How does the increasing urbanization impact the connections between landscape and identity? Is our connection with nature in crisis?
Last week, I highlighted the connections between landscape, identity and history. I described some of the connections between our landscape and the ways in which we think about ourselves. I suggested that our landscape is part and parcel of our collective identity.
This week, I would like to introduce a new question: What is the impact of the increasing urbanization on these connections between landscape and identity? Is it possible that urbanization endangers that archaic bond with landscape? Is our connection with nature in crisis and is this crisis a reflection of the crisis of modern man?
Rural and Urban Landscapes
Before the explosive expansion of cities, the borders between rural and urban areas were functional and well defined. I grew up in the landscapes and horizons of the area around the city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. The city, over 2,000 years old, is situated on the banks of the river Waal and is surrounded by hills, woods and polders. A medieval church forms its inner core. Narrow cobble-stoned streets are lined with market stalls, small shops, coffee shops and restaurants. In the summer, the patios of the plentiful cafes along the riverbank swell as the river itself in spring. Commercial life, as in many European cities, centers on the streets. City squares and marketplaces are places where people gather and connect with each other. On the other side of the river Waal, polder landscape, grazing cows, cornfields, and the odd farm. From there, the city's silhouette is beautiful- a rich mix of ancient ruins, historic buildings, modern architecture and a variety of monuments. In and around Nijmegen, the distinction between the rural and the urban is still clearly defined and functional.
Fragmented Landscapes
In our contemporary North-American suburbs, this context is fragmented. Much of the rural areas surrounding the cities have been sacrificed in favor of housing complexes, industrial areas, and mobile home parks. Many of these developments are built in isolation, without a connection to the environment. Pedestrian street life disappears in these disconnected and isolated buildings and complexes. In the sprawling suburb I call home, I see only remnants of what was once the indigenous landscape. A small creek runs behind my house, just a few minutes eastward there is a marshy lake and there are a few pockets of farmland left a little further south. These are remnants indeed- homogeneity is the norm in most of the landscape planning in the cities suburbs. In my neighborhood, I see few indigenous plants and shrubs in the nicely landscaped areas around the townhouse complexes. They have, more often than not, been replaced by ready-made, best-selling, often exotic and therefore alien horticulture, which perpetuates, like any other mass-produced product, a uniform environment that has few if any connections with the traditional cultural and ecological realities of the place.
Fragmented Landscapes, Fragmented Lives
The fragmentation of our landscape affects our lives. Home, shopping and recreation have also become fragmented and isolated, connected no longer by pedestrian street life, but by a no-man's land of highways and parking lots. In our endless stretches of strip-malls and suburbs, the streets separate people rather than connecting them.
Malls: A Place in the City?
Motivated by cost efficiency and convenience, we move from malls to suburbs to recreation parks that are all connected by a labyrinth of highways and surrounded by parking lots. In doing so, might we lose our connection with the indigenous culture, ecology and landscape? What place do people have in a landscape ruled by convenience and cost efficiency? Do we still have a sense of place, a sense that we are sensually connected with our environment, nature and the ecology of our place? Or are we really as fragmented as our landscapes? Next week's article will explore these questions in more detail.
References
Michael Hough (1990). Out of Place. London: Yale University Press
