Selected Papers from the 6th Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning: Adapting to Expanding and Contracting Cities

Abstract

scape was implicated in extensive networks and flows of capital, knowledge, and labor. The collection includes several photos from Dorothea Lange’s Farm Security Administration travels in the region and her notes on housing conditions and length of the workday. The representation of hopscapes in this book illustrates the dilemmas that arise at the intersection of food and landscape systems. As the revival of craft breweries focuses attention on the complexities of hops varieties as registered on the palette—citrus or piney aromatics or just plain hoppiness—it can also reveal the social justice and environmental problems of the food system as registered in the landscape. The historical record in this book provides a backdrop for assessing the current revival of hop production driven by the emergence craft breweries pioneered in Oregon in the 1980s and now finding niches in other places. The scholarship emerging in the crossdisciplinary synthesis of food studies or the work of geographers such as Don Mitchell (2003) help analyze the power relationships embedded in and often concealed in everyday practices that shape food and landscapes. Meanwhile, scholars (Reang, 2017) are working to uncover the more specific stories of the groups of people who appear in the archival photos who helped make Oregon at one point the “hop capital of the world.” Agriculture has radically transformed ecological habitats to the point that half of what is considered the world’s habitable land is now under agricultural production. The hopscapes found in a relatively narrow range of climate suitability between latitudes of 44 and 51 degrees represent an extremely small portion of this cultural ecology, and the Willamette Valley locates an even smaller fraction of these landscape metrics. However, as this book vividly illustrates, this valley and the relationships documented in these photos and archival text are microcosms of systems that will continue to have significant global implications.