Rod Barnett

This paper explores the complexity of environmental attitudes and values within the edge condition that humans have created between themselves and other species. It suggests that awareness of this ambivalent condition should not lead to simplification or detachment, but may be viewed as a source of renewed efforts of revaluation, particularly in the light of the mass population movements that are occurring across the globe today. Three dislocated ‘species,’ Creek Indians, kudzu vine and urban coyotes, are discussed . Motivated by ideas of migration, displacement, and boundary-making, the project investigates the movement of species through different terrains, asking questions about indigeneity and exoticism. Coyotes entered Alabama after the native wolf population had been eliminated, by drifting westwards and adapting to new ecological niches such as the urban environment of Auburn, AL. The City of Auburn, however, employs pest eradicators to cull coyotes when they become too visible. Another migrant, kudzu, the ‘wonder vine’, was introduced early in the twentieth century and is now invasive species number one, finding a particularly amenable habitat along highways where it can be seen smothering tall trees and is cursed by travelers. Auburn University’s Forestry and Wildlife Department has spent forty years researching an effective pesticide but so far to no avail. For many centuries Central Alabama was home to Creek Indians, who moved along the rivers and fed off the plentiful wildlife that gathered there. After the Indian Removal in the 1860s, only a few families remained. An 1832 map of Lee County shows an abundance of Indian settlements and their names, but the physical record of their long duree has been all but obliterated.

Maori imagery and design elements increasingly feature in New Zealand cities as markers of place and geographical specificity. The adaptation of non-Modern, indigenous design elements in the creation of post-industrial urban identity, however, is not without its problems. Torgovnik has said,
‘The real secret of the primitive … has often been the same secret as
always: the primitive can be – has been, will be(?) – whatever Euro-
Americans want it to be. It tells us what we want it to tell us’.
(Torgovnik: 9) The use of Maori iconography in landscape architect Ted Smyth’s public open space work is examined as a way of initiating discussion on this issue. As is so often the case, the migration of symbols across cultures is here fraught with ambiguity and misprision. This is particularly the case when contemporary urban design purports to
rescue primitive forms from cultural oblivion by importing them into post-industrial space, and through this transference attempts to rescue post-industrial space from the very transience, mobility and genericity that enables it in the first place.