Landscape Citizenships

Ecological, Watershed and Bioregional Citizenships

Tim Waterman, Jane Wolff, Ed Wall, Tim Waterman, Jane Wolff, Ed Wall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000388268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Landscape Citizenships, featuring work by academics from North America, Europe, and the Middle East, extends the growing body of thought and research in landscape democracy and landscape justice. Landscape, as a milieu of situated everyday practice in which people make places and places make people in an inextricable relation, is proving a powerful concept for conceiving of politics and citizenships as lived, dialogic, and emplaced.

Grounded in discourses of ecological, environmental, watershed, and bioregional citizenships, this edited collection evaluates belonging through the idea of landscape as land ship which describes substantive, mutually constitutive relations between people and place. With a strong international focus across 14 chapters, it delves into key topics such as marginalization, indigeneity, globalization, politics, and the environment, before finishing with an epilogue written by Kenneth R. Olwig.

This volume will appeal to scholars and activists working in citizenship studies, migration, landscape studies, landscape architecture, ecocriticism, and the many disciplines which converge around these topics, from design to geography, anthropology, politics, and much more.

1

Landscape citizenships

A conversation among treaty people

James Bird, Ange Loft, and Jane Wolff

Why begin this mostly theoretical book with a conversation about tangible experiences and observations of a particular landscape? From the start, landscape citizenships are personal: they arise from a sense of connectedness between people and places—and between people and other people who care about the same place.

Landscape citizenship in Canada is neither abstract nor uncomplicated. Our country is famous for welcoming immigrants and refugees, but its settler colonial culture has disenfranchised and dispossessed the Indigenous peoples who have been here since time immemorial. Canada’s foundations rest on treaties, nation-to-nation agreements between Indigenous peoples and European colonizers to live as allies on this land.¹ Every Canadian is a party to those treaties: a treaty person. And every settler Canadian bears responsibility for the fact that the Canadian government has not honoured its treaty obligations.

Being a treaty person means knowing that landscape citizenship, like all questions related to land, exists in a web of relationships with Indigenous compatriots. It requires conversation. And so, during the first summer of a pandemic that has shed a harsh light on longstanding crises of inequity and injustice in the city and country I call home, I asked my friends, colleagues, and guides James Bird and Ange Loft to talk with me about how we might understand landscape citizenship together. A few words about the three of us:

James is from both the Nēhiyawak and Dënesųłiné Nations and affiliated with the Northwest Territory Metis Nation. After a career as a carpenter and cabinet maker, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Indigenous Studies and Canadian History at the University of Toronto. A member of the steering committee that prepared the university’s response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action (Steering Committee for the University of Toronto Response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2017), he also belongs to the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada’s Indigenous Task Force. Two years ago, James began studies in the master’s degree program in architecture at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. His wisdom, experience and generosity have made him a teacher to many people at our school, including me.²

Ange, an interdisciplinary performing artist and initiator from Kahnawake Kanienkehaka Territory, works in ways that defy classification: her endeavours include arts-based research, oral history, outdoor performance, community art design, wearable sculpture, and project planning. As Associate Artistic Director of Jumblies Theatre, she initiated and directed Talking Treaties, a collaboration with historian Victoria Freeman in which film, spectacle, dance, large-scale puppetry, sculpture, and humour are used to examine the controversial treaty over land that now comprises most of Toronto. She created the Toronto Indigenous Context Brief for the Toronto Biennial of Art’s Advisory Councils for 2019 and 2021, and she is a vocalist with the band YAMANTAKA//SONIC TITAN, which has been nominated for the Juno and Polaris prizes for Canadian music. Ange and I met in connection with the Toronto Biennial. From our first conversation, she has been an inspiration and mentor.³

And I am an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. My education in documentary filmmaking and landscape architecture has led me to work that investigates and articulates language for complicated places subject to change. The methods use drawing and writing to tell documentary stories that represent different ways of understanding the landscape; the goal is to offer terms for discussion that can be broadly shared among the range of audiences with a stake in the future. At present, my work concerns the everyday landscapes of Toronto, where dynamic processes and phenomena are hidden in plain sight.

James, Ange, and I are all Torontonians, and like many people here, we came from someplace else. Toronto is the largest city in Canada. Established in the late eighteenth century as a colonial outpost on the shore of Lake Ontario, it expanded across (and transformed) a glaciated landscape dissected by rivers and streams. In recent decades the city has become the centre of a metropolis, and arrivals from across the country and around the world have made it extraordinarily diverse. The municipal government estimates that there are 70,000 Indigenous people living here. That makes Toronto home to the largest Indigenous population in the province of Ontario and the fourth-largest in the country (Indigenous Affairs Office, n.d.). Common stereotypes imagine Indigenous cultures on reserves and in the past; many people don’t know that the city is home to such a vital, substantial Indigenous community.

James and Ange had not met until this conversation. Instinct told me that their points of view would resonate, and our triangle gave rise to wide-ranging questions, subjects, and insights about the importance of rootedness; the excitement of movement; the problem of exclusion; the need for ritual and ceremony; the presence of the sacred; the liveliness of language; the knowledge in names; and the power of kindness and care to engender meaningful relationships among people and with places. Together, these topics sketch an outline for landscape citizenship. What follows is a record of our exchange, held over Zoom and edited and condensed for clarity. JW

Jane: When my colleagues Tim Waterman and Ed Wall asked me to work on a book about landscape citizenship, I began to ask myself what that means for a treaty person. I know that I’m only a little part of the picture in the place where I live (and where I feel like I belong). Rather than writing from my point of view, I wanted to have a conversation with you—like the conversations we’ve had over the last couple of years about so many things relating to our lives here and together. I didn’t send questions in advance because I’d like to start with what you think and see where that takes us. I hope that’s okay.

Ange: Yes, but I want to hear what you think first.

Jane: Because of this project, I began reading about ideas that connect the meaning of landscapes to people’s processes of participation in a place over time.⁴ For me that was interesting: I’m a member of Jewish diasporic culture that didn’t have a particular attachment to place for thousands of years. I’m an immigrant citizen of Canada and a settler.

The question of citizenship seems very freighted to me, and I’ve begun to think more about belonging. I feel at home here because I have relationships that make me feel at home. Some are to people who have kindly welcomed me here—like you!—and some are about my interactions with the landscape—like the way water from Lake Ontario goes into my body and sustains me and then comes out of my body and goes back into the lake. Just walking around the city has caused me to understand a set of very old processes in a new way. I’ve never lived in a landscape that was so clearly shaped by glaciation. And until I came here, I really didn’t have awareness of myself as a treaty person, even though I came from settler culture in the United States. I think about my belonging here as having to do with generosity—by people and by the place itself.

Ange: Belonging has been tied a lot to thoughts about place and homelessness. We’re being displaced. We’re also being priced out of our neighbourhood. I’ve lived with a bunch of roommates in the same neighbourhood for many years, and now I’m moving to a place that’s going to be different. If I ever choose to move back, I’ll be paying much more. To be able to belong to a place actually involves the financial ability to have a home. It’s impossible for me to own a home in Toronto, and it always will be.

I think about how very limited my access to outdoor spaces is because I don’t have any land and because I don’t have any space to go. My community is six hours away. Even in my own community, I don’t have any land access. I’m actually very restricted from feeling like this place is my own, even though I’ve been in this city for 11 years. Having your own house makes it feel like you have a space—and makes it feel like this land can own you. As you say, your water moves through the same pipes every day.

We’re growing squash now, but it won’t be mine because I’m leaving before the end of the harvest. I’m moving to Scarborough for about a year. I’m moving in between two tributaries of the Don River,⁵ and it’s going to be a 15-minute bike ride to get to any river edge from this particular spot. That’s going to be different. Right now my closest access to a river would be biking towards the Humber,⁶ which would take me about half an hour. Or I could bike down to the waterfront, where I don’t want to go. I never want to go to the downtown core these days.

Even if you put down roots in Toronto, they’re always incredibly precarious. As a community artist, the ability to say this place owns you and that you make art for and of this place is completely destabilized by not having a house and not having a place to call your own and not having a place to put your things. It’s going to make a huge difference to leave my small Toronto West/Dufferin community. It’s going to be a whole other world. It’s hard for me to think about belonging to a place when it’s financially unfeasible.

James: When I think of landscape citizenship the first thing that comes to mind is the Dënesųłiné⁷ ways of knowing the land and our relationship to land. We [Dene people] believe that our language is from the land and that the land is the language. This interwoven relationship has a metaphysical aspect built into language.

When I went up north this last week, I brought my medicines⁸ and my eagle feather that we used in Sun Dance. It was a nice connection to the land because I slept on the land. I had some ceremony, which really helped me connect to the land in my Dene ways of knowing the land.

It’s interesting what’s happening with all of us during this pandemic and how we’re forced now to really think about who we all interact with space, and how our space (at least my space) has become very sacred. I’ve examined every corner of my space, being stuck in it, in the beginning. I had to re-imagine my little apartment [in] downtown Toronto: my home office, my studio, my everything. I do ceremony at home. Many of the Sun Dances were cancelled this summer; the PowWow at Six Nations was cancelled; the one in Albuquerque that is very popular in the summers, the Festival of Nations, was cancelled. All the big dances. I’ve had to reinvent my own ceremony with land.

When we talk of this l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Landships
• 1 Landscape citizenships: A conversation among treaty people
• 2 Unearthing citizenships in waste landscapes
• 3 Narrating landscape citizenship on the coast: Conflicting views from the Bulgarian Black Sea and Yorkshire North Sea shores
• 4 Superkilen: Coloniality, citizenship, and border politics
• 5 Avuncular architectures: Queer futurity and life economies
• 6 Situating landscape citizenships: Borders, margins, hybridity, and the uncanny
• 7 Border crossing: Landscapes of mestizaje, citizenship, and translation
• 8 Spatial inequalities and marginalization: Displaced Syrians in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon
• 9 Disaster volunteers: The constructed identity of disaster aid workers and their place in the affected community
• 10 Beirut’s public realm and the discourse of landscape citizenships
• 11 Working with uncertainties: Living with masterplanning at Elephant and Castle
• 12 Legacies of violence: Citizenship and sovereignty on contested lands
• 13 The Common Line project: Lines, landscapes, and digital citizenships
• 14 Wondering through the looking glass, and back out of the ‘BOX’?: A meta-epilogue
• Index