Erasing and Embracing Aridity
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Keywords: critical physical geography; urban vegetation; landscape and planning professions; regional climate; historical geography
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Anna Bierbrauer, University of Colorado and Augustana College
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Abstract
In a semi-arid climate, plants are highly dependent on supplemental irrigation, revealing the relationship between the provision of water, the promotion of landscape professionals, and the priorities of the state. Combining approaches from critical physical geography, urban political ecology, and cultural landscape history, this longitudinal embedded case study of Denver, Colorado uses plants as “highly visible shards” of the ongoing, underlying technology used to construct the urban ecological system. (Schlereth, 1980) It utilizes professional and municipal archives, geospatial datasets, and past planting recommendations to produce a thick history of the present-day material landscape. (Way, 2013) This “concrete historical-geographical analysis of the production of urban natures” untangles how—and with what—design and planning professionals have embraced or erased aridity in the last century, and who has benefited or been shut out of this process. (Heynen et al, 2006)
Erasing and Embracing Aridity
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Paper Abstract