Land Matters

On an uncommonly warm Saturday at the end of January, my wife and I walked from our house in downtown Washington, D.C., to the National Mall. We often do this on weekends, usually to visit one of the Smithsonian museums. But this sunny Saturday was different: We were there to march with tens of thousands of other Americans who demand an end to the war in Iraq.

American gathered to march against the Iraq war on January 27, 2007. (Jay Wescott/Getty Images)

The starting and ending point of the march was a park—not just any park but “America’s Front Yard.” But the Mall is much more than that. It’s an outdoor theater on which grassroots activism has been played out over the past century. Again and again, constituencies who felt shut out of the political process have converged and raised their assembled voices there. In other world capitals, protesters take to the streets. In Washington, D.C., they take to the landscape.

You may remember some past marches on the Mall. Last year’s Hispanic march for immigrant rights. The Million Mom March for gun control. In previous decades, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the vast convergence to protest the Vietnam War. There have been many, many other protests. You may have taken part in one of them.

I’m not much of an activist, but that Saturday it seemed only right to turn out instead of endlessly fuming about the war. And what a stirring public event it was: the electricity in the air as a vast sea of Americans came together, the speakers, the chants, the banners, and finally—most moving of all, for me—a few American flags held high by protesters to remind us what was really at stake. The sea of humanity slowly moved up Capitol Hill, rounded the U.S. Capitol grounds, and returned to the Mall. Off to one side was a tiny group of counterprotesters, but the event remained civil and orderly; there was not a single arrest the entire day.

Protest on the Mall doesn’t have to involve thousands of people. Last year, the American Friends Service Committee’s “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit set out 504 empty pairs of boots symbolizing soldiers killed in Iraq on the Mall for visitors to reflect on. “Eyes Wide Open” traveled across the country; perhaps it came to a park in a city near you.

Landscape architects tend to shy away from political action, but the parks and plazas they design sometimes become theaters of political expression. Has this ever happened in a landscape in your town? Remember that a protest can be as focused as a single tree sitter in a threatened tree, as shown in this month’s “Riprap.”

Finally, what should landscape architects keep in mind when designing landscapes that may become theaters for democratic expression?

The views expressed in this column belong to Bill Thompson, FASLA, editor of Landscape Architecture magazine, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of LAND Online or the American Society of Landscape Architects. Please direct all comments and responses to Thompson at bthompson@asla.org.