F E AT U R E
Designing for direct action The climate movement is taking and remaking public spaces, and the Schools Strikes, the Climate Coalition, and Extinction Rebellion are providing clues to creating more democratic landscape practices. 1. This protest banner is the starting point for The Wilderness Assembly, a new public space for human and nonhuman participants in the Greenwich Park deer park.
Ed Wall
© Meredith Will, University of Greenwich, 2019
University of Greenwich
Remaking public spaces through environmental protests, strikes, demonstrations, and occupations makes landscapes of the climate crisis visible. Direct action provides an essential voice in discourses aimed at addressing anthropocentric climate change – it makes an urgent contribution to discourses that move too slowly due to the need for international agreements, because of resistance by corporate lobbies, and by politics of national economic interest. The actions of the climate movement involve taking and remaking of public spaces – from streets to squares, government buildings to global corporations, airports to oilfields, newspapers to printing presses – to demand action from banks, corporations, the media, and elected representatives around the world. These are not just public spaces as material places owned and managed by the state, but instead they are an array of sites made public through the coming together of people around issues of concern. They are also not necessarily the traditional public spaces of landscape architecture, urban development, and masterplanning projects that can operate in tension with such direct action. As Shelly Egoz writes: “All too often, politicians, security forces, and in some cases a small army of design experts and landscape professionals, have gradually erased the visibility and symbolic prominence of these 36
2. The global rebellions in cities around the world were marked by the distinctive Extinction Rebellion logos. © Ed Wall, 2020
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landscapes.”1 As public spaces are redesigned, agendas for limiting ‘undesirable’ communities, from homeless people to political protestors, can manifest in planning processes, material specifications, new bylaws limiting protest, and police patrols that restrict public gatherings. But the public spaces of the Schools Strikes, of the Climate Coalition, and of Extinction Rebellion can provide clues to more democratic landscape practices, more just relations with worlds around us. Rather than focusing on the visual and material reconfiguration of urban spaces that may fulfil a client brief to appeal to narrower, more commercial, more passive, the formation of public spaces around concerns for the climate crisis demonstrates openness to collective participation, invention in forming social spaces, and determination in organisation. It is through the remaking of public spaces that shared concerns