ABSTRACT
The interplay between cities and nature is one of the most powerful themes of contemporary culture. This is not only because they are “where we live” – or, in the case of nature, where many of us used to live. It is also because they represent opposite polarities of the human mind. The overlap between the spatial and the psychological – between cities and “nature” as physical places and as countervailing cultural and psychic forces and processes – is one of the things that makes analysis of their relationship so fascinating and yet so complex. The last three centuries have seen these tensions – present but latent throughout the previous six or seven millennia, since the rise of the first cities in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia – emerge on a striking new scale, playing themselves out in ways that bear directly on human occupancy of the planet – not least what form it takes and how well it survives. It is a story with a number of elements: the increase in human numbers, affluence and impact; the rise of urbanization as a global force, dominating the Earth – culminating in the moment (in 2007) when the world’s population became predominantly urban; the shrinkage of “nature” and loss of the wild; the emergence, in the second half of the twentieth century, of a new political and social movement – environmentalism; and, partly as a consequence, a profound shift in attitudes towards nature and cities. These were the deep social and cultural patterns that underlay and influenced the more obvious changes in aesthetics – defined here as the design language we use for our settlements, in particular those parts of our settlements that we leave unsettled. Settlement and its opposite, indeed, is one aspect of the polarity of city and nature. As will become clear later in this chapter, a key property of nature is its “unsettlement” – the fact that it is both unsettled and, potentially, unsettling. Cities, by contrast, archetypally represent order, control, predictability – and thus, in one sense, liberation from the threat posed by the subversive, anarchic forces of the wild. This was the case for most of history, from the Greek polis to the medieval city – where, it was said, stadt luft macht frei (city air makes you free) – and it was a fundamental characteristic of the world in which nature, in its scope and mystery, simply outweighed humanity: it remained, largely, unexplored and unexplained. Wildness was unregenerate, pagan and dangerous: it was something to be abolished, rescued or reclaimed. The language we use to describe the nature that existed within the boundaries of settlements of this period, therefore, crystallizes around the concept of formality. From the hanging gardens of Babylon to the Elizabethan knot garden, nature, to a modern sensibility, seems tamed and
tidied, organized and subjugated. That there was a need for a connection with it, on the part of human beings, is not in doubt. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Nebuchadnezzar, in constructing the gardens at Babylon, “rendered the prospect an exact resemblance of a mountainous country” in order to please his queen, who had been brought up in a remote region of Asia “and was fond of a mountainous situation”. And since the loftiest point in the gardens was at the same height as the city walls, it must have been possible to stand in this paradise – as gardens were then known – and gaze out over rural Mesopotamia. The survival of greenery within settlements throughout the millennia that followed is testimony to the human urge for a connection with nature beyond the merely functional, yet for the most part it was a connection that had to be firmly controlled – like nature itself. The last three centuries have witnessed a sea-change in attitudes, at least in the developed world, and a corresponding revolution in nature aesthetics. Much of the evidence for this comes from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which saw the spread of cities, the birth of Romanticism, the rise – in the poetry of Wordsworth and his contemporaries, for example – of a recognizably modern nature paganism. In north America the exploration and colonization of a pristine continent by “civilized” man was the catalyst for the development of a wilderness movement, best exemplified in the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, and an appreciation of the American “sublime”. In the second half of the eighteenth century – around 1760-1770, according to the cultural critic Raymond Williams, attitudes to the city reached a turning-point. Before this period, cities represented manners and refinement; after it, they came to be viewed as oppressive (Williams 1983). In John Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language, meanwhile, published in 1775, the word “civilization” was defined as the “state of being civilized” as well as the act of civilizing – in other words, as an (achieved) condition, not merely a process (Nicholson-Lord 1987). Cities can be seen as the spatial or physical expression of the cultural state we describe as civilization, and both have soured in the last two centuries. The environmental psychologist Y.F. Tuan argues that an inversion of long-established polarity has taken place – that wilderness has become sacred and settlements profane (Tuan 1974). Tastes in landscape reflected this – notably the new appetite for uplands. At the start of the eighteenth century, for example, Daniel Defoe was still describing the English Lake District as “barren and frightful”: less than a century later Wordsworth and his fellow Lake poets were discovering there the joys of solitude and “tranquillity”. In the intervening period a new aesthetic had arisen which was to dominate Western thinking about the design of larger landscapes into the twentieth century. The English landscape movement associated with the names of William Kent, Humphry Repton and, above all, Lancelot “Capability” Brown was many things: a revolt against formality, seen as a Continental (European) phenomenon associated with absolutist monarchies – not least the geometrics of Versailles; an expression of dissatisfaction with enclosure and with the near-athand; an aspiration towards its opposite – the far away, that which lay outside; and a new union with nature, now seen as embodying these qualities of “outsideness”. The poet Alexander Pope, a landscapist himself, used a striking phrase to describe the new school of landscape design – “calling in the country” – and one equally striking technical innovation expressed this perhaps more than any other. This was the ha-ha, or sunken ditch, an “invisible” boundary that removed the sense of separation between viewer and viewed, creating a psychological connection between humans, assumed to inhabit the civilized foreground, and nature – assumed, tellingly, to have been lost but recovered yet still, somehow, remaining “outside”. The ability of the eye to sweep uninterrupted from the near-at-hand to the distant was a crucial element in the sense of psychological freedom that these new eighteenth century landscapes conferred. So too was the informality and “naturalness” of the landscapes themselves
– rolling green vistas, dotted or clumped trees, a body of water. The Brown style, developed at Stowe in Buckinghamshire after 1741 and achieving the royal imprimatur when he became Master Gardener to George III, was widely copied throughout Europe and the United States and gradually assumed the status of an international landscape language. It was no surprise, therefore, that when the spread of cities accelerated in the nineteenth century and new parks were created as a counterweight to the perceived horrors of urban life, the landscape movement of the previous century should provide the template for their design. The Victorian city, with its densely packed masses, was seen, by those in power at least, as not merely a breeding ground of disease and immorality but as a potential hotbed of revolution. Nature – embodied in the surrogate countryside of the urban park – was an all-purpose antidote: calming, diverting, health-giving. In their heyday – the mid Victorian era when urban densities were at their peak – the parks were enormously popular. In Victoria Park, the first major public park in London, 25,000 bathers plunged into the open-air lakes before 8 am; on one Sunday in June shortly after it opened, the park received 118,000 visitors. The authorities responded with measures of crowd-control, banning games, forbidding contact with the grass, employing park police, replacing grassy walks with paving or gravel. Floral “entertainment” became de rigueur – brightly-coloured ornamental beds, specimen shrubs or trees, horticultural “features” such as rockeries. Bandstands were ubiquitous; later organized sports were introduced. But by the second half of the twentieth century their glory days seemed over. Cities were thinning out, rambling had become a mass pastime, the car, in particular, was providing a passport to the “real” countryside beyond. A downward spiral set in: as visible usage declined, hard-pressed local authorities increasingly begrudged the funds needed for their upkeep. Maintenance regimes lapsed, staffing was reduced, an air of neglect prevailed. Parks, notoriously, became the “Cinderella” service. Behind this institutional decline, however, lay a deeper cultural narrative. By the later twentieth century, it seemed, the inspiration for parks had gone. They embodied an outdated, defunct vision of nature – or, perhaps, no vision at all. One reason was that nature had, yet again, retreated – to the national parks, for instance, “created” (as legal entities) in the UK in the aftermath of the Second World War. Here you could find both natural features – mountains, forests – unmediated by human design and the solitude in which to appreciate them. Far from serving as a connection to this distant nature, as the eighteenth century landscape had done, the late twentieth century park seemed to be a mockery of it. A century or more of usage had taken its toll: the parks had in some sense become encrusted with the detritus of design, of piecemeal intervention. They had become, themselves, exercises in control, bureaucracy, perhaps even formality – and, what was worse, a failed exercise. Several broader lessons offered themselves. First, it seems, “nature” – or our understanding of it – changes from generation to generation, and the aesthetic – the design language – we employ when we incorporate it into our settlements needs to change too. Second, a process of design creep appears to be at work in which the original vision of a natural – and thus, by implication, undesigned – world is overlain by visible accretions of human agency, tarnishing and ultimately destroying the sense of naturalness. And third, both these processes are driven or influenced by social, cultural or economic trends in society at large. Under the influence of counter-urbanization, for example, cities from the 1960s onwards throughout much of the developed world began to empty dramatically, opening up possibilities for green space creation on a scale not seen since the nineteenth century. The aesthetic behind these new green spaces drew much of its force from environmentalism and ecology: it thus placed much emphasis on biodiversity, on (re)creating ecosystems and habitats, on “untidiness”. This went hand in hand with an intensified appetite for naturalness, driven partly by an awareness
of the loss of the natural in the world at large but also by the experience of the late twentieth century urbanite – of a life lived increasingly indoors, inside man-made habitats, of distancing and disconnection from nature. For the first time, too, a concerted scientific analysis of human-nature interactions was attempted. By and large, the nineteenth century had created parks without a “scientific” rationale: nature was assumed to be health-giving and improving. This was partly a function of Romanticism, partly a reaction to the perceived awfulness of the new industrial city. But there was also a sense in which both the policy and the spatial context was looser, more flexible: cities were younger, smaller, institutions fewer, newer, less monolithic. By the late twentieth century, although cities had opened up spatially somewhat under the influence of population exodus, the policy context remained relatively unforgiving: in a crowded, complex, competitive world – crowded institutionally as well as demographically – policies had to prove themselves. Hunch and gut feeling were no longer enough. The research into why nature might be “good for us” (and therefore worth public investment), and what makes nature, or the countryside, different from towns and cities, has taken us into new and uncertain territory. In 1978 the Nature Conservancy Council asked people involved in four urban conservation projects why they enjoyed the experience of nature in cities. They spoke of escape, freedom, adventure, discovery; of the sense of a world apart – a “timeless” world, a “paradise”, an “oasis”; of the rediscovered richness of once-ordinary sensations. One schoolboy talked about “fun with dirt”. Others dwelt on fresh air, the “feel” of flowers, the crackle of ice, above all, perhaps, on smells – “smells”, as one Londoner said, that “you wouldn’t smell anywhere else. Your whole senses are alive” (Nicholson-Lord 1987). Later research by University College, London, with residents of Greenwich has suggested that people see nature in cities as a “gateway to a better world” – one that is uncommercialized, rich in sensory impressions and, most important, alive. People feel “part of a living word in which plants, insects, birds, water, mud, birdsong and earthy smell all have their place,” the researchers concluded (Nicholson-Lord 1987). Cities, by contrast – or more specifically, the built environment – are typically seen as dead. A “sensory mapping” exercise in an American town found that four-fifths of its best-loved places were natural landscapes; the most disliked parts were “constructed-urban.” Three-quarters of the most memorable sensory experiences cited by residents were linked with “primitive-natural” landscapes. When, in another study, psychologists asked adults – not, it should be noted, country people – to describe the most significant places in their childhood, they drew a sketch of trees, rocks or bushes – in other words, somewhere out of doors. University students shown photographs of urban and rural scenes found that the natural scenes made people friendlier, more playful, less nervous, more content; the urban ones made them depressed and aggressive (Nicholson-Lord 1987). A dominant theme of such studies is not only that the physical shades over into the psychological but that the two often cannot be disentangled. We react to nature with body and mind: and the two kinds of response feed off and enrich each other. A Countryside Commission study in 1996 found that the feature people most appreciated about the countryside was the sense of relaxation and well-being, followed by “fresh air” and peace and quiet. But, significantly, 93 per cent of people benefit from “just knowing it is there” – merely the thought of it is a comfort (Nicholson-Lord 2003). American student campers, asked what they enjoyed most about nature, put the natural environment top of the list, followed by “cognitive freedom” – the freedom to control one’s thoughts, actions, use of time (Nicholson-Lord 1987). More recent research on “tranquillity” – the most common reason for visiting the countryside – has shown that the absence of people – other people – is its most crucial ingredient. As to what
constitutes tranquillity, people surveyed mention openness, greenery, “natural places”, water (and particularly its sounds), views and horizons, wildlife. One poll of BBC Radio 4 listeners felt tranquillity was encapsulated in sounds like waves or wind through trees (CPRE 2005). Much of the evidence of the powerful symbolic meanings represented by nature has come in studies by psychologists. In 1994 a study for English Nature reviewed over 250 of these and came to some intriguing conclusions. Nature, it found, offers a “sense of coherence” – in contrast to the confusion of the man-made world. It is mysterious – provoking awe and wonder, a sense of the sublime, encouraging contemplation and “effortless attention” yet resisting explanation. It is largely devoid of “negative feedback” – it does not, in other words, carry a burden of human meaning, or rejection – and thus reinforces self-esteem (Nicholson-Lord 2003). With concepts such as coherence, mystery and freedom, we are into challenging terrain. Cities, as we have seen, were once associated with freedom: how, and why, have roles been reversed? One reason, clearly, is that the urban freedom of medieval times was political, to do with emancipation from serfdom. No doubt there was also a sense of liberation from what Marx called the “idiocy of rural life”. The freedom that nature confers today, by contrast, has more of a psychic dimension to it – the freedom of a world from which people, their rules and hierarchies and interfering ways, have been excluded. A world in which nature is seen as free is a world in which human society has become – or so it seems to many people – oppressive, invasive and intrusive. Behind such responses there is a long cultural history – a history of associations that derive from art, fiction, religion and mythology and have coloured our attitudes at a level below conscious thought. Nature is rich in such meanings, from the prelapsarian idylls of a Golden Age, of which the Biblical Garden of Eden is one example – the term Paradise derives from the Avestic (ancient Persian) word for enclosure or park – to the role of forests and wilderness. Throughout myth, legend and literature, as authorities such as Joseph Campbell have pointed out, forests are not only places of awe, mystery and fearfulness – places inhabited by wild men and beasts. They are also places where quests begin and adventures follow – places of escape, loss of self and subsequent finding of self (Campbell 1968). The questing knights of the Grail, for instance, enter the forest “where it is thickest”. In Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, wrongs are righted, the world-weary refreshed, the world turned upside down. From Robin Hood to the Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico, forests are home to outlaws: to subversion, revolution and world-changing. Indeed it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a vital part of ourselves lies in forests, or at least in the rich yet unknown space they represent, and that if the forests and the wilderness die, this part of ourselves will die too – or, perhaps worse, atrophy and turn septic. Some such logic helps to explain the paradox that increasing numbers of comfortable, affluent Westerners are now actively courting danger, walking across continents or rowing round the world – activities that former ages would have deemed inexplicable. Many of these psychological responses, of course – mystery, awe, redemption – have long had religious associations and there is much evidence that nature, for many people, now serves as a spiritual focus, rivalling or replacing that of organized religion. While church attendances have been falling, secular religions such as paganism and witchcraft have undergone a resurgence. Movements such as creation spirituality and green Christianity – the latter stressing man’s stewardship of the planet as opposed to his dominion over it – have emerged out of Christian orthodoxy. New Age beliefs – the product of a new distaste for the disenchantments of science, a new openness to mysticism and mysteries – have proliferated. In the main, however, the new nature-based spirituality has not organized itself or codified its beliefs, preferring to remain private, celebratory, free of ideology. Its public face is the sprawling confederation of green NGOs and pressure groups now referred to as the environmental movement, which has grown explosively since the 1960s and is estimated to number, in the
UK, between four and five million people. In their defence of wilderness and resistance to development and “pollution” can be glimpsed a much older sense of what is sacred, profane and taboo.
