Media Matters in Landscape Architecture

The reciprocal formation of ideas, representations, and the material world entails various technologies that mediate their relationships. Numerous books and articles have examined the concepts of “media” and “environment,” and recently, there has been a proliferation of publications that explore the relationship between these two ideas in ways that go beyond early media theorists’ formulations of media environments or media ecology as developed in the 1960s.9 One of the criticisms of the limitations of these initial conceptions is that environment and ecology were treated metaphorically rather than materially; that is, they referred only to the relationships between humans and technology as environment and to ecology as the complex interactions between human cognition and media technologies—especially “mass media”—without paying attention to the material reality through which all technologies are made and in which they are embedded.10

Our approach to the relationship between these two terms is very much in line with that of Adam Wickberg and Johan Gärdebo’s in Environing Media (2023), which was published while Media Matters was in progress. The editors define environing media as those that explicitly focus on shaping the human–earth relationship and describe activities, such as how data are collected and acted upon, as the middle ground of environment as media.11 As Sverker Sörlin states in his contribution to their collection, “Environing consists of processes whereby environments appear as

historical products, and technologies and media as the tools required for the environing to take place.”12 Thus, as media change—and approaches to their study evolve—so do conceptions of “environment,” and vice versa. Accordingly, it is essential to consider recent significant shifts in the operational aspects of images and models, especially those that mediate between landscapes—which are localized or regional and primarily terrestrial places—and environments that have a broader scope, encompassing the “ephemera” that affect local landscapes, as well as those that span across scales and include global environmental change.

In its early usage, the term “environment” referred to the immediate surroundings; at the scale of the landscape, it would therefore be considered coterminous with it.13 Although efforts to modulate environments to create particular landscape characteristics through attempts at climate modification are not new—such as afforestation to generate moisture and fertile

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the medium matters, the shift from analog to digital does not always constitute a fundamental change. In some cases, as in Mitchell’s example of a family photograph, the medium is not critical to the image’s function; the image itself is not infrastructural or operational in the sense described here. However, there are many instances where the distinction does matter, where the “technical process” is the content and the medium is the message. 35 This is undoubtedly true for images that embed spatial data for the express purpose of quantifying, mapping, and modeling environmental and landscape change. As Pritchard aptly states, “environmental knowledge cannot be isolated from environmental knowledge-making.” 36

Media Matters goes behind the scenes to consider how media technologies that have emerged in recent decades are reshaping the practices of artists, designers, and scientists. The media infrastructure of climate science and Earth remote sensing, coupled with the increased availability of spatial information and modeling software, provide the context for many of the chapters that follow. Many of the practices and projects are geospatial in nature, where the media and methods employed are designed to capture phenomena that are not directly visible to human perception and where

there is a high degree of uncertainty or changeability due to dynamic material conditions. What has become increasingly apparent is that the pace of climate change is faster than models predicted two decades ago, and with that comes the recognition that uncertainty and variability (which have always been there) cannot be tamed. As Durham Peters notes, “Media capture and fail to capture time, whose fleetingness is the most beautiful and difficult of all natural facts.”37 This has been a primary challenge for our discipline.

Contributors

In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of practice and the aims of this book, we have invited contributions from a range of disciplines, including landscape architecture, ecology, civil engineering, art history, environmental history, STS, and media studies. The projects focus heavily on the US context, partly because of our familiarity with the practical context, but also because the data infrastructure and technology that underpin much of the media discussed originated in the United States. Many have pointed out the problematic military origins of these technologies. At the same

Measuring the Sky from the Curve of the Earth

Jeffrey Moro

Weather stations are physical structures comprising diverse scientific instruments that measure meteorological phenomena. Some are building-sized facilities, while others are small enough to hold in your hand. They are located on land or at sea, or even—through weather balloons launched from such sites—reach high into the atmosphere. Larger weather stations often have staff who collect data and maintain the instruments; others, particularly those in remote geographic locations, are at least partially or even completely automated. It’s difficult to fix a hard number to how many weather stations are operating across the planet right now—the global network for the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an agency of the United Nations tasked with “promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science,” comprises over 10,0000 national-level

“Additional complications have emerged”

Karen M’Closkey and Keith VanDerSys

An overlay of Philadelphia’s FEMA maps from 1979 and 2015 (purple dot pattern) shows a 14% reduction in the 100 year floodplain area (light purple tone) despite the population in the combined area increasing by more than 5%. Structures included in the 1979 map are no longer covered by the current 2015 FEMA zones, even though the risk of flooding has grown due to increased storm volatility.

On July 4, 2023, as Americans celebrated Independence Day with barbecues and fireworks, the Earth recorded its hottest day in over 120,000 years, a figure that will likely be surpassed by the time of this publication.1 While this fact confirms the alarming trends projected by climate models, global averages cannot capture how the increasingly severe and unpredictable weather caused by a rapidly heating planet will affect specific places. In The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, journalist Jack Bittle paints a vivid portrait of domestic climate migrants whose intimate stories portend what many millions more Americans will face in the not-too-distant future. Bittle’s stories include people ranging from low-wage workers to the ultra-rich; those displaced by headline-grabbing “event” disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires; and those experiencing slow-moving, or less visible, disasters caused by drought, the creep of high tides, or heat. 2

Although development in coastal areas and deserts is unfortunately still increasing, this trend will likely reverse as land subsidence and sea level rise push people away from coasts, and lack of water and extreme heat drive them away from deserts. As Bittle makes clear, this displacement will be “unpredictable, chaotic, and life-changing.” 3 Not only is the United States, as a nation, ill-equipped to deal with the increasing numbers of people who will need assistance after experiencing loss from a disaster, but it is also woefully unprepared to prevent the same calamities from occurring in areas that are being developed in response to climate-induced migration.4 This is especially true in the case of floods.

This chapter considers environmental media in relation to the concept of floods as “risk objects” and the creation of floodplains as a spatial result of this concept.5 These media include hydrologic and hydraulic models that incorporate rainfall, water flow rate, and topographic data; flood maps that delineate the location and extent of floodplains based on the outputs of those models; and the physical and statistical apparatus that underlies the measurement of dynamic media—rain, wind, and tides—that the models and maps seek to represent. We use the word “creation” rather than “mapping” because, as discussed below, flood maps are not simply the media through which a hazard is documented. Rather, flood maps yield specific material and social conditions around which a particular understanding of “floodplain” emerges. This understanding conditions how and where we build and thus shapes the practice of landscape architecture. This phenomenon is not unique to the United States; however, we focus our attention

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Brian D. Harris and Justin Shawler

Utqiaġvik, formerly known as Barrow, is the locus of our five-year study to develop design and planning approaches and tools that address changing built–natural environmental interactions.3 The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth; air temperatures have increased up to four times faster than the global average, leading to warmer ground conditions and thawing permafrost with major effects on the stability of the built environment and ways of living that depend on it.4 The population has grown substantially from several hundred in the early 1900s to over 4,000 at time of publication. As a result, the city has expanded into new neighborhoods in a typical suburban morphology with detached houses in a gridded road and utility network. Since 1972, the North Slope Borough has built a host of community infrastructure in its administrative center of Utqiaġvik, including water and electrical utilities, roads, sanitation facilities, snow fences, and numerous single- and multi-story buildings. Nearly all structures are raised on wood or steel pilings driven into the underlying permafrost, permitting air flow in one meter-high crawl spaces to minimize the destabilizing effects of heat flow into the ground. However, with increasing permafrost degradation due to climate change, current ways of designing, constructing, and maintaining buildings and infrastructure in the city—and for so many more across the Arctic—face serious, if not existential, challenges that require significant multifaceted adaptations over time.

Our research team—composed of a diverse group of scientists, designers, engineers, anthropologists, and data scientists—working in

partnership with local, borough, and tribal organizations as well as federal research labs, arrived at the North Slope of Alaska in the early summer of 2022 for the first field season. The project, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation, has as its primary goal the measurement and characterization of environmental conditions in and around buildings and infrastructure built on permafrost by deploying environmental sensor arrays at several sites across Utqiaġvik. The result will be a multi-year high-resolution spatial and temporal dataset. This approach differs from most of the scientific research that has taken place on the North Slope due to the focus on the instrumentation of buildings, infrastructure, and adjacent ground instead of only focusing on the undeveloped tundra.5

The project consists of a coordinated array of environmental monitoring, with three independent networks of fixed sensor arrays within which geophysical surveys are conducted annually. In addition to a control site located on undisturbed tundra outside of the city limits at the Barrow Environmental Observatory, our instruments are located at sites with various land use designations and environmental gradients as well as on or near structures built during different time periods:

Taġiuġmiullu Nunamiullu Housing Authority’s “29 Plex” residential building (built in 1977); Barrow Utilities and Electric Cooperative’s public utilities infrastructure complex (1983); and the regional Samuel Simmonds Memorial Hospital (2013). Many of these specific locations, as well as general study areas, were initially identified and suggested to us by our community partners. Within each site, the configuration

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Muddy and debris-laden flow simulations throughout the design process highlight a possible scenario after 20 years. The topographic design is continuously adapted using iterative simulations to create a valid landscape structure capable of performing on structural, ecological, cultural, and aesthetic levels. Inputs include volume, flow depth, bed erosion, deposition, speed, and duration.

120 Christopher Streb and David Blersch

Forests as Environmental Media: Vegetalizing a Smart Forests Atlas

Jennifer Gabrys

A screenshot of the Smart Forests Atlas homepage shows the tag network structure and clustering of related tags. Clicking a tag opens a side panel, which displays contributions related to it.

Environmental digital technologies are now planetary in scope, monitoring oceans and farms, cities and atmospheres. Remote sensing satellites and in-situ sensors, lidar, and environmental robots are deployed to monitor, manage, and transform environments. In this context, forests have also become increasingly digitalized. Digitally monitored forests connect to expanded networks for documenting and managing a changing planet.1 Whether to prevent deforestation or enhance carbon storage, smart forest technologies are often programmed to optimize or augment forest services for addressing the climate crisis.

from the ground. This familiar near-ground proximity ought to be less prone to the aestheticization and misinterpretation of the landscape that often plagues more distanced imagery.

As an instrument, the drone promises a digitally escorted return to the field that renews the discipline’s foundational traditions of in-person, on-site fieldwork.9 That landscape architects now have the capacity to travel back up the mapping chain to self-map a complex site in the moment in hyper-detail—untethered from the predetermined timeframes and parameters of satellite mapping data—should be groundbreaking. Just as ubiquitous satellite imagery sparked a reimagining of the upper limits of landscape architecture and urbanism’s creative scales of operation, drone mapping potentially stretches those creative parameters downward, closer to the ground. This might manifest as more intricate and nuanced site-specific design that prioritizes amplifying existing site features and reinvigorating building craft. This focal shift is especially pertinent for design interventions on complex post-industrial wastelands and other similarly marginalized sites, such as the Albany Bulb.

In practice, the transformative promise of drone mapping is proving more complicated. Inconvenience is clearly a factor: drone sitemapping missions require far more effort and foresight than harvesting online satellite data (however inexact and outdated the latter may be). The tightening regulatory environment weighs on this convenience

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calculation, with aviation agencies and local ordinances now heavily restricting or, in many instances, prohibiting impromptu drone flight. This is with good reason, since drones not only survey but also surveil, fueling societal suspicion around a device that appears to cross the line in our social contracts, just as the Google Glass beta testers learned a decade ago in the streets and bars of San Francisco. Despite drones still being deployed sporadically, rather than systematically, it seems that we prefer our surveillers (which translates from the French as overwatchers) to remain up and out of sight, in orbit and in the cloud, where we can apply cognitive dissonance to the mass upload of personal data.10

Viewed from the other side of the UAV’s disembodied eye, our unease at being drone-surveilled is reflected in the uncanniness of the drone survey itself. By this, I posit that site mapping traces the contours of the uncanny valley, a phenomenon first perceived in robotics and animation. As representations of familiar lifeforms become more lifelike, they become more engaging – but only until an abrupt inflection point, where they appear real yet not real and elicit a sense of unease. While the uncanny valley carries over directly to landscape design representation (to include, for example, perspective renders populated with 3D humanoids) with some adaptation, it also applies to landscape architectural mapping. Site mapping, including site models and imagery, becomes more conducive as it becomes more lifelike, which is to say higher fidelity. But only up to an inflection point, where, as it approaches J. L. Borges’ fabled 1:1 map of the

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Data, Relationships, and Action

Samantha Jo Fried

IMPERVIOUS SURFACES

EPA WASTE DISCHARGE

BEACH CLOSURE

BEACH

HEAT ISLAND

IMPERVIOUS SURFACES

EPA WASTEWATER DISCHARGE

Composite and separate layers of the spatial coincidence of high-probability wastewater discharge, impervious surfaces, heat, and beach closures in Worchester, MA.

Many Earth remote sensing activities by satellite were—and still are— characterized by a “data-to-action paradigm.”1 This is a paradigm in which vast amounts of meticulous Earth data are collected with the belief that these efforts will eventually lead to action. More specifically, it is the idea that the more data about a phenomenon that experts can collect, the more apparent the best course of action on that data will become. In the data-toaction paradigm, it is not the experts’ responsibility to think about action when collecting, processing, or analyzing data. It is assumed that the data speak for themselves and that collective action toward a unified goal will become obvious and inevitable once the data are in hand. In contrast, in a “civic engagement paradigm,” discussions about the data are never far from

Massachusetts Freshwater Beaches [2021]: Water quality data for . . .

Best 11 Fishing Lakes Ponds in Rowley, MA with Reviews

Dog Friendly Beaches Worcester, MA – Last Updated December . . .

MassDOT is committed to improving the quality of stormwater runoff . . .

Massachusetts 2016 303(d) List of Impaired Waters: Final Listing of . . .

John J. Binienda Memorial Beach at Coes Pond in Worcester: $1M . . .

Coes Pond Binienda Memorial Beach in Worcester to reopen . . .

Coes Reservoir, Binienda Beach in Worcester closed to swimming . . .

Coes Reservoir – Worcester – South Worcester County

Worcester Opens Coes Pond Beach As Bacteria Levels Drop . . .

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A zoom-in of the area shown on the previous map and postings (scraped from Google) about beach closures and Coes Pond.

IMPERVIOUS SURFACES

ONLINE MENTIONS Plan to meet on

multilayered digital map that includes categorical layers of data, marked by color. The multilayered map of CRMS and its diverse forms of visualization show the digital translation of a collected ground truth that tracks temporally specified physical attributes of the area. The data categories that one can choose to make visible on the map include the locations of CRMS stations, locations of restoration project sites, elevation surveys, areas of hydrologic basins and vegetation, land indices, and areas designated as public. The visualizations of both the map, with its embedded layers, and the photographs give an observer an informatic overview of the region and provide temporal indices that make visible before and after changes that have been introduced and affect the land. Although the categorical features of the CRMS map delineate spatial and temporal parameters, providing, for example, data about the specificity of locations, the overall mediated product of the map reproduces what appears and enacts an environmental gaze with an all-encompassing view – a holistic image of a landscape made legible through its multiple layers of data.

In the CRMS map, the data layer that tracks vegetation, once clicked on, visualizes color-coded layers onto the map that mark the soil composition as salinized, brackish, freshwater, swamp, water, and other. These areas coincide with the sites of CRMS stations. When zooming into the area known as Death Alley or Cancer Alley—named so because of the amount of toxins produced through the petrochemical companies that inhabit the landscape along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans—one sees blocks of bright yellow that encase the entirety of the length of the river and its tributaries. The bright yellow color marks the areas of vegetation known as other on the map legend or, in other words, unknown. Like a neon marker, which, instead of highlighting signals a redaction, this area of “other” vegetation marks blind spots of data on the map that coincide with a lack of CRMS sites along this stretch of the Mississippi River. In an otherwise informatically comprehensive form of environmental media, what is

this broad area of “other” and how does it point toward contextual limitations of environmental monitoring? How can its (in)visibility be accounted for? What other sources of data and meaning can account for this blind spot?

One answer is the type of environmental monitoring conducted by the collaborative, investigative group Forensic Architecture, located at Goldsmiths University, in partnership with RISE St James, a community environmental justice organization. Together they trace the composition of land and its air quality in a project titled “Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana.”10 An aim of Forensic Architecture is to produce visualizations through the cross referencing of multiple data sources and media formats to bring visibility to state violence and violations of human rights that otherwise would go unseen and therefore unaccounted for; in this case, the toxic air pollution and lethal airborne pollutants emitted from the more than 200 petrochemical industrial giants that inhabit the area along the Mississippi River. The privatization of land by the petrochemical industry in this area coincides with the area that is highlighted as “other” in the color-coded maps of CRMS. Yet, this industry’s activity predominantly affects the physical and material landscape of the surrounding area, which CRMS tracks and monitors. Forensic Architecture fills in a gap in visual knowledge that also speaks to the ethical and evidentiary implications of its production. Forensic Architecture relies on multiple sources of data and imaging techniques. Like CRMS, it produces digital maps but, instead of tracking the ground composition, these maps track the composition and movement of the air in this region. This approach perhaps circumvents the lack of access due to land privatization and instead sources multiple, publicly available data sources, including wind indices, which show the speed and direction of the wind on specific dates, and cross-references them with records that list the percentages of chemical toxins present in specifically located petrochemical tanks. These sources of data are pieced together with other