modernity, community and the landscape idea denis cosgrove
TRANSCRIPT
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MODERNITY, COMMUNITY AND THE LANDSCAPE IDEA
Denis Cosgrove, UCLA
Abstract
Landscape has recently achieved a broad intellectual prominence as a
theoretical concept across the arts humanities, and social sciences. Its
complex roots and meanings are scrutinized with particular attention given
to the pictorial and scenic aspects of landscape, which are here historicized
in relation to processes of cultural modernization. Landscapes roots in
territorially based community governed by customary law have never been
wholly destroyed and an analysis of the evolution of landscapes in Southern
California suggests that they are being recovered in certain respects in the
context of hypermodernity.
Keywords: Landscape, Modernity, Community, Picturesque, Los Angeles.
My evening walk leads me up a steep hillside, along a turning road
and past an assortment of houses whose styles, as much as their prices,
would astonish most visitors, towards open upper slopes covered by the
grasses and shrubs of a degraded California chaparral. From the summit of
my hike, depending on the clarity of the Los Angeles basin infamous air, I
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gaze across high-rise offices, commercial boulevards, palm-lined residential
streets, billboards and red tiled roofs that stretch to the horizon. My view
from the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills sweeps from the snow-covered
San Gabriel Mountains to Pacific beaches and on to the offshore islands. At
night, when city lights pick out the grid of streets that structures this vast
urban field, I am looking at one of modernitys iconic landscapes. (Krim:
1992)
Many of the properties on my walk have been sited and designed to
capture this famous view. One of the most quoted examples of mid-century
modernist domestic architecture, Pierre Koenigs Case Study House #22, is
less than a kilometer away from where I stand. Cantilevered over the steep
hill-slope, its entire spatial conception is governed by the illusion of flying
over the city into an aerial field of twinkling lights.(Fig.1) The plate-glass
walls that frame its picture view and erase the boundaries of internal and
outdoor living offer just one example of the unique blend of cultural
modernity and landscape that has shaped Southern California.
The Los Angeles metropolis is frequently cited as the locus classicus
of an increasingly global popular culture. Not only is this true in the obvious
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case of Hollywood with its constellation of cultural phenomena movies,
television and popular music, celebrity journalism, street fashion, colloquial
speech -- but of the citys diverse ethnic groups, languages and lifestyles, its
cultural politics, its cult of the automobile, its suburban edge cities, and its
residential morphology: in short, its landscape.
In these opening lines, I have used the word landscape in three
distinct, if overlapping ways: to describe extended, pictorial views from the
Hollywood Hills; as an idea that played a significant role in shaping
Californias modernity; and as a shorthand for a blend of land and life, of
physical and social morphologies, that constitutes a distinct region and
community. Landscape, as Barbara Benders work so clearly demonstrates,
is complex and multi-layered, difficult to categorize or to quantify. (Bender:
1993) Landscapes have an unquestionably material presence, yet they come
into being only at the moment of their apprehension by an external observer,
and thus have a complex poetics and politics. These characteristics make
landscape frustrating for those preoccupied with conceptual clarity and
definitional exactitude. From his extended treatment of the concept, the
American methodologist/geographer, Richard Hartshorne (1939: 149-74,
250-84) came to the conclusion that landscape had little or no value as a
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technical scientific term, adumbrating its long abandonment within his
discipline. Contemporary scholarly thought, much focused on
interdisciplinarity, strongly influenced by semiotics, and distrustful of rigid
categorical thinking, is more responsive, so that today we see landscape
revived as a significant concept in geography, architecture, archaeology,
anthropology, philosophy and history. (Cosgrove: 1998, Olwig: 2002,
Corner: 1999, Smith: 2003, Hirsch and OHanlon: 1995, Bender: 1993,
Casey: 2002,)
The meaning of the English word landscape both encompasses
framed views of specific sites and the scenic character of whole regions; it
applies equally to graphic and textual images as to physical locations.
(Daniels and Cosgrove: 1989) Through all these applications, landscape
retains an unshakeable pictorial association, although this is no longer
confined to the framed view or to aesthetic pleasure. But consistent too, as
Chris Tilley (1994), Ken Olwig (2002) and others have insisted, is the sense
that the pictorial in landscape incorporates a more visceral and experiential
reference.
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From a critical perspective, the pictorial dimension of landscape has
frequently been charged with duplicity. Dissecting landscapes capacity to
naturalize social or environmental inequities through an aesthetics of visual
harmony, geographers and art historians have long recognized that
Georgian landscapes, superficially paradigms of English social and
environmental order, were often painstakingly constructed by rapacious
landowners in the course of destroying more communal but less profitable
fields, farms and dwellings. (Barrell: 1980, Bermingham: 1986, Daniels:
1999) In the creation of landscape, impoverished laborers were removed
from the landlords view and relocated in model villages. In his ironically
titled Lie of the Land,Don Mitchell (1996), has also used landscape
critically, to expose the inequities of capitalist agriculture, migrant labor
exploitation and racism hidden below the Edenic images of Californias
agricultural scenery, while W.J.T. Mitchell (2002: 10) examined the
complicity of landscape visions with colonial exploitation, referring to
landscape as the dreamwork of imperialism. The politics of Stonehenge,
a paradigm British landscape, has been one of Barbara Benders enduring
interests. (Bender: 1998)
We are not obliged to reduce landscape so completely to a hegemonic
tool in the cultural politics of land in order to recognize that its semantic
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evolution has been a linguistic expression of the complex cultural processes
that mark the social evolution of the modern world. I refer to this as the
history of the landscape idea, a characteristically modern way of
encountering and representing the external world: in its pictorial and graphic
qualities, in its spatiality and ways of connecting the individual to the
community, as well as in such forms of representation as maps, paintings,
photographs, and movies. Some twenty years ago I began exploring the
roots of the landscape idea, laying quasi-exclusive emphasis on changing
landed property relations in the mercantile urban regions of early-modern
Europe. (Cosgrove: 1984, 1993) I want to revisit that discussion in order to
explore why landscape remains potent enough today to shape not only the
way I and others actually connect to such a quintessentially modern place as
Los Angeles, but to help account for many of the forms and patterns that
actually exist in the geography of Southern California, and which shape
increasingly large parts of the contemporary world.
I open with a discussion of landscapes conceptual role in articulating
a response to the characteristically modern question of community in its
spatial expression, and seek to show how this constituted the original
synthesis of the territorial and the pictorial. I then examine ways that
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landscapes moral authority, articulated through landscape representations,
has been extended spatially to territorializing the imagined community of the
nation state. Finally, I discuss how landscape, thoroughly naturalized as a
picturesque expression of utopian social and environmental relations, has
played a role in shaping a wholly modern space such as Southern California,
and has thus come full circle, generating social spaces that bear intriguing
similarities in structure and process, if not in form, to the original and pre-
pictorial meaning of landscape in the German Landschaft.
Landscape and community
Landscape is a connecting term, aZusammenhang. Much of its
appeal to ecologists, architects, planners and others concerned with society
and the design of environments lies in landscapes capacity to combine
incommensurate or even dialectically opposed elements: process and form,
nature and culture, land and life. Landscape conveys the idea that their
combination is or should be balanced and harmonious, and that harmony
is visible geographically. Balance and harmony carry positive moral weight,
so that a disordered or formless landscape seems something of a
contradiction. Scenic values thus come to act as a moral barometer of
successful community: human, natural or in combination. Landscapes
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moral authority has been applied to both wholly human and purely natural
spaces. Frederick LePlays triad of place, work and folk was graphically
expressed by the Scottish architect, ecologist and regionalist Patrick Geddes
as the valley section, where human activities arise out of organic
connections with the land and express themselves in an evolving series of
settlement landscapes. (Steele: 2003) A similar idea was powerfully
expressed in Martin Heideggers Building, dwelling, thinking. (Heidegger:
1978) In the USA, landscape has more often been applied to wilderness
spaces, often wholly devoid of human presence (although commonly
produced by the active removal of human communities), where balance and
harmony are believed to depend upon the absence of permanent habitation.
(Meyerson 2001, Neumann 1998) What the designation landscape brings to
all these diverse spaces is the idea that their qualities as dwelling places
(biotic, animal, human) are rendered visible in pictorial form.
The immediate question that arises from this is precisely how the
pictorial form of space came to be so closely tied to ideals of natural and
human community. Kenneth Olwig (2002) has recently argued that the
Germanic Landschaftapplied originally to quite specific locations in the
North Sea and Western Baltic regions. Landschaft and its cognates in the
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Scandinavian languages are still used as a descriptor for administrative
regions in parts of Frisia and Schleswig-Holstein. The physical character of
these low-lying marshlands, heaths, and offshore islands is, he suggests,
important in understanding this foundational usage. These have always been
relatively impoverished regions, marginal to the interests of monarchs and
aristocrats, more concerned to control, own, and tax more fertile and
accessible territories and mercantile cities. Location on the borderlands of
the Danish kingdom and the German states reinforced the opportunities for
considerable local autonomy, and Olwig (2002: 16)points out that their
designation as Landschaften denotes a particular notion of polity rather than
. . . a territory of a particular size. Critical to their designation as landscapes
was that these were regions in which customary law, determined by those
living and working in an area, extended over and defined the territorial limits
of the Land. Custom and culture defined a Land, not physical geographical
characteristics [nor fixed territorial scale]it was a social entity that found
physical expression in the area under its law. (Olwig 2002: 17)The unity of
fellowship and collective rights, and the physical area over which these held
sway, constituted the Landschaft. It is a spatiality expressed by Heidegger
in a key passage from Building, dwelling, thinking:
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A space is something that has been made room for, something that is
cleared and free, namely, within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is
not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the
boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding. That
is why the concept is that of horismos, that is the horizon, the boundary.
Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let
into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence
is joined, that is, gathered by virtue of a location Accordingly, spaces
receive their being from locations and not from space. (Heidegger 1978:
332. Original emphasis)
In this respect, the root sense of Landschaftfinds parallels in most European
languages, although the precise legal situation may vary from that to be
found along the North Sea coasts. The English word countryside, the French
payage, the Italian paesaggio and the Spanish paisaje are similarly social,
and scale-flexible, denoting a collective relationship with land more than a
specifically bounded territory.
The localized combination of community, custom, and land might be
expected to give rise to visibly apparent morphological distinctions between
individual Landschaften. But scenic aspects are not denoted by the
Germanic word and its cognates. Landschaftthus points primarily to a
spatiality constituted through social and environmental practice. In a pre-
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modern world such practices were dominated by production, whether
agricultural, artisanal or industrial. In todays landscapes, they are
increasingly dominated by consumption.
Landscape and scenery
The scenic dimension became attached to landscape in the late 16th
and early 17th
centuries. The designation of landscape as a type of painting
was first made by Italian connoisseurs, but was applied primarily to
Northern European art works. (Gombrich 1966) It was in cities where
Flemish and Italian cultural influences met and mixed most fully, and where
map-making, engraving and printing became major industries by 1500
north east Italy and southern Germany - that schools of landscape paintings
first become distinguished. (Gibson 1989, Alpers 1983) In Venice, the taste
for paintings of landscape paralleled a demand for pastoral poetry, arcadian
writing and actual landscape views among patrician families investing
heavily in the land improvement through drainage, irrigation, new-word
crops and new labour practices. Newly constructed villas were decorated
with idyllic trompe loeil landscapes that harmonized imaginary scenes of
ancient Roman villa life with views of the rustic world surrounding them.
(Cosgrove 1993) In south German cities such as Augsburg, Ulm and
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Nuremburg, landscape paintings and engravings reflected rather different
commercial and political realities. On the one hand, appropriately in the city
where the Fuggers capital financed political and commercial schemes of
global reach, landscape paintings captured vast almost global scenes
within tiny, jewel-like frames, often referred to as cosmographies. On the
other, as chorographies expressing a desire for local connectedness,
landscapes depicted and celebrated the countryside immediately surrounding
the city. Referring to these images, Albrecht Drer claimed that 'the
measurement of the earth, the waters, and the stars has come to be
understood through painting. (quoted in Wood 1993: 46)
Drers words capture the shifting meaning of landscape in the early
modern world: no longer the undifferentiated space of unreflective social
dwelling and pagan attachment to land, but earth, sea and stars
conceptualized; no longer space regulated through the customary practices
of daily life, but nature measured across the surface of paintings and maps.
Olwig (2002) has charted the political process whereby the early 17th
century Stuart court sought to unify its new national territory the country
under the natural authority of divine right and to subordinate local
custom. An element of this was the emerging culture of measured and
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composition, color and shadowing. Nor was Landschafts spatial flexibility
lost, indeed through a scale jump landscape came to accommodate the newly
significant idea of modern nationhood.
Picturesque landscape and the national community
In the late 18th
century the pictorial techniques developed for
representing landscape were theorized in the aesthetics of the picturesque, a
philosophical term born directly out of landscape discourse, and a fusion of
aesthetics and moral thinking provoked directly by modernitys social and
spatial disruptions. Often termed a mediation of Edmund Burkes aesthetic
and moral binary of sublime and beautiful, the picturesques defining
visual characteristics were roughness, wildness and irregularity. In the
contemporary context of Romanticism and Jacobinism these words carried
powerful social and moral as well as visual significance. The picturesque
encapsulated a wide-ranging debate in late Georgian England about the
social, political and moral health of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing
nation facing the challenge of a revolutionary and territorially ambitious
France. Touching in Britain on such contentious internal matters as
enclosure of common lands, removal of village communities for
emparkment, and planting conifers for short-term commercial profit rather
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than oaks that would provide naval timber generations hence, and even on
colonial slavery, the debate over the look of the land involved the
patriotism of landscape improvement: its allegiance to various geographical
identities, local and national, provincial and metropolitan, English and
British. (Daniels 1999: 2) Pictorial, cartographic and parkland landscapes
offered media through which questions of national identity were debated, in
the period when the modern British state was being imagined and
constructed.
In this context, picturesque landscape quickly escaped the patrician
confines of park design to become a field of concern for a growing
bourgeoisie in the late 18th
century. Picturesque was applied to a style of
seeing and representing that took a nostalgic pleasure in the signs of
roughening through age, longevity and decay; a sentiment that we can easily
recognize as a response to the cultural uprooting and displacement
associated with carboniferous modernization. The word nostalgia, a pseudo-
Greek neologism that combines the sense of bodily pain (algia) and
returning home (nostos), was coined as a quasi-medical condition in these
very years. Picturesque landscape images, while easily drained of the
explicit social concerns of early theorists, sustained the dream of a
harmonious, organic connection between a locality and its community,
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visible in the historical depth of dwelling, but consistently threatened by, if
not already lost to, the past. Positioned outside the pictorial landscape,
materially and affectively, the viewers response to the image cannot be
other than sentimental and nostalgic.
Study within geography, art and cultural history has demonstrated the
consistency with which picturesque landscape became deployed in the
construction and communication of nationalism in late 19th and 20th century
Europe and colonial settler states. (Daniels: 1993, Mitchell: 2002, Schama:
1995) The process is a complex one, and it continues today. In every modern
nation, pictorial icons of specific regional scenery have been generalized,
often through the medium of art itself, as iconic of the whole nation. Thus in
Britain, a home counties scenery of lowland chalk downs, wide river
valleys with slow-flowing perennial streams, compact villages and stone
churches set among a hedgerow mosaic of garden-like fields, sometimes
with distant views of sea cliffs and bays, leaps scale through the popularity
of paintings by John Constable, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and
successor artists, to become figured as the whole nations vulnerable and
feminized heartland.(Daniels: 1993)
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The appeal of such iconic landscapes is overwhelmingly conservative,
and commonly supported by that declensionist view of change that
accompanies Modernitys commitment to progress. It is thus a simple and
predictable step from promoting the pictorial or scenic qualities of specific
regions as embodying essential qualities of a nations territory and people, to
seeking to fix their origins and preserve and protect them from change.
Precisely because such spaces are deemed to embody natural and
immemorial qualities they become embraced as patrimony: archaeological
and historical sites, ever threatened by the progress and modernization that
also underpin nationalism. Landscapes are freighted with what Svetlana
Boym (2002) calls reflective as opposed torestorative nostalgia. The former
emphaisizes the bittersweet pain of longing and loss (algia) and dwells upon
ruins, on the patina of time and history, on uncanny silences and absences,
and on dreams. (By contrast, restorative nostalgia emphasizes nostos:
rebuilding the lost home and patching the memory gaps). Of course,
landscape conservation today can take both forms. Indeed, It is not therefore
surprising that nations devote significant amounts of often scarce resources
to maintaining not only the physical morphology but also the social form
and expression of such iconic landscapes as Irelands gaeltacht west.
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Preservation, protection, conservation, sustainability: while each of
these terms parses a slightly differently a similar goal of arresting or at least
negotiating the social and environmental impacts of change with the
intention of sustaining values inherited from the past, they all reflect the
same contradiction of modernity: the belief in improvement and progress
generates its opposite in tradition, whose poignancy bespeaks a sense of
loss commonly interpreted as a sign of a more existential alienation. This is
a discourse that reaches through virtually every aspect of modern thought,
from our approach to the threatened flora and fauna of the natural world,
through scholarly disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology to
cultural heritage and museology. Landscape is significant within this
quintessentially modern discourse precisely because it puts into material
form the matter of dwelling,to adopt Heideggers sense of pulling together
earth, sky, the divinities (in the pagansense of the life-sustaining natural
elements and forces) and the mortals, individually and collectively.
California: landscape and the dialectics of modernity
With these thoughts in mind, we can return to Southern California.
With a permanent settlement history of scarcely two centuries, lacking any
tradition of pre-modern agriculture, a 20th
century experience of explosive,
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hypermodern urbanization, and unprecedented topographic, hydrographic
and ecological transformation, California, and especially its southern, semi-
desert zone, represents for many observers the very antithesis of landscape
as a local integration of community life and regional nature. Indeed,
Southern California has consistently been held up by cultural critics from
Evelyn Waugh and Gertrude Stein through Jean Baudrillard and Umberto
Eco to Paul Virilio to Michel Aug as the poster-child for hypermodern,
placeless space. The regions historic and geographic reality is, predictably,
more complex. And ironically, in its very hyper-modernity, contemporary
California may be returning us to something remarkably parallel, if not
exactly similar, to the premodern experience from which the landscape idea
diverged.
It is not possible to offer here more than a brief synopsis of Southern
Californias settlement history. None of its pre-Columbian peoples engaged
in permanent agriculture, and their impacts on the land were ecological more
than architectural. (Gutirez & Orsi: 1998) The short-lived Spanish-Mexican
settlement may be traced today as remnant forms in the toponymies and
cadastral patterns of the rancho system, and in the spine of mission, presidio
and pueblo settlements, but it lacked the intensity of occupance necessary to
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leave a lasting landscape impression. Indeed it endured principally in the
mythic Spanish culture and romantic lifestyle through which Anglos
marketed Southern California as a Mediterranean arcadia within a mere
three decades of having erased the Californios world. Warm climate, balmy
air, natural beauty, and a leisured life were promoted to financially
comfortable mid-westerners as an escape from the rigors of Prairie winters,
crowded, smoky and tuberculosis-ridden industrial cities, and their growing
ethnic diversity for a bucolic life in a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant cottage
community set among citrus groves against the backdrop of snow-capped
Sierras. Competitively cheap rail fares and exotic landscape images on rail
posters and orange boxes played no small role in bringing large numbers of
these people and their capital into Southern California. The region was from
the start conceived as much as a space of consumption as of production, and
a principal object of consumption was the natural landscape itself.
A characteristic settlement form emerged in Southern California
during its first period of rapid urbanization between 1880 and 1920. Former
rancho land grants were subdivided and sold as small-scale communities,
often with a distinctive character: Anaheim was a utopian German
settlement, Hollywood a temperance community, Malibu an artists colony,
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Pasadena a wealthy health and retirement resort, Venice a bohemian seaside
development. Permitted by the states relaxed constitution to incorporate as
an independent municipality with a mere five hundred citizens, individual
communities gained considerable control over property regulations and land-
use statutes, often adopting exclusionary tactics to prevent the influx of
undesirable ethnic or religious groups. However indefensible, these
actions bear some resemblance to the customary practices that once defined
the European Landschaft. Around the former puebloof Los Angeles, a
network of electric tramways opened land for such developments, linking
them into a loose regional settlement pattern. (Banham: 1971, Hise: 1999,
McLung: 2000)
Southern Californias settlement morphology reflects fin-de-sicle
ideas of the model community, which drew heavily on picturesque
precedents. Ebenezer Howards Tomorrow, a peaceful path to real reform,
was one of many tracts offering a solution to the ills of industrial
modernization. (Howard: 1902) His garden city was to be a self-governing
municipality of no more than 60,000 people, designed with large areas of
open space, boulevards, zoned land uses and residences individually set in
gardens. Domestic architecture took the nostalgic, anti-modern form of the
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arts and crafts movement, reworking the form of the bungalow adopted
from colonial India.(King: 1984) The impact of these ideas on the generally
well-educated, monied and often self-consciously progressive settlers of
Southern California remains visible in the regions craftsman style
bungalows, large lots, wide, tree-lined boulevards and early zoning
ordinances controlling non-conforming land uses.
Early, widespread ownership of automobiles allowed individual
communities to expand well beyond the constraints of the light rail system,
and by the 1940s had lined the boulevards with the gas stations, motels,
drive-in gas stations, restaurants and movie houses, and billboards of the
American strip. This was a truly modern landscape of consumption,
designed to be accessible by car and viewed and experienced kinetically and
serially, from the automobile windscreen. (Figs.2,3). Ott: 2000) The
automobile also opened up an extensive region of mountains, deserts and
forests to leisure hungry Southern Californians. Parkways and highways
were constructed with the principal goal of servicing the consumption of
landscape and scenery. Wartime industrialization and the huge population
growth of the Fordist 1950s would see the orange groves, nut orchards and
bean fields that surrounded the original settlements subdivided for new
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suburbs of standardized, mid-century modern bungalows, on restricted
garden lots to be sure, but with picture windows designed to bring the
external scene into domestic space.(Fig.4) Today indistinguishable within
the urban field, except by their signed designation on the roadside or on the
political map, and overlain with the markers of very different ethnic and
cultural groups from their original residents, these communities nevertheless
retain traces of the social and scenic ideals that the modern suburb owes to
the picturesque tradition of landscape.
It was at the extreme edges of the Los Angeles metropolis, in the
desert and oasis settlements of the Coachella Valley, that the landscape idea
helped define the elements of a settlement form that increasingly
characterizes 21st
century urban neighborhoods globally. In the late 1940s a
group of screen actors and movie industry associates, attracted to Palm
Springs as a relaxed vacation spot within easy automobile reach of
Hollywood, purchased the Thunderbird Ranch for development as a country
club, and initiated a novel way of financing their venture. (Culver: 2004)
The golf course at the core of the development would be financed by the sale
of residential lots marked out along its fairways and around the
greens.(Fig.5) House design would be restricted to single story, low,
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rambling ranch houses, while a homeowners association enforced deed
restrictions governing the maintenance and appearance of the visible spaces
of the community, both private and public. The entire development was
gated to exclude all but residents and guests, while the golf course, green
with imported fescue and watered from deep desert wells, was the focus of
its civic life.(Fig.6) Air conditioning and fast freeways to Los Angeles
allowed the recreational home in the desert to become a permanent family
residence. Partly through the national televising of its Bob Hope golf
tournament, the Thunderbird Ranch soon came to represent a leisured
lifestyle option promoted and desired across America, beatified when Ford
Motor Companys chose Thunderbird as the name for its 1955 sports car.
Landscape in all its various meanings and representations is the
defining feature of the covenant, gated, golf-course suburb that, from its
Palm Springs origins has now evolved into the dominant form of exurban
community in North America and across many parts of Asia and the Pacific
Rim. In the pictorial and picturesque sense of landscape, the golf course
whose form controls the overall settlement plan, and whose originating
morphology was the turf-covered glacial dunes, or links of the Scottish
east coast, is the anodyne successor of 18th
century English picturesque
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parkland, with its combination of gentle grassy slopes, serpentine pathways,
copses and rough land edges. The house style of the golf-course suburb is
determined by its views over the greens or natural scenery beyond. The
scenic sense of landscape is thus the design Leitmotif to this form of
settlement. The second sense of landscape, as an idea, which so
powerfully shaped early Anglo settlement in Southern California, continues
in this contemporary materialization of the dream of community, realized in
pleasing physical surroundings. Finally, landscape as a harmonious balance
of nature and culture shapes the settlements design language, if not its
environmental practices. Although the verdant rolling hills, sandy bunkers
and rough of the golf course are almost always engineered spaces, often
alien to the surrounding natural environment, and requiring vast outlays of
resources for maintenance, and while the residential architecture has become
entirely standardized and largely disconnected from local climate,
topography and tradition, the formal illusion of leisured consumption is
carefully inscribed in all visible features of these spaces.
Conclusion
It is easy to criticize the exurban, gated community, with its
exclusionary restrictions, master-planned picturesque design conceits and
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contingent connections with the history and physical geography of its
location as inauthentic and placeless, an unhomely (unheimlich), pastiche
landscape that utterly fails to pull together earth, sky, the divinities and other
humans into true dwelling. (Heidegger: But it is more accurate to see it as
one expression of the characteristic modern sensibility of nostalgia. It
expresses the restorative nostos - return to home - rather than the reflective
algia, the bittersweet pain of loss and ruin. And a more measured look at
these residential consumption spaces discloses some noteworthy parallels
with those premodern Landschaften from which the pictorial sense of
landscape historically diverged. These are self-regulating communities,
quasi-independent politically from the major cities to which they are
functionally attached, raising revenues and purchasing such public services
as police, waste disposal, education, health and welfare, and developing
customary local laws to regulate land uses and appearance. Land is a
dominating concern in their community life, although it produces capital
value and amenity rather than subsistence. As in Olwigs designation of
Landschaft, the exurban community is a social entity that [finds] physical
expression in the area under its law. (2002:17) Significantly, such
communities have prospered as the social welfare character of the modern
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state has eroded, and its public revenues and moral authority weakened, and
they are located in the interstices of regulated metropolitan space.
It appears that we have come full circle. A defining historical feature
of modernity has been rural depopulation and the destruction of
Landschaften. Karl Marx saw modernity as the capture of the countryside
by the city; and Henri Lefebvre wrote of the complete urbanization of
society. (Lefebvre: 1970) But in many parts of the world this process has
reached a point where city, country and urbanization are of diminished
analytic value. Suburb, an arcadian middle space of dwelling, has emerged
since the early 19th
century as the authentic spatial expression of modern
consumption. (King: 2004) And, through the visual language of the
picturesque, landscape is the suburbs geographical expression as a
consumption space. If such landscape is duplicitous, it is less through
obscuring the realities of production, for these have been globally displaced,
than in masking a scale and rapacity of material consumption that threatens
the sustainability of physical and bio-geographies and thus of dwelling.
Spread before me on my evening walk therefore, is more than a
visual icon of 20th
century hypermodernity. The Los Angeles metropolis
represents one albeit signal - stage in the complex and historically
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extended evolution of cultural transformation in which visions of social
order and homeliness, and ideals of harmony between land and human life
become instantiated in the material forms of landscape. Cultural dismissal
of such spaces is conservative and reactionary. (Hayden: 2004) The task is
to exploit the ambiguities embedded in landscape, as dwelling and picture, to
discover ways of understanding and engaging with its varied and always rich
meanings.
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Figure captions
Fig.1 Case Study House #22 by Pierre Koenig. (Photo by Julius Schulman;
Getty Research Institute; Reproduced with permission)
Fig.2 View East along 3rd
Street at Fairfax Avenue in 1921. The La Brea
oilfield occupies lands formerly occupied by bean fields and pasture.
(Spence Air Photo collection; Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA)
Fig.3 View East along 3rd
Street at Fairfax Avenue in 1954. Within thirty
years both agricultural and oil fields have been replaced by an auto
landscape. The citys first drive-in gas station may be seen to the bottom
left, and a drive in movie centre right. (Spence Air Photo collection;
Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA)
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Fig.4 Post-war suburban development in the Los Angeles basin. Tract
houses at Lakewood 1950. (Spence Air Photo collection. Courtesy:
Department of Geography, UCLA)
Fig.5 Residential development along the fairways at Thunderbird Country
Club, Rancho Mirage, California, 1959 (Spence Air Photo collection.
Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA)
Fig.6 The original golf-course suburb: Thunderbird Country Club, Rancho
Mirage, California, 1959 (Spence Air Photo collection. Courtesy:
Department of Geography, UCLA)