Towards a new aesthetics of care : a critical reading of Nassauer’s cues to care

Abstract: Joan Nassauer’s concept of cues to care has been influential within landscape design since her seminal essay Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames was published in 1995 and her research is often used to justify the need for marking landscapes as owned, although there have been critical voices too. The enduring popularity of cues to care as a design method is due to how open it is to interpretation, and this thesis examines various landscape interventions that can be classed as cues to care, both explicitly and implicitly. Using Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to be” approach as a guide I use a close reading and intertextual analysis to interrogate three of the assumptions in Nassauer’s Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames. After examining the meaning of “care” in cues to care, I problematise the assumptions behind the ideas in Nassauer’s article by focusing on three assumptions. Firstly the idea that ecology is functional, secondly that ecology looks messy, and thirdly that nature is above all a cultural frame. I argue that these assumptions are revealing of particular attitudes to the more than human world and that they shape the scope, meaning and limits of cues to care as a strategy. Timothy Morton provides an alternative metaphysics and conception of aesthetics (based in object oriented ontology) that I think has much to offer landscape architecture and is used here to develop an alternative view of the role of the landscape design professional. In addition I examine his and De Block and Vicenzotti’s new conceptions of the sublime to try to find a way of working that addresses and engages with the intimate strangeness of the more than human world while remaining critically apart from it. Following this analysis I suggest directions for an alternative cues to care that is more open to collaboration with, less keen to direct, the more than human world. I outline three types of cues to care that I believe can work within this paradigm, drawing from found objects and contemporary landscape design: Cues to care as a collaboration (with the human and more than human), cues to care as lens (drawing attention to strangeness in the landscape rather than marking as owned) and cues to care as veil (porous, shifting divisions rather than hard, fixed boundaries).