Pace Maker

Think of how many eyes have been on the stretches of interstate and the facades of houses but how few have penetrated past a couple of meters off the shoulder or down an alley. There’s a windshield between you and the buildings and grass in a car, not unlike a television screen. The speed is too fast to take in much at all. Like most things “American”, seeing a landscape from a car window is about getting in quantity, not quality. And as lovely as a stroll may be, it’s a slow way to see a place. Most people see the same stretch on their walk, to and from a Metro or the grocery store. And those folks are the lucky ones, who live in proximity to places they can walk to. For me, the middle ground is also what keeps me sane throughout the week – a run. In the States I would run almost every day, covering about 6 miles each time, trying out new routes or trying to return a library book in a new neighborhood and accomplish small tasks as I go. On the weekends I’d strike out to see someplace new, further away. Sometimes you get stuck on a hot street without a sidewalk or a shoulder, stepping into gravel and cigarette butts when you hear a car coming. Another time I discovered a bright blue adobe house that inspired me to repaint my own house. I ran by it numerous times afterwards to test paint chips against the trim.

Now I live in a place where I get sideways glances for breaking a jog in my running shoes on the way to the market. Running for Croatians is for exercise or getting away from something. Even then, it is done on a treadmill, perhaps at Maksimir Park or if an angry dog gets off its leash. It doesn’t belong on city streets unless a tram is about to slam into you. Sometimes I don’t care at all and I’ll jog around my neighborhood. But mostly I find it most peaceful just to head up the hill where the city ends and the “suburbs” (if you can call them that) start, where there are less people on the streets and those who are there care less about the…. what…. “inappropriateness” of breathing hard and wearing shorts on the city streets.

Europe is amazingly laid out for the pedestrian. So why then, does a runner not seem to fit into that category? And more importantly, how can running be programmed into the city better? For all the inadequacies of American cities when it comes to pedestrians and all the priorities given to cars, traffic and parking, Americans often run through their streets more than they walk them. Especially in suburbia, you may see an American driving a quarter mile down the street to stick a letter in the postal box or driving into their garages never to be seen in the public domain in their street shoes and office clothes. BUT… they’ll be out in their spandex and Nikes for a forty minute jog every morning. In this case, often runners will get themselves as quickly as possible to a bike path or off-road running route. For me, although this is always a pleasant place to run, I like running through urbanity. I like the distractions of architecture watching and the minutiae of life that happens at each doorstep and corner. I want to run on pavement (is this wrong?).

Here in Zagreb, I want to run down Illica, the commercial street, and window shop for shoes. Or run to the market, pick up some peaches and walk home. Makes total sense to me. For now I’ll get glances and children will lag behind their parents as they follow me with their eyes. Women smoking cigarettes at a sidewalk café will pause and follow me like an owl turning its head. I won’t look as put together as the mother in stilettos at the market with her baby carriage. I’ll be sweaty but who cares. I’ll be planting seeds. People will start seeing my strength and find it perhaps ‘cool’ (maybe…). The peanut gallery of smoking old men drinking their morning Karlovakco will snicker at first and then call me over one day to “chat” and soon enough, it won’t be so weird. Not that I have any aspiration to goal to change their way of life – just to accept a piece of mine. Seeds are planted, growing own little revolution of sorts.

The next step is to think about how the city infrastructure could support this newly seeded running culture….

That’s the next entry.

RIP Platnus x acerifolia on Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra

When I was 8, my family had a dog named Brewster, like Punky. He was a mut from the pound and he loved us. But he could be aggressive with other people, especially men, especially the little brat boys down the street who bullied everyone and threw rocks at dogs. One day Brewster snapped at Michael, the oldest boy. I don’t remember if he broke the skin or just scared him. But one day after that I came home from school and Brewster was gone. My mom said she gave him away to family on a farm, where he could run more and there were less people around. It was sad and I was young and angry at my mom but Brewster now lived on a farm and was surely a happier dog for it. 20 years later, Brewster comes into the conversation while driving with my mom on a visit home. She says non-chalantly that she actually had Brewster put down all those years ago. It seems to me that she felt that now that I was an adult, I’d understand why she did what she did. But in my mind, she had a problem – a dog with a penchant for biting people who taunted him and threw things at him – and she took the easy way out by having him put-down rather than try to find a better solution for him. She knew at the time that the answer she had chosen wouldn’t have flown with her family, especially her children, but either time or age, she figured would have softened the blow on me, a person who genuinely was attached to Brewster. But why I recount this silly story actually has to do with the offense committed in 1989. She made a decision that she knew was not only controversial but perhaps even recognized was wrong, went ahead and acted upon it even though there were many other involved people with opinions on the subject who had the right to be a part of the decision and were affected directly by it and then lied about the “good intentions” behind the decision as if it were really made in the best interest of Brewster and the children of Elmwood Avenue.

This actually has relevance to landscape architecture:

I was in Belgrade a couple of weeks ago, just as an entire street of mature London plane trees (sycamores) was being razed. Citizen groups were up in arms. “Zeleni Srbije”, Green Serbia, had organized protests, using a social networking site to voice their opinions. I guess, after seeing how the powers-that-be “communicate” with protesters (ie – tear apart the canisters that the students set up on Flower Square in Zagreb a couple months ago – I wrote about that a while back), the Serbian protestors figured to get Facebook behind them – I mean, you can’t take the ‘jaws of life’ to Facebook. But even that didn’t seem to faze the Belgrade authorities and they still razed the trees on Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra, saying that the trees were diseased and all 500 of them needed to come down. These trees can get quite massive with age (check out the picture of the tree in Dubrovnik). The Serbian Academy of Architecture (these may be Serbian landscape architects as there is no official landscape architecture organization in Croatia or Serbia as we have in the US, Canada and Europe. Thus all landscape architects are licensed under the Architecture Academy) called this “the biggest tragedy for Belgrade since the NATO bombing of the capital in 1999”. That’s arguably a bit histrionic. Perhaps not. It’s not as dramatic as a bombing. It’s not covered by international news organizations. And true, no one has died as a result. However, the lack of honest public process about decisions that affect citizens and their lifestyles is a mistake that seems to happen over and over again in this neck of the woods. Citizens have learned their roles too – protest perhaps but don’t expect much response. “This shouldn’t have happened without consultation with relevant organizations and experts”, says Dusan Pavlovic from “Green Serbia”. But in the end, “now that the damage is done it is too late to stop and therefore we will try to press authorities to do what they promised to do afterwards, namely plant new trees” (Belgrade Insight – Issue 60, Feb 26-March 11 2010). Citizens have realized that their opinions matter very little in the decision making process. One student in Zagreb who I met apathetically said when we chatted about politicians “we elect them. It’s our fault that they are in power. So who cares if they do things that are wrong. We can’t change anything at that point” (which, at that point, after standing on a tram with her for 4 stops listening to this 20 year old talk with indifferent callousness, I had to get off the tram). All the public seems to be able to do is react. And even then, they are often ignored.

Massive London plane tree in Dubrovnik:

All of this is being done under the guise of pubic improvement and that’s what seems most irksome - this rationalizing of decisions to make events that are wrong, seem right. And then, when all is said and done, a film of altruism is laid upon the entire thing. Apparently the timber from the diseased trees is going to be given to “vulnerable families for heating”. Yet most suspect that the new parking places have been sketched in with CAD and there is suspicion over other “hidden projects” that are in the works.

P.S. Other than this little analogy, my mom is nothing like corrupt politicians. May Brewster rest in peace.

Gondola rides through the sand - what does Croatia have to do with Dubai and Abu Dhabi?

Dubai, Abu Dhabi – all of these fast growing places are looking to develop pronto and hiring firms from the west to help them do this. They want the success that the west found over centuries but they want it in the next 10 years. They want the prestige that association with the west has. So they hire firms from London, the US and even Croatia to help them do this. In some cases we’ve already seen the results. The canals of Venice were brought to the desert of Dubai in a Las Vegas manner. A ski mountain a la the Swiss Alps, was constructed in the hot and dry sand. These examples are well known and no one argues that they are far from a seamless or even tasteful creation in Dubai. No one seems to care. But taste aside, how about the environmental impact, the water use, the electricity needed to maintain these places. And then overlap of the psychology involved in making these places with the environment and you realize that one very dangerous repercussion is the mentality that this is OK because it is possible. If you can build it, then it is righteous. Rolling that idea back one notch, you get “if you want it, if you can envision it… then you can build it and it is righteous”. Before you know it, a mentality that we esteem in the US, the American self-made man who has a dream and goes after it has supplanted any cognizance of where you are – the genius loci. I’m not even talking about the greed involved in these decisions. Simply the idea that if you want it, it can be so. And if you want Venetian canals, Miami-style swimming pools and verdant British parks, you can have it. Thus the surgical extraction of people from their environment occurs and is replaced, like poor plastic surgery, with artificiality. That’s right, Dubai is turning into Joan Rivers, David Hasselhoff and Joselyn Wildenstein.

There was a report about a Chinese girl who is having plastic surgery to look like Jessica Alba. The transformation includes changing her eyes and rhinoplasty among other things. She still speaks Chinese, goes to a Chinese high school, eats Chinese food, and spends time with her Chinese family. Yet she wants to be a southern Californian actress. This is the conundrum of Dubai. Some doctor needs to talk to this Chinese girl and say, “it’s cool to be cool – we get that. We all want to be beautiful – that’s easy to understand. Let’s help you gain what you want in a way that fits with who you are”. So (I’m getting to my point in this drawn out metaphor), when Dubai businessmen come to foreign landscape architecture firms and say “we were thinking we’d really like San Tropez here in Dubai. Maybe throw in a bit of Versailles because we love that fountain of Neptune and we were hoping for a Champs Elysee leading up to Hyde Park with a gondola that travels through aspens. Can you do that?”. I’m not sure if it’s the horrible economy or the ease of creating something brand new but firms are jumping at the opportunity. I had coffee here in Zagreb with one firm director. I asked him about this dynamic. He simply said “but it’s what they want”. The water becomes murkier here because who are we to question what a client wants? It seems patronizing to tell them that they really do NOT want that and in fact, they SHOULDN’T have it because it’d be irresponsible, overly consumptive and a waste (not to mention tacky), even though the west has all of those things (including the tackiness). This firm director sees the environmentally sensitive solution as finding technology that will reduce the energy and water waste while giving them green grass, spouting fountains and ski hills. As Bill McDonough points out in Cradle to Cradle, it’s like the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra – it allows us to continue to consume, waste and discard… but at a slower or lesser scale thus better. Eventually that recycled water bottle is going to end up in a landfill and its better that it took four forms before that happened but it’s still trash in the end. That's not a healthy cycle. It's not really a cycle at all. It's the same linear, consumptive mentality - a "better badness". The landscape architecture firm director gave me an animated explanation of their new and improved, still-in-the-works (lean in and whisper or risk the idea getting stolen by the couple at the next table) drainage system installed under the lush fields of irrigated grass. It prevents irrigation water from seeping into the sand under the soil substrate thus it saves water. But the grass still allows for massive evaporation as it acts like a wet towel on hot sand. And, perhaps more importantly, the people who use this grass have now lost their connection to the desert in which they live. They live in a grassy bubble.

“They want an oasis”, the director said. “We need to give it to them”. Is this because his firm seeks to please or because if they don’t give them the grass and dolphin fountains, some other firm will?

Actually, an oasis is a landscape that does originate in that part of the world. It is the perfect scenario for Dubai – I don’t argue that. An oasis is a place of respite amidst the harsh sun and dry conditions of the desert. People hallucinate the lush palms, heavy with dates clustered around a spring with fresh water. It is a place of activity, a crossroads. These are all positive elements of the oasis. Yet there is one very important experience that must occur for an oasis to truly feel like the haven that it is – one must pass over desert to get there. You need the contrast between the harsh environment and refreshing oasis to have an oasis. You must cross over. You can’t have an oasis if you turf the desert. Then you just have suburbia.

Gustafson Porter was hired to do a park in Abu Dhabi. I applied for an entry level position the moment I saw it. Since I did my MLA in the desert, I felt that my expertise would be the cognizance of creating public open space, responsibly, in the desert. I didn’t get the job, or at least they didn’t respond to my application. Gustafson Porter is well known, well respected and out of London. Katherine Gustafson designed the award winning Princess Diana Memorial. I don’t think my MLA from University of Arizona, with no experience impressed them much. But every so often I google the project to see what has progressed. I’m curious to see what their interpretation of the desert oasis will be.

Bon-e-fide. Happily stick me in the footnotes.

I'm referenced! Does this mean you have to trust what I say now?

http://dirt.asla.org/2010/02/22/land-matters-should-arid-regions-be-landscaped/

Going Once, Going Twice, Public Pedestrian Street SOLD to the highest bidder.

Protesting students having a drink after their "shift" in the container, pre-container demolition.

Back in the day women used to come to Cvijetni Trg (Flower Square) to sell their, well, obviously, flowers. There were hand pumps for water and a beautiful, small Orthodox church flanks the square to the north. Pedestrian corridors radiate from the square, connecting to Ilica Ulica, a big commercial street and tram line while a network of small passages connect under and through the surrounding buildings. The “sun”, a huge metal ball representing the center of the universe sits in the middle of one connector pedestrian street and small specks of metal have been cemented onto buildings around town representing, to scale, the universe in Zagreb. Mercury is in the old upper town. Pluto is beyond the last tram stop to the west. This central square is marked as such both symbolically with the “sun” (see image below) and physically in its proximity to almost everything in downtown Zagreb. There used to be large, old trees but at some point a “modernization” effort removed the old hand pumps, newly paved the square and took down the old trees. People protested but their voices seemed to resonate like TV fuzz in the background and were easily tuned out. Numerous people have said that the “renovation” of Flower Square was the biggest architectural mistake in Zagreb (this is saying a lot in a town that destroyed 500 year old fortress walls surrounding the cathedral to create open space that turned into a car turn-around and demolished a medieval neighborhood so that they could move the market from the main square to someplace less dignified and fitting of the provincial Dolac market). An old factory sat on one edge of the square where chairs are set up in thick clusters like hundreds of living room arrangements gathered around tiny tables for coffee and beer. The building was over a hundred years old when it was sold to a private developer with visions of shopping malls dancing in his head. The omnipresent shopping malls in Zagreb feel like the shopping malls in LA, Berlin or Milwaukee – they have the same stores and the same layout, facing inward along the “streets” of tile and escalators that create cloned indoor cities across the world with the result of homogenizing people and stripping away any distinctive character that a place may have. Since it was just reported that over 300,000 Croatians are unemployed, I am not sure who will be patronizing this new mall. Zagreb citizens protested and while the discussion went on in city offices, the factory was bulldozed and VIP Telecommunications was sold the advertising space on the scaffolding surrounding the new pit which they promptly covered in a flashy poster of a woman’s legs, 25 meters tall, waltzing with her cell phone. You’d think that the citizens of Zagreb may be deterred or discouraged but they remain ever vigilant because they know that the buck doesn’t stop with honored public space and traditional livelihoods like the flower vendors. The 150 year old factory was simply a remnant of a socialist history that the powers-that-be in Zagreb would rather bulldoze into the past. This is how Croatian cities are formed and reformed, you see. Politics and influence are constantly flexing, responding, defining themselves and redefining themselves. Last night I got into a conversation with a bunch of Croat friends about Coca-Cola versus Pepsi during which one friend gave me an animated lecture about the politics surrounding both brands and the soap box that you stand on when you chose to drink one over the other. Regardless of whether he had his facts straight about soda pop, every choice made in this country by Croatians is made to make or erase a point. And the situation of truth is relative. Drinking Pepsi is a statement against “fascist bastards” (according to this friend) and tearing down the old factory is a statement of progression into the modern capitalist world that Croatia is trying so hard to gain respect in (they are rushing the EU right now and they are trying to be the best darned European nation they can be). Well, I’ve got news for you, the powers-that-be in Zagreb: you can’t sell off your history and you can’t ignore the voices of the public because they own that land as well as those streets lined with cafes and stores. Those little conduits where the public musicians play guitars by the big “sun” – that belongs to them too.

left: inside the container on a peaceful night.

But here’s the kicker. A week ago I went down to meet the boyfriend of a friend who is part of a student protest on Flower Square. The City didn’t stop at demolishing the factory. The developer decided to put in high-end condominiums and wanted private parking for his residents’ BMWs and Mercedes. He asked the city for a little favor – could he please have one small pedestrian street connected to Flower Square. He wants to put in a parking garage with close proximity to the condos. The City of Zagreb acquiesced, perhaps even willingly since I’m sure this developer is paying a pretty penny. Students and citizens set up “containers”, the box-like structures often put semi-permanently on construction sites. They filled the containers with protesters around the clock who smoked cigarettes, chatted and watched the police in their SmartCars zip around the square monitoring their activities. A British-Croatian girl had hunkered down for the long haul, in her sleeping bag, explaining to me that although the decision to turn this street into a private parking garage would go through a public process, the public really had no forum for participating in the discussion. These containers were their “letter to the Mayor”. They were their chance to stand at the microphone before Mayor and Council and be heard.

I left Zagreb to come to Vis for my research for a week. Sitting in the kitchen of my friend Dini, he turned on the television and to my horror, the national news showed the Special Police (in full riot gear) tearing down the containers and crawling over the edges into them to pull out the protesters like flopping fish from the ocean. It was dark and the entire scene looked like an overly dramatic movie. There are so many things I find uncomfortable/despicable about this situation. I am sad to predict that the reason the Special Police were used (at night, in large numbers) appears to be part of the manipulative drama that portrays the protesters in a dark and unruly light in an attempt to influence public opinion towards what seems to be another inevitable mistake in public space appropriation and use. This is just my hypothesis. But I don’t think it’ll work. I think the citizens of Zagreb know exactly what is happening. I don’t have my ear close enough to the ground to know if it will matter, if the majority of citizens will be apathetic, feel they don’t have any power, or see this as yet another inevitable case of corruption lining the pockets of the powerful… or whether the Croatian collective psychology that seems to find power when there is a reason to coalesce against something will continue to protest. I leave for Zagreb today. I’ll keep you updated.

left: the pedestrian street leading to the Trg (square) that is slated to become a parking garage.

The Big Trg - the honey pot

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Medva. She lived in the mountains. One day she wandered down the mountain and met a tired bear. He was sitting on a rock and as she approached he looked up anxiously. “Honey, I am thirsty. Do you have some water?”. She didn’t have any water. But she knew of a secret spring – the Medveščak stream. It came up from the ground not far from where he was sitting. She brought him to the spring and he drank and it saved his life. Forever after that day, this spring was sacred. By sacred, I also mean “fought over”. It divided two parts of the city, ran mills, flooded and drowned people, earning a bridge over it the name “Bloody Bridge”. Then, in 1898, the powers-that-be decided to cover the spring and turn it into part of the sewer system (makes sense, doesn’t it?). By this time the people had built trams around the old spring and a big statue of Ban Jelačić stood in the middle. It was built by Austria in 1866, facing north with his sword raised towards Hungary. A while later, after a great war, a man named Tito came along. He said that the old story was hogwash and bricked over the sacred spring. People were sad but they looked towards the great man and said, “if you say so”. The big Ban statue was removed by the Communists in 1947 since it commemorated collaboration with the Austrians (who collaborated with the Germans who collaborated with the Ustasha who persecuted Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Communists. In a much more impacting and terrible way, it was like highschool). Then one day, Tito died. Tall buildings towered over the bricked-over spring. The summers were hot and the outdoor cafes, filled with people smoking slim cigarettes, yearned for the quenching spring. In 1990, the new leaders were saying “you know what, perhaps that talking bear was OK… because you know, he was a Croatian talking bear. Let’s bring the statue back (but face him south), open up that spring and tell our children the folk story. Then let’s declare our independence and be as we always should have been, an independent Croatia”.

Image below: Ban Jelačić defending Partner Banka, Mikla Chocolates, Vip Cellular and Loreal.

I am sure to have many details of that story wrong. I heard it over beers at a Cinkuši concert – a “modern traditional” Croatian band from the region to the north of the city. The crowd was young and hip, some having dreads, leggy women in slinky dresses, but they were swaying with beer glasses held high, chanting the traditional music as their great-grandparents would have. I remember the woman translating the story into English was stumbling along – her English was rocky – and when she said, in a thick Slavic accent “Honey, I am thirsty”, her colloquialism cracked me up. “But you see, bears like honey”, she said. “Of course!”. The roots of Winnie the Poo may have come all the way from Medvenica, the mountain above Zagreb with the talking, honey-lusting, thirsty bear.
Images above: Giggling Croatian teenagers in the Trg; the staggered clock tower in the distance, the Ban in the center and the fountain in the foregroundpast the flower sellers, up the stairs to the Dolac market.

But the gist of the story stuck in my mind. It put a new spin on the Jelačića Trg (Jelačića Square), the most important public space in Zagreb. It is a clumsily designed square if you ask me. It’s a rectangle at the foot of the old town. Above it, past lovely, wide steps is the Dolac, the main city market that overflows with rural farmers selling produce, home-made cheese, honey, hand-knit caps, traditional cloth, and dried figs. Around the Dolacs are small shops with tables you can stand next to and eat chevapi, little meat sausages in fried bread. A girl runs around bringing cups of coffee to the vendors, many of whom are old, weathered and bundled head to toe in coats and scarves, selling their produce as they have their entire lives. And as you walk down the steps and the vista opens up to Jelačića Trg, flower vendors line the passage. No joke. It’s like you are walking down the isle to the alter every time you enter the square, with the scent of flowers on either side and rose petals scattered on the herring bone stone pavement. Aerial below: Jelačić is in the center red square, the clock on the left/west side and the fountain on the right/east side. The green square is the Dolac market; the fountain on a cold day.
So this fantastic market flanks the square to the north. Ilica Street, the most bustling commercial street in the city runs along the south side of the square, the main artery pumping people in and out. Every tram line passes through Jelačića Trg. Which means huge crowds gather around the tram line. This brings newspaper vendors, the man hawking small bracelets, the Roma women with random articles of clothing, the fancy Italian business woman, the crowds of smooching and giggling Croatian students. It’s jam packed. But just above the tram line is the other clumsy element of the square, a small, out of scale clock that stands on the other side of the big statue of the old Ban. It’s modern in style but awkward, like an Ikea afterthought in a college dorm room. It seems cheap but utilitarian. But it does its job. It was stuck there to, I assume, inform travelers of the time. Just like the blocks of socialist era housing on the south side of town, built to house the workers, pure and simple, this clock tells the time, pure and simple. Even though it has none of the class and sophistication of the old clocks found in train stations and on towers in the centers of other great cities, I’ve met every “coffee date” under the clock in Jelačića. It’s pedestal is constantly surrounded by a group of people waiting for someone else. So regardless of my nose-in-the-air opinions on its awkwardness, it works and people love it.

I’ve been here for three weeks and talked to many Croatian architects and landscape architects. I’ve asked many of them about their opinions on the “Big Trg”. And every single one of them defends it so quickly that you learn shut up and admire its vitality over its design. But this may be the reason why it looks as it does and why people love it so. It is an amalgamation of all the little things, here and there in Croatian history that make the people who they are. It’s a folk story that roots them in the ancient forests, it’s a reminder of the socialist ideological leader who ‘knew best’ and the rebellion when folks decided they wanted their folk story back. It’s the old “Ban” (leader from Austro-Hungarian times) and a placard to modernity with all the big Croatian companies advertising phones, banks, make-up and technology on scaffolding around the buildings lining the square.

What do we do? Can you sum it up in a sentence?

Zagreb. So much to say about this place – it’s urban-ness, its parks, even parking is worth a couple photos (so I'll stick a couple photos in). But what I find myself confused by and thinking about most often is my inability to describe/circumscribe my profession in this country. People don’t get it and I started to find myself confused. There are only 30 registered landscape architects in ALL of Croatia, if that helps you to understand why people don’t know what we do. The academic program is new at the University and began under the instruction of Slovenian landscape architects. I am not sure why it got its own designation in Slovenia but has only slowly and recently trickled into Croatia.

I had an interesting short conversation with a Croatian architect this week. He is a friend of my roommate and with one hand in the pocket of his black suit, after an explanation of what the “fancy” people in Zagreb do in their summers, he said that “landscape architecture” is shared between the Agriculture and Architecture departments at the University of Zagreb but “not respected by either”. At first I felt my feelings were a bit hurt. Then I felt as if I needed to explain, to defend my profession. I didn’t. I let the comment pass and thought about it the next day as I walked around the city.
(Smart Cars: created to make their own rules about parking in old town Zagreb - first image. Even though it's not an ideal solution, cars get squeezed into old town streets, two wheels up on the old sidewalk, their butt in the street. New Zagreb has taken care of this problem with oceans of parking sandwiched between the roads and the buildings - second image)



The designed environment is so obviously in your face all over European cities and Zagreb is no exception. But architects design buildings (and their plazas) and engineers design tram lines, according to the architect I talked to. Gardens are seen as frivolous here in Croatia because the recent war, the thousands of refugees and a depressed economy makes people worry about food and security. Parks were often designed hundreds of years ago on the property of rich land owners, often for their private use, appropriated by the public later on when the cities grew around them. One thing I want to point out though, is that Croatia has great “bones” for good public, open space even if it doesn’t have the money currently to keep it up. The plaza in front of the Zagreb Cathedral has much to be desired. It is essentially a concrete car turn-around sandwiched between a Baroque fountain and the impressive façade of the Cathedral. It hardly looks designed (although maybe at one point it was). The square in front of another notable church is used for parking for the Sabor (the Parliment). And Trg Ban Jelacica, the main square is a big and well used rectangular space full of people, trams and activity. In the center is an ostentatious statue of the Ban himself, on a horse. At least fits in scale to the huge space. Flanking him is a pitiful, modern-esque clock and a poorly placed, small, sunken fountain. The beautiful, tall, old buildings surrounding the square are covered in Zip and T-Mobil advertisements from the ground to floor 6. But in contrast to some of our most well-designed and thoughtfully designed spaces in the US that hardly get a lunch-time passerby, these places are hopping. In terms of the design of public space, whether someone did it on purpose or not, back in the day, they did it right.

(Ban Josip Jelacic Square - the statue and the advertisements show what was and what is important)


Now travel out to Novi Zagreb, the new part of town. You get all the crud that you get in the US – huge arterials filled with cars around (a somewhat uniquely Communist element) huge apartment buildings with clothes lines hanging out windows, parking surrounding them like a tree skirt and grafitti covering the ground floor. It reminded me of the plans that Corbusier had for a re-built Paris. This part of Zagreb felt sad. Of course, the war was a terrible thing for Croatia but this landscape of sullen buildings in a web of streets and parking lots made it seem like “landscape architecture” or at least what it could offer the people living in post-war Croatia may be a very un-frivolous endeavor.

In an office in Novi Zagreb I met the director of Oikon Ltd. and one of the few registered landscape architects, Hatec and Visna. Hatec, came to introduce himself and talk a bit about the COAST Project, the project off which I am hoping to work. Vis, my island of study, is part of COAST. Quickly Hatec began talking about the difference between American and Croatian perspectives on landscape architecture. It’s not about pretty gardens or even nice parks, he said. “We have had war in this century. You (Americans) have not, at least not on your own soil, since the Civil War”. He began analyzing the Civil War to make the point that during the Civil War, soldiers fought and died but it didn’t involved civilians and villages. I didn’t believe this to be completely correct but since he was on a roll, I didn’t stop him. My blood pressure did begin to rise, however. Then my internal psychologist reminded me that part of this process is being “that person”, the foreigner, and listening and understanding the point of view that comes out, provoked by people who are “not from here”. This is an important dynamic on Vis, an island steeped in "island syndrome", suspicion of foreigners and a desire to keep life as they know it, far from the grasps of those who aren't like them.

Hatec said that perpetual war has impoverished this country. The one-party government was a supervising and regulatory government. This role was not enabling and did not seek to grow knowledge but to contain what it felt was not correct and needed reigning-in or controlling. The government saw themselves as “bosses” not looking for active participation and partnership. This, as Hatec explained, was not a healthy process but an imposed one. Implementation occurred when the government went to University professors with ideas and asked them to back them up with their knowledge instead of education and discovery informing government creating progress. The process was backwards but that’s how it worked. After the Civil War comment and the shell I was ready to hold up to deflect the “you-just-don’t-get-it” comments, these points were salient.

How does this apply to Vis? In Croatia (said to compare it to the USA), “we care about what is old not what is new”. A conversation about the new-ness of American communities and an assumption that Americans love brand-spankin’ newness above all else that is holy, in contrast to the Croatian mentality began. I succinctly retorted that many Americans place great value in what is considered old, traditional and important to history. Our history may seem less “deep” (in age) than in Europe however it is no less revered (and in fact, just as old depending on the measure of it and the societies you are considering). The “newness” bug has more to do with the ability for expansion to happen so easily in the US. We had and still seem to have so much space… so we keep consuming it! I wanted to remind him that his office sat in “Novi Zagreb” (new Zagreb), that this bug exists in all humanity and if he wanted to see new towns that would turn your stomach, he should look in the old rice fields of Asia. But I held my tongue. Back to Vis…

Communism encouraged an industrial society which brought young people from their rural homes to industrial centers. It left old people in the villages and depopulated the islands. The “farmer was the enemy”, said Hatec. The idea of a farmer that owns his own parcels, equipment and animals was against the societal ideology. Socialism wanted to aggregate land parcels and in fact mandated that his happen. Unlike the Israeli kibutz, where people chose to farm as a community, the Communists enforced this notion. Vis didn’t have industry in the same way that the larger towns and cities did so its economy under Communism was different. The economy on Vis in the Communist years was based on a military relationship (I’m not sure what this means – did the military buy food from private farmers? Or was the island so militarized that agriculture hardly existed in those years?). There were 13 military installations on the island. Foreigners were not allowed. Tito even had his secret, private bunker on the island.

So the agricultural “memory” from the socialist (I am never sure whether to call it “socialism” or “communism”) period may not be contiguous from the older traditions. As people left the island and the pressure for arable land decreased, the terraces that were constructed on the slopes and in the more difficult areas were abandoned and people farmed the best land in the valleys. Consequently there are many old terraces overgrown with macchia and scrub growth. They grew primarily vines and some “mixed agriculture” for vegetable production.

Hatec wisely said that the key to ultimately creating meaningful places is to design the interaction between the urban and the wild. The question then is, “what is ‘wild’ on an island that has been manipulated for over 2000 years?. Like the island of Hvar and Stari Plain (an old agricultural plain from Roman times that has been continually farmed for ove 2400 years – amazing – and is now protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site), perhaps it is not necessary to define a “period of significance” as we often do in the States. We are not restoring to the past but to a healthy dynamic. What is the healthy dynamic that can exist on Vis? That is the question.

My future's so Fulbright, I gotta wear shades

It’s been a while since I’ve written because it seems that there isn’t a whole lot to say. But that’s because in this economic climate it becomes tiring writing about/discussing/reiterating the fact that it’s just tough. We are all walking uphill, through the snow, both ways and waiting for the big melt. Our industry says it’ll come this year. But still I hoped my moment would come and I could look back on the uncertainty of unemployment as a reality check, a moment (and just that, a short period of time) where I understood what it was like to be part of the poor, go on food stamps, live hand-to-mouth and then eventually, sooner rather than later, get a job. But after a while you start to reevaluate. Maybe this isn’t just a short slump in the market. If this continues, will my job skills atrophy? At first I said I’d weather it and continue to look for exactly what I wanted. I soon revised that to look for a wider spectrum of job types. I then realized how important my bartending gig was and it became an organizing element of my life. I worked nights, couldn’t go on my early morning runs because I was often too tired and if I went away I made sure there wasn’t a show (and thus a bartending shift I’d miss). I talked with a friend from graduate school who had moved to LA. If anyone was “hirable”, if anyone was smart and up for any challenge and willing to put in their fair share and then some, he was the guy to do it. And even he wasn’t getting any bites.

And then, one miraculous day, as a sat in front of my computer and applied for food assistance, checking the clock to make sure I wasn’t late for that night’s bar shift, I got a call. I almost didn’t answer it since I didn’t recognize the number.

“Rachel Hill? This is Rachel Holskin (my initials-sister) from the Fulbright. Are you still interested in taking a Fulbright fellowship to Croatia?”. I could hardly believe it. I asked her if I could have some time to think about it. Time to think what? - “maybe the 100 bucks a night I can make slinging beer is worth staying in Tucson. Living on my back porch has been kind of nice, like camping with plumbing. I do love my cat.”

I called her back the next day and took it. Since then I’ve been preparing and consciously putting it out of my mind at alternating moments. I applied for this thing a year and a half ago. The Croatian land planning agency that I had contacted to work with has since stopped working with the UN (the other organization I wanted to collaborate with). The most I’ve gotten from either are a handful of emails that say something along the spectrum of “just drop by when you come to town” to “ya, the project sounds neat. We’ll see”. That’s the extent of the commitment these guys have to my vision. But I guess that’s just it. It’s my vision and I have to craft it, work on it and make it happen. I jumped in with both feet at first. I found and read anything I could find on the area and the topic of rural tourism, agricultural systems, land planning around agriculture, cultural integration of agriculture into transitioning landscapes…. And then, when it seemed I could read forever and still not circumscribe my project in any more detail from the US, I focused on the nuts and bolts of living in Croatia. I got an apartment with a 27 year old woman on a square above a farmers’ market. Sounds fantastic. Anita, the roommate, is a language teacher (how perfect) and the room is furnished (except for blankets – I may be wearing my coat to bed for the first couple days).

I am sure the pace will pick up and the project will get defined. At the same time I feel like I need something inspiring and creative outside of my project to study. Any ideas? My old housemate Becky said I should photograph myself with every Croatian beer I can find. I’ll be like the troll in the photo except I’ll be me and instead of interesting locations around the globe, I’ll pose with interesting beers around Croatia. That’s one idea. Inspired by a Rome Prize winner I have vowed to draw at least once a week.

At the moment, I just want another London coffee (my 6th on this epic journey through airports). And a flat place to lie down and sleep. A down blanket would be nice. I can even put up with the bustle and noise in this terminal. It’d be great to take these boots off and wash the smudged mascara off of my face (who am I trying to impress anyways?). And I’d love to not have to tote my bags into the bathroom stall with me. And have a hug from someone familiar. That’d be nice. Day 1.5 down.