The end of drawing: narrative visualization and community-based collaboration

Abstract

That conventional design practice cannot substantively address many aspects of spatial production is beyond the concern of many architects and landscape architects, who would argue that the limits of their practice do not extend beyond the formal boundaries of buildings and grounds. It is at least arguable that growing anxiety about these limits led to the emergence of landscape urbanism, some practitioners of which employ a diverse array of graphic techniques not in the service of design, but instead to identify, analyze and describe problems and phenomena related to but beyond the self-imposed limits of building and ground.

Landscape urbanism's open-ended objectives expand the field of potential research subjects and the potential for community-based engagement. At least initially, many communities may require the skills, if not the standard products, of an architect -- skill sets learned during a design education -- one set rooted in graphic description and analysis (documentation), the other, in the graphic description of synthesized interrelationships (design). Two landscape urbanists using contrasting techniques, Fernando Romero (geographer) and Jane Wolff (storyteller), provide a useful reference point.

An open focus on the use of graphic skills is of benefit when working with aboriginal communities on British Columbia's coast. In that context, selecting which skills to use and how is dependent on issues that emerge from inside a collaboration rather than superimposed from outside, resulting in education, history, and legal evidence projects that are largely dependent on visual communication. These apparently simple acts of drawing have helped build trust between an academic and aboriginal community, and led to the development of other collaborative projects across environmental and social science disciplines. A wide-angle, open focus design practice of drawing research might be appealing to those unconvinced that building and ground are the practical limits of our disciplines.