2020 > ONWARD, Ground Up Journal ISSUE09, onward team, COLLEGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN, UC BERKELEY

Onward was born out of a preoccupation with the future. We feel it in studios, in the news, in popular articles that get passed between students, in casual conversation. This is a preoccupation that many of us share—designers or not, landscape architects or not. So for the ninth issue of Ground Up Journal, we posed the question, how do we proceed from here?

What follows are the answers, the imaginings, the speculations we collected.

The journal is organized around three chapters. DESPERATEtimes calls out real-time problems our field has the power to address. CRITICALpractice is an examination of our field and proposes methodological change in teaching and practice. IMAGINARYfutures presents visions of paths forward. ONWARDialogues, a discussion in print between academics, practitioners, and students, is situated at the center of the journal and represents what is at Onward’s heart: knowledge-building through open investigation.

As we prepare Issue 09 for print, strange, sad events transpire. Now we work isolated from each other at home, hoping to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Public space has a new, ephemeral power, and so unprecedented are day-to- day affairs that fiction is sometimes a better reference than reality. The future we found is not what we had thought it might be, but it is our intention that the stories, ideas, and conversations captured here can act as a roadmap—or perhaps a travelogue—as we pick our path Onward.

2020 > ONWARDialogues, Ground Up Journal ISSUE09, onwardialogues team, COLLEGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN, UC BERKELEY

ONWARDialogues is a collaborative curatorial effort that creates transdisciplinary content out of discourse. The project was designed in conjunction with the 2019-20 Lecture Series in our home department, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. The ideas of the four guest lecturers are at the heart of the dialogue we have created.

The project facilitates the exchange of ideas and opinions between people with different academic backgrounds and professional expertise. Students, academics, and practitioners from design, architecture, landscape architecture, and planning-related disciplines contributed their voices to the conversation.

ONWARDialogues uses interviews to critique and review reductionist binary frameworks such as present/future, local/global, design practice/theory, personal agenda/client agenda. We posed questions to our contributing lecturers with the intent to generate new questions and to allow for a degree of uncertainty. Inspired by the tradition of marginalia, we then facilitated another layer of critical dialogue: we asked members of the College of Environmental Design to comment on excerpts extracted from the long-form interviews. Finding relationships between the thoughts of the four lecturers, readers had the opportunity to relate, combine, and hybridize their ideas into new arguments. By embracing an inductive strategy, we built a framework that invokes an open and dynamic system of knowledge that continues to be adapted by each new reader.