Unlearning and deconstructing is also designing

Source: Unlearning: Just a different kind of learning

It is only necessary to look around to realize how we have failed as a society. We -professionals, leaders in different disciplines, with strong academic profiles- have lost the connection with the local and our efforts have been centralized in regional or global levels, dis-articulated with the small pixels that compose the great image of reality.

Last week I had a wonderful class by Deni Ruggeri about spaces and places, about the sense of the sacred, social identity linked to territory, transformative values, and participatory landscape architecture. It made me reflect strongly on the great need that all professionals, from all disciplines, have to expand our vision, to give spaces to integrate alternative knowledge (non-academic but equally valuable) and experiences (more subjective than objective approaches) in the search for solutions. It is an arrogant and unfeasible position to propose solutions for problems that we do not live in places we do not know. Participatory processes that include the knowledge, experiences and needs of the species and communities (human and non-human) that inhabit, use, and protect the “study areas” should be the commonplace and not the exception to the rule.

Thinking about all these challenges we face, I also see the need to include unlearning and deconstructing processes as fundamental pillars of environmental design and landscape architecture. We need to dispel the “common senses” that we have inherited from a long cultural hegemony where racism and colonialism have been strengthened in the name of “progress” and “development”, where human capabilities can “fix” everything through high technologies (geoengineering and its intention to regulate the global climate, the false idea of being able to replace ecological processes such as pollination with specialized drones, etc.), where natural resources are only valuable because of the use and control we exercise over them. We need to deconstruct or unbuild, to leave empty spaces where unseen processes can appear, to accept that we have made mistakes with many decisions, to be aware that we are not the only species capable of designing ecosystems (the wolves that reform the landscape in Yellowstone, the beavers that restore rivers, the otters that manage the kelp forests, are just some examples of this) and to understand that sometimes the best design is not to build or to unbuild what has been built.