ALISON HIRSCH
Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, Director of the USC Landscape Justice Initiative and co-founder of foreground design agency
Alison B. Hirsch is an Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture. She is co-founder of foreground design agency, a critical landscape practice led by her partner Aroussiak Gabrielian. Hirsch is author of City Choreographer and recipient of numerous recognitions, including multiple Graham Foundation grants, most recently for her project Landscape and “the Working Country”; Food Justice and Landscape Ethics in California’s Central Valley. She has also received the 2020-2021 Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership, the 2017-2018 Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the Pruitt Igoe Now competition prize. At USC, she established the Landscape Justice Initiative as a platform to catalyze and support communities and implement multidisciplinary collaboration in areas of environmental, spatial, and climate justice.
We were excited to speak with Alison about her recent work in the lower San Joaquin Valley where billions of dollars of specialty crop farming has set up challenging conditions for the land and the people that labor on it. Her broad research focus is how the interpretation of sociocultural practices and marginalized histories and memories can contribute to the design of meaningful places, and we were curious how this manifests itself in a large regional, predominantly rural context with socioenvironmental extremes and complexities. Alison brings a vital lens of spatial justice to the DIALOGUES and we are honored to share her visions for a more equitable rural future.
You and your colleagues at USC launched the ‘Landscape Justice Initiative’ in 2019. Tell us about this program and where it’s going.
The Landscape Justice Initiative is a platform through which to initiate and support efforts at achieving environmental, climate and spatial justice in communities where design has not historically reached. The primary intention is to begin to fill the gap between academic inquiry and meaningful change on the ground. To achieve this, LJI provides a chance for students to participate in service-learning and long-term projects that depend on sustained engagement with local and regional communities. Through projects as wide-ranging as designing cooling stations for the unhoused in Skid Row, to developing a process through which to design and build community monuments, to working with rural communities on climate adaptation plans, students have opportunities to learn from local knowledge and expertise derived from lived experience and imagine how design can be enacted as a form of cocreation. Another primary focus is to demonstrate pathways to initiate projects outside the structures of the market, offering students opportunities to discover their agency and to develop into future leaders in design and environmental decision-making. Finally, in addition to our focus areas in climate, environmental and spatial justice, LJI focuses on communities with histories and threats of dispossession and displacement, so questions of place attachment and cultural memory are considered fundamental to seeking landscape justice.
LJI has established a broadening network of public, non-profit and institutional partners who are primary points of connection with the communities in which we work. We also work across scales – as a structure both for building and strengthening these partnerships to contribute to immediate local impact on neighborhoods and their ecosystems, and for multidisciplinary collaborations to tackle large-scale policy and environmental change. Geographically, the primary focus region is Southern and Central California due to the range of socio-environmental challenges presented here, responses to which have application elsewhere. My work in rural California is essential to LJI’s ongoing efforts.
You're currently looking at the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in California and its impact on the landscape, communities and labor in the lower San Joaquin Valley. What are some of the changes needed on the ground at the small community infrastructure scale vs. the large land-use and planning scale? And what does your involvement as a landscape architect with this project look like?
The Tulare Lake Basin, which largely covers the extents of the San Joaquin Valley or the southern third of California’s Great Central Valley, is the nexus of some of the most pressing environmental questions of our day, including climate volatility, rising temperatures, exhausted water systems, degraded air quality, contaminated soils and groundwater, food insecurity despite the agribusiness economy, extreme environmental and social inequity that is the manifestation of generations of discriminatory practices, high concentrations of poverty and unmanaged growth around its urban centers. More positively, the region has been host to migrant and immigrant populations throughout its history who have shaped the character and culture of the region. The land once supported a diverse ecosystem cared for by the numerous tribes of the Yokut people, a population that was nearly decimated by colonizers but still lives on, passing down cultural and ancestral knowledge. The San Joaquin Valley is thus a landscape of extremes but its cultural resilience provides both optimism and hints for ways forward.
A recreated scene of the Tulare Lake Basin looking toward the Sierras prior to colonization. Image provided by Alison Hirsch and developed in collaboration with student research assistant, Andrea Binz (MLA’22).
As a cultural study and a framework for change operating across scales – from the region to the bodies most at risk, my work in the San Joaquin Valley/Tulare Lake Basin is deeply focused on the opportunities for transformative change presented by the initiation and enforcement of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). The intention is to bring overdrafted groundwater basins into balance (between water extraction and recharge) by 2040. As the enforcement of this policy has only just begun, it will ultimately mean land transitions of at least 500,000 acres coming out of agricultural production - with impacts not just to growers but especially farmworkers and their communities. This massive land transition is the opportunity to realize a more just and equitable San Joaquin Valley as it will mean the reduction of scale of industrial operations and the diversification of land uses. Most significantly, it provides opportunities to think innovatively about how to safeguard and strengthen the most vulnerable communities – specifically unincorporated communities which are populated almost exclusively of residents of color and who suffer from the highest environmental burdens. Those burdens include lack of access to clean drinking water most fundamentally, but also failing septic systems, hazardous particulate matter in the air, and soils laden with nitrates, arsenic, coliform and other chemical inputs from industrial agriculture. Seeing these potentials for positive change for rural communities drove me to reach out to the Environmental Defense Fund, which is spearheading a program called the Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program that facilitates state grants to sub-basin scale cross-agency collaborations looking to creatively transition land to new climate-resilient uses. Visioning how land repurposing around rural communities can protect water supply quality and quantity has been critical to this effort.
Drilling groundwater wells in the Westlands. Photo by Alex Nuffer
Your research often deals with memory. Rural areas are commonly misconstrued as picturesque landscapes that evoke a pastoral nostalgia. How does your research confront memory across rural landscapes in a new way? What roles do history, remembering and forgetting play in your current studio in Allensworth, CA?
History has been essential to my study of the San Joaquin Valley. It is only by studying the histories of place that I can truly understand how this region has taken shape and arrived at this particular moment, and as I am trained as a landscape historian as well as designer, my own approach to practice requires that I have this deep temporal knowledge to develop any design intervention. I and many before me have used this landscape to critique the mythologized separation between urban and rural, where the rural is considered some bucolic Arcadian antithesis to the urban. In the San Joaquin Valley, the rural is an industrialized landscape of agricultural production shaped by processes of extraction and global trade. Legacies of 150-years of capital-intensive agriculture – the commodification of food, land and labor – clearly stretches much farther beyond the fields where crops are grown and harvested, into a sprawling landscape of agrochemical factories, feed lots, processing plants, packinghouses, warehouses, supermarkets and many other nodes within the complex commodity chain. In other words, there is no pastoral ideal here of the yeoman farmer living off the land.
Allensworth, CA. Photo provided by Alison Hirsch from drone footage by LJI Research Associate Yuliang Jiang, July 2022.
With that said, residents representing those predominantly unincorporated communities in which I have worked truly value what they see as a rural lifestyle – away from the bustle and the regulatory aspects of cities, where they can build homes in the quiet spaciousness of the vast agricultural landscape (even if that landscape is monocropping with huge chemical inputs and harsh environmental realities). At the same time, most of those I work with directly are striving to stabilize a safe drinking water supply and to upgrade infrastructure to ensure basic features of a safe, healthy and sustainable neighborhood – most essentially potable water, a sewer system, but also, more generally, safe housing, public transit, parks, sidewalks, street lights, storm drains, etc.
Recently tilled agricultural fields in the San Joaquin Valley. Photo by Alex Nuffer
Allensworth is an amazing town that has really become the focus of my work these days. It was settled in the vast agricultural region of the Tulare Lake Basin in 1908 to fulfill a vision for Black self-determination. Colonel Allensworth and his partners founded the town to serve as a center for Black innovation, and a place of refuge and prosperity for Black families to thrive. While the town experienced setbacks created by systemic racism, in 1974, California State Parks purchased 240 acres in Allensworth and operates it as Allensworth State Historic Park. Today, the living community of Allensworth adjacent to the State Park is comprised of about 600 people and is predominantly Latinx, including many farmworkers living with high levels of economic, health, and immigration status vulnerabilities. Despite challenges, the Allensworth Progressive Association (APA) has been pivotal in the securing of $40 million to ensure Allensworth “rises again.” In partnership with the APA and allies, my students are contributing to the Allensworth Community Plan. History, and memory, are essential to these efforts. The history of the site as both unique and emblematic of the Black Town Movement as it landed in California, and descendants’ memories of place have been essential to not only creating the park but telling the stories of that history for generations to come. While many of the current residents of Allensworth are not descendants of the original settlers, they are fundamental to telling that history and for imagining a future for Allensworth that builds on this amazing past.
I will say at this immediate moment (week of March 20, 2023), Allensworth is under evacuation orders due to extreme flooding, and climate planning has moved to their number one priority. While the repeated historic rainfall from atmospheric rivers – an impact of climate change on an area that has suffered from many years of extreme and historic drought – is the reason for the regional flooding, the community evacuation was the direct result of foul play by a large and powerful landowner who breached a levee to save their land from flooding and decided instead to flood out their neighboring poor community. It is an old racist script being played out in real time yet again – history repeating itself, yet this time in an entirely new climate reality.
What does your ideal future for the rural countryside look like?
This is a question I am attempting to answer in a book I am writing on this amazing region, so it feels difficult to state concisely. My ideal future for this very specific rural countryside looks like a highly diversified landscape that values life over profit. That transitions from a landscape of extraction and environmental violence against the working people who feed us, to a landscape of wide ranging economies and opportunities for educational attainment and political representation for the people that live there. A place where it is not only no longer hazardous to be outside, but public health is improved and the landscape becomes a source of healing and renewal. In terms of agriculture, there are amazing things happening in places like Allensworth around regenerative farming and agroecology, as alternatives to the chemically-intensive practices of industrialized farming. These farming techniques are being coupled with training in business-development, land acquisition, cooperative farming and alternative models for stewarding the land and its people. Tribal partners have been essential to these efforts. My ideal future therefore builds from what is happening there already - by the amazing people who are working and dreaming this landscape every day and who see a future for their children to stay and thrive and give back to the communities that shaped who they are.
Table grape harvest near Bakersfield. Photo provided by Alison Hirsch
