July 26, 2023 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
At one of the nation’s most prestigious landscape architecture schools, the summer studio of Ohio State University professor Michelle Franco has students learning how to pull up weeds, prune trees and mix soil. Sometimes, this calls for expertise beyond what Harvard-educated Franco can provide. So she brings in the people who know the most about this kind of work — actual landscape laborers.
Franco leads the Diggers Studio, a project of OSU’s Knowlton School of architecture that posits an alternative model for landscape production. Each summer, students participate hands-on in the design and construction of a community green space in Columbus, Ohio. They pick up tools and go to work alongside city parks crews and landscapers — laborers whose contributions are often made invisible by an academic and disciplinary apparatus that prizes the creativity and vision required to design a streetscape or park, but not the technical skill and sweat required to make it a reality.
“Labor is an externality that landscape architects view [as] something that isn’t deserving of their primary focus,” says Franco. “There’s a whole population of people that aren’t represented in the work of landscape architecture, but are building and maintaining it.”
The first Diggers Studio, in 2022, had students re-grading a riverside site at the McKnight Outdoor Education Center, connecting trails and building seating out of logs. This summer, a team of students spent several weeks establishing an urban food forest and nursery on a vacant lot in Columbus’ west side Hilltop neighborhood.
“I had them mulching,” says Jeremy Thomas, a gardener with the Columbus Recreation and Parks Department who collaborated with the studio last year. On a trip to a downtown park, he pointed out the design details that made it harder for landscapers to do their jobs, like placing planting beds below street level, where they are likely to collect roadside trash.
Tension between laborers and designers is typical on any sort of construction site, says Thomas. “It’s the boots-on-the-ground versus the people in the air-conditioned office,” he says. But “any time you open up dialogue between two groups that typically don’t interact, you really do start to see each other as humans, instead of an us-versus-them kind of thing.”
The kind of service learning that the Diggers Studio does isn’t new, but applying it within Franco’s specific ideological point of view is. By placing landscape labor and design on equal footing, Franco aims to tear down divisions between the two types of work. She’s pushing against some of the most fundamental tenets of the landscape architecture industry — the centrality of design, the corresponding marginalization of labor, and the commodification of the natural world as design material — in order to place labor at the center of the discourse and economic structure of the built environment.
Digging In
On a mercifully cool morning in late June, a team of eight students surveyed their Hilltop worksite, on a vacant lot where a house once stood.
The plot is owned by the Columbus Land Bank, one of about 200 such sites in the neighborhood. It’s designed to have two distinct functions. When it’s grown in, it’ll be an urban food forest for Hilltop residents who will be able to pick mulberries, persimmons, paw paws and hazelnuts, Franco says. The site will also serve as a plant nursery and seed bank to stock future Diggers Studio projects.
Franco was also attracted to the nursery idea in order to push back against the high carbon footprint of standard greenhouse propagation, which ships non-native plants in plastic trays and soil in plastic bags to garden centers, maximizing convenience and minimizing legibility of the environmental costs of this process. Nursery production is “an externality that we don’t often consider in our work, but should be considered, because it has a huge carbon footprint and human impact,” says Franco. “I want to bring production out of hiding.”
The lot has been vacant since 2018, and because of the likely presence of lead in the ground, much of the students’ work is building up the soil with a mix of recycled concrete, wood chips, and a dark and spongy material known as Com-Til, a locally produced compost derived from municipal solid waste.
Students focused on the south edge of the site; beneath a line of mulberry trees, they shoveled out wheelbarrows full of soil mix and snuffed out some straggling poison ivy with wood chips. Wrapping burlap around trees and bollards to prevent erosion made OSU student Ruby White “feel like a seamstress,” she said. In the fall, the students will return with a final round of plantings.
Franco started the day with a few sketches detailing how to approach securing soil along the slope, but the work is far more physical, tactile and olfactory than representational. Shovel into a pile of Com-Til and the smell slowly changes, like a pungent kaleidoscope: It’s a steaming, smoky odor that’s becomes subtly earthier, then takes a barnyard nosedive more reminiscent of its origins in the toilets of Columbus. Franco and her students spent seven hours one day mixing the Com-Til with concrete fragments and wood chips, one shovelful at a time.
“It was really hard work,” Franco says. “We could just buy the soil. It’s this dialogue between, ‘How much work are you willing to put in to achieve a balance?’”
A landscape of risk
This kind of work is never very far from Franco’s life. A Mexican-American from Los Angeles, her mother first decided to move to the US after her own mom nearly cut off a finger with a hand scythe while the whole family was harvesting sorghum in Michoacán.
Associating with landscapers — a title that can make some landscape architects wince if it’s applied to them — is itself a deep critique of landscape architecture. The discipline grew out of 18th century English landscape gardening, where garden designers like Lancelot “Capability” Brown pursued commissions with the English aristocracy, positioning their ornate gardens as showcases of sylvan largesse and cultural sophistication.
Maintaining this status meant differentiating designers from the common laborers who were required to plant and till. What became landscape architecture developed as a luxury good, which it still largely is. In an US context, the race and class dynamics of who does this work — often Black and brown people, many of whom are new arrivals to the US — are equally stark.
“Doing landscaping work is dangerous,” says Alexandra Sossa of the Farmworker and Landscaper Advocacy Project, a nonprofit that offers free legal services and advocacy for Latinx farmworker and landscapers in Illinois. There were 142 fatal workplace injuries in the landscaping industry in 2021, according to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. It’s the 12th riskiest job in the US — three times more dangerous than being a police officer.
Sossa points to unsafe working conditions, especially tied to extreme summer heat and the widespread lack of legal protectionsfor outdoor workers in the US, as well as human trafficking, racial discrimination and illegal paycheck deductions as some of the chronic issues facing this workforce. Poor wages magnify these challenges: Median wages for landscapers in Illinois are $28,500 a year, and slightly less in Ohio. “They’re the ones that are cleaning the parks and the streets and making the city beautiful, but they don’t have a nice place to live because their wages don’t allow [it],” says Sossa.
Cutting landscape labor off from the cultural capital and prestige attached to landscape design means you can often get it for cheap, which design clients like. From that perspective, designers owe labor more than they’re getting. Franco aims to use her academic project as a means of transforming that relationship, and tearing down some of the distinctions between design labor and physical labor.
“I definitely do not want it to be just a technocratic exercise that is about value-engineering the private practice model,” she says. “I think of it as more of an empathetic inhabitation of social difference. The idea that we’re all workers is true. Very few of us are capitalists in terms of the financial and economic benefits. I hope by working in this studio there is a sense of allyship with the working class. There are probably many ways to get there, but one way is to literally do the same work.”
Designing a labor movement
Beyond its conceptual aims, the studio has a practical goal: By better understanding how landscapers work, the participants can create designs that use labor more effectively. Ruby White, for example, wants to use this experience to build tighter connections between urban agriculture, design, and labor. “Designers weren’t in that space when they should have been,” she says. “I want to connect food systems and urban agriculture to design. Landscapers always have to work on the hedges and the grass. We could have landscaping firms that actually produce food systems.”
Before she set foot on the studio’s nursery and foraging forest, Bilwa Gulavani admits that “I’ve never, ever held any of these hand tools before.” Trained as an architect, she worked on her own and with a large firm in her native India. This studio has given her a better understanding of what designers can indicate at the drafting table and what needs to be figured out on site.
“It was just not enough to give [builders] the drawings and say, ‘Do that,’” she says. “The way we have design discussions with the community, or structural engineers, we should also have discussions with laborers. Sometimes [designers are] really rigid, but [landscapers] have more hands-on experience.”
The territory that the Diggers Studio is exploring also aligns with the nascent unionization drive that the design field is undergoing. In August, Berheimer Architecture in New York formed a union, and US employees at Snøhetta, a design firm including architects and landscape architects, narrowly voted against forming a union by a vote of 35-29. Among the issues that architects have cited: long hours, low pay and punishing student debt.
This labor push makes sense to Jeremy Thomas, the Columbus Recreation and Parks gardener, who is himself an American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union member. Just because they work indoors, “I don’t believe that [designers] are not subjected to a number of exploitative practices,” he says. “I would stand with them. If the boots-on-the-ground know you can put in an honest day’s labor like [the students], they’ll run through walls for you if they see that you treat them well.”
Historically, Franco’s chosen field has hidden the “violent labors of the landscape” needed to bring forth pastoral wonderlands, “and I feel like we still do that,” she says.
But one lesson she wants her students to walk away with is that labor is not inherently exploitative. “Yes, labor can be exploitative, it can be painful, it can be tedious,” she says, “but it can also be a sense of belonging, it can be care, it can be love, it can be community. It has all of those capacities, and I think as landscape architects, so far we’ve been involved in very few of these capacities and mostly the negative ones.”