Not in my City: Rural America as Urban Dumping Ground

Introduction

The ideological divide between “urban” and “rural” is deeply rooted in the American consciousness, fraught with tensions stemming from false memories of a pastoral past on the one hand and the American yearning for progress as exemplified by the industry of the city on the other. These tensions have figured prominently in design discourse, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City¹

Ebenezer Howard, and Frederic J. Osborn. Garden Cities of To-morrow. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965.

Patrick Geddes was among the first urban theorists to suggest that human settlement ought to be analyzed in the context of its natural region. Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution; an Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (New York: H. Fertig, 1968)

Ian L McHarg. Design with Nature. (New York: Natural History Press, 1969)

This resignation to the eventuality of rural decline has facilitated an exploitative relationship between urban hubs and their rural hinterlands.⁴

For the purpose of the study, “rural and urban” shall adhere to the definitions established by the Federal Register Notice for 2010 United States Census. To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters. "Rural" is defined as any population, housing, or territory outside urban areas. “Urban Area Criteria for the 2010 Census; Notice,” 76 Federal Register 164 (24 August 2011), 53030-53031.

Rural America at a Glance: 2013 Edition. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 2013)

Ibid

In the United States, Locally Undesirable Land Uses (LULUs) are increasingly being pushed out of cities and into rural areas. Though most city dwellers would agree that LULUs like power plants, factories, and hazardous waste storage facilities are necessary, most would prefer not to live near them. Though LULUs may offer significant benefits to society at large, they do so at the expense of neighboring communities. The siting of such unsavory land uses also typically exploits disadvantaged and unempowered populations and makes the rural-dumping ground paradigm particularly problematic. While the economic benefits of LULUs are largely unproven, the negative environmental and social consequences can be wide ranging. Landfills and livestock operations, for example, pollute land, air, and water resources, negatively impacting biodiversity and public health. As an out-of-sight-out-of-mind strategy, the geographic displacement of these ecologically and socially damaging systems enables relocation over reformation. By analyzing the geography and design of three of the most significant LULUs, meat production and processing facilities, landfills, and prison complexes, this study seeks to illuminate the extent to which unwanted urban land uses are impacting rural areas today.

Figure 1.

Mapping livestock production, meat consumption and watershed contamination⁷

Potential Priority Water Resource Subregions U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service, 2000 and 2007 Census of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2007.

Rural Livestock Production and Processing

At the turn of the 20^th century, slaughterhouses were common fixtures of the urban landscape. Cattle and hogs were transported by rail to stockyards in Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Kansas City, where they could be processed and distributed to nearby markets.⁸

J’Nell Pate, America's Historic Stockyards: Livestock Hotels (Fort Worth, Tex.: TCU Press, 2005)

Dorothee Brantz, “Recollecting the Slaughterhouse” Cabinet, A Quarterly Magazine of Art and Culture (2001): 118

After the publication of Upton Sinclair’s exposé, The Jungle, however, the fascination with this industrialized slaughter was gradually replaced by a collective distaste for the brutality of the meat processing industry. As Richard Bulliet describes in his book Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships, contemporary American society “continues to consume animal products in abundance, but psychologically, its members experience feelings of guilt, shame and disgust when they think (as seldom as possible) about the industrial processes by which domestic animals are rendered into products.”¹⁰

Richard Bulliet, Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers: the Past and Future of Human Animal Relationships, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 3.

As processing facilities industrialized, a shift also occurred from raising livestock in small numbers on geographically widespread medium-sized farms to producing livestock in much larger numbers on fewer farms known as Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs.¹¹

Daniel Imhoff. The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories. (Los Angeles: Foundation for Deep Ecology, 2010). xiii

United States Environmental Protection Agency, “CAFO NPDES Regulations and Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards,” Federal Register /Vol. 73, No. 225 (2008).

With so many resident animals, it is not uncommon for a single CAFO to generate the same amount of waste as a city of 100,000 people.¹³

Imhoff, The CAFO Reader, xv.

USDA. Natural Resources Conservation and U.S. EPA, as cited in Imhoff, The CAFO Reader, 43.

“Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America,” Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, (2008) accessed October 16, 2013 http://www.pewtrusts.org/Reports/Industrial_Agriculture/PCIFAP_FINAL.pdf.

As water transports toxic effluvia from CAFOs downstream, wind carries malodorous fumes to nearby communities. Though unpleasant odor may seem like little more than an annoyance, studies have shown that such malodors can have a profound impact on the health and quality life of those living in close proximity to industrial animal agriculture.¹⁶

Carrie Hribar “Understanding Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and Their Impact on Communities” National Association of Local Boards of Health (2010), 7

Steve Wing et al “Air Pollution and Odor in Communities Near Industrial Swine Operations” Environmental Health Perspectives Vol 116, No 10 (2008): 1362-1367

M. Tajik et al “Impact of odor from industrial hog operations on daily living activities” NEW SOLUTIONS A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy 18 (2008):195–205.

Sociological and anthropological research in meat-processing “boom-towns” such as Garden City, Kansas and Brooks, Alberta, Canada has shown that the negative effects of slaughterhouses and feedlots can often outweigh perceived economic benefits. Such effects include rapid shifts in demographics, increases in crime, and strains on local infrastructure, healthcare and other social services.¹⁹

Amy Fitzgerald, “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications,” Research in Human Ecology Vol.17, No. 1(2010): 58-69.

An example of such environmental injustice can been seen in North Carolina where hog CAFOs are clustered low-income, minority communities. Wendee Nicole, CAFOs and Environmental Justice: The Case of North Carolina, 121 Envtl. Health Perspectives (2013), A183.

Bob Edwards and Anthony Ladd “Environmental Justice, Swine Production and Farm Loss in North Carolina” Sociological Spectrum. 20 (2000): 263-290.

Today, most urban livestock production and processing operations have been decommissioned. Unlike the grand buildings of the Union Stockyard Era, the architecture of the contemporary slaughterhouse is generic and placeless. Set back from the street and restricted from public access, the nondescript structures are designed to look like any other factory (Fig 2). Livestock confinement buildings for animal production have been designed in a similarly generic fashion (Fig 3). Whether they are nestled in the mountains of North Carolina or the expansive plains of Oklahoma, the mass-produced, metal-skinned and mechanically ventilated structures look exactly the same. Such “designed indifference” has enabled the livestock industry to remain inconspicuous and largely unchallenged over the years. Meat processing has always been physically demanding, unpleasant and dangerous work, currently performed by a mostly immigrant labor force.²²

Georgeanne Artz, Rebecca Jackson, and Peter F. Orazem, “Is It a Jungle Out There? Meat Packing, Immigrants, and Rural Communities” Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 300 (August 2010), 299.

Figure 2.

Aerial photographs of CAFOs demonstrate lack of geographic specificity. From left to right: poultry farms in Alabama, Arkansas and Virgina²³

Google Earth, Accessed October 10, 2014

Design Implications

The challenges facing industrial animal production are by nature interdisciplinary. Though landscape architects and architects are uniquely positioned to facilitate collaboration and identify potential solutions, examples of such collaboration are limited. The bulk of applied design research, has surrounded the architecture of livestock facilities. The Center for Rural Design at the University of Minnesota is part of an interdisciplinary team currently developing integrated performance design guidelines for sustainable animal agriculture facilities. This research seeks to provide industry and allied communities with a metric for evaluating proposed locations, site and facility design, construction, and management of animal production facilities.²⁴

Dewey Thorbeck. Rural design: a new design discipline. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2008), 8.

Within the realm of design speculation, The Expanded Environment, formerly Animal Architecture, is a nonprofit organization advocating for the incorporation of biological and ecological agents into the built environment. Founder Edward Dodington advocates for a “cross-species design imperative” and has digitally published over 200 projects from architects, artists and designers that explore a wide range of animal-architectures.²⁵

Edward Dodington. “The Cross-Species Design Imperative,” The Expanded Environment, accessed August 10, 2014 http://www.expandedenvironment.org/cross-species-imperative/

From agricultural theme parks to urban apiaries, these projects are mostly speculative in nature and intended primarily for a design audience. Though the majority of such projects have limited to no practical applications, the platform is useful in expanding the architectural field to include the consideration of spaces occupied by non-human animals.

Designers must engage with the landscape of meat production and processing in both practical and imaginative ways. If the realities of the system were rendered visible, society would be compelled to advocate for a more local, sustainable, transparent and humane model of meat production. This system need not be defined by society’s collective nostalgia for a pastoral past and historic barnyard vernacular. Rather, design can define new models for contemporary animal agriculture that accepts the industry’s importance in developing a sustainable and healthy food system to support the world’s ever growing population. Architects could help develop new livestock facility design guidelines and create new architectural typologies that consume less energy, absorb hazardous gases and malodors, and mitigate the ecological and social consequences of the industry.²⁶

Thorbeck, 199.

At the site and planning scales, research indicates that site design and best management practices such as riparian buffers, engineered wetlands, grassed waterways, filter strips and field borders can significantly reduce sediment and nutrient loading in agricultural watersheds.²⁷

Kellie B. Vaché, Joseph M. Eilers and Mary V. Santelmann, “Water Quality Modeling Of Alternative Agricultural Scenarios In The U.S. Corn Belt,” Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 38: 3 (June 2002), 773.

Strategically designed shelterbelt systems near and within livestock facilities could mitigate malodor in adjacent communities.²⁸

Research indicates that shelterbelts, when planted in strategic designs (e.g. on-farm location, species selection), can help incrementally to reduce odor pollution. John Tyndall and Joe Colletti “Mitigating swine odor with strategically designed shelterbelt systems: a review” Agroforestry Systsems 69 (2007), 61.

Rotational grazing strategies could protect soil quality, while creating valuable habitat for grassland species.²⁹

Jerry L. Holechek, Raul Valdez, Sanford D. Schemnitz, Rex D. Pieper and Charles A. Davis. “Manipulation of Grazing to Improve or Maintain Wildlife Habitat” Wildlife Society Bulletin, 10: 3 (Autumn, 1982), 209.

Excess waste from confined feeding operations and processing by-products could be used to support sustainable aqua and agricultural systems.³⁰

Peter Edwards, “A review of recycling organic wastes into fish, with emphasis on the tropics.” Aquaculture 21:3 (1980), 261.

Smaller, multi-species processing facilities distributed more evenly across livestock producing regions could encourage small-scale husbandry practices while improving quality of life for both animals and workers alike.

There exists no magic bullet, but such design opportunities could contribute to a more sustainable and humane system of meat production that benefits local communities and ecologies as well. However, the geography and design of the contemporary livestock industry leaves does little to encourage such change. Away from populated areas and hidden behind a generic façade, this industrial obscurity enables Americans to avoid confronting the collective moral dilemma of animal consumption.

Figure 3.

Mapping municipal solid waste generation, export, and emissions³¹

Environmental Industry Association and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP), April 2008.

Rural Dumping Grounds

Just as livestock farms generate too much waste for nearby land, most American cities generate too much solid waste for local landfills. Beginning in the 1800s, urban solid waste management was established as a local responsibility, with waste sent to local municipal dumps. As urban waste began to outpace the holding capacity of local landfills and the environmental consequences of waste disposal became apparent, legislation in the 1970s forced the closure of open urban dumps nationwide and required regional planning for municipal solid waste management.³²

Garrick E. Louis “A Historical Context of Municipal Solid Waste Management in the United States” Waste Management and Research. 22 (2004), 306.

“The State of Garbage in America,” BioCycle, (2010), accessed December 15, 2013 http://www.biocycle.net/images/art/1010/bc101016_s.pdf

The E.P.A. estimates that 2.6 million tons of electronic waste were landfilled in 2007. Such waste leaches poisons and heavy metals into surrounding soil and groundwater. Leslie Kaufman, “A Green Way to Dump Low Tech Electronics” The New York Times. N.p. (30 June 2009) accessed October 10, 2014.

This risk applies to both landfills and waste transfer stations. A comparative study of health risks of waste management strategies conducted by Columbia University researchers indicated that the health risks of landfilling is five times greater than waste-to-energy incineration. Pearl Moy et. al,“Options for management of municipal solid waste in New York City: A preliminary comparison of health risks and policy implications” Journal of Environmental Management 87.1 (2008): 73.

Martine Vrijiheid, “Health effects of residence near hazardous waste landfill sites: a review of epidemiologic literature,” Environmental Health Perspectives 108 (2000): 101-112.

With local urban communities unwilling to tolerate the noxious smells and environmental consequences of landfills, more urban trash is winding up in rural communities where political resistance is minimal. Taking into account tipping fees and land values, the economic advantages of waste export can be immense. Tipping fees vary widely according to the region, ranging from $11 per ton in the Midwest and Southwest to more than $100 per ton in the Northeast.³⁷

Kristin Engel, “Reconsidering the National Market in Sold Waste: Trade-offs in Equity, Efficiency, Environmental Protection, and State Autonomy,” North Carolina Law Review 73 (1995).

Exporting municipal solid waste (MSW) to less densely populated areas has become the norm for metropolitan regions like New York City. When the notorious Staten Island landfill Fresh Kills, which at one time was not only the largest landfill in the world but the largest man-made structure in the world, closed, the city of New York committed to exporting its trash to regional landfills. Each year, the city exports approximately 6 million tons of trash by truck and rail to landfills and incinerators in New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina. Trucks travel 40 million miles to dispose of New York City’s waste alone.³⁸

“Taxes In, Garbage Out :The Need for Better Solid Waste Disposal Policies in New York City,” Citizens Budget Commission 29

Today, twenty-five percent of all solid waste in the United States is transported across state lines. Trash is often transported hundreds of miles, by truck, rail and barge to privately owned, regional waste disposal facilities located in remote areas.³⁹

Vivian Thompson, Garbage In, Garbage Out: Solving the Problems with Long-Distance Trash Transport (University of Virginia Press, 2009). Ebook accessed July 1, 2014

Geogh Manaugh and Nicola Twilley. “Mount Angeles” Venue, (2013), accessed July 15, 2013 http://v-e-n-u-e.com/Mount-Angeles

Ibid.

Figure 4.

Los Angeles municipal waste previously sent to La Puente Hills Landfill (upper left), is now shipped 200 miles away to the newly opened Mesquite Regional Landfill (upper right)⁴²

Google Earth, Accessed October 10, 2014

Transporting urban garbage to far away rural locations allows city dwellers to avoid confronting the consequences of excess waste. Urban populations push their waste into someone else’s backyard, forcing those communities to deal with air pollution and groundwater contamination that is a consequence of affluent, consumptive lifestyles. Landfills are also often located in communities that are disproportionately rural and poor, whose residents do not have the agency to organize any opposition.⁴³

Robert Bullard, Dumping In Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 1-24.

Design implications

Designers have engaged with the processes and products of waste in a variety of ways. In the context of design theory, landscape architect and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alan Berger describes what he terms Drosscape in his book of the same name. He defines drosscapes as “large tracts of abused land on the peripheries of cities and beyond, where urban sprawl meets urban dereliction: landscapes of wasted land where the planners gave up. They are a world of contaminated former industrial sites, mineral workings, garbage dumps, container stores, polluted river banks, and sewage works.”⁴⁴

Alan Berger. Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

He categorizes landfills as “waste landscapes of obsolescence” because they are designed explicitly to accommodate consumer waste. Though Berger identifies and describes the conditions of waste across the contemporary landscape in great detail, he offers little in the way of design solutions.

In praxis, landscape architects and engineers have been actively involved in the remediation and repurposing of decommissioned landfills. The social and ecological programming of Fresh Kills Park in Staten Island and La Vall d'en Joan in Barcelona, designed by Field Operations and Batlle i Roig, respectively, prove that the conversion of landfills to parks has great potential for cities and regional ecologies. Through innovative design and remediation, Fresh Kills Park, once the biggest landfill in the world, is now the largest park in New York City. The Park Masterplan includes nature preserves, animal habitats, hiking and bike paths, picnic areas, comfort stations, and many other amenities typical of a large public park. The plan also includes a dynamic ecological succession strategy in which birds and insects facilitate wetland restoration by dropping seeds and pollinating flowers.⁴⁵

Field Operations. 2002. “Fresh Kills Competition.” Praxis 4 : 18–27.

While there is great merit in transforming inactive landfills into wildlife refuges and recreational spaces, such designs do not address the fact that Americans produce some 254 million tons of MSW annually.⁴⁶

“Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2012” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2012) accessed October 10, 2014 http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/2012_msw_fs.pdf

Even if large portions of the waste stream are diverted, recycled and reused, the country would still needs hundreds of landfills and incinerators distributed across the landscape. A speculative work by landscape architects Mira Engler and Gina Crandell provides a compelling example of how design and planning might begin to address this reality. The conceptual design for an “Open Waste System Park” features a decentralized network of suburban parks dedicated to waste recycling and management. Rather than hiding waste from the public, this design makes the spaces of waste disposal accessible and productive.⁴⁷

Mira Engler, Designing America’s Waste Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 173-174.

As Engler notes in her essay, “Waste Landscapes: Permissible Metaphors in Landscape Architecture,” “Instead of distancing ourselves from waste, design can bring people closer to waste operations and help foster creative solutions to problems intrinsic to waste disposal, issues common to all people.”⁴⁸

Mira Engler, “Waste Landcsapes: Permissible Metaphors in Landscape Architecture” Landscape Journal 14: 1 (1995), 24.

By re-conceptualizing waste as an opportunity, the relationship between urban waste generators and rural communities could be a positive one. A recycling and post-consumer manufacturing industry could bring much-needed jobs to rural areas, while compost facilities could provide organic compost for regional farms. Urban areas could adopt a proximity principle that mandates that waste be treated and/or disposed of as close as possible to the point of origin.⁴⁹

The Proximity Principal is emphasized in the European Union in order to confer proportionally more responsibilities to the communities that create waste. Waste Treatment and Disposal, (Chichester, UK: Wiley & Sons, Ltd 2005), 8 – 13.

Urban communities would quickly demand the design and development of cleaner, more sustainable landfills. Such design strategies would allow society to confront the real problem: Americans create too much waste. With the consequences of waste left hidden in far away landfills, however, little remains to incentivize urban communities to place more value on recycling, re-using, composting, and manufacturing goods that are built to last.

Figure 5.

Mapping inmate density⁵⁰

United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009.

Rural Prisons

The rural communities that import urban trash are often the same communities that compete for prisons, each a culturally unappealing and non-productive industry that requires large tracts of land. Since 1980, the majority of new prisons have been built in non-metropolitan areas, and as a result, the majority of predominately urban prisoners are now housed in rural America. In fact, in the United States today, prisoners outnumber small family farm owners. While the Census of Agriculture estimated that 2,131,007 family farms operated in 2009,⁵¹

A family farm is defined as an operation grossing less than $250,000 annually. “Agriculture: Section 17” Statistical Abstract of the United States (2012) accessed October 10, 2014 http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture.html

Correctional Population in the United States, 2011. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved 10 February 2012

Jeanie Thies. “Prisons and Host Communities: Debunking the Myths and Building Community Relations,” Corrections Today 62: 2 (2000), 136–139.

The majority of prisons constructed since the 1990s have been concentrated in the economically depressed regions of the Southern United States. On the western plains of Texas, where both agriculture and oil extraction were on the decline, eleven rural counties opened new prisons. Overall, one in every five new rural prisons opened during the 1990s opened in Texas, with a total of forty-nine new facilities. Approximately 12 new prisons each were opened in the Mississippi Delta and Southern Coal Fields regions of Appalachia, with south central Georgia opening fourteen new rural prisons.⁵⁴

Tracy Huling. “Building a Prison Economy in Rural America,” In Mauer, M. & Chesney-Lind, M. (Eds.) Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New York: The New Press, 2002), 197-213.

Ibid, 198

The promise of a stable growth economy in which every ten inmates brings three new jobs has started a bidding war between small towns competing to host new state prisons. The prison site selection process is the result of a complex interchange between local and state officials. Towns selected for prison sitings are typically chosen because they meet infrastructural requirements (e.g. proximity to highways, sewer and water accessibility) and they offer land for a competitively low price. This has led many towns to take out loans in order to upgrade their infrastructure and to sell their land for far below market value. Antwerp, a small community in upstate New York, applied for a $600,000 federal grant to rebuild their water supply system to increase their chances of winning a state prison. Pennsylvania offered to sell 200 acres of prime state-owned farmland in rural Wayne County to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) for just a dollar.⁵⁶

Ibid, 198.

The rural communities vying for new prisons are typically characterized by endemic poverty and limited economic growth. Though rural and predominately white, these towns have a great deal in common with the impoverished and diverse urban spaces from which the majority of prisoners originate. As Anne Bonds notes in an essay on prison sitings and poverty, “Depressed rural communities have been dispossessed by similar sorts of processes, (re)producing disinvestment, unemployment, and entrenched poverty across urban and rural spaces. But prisons do not solve poverty in either place.”⁵⁷

Ann Bonds “Building Prisons, Building Poverty: Prison Sitings, Dispossession, and Mass Incarceration” in Beyond Walls and Cages:Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, ed. Jenn M. Lloyd et al (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

Regrettably, the promise of economic growth as a result of the prison industry has remained largely unfulfilled in rural America. Research on the prison boom indicates that, when compared to non-prison towns, new state prison communities experience less growth and see increased levels of unemployment and poverty.⁵⁸

Terry L. Besser and Margaret M. Hanson, “The Development of Last Resort: The Impact of New State Prisons on Small Town Economies,” Journal of the Community Development Society 35 (2004): 1-16, accessed October 16, 2013, doi: 10.1080/15575330409490129.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Ibid.

Though the economic benefits of a new prison can be minimal, the adverse infrastructural, ecological and cultural consequences of its siting and operation are myriad. Since prison employees often commute long distances, traffic during the typical three shift changes can congest local roads. Bright security lighting creates light pollution that, in addition to impacting the beauty of the night sky, has been shown to significantly interfere with bird migrations and other animal behaviors.⁶¹

Joe Bower, "The Dark Side of Light." Audubon (March-April 2000) accessed October 10, 2014 http://archive.audubonmagazine.org/darksideoflight.html

Richard Purdue, quoted in Tracy Huling, "Building a Prison Economy in Rural America," in Invisible punishment: the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment, ed. Meda Chesney-Lind et al. (New York: New Press, 2002).

Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of the rural isolation of the prison system, however, is the reshaping of the political landscape. Prison inmates are counted as residents of the communities in which they are incarcerated. The incarcerated population of about 2 million is larger than that in each of the 15 smallest states and would have five votes in the Electoral College if it comprised a single state and inmates were allowed to vote.⁶³

David Hamsher, Comment, “Counted Out Twice—Power, Representation, and the “Usual Residence Rule” in The Enumeration of Prisoners: A State-Based Approach to Correcting Flawed Census Data” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Vol. 96, No 1 (2005):299-328.

Huling, 2009.

Design Implications

Designers have engaged with the problem of incarceration in varying ways. That architecture has been the primary form of design investigation is not surprising, given that confined architecture is the primary method of imprisonment. From the haunting imaginary prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi to the circular surveillance design of Jeremy’s Bentham’s Panopticon, imprisonment has captivated the architectural imagination for centuries.⁶⁵

Norman Bruce Johnston, Forms of constraint: a history of prison architecture. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

Contemporary examples of innovative prison design are located primarily in Europe. The Halden Prison in Halden, Norway by HLM arkitektur in collaboration with Erik Møller Arkitekter is considered to be the world’s most humane prison. Norway's second largest prison, with a capacity of 252 inmates, opened in April of 2010. With exteriors made of bricks, galvanized steel, and larch, the building responds to the local woodland landscape. Trees obscure the twenty foot security wall, so that the architecture appears less hostile. Halden also features jogging trails in nearby woods and a freestanding two-bedroom house where inmates can host their families during overnight visits. The design reflects the principles of the Norwegian penal system: that treating prisoners humanely improves their chances of becoming productive members of society.⁶⁶

William Lee Adams “Norway Builds the World's Most Humane Prison” Time (May 10, 2010) accessed October 10, 2014 http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html

Though the Halden prison is an example how design can improve quality of life for inmates and guards, it does not fundamentally challenge the justice system. The design activist group, Architects / Designers / Planner for Social Responsibility (ADPSP), on the other hand, would like to abolish incarceration altogether. Led by architect Raphael Sperry, the Prison Alternatives Initiative calls on architects and other design professionals to refuse to design prisons and instead support community-based alternatives to incarceration.⁶⁷

“Prison Alternatives Initiative” Architects / Designers / Planner for Social Responsibility Accessed October 10, 2014 http://adpsr.org/home/prison_alternatives_initiative1

ADPSP is also asking the American Institute of Architects to change their Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct to “prohibit the design of spaces for killing, torture, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”⁶⁸

Ibid.

With an increasingly vocal contingent advocating that architects remove themselves from prison design entirely, contemporary designers in America are understandably reluctant to be associated with the process of incarceration. As a result, new prison design and construction is carried out by a small number of large and relatively anonymous firms. This anonymity discourages architectural innovation and perpetuates generic, placeless design. Moreover, the displacement of prisons to rural areas further eliminates the need for a mediated and designed public presence. Prison architecture is not an icon of civic pride or communal justice because no one is supposed to see it.

Figure 6.

The spatial buffering and geographic isolation of Arizona State Prison, outside of Tuscon is characteristic of rural prison design today⁶⁹

Google Earth, Accessed October 10, 2014

With bland nondescript facades surrounded by razor wire and high walls, prisons are commonly surrounded by a substantial spatial buffer that separates the prison population from society at large. Prison facilities are thus isolated from both the urban communities that supply the inmates and the rural communities in which they are sited. The geographic and architectural concealment of prisons belies the fact that there are over two million incarcerated people in the United States today. If the entire inmate population resided in a single metropolitan area, it would comprise the fourth-largest city in the United States, having more inhabitants than Houston.⁷⁰

The US Census Bureau estimated that Houston has a population of 2.196 million, while the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails in 2011

The concealment of such an immense population allows the special interest groups that are profiting from the prison industry to grow their businesses while most of the American population remains unaware of what is transpiring in remote regions of the United States. This paradigm of spatial secrecy is not immutable, however.

Designers and planners should advocate for the re-urbanization of incarceration. The proximity of prisons to urban centers would facilitate family visits, which are known to contribute to the psychological well-being of the inmates and reduce recidivism.⁷¹

William D. Bales “Inmate Social Ties and the Transition to Society: Does Visitation Reduce Recidivism?” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 45: 287 (2008), 287.

Inmates would also be better prepared for reintegration into their home communities through the use of visits and furloughs. Access to legal, social and medical services would also be facilitated by the relocating of prisons into metropolitan areas. Cities would provide a more diverse, well trained staff that could more closely represent the racial and cultural backgrounds of the inmate populations. Most importantly, by removing landscape barriers and developing new urban architectural typologies that reflect collective ideals of communal justice, designers could help uncover the realities of incarceration and, in so doing, encourage society to enact change.

Conclusion

We seldom think about where our trash goes, how animals are slaughtered for meat, or what happens to the 2.3 million Americans locked behind prison walls. This is no oversight – it is designed. The remote siting and placeless design of livestock operations, waste management systems, and prison complexes allow society to avoid confronting the unsettling nature of wastefulness, slaughter, and imprisonment. From water contamination to increased crime, the environmental and social consequences of such designed indifference can be wide ranging. Hidden from public view, the ecologically and socially damaging nature of these industries will remain unchallenged. Though design has facilitated the paradigm of industrial obscurity, it can also help to change it.

The complexity of urban-rural relationships requires research and management approaches that cross traditional disciplinary lines. We have in the past addressed the challenges of the city and countryside as separate and closed systems. This has had limited success in mitigating urban-rural conflicts. Planning and management decisions for relocating undesirable land uses outside of urban areas cannot be made outside the context of rural needs and wishes. Rural and urban landscapes must be acknowledged as mutually interdependent and equally important parts of a unified whole. Architects and Landscape Architects are uniquely positioned to employ a systems approach and develop scenarios, typologies, and generative spatial principles that reconcile rural resources with urban demands. As economic, social, urban, and environmental generalists, designers can bring perspective and vision to these issues. A broad macro-level knowledge base combined with site and architectural scale expertise, affords them a unique ability to intertwine scientific, visual and verbal thought across scales and communicate across disciplines.

With considered design and participatory planning, ecologically and socially damaging urban industries could potentially be transformed into assets for rural communities. Expanded free range and sustainable husbandry methods, coupled with small scale processing and distribution networks, could improve the quality of life for both the animals and the people responsible for their slaughter. Recycling and post-consumer manufacturing enterprises could help to enliven stagnating rural economies. Urban food and yard waste could be composted and used as fertilizer in a new model of nutrient efficient agriculture. A new prison typology that allows the public to see beyond its walls, figuratively if not literally, might force society to reexamine the racially and culturally complex realities of incarceration. Though far from comprehensive, these potential solutions should be a springboard for further design investigation.

The time has come to identify synergies and strategies hidden within existing urban-rural relationships. Contemporary academic urbanisms tend to homogenize local space and identity, defining the rural landscape as ecological repository, industrial staging ground, or urban hinterland. In contrast, preservation frequently addresses rural place-making at the neighborhood and architectural scale, while ignoring regional ecologies and industries. Design must adopt a synthetic approach to rural and urban territories whereby ecological and agro-industrial production supports rather than suppresses the identity, integrity and prosperity of local communities. In so doing, designers can contribute to a more sustainable, humane, and fair future for rural and urban communities alike.