Game On Nebraska!

Since I choose to live by the belief that there is no such thing as coincidence (or coincidii, in the plural) there has been yet another bloggerific moment. The day after attending Farm Aid, I received a letter from the U.S. Federal Government stating that they have granted the non-profit I started in Omaha, official 501(c)(3) status. It has been a full year of back and forth between me, our legal counsel, the board of directors, and the Internal Revenue Service - not at all painful, just a whole heckuva lot of work. Fun work though. What this means is that our grant applications, awards, and foundation contributions to date are now legit, and fully tax deductible. It means we're for real. So I suppose now is a good time to explain what we're doing, and why it's downright cool that this happened after attending Farm Aid.

As many of you know, I have a deep attachment to my hometown, Omaha. It's simply a very cool place. No cheesiness, gentrification is non-existent, fantastic arts, even more fantastic music, and most importantly, a rockus philanthropic scene. There is a certain understated saavy there that I haven't found anywhere else in the world just yet. I grew up with these things all the while farming with my dad. I drove tractors, putzed around the farm, and enjoyed watching and listening to him assess the land in ways a landscape architect would only hope to be able to do by the end of her career. As the years have gone on, I have consistently pursued landscape architecture as a profession, and the farm continues to be surrounded by absurd development. There are now 3 Super Wal-Marts in 3 cardinal directions not less than 5 miles from the original homestead - settled in the 1820's by my ancestors as they came to the midwest from Connecticut for free land.




Map of my family's land ownership in 1887, several decades after originally settling. At this point, some land had traded through marriages and small pox deaths. But check out the simplicity and regularity of that Jeffersonian grid. Relatively few incidences of subdivision of the original increment.




Current land division map, blue parcels have conventionally developed in the last decade.


My subconscious and intuition have been preparing me to eventually figure out what to do with 100's of acres in the middle of suburbia, directly adjacent to what I think is one of the most vibrant small cities in America. I have no idea what this may look like, but it seemed a good idea to start a non-profit to begin this pursuit, so I did it. We call ourselves an educational non-profit research and design collaborative with the mission of disseminating information to the public about the cultural, social, and economic factors that shape the built environment. We communicate with the public through exhibition, publication, and educational programming in order to establish a broad reaching forum for discussion.

We have 3 projects on the go right now. One is an international design competition for an enormous vacant grain elevator that sits near downtown Omaha. Holding such a competition and the ensuing public exhibition is one part of a discourse about the changing land use of the region as well as a suggestion of potential innovative future use for such derelict infrastructure of the past.






Another project is a giant scale print exhibition and built ground terrain in a vacant Wal-Mart. This is a complex project to describe here, so if you're really interested, email me. It's actually a rather shocking exposure of a whole separate underground economy that has been created by the commodification of high quality farmland for development. It's all quite shocking. We're working with a stellar aerial photographer out of Boston and another landuse arts nonprofit from San Francisco. It's actually rather fun working with Wal-Mart, calling their 'real estate' division and talking them into the use of their vacant structure for programming that ultimately talks about their affect on land culture, without ever having to overtly say it. They call it 'community contribution'.


Wal-Mart Exhibition with built ground terrain.


We are also preparing a large fundraising event called 'The Land Ball'. An evening of fab food under a big white tent in the middle of the farm with music. Should be fun.

My hope with these projects is that as I use them as means to slowly figure out what to ultimately do with land, I can simultaneously bring the community along by way of a proactive public involvement that isn't a stupid charette. So we'll see. Fun times the world has waiting for us all if we so desire to participate, no?