Social Distance: Urban Prairie Landscapes and The Production of Forced Distance Through Public Ecology

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.