The median seems an intensely American convention, offering often rather menial landscaping fed by precious water resources for the safety, aesthetic, and presumably anti-erosion, purposes of passing highways and motorists. The life of the average American, stuck in their car commuting for an hour and a half each day, is filled to the brim with these often completely overlooked swaths of land. Occasionally, however, the median becomes the object of attention. For a few weeks every summer in Maine, for example, on the highway between Portland and Bangor, the median strip is awash with purple and pink lupines, transforming a typically uninteresting drive (except for the occasional moose sighting) into a rather transcendental experience. It is here, where the median successfully mediates between parkland/nature and the highly constructed reality of your automobile and the asphalt, that the median takes on a new identity—an identity of place, rather than of forgotten space.

The thing about medians is that, as their name might suggest, they are in the middle of often quite busy streets, and are therefore by their very nature uninhabitable. They are traditionally waste spaces, neglected but not completely forgotten, and as such, they seem ripe for landscape urbanist interventions. They are the part of the fabric of the urban surface that deals perhaps the most directly with the way most of us experience the urban surface—the car.

As such, and before such thoughts had surfaced in my consciousness, I am drawn to the particularly Berkeley spectacle of people commandeering the median strip on Shattuck Avenue in the Gourmet Ghetto for the consumption of pizza from the Cheeseboard. The reappropriation of the median strip for pedestrian purposes is, to my mind, one of the ultimate forms of Landscape Urbanism—the transformation of landscaping into an inhabitable landscape. It is amazing to witness how this simple act transforms the neighborhood—in some ways, it is like parking day every day in the Gourmet Ghetto. Cars drive slower in response to the unexpected intrusion into their territory, and anyone can come and eat on the median strip and instantly have the sense of belonging like a local. This unusual act unites pedestrians in its unexpectedness. Where the median strip traditionally mediates between the car and the outside, when inhabited by people relaxing and enjoying a meal, it serves to further alienate the automotive passersby from the outside, while serving to mediate between the pedestrian and the car.

The project that Evan and I are proposing for this median strip, then, seeks to reinforce its human inhabitation, while at the same time making it a safer and more comfortable experience. We are interested in designing a prosthesis to ease and make more graceful the consumption of pizza in the median, while at the same time perhaps landscaping the median in such a way that it is a landscape created with human inhabitants in mind rather than automotive. It will be designed in such a way that it will hopefully successfully mediate the boundary between landscape and landscaping; when inhabited, it will act as landscape, but when empty of human inhabitants, it will read as landscaping. Whether or not this intentionality will weaken the experience of median reappropriation remains to be seen.