Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning

Modern ideology strips water of its sociocultural and political contexts, reducing it to the scientific abstraction of H2O. This reductivist approach to water has erased longstanding ontologies and physically transformed America's aridlands to advance modern political and economic agendas. By studying the 1947 proposal for the Orme Dam and the Yavapai Nation's forty-year resistance to it, this paper reveals the interconnected relationship between modern ideology and the design, development, and management of the environment. I also suggest that the inclusion of alternative ontologies can inspire the design of more just and resilient environments.

In recent decades, programmatic design activations have successfully rejuvenated many underperforming urban parks and vague sites. Nevertheless, the innate ephemerality of the landscape also leaves it susceptible to over-activation and loss of resilience and future possibility. Framed by this vulnerability, the article contributes a landscape-based interpretation of existing architectural and urban theories of vagueness and temporary use. Upholding of the potentiality of a site - even if not visibly active or productive - is agued to exhibit valid use-value within the contemporary accelerated urban context. The article cultivates landscape mechanisms for maintaining and propagating uselessness and neutralising existential threats to the openness of a site.