Representation and Reclaiming: Cartographies, Mappings, and Images of Altered American Western Landscapes

Abstract

This essay argues that critical representation lies at the heart of understanding (and finding potential for) reclaiming landscape—an emerging practice of landscape design that will occupy significant acreage in the western United States by the year 2200. The western landscape is presented as a unique and dynamic region being reclaimed through the interests of mining and energy resource producers, federal and public land use controls, and population migration. These conditions are presented as entrenched frameworks guiding western landscape development. This essay argues that rather than deny their authority and ability to persist, these systems can be worked with opportunistically to create a future for the West whereby one imagines new dispersals of reclaimed federal domain land, and reclaimed private land, with inventive post-mined ecologies and programmatic uses. Speculation about a new western landscape demands fresh ways of seeing, imagining and designing its potential future. Envisioning how reclaimed landscapes are designed opens new dialogues for redirecting how culture thinks about reclamation. The work presented uses a wide array of graphical agents to represent reclaiming through cartographies, mappings, and images. Each representational system is explored as a unique language that reveals the emerging reclaimed landscape.