Panel 3: Green Infrastructure
Tim Love Where process and the outcome are the same, where there isn’t a schizophrenia between the two… 68
David Fletcher At best… Charles Waldheim I can tell you that across the river we’re interested very much in alternative and better futures. We’re very conscious of the fact that our students arrive with a self-determined interest in the social, but don’t necessarily see it in the same generational terms that we do. That is, they don’t necessarily see the idea of being culturally relevant as in opposition to being socially relevant. For too long in these fields there has been this false choice between being critically engaged or culturally relevant—as if we have to choose sides. In fact, there’s an opportunity on the table—certainly at places like the University of Pennsylvania, certainly at the GSD—because of disciplinary histories in which questions of urbanism, questions of landscape, questions of ecology are out there. The deck is being reshuffled and we have a generation of students who are grappling with these issues just now in ways that I think are well out ahead of our ability to keep track of them. Tim Love I agree with you. It’s back to what Daniel said a couple of minutes ago, which is that the opposition back when I was at the Graduate School of Design was that you either were co-opted by the man and you went to work for SOM, or you had a critical practice and you had transparent plumbing so you could see the waste water coming out of the toilet. Those were the only two choices. You were either co-opted or every step of the day you were in a resistant mode, and I think the idea of agency as a post-ideological view means that you can be both part of the system and do better. Does that simplify the issue a little bit? Charles Waldheim The project of autonomy—the idea of being relevant as a cultural producer—is now ironically central to agency in delivering better envi-