Landscaping Pavements (online text)

Tomás Criado

We, modernist urbanites, tend to have a very strange relation to the streets we tread on, as if walking was an act of material oblivion. Indeed, every step seems to be pushing us further and further away, instead of bringing us closer to the ground. It’s as if the pavements we tread on permanently disappeared from view, despite their silent permanence, their stubborn smoothness, their standardised sturdiness becoming almost unthinkable. As if they were just there, supporting without mattering much, as well-ordered stages of public life, quintessential furniture of liberal ideas of politics: our contemporary agora!^[1] So much so that only children dare to ask: who has laid the streets overnight for us to walk on them?

In fact, the streets, and the sidewalks as we know them – critically-minded readers will already know – needed to be conceived, invented and installed, and are permanently under maintenance. Pavements, not just pedestrians, also deserve a genealogy!^[2] In fact, they bear in them the imprint of the clean slate of progress and modernity: from their durable materials – tarmac or granite, you name it – extracted from the belly of the Earth to their bulldozed modes of construction as perfectly sealed soils.^[3] This is their secret engine, the unrevealed truth, the machinery that they conceal for us not to think much of them.

Even if there have been many traditions of incredible technical prowess, creating walkable roads and ways across the globe – The Great Wall of China! The Andean Qhapac Ñan! –  pavements stand out as a peculiarly modernist infrastructure: the result of early Modern zonification to prevent killings from horse and chariot transit, subject to subsequent endless policing and reforms for the sake of hygiene and decorum, later on paving, literally, the way for automotion to take the world as a hostage.^[4] 

IMAGE: https://bcnroc.ajuntament.barcelona.cat/jspui/bitstream/11703/74982/1/00010002JI0004.PDF 

Their construction not only has brought about the modern city as we know it, but has also assembled its quintessential walkers: from the need to wear shoes to the compacted ground on which we walk! So much so that the beloved flâneur of Walter Benjamin cannot be thought of but as an infrastructural being, the result of Hausmann’s spatial reordering: nature below, what only experts can access to, culture above, for us to window-shop into eternity.^[5] The academic and political centrality of a white, able-bodied, male figure standing out for the profound oblivion of the material world that bore its creation is also a symbol of many things that cannot go on, damn urban studies!

        In the meantime, Euro-American urbanists became captured with what Gordon Cullen called ‘townscapes,’ a rather peculiar form of landscape design promising visual coherence, orderliness and organisation of “the jumble of buildings, streets and space that make up the urban environment.”^[6] The frenzy of late 19th century urban modernization laid the grounds for pavements to become everyday more highly technical endeavours. This is the marvellous tale recounted by historian of art Danae Esparza in her incredible book Barcelona a ras de suelo (Barcelona at ground level):^[7] a detailed exploration of the perpetual redesign that the city’s pavements have undergone since the Romans. One of the most salient features being the devoted efforts to both engineer their durable and stable foundations – compacting the soil, layering insulation materials like aggregate – together with patterning the outer crust, its walkability and grip, in attempts at rendering urban space readable, a legible milieu. Nothing represents this better than the Panot Gaudí, “the hexagonal hydraulic tile he [architect Antoni Gaudí] designed in 1904 in conjunction with Escofet.”^[8] As a result of the work of the municipality, together with corporations that have specialised in designing ‘urban elements,’ like Escofet, pavements have become part of a system: one more element of a catalogue of products by which a deeply modernist city is perpetually made and remade into a static image of itself, a collage of ready-made building types, their additions and subtractions.

IMAGE, PAVIMENTOS BARCELONA 1:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panot_Gaud%C3%AD_al_Parc_G%C3%BCell.jpg 

IMAGE, PAVIMENTOS BARCELONA 2: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panot_Gaud%C3%AD.JPG 

The tensions that these ever-present modernist demands generate were apparent in a rare gem of an exhibition, titled Debaixo dos nossos pés (Under our feet),^[9] which opened Lisbon’s inner guts to foreground a multi-layered display of pavements, from the times of its first inhabitants to the present. The exhibition happened at a time of increasing pressures for urban standardisation, not just having city branding at their core, but also concerns for accessibility, desperately demanded by disabled and older people for decades. However important this might be, the strange lure and aestheticization of an urban image can also happen at the expense of traditional forms of street-making, pushing aside those who manipulate them. This has become evident in public struggles to keep what came to be their early modern ‘traditional’ configuration (calçada portuguesa, a peculiar form of cobblestone-based pattern) and the communities of practice of their soon-to-be-extinct trade (calceteiros), unless turned into World Heritage, a paradoxical fixation to resist a more contemporary fixity?

IMAGE, CALÇADA PORTUGUESA 1:

https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5507/d314/e58e/ce2f/d200/00eb/large_jpg/12.Problemas_na_cal%C3%A7ada.jpg?1426576142  (taken from https://www.archdaily.com.br/br/763989/a-calcada-portuguesa?ad_medium=gallery)

IMAGE, CALÇADA PORTUGUESA 2:

https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Calceteiros_lisboa.jpg 

IMAGE, CALÇADA PORTUGUESA 3:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/orientadicta/8502085803/ 

Even if this fixation is relevant for many purposes, it’s also highly problematic, ecologically-speaking. In his signature process-oriented anthropology, attending to the dynamic processes of world-formation of sentient beings, Tim Ingold takes issue with the modernist practice of the hard surfacing of the earth, because of how it “actually blocks the very intermingling of substances with the medium that is essential to life, growth and inhabitation.”^[10] 

IMAGE, City of Leuven https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/624x351/p0hdjn4m.webp 

This is far from being a cumbersome theoretical issue: the European Environmental Agency has been alerting for years of the many problems that sealed soils are bringing to the fore – related to heat island effects and the destruction of soils –, particularly in urban settings.^[11] As a consequence, environmentally-minded architects and urban planners have started to uncover ‘the beach beneath the street’: depaving the streets or creating porous sidewalk materials to foster the important underground soil relations essential to life on Earth.^[12] 

IMAGE: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/mean-soil-sealing-in-europes 

Far from being the dirt beneath our shoes, in geography, anthropology and environmental humanities, the very soils we used to tread on are increasingly becoming a matter of relational engendering with different beings, animating newer forms of social theory and eco-political practice.^[13] The world beneath our feet, hence, appears before us as a moving territory, with their own history, formed – or even ‘terraformed’ – by a wide variety of beings, from worms and plants to different animals and human groups.

IMAGE: https://mmmapa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/c3-744x1024.jpg 

To re-enliven pavements and their politics perhaps there would be no better way than to treat them as landscapes in their own right. Not in the early modern sense of the term – used in geography and other cognate disciplines to fixate stable nature-cultural patterns^[14] – or in the same sense that still breathes in the notion of townscape mentioned before, but in a new materialist sense: thinking from their complex temporal and spatial material interconnectedness.^[15] All of a sudden, the streets we walk cease being the same. What appeared static, indeed moves! This can happen in strange and imperceptible ways, as part of the earthly transformation of microbiota or weeds. But pavements are many times the result of violent capitalist extraction: as it happens in the far-away travels of many of the very anonymous materials that constitute the world at our feet, captured landscapes whose origins remain obscured.^[16] 

IMAGE, CRACKED PAVEMENT: https://www.flickr.com/photos/designmag/3550765831   

However, landscaping pavements might be the first way for them to start speaking back. Not as the mute foundations of the present, but in their strange temporal mash-ups: between deep and shallow time. Manuel de Landa provides an apt metaphor for this approach to city-making: “About 8000 years ago, human populations began mineralizing … when they developed an urban exoskeleton, bricks of sun-dried clay became building materials, stone monuments and defensive walls.”^[17] In that mineralized sense, pavement landscapes can be thought of as siblings of Rome. But not the classic and boring take that obsessed many neoclassic and fascists architects and artists. Rather, we should follow up the fantastic visualisations landscape architect Kristi Cheramie has worked hard to unearth: Rome as a concatenation of landscapes, where the contemporary city is deeply entrenched in the terraformation that the ancient one undertook. A geological entity, whose complex boundaries are sometimes those of the very Mediterranean olive oil trade, sedimenting a way of living as well as the mode of circulation that saw its growth and demise.^[18] Taking landscape as a unit of analysis of pavements means, hence, studying and dimensioning the different agents there involved, their temporal and spatial boundaries as well as their material configurations.^[19] Thus understood, our urban arenas appear as layered compounds, palimpsests through and through.^[20] Or as Francesc Perers calls it, in a rather peculiar photo-book on Barcelona’s sidewalk archaeology, “a cohabitation of strata.”^[21] 

IMAGE, ROME: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jsjgeology/36739267000 

How could we exercise this approach when we walk?^[22] What exercises could we engage to reconnect to these underground palimpsests that are also our very mineral and multispecies condition? How to approach them, how to inhabit closer to them?^[23] Thinking of all this, the next time you walk in the street, perhaps this could be the new conversations you might engage in:

What could you tell me, oh, anonymous piece of stone?

From what quarry do you come from? Who took you from the belly of the Earth? Who broke and dismembered you from the common body of other stones, using what machine? What standard shaped you? How might others resist the corset you provide? How will you let me walk on you when it rains?

Oh, you macadam, strange collective body, interconnected and singular, strangely one, what life can you also give? How have you been prepared for me to tread you, using what procedures? Under what technical or parliamentary regulations? How could you resist this encounter?

Oh, you all strange pavements: What life do you also partake of? What new city could we engender, together with the others who could crack you, and make you into their new home?