Civilization(second)
Recentering landscapes in a civil engineering world
Engineering(first)
A title reference to a session at the National ASLA conference in DC, the Engineering(first) panel discussed the experience of working at a multidisciplinary engineering firm. Despite the numerous benefits (see image below), landscape architects working underneath an engineer is not always immediately appreciated. Regardless, professional territories are often defended with little context to how they emerged and little planning on how they should collaborate.
Civilization engineers
When we say civil engineers, we often don’t ask for whose civilization or what exactly are we civilizing? Stemming from military traditions, the civil engineering we know today was largely developed in times of war and exported through colonialism. Exasperated through capital and financial systems, the engineering which is sold as benign and neutral was in service to larger political and economic projects that had their winners and losers but also their reactionaries.
Landscape first
From their early beginnings, landscape architects worked to reign in the consequences of the industrial revolution. Emphasis of health, relief and beauty from the harsh conditions of urban cities has caused the profession to naturally align itself with progressive movements. Not to say engineers were unempathetic to these priorities given both fields still have a responsibility to the public, but more so to stress that the mandate and training of each deploys altering attitudes towards intervention. Within this light, rather than further emphasizing differences in training and practice, stressing a language which proposes common visible features (words such as landscape or geography) as central can possibly lead to more equal negotiations between inevitable expertise diversity.
