Recycling Suburbia

"The leftover parts of San Diego's older subdivisions--standard framing, joists, connectors, plywood, aluminum windows, garage doors--are being disassembled and recombined just across the border. A few miles south, in Tijuana, new informal suburbs--some call them slums--spring up from one day to another. This river of urban waste flows across the Tijuana-San Diego to make something dramatically new.

On the edges of Tijuana, rife with poverty, social upheaval and a severe housing shortage, the detritus of San Diego's suburbs is reassembled into a fresh milieu, a city made of waste. But not only small, scattered debris is imported and recycled into makeshift housing in Tijuana. Entire pieces of one city travel southward as residential ready-made houses are directly plugged in to the other city's fabric. This process begins when a Tijuana speculator travels to San Diego to buy up the little post-World War II bungalows that have been slated for demolition. The little houses are loaded onto trailers to travel to Tijuana, where they clear customs before making their journey south. On some days here, one can see houses, just like cars and pedestrians, waiting in line to cross the border." ~ Teddy Cruz

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About 18 months ago I posted on Teddy Cruz, an architect who works at the border of Tijuana and San Diego. This evening I came across a short essay of his - "A City Made of Waste" - in The Nation. It is accompanied by a film (lifted here) of the same name made by Laura Hanna. Ironically enough, I wrote a post yesterday and called it Recycling the Suburbs? where I complained that "design ideas tend to be class-blind." Well, Cruz comments on the underlying class and ethnic basis of the processes by which suburban San Diego literally is being disassembled and recycled in Tijuana.

Recycling the Suburbs?

At The New York Times yesterday there was an interesting piece by Allison Arieff entitled "Saving the Suburbs, Part 2." As her title implies Arieff had published an earlier installment called "What Will Save the Suburbs?". I'd missed it when it first appeared, but you can find it here. Arieff speculates on design strategies that might in a real sense recycle suburban spaces in user-friendly, greener, economically viable ways. In the process she refers to a whole slew of studies and proposals - "ideas" - for how to turn commercial dis-investment and real estate crisis to useful ends. I have since my college days been fascinated by these sots of ideas. But I also agree with the reader who commented that the design ideas tend to be class-blind. Among the most problematic aspects of suburbia in the U.S. is that it typically embodies quite pronounced economic and racial homogeneity and segregation. I see that not as an insurmountable obstacle but as a challenge - a problem that perhaps Arieff might address.

Rhondal McKinney

Untitled #1293, from Farm Families Project (1985).
Photograph © Rhondal McKinney

Midwest Landscape 947B-381. Photograph © Rhondal McKinney

Last week I posted on some really powerful landscapes by Art Sinsabaugh. That post elicited a comment suggesting that I track down Rhondal McKinney too. (Thanks ps!) Well, I've taken that excellent suggestion and here is some of his work too. You can find more here at the (cumbersome) web page of the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

What would you say about McKinney's work? Well, three things, at least. First of all, much of it occupies the intersection of portrait and landscape. It is not just that the landscapes are populated, and that the inhabitants have left traces of all sorts, as in, say, Robert Adams [1] [2]. It is that in his series of farm families he makes their portraits against the often somewhat dire and bleak landscapes where they work and make their home. Moreover, he locates them, usually centrally, in truly panoramic views of the land.

Second of all, his images impress me because they capture relationships and vistas that are disappearing. Here in Western NY the situation is much the same. The farmlands are being engulfed by development. There has been a pause - involuntary, imposed by the stagnant economy - but the farms and those who work them are an endangered species. I wonder how many of McKinney's mid-1980s farm families have managed to hold on to their farms?

So, third, when I see his portrait/landscapes as austere, I have the feeling not just of natural harshness but of political-economic harshness as well. For, as we know, development - sprawling development [1] [2] - hardly is a natural or inevitable phenomenon. Neither are the problems and stresses in our distorted and distended agricultural economy "natural." On both dimensions, and several others that impact farmers and their landscapes, politics is hard at work.
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* This is a big topic. Two places to start: David Ehrenfeld. 2002. "The cow tipping point," Harper's Magazine, 305:13-20 (October) and William Grieder. 2000. "The Last Farm Crisis," The Nation (November 20). These are reproduced here and here.

Before & After

Higley Hot Dogs, 2005 © Andrew Phelps

From the series Oblivion (2004-2006) © David Maisel

At lensculture there are items on projects by Andrew Phelps and David Maisel that form a nice (I presume intended) complement. Phelps offers "The Last Days of Higley" a photo essay on the small Arizona town where his grandparents' had lived as it is swallowed up by urban sprawl (Phoenix). Maisel offers "Oblivion: Los Angeles from the Air" which is just what the title portends. Both projects are provocative - a sort of Before & After on seemingly irresistible 'advance' of urbanization. That said, while we may lament both the loss of before and the arrival of after, it seems important to me not to romanticize the former nor demonize the latter.

Flag Desecration

"Northwest Suburb of Chicago, Illinois, 2006" © Chris Schedel

Back to Burtynsky & Politics

Photo: © Edward Burtynsky

Over at State of the Art Miki Johnson (no relation) has a brief review of what seems like a not terribly interesting "documentary" film that is not-quite-about Ed Burtynsky and his work. I've not seen the film, but will get our library to buy it. That said, I find the review interesting because it raises the matter, once again, of in Johnson's words "why he [Burtynsky] hasn't gotten involved in the politics of environmentalism -- even though his large-format prints of humanity's effects on the landscape could easily serve as its posters." Although Johnson praises the visual aspects of the film ("with beautiful long pans and careful attention to composition"), she (I think, she) finds the soundtrack to the film irritating and distracting because it is ominous and seems to be prompting the viewer to find Burtynsky's "enthralling pictures" similarly darkly disconcerting. Johnson seems to think the images simply are disconcerting. And she therefore criticizes the filmmakers for departing from "Burtynsky's diplomatic apolitical" stance.

I find Burtynsky's stance here (and Johnson's endorsement of it) irresponsible. Given his purported concern for the environment, and given the pressures of environmental degradation, how does he justify being diplomatic or apolitical? His images are big and colorful and striking and they could well be "posters" for virtually anything. The notion that they somehow speak for themselves, or that they necessarily prompt viewers to reflectively examine their environmental "footprint" is amazingly naive and complacent.

About Burtynsky, Johnson writes: "With his vast photos he has uncovered the disturbing breadth of our greed and ambition." There are people who might look at the picture reproduced above (lifted from Johnson's post) and see not waste heaps but, at worst, the inevitable by-product of economic progress and, better, an opportunity. Various sorts of entrepreneurs, after all, can collect wire, strip the insulation, and sell the metal as scrap. And are there not more direct indications of 'our greed and ambition?' If you want to get people to reconsider their carbon footprints, why not look at the 'big ticket items' instead of simply the waste to which they contribute only marginally?

"Glowing" © Patti Hallock

For instance, compare the Burtynsky image above to any in this terrific series Nocturnal Suburbia by Patti Hallock.* These images reveal immensely wasteful patterns of resource use - McMansions built in sprawling subdivisions. [1] (Let's leave aside the tacit commentary on family or community life in suburbia.) They are no more preachy than Burtynsky. The composition and use of color and lighting all are, I think, striking. But, this image is no more "political" than Burtynsky's. It might serve as a "poster" for real estate developers, home security firms, lighting systems, etc. - what about those ominous shadows!?! ... And I know lots of folks who would find the images in this series (or Burtynsky's!) not in the least discomfiting.

I have, in the past, recommended this review of Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes by Rebecca Solnit. She has reproduced it in her new book and it gets directly to the heart of what I like about Burtynsky and what I find troubling about him too. Solnit argues persuasively that Burtynsky "approaches" the task/accomplishment of getting viewers to think about the causal structures and processes that generate the startling scenes he depicts. I think he does, but only incompletely. And in order to go further and accomplish that task, he really needs more than pictures. They don't speak for themselves. Someone needs to speak for them too. ... Ed?

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* Thanks to Alec Soth for bringing Hallock's very impressive work (as well as that of a couple dozen other photographers) to my attention.

A Field Guide to Sprawl

I just picked up a little picture book A Field Guide to Sprawl (WW Norton, 2004) which is a collaborative work by author Dolores Hayden who teaches at hte Architecture School at Yale and aerial photographer Jim Wark. The book offers an "illustrated vocabulary of sprawl," a lexicon for envisioning and discussing the consequences of uncontrolled land use.In her introduction Hayden writes: "When people struggle to interpret their local landscapes aerial photographs reveal the scale of existing and new development. In an era when a truck stop can be larger than a traditional town, aerial images convey the vast spread of twenty-first- century development and can bring up-to-the- minute data on the progress of construction. Also, aerial photographs can be understood by people without technical training in a way zoning maps, zoning codes, satellite surveys, and traditional site plans cannot. If shot at altitutdes of 1,000 to 2,ooo feet, they can show building facades as well as site massing. Although they rarely include recognizable people, when aerial images are shot at oblique angles and at relatively low altitutdes, showing land and buildings together, they entwine natural and constructed elements. Low-level, oblique-angle pictures can establish a complete visual inventory of a town because they can show inaccessible places such as wetlands or steep terrain, and reveal hidden sites such a dumps or gated communities."

Here are a couple of examples of images from the book that illustate the difficulty of envisioning "hidden sites" of the sort Hayden mentions:


Tire Recycling Dump. Midway, Colorado, CO, United States. (11/5/1997) © Jim Wark.


Golf Condos. Palm Desert, California, CA United States (3/10/2002) © Jim Wark.

On the highly questionable economic consequences of sprawl I recommend: Robert W. Burchell, Anthony Downs, and Sahan Mukherji, Sprawl Costs (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2005) as a terrific companion to the Hayden/Wark book. Burchell, et. al. puncture the common refrain that only uncontrolled development is economically viable.