Scoring Collective Creativity and Legitimizing Participatory Design

Like most students of landscape architecture in the 1960s, I was influenced by Larry Halprin long before I knew him personally. Half a generation our senior, he inspired us indirectly, largely through Grady Clay’s Landscape Architecture Magazine. Articles told us he worked on site, sensing with his whole body, camping out at the Sea Ranch to learn its microclimate, to feel firsthand the power of the landscape. By evoking a primal sexuality from the land, he indirectly encouraged us to experience nature, not just rationalize and abstract it. For him, sensual delight was far more powerful than surface aesthetics or fear of ecological calamity. Moreover, Mr. Halprin sketched not to market a product but rather to sense a place and learn the experiences it offered. The media explained that, to him, the essence of landscape design was not to be found in two-dimensional art but in the experience, a multi-sensual sequence of movement. Halprin proclaimed that he was process-oriented and not thing-oriented. This was most significant to those of us who were fledglings in the activism of the Civil Rights movement and participatory landscape design.

Legitimacy

The profession of landscape architecture found public participation threatening. As the President of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Ted Osmundson, admitted in 1969 our membership was “to all intents and purposes, a gentlemen’s club in the truest sense of the word,” white, male, college “educated people doing a nice thing.” They worked “in the suburbs and beyond” for clients who represented corporate not democratic interests. The model they followed was top down; considering diverse viewpoints from the grassroots masses was blasphemous. Landscape architects, like other professionals at the time, were insecure, fiduciary elites whose expertise was vulnerable to public scrutiny. To one African-American participant, the landscape architects he worked with were “fat-cat establishment-oriented reactionaries” who were landscaping urban freeways and urban renewal projects that destroyed the neighborhoods of people of color. These projects came to be called Negro Removal after their real intentions became public (Hester 1975, 172–175).

It was in this context that Halprin arose as the champion of participatory design. He justified public involvement to a profession overwhelmingly hostile to the idea. Others were already challenging the dominant design order. Herbert Gans (1962) exposed an irreconcilable difference regarding urban renewal arising from class, race, and professional distinctions. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1992) called us to nonviolent action. Paul Davidoff (1965) offered an alternative approach that served low-income communities. Karl Linn (1968) began making landscape commons with residents in desperately poor neighborhoods and Saul Alinsky (1971) revived disruptive techniques. All of these were easy targets for traditional practitioners to marginalize and discount.

Halprin’s work could not be marginalized. He provided undeniable evidence to legitimize community involvement in landscape design. His work was big (Sea Ranch), urban (Ghirardelli) and dazzlingly inventive (Lovejoy Fountain). And it was participatory! In 1969, Halprin described how he was using his participatory process, RSVP Cycles, to design these projects (Halprin 1969). Even stagnant practitioners had to acknowledge that public participation did not threaten Halprin’s creativity; in fact, his projects were the most creative of anything being published in Landscape Architecture Magazine at the time. He laid the foundation of legitimacy for participatory landscape architecture in ways that no one else could.

The Interview for Places Magazine

The lessons I learned secondhand as an undergraduate student were reinforced when I moved to California in 1980 and got to know Larry while working with him in workshops, on the Presidio, and Places magazine. Two decades later, I interviewed him regarding participatory design for an article that appeared in Places (Halprin, Hester, and Mullin 1999). By this time, Marcia McNally and I had developed a public process that we considered superior to other approaches. Larry and I occasionally sparred over process, design, watercolor painting, and personality. We had substantive disagreements as deep as the central purposes of participatory design and as superficial as the use of water features in the Los Angeles parks.¹

He seldom confronted me directly, choosing rather to urge our...