Kerb issue 28, titled Decentre, addresses the seismic disturbances of 2020, a year of catastrophic bushfires, an ongoing global pandemic and increasing awareness of systematic inequalities across race, gender and class. This is all underpinned by the even more dramatic awareness of the climate emergency our world is facing. As the issue’s editors note, where landscape architecture is engaged with these occasions, it ought to consider what its responsibility to tackle these should be. Bringing together contributions from far and wide, Kerb 28 destabilizes a mainstream “centrist” worldview to point us in a new direction.
The issue is organized through the topics of “Framing,” “Mapping” In his contribution to the issue, designer and urbanist Dan Hill builds on his Slowdown Papers of 2020 (a series of reflections on the impact of the COVID–19 pandemic on city systems, infrastructures and technologies) to unfold the perils of infinite growth on a finite planet. Popular contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton seduces us with affirmative statements about landscape architecture’s value over “objectified” architecture that ignores the “lifeforms that inhabit and surround it.” Morton’s argument is intriguing in its extension of agency to non-human objects. Still, it has been criticized, along with broader “object-oriented” philosophy, for its obscuring of existing inequalities and hierarchies of power, effectively depoliticizing design conversations.
