman, 2022)
Design by Management
Marti Franch’s process starts with differentiated management practices to deeply understand a site. This is exemplified in his work throughout Girona, Spain. (EMF, 2014)
On a smaller scale, practices like D.I.R.T. Studio, led by Julie Bargmann, situate themselves as experts in site specificity because of their surgical site analysis. Bargmann’s first move is to dig and see what is underneath the surface. Core City Park takes up a 1000-square-foot abandoned parking lot in Detroit. Under this parking lot were fragments of an old Engine House demolished on-site, which she used in the final design. A caption on their website says, “Open it up to accept an urban woodland.” (Bargmann, 2019)
This phrase embodies the culture of embracing the unknown—the feminine approach of listening. In Bargmann’s case, listening means digging. The response is based on what is heard.
D.I.R.T. Studio’s Core City Park in Detroit used the keystone dug up from the rubble in the park. (D.I.R.T. Studio, 2019)
Another studio that is working to challenge the status quo is Taktyk. One of the partners, Thierry Kandjee, started exploring gardening as a practice by learning to prune rose bushes. He says, “Pruning a rose firstly requires a very careful identification of the plant’s various conditions before engaging in any action. The action of pruning calls for both precise intervention and anticipation. The act is both giving shape to the plant and also strengthening its vitality, resulting in a more intense flowering.” (Kandjee, 2013)
This seeps into the work that Taktyk does today. Their projects, such as Parckfarm, strike a balance between “improvisation and precise craft” and facilitate the “expertise between the designer and the local”. (Landezine et al., 2016)
They have not always had success with this type of project, however. Their recent work, 12 Seasons Park in Paris, was designed flexibly and empathetic with existing human and non-human ecosystems. Ultimately, the client wanted more intensive design prescriptions and removed the installation.
Parckfarm, Brussels, Belgium (Taktyk, 2014)
12 Seasons Park, Paris, France (Taktyk, 2017)
Our world is still one that ships grass to Qatar, and islands are being lost. Sometimes projects will only thrive if they fit into the agenda of those with the power and money to control the situation—the masculine steps back in, in favour of predictability and stability. The sad thing is that unpredictabilities still happen within a project when the masculine is dominant. For many designers, management and maintenance are an afterthought because they are trying to deliver an image, not a living, breathing system.
TERREMOTO, based in Los Angeles, is fighting this. They say, “Outside of City Hall, half of the trees and the lawn were dead. These public open spaces were built with the assumption that they would be taken care of and that they could rely on civic and external inputs that are now unreliable. We have built all these incredibly fragile landscapes, and the moment there is a jolt to the system – like a heatwave or the irrigation turns off – they immediately fail. And I’d offer that that failure speaks to poor design and, as designers, we need to improve” (Reid & Godshall, 2022)
Systems that are built out of the masculine agenda depend on engineered solutions. When natural systems fight back, these human interventions are weakened because they were built without sensitivity to existing conditions. As Hill outlined in his book, static masculinity is at the core of systems like law, government, and social order. When these systems can decide what happens to the garden and do not listen to the opposing feminine forces, the natural systems cannot thrive, and we end up with dead trees and dry lawns.
TERREMOTO is highly collaborative. Their project statement for the above project called TEST PLOT! is that they “believe that current/recent historic notions of "ownership," whether of ideas, materials or property, feel increasingly antiquated and contrary to the collective betterment of our environment and society. The Next Civ will be blurry, pluralistic, incomprehensibly beautiful and, most importantly, of many hands.” (TERREMOTO, 2023)
