Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Cahokia
and city. The narratives by which we fix ourselves within the
coordinates of our desire are different.
What myth of landscape would the Cahokia Mounds speak
to us if we could reanimate them? What are the narratives of
the farmer in Fife, the hound hunter in Derby, the plantation
manager in Argyll, the seaplane constable of the Highlands
and Islands? Platforms are for modern-day tricksters and
shamans to tell our stories and their vicissitudes, the story of
our speaking landscape, the land that could speak for us to us,
if only we could tell its stories. What are the narratives of the
land? Digitize it. 3
Collapse
We are today hemmed in by stories of environmental collapse.
A recent issue of the journal Nature headlined ‘Ecological
complexity untangled: the architecture of ecosystem fragility’.
A recent Guardian had a full page on water scarcity. Al Gore’s
documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, plays
everywhere. If the ecosystem is an architecture, it ought to be
possible to make its networks visible in ways that most people
can understand. The asymmetric, intricate nested networks
that link species into food chains ought to be made visible so
that we can see how they shift and change when we insert
ourselves into them. 4
We all know the world is heating up, we all know we are
losing our rural culture: yet we are incapable of doing anything
about it. Most of us don’t wake up in the morning and say
‘Hmmm, I think I’ll pave a few more acres today. I think I’ll
drive a few more species to extinction.’ But we do it anyway. It
is our ‘style’ – lifestyle that is. Remember the truth of jokes?
Remember ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’? The
environment will be destroyed unless we find the platforms
from which to mediate our stories about the landscape.
In ‘The effectiveness of symbols’ Lévi-Strauss describes how
a shaman is called to attend to a difficult birth. He is called,
not because he can, but because he cannot, offer medical
assistance. The horizon of the shamans’ science had not yet
expanded to encompass what we recognise as natal care. This
woman is in the hands of the larger order of nature. The role
of the shaman – like the psychoanalyst – is to fix this event
that they cannot otherwise understand into the coordinates of
their symbolic universe, so that what was traumatic and
frightening becomes assimilable and understandable. 5
It may be that our fate is environmental death. The digital
landscape may be our efflorescent Cahokia before the
collapse. Like the shaman’s myth, narrative explains my world
to me so that I am able to bear what would otherwise be
unbearable. A speaking land is about how we can create the
narratives that allow us to understand our role in our own
destruction, and by so doing, to take responsibility for it. The
only way we can take pleasure in what we are doing to
ourselves is to take responsibility for it. But we pretend not to
know, and feel victimised by what is seemingly out of our
control. This project for a future digital landscape terrain is
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