GROUND UP Issue 02: Grit

GROUND UP: Is the student journal of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley is an annual print and web publication intended to stimulate thought, discussion, visual exploration and substantive speculation about emerging landscape issues affecting contemporary praxis. IS an examination of a critical theme arising from the tension between contemporary landscape architecture, ecology and pressing cultural issues. IS intended as a discursive platform to explore concepts grounded in local issues with global relevance.

Grit is from the ground, abrasive and coarse. Grit erodes and accrues. Like sandpaper, grit refines. Like the grain of sand that creates a pearl, grit is an agitator and a catalyst.

The inaugural issue of GROUND UP peered into Landscapes of Uncertainty, examining who and what defines the next move in landscape architecture. This second edition asks how our field fulfills its potential by exploring grit as a quality, texture and approach for negotiating change in our landscapes. Shifts in climate and society call for responses and interventions grounded in courage and creative resolve.

How we each take up this call is as diverse as the fingerprints on these pages. For our team, grit was born of the dialectic between the desire to create critically acclaimed landscape architecture and the necessity to cultivate intact ecosystems and spatial justice. Your submissions expanded grit's meaning, introducing implications, actions and inventions well beyond our original query. As Walter Hood tells it, grit is the stuff of dreams. Through Brett Milligan's microscope and macroscope, grit is the sediment casualty, the matter moved. For Iran's Baha'i religious minority, grit is defiance of human rights violations.

From your expanded definitions of grit, the narrative arc of the journal emerged as a journey of design- operable at multiple scales- moving from the process of a single project, to the lifetime of a designer, to the ontological evolution of the design discipline. Abutting the limits of print, the journal expresses the iterative, cyclical, blended nature of process in a static framework. The dialogue evolves over four units:

DREAM BIG
From speculative imagination to continental scale, expanded vision pushes convention.

SPECIFICITY
Citizen data, parametric multiplicities and geodesign make tangible the intangible.

AMPLIFICATION
Inherited artifacts, mores and intellectual property widen our present futures.

RESOLVE
Convictions, like water, stay the course and find the cracks to shift dominant inertias.

What do you make of your grit?

GROUND UP is guided by the interests of our readers and collaborators. We operate on an open call with invited entries from academics, practitioners, students, designers, scientists, and activists.