GUEST EDUCATION BLOG FROM EDUCATION CONFERENCE SPEAKER

Ecologically Performative Landscapes and The Green Industry
David Hopman, ASLA
The University of Texas at Arlington

Nature in Complex Cultural Environments

Performative theory has been applied to many facets of social theory including economic theory, and regionalism in architecture. Simply stated, it is the notion that a thing becomes what it purports to be through actions and behaviors. The term is applied here to landscapes in complex cultural environments with environmental features that are used to mitigate or even to enhance the environmental footprint of the landscape. These landscapes are a recognition that designers should no longer separate “natural” areas from the places where people actually live and work.

“Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or for worse we call home. Most of our most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems we need an environmental ethic that tells us as much about using nature as about not using it.”
In a performative landscape, the designer creates what Michael Pollan has called “second nature”. It is a man-centered nature that seeks ecological balance but recognizes that any natural ecological system in a complex urban environment is “man centered” and subject to all the decisions involved in its inception. The projects illustrated in my presentation for the TNLA conference take an incremental approach to environmental benefits with a design of man created nature that is self-examining and self-questioning.
Addressing the actual conditions of our lives means that any, including small, movements towards future viable practices are environmental benefits worth pursuing. Peter Berg refers to the frame of mind necessary to address these actual conditions as “living in place” and “reinhabitation”. Living in place means keeping a balance between “human lives, other living things, and the processes of the planet”…Reinhabitation means working with and restoring the ecological relationships of a place and establishing a socially and environmentally future viable landscape. Berg considers this type of landscape the minimum requirement for a long-term strategy of survival.
“Reinhabitation means learning to live in place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place by becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it… It involves applying for membership in a biotic community and ceasing to be its exploiter.” Dodge believes that the most important issues in ecologically performative design are “practice and engagement” and not endless theories and debate. He understands that while theory sets the parameters, it is the difficult and uncertain realities of practice that determine the outcome.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 83.
Michael Pollan, Second Nature (New York: Dell Publishing, 1991).
Peter Berg and Raymond Dasman. “Reinhabiting Califormia” In Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, edited by Vincent B. Canizaro, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 355.
Ibid, 355
Jim Dodge. “Living by Life: Some Bioregional Theory and Practice” In Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, edited by Vincent B. Canizaro, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 341-349.