The natural landscape and developed city are often spoken of as oppositionary spaces, but there are ways of reading the two in a more entangled fashion which can perhaps help explore why elements of London and other modern cities are shaped as they are. Richard Wilson painted nature wrapping Rome’s ancient ruins, Walter Benjamin spoke of the urban forest, the Situationists discussed Haussmann’s boulevards in the shadow of Le Nôtre’s landscapes, and we are currently “greening” our cities with projects such as the London National Park City.
Using English landscape and associated ideas around the picturesque, this talk will follow a trajectory from how we read and commodified natural landscapes, slowly it to human ideals. When the industrial revolution saw economic and political power shift from rural to urban, these ideas of landscape were taken into the metropolitan centres to provide answers not only to parks and recreation but also to the shaping of the city itself, and this talk will explore how some of the principles of English landscape design have been folded into the design of industrial, postwar and now neoliberal cities.
Will Jennings is a visual artist and writer based in London. He is interested in the intersections between cities, history, politics and culture. www.willjennings.info
source
