Lie of the Land

Academic talks, like the pair recently staged at the Buell Center’s under the name Made Land, can be impossible to summarize—not because I find them confusing, but because every word is so carefully chosen. Like boulders being dragged into formation, the words plot, land, and reclamation were prodded throughout the presentations even while they served as chapter titles and thematic anchors. Word-agonizing is what makes these people historians, honey, and that nitpicking attention is what brings alive the conditioning systems of colonialism and neoliberalism under which we all live.

My respect for discerning historians is also my excuse for saturating my summary with quotes. The event, which was part of the Buell’s ongoing Conversations on Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas series, brought together two scholars to speak about land that “has been ‘made’ from its edges inward” over the past four centuries (in other words, for the duration of capitalism). Deepa Ramaswamy of the University of Houston and of Cornell University shared research that the website description ever so carefully characterized as “showing how wealth is made from (and on) the edges of landed territories… Countering classical economics’ characterization that land’s value comes only from investing in the earth’s agricultural productivity, both speakers examine the long-term effects of alternate liquidities onto land’s shape and settlement.”

Ramaswamy showed maps and photos from Mumbai and Bombay, where the edges of both cities were expanded by “reclaiming” land from the sea, and how edges were defined by their uses as ports. The access and conditions of the coast have changed as it fell in and out of the hands of trading space.

Bizé talked about capital-P Plots in western Kenya, just outside the city of Nakuru. A plot as a unit of measurement is slippery to define as it fluctuates in proximity to city limits and the delineating highway; linguistically, it’s used in place of the word shamba, which means land/farm. Bizé related how “farming land [thus] turns to real estate land—indicating not only a division of area but a rupture of a set of ideas and land use practices.”

In a coda to the talks, Reinhold Martin of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, said the talks helped us consider what “made land” is. Or as he exactingly put it, “How might this regime called land be made different (speaking in passive voice) and in active voice, how to can we name the makers and hold them to account in the remaking?”