Excerpt from:
NOT A CORNFIELD: HISTORY/SITE/DOCUMENT (2007)
Janet Owen Driggs, Editor
Lauren Bon, Project Artist
It is ironic that a “brownfield site” is legally defined as “real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.” For brown is the color of good, fertile soil. Polluted earth tends toward the gray end of the spectrum, and is far from capable of hosting the kind of growth evoked by the word “field,” with all its rural connotations.
In partial explanation of its contradictions, the term “brownfield” was coined in the early 1990s—likely at a 1991 conference titled “New Life for Old Buildings”—in relationship to the rather more appropriately descriptive compound “greenfield.” Urban planners and developers had been using “greenfield” since at least the mid 1970s to designate natural habitats, farmland, and other open spaces that had not yet been developed.
The fact that a new word was needed in the 1990s to describe decommissioned industrial sites speaks clearly to the ongoing shift from an industrial to an information and service economy, and the subsequent exodus of mass industrial production from Europe and North America. The fact that planners had previously felt the need to mint a new word for land that had not yet been developed speaks to a concomitant rise in rates of urbanization.
As matching but contrasted neologisms, “brownfield” and “greenfield” effectively bracket the environmental and sociological contexts for the Not A Cornfield project. These contexts include simultaneous deindustrialization and urbanization; the freeing up of land long used by industrial facilities and the freight networks that once supported them; the abandonment of industrial buildings and landscapes polluted by industrial waste to public sector responsibility; rising population rates; an increase in the kind of urban sprawl that eats up greenfields; and a simultaneous increase in urban density.
The statistics in this regard are telling. Census Bureau calculations show that between 1970 and 1990, North America’s hundred largest cities added 14,545 square miles to their mass. Ranked sixth in a roster of urbanized areas with the greatest degree of “sprawl,” Los Angeles alone built on more than 250,000 acres of greenfield, and added 3.1 million more residents. At the same time, with land consumption reduced to 0.11 of an acre per individual, the city also became more densely populated. In fact, despite being nicknamed the “sultan of sprawl,” no other urban area in the United States provided so little space per capita for its citizens, and in 1990 Los Angeles officially became the most densely populated city in North America.
In such circumstances of accelerating sprawl and densification, how is it possible to accommodate increased population growth without either encroaching on virgin greenfield, or pressurizing already compromised urban environments beyond breaking point? While they cannot provide a blanket solution, the estimated 450,000 brownfield sites in North America offer the opportunity to “sprawl inward” as it were, and thereby take developmental pressure off of greenfield land. At the same time, with their abundance, their potential hazard, and their unpredictable cleanup costs functioning something like the tines of a triple-pronged fork, brownfields also prod a reconsideration of what “expansion, redevelopment, or reuse” can and should mean in a contemporary urban context.
In particular, and especially in a park-poor city such as Los Angeles, brownfields represent an unprecedented opportunity to “not build.” Instead, begging the question, “What would profit be if it were assessed in relation to improved life quality and environmental benefit rather than dollars?” brownfields offer the opportunity to explore urban land uses and funding alliances that go beyond the limits of conventional profit-driven real estate scenarios.
Taking up the cudgels of that question, the Not A Cornfield project’s Brown Phase began in April 2005. The brownfield concerned had seen almost a century of use by the Southern Pacific Railroad, followed by fifteen years as a vacant lot, and a short period of public ownership. Although its soil had recently been cleaned of arsenic and other heavy metals, the brownfield dirt was gray, compacted, depleted of nutrients, and crusted with trash.
Far from being the social and environmental resource that many people had hoped for when they fought to stop the development of a warehousing facility on the site in the 1990s, and far from being the verdant public space that many had anticipated when the site was purchased by California State Parks in 2001, the area had become a desolate lot. Abandoned shopping carts, dead televisions, and relentlessly durable plastic scraps lay scattered among meager weeds. And, in small letters on an adjacent wall, an anonymous commentator had written, ‘‘This may be god’s most destitute place on earth.”
By the end of the Brown Phase, however, the Not A Cornfield project had cleared the impoverished brownfield of 1,600 cubic yards of trash, trucked in 30,000 cubic yards of construction dirt to create a new layer of topsoil, irrigated and organically fertilized the whole, planted 875,000 corn seeds, and effectively transformed a hole in the urban fabric into a fertile field of rich brown soil. At the same time, Not A Cornfield had also begun its ultimately successful (though initially challenging) navigation of the site’s complex history, politics, and local significance.
Pushing far beyond both the conventions of a real estate engine that has long driven the form and function of the urban environment, and stretching the limits of any expectations established by the paradigm of the municipal public park, Not A Cornfield took a brownfield and grew a cornfield. A cornfield, which was also an inquiry into the possibilities of urban greening, an ephemeral agricultural site, a work of art, an ultimately much-loved community resource, a dynamic social center, a flourishing cultural space, a beautiful place, a metabolic sculpture, and a strong symbol of hope in a previously gray landscape.
More than a site-specific success story, however (although it certainly was that), Not A Cornfield also functions as a vivid example of what is possible when brownfields are not so much “redeveloped” as “revived.” They can be quite literally brought to life again—not merely as non-hazardous and therefore commercially viable land, but also as biological ecosystems and as significant landmarks in community life, collective memory, and a city’s delicate emotional geography.