Words on Works
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Urban Reclamation: Place, Value, Use:
The Nine Mile Run Project
Tim Collins and Reiko Goto
The Nine Mile Run - Frick Watershed Project
Nine Mile Run (Fig. 1) is a historic stream valley identified by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., for its beauty and waste-water problems in 1910. By 1928, it had been alternately identified by influential Pittsburghers for a city park and then bought by a steel industry slag-disposal firm. At different points in its history, the site has been a hunting club, a ball field and, finally, the depository of millions of yards of industrial waste. The stream is still complicated by municipal waste.
Fig. 1
A collaborative project we undertook with Bob Bingham, David Lewis, Joel Tarr and John Stephen, along with numerous consultants, students and citizens of Pittsburgh, The Nine Mile Run Project at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University [1] is being co-administered with the Pennsylvania Resources Council.
The intent of the Nine Mile Run Project is to use the relatively small scale of the Nine Mile Run watershed, its planned re-development areas [2] and extensive public space component [3] as an opportunity to identify, experiment and model the application of sustainable alternative approaches to urban open space and the attendant cultural and aesthetic components. The project will also explore and model methods of communicating seemingly complex environmental problems using the latest methods and technologies. The focus of the project is best defined within the history of reclamation art.
Reclamation art has been defined both as an opportunity to beautify a devastated landscape and as an opportunity to commemorate (through formal intervention) the aesthetic components of post-industrial landscapes. At the same time, reclamation art has been plagued by controversies:
1. By working to reclaim post-industrial sites, artists provide solutions that make further devastation plausible.
2. Reclamation art is indeed not art at all.
Over the last 30 years we have seen three successive "waves" of reclamation-based artistic practice. It began with formalists who moved out of the galleries and (sometimes) into devastated landscapes. Artists such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt and Robert Morris have tackled the problems and issues of post-industrial sites by creating images and symbols in response to the experience of environmental degradation.
The next wave includes people such as Joseph Beuys, the Harrisons, Buster Simpson and Mierle Laderman Ukeles: artists that think and research in a "systemic" way at the same time their final product returns to symbology and formal solution. The third wave of reclamation art includes artists such as Agnes Denes, Viet Ngo and Mel Chin. They have pioneered practices that follow the systemic path to its own aesthetic ends. Products in the case of these artists include tools and applied process. The work and the inquiry is as informed by practices outside the art as from within. The interdisciplinary intention is to mitigate the affected environment and the values that radiate outward from the experience of post-industrial place. It is in the act of reclamation that the aesthetic experience is created.
Post-industrial environments are by nature complex systems. Reclamation projects involve inquiry and action that can occupy a roomful of disciplines. At the same time, the specificity of inquiry that is illustrated by the "roomful" of individuals prohibits individual understanding. It is our belief that the existing academic disciplines are too narrowly defined in terms of interest, knowledge and expertise, creating boundaries that do not reflect the complexity or realities of natural processes. It is only through collective interdisciplinary inquiry and discourse that complex systems can be perceived. If we accept Kosuth's comments on art and quality---"Quality is to be found in the artist's thinking" [4]---then reclamation art by its nature must free itself from the constraints of individualist practice. The "art" becomes the work and process of the entire interdisciplinary team; the experience of the work is the experience of place or topophilia [5].
The Nine Mile Run Project site in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a complex system of land, water and historic socio-political inequities. It is the intention of the team to fully participate in all elements of site reclamation: reclamation of land and water, reclamation of indigenous (contemporary) place-based values, reclamation of long lost access rights and use patterns. As practitioners in the arts and humanities [6], we view value shifts as the primary focus of modernist and post-modernist creative practice. The intent of our expanded collective creative practice is to define and value a new category of urban environment, a new kind of urban aesthetic experience.
The inclusive team of interdisciplinary researchers will be collectively reclaiming land and habitat from slag, reclaiming water from sewage, reclaiming notions of public space from private excess, reclaiming notions of public use. The 230-acre Nine Mile Run site is plagued by two complex physical realities: multi-million cubic yards of slag (a by-product of the steel industry) and a stream that has been impacted by multi-municipal waste water since the turn of the century.
The Nine Mile Run team at the Carnegie Mellon Studio for Creative Inquiry was initially assembled as a group of arts- and humanities-based practitioners with a common civic interest. We recognized the challenge and the opportunity presented by post-industrial sites and promoted the project amongst our science and engineering colleagues with the intent to develop interdisciplinary models that have the potential to delineate the complexity that these sites embody. The existing market-based design paradigm is not equipped to economically sustain the interdisciplinary discourse necessary to produce the best solutions for these complicated problems. The Studio project will explore and model alternative approaches to funding the public space development.
Coalescing over the last 6 months, the Nine Mile Run Team is just finishing the initial site assessment. We are preparing to begin the "Ample Opportunity" series of public charrettes that are intended to define, contextualize and expand the public and municipal discourse about public-access issues in brownfield environments. (Brownfield sites [post-industrial properties within the urban core that currently lie dormant] are sustainable development alternatives to greenfield sites [agricultural and woodland properties that lie just beyond the suburban edge].) "Ample Opportunity" will be organized around the history/context, land/habitat, water, policy and green design issues that define the potential transformation of the site.
Over the last 6 years or so, we have taken an active interest in old industrial sites. This began in earnest in 1988 when Tim was asked to develop a waterfront art plan [7]. Since 1988 Tim has sustained place-based research in public aesthetics, water issues and urban waterfront infrastructure. Projects have occurred in San Francisco [8], Oahu [9] and New York [10]; most often the works have been created collaboratively with Reiko. At the same time Reiko has sustained research into urban-natural interface opportunities. She is involved in an extensive inquiry to identify creatures and their relationships to habitats. This inquiry has its best realization to date in the work Cho-en [11], built at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Reiko has also recently finished the first step of an interdisciplinary Nine Mile Run--based inquiry presented in August 1996: Equation [12].
Coming to Pittsburgh, we were lucky to meet fellow faculty member Bob Bingham, who was installing a work called The Urban Semi-Wilderness Area [13] the week we arrived in Pittsburgh. Bob's research has involved the "event" of moving through the natural environment with an emphasis on boundary, traffic paths and invented natural elements that unfold with time. Bob suggested that Friends of the Riverfront director John Stephen [14] visit with us. John is involved in greenway activism and a variety of sustainable city initiatives. Through a campus planning committee, we got to meet David Lewis [15], who had an active interest in Nine Mile Run and its relationship to Homestead across the Monongahela river. A campus search of ongoing research initiatives introduced the team to the work of Joel Tarr [16], who has been invaluable providing context and contacts for every step of the project. Other primary team members include John Buck, soils engineer with a specialty in reclamation and re-vegetation, and Dave Dzomback, civil and environmental engineer with a specialty in post-industrial water issues. The other team consultants' names and information on current project work, as well as the ongoing funding search, can be found by accessing the Nine Mile Run web site at http://slaggarden.cfa.cmu.edu.
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References and Notes
1. The Studio for Creative Inquiry was founded in 1990 as an interdepartmental unit of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. Its mission is to support cross-disciplinary and experimental work in the arts.
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2. Slag dumping ended in the late 1970s. The early 1980s saw development proposals to use the valley for a freeway and then a shopping mall. Recent proposals include a housing development and extensive open space.
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3. One-third of the total development acreage is slated for open space. The urban stream drains from 30% green space and will be surrounded by public space from the point that it emerges to the mouth at the Monongahela.
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4. Joseph Kosuth, "A Short Note: Art, Education and Linquistic Change," initially published in The Utterer, Journal of the School of Visual Arts, New York. It can also be found in "Art after Philosophy and After, Collected Writings 1966--90" (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). The full quote is: "We do now realize that anything can be art. That is, any material or element in any sense can be made to function within an art context. And that in our time quality is associated with the artist's thinking, not as a ghost within the object."
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5. Topophilia is the effective bond between people and place or setting, a diffuse concept, vivid and concrete in personal experience. The word was coined by Yi-Fu Tuan in his book of the same name.
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6. The arts and humanities provide a "meta-market" model for the team project. Creative inquiry driven by individual curiosity and public expression provides the conceptual guidelines for the project.
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7. Tim Collins, Laura Farabough, Michael Oppenheimer and Peter Richards were hired by the State Arts Commission to develop an art plan for the San Francisco Waterfront.
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8. Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, Aqua Pura, an interactive project and freely distributed book for the San Francisco Water Department.
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9. Tim Collins, A Unified Analysis of Liquid Phenomenon or Kanawai, for the Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii.
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10. Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, A Liquid Evaluation of the Waterfront of Brooklyn, for Creative Time, New York, NY.
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11. Reiko Goto, Cho-en is a butterfly garden created in collaboration with entomologists and a botanist. It was funded by the Urban Redevelopment Agency of Pittsburgh. The work includes plants and a rigorous maintenance document that elevates the "gardeners" to the role of public stewards in the garden.
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12. Reiko Goto, Equation: a three site installation, empty gallery, on-campus greenhouse, a trail at Nine Mile Run with all plant material catalogued and identified.
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13. Bob Bingham, The Urban Semi-Wilderness Area, a temporary public project with permanent roots, for Mellon Park in Pittsburgh. A manicured garden has an hourglass shape delineated with planted paper birch then left to "wild." It was slated for a temporary 3-month exhibition and 3 years later is getting "wilder" by the day despite the outrage of the local garden club set.
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14. John Stephen is an environmental attorney and introduced Nine Mile Run to the rest of the team. He has interests in the environment with its related economic and policy issues.
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15. David Lewis is the founder of UDA Architects, a distinguished professor of Urban Planning at CMU, and an internationally respected urban planner.
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16. Joel Tarr has done extensive historic research into the policy and impact of technology and industry on the environment. His "The Search for the Ultimate Sink, Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective" has just been published by the Univ. of Akron Press.
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