@article{THESIS,
      recid = {8046},
      author = {Morgan, Hunter J.},
      title = {Social Distance: Urban Prairie Landscapes and The  Production of Forced Distance Through Public Ecology},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {B.A.},
      address = {2021-04},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us  all to dramatically reconsider how we exist within and  engage with public spaces. Drawing from the exigency of  this moment, I employ the practice of social distance (a  framework taken from the context of the pandemic but with a  long history in the social sciences) to explore the  relations between public landscapes and the communities  that move within them. In exploring this practice within  urban space, I focus this essay on prairie restoration  administrative policies pursued by the Chicago Park  District across Chicago over the past 30 years. In  producing these landscapes, I argue that city agencies work  to create urban landscapes existing outside of conventional  expectations for public ecology. Namely, through producing  practices of social distance within urban space, I argue  that prairie restoration policies, as a form of intentional  design, create separation between individuals and  deteriorate the role of parks as a space for collective  utilization. Using ethnographic, autoethnographic, and  archival methods, I focus on how these areas produce both  physical and subaltern practices of social distance through  their physical construction and the historical narratives  that are spatialized within them. Moreover, I then go into  a discussion of how this distance affects and reframes the  role of the public while catering to the interests of the  private developers and conservationists that create these  geographies in the first place.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/8046},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.8046},
}