Topos 76

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2011

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Crisis Landscapes

jessica bridger c risis l a ndsc a pes · livia corona me xico · HIKO MITANI SPECIAL repor t from ja pa n · elizabeth mossop a f ter k at rin a · alan berger e x teri a l l a ndsc a pe s · christian werthmanN h a iti · anthony acciavatti t he g a nge s · justin fowler surface · anna grichting c y prus · kristina hill LAURA SASSO c risis sublime · John Walsh c hristc hurC h · julian raxworthy brisba ne · frank eckardt disa ster orientation · ute plagge t r aum a response · miho mazereeuw rebuilding in ja pa n

crisis

landscapes

table

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contents

Cover: Livia Corona (photo)

J essica B ridger

A nthony Acciavatti

08 Crisis Landscapes

70 A Well-Developed Plan: Wet Monumentality

Close to Home

Representing the Ganges River Basin´s complexity

H iko Mitani, Kenta Shinozawa,

12 Tahrir Square:

Seiichiro Takahashi, Yuko Tanabe

Origins and Futures

77 Tsunami Landscape

M ohamed E lshahed

Reflections about Japan The surface of the landscape is an important

Alan Berger

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signifier. In post-Baathist Baghdad, restrictions on architectural façades have been lifted, enabling a new

A nna Grichting

18 From Crisis to Opportunity

The Healing Ecologies of the Cyprus Green Line

82 Preemptive Landscape

Miho Mazereeuw

A Prototype for Coastal Urbanization along

colorful identity for parts of the city.

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A nutrient plume released into the sea is the

J ustin F owler

result of an “Exterial Landscape” where costly externa-

24 Human Shields:

lities harmful to the environment were not considered.

The Surface as Avatar

the Pacific Ring of Fire

JO hn Walsh

86 Christchurch:

A lan B erger

Living in a Crisis Landscape

30 Exterial Landscape A consideration of consequence and potential

Christian Werthmann

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The people side of the problem

The recent political changes in Northern Africa were played out in public space. One of the most famous,

Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, is one example of how the use of public protest combined with social media

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K ristina Hill , L aura S asso

F rank E ckardt

Landscape Crisis in New Orleans

Currents 6 News 105 News, Awards, Obituary, Competitions

Symbolic Spaces of Orientation

110 Authors

can offer solutions for a diversity of problems.

involvement and consideration are key to resilience in

L i v ia C orona

this devastated landscape.

55 Two Million Homes for Mexico

111 Credits/Imprint

Photoessay

J ulian R a x worth y

64 The Social Dimension of Crisis Communities react to flooding in Brisbane

Miho Mazereeuw

Dan Weissman

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E lizabeth mossop

Climate change and the potential of scale

51 Landscapes of Disaster

The Ganges River is part of a complex ecologi-

cal and social system. Understanding the waterway

the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Community

46 Crisis, Poignancy and the Sublime

A gate remains after the devastation following

The Exemplar Community Zoranje in Haiti

97 Remaking City and Coast

enabled profound change.

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U te P lagge

40 Post Traumatic Stress Management

Anthony Acciavatti

Aman Oghanna

Mohamed Elshahed

90 Designing Process

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In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti,

social, political and economic challenges make change difficult, yet there are viable plans for improvement.

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Mohamed Elshahed

Tahrir Square: Origins and Futures The ongoing political upheval in Egypt has drawn attention to the various public stages for protests, demonstrations and other exercises of free speech, and none more so than Tahrir Square in Cairo. The history of Tahrir Square and the consideration of the function of public space in Egyptian society are rich sources of insight into the ongoing developments.

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n Friday 11 August 2011, hundreds of protesters returned to Tahrir Square in Cairo waving Egyptian flags, singing nationalist songs, and holding placards with various demands. Protesters competed for space with moving vehicular traffic, which returned to the square after the army used force to once again end a sit-in that had begun on 8 July. The now famous grassy epicenter of Tahrir was clear of protesters.

The entire circumference of this traffic circle, verdant with grass, which had been the primary site for political movements to set up camp, is now guarded with a wall of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, armed, wearing helmets and military uniforms. The army may have reclaimed the grassy center of Tahrir, but the protesters still have the rest of the square and the rest of the city to claim as their rightful place for protest. The fight over public space has been, and continues to be, an integral part of this revolution.

From the start of Egypt’s uprising, massive protests have taken place across the country in

public squares, city boulevards, and main streets. Curiously, media attention was solely focused on Tahrir Square, creating the illusion that it was the only space where the public voiced dissent and clashed with security forces.

Since the Supreme Council of Armed Forces filled the role of the president, there has been a constant struggle over the future of the country between the army generals and various political interests. Public space continues to be an integral part of this struggle, and various political groups have made themselves visible by protesting. Visibility is an essential component of effective protest. This means that it is not enough for a group of citizens, whether hundreds or millions, to occupy public space and disrupt urban life. The event must be mediated, shared, tweeted, televised and circulated. Tahrir Square has been in the spotlight in the past as the city’s premier location for political protest, and the current uprising adds a new chapter to its legacy as the stage for liberation.

Tahrir Square is a landscape of both trauma and crisis. In collective memory, it is a site of national trauma as the location where many were killed in protests first against British occupation and more recently against Mubarak’s regime. The square’s current awkward shape and plan is the result of decades of political maneuvering and failed attempts by politicians and state-backed architects to reimagine it. With the current political standstill in Egypt after Mubarak’s fall, the square continues to be a landscape of crisis and the main stage where the country’s political future will be determined.

The July 1953 issue of the popular Egyptian magazine al-Musawwar celebrated the one-year anniversary of the coup d’état that overthrew the monarchy. The theme of the issue was “Egypt of Tomorrow.” The coup was referred to as “the revolution”, and the editors of the magazine, reflecting a popular sentiment at the time, saw this so-called revolution as the rebirth of Egypt. A euphoric celebration

Tahrir became the symbol of the Egyptian revolution from January 28 to February 11, 2011. Cairo was not the only place where people were protesting; public space in many cities was a key part of the struggle's success.

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Ute Plagge

Post Traumatic Stress Management Whether suffering is caused by nature or by other humans, the consequences are serious for those affected. Recovering from a traumatic experience is important and requires support.

Fukushima offers an opportunity to examine how people cope in areas affected by the triple catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown. How do they experience the loss of loved ones through a natural disaster caused by an earthquake and a tidal wave, as well as the additional loss of their homes due to the radioactive poisoning of their environment? Do the Japanese experience this kind of drama differently than Europeans or Americans do? Are there different kinds of “inner landscapes”?

Before the question of cultural diversity is addressed, other important issues should be looked at as well. Is such an event man-made or is it a natural disaster? Am I the only one affected or are there many others as well? Is it short and violent, such as the death of my child or partner in an accident, or is it long-term, such as the expulsion from my home? Psychotraumatological research has found answers to these questions: Humans are better at coping with fateful experiences like natural catastrophes than with intentional, man-made occurrences.

This involves everything humans do to other humans. Inadvertent accidents such as power plant operators who flippantly overlook the consequences of taking technical risks and all forms of deliberate violent acts against individ-

uals, such as murder and rape, or terror attacks and war as violence against many. The more personal the event is for those affected, and the longer it lasts, the more severe the emotional costs will be.

Trauma and its Emotional Costs For humans, the terrible and harmful aspect of trauma is that the seriousness of the situation and the individual ability to cope with it no longer match. The helplessness people experience and the feeling they can do nothing to protect themselves completely undermines their understanding of themselves and the world around them. Most people have a spontaneous stress reaction that involves a variety of responses: despair and anger, fear and withdrawal, i.e., the complete avoidance of everything that might somehow be associated with the trauma, and finally, excessive activity (hyperarousal) and anxiety. This rollercoaster of emotions contrasts sharply with another condition common to trauma, namely a feeling of numbness. This inner “depersonalisation” or the feeling one is in “the wrong film” is a form of inner absence (dissociation) that initially protects people from the full force of their feelings. This “freeze mode” can lead to illness if not resolved.

Catastrophes, like the 2011 tsunami in Japan, can leave people helpless. The feeling of helplessness causes stress reactions like despair, anger, fear and withdrawl. Personal belongings like photos can help people to become grounded and regain feelings of control over their lives.

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The River to Bayou project by the Coastal Sutsainibility Studio at Lousiana State University proposes the restoration of the cypress swamps and the wetlands of the Central Wetlands Unit.

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Oil industriy interventions in marshland and river engineering caused environmental problems. This was one reason why the impact of Katrina was so devastating.

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urricane Katrina caused a massive traumatic impact to New Orleans in 2005. Eighty percent of the city was flooded for weeks (up to depths of over ten feet), and catastrophic damage occurred in the vicinity of the six canal failures. More than a thousand people died, the vast majority of the population was displaced, and many people suffered significant health effects. The city also suffered extensive wind damage to structures and lost significant tree canopy. Even more significant, as the aftermath of the disaster has played out in the subsequent six years, a systemic landscape crisis has been revealed by the hurricane’s impact rather than created by it. The trauma of the hurricane speeded up events significantly, but it is the systemic issues that have truly shaped the nature of the ongoing landscape crisis.

The systemic issues are political, socioeconomic and physical. Both the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans have an enduring tradition of political corruption and a concomitant lack of effective administration, greatly reducing their capacity to act effectively in the public interest. The accompanying high levels of poverty and a depressed economy have also contributed to a lack of effective education and health systems, which have all combined to produce conditions of substantial urban blight. Physically, extreme coastal erosion related to the United States Army Corps of Engineers’ large-scale river engineering and the depredations of the oil industry, combined with lack of environmental protection over decades, have created a situation of rapid and catastrophic ongoing

land loss. The combination of the hurricane’s traumatic impact and the systemic issues it revealed have created a situation of extreme dysfunction at different scales in both space and time.

At the delta or regional scale, the exponential speeding up of coastal erosion has created the conditions where numerous towns and settlements are threatened by the encroachment of Gulf of Mexico waters within the coming decades. Those furthest south are already facing the impacts of inundation either permanently or periodically. Recent projections show the total submersion of the coastal region below New Orleans within the next hundred years.

At the metropolitan scale, we see conditions of extreme urban blight in the city: massive urban vacancy, damaged and non-performing infrastructure, very high levels of crime and poverty, lack of employment and a chronic shortage of affordable housing.

In trying to explain the reaction to the hurricane, the lack of capacity at all levels of government was striking. In dealing with both the immediate trauma and the systemic issues, the city and state have been hampered by the lack of overarching coordination or any clear hierarchy of authority to tackle rebuilding on this scale. The most common strategy in dealing with such a wide-ranging disaster would be to appoint a special authority with the power to implement disaster response and to coordinate the rebuilding effort. These types of authorities commonly have the power to cut through existing red tape and coordinate between existing levels

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currents

news

news

awards

currents

awards

2011 ASLA Medal Awarded to Laurie Olin

With Landscape: Maxwan Architects + Urbanists

Seen in the Xi’an Expo, projects by EMBT (top) and Topotek 1 are examples of the wildly imaginative projects at the international event.

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of gardens exhibit the design work of eight design schools: Berkeley, Columbia, University of Toronto, Architectural Association, Peking University, Hong Kong University, and Universidad Torcuato de Tella. As the University Gardens occupied lake-edge and up-slope positions, the designs tended toward contextual synthesis and site specificity rather than isolation and abstraction. On reflection, the Masters’ Gardens employed strong predetermined frames and tight visual choreographies, which concentrated their intended effects. Conversely, the University Gardens removed the frame as a conceptual tool, substituting controlled incremental experiences for total visual overview. A consequence of opening up the frame was to ironically reduce the visibility of the projects to visitors, who could not “see” them as gardens. While William Kent may have long ago “leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden,” dissolving the dualism between the garden and the landscape remains fraught terrain for a garden expo.

Karl Kullmann

OLIN

Karavan Prize for Reading Park and the Northern Shore Promenade in Tel Aviv-Jaffa by Braudo-Maoz Braudo-Maoz Landscape Architecture designed the southern part of Reading Park for intensive use. Seating walls complement the wooden deck of the continious promenade.

Amit Hass

Following the Shanghai World Expo and the Beijing Olympics, the Xi’an World Horticultural Expo continued the recurring theme of using major events to influence the fortunes of cities.

While many garden installations drew on kitsch representation of other provinces and countries, two collections expanded the ambition of garden exhibit design – the “Masters” of landscape architecture and the “Creative Nature” project by invited universities. The Masters’ Gardens showcased designs from nine internationally celebrated studios: West 8, EMBT, Mosbach Paysagistes, Gross.Max, Topotek 1, SLA, Martha Schwartz, DYJG, and Terragram. The level plots framed with bamboo reinforced the idea of the walled garden as an ‘other-world’ decisively withdrawn from the surrounding landscape. Accordingly, the Master’s gardens tended to employ thematics associated with the labyrinth and the grotto; of hiding and revealing, voyeurism and exotica.

Conceived under the title “Creative Nature” by the University of Southern California, the other collection

The role of the landscape architectural component in winning competition entries by Maxwan was central to the success of the schemes.

Maxwan

Karl Kullmann (2)

De/Framed Gardens: 2011 World Horticultural Expo, Xi’an, China

Maxwan Architects + Urbanists’ recent competition wins and awards for landscape projects reflect the office’s hybrid design method and its investment in landscape as a critical basis for the built environment.

At Maxwan, a landscape architect is involved in all projects regardless of scale – from private villas and housing blocks to national highways – and throughout all stages of design development, site analysis and visualization. These crucial phases require the sensitive investigation and representation of the landscape components.

The office’s recent winning proposal for a new cultural centre in Ostrava, Czech Republic is driven by a coherent landscape strategy.

The public space binds fourteen cultural buildings and programs together and drives the architectural solutions as a means to intensify and diversify the use of public space. Another winning proposal for the Machelen/Diegem masterplan in Belgium offers a fresh take on transportation buffer zones to increase recreational and ecological spaces in the city. The critical task for the landscape architect on the project was to prioritize design opportunities and constraints based on a landscape-oriented, ecologically based assessment of the site. Existing topography, planting and pavement materials, usually limited to the language of landscape architecture only, were reconfigured to create a tangible urban identity, one that complements the city’s spatial, cultural and economic ambitions.

As is the case for other projects in the office, a team composed of various disciplines, including architects, urban planners and landscape architects developed both proposals. Initial research on circulation, adjacent open space, industrial/historic sites and water ecology generate landscape-informed architectural strategies and urban visions, as well as site-specific design options that lead to the final proposal. However, the role of the landscape extends beyond spatial masterplans, strategies for open space and the public realm; it provides a basic framework for all Maxwan projects to integrate architecture and landscape, density and ecology, beauty and infrastructure. It is an irreplaceable instrument to achieve a holistic, sustainable urbanism. Leena Cho

Laurie Olin, a founding partner of the landscape architecture firm OLIN in Philadelphia, recieved the 2011 ASLA Medal. The award is given by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) to landscape architects for their lifetime achievements and contributions to the profession.The award will be presented at the ASLA’s annual meeting, which takes place in San Diego from October 30 through November 2, 2011.

OLIN’s projects include Bryant Park in New York and the Brancusi Ensemble in Romania. Recent and current projects include Simon and Helen Director Park in Portland, Oregon and the new Barnes Foundation Art Education Center in Philadelphia.

Currently, Laurie Olin is Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Furthermore, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Around Israel’s port cities Tel Aviv and Jaffa, two obstacles – a landfill and a power plant – blocked the continuity of the Tel Aviv Jaffa shoreline (see Topos 72). In the last couple of years these derelict landscapes were transformed from closed areas to open public parks.

For their design of Reading Park and the Northern Shore Promenade, finished in 2010, Aliza Braudo and Ruth Maoz from the firm Braudo - Maoz Landscape Architecture Ltd. have been awarded the 2011 Abraham Karavan Prize for

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Landscape Architecture. Their design reconnects the shoreline to an approximately 13 kilometre strip of park along the coast. The park includes a wooden deck promenade and a beachfront where you can still find historical remnants.

Having managed to make a formerly “no-go” area into an accessible popular waterfront, Braudo - Maos will be honoured on November 22 with one of the most important landscape architecture awards in Israel, established in 1971.

Juliane Schneegans