Season 1 Episode 02 Podcast Transcript
Interview with Zannah Matson
Host: Priyanka Bista
Audio Engineer and Editor: Mary Anne Funk
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Welcome to Design for Spatial Justice Podcast Series launched by the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Environment. This podcast brings you insights into the work of Visiting Faculty Fellows in Design for Spatial Justice Initiative. They are designers, researchers, and activists from around the world working on spatial justice issues at the intersection of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and income inequality. For the first four episodes, I’ll be your host, Priyanka Bista, a design for spatial justice fellow. My own work, which we’ll talk about in the final episode, is focused on biodiversity conservation and participatory design in Nepal.
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Priyanka
With the first episode, we talked about the problems with the architectural profession and perhaps our Eurocentric biases through which we engage with the world. In this episode, we’ll dig deeper and talk about how unequal power structures and racial hierarchies tend to manifest itself through infrastructure projects starting with the lot lines.
To talk about these critical issues Zannah Matson is my guest today, joining us via Skype from the Eugene campus. Her work focuses on the histories and contemporary reinterpretations of landscapes through processes of colonization, violence and state infrastructure projects. She’s a PhD candidate in human geography at the University of Toronto and holds a master’s in landscape architecture degree from Harvard. Her current research focuses on a highway development project in Columbia’s Eastern Piedmont region.
Priyanka
So great to have you here Zannah, welcome!
Zannah
Thanks so much for having me, Priyanka.
Priyanka
So Zannah, through your research, you’re continuously challenging the status quo that perhaps we as designers, spatial thinkers, architects, planners take for granted. And so on that note, I actually start the first discussion on the lot lines or property lines. Our job as designers is to begin with the lot lines derived from surveys and ownership deeds. Those are our starting points for our drawings. And so in your essay, Land and the Seams of Colonialism, you’re asking to think beyond the lot lines and to unearth and make visible the systems of control that has shaped these lot lines. Could you elaborate more on this point? What are the invisible forces you’re speaking about and how do we begin to unearth these forces?
Zannah
As designers we get this kind of pre set parcel of land often that we’re working on. And the kind of given parameter that we’re working with is actually the lot itself. So that there’s this kind of sense that. In some ways, that lot line then feels almost naturalized as though it’s like that’s how land is divvied up and that’s how it must be. And then that’s all we’re kind of able to work with.
These systems of land control have been varied in terms of how we’ve arrived at the lot lines that we’ve arrived at, but they have embedded within them, colonialism on its very core and the way that land in its kind of most fundamental sense has been divvied up and turned into property.
So I think uncovering those systems, when we think about lot lines and we think about how we’ve arrived, where we are is really important to think about how actually when we reinforce these lot lines, we participate in these systems as well. And obviously, there are many cases in which in practice we can’t just be building across all the lot lines that we’re given, but I do think that when we’re thinking through what’s possible with design, maybe not starting with the lot lines or at least troubling the lot lines or property boundaries a little bit, is a really wonderful place to kind of open up what’s possible for design and so there’s many layers of colonization and I kind of work through a framework of coloniality that understands how colonization is really enmeshed in our present as well and so these kind of. Initial systems of land dividing and I think in the United States context, we talk a lot about the Jefferson grid, but I think the way that land has been divided has only been reinforced and then actually these kind of lot lines and the idea of property is used to uphold many other forms of land control and use to uphold inequality when it comes to land production or in Latin America, kind of have the systems of land control that lead to lots of campesinos becoming landless or displacement happening from their land and things like that. And so there is actually these lot lines, although they’re rooted in colonial forms of land control, they’re kind of worked through out capitalist understandings of land as a kind of productive basis on which we extract resources for a kind of capital production model of economy.
And then one thing that I think is really important as designers, if we are to be critical designers and we are to incorporate spatial justice into our practice, is to kind of challenge, even the fundamental assumption, so it’s not just necessarily about designing a better project or a more inclusive project while still using the same kind of systems of land control that have got us to where we are today. Instead it might be actually challenging what these lot lines are and how they’ve come to be.
Priyanka
Zannah, you really have a way with words. I found the first sentence of your essay also equally powerful—“All land is a land of consequence.” Could you be able to elaborate on it?
Zannah
Often when we come to a project, we think of particular sites like particularly contaminated sites or brown fields or maybe particularly entangled sites that have conflict in them as being maybe more significant or having kind of a more significant consequence or what has happened to those lands has a kind of really deep history and therefore significance. And when thinking about it, one thing I want to bring attention to, and this is related to my answer to the previous question is, all land is land that has consequence, our actions have consequence on it, but it exists as a consequence of other actions as well. I’ll use an example here that I use in that piece: There was, and this a case that has gained more recognition in the past year or so.
So, in this 30 meter telescope project, it’s seen as a cutting edge telescope project, there was the belief that it should be sited where there are actually a number of other telescopes currently in Hawaii on Mauna Kea, which is one of the most sacred sites to the Hawaiian people. All the previous telescopes have been sited here without consultation about whether or not this is the place that they should be when it comes to this place as a sacred site. And some of those are deeply colonial and the telescopes themselves has a deeply colonial euro western idea of science. And this is something that I’ve written about with Neil Nunn as well, that this kind of euro western view of rationality and science and one way of understanding the cosmos is at odds in this particular case with a kind of way of knowing land and I think in this case, this initial kind of siting question and I think this is kind of where it comes back to design with the idea of where something is sited is sometimes not understood through the consequences that arise from that sighting, but also what has led to this kind of location becoming a prime location for the activity in the first place. And I think both of those ideas of consequence really deeply affect our understanding of land and affect our understanding of the types of design that we do for the kind of types of spatial practice that we can have.
Priyanka
For the western mindset again, I think looking at this project, you only think about science and technological development and I think seemingly harmless actively of building a telescope relating that to colonial occupation, I think is very intriguing and I am quite familiar with…..
Zannah
Many ways I research infrastructure as a way of grounding the study of these larger systems of power that I’m interested in. Sometimes the conversations about power feel like they’re very abstract and because of their complexity, it just feels like it works in all directions and it’s and it’s everywhere, which it is, but I think sometimes grounding in a particular piece of, in my case, infrastructure, but having a particular site that you study these things lets you understand in more specificity how power operates and I think infrastructure is something that really it becomes a window to understanding the kind of motivations of the state. And this isn’t just in Columbia it can happen. It’s happening here in the United States all the time. And there’s lots of cases where this happens. Lots of different locations, but for me, this particular project is interesting because it’s called the highway at the edge of the jungle.
And in some ways, like its specific location in terms of where it is, was considered as a way of integrating parts of the country that were seen as marginal, peripheral and in some ways, ungovernable or that’s kind of my suggestion. And so this project was first proposed in 1963 and again it crosses through a number of Latin American countries. Specifically I study the part of it in Colombia.
But the ideas around it are to integrate, particularly these two regions of the country in the east. Los ? and La Selva, which are these two kind of ecological zones that have been historically constructed through myth and art and lots of different ways. They’ve been constructed as these kind of violent regions of the country in need of some form of control and the highway becomes this way of extending this control in this case.
And so the highway itself is, it’s not complete in any way, but there are these pieces of it that have been built as a way of extending the state’s presence in a place that often and this is a common thing to hear, where there is a kind of absence of the state, there is violence and instead there is this idea that if you extend the state’s presence through the building of hard infrastructure projects, that there will be less violence or that at least it will come under state control.
What is significant, I think, to understand in these cases is that the state is also a violent actor. And oftentimes, you know, there is extreme violence in the assertion of the state in these regions. And so to get into counterinsurgency there’s so many layers to it, but given the most recent conflict in Colombia, there have been particular types of counter insurgent warfare that really have used infrastructure as a way of holding territory and, using kind of state investment as a way of holding territory that was maybe not previously under the state’s kind of control, and I suggested this highway has been one of those projects, but it also kind of has international dimensions as well.
Priyanka
That’s really interesting. I actually came across one of these ungovernable regions in Nepal as well when I was doing my Masters research and in it. My initial interest was simply to look at roads and study how the vernacular architecture of that region was being impacted. And suddenly I was researching a deeply political and contested region. And because of its location close to the border of the Tibetan autonomous region, this highway was actually a strategy being used by Nepal and its neighboring countries to reposition Nepal as a trade route between China and India. And this particular road, it turned out, was one of the eight proposed major North-South transport corridors, which was a part of Beijing’s China’s develop the West policies. And China embarking on its mission to expand its international road arteries and cross-border linkages throughout Asia.
And so in Nepal, the sanctioning of the bilateral trade agreements actually had resulted with China had resulted in the construction of these corridors. And so what China was doing was that it was providing aid to construct new friendship bridges. They were training and deploying 20 thousand Nepali police force to be stationed at the borders. And so there was an equal level of militarizing, that was happening actually to secure that border because of its sensitive location again. And the more I studied, the more overwhelming it became to unearth these invisible macro level geopolitical forces. It was quite fascinating, but really overwhelming as well.
Zannah
You know, there have been lots of things that I’ve been surprised by in the archives. The way that power kind of positions itself through these infrastructure projects as well. Particularly looking at these time periods. So a lot of what I’ve been looking at is through the kind of the Cold War era as well. There’s just surprises, all along, actually, when you when you start to study infrastructure in terms of what ends up being related. So, yeah, lots of lots of resonances for sure with this work.
Priyanka
Yeah, I was quite surprised. But partly also because this region was actually always portrayed as this untouched uncommodified landscape, the Shangri la, Mustang was the area that I researched. It’s always seen, you know, through this exotic lens. And so here I am coming and thinking that, you know, this building off this road has it is it is destroying this culture in the vernacular and suddenly encountering a larger sort of political context was was pretty interesting. I found many things problematic, but I also found the imagination of Mustang and Nepal problematic. And so I want to talk a bit more about the landscape painting tradition of Columbia that you talk about and how it’s depicted the indigenous people as a part of the landscape and how, again, the state is using these images in representing highways or through piece murals and doves. Would you like to elaborate more on that?
Zannah
One of the things that I really find significant in this conversation is thinking about, both critiquing and understanding where landscape representations, traditions are coming from and how those have gotten us to particular ways of understanding the people that live in particular regions as well.
There’s a visuality to landscape and it’s not just necessarily like nature plus culture equals landscape, but that there’s also a way that the landscape is perceived that’s significant in the study of landscape and so I think in this representation of this landscape is really important. There is an example of the Cadazy commission in Columbia that was sent out to map this newly independent nation and in mapping also was producing these watercolor landscape paintings. And one of these big tensions is that when you start to actually have a person observing the landscape that person is granted subjectivity because they have this kind of viewing eye. But the people that are inhabiting the landscape that they are looking out over and so often in these kind of expedition style of paintings, those people were indigenous people inhabiting the landscape and painted without subjectivity as a kind of part of the landscape. And this tension between observing and inhabiting is something I think is really significant in landscape representation.
But it is also something that we as designers are also working with. We’re constantly making renderings that are reinforcing both the linear perspective and these kind of ways of seeing that are bound up in modes of thought that are deeply problematic. And I think as a discipline of landscape architecture or design more generally could be doing more to challenge these methods of representation.
Priyanka
I think as educators and spatial justice fellows, we’ve been tasked to actually bring these macro level ideas and complexities within a 10 week long architectural studio setting. And so I want to end the last question with asking you on how do we begin to do that?
Zannah
It’s a really important and interesting question. One way that I think we can come to this is through the ways kind of what we understand as knowledge and what we let in as knowledge when it comes to how we are making decisions in our projects. And so I think thinking through the kind of ways that we find out information about site, it maybe means that we turn to other sources that we don’t typically turn to or finding kind of interesting stories about site that could determine the could determine design decisions for students
Another thing that I think is really significant in how I teach is really thinking about the kind of voices that are that make up the syllabus. So who who is being sited and who is being read when it comes to kind of different voices that are a part of the foundational understanding of a syllabus or brief, and I think to kind of use voices that are maybe not typically used, site readings that are not typically read is actually really important for rethinking some of this, because if we start with different kind of materials that form our foundational thinking about a project, we can lead to very different answers or not even really answers, just very different projects or avenues of research, and I think in some ways embracing again and kind of embracing the messiness or that kind of open endedness of a lot of these questions is tough when you need to neatly tie up ends and put it into a kind of portfolio for students. But I do think that, the fact of the matter is that actually a lot of the projects that we work on in practice are never completed or they’re impartial. It is kind of their only partially completed or they change a lot over their lifetime. It is actually better to understand the open endnesses of projects, particularly kind of in the schematic design phases, because we actually are living in a pretty uncertain time, but also with very uncertain project timelines, project budgets, things like that. So to kind of understand that these things are deeply contingent on a number of factors, potentially leads to more flexible designers and designers kind of thinking in more flexible and inclusive ways. That to me is is very significant and I think not something to just add on to what already needs to be taught. But maybe as a rethinking about what does it mean to design and to kind of deeply uncertain time or designing, right now.
Priyanka
I know speaking with you, and in reading your work, I’ve actually started to question my own own ways of representing my own biases as well. And so I hope that those listening today will will be able to look at their own works through the messy, imperfect and open ended framework that you have introduced us to.
Priyanka
Zannah, thank you for this thought provoking discussion on how to start dissecting and understanding how power manifests itself through the built environment.
Zannah
Thank you so much, Priyanka for all of your thoughtful questions as well in this conversation.
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This is Priyanka Bista, your host, signing off, along with Mary Anne Funk, our editor, from Portland, Oregon, with music by Chicoco Radio – all the way from the waterfront settlements of Port Harcourt Nigeria.
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