Reciprocal Landscapes

How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials ¿ fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood ¿ from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from.

Drawing from archival documents, photographs, and field trips, the author brings these two separate landscapes ¿ the material¿s source and the urban site where the material ended up ¿ together, exploring themes of unequal ecological exchange, labor, and material flows. Each chapter follows a single material¿s movement: guano from Peru that landed in Central Park in the 1860s, granite from Maine that paved Broadway in the 1890s, structural steel from Pittsburgh that restructured Riverside Park in the 1930s, London plane street trees grown on Rikers Island by incarcerated workers