Remediating Vacancy
by Josh Morin & Aaron Z. Lewis
October 2025
This essay was first delivered as a talk for the 2025 Conference on Communication and Environment.
"The social imagination of place, as described by Keith Basso in his ethnography of Western Apache place names, Wisdom Sits in Places … is a practice 'in which individuals invest themselves in the landscape while incorporating its meanings into their own most fundamental experience,' a narrative practice not of individual encounters with physical nature but rather communal interpretation of reality through its embodiment in geographical space."
—Roy Scranton, Strange New World
Long before the plan of Washington, DC was laid, with its diagonal boulevards and gridded cross streets, the land stepped down where two rivers meet. There, where trading was opportune and nearby rockface made excellent quarry for sharp tip and stone tool, existed a gentle stream that carved its way through coastal plain sediment on downward journey towards widened river, bay, and sea beyond.
One can imagine the seasons at play in such scenery—Winter’s stillness, clinging on bare branch, giving way to Spring’s muddy thaw; when soil slumps and hidden green unfurls with moist exhale sweet fodder for eager flyers, recently hatched and hungry to taste what sticky Summer sun summons forth from the underground, where all beginnings and endings entwine; a reminder that dignified Fall, fully fertile and proud, again whispers in cold nights as Winter’s coming curtain call. Wise ones know to prepare or perish. Eyed ones marvel at faded tones of stem and leaf while gorging on freely sacrificed seed gathered up or else buried under snow. The tremendous marvelous of it all.
It is from this truth, that land is always whole, that we began. And it is from the Garden that we gained this perspective for ourselves.
***
Our project was well-defined, both physically and legally. A 10,000 sq ft parcel of inner alley lots, what amounts to a long rectangle, fenced in barbed wire, leased for 3 years of temporary stewardship to the immediate neighbors suffering under pandemic lockdown in the U Street Neighborhood. The Temperance Alley Garden took its name from the historic address of these plots, where two storeyed brick dwellings were once homed by the city’s most precarious livelihoods. Families of wage workers, construction laborers, dish washers, truck drivers, cooks, laundresses, domestic helpers, and women of the night. During and after the Civil War, recently freed enslaved peoples traveled north to DC to settle in alleys like ours, all throughout the city. Tucked away behind public streets, there emerged a community culture set apart, derided for its vices—alcohol, gambling, & prostitution—yet held together by a culture of mutuality and collective care. In 1953, houses were torn down and families displaced after a long period of neglect. We wondered, can we recover vitality to the area while honoring the alley life that once was here?
Through the fence we met the others, alley dwellers who dared enter the backside of our tree-lined street. Dog walkers, sanitation workers, and grocery shoppers taking a shortcut home.
We transformed the metal danger signs into welcome signs using chalkboard spray paint. A way of showing neighbors that something new was growing here and that they were welcome to join us during the weekly posted open hours. Chalk, a medium of ephemerality and a sign of recent presence—exposed to the elements, always inviting retracing, refreshing, reanimating. Marking care through handwritten posts and clever wayfinding on the alley bricks. Arrows and hearts, love notes of solicitation.
Not meant to last forever, chalk art helped neighbors experience the nowness of the place and maybe even come to delight in it.
We’ve since opened the gates to produce over 1,000 free public events, each one hosted by a neighbor. Concerts in the garden featuring original compositions of local artists, meditation circles, workshops on ecology and dance and improv, exhibitions of photography and painting, wonder-filled field trips for the local elementary school children, feasts and seasonal celebrations.
We wore construction vests without permission and vested those who came along to join the build. The vests were not an employer-mandated uniform but a playful reminder of the people’s power to construct landscapes of their own, outside of professionally gatekept industry and formal architectural schooling. It was no one’s job to build the garden, no employment contracts were signed, and yet we worked in our shared backyard, together with the volunteer plants, making home. There was no reverse-engineering a master plan or computer render, only immersive blueprints made on the site itself out of twine and stake and found stone. Cheap materials were our sketches on the land canvas, lived in, until we felt confident enough to color them in with ever-more sturdy features.
Slowly, sketches became solidified as raised beds, and we’ve grown 1,400 kg (over 3,000 lbs) of vegetables, a third of which has been donated to a local food pantry in DC. These raised beds became also an outdoor classroom, a demonstration garden for hundreds of volunteers, the most accessible place in the city to practice urban agriculture.
Finally, we gathered each month under a small geodesic “Story Circle” dome to cultivate an analog-digital archive, a collective memento mori. Posters, flyers, artworks created during events—community members contributed their creations, learning to break the mental habit of fastforwarding to a future when they’re no longer here. We learned about the land’s lineage and added our own memories to this story line, an ongoing practice of revelation, retrieval. A ball hanging from the top of the dome served as our dynamic talking piece, to be swung around and caught by storykeepers so moved to speak next, each responding to gentle prompts recalling all that blossomed in the time since we last assembled.
In this way the dome became our time machine as we assembled at each season’s end (solstices and equinox celebrations) to write a letter to our future selves, casting aspirations and admonitions across the months and catching them on the flip side. We perceived the garden through the window of Story Circle, through the artefacts accrued and the correspondences written and the personalities present.
During our efforts we found that sustained attention engenders care, and over time care matures into love. Through our inhabitation more was revealed. The gentle stream mentioned earlier was only remembered when our neighbor and local historian pulled the surveyor’s map from the library. There on the page drafted before the first brick was laid, our block was scribed with a single blue line. Squiggled from north west to southeast corner. Then continuing on to contribute tributary offering to what was then called Tiber Creek—a name borrowed from Rome by an Italian colonizer self-conceiving a city of grandeur on what was still soggy silt lands—a poignant lesson on how the perception, engagement, and transformation of landscapes in the so-called “New World” relied almost entirely on the tradition of European mapmaking for urban grid laying (another Roman intervention) and the enclosing of winding watersheds into parcels of private property.
In our case, Square 274. And a meager blue line, long paved over.
The power to transform a place is a privilege that should come with the responsibility of deep time awareness.
Why aren’t urban developers the city’s deepest keepers of the land’s memory? To own and trade contracts, perceiving the land through satellite imagery, zoning code maps, and market trend forecast is to debase that source of dignity which only comes from intimate contact with landscape. Not just any land, though—the land one lives with and belongs to. This land. A Garden surrounded by an alleyway.
This is a lesson we impart to our 8-year-old neighbors—second graders from the surrounding public schools on field trips who find themselves seated on pine stump under the Story Circle—when we reach a hand into a hole we dug in the ground to pull out a jar full of artifacts from the Garden’s previous lives. Glass, shards of pottery, rusted nails, and oyster shells from the time when brick houses stood right where they sit, in the old dining room, where a bay caught meal was shucked into the backyard, returned to the earth for safekeeping only to be held again now in their hands. Somebody’s dinner.
Why do our city structures so often require the scraping down to bedrock to be rebuilt? Thoroughly removing all traces of here, to be discarded there, before piling back on with new-old materials from elsewhere. It’s comforting to imagine how many more oyster shells remain buried underfoot.
***
As we transformed this vacant land into a storied garden, we were surrounded on all sides by signs the developer tied to the very fence we met neighbors through—signs that invited passersby to zoom meetings, online forums, and public hearings to discuss the future of the site. The developer saw in the vacancy not a latent garden but a problem to be solved. Their computer-generated images of the housing project they planned to build here made it feel like the future had already arrived, as if the render was more real than the vacant lot before our eyes, as if there was no point in making use of the time between proposal and approval. Their fence signs privileged conversations about what should happen years down the road. Their online forums sucked neighbors into screen-based conversations, far removed from the immersive blueprints we’d sketched directly into the land.
Developer plans try to foreclose the present and transport residents into a sparkly future in which the land is domesticated for human occupation. They create a vacancy in time alongside the vacancy in space, turning attention away from the landscape as it is, hiding the present reality behind a future render, and denying neighborly placemaking. Over and over again, we met neighbors whose temporality and vision had been shaped by developers’ communications. Neighbors who responded to our construction effort with confusion, wondering why we’d spend time cultivating a garden on a site that would soon be something else. To occupy the in-between went against the logic of a profit-centered culture focused on building long-term investments that last for generations. Gently and deliberately, we steered community attention back to the precious seasons at hand.
***
Chalk, construction vests, a story circle—these media for seeing present possibilities in vacancy are important because they open up new ways of practicing urban ecology. They expand the menu of land use options beyond ‘vacant’ and ‘developed’, opening up a generative in-between space that allows for new modes of environmental perception and new ways of caring for place.
Environmentalism is often pitted against urbanism. Vacant lots are seen either as lost causes (doomed to development) or as battlefields for a fight (against big bad developers). We have been designing a third way in a very unlikely setting. It’s a way that brings “nature” to the heart of the city, in a manner that’s temporary by design, in order to reorient our attention towards the possibility of vacancy. But we don’t have to escape to rural landscapes or wait for permanent plots — we can create meaningful encounter with nature in a very urban setting by remediating our perception of the lots that sit vacant all around us.
We’re hopeful for a world in which Temporary Nature sites like ours are part and parcel of the urban landscape. New research shows that even temporary green spaces have long-term benefits for the surrounding ecosystem. Our place of Temporary “anti-environment” that “remediates our perception of the outside world” by reminding us of the impermanence of the built environment, teaching us that vacancy is in the eye of the beholder, and drawing us into deeper relationship with the plants and animals that often blend into the background of urban life. Temporary Nature brings the abstract concept of “climate change” down to earth, confronts us with the particularity of this squirrel, this vine, this patch of grass; and it is in the particular that we learn to care again.
Season after season, we bear witness to the crippling climate despair that our peers in the next generation are grappling with. More often than not despair matures into despondency. This despondency is caused on a larger scale by the same sort of “time vacancy” that plays out on our small plot: simulations and forecasts of future ecological realities that make the present feel futile. The environmental communications strategy we need must invite land stewards of all kinds to fully inhabit the time in-between. We can’t allow an imagined future doomsday to evict us from present ecologies. Perhaps embracing the temporary is, paradoxically, a path to lasting environmental transformation.
Composed with care at See What’s Under studio.
