Unused and vacant lands occur in all cities as part of ongoing cycles of urbanization. Often shunned or ignored, these feral spaces present opportunities to foster landscape regeneration through self-initiated and proactive design techniques.
The Belmont Goats project is a telling example. It illustrates how engaged and embodied forms of practice within our own habitual environment can generate desirable activity and build local and networked communities. Specifically, it speaks to the ability of landscape architects to skilfully “read” the urban landscape, and from those readings engage with the medium directly. This mode of practice offers possibilities beyond our profession’s normative modes of chasing after pre-packaged client-based contracts and top-down capital-intensive projects. Rather, this work speaks to the underutilized potential of in-the-field approaches and to the proactive design of unsolicited works.
This project dates back to 2007, when I began observing and recording the vacant field’s qualities, seasonal patterns, ecology and urban context. I observed that the lot would at times be occupied with a rich and spontaneous ensemble of vegetation, which would periodically be cut clear by industrial-scaled lawn mowers. I personally disliked the vibe of the mowers. They have some of the dirtiest and loudest engines, which create exponentially more pollution than those of automobiles. I wondered if we could do something more creative and nuanced in how we perennially engage the vacant. So I cold-called the owners of the lot to see if I could persuade them to use goats, rather than mowers, to prune this feral meadow. I leveraged this proposition by listing a range of potential benefits, including reduced fossil fuel usage and carbon emissions, reduced regeneration of weeds and the building of urban soil. Most importantly, I described a useful loophole in Portland’s urban planning code: categorized as livestock, goats are exempt from special provisions or permits, so long as their use or occupation of an urban site is temporary. From this initial enquiry, a deal was made between the property owner, an adjacent business owner and a service provider, whereby I agreed to “shepherd” the herd of goats while they were on site, making the intervention an immersive landscape experiment.
The site’s chain fence served as a ready-made enclosure and became the interface where the public would observe and engage with the field.
Image: Brett Milligan
A herd of goats was first brought on the site in 2010 as a trial in regenerative maintenance. This prototype proved to be successful for all stakeholders. As a requirement of the project, the landowner requested that the public not be allowed into the field due to liability issues, which limited public access to the surrounding sidewalks. Responding to this restriction, signs were created and embedded in the chain-link fence to provide onlookers with a field guide to the collection of cosmopolitan urban flora (weeds) and fauna that could be spotted in the “vacant” lot.
The presence of the goats on the lot created a vibrant hub of activity, performing like a roadside attraction that activated a field of social action in the community. Hundreds of people were observed getting out of their cars to pause, watch and ask questions. Over the course of the many hours I spent in that field, I had conversations with more than a thousand different people, and in doing so, I learned far more about that landscape than in any site analysis I’ve performed in a commercial or academic capacity. Over time and successive stays by the goats, the basis of the experiment – the “work” of cutting down weeds – morphed into the vagaries of urban pleasure, recreation and sociability. Regenerative landscape maintenance was performing double duty as a public amenity.
The increased activity at the lot gave rise to a multitude of media events. Known as the “Belmont goat field,” it has been written about, documented and televised more than thirty-five times since it began, including in numerous feature stories, appearances on the news, in film documentaries and on the television comedy series Portlandia . These stories have helped to meme and further popularize the practice in other cities (we were not the first to do this). The site’s fenced perimeter also became a forum for expression and communication, through signs, artwork and miscellaneous other artefacts.
Neighbours near and far engaged with the site and the longer the goats were there, the more this invented community took on a sense of ownership and investment in the herd, eventually assuming the most prominent roles in the project. From the time the goats arrived on site, Mike Redmond, the owner of a neighbouring woodworking business, was one of the project’s biggest supporters. He and his employees supplied water for the goats, helped with fence repairs and built the goats’ play structure, all in appreciation for what the interventions were doing for the community. In 2012, he decided to build his own entrance gate into the lot and began purchasing his own herd of goats, which he hoped to keep at the field on a permanent basis. In a signed agreement he worked out with the lot’s owners, Mike agreed to assume personal liability for people coming onto the site, thus allowing the public to enter and socialize on privately held vacant land. The goats’ temporary occupation of the site turned into year-round residency.
A crowdsourced campaign was initiated to find a new vacant lot for the Belmont Goats, via MapBox (2013).
Once Mike opened the door to public access to the field, a group of people soon volunteered to help take care of the goats and supervise “gate hours,” during which the public was invited into the lot. Now called The Belmont Goats, the group hosts a website and a suite of other social media profiles, including a very active Twitter feed (1,400 followers) that chronicles day-to-day events at the lot. In 2013, the developer-owners of the lot announced their intent to redevelop the site – something we all knew would eventually happen – requiring the goats to move on. To prevent the herd from being sold and split up, the group of volunteers purchased the goats and began the search for a new urban meadow.
An online, city-wide crowdsourced mapping project was initiated to find a new home for The Belmont Goats. Early in October 2014, at the invitation of the neighbourhood and after a successful crowdfunding campaign, The Belmont Goats relocated to Lents Town Center, on land provided by the Portland Development Commission, the city’s official urban renewal and economic development agency. The goats were granted a three-year stay on an idle lot within one of its urban redevelopment zones, banking on the idea that the animals will help them achieve their official planning goals through the community building and urban vibrancy the goats generate. The Belmont Goats’ fiscal sponsor, Green Lents, is an all-volunteer-run non-profit group with a mission to provide education, volunteer and leadership opportunities in and around the Lents neighbourhood. The Belmont Goats is now also a non-profit group, pursuing its “found mission as a kind of rural community in an urban environment.”
This project continues to evolve through a broader and different set of actors than when it began, migrating through vacant lands and a meshwork of bottom-up and top-down efforts. All of this emerged from a single proactive phone call five years ago.
