Reflection on the crisis of city and the origin of landscape

(There may be some mistranslation and inaccurate expression because I read the book in Chinese version and I cannot find the English one. I heard that due to some copyright issues, Chinese version is much thinner than the original one and many essences have been deleted)

Recently, I read the book named Landscape as urbanism: a general theory again and want to share some thoughts of one chapter and related reflection on our Marin City project. The fifth chapter introduced the origin of the LANDSCAPE from the decline of the contemporary Detroit, and presented the construction of “landscape culture”, emphasizing the influence of the landscape after the decline of the city of Rome on future landscape planning.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Detroit, once the fourth largest city in the United States, reduced its population by nearly half. As early as 1920, Henry Ford decided to relocate factories outside the city. For Detroit, synonymous with the automobile industry, a continuous process of elimination has already begun. Similar situations have occurred in almost all industrialized cities in North America.”

(View South from Sibley St. along Park Ave.,Detroit, 1991. At the time of this photograph, Detroit had the largestconcentration of vacant skyscrapers in the world© CAMILO JOSÉ VERGARA viapublicbooks.org)

In Detroit, a decayed “city of the past”, when the discipline of architecture is unable to provide a useful framework to describe or intervene in the face of urban abandonment, reduction of investment and declining investment, such professional construction becomes meaningless. Because in the early 1990s, demolition surpassed construction and became the main construction activity of the city. People can’t help but ask, if in such a crisis period, would the demolition of the city replace the main municipal engineering in the traditional policy? If so, the nature of a declining economy and industry cannot be distinguished from the nature of war.

“When the main visual elements of urban order such as architectural texture, street walls, and traditional public spaces disappear, the landscape exhibits the unique ability to repair certain spatial forms and social order. For many disciplines, landscape becomes a kind of unparalleled medium for description and intervention to CITIES OF PAST.”

So how was this medium discovered and well-known by people? The author uses Rome as a typical example of Western cities (a typical example of past cities) to introduce the origin of the landscape. The author writes that “landscape is a construction of urban culture”. In North America, the definition of “landscape” has the following context:

1/ In the 16th century, landscape was originally used as a form of painting and a category of drama, which was different from ocean landscape painting and portrait painting

2/ In the 17th century, the landscape changed from a painting form to a way of observing the world (a way of thinking based on sightseeing)

3/ In the 18th century, the landscape represents the land observed in a specific way

4/ In the 19th century, the landscape represented the design to make the land look like a painting

(Source: from Internet)

In the 9th century AD, Rome lost 95% of its population, and it has become a “city of past” where ancient ruins and agricultural land coexist. The walls of Aurelian were still standing, and most of the areas within the walls have been turned into gardens, vineyards, orchards, and large areas where plants can grow at random. Such an area is called “disabitato” in Italian.

The English expression of the term “landscape” first appeared in 1603, and a year later, the landscape painter Claude Lorrain began to use this term frequently. His works showed a lot of overgrown sceneries of disabitato in ancient Rome. Many English gardeners were influenced by Lorraine’s paintings and began to promote English landscape gardens. Claude Lorrain’s works were generally recognized in the discussion of gardening in the United Kingdom. The landscape images he painted for the disabitato area in Rome became a lens, recognized by the public, and gradually became a new form of Western culture.

(Giambattista Nolli, Pianta Grande, 1748.Digitally remastered, 2005, from original print engraving, 1760 x 2085 mm.Courtesy John Reynolds. Digital Copyright University of Oregon, 2005.Digitization by James Tice, Erik Steiner, Mark Brenneman.)

This unique art form, landscape image and its contemporary design culture continue to have a huge impact on the development of today’s disciplines. The record of “the city of the past” reinterpreted the origin of the Western landscape. As a cultural category, landscape has a unique plasticity for the problematic sites forgotten by the city and is particularly effective in dealing with social, environmental, and cultural issues caused by traditional architectural models.

Highline park in NYC can be regarded as a perfect case to illustrate landscape urbanism. Originated from the insistence of a group of trains love, the park on a elevated train line spur changed peoples’ view towards traditional and abandoned industry installation. And thanks to the stunning landscape project, the community near the park got revived. And this project exerted huge influence on numerous alike industrial relics allover the world. Like a revolution to generate highline inspiration. And same experience of Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord has crazy effect on other dumped industrial campus and brownfield land.

Both two cases of obsolete land transformation prove that the landscape itself is a manifestation of the lack of modernity. This is a cultural form formed after the primitive relationship between mankind and nature is interrupted by urban life, commerce, and technology. In other words, the current urban crisis is also an opportunity for landscape development. However, at the same time, these two cases are also typical representatives of ecological gentrification. Their ingenious design attracts higher-income residents and high-end businesses and drive the design target population who originally lived here to a worse environment. A paradox is created.

These have triggered my reflection about an unsustainable type of urban fabric in my hometown of Guangzhou: the urban village. This is an urban fragment similar to Marin city. They are all glaring pocket of urban-style poverty. But urban villages are not vacant or shrinking urban fragments. And its living environment is even worse because they have no remaining space and natural resources for vegetation and animals to grow. Now some public welfare teams are beginning to use the only remaining blank land: the roof as roof gardens. Designers apply productive landscapes and semi-finished landscapes to replace merely aesthetic landscapes for leisure and entertainment to resist the evasion of gentrification. I once participated in a roof garden design project, but with little success. Because the designer’s design depth easily surpasses the daily use needs of users, and the nature of a single roof garden limits the development possibilities of publicity and openness. At present, the design experiments of urban villages are emerging in southern China, waiting for the arrival of an optimal solution. When space and resources are extremely scarce, and the city is also malignant and rapidly developing, what is the role of landscape and how will it fulfill its malleability and improve the health of the human settlement environment? I hope to acquire the answer in my future studies.

The current situation of urban villages in Guangzhou. Credit to: Zhiyou Zhang

Some landscape experiments in urban villages. (Source: https://www.gooood.cn/page/2)