Praxis in Landscape Architecture

Land is political. Making change happen – to protect landscape resources, to create more sustainable neighborhoods and cities, and so forth – requires that potential changemakers have political awareness, at the very least, and, better yet, shrewdness and intuition. Phil Lewis, emeritus professor of the University of Wisconsin, tells a story in his book, Tomorrow by Design, from the early years of landscape planning, before the environmental movement, that is worth repeating. Lewis demonstrated political ingenuity that is simply too uncommon.

In 1960, Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson decided that his state needed a statewide recreation plan. Lewis has just finished a state natural resource mapping exercise (with hand-drawn maps) for Illinois and had produced that state’s outdoor recreation plan, so he was hired by Wisconsin. Lewis says that he arrived at the state capitol building on the first day and was escorted to a back room in the Dept of Resource Development offices. “I had one oak desk with one oak chair, and $50 million to spend.” The money was meant for purchasing land, so, as Lewis says, “I had money to spend but no staff to help me do the massive inventory required.” And he had no space in which to produce the multitude of large maps that would eventually be developed. He needed an operations center.

For his operations center, Lewis got permission to use an “inner vault” at the state capital that had a spiral staircase leading up to the governor’s office. At the base of the stairs, students from the University of Wisconsin created large maps of the state, based on USGS topo quads, as well as overlays for each base map depicting land-based resources. On the walls leading up to the governor’s office, Lewis displayed this work as it progressed. As Lewis tells the story:

The immediate effect was assurance that we were progressing rapidly with our assigned inventory task. Each day the governor and my director would buttonhole another legislator and descend the spiral staircase into this awareness center. Within a month, the entire legislature was informed of what was underway and we had bipartisan support. [snip]

As the inventory proceeded, new overlays were placed over the statewide map, and inquisitive legislators regularly dropped in to view the work in progress, especially in their home districts.

Fifty years later, it is difficult to imagine the reality of that time, especially if you were born in the early 1990s like most undergraduates today. The event often cited as the dawn of the environmental movement, publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, occurred in the year after Lewis started this work. Lewis was ambitious and a passionate believer in regional planning. He didn’t want his plan to grow dust upon a shelf after it was completed, and he knew that legislative support was needed if the plan was to be properly supported and later implemented. Strategic use of a back stairwell and, importantly, a supportive governor made the plan a success.