Shapely City

In a 1958 editorial of the journal Landscape Architecture, the journalist Grady Clay observed that ‘more men […] than ever before are working to shape our urban landscape according to principles of design’. Clay’s editorial was entitled ‘Shapely Women and Cities: What’s the Urban Equivalent of “38–24–34”?’ In sexist lingo common at the time, he compared the formal and aesthetic qualities of the city to the customary figures used to describe the beauty of the ideal female body. He noted that ‘few influences more subtly repel our advances or more surely arouse us than the spatial qualities of our cities’. Clay was writing when the American city was subject to white flight, disinvestment in the urban core, and large urban reconstruction projects characterized by postwar modernism. Jane Jacobs was criticizing what she considered socially alienating urban renewal schemes, while Kevin Lynch and his colleagues at MIT were conducting studies into the visual perception of cities. In a speech held in 1960, Clay deplored the unordered growth of cities and argued that a new urban environment had to be created that was ‘not only workable but beautiful’. He disagreed with what he considered a pervasive argument at the time, that ‘any concern with the final, visible results of this filling-up process i.e. urban growth is sissified, European, and possibly un-American’. Clay’s plea revealed the residue of the conflicted nineteenth-century gendered discourse revolving around the city, both in Europe and the United States. It also shows that he was primarily addressing men, despite the fact that women had been active in shaping the city for a while. One of the means women had been using to assert themselves as activists, reformers, and design professionals in the public realm was the planting of street trees. 

By focusing on the role that North American women have played in the efforts of greening the city, in particular street tree planting, this article argues that female landscape architects, as well as social and environmental activists, embraced street trees as a means and symbol of empowerment, emancipation, and even resistance. The women transgressed the separation of private and public spheres, and the binary of male-coded architecture and female-coded nature by initiating and playing a role in the planting, management, maintenance, and care of street trees. The trees themselves were both living nature, and architectural, structural elements in the modern public urban landscape and, therefore, provided an ideal material for this transgression. Street trees were an aid for female designers and activists to embrace their own otherness and they were a means of empowerment to ‘conquer’, reimagine, and construct relationships with the city.

 

Sonja Dümpelmann, Designing the ‘shapely city’: women, trees, and the city (2015)

Gabrielle Kiefer + Büro Kiefer, Johannisthal-Adlershof Landscape Park (2005)

FIND IT ON THE MAP

 

Relief

The urban park was a 19th-century concept, its invention necessary to provide relief to the urban victims of the new, untamed metropolis. (…) Planning, real estate development, and the poetic presence of nature were combined. Properly regarded, these were the purest forms of landscape urbanism—or landscape-as-infrastructure.

This Olmstedian principle seems still to be the ideal of landscape urbanism, although in practice hardly any critical attention is paid to some of its weaker aspects. Why is it so easily taken for granted that the green of parks will bring a better world?

First, the steadily increasing area of suburban green structures is of a dubiously hybrid character: they are often loud statements of overdesigned park architecture expressing a desire for liveliness, and for the cultural significance of beloved 19th-century city parks; but on the other hand, they attempt to create an idealistic wilderness. Realization of these plans often results in a strange nonworld of cultivated innocence. The essential characteristics a park needs to survive, so exhaustively described by Jane Jacobs, are almost always lacking. According to her analysis, for parks and greenery to succeed, a good context is fundamental. Many city dwellers see peripheral green zones as valuable green background, but also as potentially dangerous, and as places to be avoided. There is simply too little activity and no mixing of user groups. Park designers have not succeeded in giving these parks the allure of nature and wilderness.

Second, landscape architecture is fundamentally linked to nature, to mother earth. But the perception of “nature” is a cultural phenomenon, quite different from one country to another. The elemental forces of nature have also, through prosperity or privation, shaped behavioral second natures— yielding national identities, religions, livelihoods, and even wars. From these basic conditions cultures are formed, each with its particular perceptions of nature. When you talk with di erent nationalities about nature, you are confronted by deeply rooted feelings and cultural convictions, all of which are assumed to be a matter of “common sense.”

Finally, the pretension often is that parks are the result of ideology and craftsmanship, and are therefore inherently unique and valuable. However, landscape architecture, in contrast to architecture, is concerned almost exclusively with the public realm—parks, boulevards, riverfronts, streetscapes, and so on. To reach decisions and establish nances, we must work with politicians, local citizens, and bureaucracies with diverse legal systems. Landscape architecture will always focus on outreach, public opinion, interaction, public policy, implementation, and compromise. The discipline cannot avoid responding to sociopolitical contexts.

Economists have an acronym to identify the forces driving development: PESTEL (politics, economics, sociology, technology, environment, and law). It is critically important that contemporary planning initiatives explicitly take these factors into account. Clearly such diverse issues as governance and legislation, high- and low-tech implementation strategies, grassroots advocacy, and megaprojects all are attendant on public policy. So in practice landscape architects and park designers work in a realm between illusion and public policy, and our work is inevitably the most banal and compromised among the design disciplines. At the end of the day, are the built realities anywhere close to the dreamt-of parks and artist’s impressions?

Adriaan Geuze and Matthew Skjonsberg, Second Nature: New Territories for the exiled (2010)

• 

• 

• 

• 

SWA Group, Ningbo East New Town Eco-Corridor (2013-)

FIND IT ON THE MAP