Cyclical City: Five Stories of Urban Transformation

cyclical city

cyclical city

Five Stories of Urban Transformation

Jill Desimini

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2021

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Desimini, Jill, author.

Title: Cyclical city : five stories of urban transformation / Jill Desimini.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021016942 (print) | LCCN 2021016943 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813946320 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813946337 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Land use, Urban—Case studies. | Urban renewal—Case studies. | Terrain vague.

Classification: LCC HD1391 .D47 2021 (print) | LCC HD1391 (ebook) | DDC 711/.4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016942

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016943

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Adrienne Rich What Kind of Times Are These. Copyright © 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from COLLECTED POEMS: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Cover illustration by the author with Taylor Baer.

To Daniel, Nora, and Arlo Bauer

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

to talk about trees.

—Adrienne Rich, What Kind of Times Are These from Collected Poems: 1950–2012

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Introduction: The Underlying Conditions

1. Stormwater: 350 Years of Hydrology in Philadelphia

2. Gleiswildnis: 200 Years of Ecology in Berlin

3. Hortas: 500 Years of Agronomy and Landscape Planning in Lisbon

4. Speelplaatsen: 100 Years of Play in Amsterdam

5. Fallow Land: 150 Years of Disinvestment in St. Louis

Conclusion: The Common Project

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Acknowledgments

I have many people to thank.

My past and present colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Design: Sarah Whiting, Mohsen Mostafavi, Anita Berrizbeitia, Charles Waldheim, Francesca Benedetto, Silvia Benedito, Eve Blau, Joan Busquets, Danielle Choi, Daniel D’Oca, Gareth Doherty, Craig Douglas, Peter del Tredici, Sonja Dümpelmann, Edward Eigen, Rosetta S. Elkin, Susan Fainstein, Richard Forman, Teresa Gali Izard, Toni Griffin, Gary Hilderbrand, Michael Hooper, Jane Hutton, Rosalea Monacella, Niall Kirkwood, John Peterson, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Monserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Kiel Moe, Robert Pietrusko, Jackie Piracini, Antoine Picon, Chris Reed, Patricia Roberts, Martha Schwartz, John Stilgoe, Michael van Valkenburgh.

My colleagues who provided or reviewed content: Michael R. Allen, Julie Bargmann, Silvia Benedito, Sean Burkholder, João Castro, Sonja Dümpelmann, Rosetta S. Elkin, Maria Jose Fundavilla, João Gomes da Silva, Jane Hutton, Almut Jirku, Erin Kelly, Ingo Kowarik, Jens Lachmund, Christopher Marcinkoski, Manuela Raposo Magalhães, Brent Ryan, Martin Schaumann, Anne Whiston Spirn, Ed Wall, Tim Waterman, Jane Wolff, and the anonymous reviewers, among others.

Research assistants: Taylor Baer, Senta Burton, Emmanuel Coloma, Tiffany Dang, Michelle Arevalos Franco, Michael Luegering, Ailyn Mendoza, Angela Moreno-Long, Ambrose Luk, Lane Raffaldini Rubin, Megan Jones Shiotani, Ruth Siegal, Ui Jun Song, Hannah van der Eb, A. Gracie Villa, Timothy Wei.

Seminar and thesis students: Madeleine Aronson, Michelle Benoit, Yash Bhutada, Dan Bier, Travis Bost, Ryn Burns, Anna Cawrse, Nina Chase, Amna Rafi Chaudhry, Elena Clarke, Rachael Cleveland, Daniel Daou, Alexis Del Vecchio, Hana Disch, Terence Fitzpatrick, Ana Garcia, Laura Gomez, Emily Gordon, Laura Haak, Keith Hartwig, Diana Jih, Je Sung Lee, Frankie Leung, Grace McInery, Nathalie Mitchell, Stephanie Morrison, Sara Newey, Avery Normandin, Laura Stacy Passmore, Paul Fletcher Phillips, Greta Ruedisueli, Zephaniah Ruggles, Moritz Schudel, Megan Jones Shiotani, Alec Spangler, Elaine Stokes, AJ Sus, Catherine Tang, Héctor Tarrido-Picart, Seok Min Yeo, Jessica Yurkofsky, Menghi Zhang.

Editors and publishers: Jane M. Curran, Anne Hegeman, Mark Mones, Ellen Satrom, Cecilia Sorochin, Boyd Zenner.

And: Linda and Donald Desimini; Sam, Louise, Suzanne, and Robert Sullivan; Rachel, Marjorie, and Mark Bauer.

This project received critical funding from the Dean’s Junior Faculty Grant programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

cyclical city

Figure 1. Sequencing the cyclical city, Philadelphia, 1999–2019: a hypothetical drive over, under, and around the Betsy Ross Bridge.

Prologue

About a decade ago, in the Bridesburg neighborhood of Philadelphia, I took a long walk along the forgotten and largely inaccessible Frankford Creek diversion channel, starting out near Delaware Avenue, one of the few at-grade crossings. At some point along an overgrown path, I passed through an open chain-link fence that opened to the wide prospect of the Delaware River. The broad scale of the river was framed and augmented by the enormous buttresses of the highway bridge above; the eye drawn out and up and away from the ground, and only when I looked back down into the water was I snapped out of a kind of sky-daze. Along the water’s edge, the riprap, I soon realized, bore names. Broken, unclaimed headstones, it turns out, were helping to support the interstate. Cars racing by hundreds of feet above depended on these old lost souls.

Creek, channel, fence, river, highway, water, granite carved to the specifications of an undertaker and the next of kin: these juxtapositions—some based on ingrained histories of urban development, others unique and peculiar—manifest layers of urban change. The specific types of changes, their stages and dates, can be peeled back to tell a story. The waterfront, marginalized by industrial development gone defunct, became a location of a transportation megaproject in the late 1960s and early 1970s.¹ The project included a new bridge across the Delaware River and a connecting highway to bring the bridge traffic to the nearby interstate. This highway portion, constructed at a perpendicular to the river, bisected a neighborhood that was already isolated, sandwiched between a major interstate and the river. The interstate itself, realized with Federal Highway Act of 1956 funds, was still a recent addition to the area when the bridge project was initiated. Neighborhood protests eventually stopped some roadway construction—a planned continuation of the bridge highway to meet another highway over 2.5 miles away. The project was literally cut off, leaving naked columns in the middle of the interstate, planned to carry the load of the highway, and two flyover ramps truncated and unconnected. These ghost ramps remain a visual reminder of the disconnect between the preexisting fabric of the city and the ensuing transportation construction efforts. The giant spaghetti of concrete ramps sits atop the old and current beds of the Frankford Creek itself partially realigned, diverted, and sewered between the late 1800s and 1956. The concrete ramps also fly over an adjacent rail line, which runs along the creek built in the late 1800s, again during a time of major transportation investments. The freight and regional passenger rail, too, crosses the Delaware River on the first bridge constructed over the river in Philadelphia, completed in 1896. The various systems—waterway, railway, highway—are layered on top of each other and placed at different elevations, each representing different eras of city building. Driving along the local industrial byway of Richmond Street, the car moves under the railroad embankment, over the creek, past the on-ramp to the bridge, and under its roadway connection to eventually arrive at a residential neighborhood of 1920s row houses. These houses, built for white European immigrants, sit next to a Catholic cemetery from 1887 and on the previous trapping grounds and farmlands of the Swedish settlers who first displaced the homelands and altered the watershed of the Taconick Indians, a tribe of the Lenni Lenape. The Swedish were in turn displaced by Dutch, British, German, Irish, Polish, and American claims.

About seven miles away in another neighborhood, around the time of the bridge construction, an old inner-city cemetery in disrepair was condemned by the city. Ownership was transferred to a nearby university looking to build a parking lot to attract commuting students. Car travel was increasing, and parking was difficult. The cemetery, built in 1839 in the Victorian garden style, had been slowly modified with time. When it was built, the area was not yet developed. As the city expanded, streets were cut through the original plot. The cemetery reached capacity in 1920, and by the 1950s, maintenance was at a bare minimum. The neighborhood around it was also transitioning, as incentives such as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, or the GI Bill, and new housing construction were pulling white families to the suburbs. The Levittown, Pennsylvania, development opened twenty-five miles away in 1958. Homes were not sold to African Americans. The city struggled to keep up, and lending practices discouraged investment in older, racially heterogeneous neighborhoods such as the one where the cemetery was located. The cemetery was destroyed, or nearly destroyed. Eight thousand bodies were claimed and moved individually. The remaining twenty thousand were transferred en masse to a cemetery nine miles north in another jurisdiction. The headstones were sold to the construction company responsible for the bridgework, filling a need for limestone and granite riprap for the bridge substructure. The cemetery was paved over and converted to a parking lot. The alignment of a nearby high school reflects the angle of the old cemetery’s perimeter—a skew taken off an adjacent street that follows an old Indian trail along a ridge in the city rather than one following the later city grid. In addition, a few stone walls and a couple of London plane trees remain, indicating the original grade of the cemetery and the city, nearly ten feet above some of the lowered streets around it. As for the parking lot, much of it has been converted to athletic facilities, reflecting the changing priorities of American universities.

The destruction of the cemetery and construction of the bridge are still united forty years later, on a literal margin, at the interface of land, water, and infrastructure. In this littoral zone, a new rocky habitat is created. It is an unfathomable yet also sadly routine story. The details and particular circumstances are unique—few bridge abutments are constructed with headstones—but the overall storylines—building infrastructure along creeks and in valleys, investing in massive road construction projects, delaying or halting projects as a result of citizen protests, isolating or destroying fallow cemeteries and parklands, expanding campuses and institutions, paving urban surfaces, investing differentially in different urban areas, engaging in policies that lead to racial segregation, causing populations to shift either through forced relocation or as a result of political and economic decisions, leaving behind other populations—are present in many places. These registrations manifest physically in the urban landscape, where the layers overlap, and where previous occupations are never fully cleared: centenarian walls and trees frame a small remnant sexagenarian parking lot and expansive athletic facilities built in the last decade.

Introduction

The Underlying Condition

This book focuses on the sites, circumstances, and contexts of abandonment as well as the political, social, economic, ecological underpinnings, and the designed responses to these conditions. It examines the differentially shifting urban landscape over long time cycles, uncovering dramatic shifts in the landscape, that can be both singular and episodic. It argues that history matters, and that past actions and policies have played a fundamental role in producing and sustaining abandonment. It also counters the notion that change is unidirectional, toward advancement and progress, and debunks myths that seek to generalize geographic and temporal situations. It looks at patterns of growth and decline and their periodic and potentially repetitive nature. It reveals the emergent properties of the shrinkage landscape, or the resultant landscapes of economic decline. In doing so, the book tests the idea of cycles with regard to long-term transformation, to place the problematic narrative of growth and decline in a relative and contingent lens. The cycles refer to both the evolution of the cities and sites themselves and the alterations to the specific material conditions present. Water, plant, crop, and material cycles exist at the elemental level and within the built environment as development promotes and resists these cycles and these cycles promote and resist development.

The work builds on design literature around the void but challenges the implication that the land is empty.¹ Instead, the terms abandoned, and fallow are adopted to emphasize the deliberate jettisoning of the land (metaphorically speaking, of course, as land cannot be thrown away) and the potential of a pause to nurture, restore and allow for inventive futures for these latent landscapes.² Ultimately, this book develops a framework to understand these abandoned and fallow landscapes beyond their aesthetic qualities in order to posit a fundamental role for spatial design practice to transform these spaces through time. It pushes against the fetishization of voids and ruins, demanding accountability to and reparations for the local inhabitants. It looks at the deep physical and social topographies of five cities, each layered with diverse material and cultural memories over centuries, as a thick substrate primed for a radical shift in modes of living with the landscape. It critiques the singular, parcel-level strategies that seek to replace one use with the next, that rely on technofixes that focus solely on the logics of capital markets: efficiency, monetary returns, short-term evaluation.³ Finally, it argues conversely for the potential of aggregation and slow incremental transformation, and the ability to empower and build communal wealth through land reform and spatial design. It develops a design approach and methodology that confronts histories of colonization and systemic failure and foregrounds the specific affordances of the land itself (hydrology, vegetation, topography, geology, infrastructural capacity, occupation potential); the importance of cyclical change; and the particularities of the cultural, political, and physical context. These themes are explored in depth through changing landscapes in five cities—Philadelphia, Berlin, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and St. Louis—across centuries, from periods of great upheaval to ones of relative stability and even growth.

Figure 2. Dissonance, Youngstown, 2011: a mismatch of GPS map and view, where the view is not what one might imagine when looking at the map.

The framework and methodology combine text and original visuals. Each city and its projects are researched, visited, and drawn in a particular manner. The fallow and abandoned landscapes are put into cartographic dialogue with the key urban structuring elements (waterways and floodplains in Philadelphia; rails and forest reserves in Berlin; valleys and soils in Lisbon; interstices and canals in Amsterdam; and highways, levees, and bridges in St. Louis). The fallow ground and projects are juxtaposed with an urban plan and a planning history. A set of itinerant sections relates the plans from above to the movement through the city and call out the particular project locations. These sites are drawn in plan and section over time, as well as in an axonometric view to give a three-dimensional understanding of the sites and chosen topographical moments. In addition, the rudimentary materials (stormwater meadow, Robinia pseudoacacia, shed and Arundo donax teepee, sand, brick, Helianthus annuus) are photographed and illustrated to provide textural quality and scalar understanding. In the end, the history and design cycles are shown, intertwined in a complex wheel of interdependency where events and statistics are related temporally. The techniques relate history and space, analysis and imagination dynamically through time.

Figure 3. City profiles: sections through Philadelphia, Berlin, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and St. Louis showing key structuring elements.

Abandonment

The idea of abandonment is complex. The term is rooted etymologically in loss and exuberance, devotion and surrender, relinquishment of property and freedom of inhibition. Abandon and abandonment represent the full cycle of inhabitation and the attendant care models. Abandonment is both the state of being left behind and the action of relinquishing.

The cultural and economic value of a landscape is dependent on context, both the physical surroundings (location matters) and the cultural history (lineage matters). The economic value of land varies significantly depending on its situation within a city, a region, or the country as a whole, and this value fluctuates with time and market cycles. The price of housing, for example, is split between the cost of the structure and the value of the land. The land value varies widely; in 2014 it ranged from 5 percent to 34.4 percent of the total price in Detroit and from 72.3 percent to 88.9 percent in San Francisco.⁴ Economic values change with circumstance, but so does cultural appreciation. The swaths of meadows occupying abandoned city neighborhoods are perceived very differently than the seeded meadows that flow across suburban campuses or even those that replace fallow agricultural lands at the urban periphery. The differences in species mix and ecological characteristics may be indiscernible, but the contextual differences override the similarities. A zoom-in renders the meadows comparable whereas a zoom-out reveals the disparities. The thin vegetative cover cannot hide the past site narratives nor the distinctions in long-term investment.

It is crucial to return to this idea of abandonment and the notion that the level of abandonment that a site incurs becomes part of its essence and ascribed value. Analogous to the hybridity between nature and nurture in human development, the site is governed both by its physical characteristics and its cultural history—and to some degree these cannot be separated.⁵ Take, for example, three sites along the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts: the Arnold Arboretum, the Bussey Brook Meadow (now part of the Arboretum) and Franklin Park. Nearly contiguous and all recognized as part of an important and valued corridor within the city, the three sites have evolved separately, as triplets separated at conception.

As part research institution for Harvard University and part public park for the city of Boston, the Arnold Arboretum is a horticultural display grounds. Established in 1872 and designed in collaboration with the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the Arnold Arboretum has been continuously operated as a living collection of trees, shrubs, and woody vines—meticulously documented, studied, and maintained by researchers and staff.⁶ The plants are deliberately placed and carefully maintained. Human touch is everywhere.

By contrast, the Bussey Brook Meadow, prior to its unification and total adoption by the Arnold Arboretum in 1996, has been subjected to multiple owners and multiple transgressors throughout its postcolonial history.⁷ The site, now a research ground for urban ecology, has been cut off from the surrounding fabric by roadways and rail berms and crisscrossed by utilities. Its hydrology has been significantly altered both inadvertently and deliberately. It has served as an impromptu landfill, a stormwater impoundment area, and the site of neighborhood controversy. It has housed community gardens and has been home to transient populations. The vegetation is spontaneous—an arboretum gone wild with its lushness an indicator of resiliency.⁸ Human abuse is everywhere.

Franklin Park represents a middle ground, between active management and active neglect, emblematic of the struggle for funding for public park maintenance especially in neighborhoods with chronic public and private disinvestment. Also designed by Frederick Law Olmsted as his large masterpiece at the end of the Emerald Necklace, the park faced immediate pressure for alteration after it opened in the late 1880s. A golf course had replaced the country park within ten years of construction. And there were further appropriations: it served as home to a zoo, a stadium, and a hospital. Alongside these large encroachments, to borrow Olmsted’s term, many of the original structures have deteriorated or disappeared. The circulation system has been significantly altered; some plantings have gone wild while others are dying en masse. Ecological succession and crude maintenance drive the vegetal transformations. The park has its major bones, but the tissue is fragmented. Human touch is varied.

The three sites reflect their diverse lineages. They represent a gradient from tamed to wild, maintained to neglected, restrained to abandoned. The differences work at the site level, but within each site, nuance prevails. Locations within the arboretum are wild enclaves perfect for rebellious parties of teenagers; well-kept, monumental granite gates enclose Bussey Brook Meadow; and the recreational areas within Franklin Park are self-sustaining and revenue-generating. These differences underscore a need for close and critical spatial reading, for a long gaze at the individual materials and properties of the sites themselves as well as an interrogation of the governing political, economic, environmental, and cultural structures and systems at play. The three sites do differ in their physical properties—properties formed over millions of years—but these differences have been enhanced through the past four hundred years of development. This is, of course, old news, but a deep look at the specific outcomes of recent history is astonishing. The physical residues reflect both the care internal to the sites, as described above, and the larger patterns of structural disinvestment that result in the inequitable distribution of resources across municipal, regional, and national landscapes.

Figure 4. Translocations, after Benton MacKaye and borrowing the idea of inflow and outflow or in-migration and out-migration.

Figure 5. Regional flows, after Benton MacKaye and again borrowing the idea of inflow and outflow or in-migration and out-migration.

Time

It is with time that the effects of abandonment become evident, that the results of human care and neglect register profoundly through the urban landscape. It can be argued that the time scale of urban abandonment is both shorter and longer than that of occupation. The systems are governed by economics. On the one hand is the issue of durable goods: buildings are erected quickly with demand and removed slowly without it. On the other is the relatively quick evacuation of populations due to conflict, weather, or geologic events (storms or earthquakes) as well as economic and political change. The measure of transformation depends on the mobility of the actors and agents and the physical characteristics and scale of the site. Programs and people shift, capable of flowing like a river, to use the American planner and conservationist Benton MacKaye’s analogy to describe American migrations from Westward Expansion to metropolitan sprawl.⁹

But this type of change is more aptly defined as translocation rather than transformation. The movement is rapid and fluid, rather than slow and halting. Empty receptacles are left behind, dry riverbeds without the water that shaped them. And it is these dry riverbeds—the residual urban formations—that are resistant to change. Adaptation of the built fabric to new models of inhabitation, new environmental conditions, and new support systems is a project of decades and centuries. Given the slow process of change and abandonment, how do we address the residual landscape? How do we see it again as something other than derelict? How do we come to appreciate this kind of fallow? To do so, it is necessary to look closely at the relatively slow change that is happening, to embrace the pause required for invention, to make room for the idea of zero growth to flourish, and to understand the longer histories at play in order to change the dominant, destructive story lines.¹⁰ We cannot be lured by the physical forms and blind to the underlying discriminatory factors that led to their existence. These are sites of incredible environmental and social trauma that demand renewed investment. But at the same time, we cannot be paralyzed by their legacies or nostalgic for their heyday so as to repeat the single-minded models of the past. Instead, these sites hold the potential for true transformation, for new spatial forms, new material expressions, and new modes of collective governance whereby those left out of past plans and projects have a role in writing the next chapters.

Growth and Decline (and Growth and Decline)

Abandoned, previously built-upon urban land is a feature of any city, an evolutionary conceit of urbanization. Yet while pervasive and nearly universal, abandoned land reserves are nonetheless correlated with cities facing population and economic loss, where the conundrum of growing reserves of underutilized land is further exacerbated by decreasing financial resources and monetary land values. Governmentally operated land banks are becoming the adoption agencies for unwanted urban land, but land banks offer no clear direction, leaving an enigmatic terrain. The use and value of the land (and the land bank) seem vague to the general public.¹¹ Attempts have been made toward holistic quantification and qualification.¹² Yet a critical question remains: what can become of this land inventory that is so rich despite its neglect, despite the derision it inspires?

Figure 6. Population fluctuations in the five cities over time

In Western capitalist culture, we are obsessed with growth, to such an extent that it is the only story we hear in most cities. Growth narrative dominates the collective imagination, but cycles of both growth and decline are a part of the overall urban trajectory.¹³ Again, the physical fabric of cities is enduring, but its response to economic growth and decline is not equal. In times of increased demand, new buildings are constructed quickly. New subdivisions are platted. New urban plans are concocted. The response to decreased demand, on the other hand, is slow. With oversupply of housing, buildings, and plots, entropy ensues. The built environment is often left to unfettered structural atrophy or unencumbered vegetal growth, depending on your perspective. Either way, when development falters, abandonment occurs, and anxiety follows. It becomes difficult to imagine a turnaround when deep within the recesses of contraction, just as it is hard to foresee decline in times of growth. In 1930, the New York Times reported, Detroit was able to cut down trees and plant skyscrapers. Today, wild urban woodlands are emerging in the vicinity of crumbling skyscrapers. Even when the city appears stagnant, it is changing. Yet, the patience for this slow, perhaps invisible transformation does not exist. Inertia masks a different kind of growth, but this isn’t to say that a city merely returns to its previous state: from forest back to forest. Rather as it travels though time the city is layered, gathering materials and knowledge, like a snowball. The goal is not to dwell on past lost but to see the urban landscape as capable of evolution, and not just in spite of its ups and downs but because of them.

Though cities may appear to have died in the short term, history has shown us that many urban centers do ultimately come back as transformed versions of their former selves, over the course of years or decades or even centuries. Take Rome, the classic example. At its height in 100 AD, the city boasted a population of over 1,000,000 people. By 400 AD, the population began to fall. By 500 AD, a mere 100,000 people were estimated to remain Romans; by the end of the Gothic Wars in 554 AD, 30,000 people.¹⁴ Yet Rome rebounded, gaining population steadily from the 1800s onward, to once again surpass 1,000,000 in the 1930s, and 2,750,000 in 2010.¹⁵ Now we look to Venice, one of 350 global cities that have experienced a steep decline in population since the 1950s.¹⁶ In the context of the climate crisis, its prospects look dire. In the context of the longer cycles of cities, Rome represents some hope for places such as Venice or St. Louis, whose present-day situation is unsettling.

Cycles

Evolution is a difficult idea when it comes to the design project. Nostalgia is a cultural value that poses a formidable barrier to evolution. Yet, to take a non-nostalgic approach to the evolution of the built environment and its designed interventions is refreshing. To imagine that what we make will inevitably change, for better and worse, relieves a kind of pressure and embraces a necessary reality. Designs, even good ones, are fleeting.

To this end, it is also refreshing to consider nonlinear models and longer periods of time. Here, it is possible to push back on the often destructive forward march of growth and progress, to investigate the periodic, the cyclical, and the recursive.

Something periodic happens again at regular intervals or intermittently. Something cyclical returns to itself, or an altered form of its former self. It is complete, reaching a momentary resolution. It is like a line closing on itself to form a circle. Something cyclical can also be defined as having a specific chronological period, for example, a solar or lunar cycle. Thus, a cycle has a period, and both the cyclical and the periodic are recursive.

In this volume, I consider the overall trajectories of growth and decline, not as either growing or declining, but rather as part of the same cyclical transformations. At the same time, I investigate recurrence related to landscape characteristics and design rudiments: the water, vegetal, crop, material, and life cycles. In the end, through each project, these transformations come together to expose the persistent qualities and potentials of the urban landscape. These changes are understood critically relative to other metric and decision-making cycles that often lead to structural disinvestment and limited readings of vitality. Cities are evaluated on three-month fiscal periods, leaders can shift with political elections every two and four years, and some resources are allocated based on decennial census counts.

Returning to the example of the Detroit skyscrapers and woodlands—the city was booming in 1930, rapidly felling trees for buildings. Those buildings are crumbling 80 years later, when seedlings are being deployed by the tens of thousands with the hopes of building an urban forest. Those trees will mature in 40–50 years. The period of change is, if all goes as currently planned, 125 years—a long time in human years and a relatively short one on a geological time scale. This cycle—from forest to forest—is understood in terms of the overall landscape, as well as the various changes in vegetal growth, political will, and social investment. In addition, it is also understood as an accruing condition, where difference over time is emphasized. The evolution is