Notes from 4,000 Miles of Fieldwork
As a student, applying to grants for fieldwork-based landscape research is a great way to not only experience ideas developed in coursework, but also to refine and improve these ideas, iterating through action and reflection. This summer, I tested my new (post-Bakken oil boom) appreciation of the relationship between industry and publics through a transect following the crude-by-rail corridor. I traveled from the Port of Albany to the boomtowns and public lands over North Dakota’s Bakken formation. I anticipated finding patterns in the relationship between this corridor and neighboring publicly-accessed and -used spaces. I did, but I also found unanticipated conclusions regarding myself as a researcher in landscape architecture directly from this embodied, field-based approach.
Like any teenager (which I am no longer), I thought researching alone was ideal to test my independence and abilities. But I was often too exhausted from driving to document and resolve questions. I lacked others to affirm or recommend alternatives when stuck, and the benefit of their different skills, perspectives, and knowledge, which are, to some level, informed by culturally- and self-developed identities.
A note from my summer travel reads, Sometimes multiple perspectives could be better – maybe this North Dakota trip will affirm only this. Where are my friends! Friends meaning classmates, but also technical experts and the publics themselves. Iteration through collaboration.
Our identities affect our research. While I have certainly read this many times in my liberal arts education, I hadn’t yet learned it best, through doing, until after these miles of experiences altering between comfort and discomfort, ability and disability. Landscape architects and planners today, as always, study vacancy, wastelands and abandonment, post-disaster and post-industrial areas, and inequality. While in other contexts I knew my whiteness and affluence affect my reality, the professional education I had received so far had not prepared me for addressing it in fieldwork.
When I visited Island Creek Park (an island today only in that it is a park set within the Port of Albany) I felt uncomfortable. I brought a nice camera, audio recorder, and tripod, in a place feeling insular, populated with families fishing and picnicking, who appeared to be working-class people of color. Writing that sentence now is embarrassing – how could I have not anticipated feeling this? Acknowledging intuition during embodied research is important; in this case, it tells me the method was heightening, rather than disarming, existing structures of identity-driven power. I have had similar experiences elsewhere.
In an extremely poor neighborhood in Lackawanna, New York, walking with an iPhone in place of expensive equipment could not remove this instinct. I momentarily accept this as a result of my process. But in the future, vital are methodologies that better engage publics and peers, and even create knowledge collaboratively while studying the material environment. This contributes to advocating for better recruitment of and making accessible our field to those with racial, class, gender, ethnic and other identities under-represented in the classroom today.
As for being a woman, I was warned in Fargo before continuing west. In Williston, the boomtown, I overheard three different conversations about women murder victims – the statistics I had read about. Surrounded by men and a harsh industrial-scaled reality, I felt uncomfortable in a different way; I was afraid for my own safety. I kept my head down, I wanted to hide, and I felt uncomfortable committing to field recordings for the durations I maintained elsewhere.
This is something to talk about as landscape architects – not to say that the conversations and work addressing this are not happening! But, I would argue, the discussion of identity in research methodology – and practice – should be directly addressed within required coursework of an accredited degree curriculum. One place I would do it, is when we read James Corner’s “Agency of Mapping” for the fourth time! I would pair it with an additional article more explicitly addressing power structures within the context we are designing and planning.
Great Writing on Equity, Power & Identity in Theory and Methodology for Planning and Design Research and Practice:
+ Planning with Things Robert Beauregard
+ Design Empowerment: The Limits of Accessible Visualization Media in Neighborhood Densification Maged Senebel & Sarah P. Church
Bonus! on Gender and Practice:
+ Men Explain Things to Me A series of essays by Rebecca Solnit
