{"id":341,"date":"2024-05-03T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-03T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/?p=341"},"modified":"2026-06-25T17:55:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T16:55:15","slug":"landscaping-pavements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/landscaping-pavements\/","title":{"rendered":"05 Landscaping Pavements"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Tom\u00e1s Criado<\/a> prepared this issue. Ester Gisbert Aleman<\/a>y curated it\u2014design and edition: Santiago Orrego<\/a><\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Editorial note: Landscaping Pavements<\/em> is the first issue in a series of urban explorations that are part of an ongoing collaboration between Tarde and xcol.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Find a detailed guide on how to assemble the printed version of this issue by clicking\u00a0here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

We, modernist urbanites, tend to have a very strange relationship to the streets we tread on, as if walking were an act of material oblivion. Indeed, every step seems to push us further away from them instead of bringing us closer to the ground. It\u2019s as if the pavements we walk on permanently disappeared from view: their silent permanence, stubborn smoothness, and standardized sturdiness becoming almost unthinkable. As if they were just there, supporting without mattering much, as well-ordered stages of public life, quintessential furniture of liberal ideas of politics: our contemporary agora! [1<\/a>] So much so that only children dare to ask: Who has laid the streets overnight for us to walk on them? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The streets and the sidewalks, as we know them, need to be conceived, invented, and installed, and they are permanently under maintenance. Hence, pavements, not just pedestrians, also deserve a genealogy! [2<\/a>] In fact, they bear in them the imprint of the clean slate of progress and modernity: from their durable materials \u2013 tarmac or granite, you name it \u2013 extracted from the belly of the Earth to their bulldozed modes of construction as perfectly sealed soils [3<\/a>]. This is their secret engine, the unrevealed truth, the machinery they conceal, so we don\u2019t think much of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if there have been many traditions of incredible technical prowess, creating walkable roads and ways across the globe, The Great Wall of China! The Andean Qhapac \u00d1an! \u2013 paved streets stand out as a peculiarly modernist infrastructure: the result of early Modern zonification to prevent killings from horse-and-chariot transit, subject to subsequent endless policing and reforms for the sake of hygiene and decorum. Later on paving, literally, the way for automotion to take the world as a hostage [4<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Their construction has brought about the modern city as we know it and has also partaken in assembling its quintessential walkers: from the need to wear shoes to the compacted ground on which we walk. So much so that the beloved fl\u00e2neur<\/em> of Walter Benjamin cannot be thought of but as an infrastructural being, the result of Hausmann\u2019s spatial reordering: nature below, what only experts can access to, culture above, for us to window-shop into eternity [5<\/a>]. The academic and political centrality of a white, able-bodied male figure standing out for the profound oblivion of the material world that bore its creation is also a symbol of many things that cannot go on, damn urban studies!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, Euro-American urbanists seem to have been captured with what Gordon Cullen called \u2018townscapes\u2019: a rather peculiar form of landscape design promising visual coherence, orderliness, and organization of \u201cthe jumble of buildings, streets, and space that make up the urban environment\u201d[6<\/a>]. The frenzy of late 19th<\/sup>-century urban modernization laid the grounds for pavements to become everyday, more highly technical endeavors. This is the marvelous tale historian of art Danae Esparza recounted in her incredible book Barcelona a ras de suelo <\/em>(Barcelona at ground level)[7<\/a>]: a detailed exploration of the perpetual redesign that the city\u2019s pavements have undergone since the Romans. One of the most salient features being the devoted efforts in the last one hundred years to engineer their durable and stable foundations \u2013 compacting the soil, layering insulation materials like aggregate \u2013 together with patterning the outer crust, its walkability and grip, in attempts at rendering urban space readable: a legible milieu? Nothing represents this better than the Panot Gaud\u00ed, \u201cthe hexagonal hydraulic tile he [architect Antoni Gaud\u00ed] designed in 1904 in conjunction with Escofet<\/em>\u201d[8<\/a>]. As a result of the work of the municipality, together with corporations that have specialized in designing \u2018urban elements,\u2019 pavements have become part of a system: one more element of a catalog of products by which a deeply modernist city is perpetually made and remade into a static image of itself, a collage of ready-made building types, their additions and subtractions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The tensions that these demands generate were apparent in a rare gem of an exhibition, titled\u00a0Debaixo dos nossos p\u00e9s<\/em>\u00a0(Under our feet)[<\/a>9<\/a>],\u00a0which opened Lisbon\u2019s inner guts to foreground a multi-layered display of pavements from the times of its first inhabitants to the present. The exhibition happened at a time of increasing pressure for urban standardization, not just city branding at its core, but also concerns for accessibility, which disabled and older people have desperately demanded for decades. The strange lure and aestheticization of an urban image can also happen at the expense of traditional forms of street-making, pushing aside those who manipulate them. This has become evident in public struggles to keep their early modern \u2018traditional\u2019 configuration (cal\u00e7ada portuguesa<\/em>, a peculiar form of cobblestone-based pattern) and the communities of practice of their soon-to-be-extinct trade (calceteiros<\/em>), unless turned into World Heritage, a paradoxical fixation to resist a more contemporary fixity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ecologically speaking, this fixation is also highly problematic. In his signature process-oriented anthropology, which attends to the dynamic processes of sentient beings\u2019 world-formation, Tim Ingold takes issue with the modernist practice of hard surfacing the earth because it \u201cactually blocks the very intermingling of substances with the medium that is essential to life, growth, and inhabitation\u201d[10<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is far from being a cumbersome theoretical issue: the European Environmental Agency has been alerting for years of the many problems that sealed soils are bringing to the fore\u2013 related to heat island effects and underground degradation \u2013particularly in urban settings[11<\/a>]. As a consequence, environmentally-minded architects and urban planners have begun to uncover \u2018the beach beneath the street\u2019: depaving streets or creating porous sidewalk materials to foster the important underground soil relations essential to life on Earth[12<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Far from being the dirt beneath our shoes, in geography, anthropology, and environmental humanities, the very soils we used to tread on are increasingly becoming a matter of relational engendering with different beings, animating newer forms of social theory and eco-political practice[13<\/a>]. The world beneath our feet, hence, appears before us as a moving territory with its own history, formed \u2013 or even \u2018terraformed\u2019 \u2013 by a wide variety of beings, from worms and plants to different animals and human groups. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Far from being the dirt beneath our shoes, in geography, anthropology, and environmental humanities, the very soils we used to tread on are increasingly becoming a matter of relational engendering with different beings, animating newer forms of social theory and eco-political practice[13<\/a>].\u00a0The world beneath our feet, hence, appears before us as a moving territory with its own history, formed \u2013 or even \u2018terraformed\u2019 \u2013\u00a0by a wide variety of beings, from worms and plants to different animals and human groups.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Perhaps there would be no better way to re-enliven pavements and their politics than to treat them as landscapes in their own right. Not in the early modern sense of the term \u2013 used in geography and other cognate disciplines to fixate stable nature-cultural patterns[14<\/a>]\u00a0\u2013 or in the same sense that still breathes in the notion of townscape mentioned before, but in a new materialist sense: thinking from their complex temporal and spatial material interconnectedness and their ongoing, engendering process[15<\/a>].\u00a0All of a sudden, the streets we walk cease being the same. What appeared static, indeed, moves! Pavements are, indeed, terraformed. This can happen in strange and imperceptible ways as part of the earthly transformation of microbiota or weeds. However, pavements are also \u2018being moved\u2019 due to violent capitalist extraction, as it happens in the far-away travels of many of the anonymous materials that constitute the world at our feet, captured landscapes whose origins remain obscure[16<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Holding these two forms of terraformation in tension, treating pavements as landscapes \u2013 put otherwise, \u2018landscaping\u2019 pavements \u2013 might be a way for them to start speaking back. Not as the mute foundations of the present but in their strange temporal mash-ups: between deep and shallow time. Manuel de Landa provides an apt metaphor for this approach to city-making: \u201cAbout 8000 years ago, human populations began mineralizing \u2026 when they developed an urban exoskeleton, bricks of sun-dried clay became building materials, stone monuments, and defensive walls\u201d[17<\/a>].\u00a0A good example of this mineralization, a peculiar form of landscaping pavements, is the city of Rome. But not the classic and boring take that obsessed many neoclassic and fascist architects and artists. I\u2019m thinking here of the fantastic visualizations landscape architect Kristi Cheramie has worked hard to unearth: in them, Rome appears formed as a concatenation of acts of landscaping. The contemporary city is deeply entrenched in the terraformation that the ancient one undertook. A geological entity whose complex boundaries are also those of the very Mediterranean olive oil trade, sedimenting a way of living as well as the mode of circulation that saw its growth and demise [18<\/a>].\u00a0Landscaping pavements enable us to study and dimension the agents involved, their temporal and spatial effects, their material configurations, and their acts of becoming with them [19<\/a>].\u00a0Thus understood, our urban arenas appear as layered compounds, ongoing palimpsests through and through [20<\/a>].\u00a0Conceived in this way, the city, as Francesc Perers calls it in a rather peculiar photo-book on Barcelona\u2019s sidewalk archaeology, turns into \u201ca cohabitation of strata\u201d[21<\/a>].\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How could we begin to exercise this landscaping approach when we walk?[22<\/a>] What exercises could we engage to reconnect to and partake in these underground palimpsests that are also our very mineral and multispecies condition? How do we liberate pavements and inhabit closer to them, entering into newer urban formations?[23<\/a>] <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exercises proposed in this issue wish to propose concrete avenues for this to happen. Following them, perhaps the next time you walk into the streets, walking might just be the beginning of a passionate conversation at the tip of your feet:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What could you tell me, oh, anonymous piece of stone? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From what quarry do you come from? Who took you from the belly of the Earth? Who broke and dismembered you from the common body of other stones, using what machine? What standard shaped you? How might others resist the corset you provide? How will you let me walk on you when it rains? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, you macadam, strange collective body, interconnected and singular, strangely one, what life can you also give? How have you been prepared for me to tread you, using what procedures? Under what technical or parliamentary regulations? How could you resist this encounter? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, you all strange pavements: What life do you also partake of? What new city could we engender, together with the others who could crack you, and make you into their new home?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Online references<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

[1<\/a>] Loukaitou-Sideris, A., & Ehrenfeucht, R. (2011). Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space<\/em>. MIT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2<\/a>] Blomley, N. (2011). Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow<\/em>. Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3<\/a>] Ammon, F. (2016). Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape<\/em>. Yale University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4<\/a>] Meulemans, G. (2017). The Lure of Pedogenesis: An Anthropological Foray into Making Urban Soils in Contemporary France<\/em>. PhD in Anthropology, University of Aberdeen; Dom\u00ednguez Rubio, F., & Fogu\u00e9, U. (2013). Technifying Public Space and Publicizing Infrastructures: Exploring New Urban Political Ecologies through the Square of General Vara del Rey. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research<\/em>, 37<\/em>(3), 1035\u20131052.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5<\/a>] Norton, P. D. (2008). Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City<\/em>. MIT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6<\/a>] Cullen, G. (1961). The Concise Townscape<\/em>. Routledge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7<\/a>] Esparza, D. (2017). Barcelona a ras de suelo<\/em>. Universitat de Barcelona Edicions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8<\/a>] See https:\/\/www.escofet.com\/en\/blog\/true-story-gaudis-panot<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[9<\/a>] Bugalh\u00e3o, J., Fernandes, L. & Fernandes, P.A. (2017). Debaixo dos Nossos P\u00e9s. Pavimentos hist\u00f3ricos de Lisboa. <\/em>Museu de Lisboa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[10<\/a>] Ingold, T. (2011: 124). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description<\/em>. Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[11<\/a>] See https:\/\/www.eea.europa.eu\/articles\/urban-soil-sealing-in-europe<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[12<\/a>] N\u00fa\u00f1ez Rodr\u00edguez, M. (2015). \u00a1Bajo el asfalto, los adoquines! Proyecto de investigaci\u00f3n sobre los servicios ecosist\u00e9micos de distintos pavimentos.<\/em> Ayuntamiento de Madrid, https:\/\/mmmapa.com\/portfolio\/bajo-el-asfalto-los-adoquines-proyecto-de-investigacion-sobre-los-servicios-ecosistemicos-de-distintos-pavimentos<\/a>; Baraniuk, C. (23rd February 2024) The cities stripping out concrete for earth and plants. BBC<\/em>, https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20240222-depaving-the-cities-replacing-concrete-with-earth-and-plants<\/a>; BitHabitat (2022) https:\/\/bithabitat.barcelona\/projectes\/el-panot-del-segle-xxi<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[13<\/a>] Salazar, J. F., Granjou, C., Kearnes, M., Krzywoszynska, A. & Tironi, M. (Eds). (2020). Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory<\/em>. Bloomsbury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[14<\/a>] Wylie, J. (2007). Landscape<\/em>. Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[15<\/a>] Seibert, M. (Ed.). (2021). Atlas of material worlds: Mapping the agency of matter for a new landscape practice<\/em>. Routledge; Harkness, R. (2017). An Unfinished Compendium of Materials<\/em>. University of Aberdeen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[16<\/a>] Cronon, W. (1992) Nature\u2019s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. <\/em>W.W. Norton and Co.; Hutton, J. (2020). Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements<\/em>. Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[17<\/a>] de Landa, M. (1997: 26-27). A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History<\/em>. Zone Books.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[18<\/a>] Cheramie, K. (2020). Through Time and the City: Notes on Rome<\/em>. Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[19<\/a>] Gisbert Alemany, E. (2022). To do a landscape: Variations of the Costa Blanca<\/em>. PhD in Architecture. University of Alicante<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[20<\/a>] For a challenging example, see the Ghost Rivers \u201cpublic art project & walking tour, rediscovering hidden streams and histories that run beneath our feet\u201d: https:\/\/ghostrivers.com\/<\/a>. Mattern, S. (2017). Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. University of Minnesota Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[21<\/a>] Perers, F. (2017: 131) Voreres. La mem\u00f2ria subtil<\/em>. Ajuntament de Barcelona.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[22<\/a>] Kanouse, S. (2015). Critical Day Trips: Tourism and Land-Based Practice. In E. E. Scott  & K. Swenson (2015). Critical landscapes: Art, space, politics<\/em> (pp. 43-56). University of California Press; Shepherd, N., & Ernsten, C. (2021). An Anthropocene journey. In H. S. Rogers, M. K. Halpern, K. D. Ridder-Vignone, & D. Hannah, Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies<\/em> (pp. 563\u2013576). Routledge. Mattern, S. (2013). Infrastructural Tourism: From the Interstate to the Internet. Places. https:\/\/placesjournal.org\/article\/infrastructural-tourism\/.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[23<\/a>] Duperrex, M. (2022). La rivi\u00e8re et le bulldozer.<\/em> Premier Parall\u00e8le.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom\u00e1s Criado prepared this issue. Ester Gisbert Alemany curated it\u2014design and edition: Santiago Orrego. Editorial note: Landscaping Pavements is the first issue in a series of urban explorations that are part of an ongoing collaboration between Tarde and xcol.org. Find a detailed guide on how to assemble the printed version of this issue by clicking\u00a0here We, modernist urbanites, tend to have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"tarde-post","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[31,30,24,29,28],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-past_issues","tag-depaving","tag-multispecies-landscapes","tag-sidewalks","tag-terraformation","tag-urban-soils"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/issue6Main_.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":614,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions\/614"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}