Landscape Armatures of ecology and community
This Fall, I am partner-teaching a fascinating studio led by UC Berkeley’s Kristina Hill, which looks at landscape ecology, climate change adaptation, and carbon sequestration strategies in the context of the fragile environment of the San Francisco Bay. The first assignment asks students to investigate their home landscapes, looking for the three-dimensional landscape armatures that “influence, and are often influenced by, the flows of energy, materials, and organisms (including humans)” (in Kristina’s own words). The students have a week to translate the findings into maps and diagrams conveying the flow and processes that have shaped their sites’ past, present, and future evolutions.
Among the many insightful readings “Reading the Landscape: A Field Guide for In and Around the San Francisco Bay” by the Oakland Museum of California & the San Francisco Estuary Institute instigated me to take a similar exploration of my home landscape, a neighborhood of Richmond, California, where one does not have to dig too deep to find evidence of these armatures and their agency on the communities that inhabited them.
Ever since COVID forced the closing of my local gym, I have been regularly hiking to and through the Point Pinole Regional Park, a large expanse of meadows, eucalyptus groves, and surroundings marshes offering spectacular vistas of the San Francisco Bay. Yet despite the beauty of the distant landscape, it is the foreground to reveal a history of exploitation of natural and human resources. The history of this once thriving community of Croatian fishermen intersects that of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor and founder of the Giant Powder Company, a dynamite powder factory, which operated here between the late 1800s and the 1960s (killing dozens of workers in the process). An interpretive sign, remnants of the old factory complex, and what’s left of the shipping piers goods complete the landscape narrative of this landmark of California’s economic history. Today, the landscape has become an armature for a new ecosystem of public health, environmental awareness, and healing.
Just a 15-minute walk south of the Point Pinole Regional Park is another landscape built on an armature of energy, power, and economic flows. At the corner of Richmond Parkway and Hilltop Drive, sits a large neighborhood looking strangely out of place, with its Spanish Revival stucco walls and terracotta tiled roofs. Built during the 1980s, the Planned Unit Development looks like a typical gated community, complete with a small shopping center, small neighborhood parks, and a lush greenbelt, complete with seating areas, exercising stations, and dense edge plantings. Here, the real landscape armature sits many feet below ground, conveniently disguised behind a ‘technically proficient’ design of setbacks, topography, and the massing of annuals and perennials. Its dangerous identity as an oil pipeline easement is only hinted at by colorful red and white signs.
These mini ‘landscape biographies’ reveal the power of these landscape armatures as rehabilitation instruments or as a distraction from past and present sins.