The Long Now
Cities are fast-paced, ever-changing places filled with fast fashion, quick commerce, short election cycles, and perpetual development. What does living in the fast lane do to our ability to see the big picture and tackle life’s biggest challenges? How might fast-paced cities influence what musician and producer Brian Eno coined a sense of the “big here and long now“? I propose that it might be possible to develop a design toolkit, a slow landscaping approach, that roots cities to a larger narrative of place and time.
How long is your Now? What timescale informs your decisions? Days? Months? Decades? Centuries? Are your daily decisions kind to your future self? Are you a good ancestor?
In 1996, the LongNow Foundation (named by Eno) was formed to “provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and [to] help make long-term thinking more common.” They define the Long Now as the last and next ten thousand years.
How differently would we act if we lived in a Long Now? In what ways would our decisions change, and in what ways might our priorities shift?
LongTrees.org
- How should we treat heritage trees?
- What would it mean to have thousand-year-old trees throughout cities?
- What kind of culture tends to thousand-year-old trees?
- What could we do right now to grow that future?
One way to provide a longer perspective might be to grow trees capable of living centuries or millennia. I propose that these Long Trees, protected and revered, could root the cities to the “big here and long now.”
In 2023, a group of local tree enthusiasts started thinking about this question and is currently attempting to grow a thousand 1000-year-old trees throughout the city of Edmonton.
Slow Landscaping
Fast landscapes are at the whim of development—slow landscaping forces development to fit itself to the site.
The point of slow landscaping is to provide continuity in a fast-paced environment, provide pause and contemplation, and remind us that we are in the middle of a timeline extending into the past and future—that we are living in a Big Here and a LongNow. The survival of slow landscapes requires the practice of good ancestry. Make decisions that leave future generations with more options than we inherited. Expand the adjacent possible.
Planting long trees on marginal land is one strategy, but a more devious strategy might be to plant long trees on sites vulnerable to development. Living longer than buildings, slow landscapes would dictate the shape of the built environment, as opposed to the other way around. Cities and buildings would bend and shift to fit slow landscapes like geological features. Each long tree would shape the fabric of the spaces it occupies. Unskilled architects and planners will hate slow landscaping, but skilled ones will incorporate them into the built form to create truly unique spaces.