Urban Displacement: a radical response to urban sprawl
(The possibility of a park in midtown Anchorage)
Background
It is not the beautiful vista or the harmonious public space which requires our attention. Whatever we would do there would be unnecessary embellishment. It is the desolate areas that we should attend to.
And what could be more desolate than a vacant lot in midtown Anchorage? Except, perhaps, the shopping mall it will inevitably become.
Suppose that something interrupted the progress of modern development. Suppose that something disrupted a parking lot with its asphalt pavement and orderly grid. Suppose that one day the earth ruptured.
Gradually, a mound appeared, and outcroppings—fragments of stone—began to re-form into a figure. Grass and shrubs now grow over the rupture in the earth, and the vegetation is advancing further into the parking lot.
Project description
The site is a large undeveloped lot in the part of Anchorage known as “midtown”. The site is typical of Anchorage, which is a morass of urban sprawl surrounded by the distant beauty of Cook Inlet and the Chugach Mountains. The site is bounded by Benson Boulevard on the north and Thirty-Sixth Avenue on the south and lies between Denali and “A” Street.
If left to the pressures of commercial development, the site will be a monument to consumption. This “improbable monument” imagines that other forces intervene, so that the site becomes a memorial to the possibility of radical resistance to the expected order of things.
A portion of the site is shown in the model (at 1/8” = 1’ scale). The figure is approximately 240 feet long and 32 feet high. The materials are asphalt, dirt, indigenous rock, sand, gravel and vegetation.
Further developments
Public response to the site has been overwhelmingly positive, as the area provides a respite from the dust and monotony of midtown. In spite of the city’s barricades the public frequents the site to picnic and to contemplate the stones.
Planning and Zoning, the Department of Public Works, the Anchorage Assembly and the Anchorage Council on the Arts have met to determine the appropriate reaction to these phenomena. The Municipality has now decided to dedicate the area as a public part.
Permanent landscaping and pedestrian “amenities,” such as walkways and benches, will be provided as part of the city’s “One Percent for Art” program. (There was considerable debate in the Assembly over whether public funds could be appropriated where a park appeared as an act of nature and not as a capital construction project, until the proponents pointed out the tremendous cost savings to the city of this process.)
Municipal botanists report that vegetation found nowhere else in Alaska has appeared at the site. Groups of people have recently been observed gathering at the site at various times apparently engaged in some ritual or celebration. Health and Social Services is studying their movements to discern if they have a purpose, pattern or effect, and the city has hired an astronomer.
City engineers and soils experts are investigating reports, as yet unconfirmed, that the fissure continues to advance and may threaten buildings in its path.
Biographical information
Elizabeth Ingraham was born in Kentucky and spent her formative years in Colorado. She now resides by necessity but with vigilance in the 21st century. She has a BA degree in art history from the University of Colorado and a law degree from the University of Denver, and she practiced law for fifteen years, most of that time in Alaska, where she worked for Native groups to implement the federal settlement of their aboriginal land claims and participated in radical social change on an unimaginable scale.
She received an MFA in sculpture from the University of California Santa Barbara, where she was the first visual artist to be awarded an Interdisciplinary Humanities Fellowship, and she now teaches Visual Literacy, a foundation design program for all art, architecture and textiles students at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. In 2003, she was the first recipient of the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Award, a biennial prize which open to all fields of creative activity, including the arts, cultural affairs, education and science. The Thatcher Hoffman Smith award recognizes a visionary creative work in progress which demonstrates the power of original thought and expression to enrich the world. She received this award for her skins series of sculptures.
Her work is widely exhibited and also appears from time to time in unsanctioned locations. |