| Abstract | What are the tools of feral landscape practices? How do you co-create with, and nurture the agency of, ecosystem and species? Such practices form a varied spectrum including wilding practices usually focussing on animals, of a conservation and/or land management nature, and those focussing more on plants such as “dynamic landscapes”. In all of them, ecosystems are feral in the sense that they are neither entirely wild nor domesticated. In them, animals and plants garden as much as humans.
How do you design with their unpredictable emergence? What are the techniques used? What kinds of relationships are defined between human and other?
A recent analysis of the key principles as leverage points, using the lens of systemic design, defined a primary paradigm of nurturing self-generation combined with balancing and reinforcing feedback loops created through various acts of insemination and population control of animal and plant species.
This paper will zoom closely on the acts of care applied by humans to enact on these leverage points, following the physical tools employed to co-create with these ecosystems: the gardening tools (the wheeled brush cutters, scythes, secateurs, guns…), the knowledge access and capture tools (books, smartphones, drones…), the drawing tools (paper, pencils, paint, brushes…).
More than the tools themselves, it is the way they are used that is revealing, the choice of what is cut – how much and where – and the timing – how often and when – as it is through these actions on the ground that the relationships between the various actors – humans, plants, animals, soil, water… – are negotiated.
This through reflective practice research, will reflect on the author’s, and other practitioners’, landscape practices, with a 3 hectares French rural landscape as key case study, where feral landscape processes have been applied for almost 20 years. Concepts from new-materialist, actor/network, and modern animist theories will be applied.
Five key lines of enquiry will be reflected on:
1. Ecosystems and some species are energetic and territorial and need to be disturbed or balanced with gardening tools that cut and kill. This violence is necessary to balance competition and nurture collaboration.
2. The use of gardening tools is a landscape improvisation between human, topography, and plant communities. The best tools for feral landscapes are designed to allow us to feel and react to the response of these actors through a lightness, adaptability and ease of use.
3. Self-generation is doing less, but doing it much more carefully and precisely. More knowledge is required. The information technology revolution of the last 30 years has afforded the rise of feral landscape practices as it has brought to the practitioners, on site, a broad range of resources: the ancestral (traditional farming…), scientific (ecology, biology…), landscape conservation, other practitioners on social media. The ease of smartphone photography, and more recently drones, allows a virtually live record of the local ecosystemic evolutions.
4. Whether handmade or digital, design tools are for analogous simulation of emergent process, to define and communicate the processes to be applied. The drawings made are not exact dimensions to follow but “scores” to apply in an improvisation on the ground (Lawrence Halprin).
5. The gardening, knowledge and design tools are used in varying successions, and increasingly mingle. Design is happening primarily on the ground, almost live, helped with the new technologies that bring knowledge in situ and allow for swift adaptation. This may explain the recent development in feral practices; not only is society sensitive to biodiversity, the majority can now access the knowledge that is necessary. |
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