Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century

Introduction

Introduction Dorothee Brantz and Sonja Dümpelmann “A City! It is the grip of man upon nature. It is a human operation directed against nature, a human organism both for protection and for work. It is a creation.”¹ This quotation poignantly expresses a principal paradigm of modernity —that human creation stands in stark contrast to nature. The city, primarily understood as a man-made built environment, stands as a material embodiment of this contrast. But this quotation also inadvertently illustrates a deep-seated ambiguity in the relationship between cities and nature because its author, Le Corbusier, also happened to be one of the twentieth century’s leading proponents of the integration of vast green spaces into urban areas. This ambiguity might be the result of a disjunction between the conceptualization of cities and nature, on the one hand, and the actual planning and design practices within urban living environments, on the other. While social theorists have often regarded the city as a space where, as Henry Lefebvre put it, “nature is emptied out” and replaced by the social production of urban space, urban reformers, activists, and inhabitants have long pleaded for the preservation or reintegration of natural elements into the urban landscape . Many scholars—particularly environmental and landscape historians, urban ecologists, landscape architects, and planners—have focused on the role of natural factors and features in the development of cities. Considering the place of nature in the city raises numerous questions, not the least about the meaning of nature. This is, of course, a complex philosophical issue that cannot be adequately addressed here.² What can be noted, however, is that concepts of nature always have to be viewed in relation to the cultural context in which they arose. Consequently, conceptions of urban nature in particular can be understood only in reference to the geo- 2 | Dorothee Brantz and Sonja Dümpelmann historical specificities in which they operate. Interestingly, though, ideas of nature and the city were, for the most part—and especially in the modern period—viewed as contrasting rather than entwined. Starting in the sixteenth century, cities were increasingly viewed in contrast to the countryside.³ This distinction between the urban and the rural was premised on the fact that urban populations were no longer selfsu fficient and that cities were regarded as built environments and thus man-made spaces of cultural, economic, and social production. Cities have usually been viewed as a physical manifestation of humanity’s separation from and control over nature. The association of the urban with a distinct way of life goes back to antiquity, but it came into common usage following the Industrial Revolution. Interestingly, though, as cities grew and became industrialized, calls for the integration of natural elements also intensified. The livability of cities has always been closely tied to natural factors such as the presence of water, climatic conditions, and topography; but the rise of large industrial cities during the past two centuries heightened awareness of urban pollution and its negative effects on low-income residents in particular. As a result, urban reformers increasingly demanded the amelioration of the urban environment and the incorporation of green spaces for the health and well-being of city dwellers. Many reformers compared cities to organisms, and green spaces to the much-needed “lungs” of that urban organism. European rulers and municipal authorities made isolated attempts to create urban green spaces in the early modern era, but it was not until the nineteenth century that local and national governments set out to bring about the large-scale greening of cities. Efforts to bring nature into the city became much more extensive and elaborate in the twentieth century as new patterns of production and consumption, of work and leisure prompted a reevaluation of the function and makeup of the urban environment. Professionals in the newly emerging fields of public hygiene, landscape architecture , and urban planning worked to integrate public green spaces and to improve environmental conditions in cities. Ever since the breaching of town walls in the early nineteenth century, parks, squares, gardens, and tree-lined streets have been gradually integrated into European and North American cities. Even earlier, however, European autocratic rulers and colonists in North America had become aware of the need to include green open space in the form of tree-lined streets, squares, parks, commons, and gardens in the urban fabric for reasons of aesthetics and public health. For example, many town walls on the European conti- [18.119.132...