Landscape

The notion of landscape implies a large-scale view of the urban environment, although it does not imply a specific view or particular boundaries. Landscape perspectives try to go beyond description to include issues of power and how its exercise - and resistance to it - alters urban space. A particular place may be part of many landscapes as different groups and individuals appropriate it within their own framework. Space is not neutral and cities in particular demonstrate inequalities and the imposition of the dominant group’s priorities on a cityscape. Urban landscapes are more intense and complex than rural ones, with more specialized kinds of land uses. One of the byproducts of this attribute is the spatial sorting of postindustrial city-dwellers according to socioeconomic criteria. Some of the cross-cultural studies of slums noted below fit within a landscape view as these spaces are often marginal, off the grid or found in atypical places. A few examples that incorporate a specific landscape perspective include Burke’s study of an Australian town, which views the imposition of ideology on the townscape; Rothschild’s discussion of the social geography in eighteenth-century New York City; and Baugher’s and Piddock’s analyses of the placement of specific urban institutions within the city. Less typical is Matthews’ work on a single structure in Annapolis, MD, and the ways in which it was remodeled to reflect the changing image of the city around it.

Burke’s study of Armidale in New South Wales is an example of the use of a landscape approach to understand the way in which ideologies of power and the dominance of capitalism were expressed through the construction of space and architectural style. Armidale was created by British settlers in the mid-nineteenth century, when its economy was based on pastoral capitalism. By the early twentieth century, its economy had been transformed to one based on industry. Burke’s analysis shows that broadly defined groups (workers and owners) used different architectural styles to manifest their class differences. Owners borrowed features from classical architecture used in public buildings such as banks to legitimize their sources of power. Workers established links to one another through the use of common stylistic details that were different from those used on the homes of the elite.

The study of cities in terms of the placement of a range of institutions and the residential locations of various groups of people is another characteristic of landscape analysis. Susan Piddock and Sherene Baugher both examine institutions for the poor, one in Adelaide, Australia, and the second in New York City, NY. In both cases, as in many modern cities, important political institutions are located in central loci while those that, for example, care for the indigent, sick or elderly are placed on the city’s margins. Rothschild discusses the placement of a variety of colonial institutions in New York City, including markets, churches, and taverns, and the relationship of their locations to the formation of neighborhoods. She further considers the ways in which ethnicity as a basis of residential clustering is modified over time and gradually is succeeded by class-based settlement. Wall shows the geographical separation of nineteenth-century New York into a business district and residential neighborhoods that were also segregated by class.

Matthews shows that changes in the landscape of a single home, the Bordley-Randall site, correspond to

Annapolis’ transformation from colonial center to, first, a peripheral antebellum city, and, then, to an Ancient City embodying history. Ancientness allowed Annapolis to maintain an important role in the state and mitigated for the absence of the railroad and other modern innovations, which focused on Baltimore. Formal gardens that had been designed by Bordley in the 1750s, when Annapolis was a colonial center, were replaced by more practical elements as the city declined after the Revolution. Then in the midnineteenth century, Randall bought the house and recreated some of its refinement but also established a series of kitchen gardens that could produce vegetables for sale, balancing front-yard elegance and backyard production.