Storming the Gates of Paradise (41 page)

What’s interesting about Tompkins is that she makes it clear that no matter which way the nature/culture construct is genderized, men come out ahead—in the Western, nature is not the chaos that needs to be subdued but the sublimity to
which we must submit, and women are just the schoolmarms and parasol-toters who, like Aunt Sally in
Huckleberry Finn
, are out to civilize the hero, giving him grounds to flee farther into the landscape. And really, in practical terms, this ability to flee deep into the landscape as John Muir did has been much more available to men than to women, and it’s this practical stuff that interests me most.

Even in that fabulous Inuit movie this summer,
The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)
, it’s clear that hunters often get to roam farther and more often than gatherers, but it’s as though they move through two different landscapes, noting different things, and perhaps the gatherers know less terrain with greater depth and intensity. In the book
The Geography of Childhood
, Stephen Trimble writes,

Once children reach adolescence, American girls typically never catch up to boys in spatial competence (perceptions of the relationships of objects that determine our understanding of place, as tested by working with models and maps). Remember, though, that we build all our cultural biases into experimental design; in Eskimo culture, both girls and boys accompany their fathers on extensive hunting trips, and both sexes perform equally well on spatial tests. Roger Hart studied what he called “the geography of childhood” in a small New England town in the early 1970s. He found that boys were allowed to range freely more than twice as far away from home as girls in all grades. In fourth grade, as children took on their first jobs, the boys delivered papers and mowed lawns, learning the lay of the town; girls hired out as babysitters. Boys broke their parents’ rules about boundaries more than girls. . . . Hart and his co-researcher Susan Saegert summarize the depressing and inevitable result of such control of girls: “Not only is environmental exploration and freedom denied to them, but also their confidence and ability to cope with environmental matters are likely to be undermined.”

So my question nowadays is not what gender is the landscape but what gender gets to go out into the landscape.

The Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko, who has written a great many more lyrical and spiritual things about landscape, declares, “Women seldom discuss our wariness or the precautions we take after dark. . . . We take for granted that we
are targeted as easy prey by muggers, rapists, and serial killers. We try to avoid going anywhere alone after dark. . . . I used to assume that most men were aware of this fact of women’s lives, but I was wrong. They may notice our reluctance to drive at night to the convenience store. . . . but it is difficult for me to admit that we women live our entire lives in a combat zone.”

In my book
Wanderlust
, I asserted:

Women have been enthusiastic participants in pilgrimages, walking clubs, parades, processions and revolutions, in part because in an already defined activity their presence is less likely to be read as sexual invitation, in part because companions have been women’s best guarantee of public safety. In revolutions the importance of public issues seems to set aside private matters temporarily, and women have found great freedom during them (and some revolutionaries, such as Emma Goldman, have made sexuality one of the fronts on which they sought freedom). But walking alone also has enormous spiritual, cultural, and political resonance. It has been a major part of meditation, prayer, and religious exploration. It has been a mode of contemplation and composition from Aristotle’s peripatetics to the roaming poets of New York and Paris. It has supplied writers, artists, political theorists and others with the encounters and experiences that inspired their work, as well as the space in which to imagine it, and it is impossible to know what would have become of many of the great male minds had they been unable to move at will through the world. Picture Aristotle confined to the house, Muir in full skirts. Even in times when women could walk by day, the night—the melancholic, poetic, intoxicating carnival of city nights—was likely to be off limits to them, unless they had become “women of the night.” If walking is a primary cultural act and a crucial way of being in the world, those who have been unable to walk out as far as their feet would take them have been denied not merely exercise or recreation but a vast portion of their humanity. Virginia Woolf’s famous
A Room of One’s Own
is often recalled as though it were literally a plea for women to have home offices, but it in fact deals with economics, education, and access to public space as equally necessary to making art. To prove her point, she invents the blighted life of Shakespeare’s equally talented sister, and asks of this Judith Shakespeare, “Could she even get her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?”

The answer is clear, and its contemporary American corollary is, “Could she go backpacking by herself in the Rockies or roam Central Park without spending most of her time thinking about safety?” I think it’s important to remember not only that every designed landscape is a place that expresses its maker’s imagination but also that the best measure of its success is how it invites, inspires, and liberates the imagination of its visitors. There’s a massive history of writers, poets, musicians, philosophers, physicists working out their ideas while walking, and so making places to walk is making places to dream, imagine, and create, a relation to the shaping of others that is perhaps more direct than any other medium. Virginia Woolf thought up her novel
To the Lighthouse
“in a great, involuntary rush” while walking around Tavistock Square.

One of the functions of landscape is to correspond to, nurture, and provoke exploration of the landscape of the imagination. Space to walk is also space to think, and I think that’s one thing landscapes give us: places to think longer, more uninterrupted thoughts or thoughts to a rhythm other than the staccato of navigating the city.

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for a Virginia Woolf to make up her novels. There is a wonderful anecdote about Seoul, Korea, in Elizabeth Wilson’s
The Sphinx in the City:

At night these restrictions were reversed. After the city gates were closed, it was men (save for officials and the blind) who were forbidden to appear on the streets, and the city was turned over to women, who were then free to walk abroad. They strolled and chatted in groups with their friends carrying paper lanterns. Even in this dim light, however, they used unfurled fans to protect themselves from being seen, or held their silk jackets over their faces. So often,
this has been women’s experience of the city: to live in it, but hidden; to emerge on sufferance, veiled.

Just before I became a student at UC Berkeley in the early 1980s, some feminists pulled off a wonderful prank. There had been rapes on campus, and the campus authorities had responded the usual way, by telling women to curtail their freedom of movement, particularly after dark, so that all women lost some freedom of access, some public space. A guerrilla group responded with faux-official posters warning men that they would not be allowed on campus after dark—a perfectly reasonable approach to the problem, and one that took away no more freedom than the authorities’ approach did—but men are not used to losing their freedom because of violence, and many of them became outraged. Women, on the other hand, are used to losing their freedom, as long as it stops a little short of where the Taliban cut it off. We’ve heard a lot about driving while nonwhite the last few years, but we need to hear as well about walking while female—particularly walking while young and female. I don’t get harassed on the street anymore, but I think that’s less because the world has changed than because I have; young women still receive lots of that attention that is officially erotic and unofficially threatening, a reminder to know their place and to know that this street or path or plaza is not it.

What would a landscape of equal access look like? I’m not sure, but I think that’s a question for landscape architects to consider. And I think it’s important to remember that parks and gardens are also social space, and social space is always at least potentially political space as well as imaginative space. Talking in San Francisco earlier this week, Mike Davis mentioned working in a poor Latina neighborhood in L.A. where the locals were ready to form a tenants union—or at least the mothers staying home with their young children were—but there was no place to meet. If they had had a public park, that space would have become not only play space for the children but also organizing community space for the adults, Davis said, noting that the ACLU is preparing a lawsuit for equal access to nature and open space in L.A. It’s a right, the right of the people peaceably to assemble, that implies democratic open space, and like most rights nowadays it’s not distributed equally without regard to gender, race, class, or location. Being out in public is
being part of the community, and it’s not so far a stretch from those women Davis met to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, demonstrating against the silence and repression of the dictatorship when no one else would—and though the plaza was transformed by the Mothers, the Mothers needed the plaza in which to be in public, to speak as the public, with their feet as well as their signs and voices. Could you have that movement without a highly visible and symbolically loaded public space? I think that the unique task of landscape architects is to design not only space to think but space in which we are in public—the space of democracy.

Again from
Wanderlust:

Only citizens familiar with their city as both symbolic and practical territory, able to come together on foot and accustomed to walking about their city, can revolt. Few remember that “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” is listed in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, along with freedom of the press, of speech, and of religion, as critical to a democracy. While the other rights are easily recognized, the elimination of the possibility of such assemblies through urban design, automotive dependence and other factors is hard to trace and seldom framed as a civil-rights issue. But when public spaces are eliminated, so ultimately is the public; the individual has ceased to be a citizen capable of experiencing and acting in common with fellow citizens. Citizenship is predicated on the sense of having something in common with strangers, just as democracy is built upon trust in strangers. And public space is the space we share with strangers, the unsegregated zone. In these communal events, that abstraction the public becomes real and tangible.

So I think that landscape architecture is in part about democracy, but I think that democracy can’t be protected and maintained only by design.

Another crisis is facing those of us who care about democracy and public space. I once heard the acerbic critique that the death of the author was announced just as
authors were ceasing to be almost exclusively white and male. We are at a paradoxical point in the history of public space: women have made great leaps forward in rights, including rights of access, just as the places to which we might have access are withering away from neglect or being eliminated by design or not even being built. In some situations, like the one Mike Davis identified, it’s a problem of people without public space, and this is a far-reaching problem. But it has a corollary, public space without people. The linked acceleration, mechanization, privatization, and disembodiment of everyday life have removed a lot of people a lot of the time from the public sphere. In my decades in San Francisco, I have seen a profound shift in how people value and use space—a shift toward what I could as shorthand call suburbanization: dependence on cars, busyness, sequestration in controlled interiors, fear of contact with people who are different.

People without public space is a problem we’ve identified pretty well. It’s pervasive in the suburbs, which are intensely privatized spaces and have become ever more so as the super-sized home is expanded to include your own gym, your own home entertainment center, DSL, cable, and other amenities that make leaving home less and less necessary. But you can see in this last example that there’s some slippage—the home is designed to keep you from having to leave it, but choosing not to leave it is not a spatial or design matter so much as it’s a social and political one. The principal alarm that has been rung says that we do not have space in which to have certain kinds of time; but instead nowadays it seems equally likely that we will not have time to accept the invitations such spaces issue—or we think we don’t, or we don’t, as they say, make the time. Equally seriously, we no longer perceive, many of us, our own bodies as adequate to navigate the spaces of everyday life. Quite a lot of people will ski or go to the gym but don’t think they can buy milk or the newspaper without mechanical assistance; I think of cars as prosthetics for the conceptually disabled, disabled in their perception of space and self. We also need to make the case that there are benefits to going out on foot, the only way most landscapes and gardens can be fully experienced.

Much of the rhetoric of the Internet, particularly during the boom years, was that efficiency and convenience were the highest goals humans could aspire to—adios, truth and beauty—and these were best served by replacing face-to-face
contact and errands run in public space with online access. In fact, a good many ads implied that actually standing in a line or moving along a street with actual strangers was a sinister and unpleasant business as well as a waste of time. The thoughts that fill your mind when you’re between tasks is like the space that fills our lives when we’re between destinations: this is the open space, the free space, the space in which the subversive and inventive and inspired stuff might happen. Open space is space to think. Cell phones, too, are about a withdrawal from public space—the person talking loudly on a cell phone in a park is saying that he or she is not in this communal space with strangers, but in a privileged space with those who are already known to him or her, and is also saying that this time out in public between things is just emptiness to be filled up. The corollary is that phone booths, the public transportation system of conversation, are disappearing—just as public transit vanished in L.A. when the automobile asserted dominance. And car alarms likewise value individual private property over community tranquility. Privatization is not only an economic but a social mandate, though the irony is that the dot-com boom happened in San Francisco because the new high-tech workers prized the public space of streets and nightclubs that was exactly what their technologies were designed to eliminate. And indeed if efficiency and convenience are your demigods, then the minutiae of life out in public—time to think, contact with others, sense of place, neighborliness, community, the minor epiphanies and revelations being out in the world brings—no longer matter. Or at least you no longer have a language with which to appraise and value them.