It’s October. Every door creaks, every picture has eyes that follow you, every call is coming from inside the house. Night falls sooner, mist swirls, dry leaves - or footsteps? - whisper along every path. Bats fly out of the tower on the old house at the edge of town, and surely phantom hitchhikers wait along every lonely road. 

Picture these spooky scenes. Where do you see them happening? Everybody knows a spooky place. A place that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Not just dangerous, but eerie. Maybe not now, but years ago when you were a child, you knew a place like this - the haunted house, the old cemetery, maybe just the basement or attic. 

Remember it, then ask yourself: have you really outgrown spooky places? What scares you, and where is it? Maybe it’s Area 51. Or your favorite Bigfoot hotspot. Or Point Pleasant, West Virginia, or (the former) Edmonson, Kentucky. 

We’re justified in fearing some places, because they are contaminated, a scarier scare for the fully grown than whatever’s going bump in the night. Paranormal or aliens or radiation, eerie places are fascinating in a way that your run-of-the-mill dangerous place is not. Show me a dangerous intersection, and I’ll show you a place you avoid but never think about. But what’s eerie combines fear with mystery - and mystery is a potent, enduring universal attractant. 

Mystery, in fact, is one of the aspects of landscapes we find attractive, according to research on the subject. That general rule is this: that we are intrigued by scenes that we can’t immediately understand fully, because they invite exploration and hint that there’s more to be learned from them. Spooky places are mysterious, but they also scare. Two reasons to notice them, remember them, and care what happens to them, for good or ill. Another general rule: we place less value on what’s overgrown and unkempt, because those places look like no one else values them. But what good is a well-maintained spooky place? It’s just ordinary. A greater feeling of abandonment makes an eerie place eerier, and perhaps that much more mysterious/frightening. Our feelings about them are, in a word, contradictory. 

Also contradictory is that spookiness can protect a place. We aren’t indifferent toward places we fear, and indifference is the real enemy here. Indifference is what makes a place invisible, and that invisibility makes it ripe for a new Wal-Mart or subdivision or what have you. That protection can create a space for nature. To see this in action, you wanna see something really scary. Like Chernobyl.

In 1986 an accident at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant caused one of its reactors to explode. At least 50 people were killed immediately, and 120,000 residents were evacuated. The site remains radioactive today. A vast 1,000 square mile exclusion zone surrounds the site, including the abandoned city of Pripyat.  

Today, Chernobyl is famous not just for the disaster, but also as a haven for wild horses, elk, boars, bison, and most especially wolves. There’s room for them to live and thrive (radiation notwithstanding) because we humans are too afraid to enter that place enough to disturb them. Chernobyl is the perfect example, because we’re afraid not just of the place, but of objects and resources, like timber, that might be extracted from that place, and it’s a big place - 1,000 square miles! Big enough for wolves to thrive. 

Nuclear contamination is authentically terrifying, but there’s also a thousand horror stories about mutants, people or animals or viruses, and about you yourself becoming mutated. We can’t see radiation or contamination, so we can’t tell if it’s gone or increasing or creeping up behind you. That’s sinister. At this point, thirty-odd years on, the sheer size of the abandoned area around Chernobyl is unnerving because who knows what’s really in there? If you go in and get into trouble, no one can hear you scream. It’s self-perpetuating spooky.

Bring contamination closer to home, subtract the radioactive wolves, and you come to Love Canal. Love Canal is a former subdivision near Buffalo, NY, made infamous as a toxic waste disaster. The homes and, incredibly, an elementary school, were built on the site of an abandoned canal project (hence the name) that was used as a chemical waste dump in the 1940s and 1950s. A disease cluster in the neighborhood prompted grass-roots investigation, revealing that chemicals were leaching through groundwater into area basements and yards, as well as the school playground (!). A lengthy and intense struggle by neighborhood activists (mostly women) led to the relocation of over 900 families, and eventually to the creation of Superfund by the federal government in 1980. The disaster exponentially increased public awareness of the dangers of industrial pollution, particularly in working-class areas (like Love Canal) and minority neighborhoods.

Today the site of these vanished homes is a parcel of approximately one square mile, comprised of meadow, more or less, and scattered trees. It’s a savanna with crumbling driveways and roads, surrounded by chain link fence. A landscape that’s terrifying, if you’re old enough to remember Love Canal as breaking news; unsettling, if you are one of the residents across the road wondering about the genesis of their ailments; welcoming, if you are a rabbit or possum or deer. 

Industrial contamination is scary stuff, and the nature of pollution underground, in ground water, or in the soil, or in your basement courtesy of your sump pump, is, again, hidden and mysterious in its extent and severity. They say it’s gone. Is it? The idea that we’ve unleashed dangers we can’t control, be they industrial or nuclear, is a very disturbing one - and a fascinating one, as illustrated by most Twilight Zone episodes, a lot of science fiction, and any scary story about repeating names while looking in a mirror.   

Spooky/ nature spaces don’t have to be famous. I used to live near Split Rock, an overgrown abandoned quarry and industrial ruin in Syracuse, New York. Already you see the eerieness, right? - “abandoned quarry,” “industrial,” “ruin” - but there’s more: in 1918 a factory making explosives for World War I exploded, creating a horrific fire that killed fifty men and critically injured fifty more.

Today the Split Rock  quarry is a big blank spot on the map, approximately 900 acres of woods and brush - and according to some, paranormal activity. It’s a place where roads dead end, with a few rusty “Danger - no trespassing” signs for atmosphere. There’s plenty of good reasons to leave the place alone: old quarry cliffs and holes, industrial ruins, worrying contamination from that munitions plant, and the very real danger of getting lost in the deep, dark, possibly haunted woods.  While not truly urban, Split Rock is close enough to the city to keep me alert for urban ills. There may be a few of those there, plus the occasional ghost hunter, and surely mountain bikers using the unofficial trails. But mostly, Split Rock is left to the deer and the coyotes and smaller creatures. 

Set aside the specters and the chemicals, look at these places as natural landscapes, and you’ll find they look pretty good. Sinister places benefit us just like any natural area, benefits like cleaner water, reduced flooding, less urban heat island, and carbon sequestration, the whole ecosystem services  bundle. These processes are going on in each of these places; some of them are doing all three. They benefit us even while we fear them, and their enduring mystery helps keep us from destroying them, thus protecting their ability to continue helping us. 

Fear can create space for nature to recolonize, recover, even thrive. Contaminated sites are especially good at discouraging development, partly because they tend to have sticky legal issues about what’s there and whose fault it is and who should do what to clean it up. 

Yet plenty of eerie places have no natural value. Most buildings reputed to be haunted are just buildings - ecologically speaking, the most haunted house is just a house, unless it’s got an overgrown yard. Lots of horrifyingly contaminated brownfields are redeveloped  into utterly mundane things, like freeways or strip malls, and people forget what they were. Even the sites of authentically horrific events like Civil War battles, can struggle against encroaching development. Sites like Chancellorsville, where 24,000 men died in 1863, arguably could benefit from being more spooky, thus helping preserve them. 

What makes the difference, turning an unsettling place into a natural space as well? Is there a way to harness spookiness to help preserve natural areas? Can we use this without it backfiring and creating a place so eerily fascinating that people love it to death? 

Back in the ‘90s, there was an interdisciplinary effort to design a warning landscape to scare away humans (or any other intelligent life) in perpetuity from nuclear waste storage sites like Yucca Mountain and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, has since gone kaput as a doomsday nuclear storage facility, but the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in neighboring New Mexico is socking away nuclear waste underground, and still asking how to keep people away long after our civilization and language have crumbled into dust. 

Fear, made to act as a warning. Spookiness to save your life. Think about it, maybe while you ignore the tapping at the window and tell yourself the shadows on the stairs aren’t moving.

Also posted on Medium.

"America's G.P.A.: D+. Estimated investment needed by 2020: $3.6 trillion."

No one’s surprised by that quote, right? We hear this at least once every four years, when the American Society of Civil Engineers releases its report card. The news is always bad, because guess what? We still didn’t do anything to rebuild, replace, or make redundant all those rickety bridges and crumbling dams. 
I regularly drive under an interstate overpass near my house (that’s Route 80 in Tully, for you local folk). It’s best not to look to closely at it, the rusted steel and crumbling concrete. When the traffic light stops me under those tons of decay, I look up and think, “how did we get here?”

Well, you know how we got here. To oversimplify (because this is a blog post, not the book), we, as a country, used to invest massive amounts in public infrastructure, and now we, as a country, do this no longer. This means not only do we not build new or replace or even maintain old, but it means that we have a large number of structures that are all reaching the end of their lifespan at once. It’s a bit like if you buy all your socks at once, they all wear out at once. If you bought one pair of socks every few months, you’d always have socks in various states of repair: some new, some wearing out, some in between. Because we’ve coasted for a long time on the infrastructure investments of the past, we now have a lot of it wearing out at once, and as all those bridges and dams and roads have aged, we’ve changed into a country that doesn’t really do huge public projects any more. This lack of investment dovetails with other urban problems, creating terrible multiplier effects like Flint's water supply crisis.


The city where I work, Syracuse, New York, had on average more than one water main break EVERY DAY in 2015.  But Syracuse is nowhere near unique in its infrastructural woes. Our failing infrastructure is one fruit borne of our politics over the last few decades, the inescapable sum of gridlock and budget cuts and starving the beast. I have my politics and you have yours, but we share the broken water main (although those of us with the wherewithal to live in the suburbs or exurbs don’t have nearly the share of broken water mains as those in the city, but that’s another post). 

I propose we acknowledge our nation’s epidemic of failing infrastructure as a typical, if not universal, condition of urban design projects. Expect the pipes to break or be clogged, the combined sewers to overflow, the pavement to crack, the streets to flood. This makes the actual condition of failing urban systems part of the landscape, not as we think they should be or wish they were. They aren’t swept under the rug of inhibitions, but instead can be viewed objectively and incorporated into the catalog of opportunities and constraints that designers make at the beginning of a project. Like every other site condition, those failing systems can provide constraints…

…and opportunities.

Wait - really? Could failing systems in urban infrastructure create design opportunities? Could those opportunities include ways not only to fix or mitigate the failure, but also advance toward cities as more sustainable, healthy, and just places?

Consider this: failing infrastructure, public systems, and neglect of all forms is already a major shaper of our cities. The whole idea of urban wilds is based on neglect, the shaping force of lack of intention, what happens while we’re looking the other way. Disinvestment is neglect. Fraying social fabric is neglect. Less directly, all the myriad compromises required by years of tighter and tighter budgets, of doing more with less, are neglect of a sort, because something (or someone) always loses that compromise.  Choices must be made, and the expendable things become neglected. We choose sidewalks over mowing, roads over sidewalks, highways over side streets, and everything over public transportation. 

Neglect shapes the city through lack of intention.  We don’t mean for it to happen, but it does, and when we’re consistent in what aspects or places we overlook, neglect becomes their primary shaper. 

How does neglect present itself in our cities, how is it shaping our cities, and most especially, how does it or could it make those cities better places for people?

Let’s find out.



WHAT DO I DO FOR CLASS? 

• Read this post and click on all the links within it. 
• Read the articles; review (that means look through, but don’t read every word) the websites.
• Think about what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what doesn’t make sense to you. 
• Come to class prepared to talk to your classmates about it.

When Banksy opens a theme park, I expect my inbox to fill up. And indeed, two versions of coverage of “Dismaland” have come my way (so far; thanks, Ely and Tim!): The NY Times' "Banksy's 'Dismaland' in England: It's a Strange World, After All," and Bored Panda's "Banksy's Dismaland: Take a First Look Inside Nightmare Version of Disneyland." This is some crazy stuff. 

To begin with, let me say that I am completely in love with the ruined Cinderella’s castle. I would love to visit this place. The pure subversive grandeur must be overwhelming. And the wit is very appealing, though dark, of course. And what could be a more appealing target for satire than those “other” theme parks, the ones with the mouse? Banksy’s signature rat sure ain’t Mickey.

But: in a way it tames Banksy’s work and that of other guerrilla street artists to corral it into a designated space like this, even one with the self-conscious wit and irony of a dystopian theme park. Part of the power of street art is its unexpectedness, the combination of raw edge and delight that comes from the discovery of artwork in the ragged fringes of our environment. The setting is very much part of the art, whether that’s on a very small site scale, like A Common Name's Urban Geodes sculptures in cracks and gaps (see earlier post), or in terms of larger context, like Banksy’s "I remember when all this was trees" mural at the old Packard Plant in Detroit. The controversy surrounding the removal of that work to a local gallery to protect (preserve? control? neutralize?) it illustrates just how valuable the context is. 

I also wonder about the impact of the lack of contrast between individual pieces and the whole of Dismaland. Much of street art’s marvelous subversiveness comes from its placement where we think no art should be, and that contrast and transgressive nature sets off the artwork. Because it breaks the rules, we notice it. We see it more clearly because of the contrast, like positive and negative space. Is this sense numbed after the fifth or tenth or fiftieth installation you pass at Dismaland? Tigers in the wild hold your attention (that's involuntary attention/fascination, people!), to say the least. Tigers at the zoo can be just part of the background. When everything is subversive, perhaps nothing is.

Final notes: Dismaland is a limited-time exhibition, so if you want to see it in person, hurry. Promotional material underscores the presence of a gift shop - the mentions are ironic, yes, but I'm sure the sales are real. I'll be best friends forever with anyone who sends me a Dismaland tee shirt.

From Tim

‘Flower House’, An Abandoned Detroit-Area Home Filled Top to Bottom With Fresh Flowers


Full story with lots of photos