Carmela Cucuzzella, PhD

Concordia University Research Chair in Integrated Design, Ecology, And Sustainability for the Built Environment (IDEAS-BE)

Associate Professor, Design and Computation Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University

Researcher, L.E.A.P (Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the power of public spaces as hinges for community dialogues and action towards sustainability. Public spaces have become increasingly instrumentalized to expose or even activate a series of social movements: gay pride parades, human rights marches, etc. This paper aims to demonstrate how public spaces have also been used to raise awareness and engage community regarding issues related to unsustainability and climate change through eco-art works. The diversity of such works, from how and what they aim to accomplish, to the audience they wish to engage, become key parameters in better understanding the means of knowledge transfer and potential agents of change.

The aim of this paper is to assess a distinctive form of environmentally driven art and design practice that has emerged in urban contexts over the last two decades. This art and design form, which I provisionally name the “eco-art installation,” distinguishes itself from previous environmental work in its crossing of disciplines, specifically, art, environmental design, and architecture, in its mobilization of different publics within various urban landscapes, and in its sanctioned collaboration with municipal authorities. I propose that the urban eco-art installation does not simply demonstrate its alignment with pressing ecological issues; rather, it is driven by the urgent need to explain, and thus constitutes an entirely new form of explanatory discourse that places what I am calling, the “eco-message,” squarely in the public realm. In this perspective, these eco-art installations in the public realm can help construct personal, social and cultural meanings of place, as urban agents of sustainable change. This paper presents a series of cases meant to illustrate the increasing world-wide phenomenon of public spaces as hinges for sustainable change in cities.

Introduction

If ecological awareness can be traced back to the 1960s and early 1970s, with the energy crises, then the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, when a series of international environmental agreements were politically defined, constitutes a significant turn. Artists were already on high alert, as exemplified by a first major exhibition of eco-art that same year (Matilsky, 1992). This exhibit, Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretation and Solutions, surveyed artist projects that responded to the environmental crisis while signalling an activist and educational stance. During this exhibition, there was an attempt to disambiguate the terms “environmental” and “ecological” in art (Zapf, 2016).

Since this time, it is possible to identify an expanding corpus of urban installations that are not simply persuasive in their ecological ethics, but that explicitly seek to be didactic, communicative devices that can be easily understood by all viewers (Weintraub, 2012; Kagan, 2011). This new form - public environmental art as didactic device – may be testimony to a change in citizens’ relationships to overwhelming environmental issues over the last twenty years. In this growing gap between collective awareness and individual responsibility, artists have found new terrain as agents of public enlightenment, a role that Suzanne Lacy first identified in the mid-90s (Lacy, 1995).

The aim of this paper is to assess a distinctive form of environmentally driven art and design practice that has emerged in urban contexts over the last two decades. This art and design form, which I provisionally name the “eco-art installation,” distinguishes itself from previous environmental work in its crossing of disciplines, specifically, art, environmental design, and architecture, in its mobilization of different publics within various urban landscapes, and in its sanctioned collaboration with municipal authorities. I propose that the urban eco-art installation does not simply demonstrate its alignment with pressing ecological issues; rather, it is driven by the urgent need to explain, and thus constitutes an entirely new form of explanatory discourse (Iandoli, 2007) that places what I am calling, the “eco-message,” squarely in the public realm.

This paper presents a series of eco-art works meant to illustrate this increasing world-wide phenomenon by responding to: How do these eco-art installations in the public realm create places that can act as hinges for sustainable cities?

Between Collective Awareness and Individual Responsibility

Given the collective scientific knowledge about the environmental crisis to date, and the ever increasing new eco-technologies and improved efficiencies to our existing technologies, the rate of environmental damage is still increasing across the planet (Venter et al., 2016). Population growth is only one of the many factors influencing the environment (Ehrlich, 1968). It alone does not explain this phenomenon of increased worldwide degradation. Indeed, more than 150 years ago, William Stanley Jevons discovered that gains in energy efficiency ultimately lead to greater energy consumption (Polimeni, Mayumi, Giampietro, & Alcott, 2008). This historical paradox is still significant today since it is manifest in various aspects of everyday life. For example, the wider that highways are designed and built, the less traffic is expected. But the opposite actually occurs. The wider the highway the more traffic congestion is experienced (Duranton & Turner, 2011). The exact same thing happens with the way energy is used in homes. Since 1990, in Canada, energy efficiency in the residential sector improved by 45 percent. Yet, energy use increased by almost 7 percent¹. This contradiction points to counterproductive behaviors, where technology alone cannot be the answer to the unsustainability problems facing humanity. Human behaviors are one of the many factors in this environmental crisis. Indeed, the technological emphasis for efficiency systematically developed throughout the 1980s and 1990s to address both global and local environmental degradation started to reveal its limitations at the turn of the century (Cucuzzella, 2009; Kohler, 2003; Papanek, 2000; Rossi, 2004).

These limitations point to at least one paradox. The profound problems facing humanity cannot be solved through technology alone, even if this continues to be the global strategy for sustainability. Social or cultural conditions and/or assumptions, and in particular outcomes of actual individual behaviors, may obliterate any measured and designed performance optimization in the built environment (Stirling 2006; Benaim, Collins, and Raftis 2008). The desire to shift collective and individual behaviors towards those that would embrace sustainable futures by using public spaces as means, is deeply embedded in places of personal, social and cultural meanings of space. This paper focuses on this paradox, since collective awareness and individual responsibilities towards a sustainable future are inseparable to the eco-technical progress yet paradoxically, such considerations are also often omitted from their design processes.

Public Spaces as Hinges of Change through Eco-Art

I argue that public spaces, a resource free to all citizens, can be part of a larger domain of exploration for addressing unsustainability by honing in on questions of social and cultural conditions and embedded assumptions regarding daily habits and even the normalized notions of ‘doing’. Public spaces are part of the civic common and have the power to influence behavior, both, individually and collectively. I maintain that public spaces can become intersection points between community and any agent of change – for example, a didactic eco-installation in the public realm. In this view, public spaces can become places of community dialogues and knowledge exchange. These agents of change in the public realm are not intended to spur more consumption, but rather address key questions directly in the community related to social and cultural assumptions that may impact daily behaviors. It is in this way that this study falls within the hypothesis of place making and meanings of space for addressing sustainable urban environments, specifically motivated by the search for alternative ways forward. Using public spaces as ways to understand, experience, and even activate sustainable changes is not tied to economic growth, but rather to principles that consider community values as tantamount.

These eco-art works in the public realm are often deeply grounded in sustainable design, and occupy space in ways that invoke architecture, urban, and landscape design, but these projects are rarely confined within the expertise of these professions (Awan et al., 2011; Bianchini & Verhagen, 2016).  They embrace culture and community for addressing the sustainability agenda with the aim to increase environmental awareness and civic engagement (Dunn & Leeson, 1997). This type of design practice does not aim to design increasingly more innovative and eco-efficient products that participate in the “junk production” process (Ariès, 2007). But rather, the main aim of this practice is to rethink the power of public spaces as places of dialogue and change.

The emergence of this new kind of eco-art works can be seen to be related to the public perception of the persistent failure of politicians to address ecological crisis (Lamoureux, 2009; Lippard, 2014). There is a growing sense that, as Owain Jones and Katherine Jones (2017) argue; artists may succeed where scientists have failed in helping the public appreciate the urgency of climate change and global ecocide. This may explain why, in recent decades, key shifts in the creative response to environmental urgency have taken place. 

The following examples make use of public spaces in ways that provide eco-messages intended make users of these spaces, ask questions, deliberate, and even act. How do designers draw upon the power of public spaces to raise awareness and mobilize collective environmental actions? In the next section, I present the analysis of three eco-art works in urban spaces around the world.

Case Studies of Eco-Art as Practices of Sustainable Degrowth

Let’s consider a piece by Particle Works of California. Particle Falls (2010), provides a real-time visualization of particulate pollution in the San Fernando Corridor (Figure 1). The billboard announces how to read the visualization part of the artistic installation (Figure 2). What can we say about its aim to raise awareness concerning air toxicity in this region. Does this visualization in the public realm, aiming towards the identification of place, lead to reduced car use? Does it lead to staying indoors to avoid the toxic particles? One thing we can say, it makes air quality visible, making community acutely aware of the toxicity in the air.

Figure 1: Particle Falls - Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga, San José, USA, 2010.

source (top): http://01sj.org/2010/artworks/particle-falls/ (bottom): http://eco-publicart.org/particle-falls/

Figure 2: Particle Falls provides a real time visualization of particulate pollution in the San Fernando Corridor, Billboard announcing art Installation. source: http://01sj.org/2010/artworks/particle-falls/

The second case is the CityTrees initiative, which started after a pilot project, known as Pollinating Ideas was completed in the Netherlands to channel human energy and ideas in support of the environment.² Three entrepreneurs, Jechiam Gural, Elwin Nuyts, and Ami Ikan, wanted to support meaningful initiatives in their community. Their design did not introduce heavy infrastructure, rather they wanted to harvest human energy to light up the area. They designed a kinetic stick such that when it is hooked onto the trees the lights would turn on (Figure 3). Once the sticks are energized through human activity, and placed on the trees’ energy connectors, the once marginalized area becomes a welcoming and beautiful space (Figure 4). This design impacts an entire community, is environmental, and good for the health of the participants. This example was not planned in the spirit of place-making, yet its outcome is directly in line with its mission of sustainable urban environments through the elimination of grid-energy use for public space lighting while engaging community to run or walk to energize the kinetic sticks. The eco-message of healthy movement to create useful energy is best experienced in action. So, it is meant for the active passers-by.

Figure 3: World City Trees Project by Jechiam Gural, Elwin Nuyts, and Ami Ikan (2012)). Human energy becomes public light for trees. The piece plays with the relationship between healthy movement and useful energy.³

Figure 4: A CityTree pilot installation designed and installed in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2012).⁴

The third example is Mary Miss’s urban art practice from New York City intended to make sustainability a concrete problem in the minds of citizens as well as to encourage action. Her initiative, City as Living Laboratory provides an integrative framework in which art, science, and design explicitly demonstrate the resource consumption of ordinary lifestyles.⁵ In Broadway: 1000 Steps (2013), Miss aims to make viewers aware of their implication in nature, and how the city has shaped ecosystems. The project locates environmental information along Broadway, in New York, in conjunction with a series of mirrors, which include the viewer in the narrative of the piece (Figure 5). This work asks viewers to look for specific physical sites and explains their impact. It helps them learn about the disturbances in ecosystems of urban development. The eco-messages in each of the sites is clearly conveyed and is augmented with public workshops and lectures. The experience was successful in raising awareness. Yet, it is not evident if this experience leads to any form of reduced consumption.

Figure 5: City as Living Laboratory, Mary Miss, 2008. Source: http://www.cityaslivinglab.org/

Discussion

The common thread among this small sample from around the world is that they all aim to:

1. Move the climate change conversation into our communities, and/or

2. Awaken environmental behavior so that citizens are empowered to act more environmentally.

Where public spaces are key, since they are the hinges, linking academic knowledge and communities. Raising awareness is the first step in the eco-art practices. Engaging community in any sustained manner is the difficult part, yet this is what moves communities and cities closer to sustainable futures. In an attempt to summarize the cases studied, indeed some eco-art works can inherently engage community, while others clearly aim to engage viewers in dialogues. The following aims to briefly indicate the main eco-message transfer of each work studied:

1. Particle Falls: the visualization of real-time environmental data in the public realm provides ongoing information and is intended to shift individual actions.

2. Light Trees: the active engagement need by the community to light up the marginalized area is specific enough, with a direct beneficial impact for the people living in the area; and

3. 1000 Broadway Steps: the eco-didactic strategies of public urban installations completed with the public workshops and lectures are intended to educate community about the impacts of urban development on ecologies of nature.

Each of these works shows the diversity of the use of public spaces as potential agents of change. The qualifier potential is key here since it is not yet clear how far individual responsibility is actually enabled. Indeed, the gap between collective awareness and individual responsibility remains large. It is through the lens of place-making that public spaces can be adopted as hinges for exchanging knowledge towards awareness and eco-action. This is not a new phenomenon as the many examples around the world indicate. These new hybrid practises in the public realm are depositories of legitimate knowledge and at times, point to potential solutions, as they distance themselves from the more abstract or conceptual ethos of their predecessors. Furthermore, they seek alliances with multiple stakeholders, such as municipal governments and scientific authorities, in their address to various communities, encapsulating a particular stage in environmental awareness.

Research on these new types of practices remains occasional and nascent (Archibald, Caine, & Scott, 2014), despite significant municipal support for such work. This points to the need to study the phenomenon of municipally sanctioned eco-art projects for public spaces, not only in terms of how, where and for whom the works are constructed, but also to better grasp how these works have an impact on various communities and individual behaviours.

References

Ainsworth, K. (2011). Public Art & Event Design: A Synthesis of Sustainability, Environmental Awareness, Beauty & Functionality. Design Principles & Practice: An International Journal, 5(1), 121-132.

Archibald, M. M., Caine, V., & Scott, S. D. (2014). The Development of a Classification Schema for Arts-Based Approaches to Knowledge Translation. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, 11(5), 316-324. doi:10.1111/wvn.12053

Benyus, J. M. (1997). Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired By Nature. New York: Harper Perennial, 1 edition.

Borgdorff, H. (2010). The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research. In M. Biggs, H. Karlsson, & S. R. Jubileumsfond (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts: Routledge.

Chupin, J.-P. (2013). Analogie et théorie en architecture : de la vie, de la ville et de la conception, même. Gollion: Infolio.

Collins, P. (1959). Biological Analogy. The Architectural Review(126), 303-306.

Cucuzzella, C. (2009). The Limits of Current Evaluation Methods in a Context of Sustainable Design: Prudence as a New Framework. International Journal of Design Engineering, 2(3), 243-261.

Cucuzzella, C. (2011). What Does Complexity have to do With Sustainable Design? In L. Graham (Ed.), Sustainability Research by Designers: an Anthology (pp. pp. 145-162): OnDesign.

Cucuzzella, C. (2016). Tensions between Expert Evaluations and Qualitative Judgment in Canadian Architectural Competitions. In J. E. Anderson, G. B. Zettersten, & M. Rönn (Eds.), Architectural Competitions as Institution and Process (pp. 117-138). Stockholm: The Royal Institute of Technology.

Dorolle, M. (1949). Le Raisonnement par analogie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Dunn, P., & Leeson, L. (1997). The Aesthetics of Collaboration. Art Journal, 56(1), 26-37.

Duranton, G., & Turner, M. A. (2011). The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities. American Economic Review, 101(October 2011), 2616–2652.

Ehrlich, P. R. (1968). The Population Bomb. Cutchogue, New York: Buccaneer Books.

Farmer, J. (1996). Green Shift: Towards a green sensibility in architecture. Oxford: Butterworth Architecture in association with WWF-UK.

Forty, A. (2013). Words and buildings : a vocabulary of modern architecture. London: Thames & Hudson.

Gentner, D., Holyoak, K. J., & Kokinov, B. N. (2001). The analogical mind : perspectives from cognitive science.

Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, Territory, Art. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gutenschwager, G. (1996). Architecture in a Changing World: The New Rhetoric of Form. Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), 49(4), 246-258. doi:10.2307/1425297

Guy, S., & Farmer, G. (2000). Contested Constructions: The Competing Logics of Green Buildings and Ethics. In W. Fox (Ed.), Ethics and the Built Environment (pp. 73-87). London: Routledge.

Jones, O., & Jones, K. (2017). On Narrative, Affect and Threatened Ecologies of Tidal Landscapes. In J. Thrope, S. Rutherford, & Anders Sandberg (Eds.), Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research, (pp. 322): Routledge.

Kohler, N. (2003). Cultural Issues for a Sustainable Built Environment. In R. J. Cole & R. Lorch (Eds.), Buildings, Culture & Environment: Informing Local & Global Practices (pp. 83-108). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

Lamoureux, È. (2009). Art et Politique : Nouvelles Formes d’engagement Artistique Au Québec. Montréal: Éditions Écosociété.

Lichnerowicz, A., Perroux, F., & Gadoffre, G. (Eds.). (1980-1981). Analogie et connaissance (Tome I- Aspects historiques, Tome II- De la poésie à la science). Paris: Maloine.

Lippard, L. (2014). Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. New York: The New York Press.

Lyotard, J.-F. o. (2002). Discours, figure. Paris: Klincksieck.

Papanek, V. (2000). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (2nd Rev edition, first edition 1985 ed.). Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers.

Polimeni, J. M., Mayumi, K., Giampietro, M., & Alcott, B. (2008). The Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements: Earthscan Publications.

Ravetz, J. (2004). The post-normal science of precaution. Futures, 36(3), 347-357.

Rossi, M. (2004). Reaching the Limits of Quantitative Life Cycle Assessment. Retrieved from

Secretan, P. (1984). L'analogie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

Steadman, P. (2008). The evolution of designs : biological analogy in architecture and the applied arts. London; New York: Routledge.

Stirling, A. (2006). Precaution, Foresight, and Sustainability: Reflection and Reflexivity in the Governance of Science and Technology. In J.-P. Voss, D. Bauknecht, R. Kemp, & J.-p. Vob (Eds.), Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development (pp. 457). Cheltenham, UK: Jan-Peter Voss, Dierk Bauknecht, René Kemp, Jan-peter Vob.

Venter, O., Sanderson, E. W., McGrach, A., Possingham, H., Wood, P., Fekete, B., . . . Watson, J. E. M. (2016). Sixteen years of change in the global terrestrial Human human Footprint footprint and implications for biodiversity conservation. Nature Communications.