When I was a kid I wanted to be a CEO of a tech company. (Which was turbo cringe.)

Now I'd like to have a boring job and be someone's mom/aunt.

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[–] 6 points 1 week ago (4 children)

How does one get into eco-Marxist urbanism?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Horticulture is one of those fields where you don't necessarily need a degree, or at least a 4 year degree, to get a job with scheming court eunuch influence at a city department. Then every radical idea can be framed as sustainability and cost/labour-saving, with a very receptive audience because your coworkers observe those problems every day. I used that role to start a municipal native plant nursery from municipal pollinator gardens used as community seedbanks, while pushing for redevelopment where public land can do more socioecologically. Within a couple years the city went from $100k/year in non-native annuals to having an infinite supply of effectively free native plants that are rapidly changing all of its planting philosophy.

    Landscape architecture is much more formal, requiring at least a 4 year degree and usually a masters, but it's much larger in scale and more consciously interdisciplinary with a strong focus on the humanities. It's the field where you can be equal parts historian, sociologist, modernist artist, architect, environmental engineer, and natural scientist while making decent money. The most radical David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre books are just daily conversation and the systems you practically work with. I'm going that route now to develop entire swaths of urban greenspace instead of changing it bit-by-bit. With the full MLA you can have a huge amount of influence in a department like parks planning.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I have a four year degree in plant bio and feel like I should've looked more closely into Landscape Architecture - I kinda assumed based on what I've seen from others that it's mostly a combo of CAD and permits. I'm currently in a large, somewhat progressive city so it might also be a challenge to break in. But it sounds worth giving it another look. Thanks for the info! And awesome job on using the scheming court eunuch influence for good.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    There's a lot of technical drawing and CAD, but that's just the final stages of a project after all the fun drawing and research. With your degree you could easily go the professional horticulturist route as-is or jump into an MLA bridge programme. My crew is a geologist leading two horticulturists, a wildlife biologist, an entomologist, a biochemist, and a political scientist. We're all overqualified, but in the interview the qualifications were less important than saying why you care about public land and how you'd want to better it. Especially with urban greenspace, it's so interdisciplinary that any kind of scientific background has some important role. Parks feels like doing communism every day so it's an amazing workplace full of passionate environmentalists who make those spaces their babies.

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