BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
Jill Desimini on her new book, From Fallow: 100 Ideas for Abandoned Urban Landscapes.
FROM THE AUGUST 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
As a rule, Americans are wizards at making waste disappear. Trash magically vanishes from the curb, wastewater disappears with a flush. But there is one by-product of our current economic system that cannot be disposed of with a snap of our fingers (or with infrastructure): vacant land. When a piece of property is abandoned, it cannot be bagged up and thrown away.
Jill Desimini, ASLA, has spent more than 10 years documenting vacancy across the United States as a senior associate at Stoss Landscape Urbanism and as an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where her research focuses on spatial strategies for shrinking cities. In her most recent book, From Fallow: 100 Ideas for Abandoned Urban Landscapes (2019), Desimini marries a decade of documentation with more speculative imaginings that take the form of simple, evocative drawings.
It is a catalog of both existing states and potential changes. Desimini presents each separately, to free the design possibilities from any “direct political, economic, ecological, and sociocultural” context and leave them to imagining. “A vacant lot is not one thing, even though we tend to think of it as such,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “Terrains have different scales, elevations, adjacencies, uses, climates, and cultures. And just as no one territory is the same, so no one idea is sufficient.”
I spoke to Desimini about the new book. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. (more…)
