From the first utopian impulse of Plato’s Republic to today's global border controls and public-space surveillance systems, there has always been a tyrannical aspect to the organization of society and the regulation of its spaces. “Tyranny takes many forms,” explains LA+ Editor-in-Chief Tatum Hands, “from the rigid barriers of military zones to the subtle ways in which landscape is used to 'naturalize' power.”
What are these forms and how do they function at different scales, in different cultures, and at different times in history? How are designers and other disciplines complicit in the manifestation of these varying forms of tyranny and how have they been able to subvert such political and ideological structures? These are the questions animating the new issue of LA+, PennDesign's interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture, which is now available for purchase online at OroEditions.com and at select retailers.
In LA+TYRANNY semiotician Patrizia Violi, sociologist Mona Abaza, and landscape architect Nick Pevzner (Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at PennDesign) each examine the ways in which we express and memorialize certain traumatic events through art, design, and erasure. Geographer and political-ecologist Erik Swyngedouw explores the architecture of protest, while urbanist Stephen Graham looks to how art can work to highlight and destabilize what he calls the “new military urbanism.” Chang-tai Hung reveals the intriguing history behind Tiananmen Square and its place in Chinese political culture, while architectural historian Steve Basson examines the role of public squares as an urban formation synonymous with both the expression of freedom and of tyranny. In other essays, Jim Kennedy unpacks and critiques the ‘emergency’ architecture of refugee camps, Fionn Byrne explores connections between landscape architecture and the military in respect of design methodologies and technologies, Rodrigo Firmino discusses the rise of technological surveillance in today’s hyper-connected cities and its impact on public space, Christopher Marcinkoski(Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at PennDesign) assesses the tyranny of speculative urbanism in Africa, Casey Lance Brown examines the rise of stateless space at national borders, and Matthew Gandy shines a light on the very first tool of modern surveillance: artificial illumination.
LA+TYRANNY also includes a provocative short-form essay by PennDesign Landscape Architecture Chair and Professor Richard Welleron the ubiquity of the Photoshopped landscape architectural view. Feature artists for this issue are Hasan Elahi, whose self-surveillance project,Tracking Transience, has become a thorn in the side of FBI intelligence gatherers, and Jesse Krimes, whose Apokaluptein installation at Eastern State Penitentiary uses prison-sourced materials to recreate a complex work devised during the artist’s own incarceration.
LA+ was created and curated by PennDesign faculty member Tatum Hands and Richard Weller, with editorial team members Katie Black (production coordinator), Nate Wooten, Nick McClintock, and Hannah Davis.
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