DESIGN WITH RURAL LANDSCAPES OF IMAGINATION AND RESISTANCE: ALABAMA

Jocelyn E. Zanzot

Auburn University, Assistant Professor

Jocelyn is Co-director of the Mobile Studio, a landscape art and design collective that studies, re-presents and re-imagines contemporary Alabama landscapes through co-creative art making and events in the field. She earned her Bachelor and Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Oregon in 2003. Her Bachelor of Studio Arts is from Reed College with an emphasis in public art. She has worked professionally in both urban design offices and design build firms from the west coast to the deep south. Teaching positions have expanded her practices between UC Davis, Sierra Community College and the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Now at Auburn University as an Assistant Professor she teaches seminars and studios that explore design as a resourceful and imaginative choreography in collaboration with diverse communities towards civic health.

Abstract

Rural landscapes, even as they are transfigured by industrial operations and wireless technologies, tend to persist in the popular imagination as pastoral places. Within the

discipline of landscape architecture the rural realm is most investigated in terms of ecological services and cultural heritage, rarely however as critical grounds of civic

imagination. The Civil Rights movement erupted in in the United States in the 1950’s and 60’s in such cities as Montgomery Alabama, however as the march from Selma to

Montgomery revealed, the movements’ deep roots extend into the mill and rail towns, cotton fields, the rural landscapes of Albama’s blackbelt. Community centers, such as

schools, important to intergenerational education and civic health, served as vital meeting grounds and places of resistance. Many such historically significant sites are

currently threatened as younger generations out-migrate and rural economies are pressured by larger global forces. The Shiloh case study presented here explores such a

site, building on scholarship on 21st century civic imagination. Engagement with the community, design exploration and exhibition techniques that reconsider and frame

critical stories of resistance and imagine new futures are examined here. The work aims to draw these stories forward, contributing to local economies through new arts + design programing. Conclusions suggest that participatory methods and regenerative strategies

stimulate new imaginations of the future lives of these rural sites of resistance and stimulate local design art health based economies.

DESIGN WITH RURAL LANDSCAPES OF CIVIC IMAGINATION AND RESISTANCE: ALABAMA

Abstract

Rural landscapes, even as they are transfigured by industrial operations and wireless technologies, tend to persist in the popular imagination as pastoral places. Within the discipline of landscape architecture, the rural realm is most investigated in terms of

ecological services and cultural heritage, rarely however as critical grounds of new civic imagination. The Civil Rights movement erupted in in the United States in the 1950’s and

60’s in such cities as Montgomery Alabama, however as the march from Selma to Montgomery revealed, the movements’ deep roots extend into the mill and rail towns, cotton fields, the rural landscapes of Albama’s blackbelt. Community centers, such as

schools, important to intergenerational education and civic health, served as vital meeting grounds and places of resistance in what was then a landscape connected by dirt roads. Many such historically significant sites are currently threatened as younger

generations out-migrate and global markets out compete local economies, but are better connected than ever by modern infrastructure. The Shiloh case study presented here

explores such a situation, to advance regenerative design scholarship through a peculiar blend of rural civic imagination. The role of arts and design education in economic

revitalization through University-community partnerships is critiqued. Engagement with the community, design explorations and exhibition techniques are examined here. The work aims to draw these stories forward, contributing to new civic programing through

arts + design. Reflection on the work suggests that participatory methods and regenerative strategies can stimulate new imaginations of the future lives of these rural

sites of resistance.

Introduction: Renewing Alabama’s Rural Landscapes of Resistance, Shiloh

Figure 1. Design across difference is committed to design informed by discoveries made across boundaries through mutual processes of teaching and learning, and to place-making through collaboration. Students, community members, and civic leaders discuss design decisions here.

This paper describes an approach to the study and design of rural landscapes in Alabama, discussed in terms of civic imagination and resistance. These are landscapes that have cultivated civic health and engagement despite oppressive conditions and are thus landmarks in an international pursuit of human rights. The paper describes what has been discovered in a partnership between Auburn University’s Master of Landscape Architecture Program and the Shiloh Community in Notasulga. The co-creative design methodology of the studio and iterative collective design decision-making process are reviewed in light of the goal of regenerating the economic and civic vitality of this historic rural landscape. In focus is the question of how intentionally open-ended design processes that engage difference on equal footing contribute to the potential of these places and how the rural gives power to this larger civic landscape project. Also of critical concern is how the resistance and imagination become instrumental in the re-activation of the site for the next generation of visitors and community members. In the contemporary American South, especially in the state of Alabama, Civil Rights era history is commemorated and activated in a series of new museums and urban installations including the Civil Rights Institute and Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, the Troy University Rosa Parks Museum and Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery. However; the rural areas from which many of those in the movement came, are often overlooked as agricultural communities somewhat stuck in time, rather than as transformative landscapes of imagination and resistance. This paper opens a first line of inquiry into peri-urban and rural landscapes of resistance in Alabama and asks how such dynamic and culturally significant history can be interpreted by design to activate a next generation of programing and inhabitation. The Shiloh Rosenwald School in Notasulga Alabama is considered emblematic of these issues and design proposals generated at Auburn University will be considered in light of a unique community-based approach. Whereas large urban design gestures can suffer from a hegemonic national narrative that dominates smaller and multiple voices (Bakker and Műller, 2010), rural projects can suffer from design gestures weakened by budgetary constraints. One of the strategies examined here is a slow programmatic approach to building capacity to better strengthen the community in the application for grant funding.

Figure 2. The Shiloh Rosenwald School and Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Notasulga Alabama stand as historic markers of cultural pride and resistance in their rural landscape, and are slowly re-opening as a community center for the next generation.

Theoretical Framework: Transforming the Land through Acts of Memory and Instrumental Imagination Alabama is one of the American States in the heart of Deep South that was born of large landscape transformations made possible by slave labor. Its expansive plains and prime river valleys, once usurped from the Muskogee-speaking peoples who had inhabited them previously, were cleared and terraced and planted with cotton, a crop so lucrative that it gave rise to an entire cultural region. In Alabama, a deep rich soil seam known as the Black Belt, for the double entendre of the color of the soil and of the people who farmed it, defines a stretch of land organized around the cities now most famous for the birth of the Civil Rights Movements: Selma and Montgomery. Not surprisingly, the laborers that transformed the soil also built the bridges, mills, and rails that industrialized these first centers of cotton commerce. However, just as the landscape architectural knowledge and practices of African peoples that were integral to Southern culture were not commonly valued, so too are the more contemporary landscapes of resistance overlooked in its newest chapter: the advancement of Civil Rights. Economic inequity persists in these communities and the resources to advance the cultural programming of these civic institutions are scarce. Through the work of such American environmental historians as William Cronon (1992) we understand that cities have grown only in relation to their hinterlands or rural extents. Seminal writers in landscape studies such as J.B Jackson (1984) have taught us to observe and value these vernacular cultural landscapes for their innovative yet locally attuned adjustments to more ubiquitous national culture. In other words, there is a great body of literature regarding rural landscape cultural value, and increasingly around the value of their intangible heritage. However, in contemporary landscape architectural theory one finds little advocacy on par with the Landscape Urbanism movement for a radical reconsideration of rural landscapes. Few have argued for the significance of rural landscapes of resistance for their contribution to civic health or put forth a platform for critical ruralism for its contribution to global civil rights and twenty-first century practices of mixed open and imaginative democracy. While urban living is substantiated as critical for both planetary sustainability and cultural evolution, rural living has yet to be included with this framework.

Figure 2. Memories of the Shiloh men waiting to be picked up for the Syphilis Study under the great water oak beside the church were evoked here by student Marjorie Woodbury and translated into design for seating under the waiting tree. She established a new moment in which to consider the lives rather than the passing of these courageous men.

Figure 3. Memories of the Shiloh men waiting to be picked up for the Syphilis Study under the great water oak beside the church were evoked here by student Marjorie Woodbury and translated into design for seating under the waiting tree. She established a new moment in which to consider the lives rather than the passing of these courageous men.

There are a few key prejudices that interfere with such a reading of rural landscapes as hotbeds of resistance and civic imagination, critical to the global project of resilience. The first is a prejudice in design for the aesthetics of form over process, material over spiritual transactions. The second is a prejudice against vernacular expression as inferior for its unselfconscious relation to the status quo or mainstream. Lastly, it seems that modern formal education in rural areas is in fact designed to require students to leave to achieve success (Corbett, 2009). Rather than valuing local landscape traditions, and place-based resources, formal education in rural regions “disembedds” people from their communities and encourages out-migration. Thus, the proud upkeep and advancing of rural traditions, craftsmanship and civic life is threatened by our public educational system which teaches that rather one should look for the lessons and opportunities of history, art, culture and new vibrant economies is urban areas. All of these trends contribute to the de-valuing of the rural as the locus of vital landscape knowledge in the twin projects of sustainability and civic health. Two theoretical bridges are proposed here between seeing and designing rural landscapes. The first is borrowed from Susan Herrington’s recent discourse On Landscapes (2008). Therein she identifies three properties of landscapes that activate the invisible or intangible: resistance, memory and instrumental imagination. Resistance in Landscape Architecture, Herrington suggests “challenges what we believe… Landscapes are spaces that condition and are conditioned by cultural and natural systems directly connected to our well-being. If we only want to experience what we believe landscapes to be, we stifle growth.” Resistance is thus the exercise of the mind- to stand against, not through brute force but through actions of character, humor, language and art. In situations where mobility, and access are unjustly limited, resistance is not a matter of meeting this paradigm head on but subverting, resisting through intellectual acuity and creative expression through acts of what Gerald Vizenor (2008) calls Survivance. Sites like the Shiloh Rosenwald School and Missionary Baptist Church in Notasulga Alabama speak of several generations of survivance, revealing acts of internationally significant strength, vision, collaboration, courage, and intellectual prowess. The second key bridge to a radical ruralism is a community engaged approach to design based on reciprocity rather than service. This participatory design work draws inspiration from contemporary art practices and might be best summarized by Grant Kester’s work Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004). Based in dialogue, mutual teaching and learning, design practices strive to bring aesthetic and performative power to the evolving aims of a collective. “These projects all share a concern with the creative facilitation of dialogue and exchange. While it is common for a work of art to provoke dialogue among viewers, this typically occurs in response to a finished object. In these projects, on the other hand, conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself. It is reframed as an active, generative process that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities, official discourse, and the perceived inevitability of partisan political conflict” (Kester 2004, 8). Engage the Community: towards co-creative design process The studio’s approach to designing in the context of civil rights histories and civic health entails a methodology of engagement that attempts to dismantle barriers and build bridges while seeking reciprocity. As mentioned, the desired result is a new art in the

tradition of resistance that provokes new understandings/possibilities of civic life while simultaneously enabling new opportunities. Samual Mockbee, founder of Auburn University’s Rural Studio coined the term “citizen architect.” While the model advanced at the Rural Studio is critiqued for imposing the gift of architecture such that everything else must stand in juxtaposition to the lofty premises of design for decency (Del Real, 2009), it has evolved to contribute in more meaningful ways to the communities of which their structures are a part. Here, the citizen landscape architect adds dimensions to the work that are central to landscapes: change through time, dialogic processes that evoke stories that connect diverse people to place. Engaging the community was integral to the studio’s design approach. Different than the charrette model that presumes on the one hand a set of experts and on the other a token selection of people of the place with a wish list for the future, dialogic design is rather a mutual learning process and the results are discovered through listening and dialogue. As part of the student’s efforts to choreograph a new design layer, bring forward memories and meanings, make new opportunities possible, dinners were cooked together and conversations unfolded. Reviews took place both at the University and in the Shiloh Community, seeking debate about the design proposals capacity to

translate intention into form and program. Kester refers to Deleuze’s history of the avant-garde to explain such dialogic practice not as sentimental or propelled by community service objectives but rather as radical and provocative in the realm of design. Shiloh is comprised of The Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church founded in 1870, its cemetery with unmarked graves dating to just after the Civil War, and the Shiloh Rosenwald School, built in 1923. The school was built in collaboration between Booker T. Washington, African American Educator and Founder of Tuskegee University and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, President of Sears and Roebuck and was open until the school system was de-segregated in 1960. The partnership resulted in the construction of just over 5000 schools from Texas to Virginia between 1912- 1932, transforming the status of education for African American children in the segregated South. Between 1932 and 1972, Shiloh became the main pick-up spot for the men in the community who participated in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Many participants of this study, who were wrongfully subjected to its continuation beyond the discovery of penicillin as a cure, are buried in the Shiloh Cemetery, one quarter of a mile down the road. The land for the cemetery was purchased and given to the Church by Charlie Pollard, who took the case against the US Government Health Department to the

Figure 4. Dialogic practice entails critical reflection and evaluation of design work. Discussions and reviews were held both at Shiloh and at Auburn University.

Supreme Court with attorney Fred Gray and won, forever changing bioethical practices around the world. The Shiloh Community Restoration Foundation was formed in 2006 to restore and preserve the Shiloh Rosenwald School so that it will be an everlasting community landmark “to promote civic and community pride; educate people about the community's history and heritage; plan, promote and operate cultural and educational/research projects through outreach programs that benefit all citizens (shilohcommfound.com).” As the community seeks to extend this mission, the whole site, approximately 4 acres, becomes relevant in new ways. In 2010 Shiloh received status on the State and finally National Historic Register, commemorated with the placement of a bronze plaque. Restoration of the school building, which had fallen into disrepair, was the first phases of the collaboration with Auburn University through the Design Build Master’s students under the guidance of D.K. Ruth and Anthony Tindall. Continuing their efforts, the landscape architecture studio focused on the challenges of rendering this site accessible to visitors, and enabling a new generation of programs. The design intrigue was to transform the site in a way that enabled the community to tell its own stories both inside the structure of the building and through the experience of their multi-layered landscape.

Figure 5 The working plan seeks to connect the site with a path system that allows visitors an experience of the civic life of Shiloh, Community Garden, Waiting Tree, Restored Well and Outhouses, seed new programming that teach about the spirit of resistance and creative vision required to build civic health.

In his essay, “Negotiated space: The Black College Campus As a Cultural Record of Postbellum America” Kenrick Ian Grandison adds nuance to the dual landscape condition of segregation particularly in the rural landscape in which Tuskegee Institute and Shiloh were located. He introduces three landscape terms and typologies (cultural- historical concepts): “the black bottom”, the “backway” and the “other side of the tracks” to discuss the landscape system which encoded, reproduced and resisted racial subjugation in the rural south and more specifically in Macon County Alabama. The “black bottoms” refers to land that is symbolically and sometimes literally least advantageous for agriculture, for industry, for whatever is most economically and politically important. Both Tuskegee and Shiloh occupy hilly terrain composed of clay soils that swell in the rains so that rather than holding water, rain sheets across the landscape eroding topsoil and creating a landscape of caverns and gullies. The one hundred acre property that Tuskegee was able to purchase with a limited grant made available to them by the State, was an abandoned cotton plantation, the remains of which had burnt down in the Civil War, of barren soils and winter winds. Within these bottom of the barrel terrains emerged powerful loci of education and enhancement, centers that developed multiple means for reaching out and extending their missions to the broader region. What we learn is that bottomlands were actually hilltops, and that hilltops were sites of resistance and civic identity.

In terms of rural resistance, this site stands as a beacon of community support, education, civic action and leadership in a territory once defined by systems of slave labor on cotton farms, later share cropper farming on depleted soils, Jim Crow laws and segregated facilities. Even after the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Notasulga Ku Klux Klan members burnt down the white town high school rather than see it integrated. Through all of these eras, the church at the top of the hill stood proud, the school an enlightened model of modern education with its signature large bank of windows for maximum daylight, and the grounds describing a precinct of African American pride in the landscape. The stories inscribed in this landscape, discovered through conversations, visits, interviews, walkabouts with the contemporary community members are of daily practices such as fetching firewood or harvesting wild plums, visiting the neighboring garden or

Figure 6. Design explorations test the celebration of individual memories of former students such as daffodils in spring beside larger narratives of resistance inscribed in the new brick pathway, made of bricks from Charlie Pollards former home.

canning jams, performing plays at assembly or Friday night movies, of Baptisms that prepared children for life in the church family and an education that prepared students for Harvard. Recollections of fathers, brothers, grandfathers and uncles waiting under the shade of the water oak tree beside the church for Nurse Rivers to take them to Tuskegee were central to the survivors’ experience of the impact of the Syphilis study. This is a community that does not want to forget, neither the vital spirit of survivance imparted by their parents and teachers, nor the suffering and sacrifice endured by the community members and finally the triumphs of civic leadership exemplified by the most mundane and courageous of acts. These memories, these eras of life full of joy and pain, comprise the significance of this site and can come forward to inform design decisions that communicate the relevance of Shiloh even within an international narrative about the struggle for and achievement of civil rights. Design proposals emerge through presentations that navigate between personal memories and interpretations that will resonate with outsiders at a civic scale, attempting to avoiding the critique offered by Bakker and Muller. Small steps in the design process are aim to build momentum for larger possibilities while retaining clarity of intention.

Figure 7. A new garden program re-activates the teachings regarding Nature and Study and Gardening for Rural Schools developed at Tuskegee and extended into the Rosenwald Schools which throughout its 20 years built more than 5000 rural school houses from Texas to Virginia. These schools became comprehensive community centers of education and industrial arts, including test plots and farm gardens, and functioned as place for evening activities, adult education and weekend events. Self-sufficiency, health and delight explored here in the garden are considered important to civic health and imagination.

A new sign announces the Shiloh Community Center proudly to passersby, complimented in a new language of steel, salvaged bricks, larger rail timbers. The most significant design moves entail the restoration and re-activation of key site facilities: the well, the outhouses and baptismal pool. Beside the Church, benches are located in such a way as to mark The Waiting Tree with cast shadows reminding us of the living men, and provide space for visitors to rest, pause and discuss. The back woods are thinned and woodland habitat cultivated along a path that identifies the former cotton terrace and that leads to the Teaching Gardens behind the school, newly activated in collaboration with the local Head Start and after school programs. A memorial at the Cemetery is proposed to commemorate those who died in the Syphilis Study, constructed in the shade of the tree beside the road that has been renamed for Charlie Pollard. The work of the Shiloh studio continues with funding through additional design development with graduate research assistants. A larger project that worked with Macon County Students from Notasulga High school and Booker T Washington High school in Tuskegee investigates the topic of civic health within all of Macon County through a co-creative art project. Shiloh was identified as a site that contributes positively to civic health within the county and thus proposals for the Shiloh Community precinct were extended through infrastructural networks and additional proposed revitalization projects to activate Shiloh as a key hub within a larger dialogically derived proposition.

The studio approach itself has evolved into a collective now called the Mobile Studio committed to intentionally open dialogic and co-creative spaces that move out into rural communities in which art and design education is often absent. As a mode of opening conversation and practice of reciprocal discovery this versatile studio proves to provide a missing table across which differences can be discussed and transcended. New futures

Figure 8. The Re-Imagining Schoolgrounds exhibit produced by the Mobile Studio invites a diverse audience to consider Shiloh’s significance to both the history and future of civic life in the region.

emerge through such engagement. Public exhibition of work becomes an important intermediary step in the re-activation of rural landscapes of resistance, inviting diverse citizens into the site to participate in its evolution and transformation.

South African Parallels, A Brief Conclusion In conclusion, investigation and proactive advancement of rural sites of resistance will continue to be important to landscape architectural practice in the American South and places around the world such as South Africa that are expanding our notion of civic life by design South Africa and the American South. While the dialogic processes of such landscape design encounters have been unpacked to argue for the breaking down of stereotypes and barriers and the identification of what Bakker describes as “multivocal interpretations and presentations of historical events” towards “embracing complex and minor narratives, thus accepting the evolving nature of identity construction and inviting the unlocking of more levels of interpretation” the second line of argument is about the power of the rural landscape itself in adding significance to this civic project. Rural landscape knowledges tap deeply into ecological relations, and self-sufficient initiatives that bind the practices of growing food, making shelter, raising families, organizing communities, resisting oppression and working for justice in relation to watersheds and the limitations of natural resources. The realm of the rural only exists in continuum with the urban on one side and the primeval or wild on the other and within this space there are great lessons and opportunities for the civic projects of the future. Future research will attempt to bridge between these two landscapes and design cultures. This bridge, while acknowledged in the academic realms of history and cultural theory is uncharted territory for landscape architecture especially in terms of a focused design dialogue about the future. Here the common ground between these two landscapes, each so passionately and violently infused in cultural identity, can also re-explored as generative of twenty-first century terrains of critical imagination and civic health.

Figure 8. The process of transforming a rural landscape of civic imagination and powerful lessons of resistance takes time. Incremental steps that provoke new understandings about the historic and future role of Shiloh become critical to future programing and inhabitations.

References: Bakker, Karel Anthonie and Műller, Liana “Intangible Heritage and Community Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, Museum International, Volume 62, Issue 1-2, May 2010, Pages: 48–54, Beningfield, Jennifer, The Frightened Land: Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century, Taylor and Francis, 2007 Cheek, William F. Black Resistance Before the Civil War, Glencoe Press, 1970 Corbett, Michael, Rural Schooling in Mobile Modernity: Returning to the Places I’ve Been”, Journal of Research in Rural Education, 2009, 24 (7) Del Real, Patricio, “Ye Shall Receive: Rural Studio and the Gift of Architecture”, The Journal of Architectural Education, pages 123-126, ACSA 2009 Edgar, Robert and Anthony, David, “African-American Historical Linkages with South Africa, ca 1890-1965, Howard University, http://www.howard.edu/library/reference/bob_edgar_site/index.html Field, Connie, “Have you Heard from Johannesburg, From Selma to Soweto”, Clarity Films, 2010 Foster, Jeremy,Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa, University of Pittsburg Press, 2008 Grandison, Kenrick Ian “Negotiated space: The Black College Campus As a Cultural Record of Postbellum America” in Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (Craig Barton, editor) Princeton Architectural Press, 2001 Herrington, Susan, On Landscapes, Routledge Press, 2008 Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, University of California Press, Berkley, Los Angeles, London, 2004 King, Dr. Martin Luther, “Letter from Bimingham Jail”, 1963 Shiloh Community Restoration Foundation: www.shilohcommfound.com Vizenor, Gerald, (Ed.) Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, University of Nebraska Press, 2008