Several Directors from the Think Tank that has yet to be named (including me) converged in Boston a couple weekends ago to present a project called “Community” in Question: Conversations and readings on art, activism, and community vis-à-vis the Green Line Expansion in which we investigated the proposed public transportation expansion (MBTA Green Line) into Somerville-Medford to examine how residents respond to (both for and against) changes in transportation and how transportation effects their cities. The project was developed for a conference on the intersection of art and activism at Tufts University, and, while the conference proceedings I attended were rather exasperating, I think our project was one of the TT’s most successful to date. We organized a talking/walking tour along a portion of the proposed transit expansion Somerville and then culminated at the Davis Square T stop on the Red Line in Somerville’s largely gentrified central hub. The unique opportunity here was to observe and discuss the effects of the previous expansion (dating from the mid-80s) on the community 25 years hence in order to consider the potential effects of Green Line expansion on another part of Somerville and adjacent Medford. In the process of developing the project we contacted and invited key stakeholders and policy makers from the community to offer their expertise and perspectives, and several of these folks joined our walk and greatly enriched the conversation. Also noteworthy is the release of Vol. IV in the series of occassional readers which compiles several texts on the following themes related to the question of community: Theoretical discussions on Community, Learning from Activists/Organizers: How to participate in a community, [Common] Space, Artistic responses to Community, Building Communities.

Yet, for all the plan’s championing of public access to the river, bike trails and parks, mix of commercial and residential uses, I felt a certain sinking in my stomach. From my reserved perch in the second row, I turned around to my left and my right to scan the standing-room-only crowd, and I saw energized and enthusiastic citizens, many of whom have devoted hours of time towards crafting the vision for the waterfront. I saw a lot of people who appeared to be like me—white, educated, professional class—and, while my survey was not scientific and while it would be imprudent to place to much emphasis on the demographic of one isolated event like this, the lack of a significant attendance by either people of color or the working class in a city with overwhelming percentages of such folks is alarming when observed through the broader lens of the neoliberal vision of the city. The “rediscovery” and “redevelopment” of Philadelphia as a desirable place to live will tend towards the homogenous; economic, cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity must be actively sought after and guaranteed if such a value is to be sustained and physically manifest in the life and form of the city.

As I listened to rhetoric in the remarks from those speaking at the event—those speaking in some respects for me as a participant in the waterfront planning process but also speaking to me as a citizen and constituent—I was thinking about David Harvey‘s recent lecture on the “right to the city” (see video below), as well as the recently formed coalition of anti-gentrification and anti-displacement groups united under the same name. I’m currently working through Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity which adeptly tracks the political-economic shifts that have occurred between Fordism/Modernism and Late Capitalism/Postmodernism over the last century. Of course, as a trained geographer, Harvey’s particular strength in this research is in how he ties it all back to a discussion of spatial practices and the transformation of the city under these conditions. (I also highly recommend another lecture by Harvey from a couple of years ago entitled “Neoliberalism and the City.”

Harvey’s critique was playing through my mind in the form a series of basic questions about this waterfront plan and the process by which it came to be… For whom are we making this waterfront and this city? Who shows up? Who participates, and why or why not? What, specifically, are we doing to ensure the inclusion of under-served and under-privileged residents? How is the quality of life raised for all Philadelphians? Hidden among the mantras of “civic engagement” and “community participation” are those missing from the program, those I didn’t see at the event last week. We have to work diligently to bring all strata of the city into the planning and making of the next era of Philadelphia. The level and attention to community involvement I have witnessed over the last few years here is admirable and should not be dismissed. However, our under-served communities often remain in the shadows and require much more outreach in order to build understanding, trust, and the kind of relationships that engender empathy and mutual respect across longstanding economic, racial, and cultural barriers.

Meredith and I recently installed a project in the Multimedia Gallery at the University of the Arts (where she and I are currently teaching): “TERRA INCOGNITA” invites viewers to join in a contemplation of the relationships that exist between the space of the gallery, the currently vacant lot at 313 South Broad Street, the impact of the University of the Arts on land use in Center City Philadelphia, as well as our roles as active inhabitants of these spaces. We became interested in the vacant lot as a very conspicuous mark made by the University in the heart of downtown Philadelphia (along the so-called “Avenue of the Arts”) that is physically felt by anyone who has ever walked down that part of Broad Street. When building that occupied that site was demolished by the University several years ago, half of the sidewalk was torn up and the lot fenced in, disrupting the pattern of pedestrian traffic along the way. For more contextual information and documentation, visit the project web site

As mentioned in an earlier post on a developing project, the Think Tank that has yet to be named recently unveiled the first major documentation of what will be a long-term project investigating the productive relationships between art, activism, and education. Four Think Tank Directors (myself included) performed public orations of radical texts in specific sites in Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia; each text responded to the specific site. The impetus for these orations was generated by an initial conversation on art, activism, and education, as well as the subsequent compilation of a third Think Tank Reader on this very subject. Audio and video documentation, a small zine, and the Think Tank Readers were all recently presented for public consumption at Version>08: DARK MATTER in Chicago. First theorized by Greg Sholette, “dark matter” refers to “a hidden social production has always found its own time and space apart from hegemonies of power and the objectifying routines of work.” I believe that many Directors in the Think Tank would locate their work in the vicinity of dark matter. Read more about this ongoing work, watch videos of the first public orations, and download the corollary materials: Radical Orations on Art, Activism & Education.

I also want to highlight two recent projects by Heath (aka DITE, Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Tactical Education) and Katie (aka DICP, Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Cross-Pollination), both of whom are friends connected via the small but exceptional network of people from my days at OPENSOURCE and Champaign-Urbana, IL.

Heath (in collaboration with Brad Thomson) has just completed a small zine, Is anyone fucking listening? A mini anthology of desperate political acts, which will be included in the upcoming exhibition “The Audacity of Desperation” curated by Jessica Lawless and Sarah Ross. The zine presents an admittedly incomplete selection of desperate acts by individuals and groups who, when faced with extreme oppression, resort to sometimes extreme acts of opposition and resistance in order to assert their own agency, their own right to self-determination and self-definition. Importantly, this history is offered not only as a document of these under-acknowledged events but as a way to bridge this past with what may be required of us today and tomorrow in terms of oppositional political activity:

These actions shouldn’t provide a template for dissent today, but should provide some footing to build off of. Obviously, all of these events were a specific response relevant to the position the activists were put in, and today is no different. Specific contexts call for specific actions and these should serve as acts to learn from and study. However, we must remain aware that new and strategic responses to the state we find ourselves in are necessary.

In March Meredith and I traveled to Boston for a couple of days and met up with Katie who gave us a brief orientation to the town—together we wondered aloud why the squares aren’t square—including an introduction to the Freedom Trail (my photos here). Katie has been researching the trail, its origins (the creation of a Boston journalist in 1951), and its evolution in development of a project that interrogates the construction of specific historical narratives and the purposes for which such narratives are invented. The Freedom Trail: Economic and Cultural Pilgrimage is a series of photographs of the removed and added Freedom Trail as well as a self-guided podcast tour of the original Freedom Trail; it will be on view from May 10 through June 21 at Proof Gallery in Boston.

Today I was speaking with the Dean at the University where I teach who raised the question of reenactment—quite appropriately—wondering if that strategy was being employed in our project. Certainly, reenactment has been on a lot of our minds, especially given Mark Tribe’s recent Port Huron Project and Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave reenactment that a few of us recently saw at the ICA Boston (to name just a couple recent examples). I’ve also recently watched T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm’s restaging of JFK’s assassination, The Eternal Frame, which recreates the event as it was filtered through the lens (literally) of the Zapruder film footage. The historical reenactment is a powerful form, and within the spectrum of verisimilitude there are many variables to manipulate for meaningful re-presentation of the so-called historical event: site, persona, language, factual/fictional, mediation. Deller’s project is contextualized within the larger practice of popular historical reenactments, the kind of grand, period-piece performances of military battles and Renaissance fairs. Deller relied on these weekend pros to stage his elaborate reenactment of the coal miner labor strike in the UK that involved hundreds of clashing workers and police.

But I digress slightly. Our oration project is not about reenactment (or maybe it is, but in less specific way?). I think that it is more related to the tradition of public speaking—like really public speaking, setting up on a street corner, jumping on the soapbox, shouting it out. The project also satisfies a desire to get some of these texts we’re reading out there in some form even if only partially into the spaces of the cities where we live. Of course, I haven’t attempted the oration yet, so I’ll reserve judgment until then.

I plan to read a fragment that actually deals with the notion of city speech. It’s from a “Laboratory for Civil Discourse” by Steven Schroeder:

City speech is not simply or uniformly nice; on the contrary, it is often confrontational and rough. A place in which speech was simply and uniformly nice would be homogeneous and have nothing but smooth edges. [...] Beauty is defined not by excluding those who do not fit within existing boundaries but by crossing boundaries to acknowledge the fittingness of diversity encountered in the city. Crossing boundaries involves confrontation and is rarely smooth. But that it is part of city speech means that civil discourse has not occurred if boundaries have not been crossed.

Nor is city speech simply a matter of saying something. If it does not also ensure space and time in which to say nothing, the listening essential to discourse becomes impossible. In terms of boundary crossing, this means that civil discourse has not occurred if boundaries that define spaces of sound and spaces of silence have not been recognized and honored. Both sound and silence are crucial if the city is not simply to degenerate into a place of violence.

Finally, and most emphatically, city speech does not avoid argument. In fact, the rhythm of crossing, recognizing, and honoring boundaries is descriptive of the discipline of argument. [...] Where there is no argument, there is no civil discourse, and there is no city. Such a place is likely to be defined in one of three ways: either it is surrounded by an essentially impermeable boundary that excludes difference; or it is marked by violent struggle for control of turf; or (most likely) it is a mixture of both, with enforced homogeneity near the center of power and violent struggle for control of turf on the fringes.

I have learned this lesson well during the last few years of community work in Philadelphia. Civil discourse is tough; it requires constant attention and diligence, especially to resist the urge to retreat from the spaces of conflict (Meredith and I have jointly written about this before). I don’t always succeed; it’s a process of becoming.

So, I’m going to give a public speech about city speech in the city. But where? A little more thinking and research left to do before I make that decision.

Next Great City: the Manufacturing of Inferiority and the Myth of Progress

With all of the rhetoric being bestowed upon us about Philadelphia as the “next great city,” we might ask simply: what is a “great city”? How do we know when a city is great? What are the terms of greatness? And, more importantly perhaps, who decides what those terms are?

The origin of this “next great city” obsession seems to originate precisely from an October 2005 article by Andrew Nelson in the National Geographic Traveler magazine. Mr. Nelson romps around Philadelphia with urban hipsters and cognoscenti, attending an anniversary gala and a noisy art opening, sampling Philly delicacies and “mixing it up” in a couple of neighborhoods. The “greatness” Nelson seems to be after depends largely on Richard Florida’s creative class formula: cities only thrive when young, hip, often gay, “creative” workers want to live and play there. In Philadelphia, Nelson finds (or is shown)—amid the backdrop of a picturesque historicism—all the right ingredients: grand, gritty old abandoned buildings ripe for redevelopment (plus some techy-looking new architecture), a restaurant “renaissance” with all the hottest fusion cuisines, an “effervescent” art gallery scene, a burgeoning city wifi program, and so many authentic, distinct neighborhoods (152, to be precise). All of these come together in the nouveau goulash that is Florida’s “open city,” a place inviting to “singles, gays, artists and individuals [who have] excitement and a sense of creative energy.” But open for whom? Great for whom? The subtext here is that 1) the citizenry of Philadelphia is somehow deficient and inferior and needs an injection of “creativity,” and 2) the terms of greatness are generated externally, not by the citizens but by a neoliberal conception of “natural” economic and cultural progress as internalized and spewed forth by a journalist reporting for a corporate travel magazine.

This upper-middle class influx of wealth and investment implied by such definitions of “greatness” for Philadelphia disenfranchises the very backbone of our cities: the folks who have managed to stay put throughout the worst of times when cities were not such inspiring places to live. Special care must be taken to insure that our long-time neighbors, who often may not be able to choose whether to stay or to go, are brought along on this “creative” adventure in urban living through such programs as inclusionary zoning, subsidized, mixed-income housing, intensive education and job-training programs, and the like. Without these economically diverse neighbors living side-by-side with us, we face the prospect of the Homogenous City, a deceptively classless mass of cafe lattes, white earbuds, and excessively priced condos.

Participation ad nauseam: 1,001 Easy Steps to a New Disempowered You

Submitted to an exhausting series of often repetitive public forums, the citizens of Philadelphia have been nearly bludgeoned to death with a particular brand of “civic engagement.” The distinct feeling of déjà vu has been reported at these events, followed by a palpable cynicism regarding the effect of these engagement processes as they have been tried before but have not yielded many tangible results. Participants are asked to respond to simplistic narratives in order to tease out their values about a given subject (eg. “your friend is thinking about moving to Philadelphia; what reasons would you give her to do that?”). The conversations are generally framed in such a way as to emphasize the positive and de-emphasize the negative, thus an attempt is made to to minimize conflict and tension, which are to be avoided for fear of derailing the process or demoralizing the participants.

The civic engagement sessions rely on clear hierarchies that mimic traditional models of representative governance. A small group of facilitators, moderators and experts determines the agenda, the questions and the format of the engagement process. Fractured into small working groups, participants respond on cue to specific queries. Their responses are collected, filtered, and then regurgitated as a presentation of the will of the people. The participants do not have access to the raw data, nor do they have any control over the interpretation and subsequent presentation of the data.

The effect of these restrictions on an organic, citizen-driven conversation coupled with the futility of so many of the same event repeated ad nauseam is to further insitutionalize the very negativity which these civic engagement processes are meant to counteract. Citizens are exhorted to join in but the illusive pay-off never seems to come. The prize of political agency is held out, but without giving the public real tools for self-organization and activism they end up leaving more disempowered then before.

Dopey Optimism: “This is the best (insert noun) ever!”

Let the superlatives fly! As was noted before, a dopey optimism pervades and mischaracterizes the inevitable and necessary conflicts that arise in any dialogic public process. Democracy opens up the space of conflict. While pragmatic democracy may ultimately depend upon a majority, its exceptional value resides in its guarantee that dissenting and minority voices will be heard and acknowledged.

The excess of cheerleading and back-patting displayed by the administrators of these civic engagement processes must be seen as necessary in maintaining the illusion of effective participation so as not to discourage the citizenry. Obviously, the key to these projects’ funding and appearance of success lies in the very participation of the public. For anyone paying attention, however, the rosy-colored reports ring false to the point of condescension, as if we, the fragile Philadelphians, might snap at the mere hint of conflict.

Constructive Negativity: the Transformative Nature of Agency

Philadelphia—or Negadelphia, as one newspaper editor has dubbed us—is “addicted to negativity,” and the administrators of our Next Great City have developed a 12-step program to wean us off the sauce. Negativity is the old, corrupt, backward past. Philadelphia’s great future will be built on that distinctly American superstructure of big ideas, optimism and a positive mental attitude. The public is consistently admonished to sublimate its negativity or forever be denied the status of Next Great City.

I would argue, however, that our negativity is to be embraced as it is a fertile field. The seeds of individual critical consciousness are sown in the soils of skepticism, negativity and dissatisfaction. The space of negation is non-compliance, the withholding of consent—after all, it is the threat of withholding our consent that the authors of the Declaration of Independence expressly invoked as our means to resist destructive forms of government. When faced with the incessant onslaught of trespasses (physical and psychic) against us, self-presercvation requires us to first yell “hell no” before we can safely utter “hell yeah.” My privileging of negativity is not meant to suggest we devolve into a reflexive, immobilizing pathology. Rather, a transformation is necessary to harness to constructive power of negativity.

Negativity, as a fundamental component in critical thinking, must be tempered by political agency. It is not enough for the citizenry to function as passive subjects in the focus group of nominal civic engagement forums and roundtables, just as it is never enough to step into a voting booth every couple of years and choose the lesser of so many evils. The citizens of Philadelphia need to be given the tools of grassroots activism: self-organization, effective lobbying, non-violent direct action, and sustained campaigns. Without them, the endless feedback loop of participation hypnotizes the public into political apathy. With these tools as implements of deep, structural change in the life of the city, Philadelphians can determine for themselves from a position of power what the terms of its greatness are and take the necessary steps to realize them, one hard-won victory at a time.

—Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Meaning, Think Tank that has yet to be named

Update: This text is also posted at Green City Journal

The Think Tank is comprised of several Departments, each led by a single Director. (I currently serve as the Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Meaning (DIM) and the Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Documentary Subjectivity (DIDS).) There can be no Department without a Director, and there can be no Director without a Department. Directors are both autonomous agents and cooperative collaborators. In this respect, the Think Tank has no members, only directors. The declaration of a directorship in a Department amounts to a statement of that individual’s bias and agenda. Nothing is more offensive to the Think Tank than the pretense of neutrality!

To date, the Think Tank’s Publicly Held Private Meetings (PHPM) have made up the bulk of the work the group has done. As the the named suggests, these meetings are held in public places—a street corner, a subway car, etc—and they are private inasmuch as their locations and times are publicized only after the fact. Anyone who happens by a PHPM is welcome to join the conversation. The only prerequisite is that the newcomer assume a directorship of the department of their choice.

For more about the Think Tank’s work, visit thinktank.boxwith.com.

Philadelphia residents have an unprecedented opportunity to work with local civic leaders and urban planning and design professionals to envision a world-class riverfront along the central Delaware River. In mid-October when Mayor Street issued the executive order creating the Central Delaware Advisory Group, a working body of 45 representatives from various communities, non-profits and offices around the city, he challenged Philadelphians to imagine the very best for the riverfront and to think boldly about the character of the riverfront we would like to live on, work on, and enjoy for generations to come. It is with a great sense of duty and honor that I serve as the liaison between the residents of my neighborhood of Fishtown and this advisory group.

Shortly after the mayor’s executive order, the riverfront visioning process quickly began with a series of 3 walks along the Delaware River from South Philly through Penn’s Landing and north beyond Penn Treaty Park into Port Richmond. These well-attended walks and talks were instrumental in reminding us of the rich history of the riverfront as well as revealing the current condition of the land along the river.

The first meeting of the Central Delaware Advisory Group was held in early November in a packed conference room at the offices of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. With introductions by Janice Woodcock, executive director of the planning commission, and Harris Steinberg and Harris Sokolof of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Praxis, the year-long visioning and planning process officially began. We talked with each other about the concerns and hopes our neighborhoods have for the riverfront. We recounted memorable experiences from other waterfronts that we have had in Philadelphia and in other cities around the world. We generated an informal list of uses and features we think it will be important to consider in any riverfront plan: things like a vibrant port industry, open spaces, housing, local businesses, and so on.

We learned that the next year would see numerous civic engagement forums and meetings across the city to gather input from Philadelphians on what they desire for the riverfront. Early next year a team of design professionals will be commissioned to work with the public and advisory group to interpret that vision and mold it into a workable plan. Finally, the entire process as well as the design work will be presented to the city in a prominent, public exhibition in September 2007.

Last week, members of the advisory group embarked on a field trip to New York to view firsthand a few of its recent waterfront development projects and to meet with key leaders who have helped guide it. Our task was not to copy New York’s development model or to find specific, pre-packaged solutions, but rather to learn about the many challenges New York has faced, the kinds of questions New Yorkers have asked and the steps they have taken in their planning processes. I believe that we gained significant insight into our own condition in Philadelphia. We have much to learn from New York’s (and other cities’) successes and failures when it comes to waterfront planning and development.

Our tour of New York began on the west side of Manhattan along a narrow strip next to the Hudson River. A generous bike path connecting a series of small-scale public spaces travels the length of the river and is punctuated by several multi-functional parks that have been created on the existing piers. At least 20 years in the making, this stretch of New York’s waterfront demonstrated the intensity and difficulty of any comprehensive planning process but also the potential rewards of fighting for a collective planning vision.

After a look at the high-end development of Battery Park City with its massive residential and commercial buildings, its focus on green building, and integrated public spaces and public art, we ended the day at the City of New York Planning Commission for presentations by 2 lead planners and remarks by Amanda Burden, executive director. We learned about plans currently underway for the East River waterfront and for a major redevelopment scheme on the waterfront in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn. Certain parallels with Philadelphia can be seen in these projects: the largely post-industrial land in Brooklyn adjacent to thriving residential neighborhoods, and the East River waterfront’s struggle with the FDR elevated highway (like our own I-95).

I came away from the New York trip with two pressing concerns:

1) How do we guarantee access to affordable, humane housing when planning for residential development on the riverfront? We saw two different approaches to this question in New York: in Battery Park City no consideration was giving to affordable housing ($6500/month rents for a one bedroom!)—market forces are left unchecked, pushing the cost of housing to levels unmanageable by all but the very wealthy; in Greenpoint-Williamsburg we saw that the city has rezoned the waterfront area and created an incentive program which uses private development capital to fund a percentage of affordable housing. The former is untenable, the latter a first step but not without problems. My neighbors in Fishtown and Port Richmond—most of whom have lived there for generations—are in danger of being displaced by the wave of gentrification that is creeping north of center city in the form of rising housing costs and property taxes.

2) How do we create truly public, democratic space on the riverfront, knowing that we will need to most likely partner with private developers? Quasi-public spaces like shopping malls present the illusion of a public commons but our rights as citizens are incredibly limited in such spaces. If the city enters into development cooperations with the private sector, we must be careful to ensure that our open spaces on the riverfront are truly public, truly accessible to all citizens, and afford our guaranteed rights as citizens.

Moving forward, it is incredibly important that we participate as fully as we can in crafting and expressing our vision for the riverfront. We will need to consider difficult problems and respond with meaningful, complex solutions. How do we guarantee access to affordable, humane housing when planning for residential development on the riverfront? How do we create truly public, democratic space on the riverfront, knowing that we will most likely need to with private developers? How do we plan for a variety of uses on the riverfront which allow for green space and economic growth, new jobs and new recreational uses, new construction and historic preservation?

For too long the voices of everyday Philadelphians have been ignored while a few have made decisions about our city that do not serve the public good. Here is our chance, by order of Mayor Street, to declare what we desire for our city and to hold those who represent us accountable for realizing our vision. In the coming weeks there will be several public meetings around the city where we can express this vision and work with each other to develop a collective plan for the riverfront. Also, all meetings of the Central Delaware Advisory Group are open to the public. For more information about these events and all other news of the process, visit www.planphilly.com.

Update 12/1/06: Also see The People’s Waterfront at Green City Journal.

I think that a good way to define an “institution” is to outline the fact that most of its efforts go in the direction of a self-confirmation of the institution itself. Therefore its activities will be, to a large extent, a “celebration,” a continuous effort to give an image of success, of richness, of effectiveness, of power. It’s obvious that any critical position will be seen as a menace; and, as I am convinced that the artist’s position is basically a critical one, there will be an inevitable contradiction between the artist and the institution. Having said that, I also think that not all the institutions are the same, nor that all their activities have always the same character. It’s true that the institution can have the “power,” so to say, of accepting and neutralizing even critical positions (making them become “trends” in the art market), but I do think that “institutional critique” is more interesting than neo-expressionist painting or sleek corporate photography, because in any case its content (especially in the beginning) provoke the public to pose questions. And then, when it has become a successful trend, no big drama. I think it just means that time has come, for another critical position to appear.

A few years later, Sholette wrote in an essay for republicart (now transform.eipcp.net):

Finally, in order to describe oneself as both artist and political being, or what Pier Paolo Pasolini termed a “citizen-poet,” one must remain ill at ease with the neo-liberalism of post-cold war institutions, especially those that seem all too willing to embrace a prudent form of political dissent, including the unstated demand that curators be culturally inclusive and socially progressive. Despite this uncertainty, and regardless of one’s divided loyalties, we might now seriously consider re-approaching the idea of critical autonomy that groups such as PAD/D attempted to establish more than twenty years ago. I’m not referring here to the modernist notion of autonomy in which the art object is celebrated as something solely in and for itself, transcending everyday life. Rather, I want to propose re-introducing the concept of a self-validating mode of cultural production and distribution that is situated at least partially outside the confines of the contemporary art matrix as well as global markets. In other words, a self-conscious autonomous activism in which artists produce and distribute an independent political culture that uses institutional structures as resources rather than points of termination.

After surveying the lay of the land here in Philadelphia since returning last October, it’s very apparent that this town is in serious need of some critical autonomy and institutional critique from the artists who live and work here. A few of us are finding each other. If you’re reading this in Philly and it resonates in any way, please make contact.

One thing many us working on the project have come to understand is that the more one observes and photographs these leftover spaces and their varied vegetation, the more one sees the quiet complexity of natural ecologies which happen to thrive in seemingly hostile urban environments. The process of close study allows one to pass through layers of perception and understanding: first scan reveals little more than the distinction between man-made and invasive weeds; second scan perhaps leads one to distinguish a prickly weed from a leafy weed; the third scan provides more detail and understanding of the subtleties nature achieves even in “limited” environments; and so on.

I believe we all also agree that it’s very important to this project that we are non-specialists embarking on a rather “scientific” course of botanical or ecological “study.” We hope to arrive at unconventional methods and systems of classification that maybe begin to challenge received notions of science and the scientific method. Specifically, I think of Thomas Kuhn’s work regarding paradigm shifts in discussing scientific revolutions: the idea that science becomes ensconced in normalized methods and worldviews of which anyone working within a specific paradigm is unaware and therefore unable to see beyond. I don’t mean to claim that our project is pushing us into a new paradigm! But the implications of engaging in a pseudo-scientific investigation, being non-scientists, are that we may work to expand a given paradigm and (who knows) find ourselves in uncharted territory.

What particularly interests me about these thriving urban ecologies we are discovering is how they relate inversely to the entropy of man-made urban environments. Walls crumble, sidewalks crack, buildings fall down–and in this loss, this slowing down of man’s progress, nature asserts itself with much resilience and vigilance. Mankind must work so hard to stay the onslaught of nature! Ours is a technological history; that is, a history of subjugating nature to our needs and desires. And I think for anyone who takes the millennial view, this is a reassuring comfort: that nature, in whatever unfathomable and infinite cycles, will always prevail, will always creep up through the cracks and gaps no matter how we trivial humans attempt to control it and ultimately destroy it. Nature is dead! Long live nature!

View some preliminary work on the Open Fields Project here.