Suburban Landscapes

How estranged are we who live in the suburbs really from nature and landscape?

Well, we've been talking about landscape now for a while. But many of us live in cities or suburbs. Do we refer to that also as landscape? If so, what does it contain? How estranged are we who live in the suburbs really from nature and landscape?

Unlike in years past, modern urban areas, especially those in North America, are no longer clearly distinct from rural areas. Much of the rural areas surrounding the city have been swallowed up by the rapid and relentless growth of urban areas. New housing complexes, industrial terrains, and of course, malls have gobbled up the countryside areas as well as the functional and esthetic boundaries between rural and urban areas. The landscape has become fragmented. Many of the new complexes, houses and parks are built with convenience and cost efficiency in mind. As a result, they are often isolated, surrounded by huge parking lots and accessible only by a no-man's land of highways. No place for pedestrians and street life in these fragmented and disconnected suburbs.

Another fragmenting aspect of the landscape of modern urban life is the homogeneity that appears to be the norm in landscape planning. In my own suburban Canadian neighborhood, there are few indigenous plants and shrubs in the nicely landscaped areas around the townhouse complexes. Instead, best-selling, exotic horticulture, alien to this environment. It makes the landscape around here look like a mass-produced product that has no longer any connections with the traditional cultural and ecological realities of the place.

How does this fragmentation of our landscape affect our lives? Well, activities belonging to home, shopping and recreation have also become fragmented and isolated, connected no longer by pedestrian connections and street life, but by a web of highways and parking lots.

Having said all of that, our need for connections is powerful, even, perhaps especially, in the tangled and secluded webs of highways, parking lots and suburbs. In some places, local malls take the place of the market place and the street. Take the mall in my own community. Small literary and community-based events are organized by a local community organization (http://www.nebca.org/), and promoted by and held at the mall. Call me naive, but I just don't buy the idea that the mall's involvement is exclusively motivated by public relations and commercial interests (pun not intended). It might just be that our need to connect and belong to a community sometimes surpasses our greed...