My oldest sister is a landscape architect. When this is brought up at family gatherings, a wayward (and often intoxicated) aunt or uncle will laugh, “You spent all that money on school to plant grass?” or “I’ll give you a dollar to mow my lawn.”
Contrary to the ideas of drunken relatives, landscape architects deal with space. Specifically, they work to actively shape and develop spaces to work and function in certain ways. They directly remind us of what Moran affirms, that space is “culturally produced,” and is “produced by a whole range of different agents and practices,” “specifically by forging links between geography and other links” such as sociology (Moran 150).
My sister works directly with uniting geography and sociology. Her job is reinventing spaces to connect the two, designing and building spaces to attract people and conversation. For a very simple example: What thought goes into creating a bus stop? Obviously there is a focus on placement, and perhaps comfort, but thought is also dedicated to how to make such a basic and important space a conversation. How do you design a bus stop to attract people, and to make the idea of taking the bus more inviting? How do you have people interact at such a simple, otherwise uninteresting space? What colors do you make this stop to attract people, soothe people, have it blend in to the street, have it stick out? What do you place around the stop to have it be more social? Trees, bike racks, food stands? How do you make an otherwise un-engaging space suddenly attract attention? What materials do you use?
This example can be applied to buildings, houses, apartments, etc. Moran has us focus upon the development of cities, which are “bound up with relations of power, producing a king of symbolic geography” (Moran 151). My sister (and others belonging to her profession) are one of the “different agents” that develop space. Landscape architects can build a space or building to reinforce a “symbolic geography” (Moran 151). Ex: by placing more modern buildings in poorer cities, to decide “what—and who—should be visible and what should not” (Moran 151).
Space, typically thought of as empty and undeveloped, is actively shaped and interdisciplinary, as it connects different subjects and academic areas to make it symbolic (ex: placing expensive buildings in poorer cities) or simply more engaging/interesting/marketable in general.