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WDM 2_23 Lecture | Planetarity: Landscapes of Double Consciousness
April 13, 2023
13th April 2023
17.30 (CET) | Zoom REGISTRATION LINK
Planetarity: Landscapes of Double Consciousness
by Tim WATERMAN, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
Respondent: Ed WALL, University of Greenwich
General subject area | landscape architecture; landscape theory; landscape heritage; landscape ecology; landscape democracy; consciousness; future and planetary imaginaries
Abstract | In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois elaborated the idea of double consciousness in his The Souls of Black Folk. Black Americans, he argued, were forced to see the world and themselves through the eyes of a white supremacist society. The idea of double consciousness has since been enriched by queer theory, feminism, gender studies, and more, with ‘triple consciousness’ and other framings added to and enlarging Dubois’s original theory. In this paper we argue that landscapes are likewise perceived and experienced in their plurality, through double, triple, multiple consciousness. Landscapes are the scenography of earthly power and financial might, but also the dialogic milieu of everyday lives. These are in conflict, but also result in hybrid formations as well as contestation and resistance. All landscapes in the world now express this multiplicity, whether as the result of settler colonialism, or the ways in which the same forces of imperialism transformed (and continue to transform) lives and landscapes at colonialism’s centre. In this paper we map two particular poles of understanding, landscapes of globality and planetarity. We explore globality as cartographic, imperial, and employing the language of colonialism, plantation, emparkment, and enclosure. In contrast we argue that planetarity is more dialogic, relational, and expressed in commonality, sharing, care, and management. While we recognise these two faces of landscape are in conflict, we contend that they also exist simultaneously in the same landscapes, often sharing the same consciousness, looking out through the same eye sockets. Understanding this not just as a duality, but as a trialectic enfolding hybrids and mutations, becomes a tool for working and thinking with all landscapes more effectively.
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Bibliography:
– Du Bois, W.E.B. (2007 [1903]) The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
– Olwig, Kenneth R. (2011) ‘The Earth is Not a Globe: Landscape versus the ‘Globalist’ Agenda’, Landscape Research, 36:4, 401-415, DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2011.582940
– Spivak, Gayatri (2015) ‘Planetarity’ in Paragraph, Vol. 38, No. 2, Translation and the Untranslatable (July 2015), 290-292. Edinburgh University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44016381 Accessed 30 Dec 2021.
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Acting Director of Architecture History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research addresses imaginaries: moral, political, social, ecological, radical, and utopian. This forms the basis for explorations of power and democracy and their shaping of public space and public life; taste, manners, customs, belief and ritual; and foodways in community and civic life and landscape. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy of the Landscape and Spatial Planning Institute at NMBU in Norway. He is the author of The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design and editor of Landscape Citizenships with Ed Wall and Jane Wolff, Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays with Ed Wall, and the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert. His writing has appeared in a variety of journals including the Journal of Architecture, Garden Design Journal, Utopian Studies, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. His brother is the experimental musician, writer, and producer Alex Waterman.
Ed Wall‘s research and design experimentation explores practices of public space and processes of landscapes through concerns for spatial justice. As Professor of Cities and Landscapes, he leads Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Greenwich, London. He is a Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Milano, and in 2017, was City of Vienna Visiting Professor: Urban culture, public space and the future–urban equity and the global agenda (SKuOR/TU Wien). He is a Design Council Expert in the UK and a member of the Board of Experts for the European Prize for Urban Public Space (CCCB).