The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Susan Moffat, Project Director for the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley.
Keyword: Restoration
Keyword: Restoration
In the Bay Area and beyond, ambitious creek and wetland
restoration projects aim to return landscapes to an earlier, more “natural”
condition. The scientists designing the projects know that it is impossible to
restore a landscape to a pre-human condition when the entire watershed has been
radically altered, and they make many nuanced choices in order to enhance
habitats. But the public often believes
the goal is to put a site back to “the way it was.”
Historical ecologists including Robin Grossinger of the San
Francisco Estuary Institute use historic maps and journals and quantitative
methods of hydrology and geology to reveal the many past conditions of wetlands
and creeks over time. They help land managers
address the question of “restore to what?
To when? “ But the public and some
advocates often seek a return to an imaginary, timeless pre-human past, one
that ignores the fact that natural systems are characterized by disruption as
much as by balance.
“Restoration” is one of a suite of words perpetuating an
image of nature as a pristine, static object rather than a network of
processes. “Restoration” implies there is an ideal state to which a landscape
can be returned, just as “reclamation” to an earlier generation implied the
right of humans to reclaim from the grips of desert or swamp the land that was
given by God for human dominion.
The much-heralded “restoration” of the Cheonggyecheon Stream
in Seoul was actually the radical reinvention of a buried river as an artful
linear urban plaza with water running through it. But it is by no means a return to the river’s
original state.
By contrast, the ongoing restoration of the South Bay salt
ponds, an area the size of Manhattan in San Francisco Bay, is successfully
transforming industrial waterworks into functioning salt marshes. But as the
marsh area increases, the birds currently inhabiting the industrial salt ponds (which
prefer ponds to marshes) are being displaced in a kind of
eco-gentrification. New reservations for
these species are being constructed, but as with urban renewal, the displaced
species are not always thriving in their assigned new homes. Restoration for
one species means removal for another.
In cities, where human and non-human needs often seem in
direct competition, the misuse of language such as “restoration” and
misunderstandings about the nature of nature can lead to conflict. At the
Albany Bulb on San Francisco Bay, a State Park plan conceptualized this manmade
landfill as wilderness to be “preserved,” “conserved,” and “restored” and required
the removal of long-standing outsider art and human encampments. The site
remains bitterly contested by its residents, users, and environmental advocacy
groups.
William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” is as
important an essay for urbanists as for ecologists. How do we use history in decisions about
altering landscapes? And since decisionmakers need words as handles, are there
better words than “restoration” to talk about the reinvention of spaces shared
by humans and other species in urban areas? Can art reveal the position of
humans in dynamic natural systems? To Susan Schweik’s point, can we talk of
“editing the landscape” as we talk of “editing the city”?
Historical ecology/Grossinger
Cheonggyecheon Stream restoration
South Bay Salt Pond project
The Trouble with Wilderness/Cronon
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