Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth

by Mrill Ingram

How we relate to orphaned space matters. Voids, marginalia, empty spaces—from abandoned gas stations to polluted waterways—are created and maintained by politics, and often go unquestioned. In Loving Orphaned Space, Mrill Ingram provides a call to action to claim and to cherish these neglected spaces and make them a source of inspiration through art and/or remuneration.  Ingram advocates not only for “urban greening” and “green planning,” but also for “radical caring.” These efforts create awareness and understanding of ecological connectivity and environmental justice issues—from the expropriation of land from tribal nations, to how race and class issues contribute to creating orphaned space. Case studies feature artists, scientists, and community collaborations in Chicago, New York, and Fargo, ND, where grounded and practical work of a fundamentally feminist nature challenges us to build networks of connection and care.  The work of environmental artists who venture into and transform these disconnected sites of infrastructure allow us to rethink how to manage the enormous amount of existing overlooked and abused space. Loving Orphaned Space provides new ways humans can negotiate being better citizens of Earth.

203 pages, Hardcover

Published May 13, 2022

About the author

Mrill Ingram, a PhD in Geography, is an independent scholar in Madison, Wisconsin.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed the way I look at the world. Not "the world" as in some global socioeconomic historical philosophical conglomeration that defies reduction to specifics (although that too...), but the physical environment where I do nearly all of my living, working, thinking, and loving. And what author/scientist/environmentalist Ingram teaches in Loving Orphaned Space is that so much of my physical surroundings are unknown, unremarked, and ignored by me as I pass through them to get where I'm going.

Buddhists and other practitioners of mindfulness tell us that to live fully, we must live in the moment. From that perspective, each moment that we ignore the place we are located, we fail to exist fully. Although I don't recall any mention of the Buddha (I could be wrong...) Mrill Ingram urges us to exist more fully in the moment by first noticing, and then, perhaps, reclaiming the orphaned spaces in our lives.

What is orphaned space? It could be an apparently purposeless strip of grass next to a highway on-ramp or a border wall, a patch of overgrown land that divides an industrial complex from a nearby waterway, or a field created for flood control or an underground septic system. Why should we care about these places? For Ingram, these orphans deserve our attention and yes, even our love, in part because they provide us with opportunities to wrest control over these portions of our world from mindless government bureaucracies and transfer some of the power back to the people who live side by side with them. The people who live and work in and near orphaned spaces should have a say in their use, should be allowed to integrate these places into their communities, she argues.

In the heart of the book, Ingram describes the efforts of artists, working with landlords, public officials, and community groups, to reinvent these orphaned spaces in creative ways, often through environmental art techniques that share much with the professions of landscaping and horticulture. The book doesn't shy away from the ways in which entrenched interests - both at the official and grassroots levels - can complicate (and in some cases, stymie) the artists' intentions.

Loving Orphaned Space is not primarily a how-to manual (although Ingram's detailed reporting of the efforts of orphan-loving artists is a potent resource); it is instead a wake-up call to those of us (count me included) who never gave a thought to these matters before encountering this eye-opening text. Ingram lays out the socioeconomic, philosophical, and scientific justifications for spending more time and energy on these neglected aspects of our physical world in cogent prose that skillfully straddles the line between academic and popular writing styles, but is never dry or tedious - quite the contrary. (My only quibble is what felt like an excessive use of scare quotes.) I even added a new word to my vocabulary ("precarity" - which means something a bit different from "precariousness").

Five stars - highly recommended.

[Maia Zade · Rating 4 out of 5]

To see the imaginative, inventive ways people engage with the spaces around them - particularly the abandoned, forgotten, sidelined, unconventional, and orphaned - was an inspiration. I was crushed to read how certain projects were gutted or scrapped by bureaucracy or lack of funding, but that indignation still moves me, and I hope new collaborations and ideas continue to blossom forth. (I hope that I can participate in such collaboration and idea-generation in the orphaned spaces I love.)

I've been out of the academic space for long enough that it was a struggle to wrap my head around the more theoretical chapters, and I do think that "language barrier" could impact how this work gets shared and who is exposed to this.