On Displacement

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AbstractDo urban open spaces, whether comprised of small planting beds and gardens or larger parks and reserves, signal the juxtaposition of two worlds, two forms of life, one human and one natural and nonhuman? Or are those spaces necessarily embedded within the logics of real estate capital that shape cities? And if so, can this be avoided? This article explores the operation of three large-scale site-specific artworks in New York City that suggest other logics by which botanically dominated spaces might operate in the city: a recent work by Mary Mattingly entitled Swale, as well as two more well-known works, Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape and Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield—A Confrontation. These works share similar form, scale, and media but most significantly function as social practice artworks that enact multispecies performances. Drawing on notions of urban cosmopolitics, the article considers how these works illustrate and perform alternative worlds and forms of life in an environment that is perceived as hostile to those ways of being. These works resist a totalizing impulse in the production of urban architectures and landscapes that would prematurely foreclose the world to nonhuman agency through a project of human control of all environmental variables. Theories of heterotopias as counter-spaces facilitate exploration of “displacement” as a metaphor that accounts for both the attempted eviction of alternative environmental practices and the works’ ongoing strategies of resistance. Through tactics such as orderly frames, sustained interactions, and cleverly attenuated performative practices, these works resist co-option within capitalist logics, which would prematurely close off the worlds they call into being. My discussion of these art-activist efforts brings authors on multispecies relations into conversation with landscape and urban theorists, raising possibilities for more-than-human modes of understanding urban and environmental design practice, with these activist artworks providing inspiration for and interpretation of alternative urban spatial practices.