The Urban Book Series

Roberto Pasini

Landscape
Paradigms and
Post-urban
Spaces
A Journey Through the Regions of
Landscape
The Urban Book Series

Series Advisory Editors

Fatemeh Farnaz Arefian, University College London, London, UK
Michael Batty, University College London, London, UK
Simin Davoudi, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK
Geoffrey DeVerteuil, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Karl Kropf, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Marco Maretto, University of Parma, Parma, Italy
Vítor Oliveira, Porto University, Porto, Portugal
Christopher Silver, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA
Giuseppe Strappa, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Igor Vojnovic, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA
Jeremy Whitehand, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Aims and Scope

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Roberto Pasini

Landscape Paradigms
and Post-urban Spaces
A Journey Through the Regions of Landscape

123
Roberto Pasini
Departamento de Arquitectura
Universidad de Monterrey
San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León
Mexico

ISSN 2365-757X ISSN 2365-7588 (electronic)

The Urban Book Series
ISBN 978-3-319-77886-0 ISBN 978-3-319-77887-7 (eBook)
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Nature: - Thinkest thou then that the world
was made for thee? It is time thou knewest
that in my designs, operations, and decrees,
I never gave a thought to the happiness or
unhappiness of man. If I cause you to suffer,
I am unaware of the fact; nor do I perceive
that I can in any way give you pleasure.
What I do is in no sense done for your
enjoyment or benefit, as you seem to think.
Finally, if I by chance exterminated your
species, I should not know it.

—Giacomo Leopardi
Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander
tr. C. Edwardes, Trübner and Co. 1882, p. 78
[1827]
I wrote this book in Mexico.
It is dedicated to all the Adelitas
betrayed by the revolution.
Foreword

The book, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, immediately puts its
proverbial finger on the existential character and necessity of contemporary urban
circumstances bound up with landscapes, namely the inevitable binary that appears
to exist, often in multilayered form, between natural circumstances and the artifice
of constructed landscapes. To be sure for the author they are multilayered, but it is
in the process of unpacking them that some paradigms succeed whereas others fall
short. In his opening exploration of natural and man-made systems in contemporary
landscapes, Pasini explodes this intriguing multilayering into an intellectually
challenging journey that is at times breathtaking, idiosyncratic as it should be and in
the end acerbic and insightful. His commentary is never flagging, mundane, or
superficial. Moving into the treatment of the composite that emerges, various terms
are evoked and concepts are raised, largely from other disciplinary fields for dealing
with the inherent two or multisided character of real or imagined overlapping urban
landscapes.
Moreover, successive concepts become more complex and intertwined. To begin
with, miscegenation derived from the Latin miscere and genus literally means to
mix and was first coined in the United States to refer to inbreeding among people of
different races. Back in those earlier days, it usually carried some weight of dis-
approval of the practice, even if in other cultural settings, this admixing was seen to
be potentially strengthening. This is followed by the creole, largely from linguistics
and commonly referring to someone from the Caribbean of mixed European and
African descent speaking and identified by a language that was stable even if
deriving from a mixture of languages—a mother tongue, if you will, formed from
the contact of two languages largely through an early pidgin stage, according to
most dictionary definitions. Nevertheless, the bifold character of creole does not
remain pidgin but evolves into something more complex and the equivalent of a
normal language, whereas it transcends a simple hybrid by becoming sufficiently
disconnected from a source language. Later on, we come to Foucault’s heterotopia
and places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions, largely as spaces
and places of some ‘other’. Certainly, these are places with more layers of meaning
in relation to other spaces than meets the mind’s eye and are in their dual or

ix
x Foreword

Fig. 1 View of a trail crossing the matorral submontano in the Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico
(photo rp)

multiple meanings segues into a necessarily symbolic realm. Towards the end, a test
is made of such a symbolic field, including its derivation, through an intriguing
construct in the Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico (Fig. 1). There an itinerary is
charted through the natural terrain, with points along it at which travelers are
confronted with objects which challenge them by re-framing their perceptions.
Consequently, they come to know a place differently and, in a cumulative manner,
the trail they are on takes on a multiplicity of novel meanings. The symbolic
landscape acts on the natural landscape and vice versa.
From beginning to end, this journey satisfies one’s intellectual curiosity about its
subject, challenges often preconceived ideas and concepts about various forms of
landscape ‘isms’, and finally pushes discussion where it should be in the guise of a
project and a symbolic field. As a wise colleague of mine once said when talking
about architecture, now I want to talk about the unspeakable or undiscussable.

New York, USA Peter G. Rowe

2018 Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture
and Urban Design and Harvard University
Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard GSD
Preface

Brief Synopsis and Structure of the Text

This book explores the merging of natural and man-made systems in contemporary
space. It proposes to interpret the entirety of the contemporary continuum through
the lens of a landscape paradigm combining scientific and cultural layers. The
theoretical elaboration results in the formulation of a ‘symbiotic landscape
construct’.
The synthetic Introduction of Chap. 1 summarizes theoretical themes and
practical issues approached throughout the book and lays out the symbiotic field
notion. The book is further organized in three parts. Part I offers a recent panorama
of the space-making disciplines dealing with the contemporary continuum. Part II
discusses the relevance of the notions of composite and miscegenation in the
analysis of the process of spatial formation at a local as well as geographic scale.
Part III illustrates a landscape installation implemented in the Sierra Madre Oriental
of Mexico as a spatial transcription of the theoretical landscape construct and casts
scenarios for future research and design work on the built/natural continuum.
Abstracts, keywords, and partial conclusions are provided for each chapter.
Part I
The first part traces a disciplinary panorama of the recent transition from a
Greco-Roman conception of spatial organization, based on the idea of confined
urban space, to a contemporary condition characterized by the diffusion of
anthropic networks over geographic extents. The overview interplays with a bundle
of individual and collective trajectories, the ideas of people and groups who have
variously engaged the challenges posited by the interpretation of incrementally
extensive dwellings on Earth.
The book sets out to expose the relics of obsolete spatial categories and notions
in the global discourse on the geographic prospects of the human habitat to sift out
the attributes of a novel kind of diffuse ‘urbanity’ emerging in an all-embracing
mixed landscape.

xi
xii Preface

Reconducting theoretical principles to practical terms, a compared anatomy of

design cases represents an array of approaches to space-making in the age of the
demise of essential divarications between natural and artificial: the cases span from
the visionary plans for macro-ecologies being implemented in Asia to the
engrafting of micro-ecologies in European cities, the merging of living and artificial
structures, and the testing of a possible cybernetic control over natural ecosystems
through digital technologies.
Part II
While the urban space suggests series of binaries deriving from the original
dichotomy city/nature, the geographic expansion favors the commingling of com-
posite or opposite principles. The second part of the book analyzes ways in which
the elective or imposed coexistence of diverse agents in a spatial field kindle a
process that evolves from juxtaposition to reciprocal permeation and eventually
miscegenation. The research interprets the spatial implications of the colonizing
action brought forth by conquering over conquered groups in a cultural and
physical terrain, originating processes of confined space-making and broader
region-forming.
By adopting the semantic construct of the garden to interpret the outer landscape,
the book pursues the exploration of the cavities in-between the tangible topography
of the contemporary built/natural continuum and the lacunose territorial mythology
that is unawares and fragmentally being produced underneath it. The idea of
reformulating the principles for the embedding of a new mythology in the con-
temporary continuum, its semantization and thereby the reinstitution of a fading
sense over the dwelling platform, orients future scenarios.
The research emphasizes the liquid multiplicity of contemporary landscape,
referred to as a symbiotic field made of biological and artificial, material and
intangible, metabolic and cultural components. Various paradigms used across time
to interpret the loose notion of landscape are first dismantled and then reassembled
into a symbiotic landscape construct to guide the interpretation and manipulation of
contemporary spatial assemblages.
Part III
The third part narrates the physical and spatial transcription of the symbiotic
landscape construct into a landscape installation. The ‘Tests for a Symbiotic
Matorral’ project is a set of installations in steel, stone, and wood, forming a
500-m-long floro-faunistic route through the luxuriant matorral submontano1 of the
Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico. Aiming at destabilizing the conventional
anthropocentric perspective over the environment, the visitor plunges into a mul-
tifocal exploration, entering the perceptive spheres of the many inhabitants of the
ecosystem. The installation is also an in situ plotting of the correspondence between

1
The matorral submontano is a low, dense ecosystem extensively covering the hillsides and lower
mountain sides of Northern Mexico. Its flora is composed of thicket and scrubland, where a varied
fauna finds its habitat. The matorral presents an extremely high biodiversity.
Preface xiii

Deleuze Guattari’s geophilosophical paradigm of ‘becoming’ and Almo Farina’s

paradigm of the ‘cognitive landscape’. The project, in fact, tests the possible rec-
onciliation of ‘cognitive-metabolist’ and ‘aesthetic-territorialist’ landscape models.
The conclusions draw some reflections about the ethic aims and implications of
this book and propose an Agenda for the Next Landscape, as a future research and
work plan for the space-making disciplines in the contemporary continuum.
Notations for Sources and Quotations
Throughout this book, all sources are credited in detail including authors’ and
bibliographic data of original texts.
Quotations from other texts are credited and indicated with the following
notations:
• “double inverted commas” indicate a direct quotation from the credited text;
• ‘simple inverted commas’ including a phrase indicate the author’s synthetic
reformulation of concepts contained in the credited text;
• a citation [e.g., (Rossi 1982, pp. 101–2)] after the final period of a paragraph is
referred to the entire period, usually including multiple phrases;
• a citation after a period in the middle of a paragraph is referred to all the
preceding phrases of the paragraph;
• a citation before a period is only referred to the specific phrase or part of phrase
preceding it.
‘Inverted commas’ including one or two words are meant to stress a certain
expression or notion.

Monterrey, Mexico Roberto Pasini

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the friends who have crossed my path during the years and
in particular those who have helped me complete this book in various ways.
This book combines the results of multiple research projects developed during
the last 5 years. The preliminary analysis derives from the 2014–2016 TeleTalks
conference series curated at the Universidad de Monterrey, Mexico, with some
events in collaboration with Laura Cipriani of IUAV Venezia, Italy. I would like to
thank Mason White, Lola Sheppard, Kongjian Yu, José Luis Vallejo, Perry Kulper,
Alessandro Scandurra, François Roche, Marco Brizzi, Erle Ellis, Ferdinand
Ludwig, and Pierre Belanger for their generous availability. The core of the theo-
retical research presented in this book was elaborated in the frame of the IDAUP,
International Doctorate in Architecture and Urban Planning of the Università di
Ferrara, Italy and Polis University, Albania, in the period 2014–2017. Special
thanks go to my tutors Besnik Aliaj, Rector of Polis, and Gabriele Lelli of DA,
Ferrara. I would also like to thank Theo Zaffagnini, for his precious observations, as
well as Ledian Bregasi and Loris Rossi for their consideration. ‘Tests for a
Symbiotic Matorral’ is a research project conducted with Patricio Garza, Andrea
Ramos, Fernanda Rosas, et al. (see credits in the text) and implemented with the
help of, among many others, Rodrigo Legorreta, who manufactured and installed
several components, and the distinguished sculptor Jorge Elizondo, who permitted
the use of his stone carving ateliers in the Huasteca canyon. The project was
brought forth on DIECI research funds of UDEM and in collaboration with the
Parque Ecológico Chipinque. I would like to thank the director of research of
UDEM Jorge Lozoya for believing in our idea without hesitation. Finally, I am
particularly grateful to Peter Rowe of Harvard University and Elisa Cattaneo of the
Politecnico di Milano for taking the time to contribute to this book by writing front
and back matter.

xv
Contents

1 Introduction: Defining a Symbiotic Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 The Ladder of Rome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Mixed Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Post-urban City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Centrality of Landscape and the Symbiotic Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.5 A Corollary Note to the Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Part I A Disciplinary Panorama

2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.2 A Critique of Metropolitanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2.1 Metropolitan Spell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2.2 Machina diaboli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.2.3 Lenin’s byt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.2.4 Stalin’s VOPRA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2.5 Manhattanist Condensers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2.6 Of New Nomads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.2.7 Of Other Nomads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.2.8 Site and Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2.9 Memory and Verticality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2.10 Horizontal Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.3 A Critique of Landscape Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.3.1 Machinic Landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.3.2 The Role of External Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.3.3 Athens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.3.4 Elitist Strolls, Autocratic Recreations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.3.5 Dissensus or Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.4 A Critique of the Urban Paradigm and Its Territory . . . . . . . . . . . 22

xvii
xviii Contents

2.4.1 Of the Continuity of the Production Matrix in the

Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 22
2.4.2 Of the Continuity of the Spatial Substance in the
Industrial City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 23
2.4.3 City as Field of Application of Economic and Political
Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 23
2.4.4 Speculation as Vehicle of Trans-historical
Aspirations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 24
2.4.5 The Monographic Studies on the Trans-historical
Aspirations of a City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.4.6 Dialectic Materialism and Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.5 A Second Critique of Landscape Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.5.1 A New Ethos for the Machinic Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.5.2 Simulacrum-Depiction and Model-Encoding . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.5.3 Of Planes and Rotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.5.4 Of Planes and Masochism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.5.5 Planes Galore and Diverse Temporalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.5.6 Bartering Ethos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.5.7 Horizontal Organizations of Vertical Facialities . . . . . . . . 33
2.5.8 Multiplication of the Transversal Plane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.5.9 For a Technocratic Governance of the Environment . . . . . 35
2.6 Crossing Culturalist Terrains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.6.1 Embedding Semantic: For an Aesthetic Mastery of the
Surroundings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.6.2 Of Lovely and Horrid Epiphanies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.7 A Second Critique of Metropolitanism as Urban Age . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.7.1 The Urban Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.7.2 Total Khéops: la misère est moins dure au soleil . . . . . . . 41
2.7.3 Massif Les Calanques and Concrete Plateau . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.7.4 Pick Your Urban Age à la carte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
2.7.5 Globalization, cet obscur objet du désir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.7.6 Anachronism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.7.7 Dioscuri of Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.7.8 The Other Half . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.8 Chapter’s Conclusions: A Novel Cityness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.8.1 Cityness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.8.2 Geopolitical Post-metropolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.8.3 Metropolitan Demise: Retrofitting, Region-Forming,
Physio-digital Responsiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 48
2.8.4 Semiotics of the Vicarious Encounter . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 49
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 49
Contents xix

3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat and the Attributes

of a Novel Urbanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.2 The Expanding City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.2.1 Expanding City Attributes Over Non-urban Space . . . . . . 52
3.2.2 Geographic Opening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.3 A Novel Urbanity, Its Attributes, and Its Mythology . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.3.1 Making the Middle Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.3.2 All-American Terrain Vague . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.3.3 Pastoral Perspectives and Technological Orientations . . . . 56
3.3.4 Mythopoeia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.3.5 The Looks and the Conduct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.3.6 All-East-Asian Expanses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.3.7 Beijing’s Artificial-Lake-Lace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.3.8 From Remnin to Lujiazui . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
3.3.9 The Presence of a Mythology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
3.3.10 Confluence of History and Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.3.11 In Civibus et in Parietibus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.3.12 Applying Attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
3.3.13 Capital or Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.3.14 About Mythology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.3.15 Constellations of Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.3.16 All Becomes Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.3.17 The Geographic Opened . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.3.18 Spatial Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.3.19 Phenomena and Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.3.20 Interstitial Inhospitality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.3.21 Overflows of Different Qualities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.3.22 Urban Reforms, Material Continuity, and Semantic
Shifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.3.23 Territorial Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.3.24 Measures of Linguistic Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.3.25 Numeric But Morphologic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.3.26 Diverse Mosaics of Uniform Patches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.4 The World as One City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.4.1 Making the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.4.2 Radical Lineages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.4.3 Opposed But Accessible Shores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.4.4 Smooth Passages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.4.5 The Formation of the Urban Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.4.6 Geographic Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.4.7 Vice Versa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.4.8 Ancient Cosmopolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
xx Contents

3.4.9 Synecdoches and Metonymies . . . . . . . . . . . . ........ 73

3.4.10 Layer and Relayer Space with Identitarian and
Heteronomous Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........ 74
3.5 Chapter’s Conclusions: Mnemonics of the World . . . . . ........ 75
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ........ 75
4 The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.2 Ten Behaviors Before the Contemporary Continuum . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.2.1 Geotechnics or Applied Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.2.2 Machinic Micro-Ecologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.2.3 Aesthetic Prostheses for an Operative Metabolism . . . . . . 81
4.2.4 Cybernetic Utopias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
4.2.5 Atmospheric Assemblages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.2.6 The Psychic Sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
4.2.7 Creole Horizons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4.2.8 Semiotic Landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
4.2.9 Geopolitical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
4.2.10 Geophilosophical Excavations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
4.2.11 A Bundle of Feebler or Bolder Routes: The Symbiotic
Field in Ten Behaviors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
4.3 Past Utopia and Present Everyday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
4.3.1 Failed Leaps into Artificial Paradises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
4.3.2 Tirana: A Case of Quotidian Agronica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
4.4 Chapter’s Conclusions: Domestic Landscape in
Biotechnological Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 92
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 93

Part II Dealing with the Composite

5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes . . . . ...... 97
5.1 Introduction: Geography, Discovery, Colonization,
and Miscegenation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
5.2 Cultural Miscegenation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
5.2.1 A Glittering String of Artificial Bananas . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
5.2.2 Modernist Primitivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
5.2.3 Colonial Geographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
5.2.4 Mythic Persona . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
5.2.5 Cet obscure objet du désir Colonial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
5.2.6 The Colonial Perspective of Landscape Urbanism . . . . . . 106
5.2.7 Miscegenation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
5.2.8 Self-reformulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
5.2.9 Unsolicited Attentions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
5.2.10 Baker Is the Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Contents xxi

5.2.11 Uneven Parallels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

5.2.12 Re-Paradigmed Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
5.2.13 The Reign of Birds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
5.2.14 The Reign of Insects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
5.2.15 Légion d’Honneur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5.3.1 Expropriations in the New World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
5.3.2 Merciless Dissection of a Country’s Destiny . . . . . . . . . . 115
5.3.3 Altépetl: Sowing, Monuments, Land Rights . . . . . . . . . . . 116
5.3.4 Vertical Axis: Ethnicity, Territory, Cosmos . . . . . . . . . . . 117
5.3.5 Permanence of the Collective Character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
5.3.6 Mythic Peregrinations from Nomadic to Sedentary . . . . . . 120
5.3.7 A Water-Filled Mountain and an Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5.3.8 Of Massacres and Foundations of Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
5.3.9 Territorial Continuity in the Age of the Vice-reign . . . . . . 124
5.3.10 Territorial Discontinuities in the Age
of Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
5.3.11 Restructuring the Role of the Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
5.3.12 Forming the Image of the Patria Criolla . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.3.13 The Construction of the Estado Nacional . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
5.3.14 Redistributing Ecclesiastic Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
5.3.15 Against the Communal Ways of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
5.3.16 Lost Idylls of the Yucatan Peninsula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
5.3.17 Bucolic Communes Alongside the Yaqui River . . . . . . . . 131
5.4 The Body of the Metropolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
5.4.1 The Leyes de Reforma Resemble an Elegant Boulevard
in French Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
5.4.2 The Venerated Forest of Chapultepec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
5.5 Chapter’s Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
5.5.1 Correspondences and Divergences Between Patterns of
Space-Forming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
5.5.2 A Doleful Stream of Trans-Historical Aspirations and
the Geography of Miscegenated Continents . . . . . . . . . . . 135
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its
Mythology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
6.2 Writing the Universe Within and Beyond the Garden Fence . . . . . 141
6.2.1 Phenomenon and Text, Gardens of Pelion . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
6.2.2 Beyond the Garden Fence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
6.2.3 Insula Occidentalis 42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
6.2.4 Open Your Summer Triclinium and Oecus . . . . . . . . . . . 143
xxii Contents

6.2.5 Water Whirls and Lava Foam Spring Out of a Vitreous

Recess in the City Wall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
6.2.6 ‘Parietal-Garden-Paintings/Cultivated-Vines/
Spontaneous-Maquis’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
6.2.7 Longitudinal Trajectory Through Vertical Facialities . . . . 144
6.2.8 Of Meteors Between Lava and Asters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
6.2.9 Of Forms and Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
6.2.10 Meteorological Mysteries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
6.2.11 Essential Continuity of Garden and Landscape . . . . . . . . 147
6.3 Bartering Symbiosis for Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
6.3.1 Rousseau, Goethe, Humboldt, and the Picturesque
Olmsted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
6.3.2 Gardens and Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
6.3.3 Gardens and Metropolitan Aspirations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
6.3.4 Gardens and Taxidermy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
6.3.5 Gardens, Effects, and Deep Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
6.4 Game Hunting in the Garden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
6.4.1 Metropolitan Services Under the Tents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
6.4.2 Vulgarized Beautifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
6.4.3 Emancipation or Ecological Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
6.5 Hunts of a Subtler Sort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
6.5.1 Souvenirs Entomologiques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
6.5.2 Gardens Grown Wild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
6.5.3 Subtle Hunts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
6.6 Chapter’s Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
6.6.1 Darwinism and Technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
6.6.2 Prey Mirrors Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
7 Reconciling Cultural and Cognitive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
7.2 Breaking Down the Idea of Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
7.2.1 Fundamental Components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
7.2.2 Atmospheric Perfumes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
7.2.3 Using the Philosophy of the Landscape to Do
Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
7.2.4 Ur-Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
7.2.5 ‘North-Sea/Mercantile-Mobility/Water’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
7.2.6 Elective Belonging: Using the Architecture of the
Landscape to Do Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
7.2.7 Metabolism, Tempered Cognitivism,
and Shape-Giving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Contents xxiii

7.2.8 Ur-Landschaft, Territory, Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

7.2.9 Cultural Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
7.3 Continuities and Discontinuities in the Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
7.3.1 Historical Discontinuity of the Notion of Landscape . . . . 169
7.3.2 A Landscape of Antiquity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
7.3.3 Recuperating the External Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
7.3.4 Sublime and Metabolic Landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
7.3.5 Historical Continuity of the Notion of Landscape . . . . . . . 173
7.3.6 Other Continuities and a Novelty in the Notion of
Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
7.3.7 An Aboriginal Idea of the Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
7.4 Combining Metabolist and Culturalist Positions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
7.4.1 A True Reflection of His Soul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
7.4.2 Cognitive, Semiotic, Semethic, and Cultural . . . . . . . . . . 176
7.4.3 Multiplicity of Eco-Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
7.4.4 Non-anthropocentric Mindsets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
7.5 Chapter’s Conclusions: Multiple, Fluctuating, Simultaneous . . . . . 179
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

Part III Tests, Philosophy, Agenda

8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
8.2 Overlapping Constructs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
8.2.1 Becoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
8.2.2 Cognitive Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
8.2.3 Cognitive Landscape and Becoming: A Coincidence . . . . 188
8.2.4 NbL to Plane of Immanence as IbPL + ObL to Plane
of Transcendence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
8.3 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral: A Landscape Installation . . . . . . . 189
8.3.1 Reasons for a Landscape Installation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
8.3.2 Site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
8.3.3 Overthrowing Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
8.3.4 A Route in Three Sections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
8.3.5 Portal to Other Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
8.3.6 Path of Fauna Trails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
8.3.7 Glade of Becoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
8.4 Deleuze-Guattarian Ascendancies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
8.4.1 Oedipal, Mythic, and ‘of-a-Third-Type’ Animals . . . . . . . 194
8.4.2 Analogies by Resemblance and Proportion . . . . . . . . . . . 194
8.4.3 Sacrifices, Totems, and the Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
8.4.4 Demons and Their Symbiotic Alliances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
8.4.5 Human Alliances with Demons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
xxiv Contents

8.5 The Glade of Becoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

8.5.1 Three ‘Becoming-Animals’ and One
‘Becoming-Demon’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
8.5.2 Animality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
8.5.3 Functional Traits and Fundamental Acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
8.5.4 Institution of the Totem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
8.5.5 Myth and Shadows Interplay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
8.5.6 Line of Flight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
8.5.7 Avian Flight Lines and Melodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
8.5.8 Down the ‘Flora Path’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
8.6 Chapter’s Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
8.6.1 Contemplation, Change, and the Waldgang . . . . . . . . . . . 203
8.6.2 Testing the Paradigm and Recording Response . . . . . . . . 205
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
9 Conclusions: Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda for
the Next Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
9.2 Contaminating the Technological Structure with a Symbiotic
Entendement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
9.2.1 Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
9.2.2 The Composite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
9.2.3 The Multiple Axes Addressing Man’s Presence
in Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
9.2.4 Den Wald Zu Bauen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
9.2.5 Symbiotic Paradigms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
9.3 Determining the Attributes of the Novel Urbanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
9.3.1 Contexts to Start with: Idyllic Global South,
Schizophrenic Global North, Welfare Global North,
Pseudo-urban Assemblages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
9.4 Post-urban Agoras, Neo-Monuments, and a Novel Mythology . . . . 217
9.4.1 Urbs, Civitas, Cityness, Landscape: Recharging a
Fragmented Territory with a New Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
9.4.2 Life with Neo-Monuments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
9.5 A Final Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Chapter 1
Introduction: Defining a Symbiotic Field

1.1 The Ladder of Rome

‘Symbiotic field’ refers to the space, topos and chora (Montaner 2000, p. 99) or locus
(Rossi 1982, p. 103) and spatium (Böhme 2006, p. 403), where anthropogenic and
geogenic1 (Baccini and Brunner 2012) systems intersect, producing the multilayered
construct of landscape. Throughout this essay, we will resort to a series of established
concepts proceeding from sources diverse in location and time across the geographic
configuration of the multidisciplinary debate on landscape to enumerate components of a
possible construct. That construct is meant to be climbed upon and then thrown away like
Wittgenstein’s ladder, which we may call here the ‘ladder of Rome’, as we are discussing
matters related to urbanity.2 A reduced assemblage made of asserted elements, sup-
porting the constant reformulation of nested frescos, unfolds through multiple layers: the
primordial natural platform, ur-landschaft (Sauer 1925); its functioning mechanics
interpreted by science and environment (D’Angelo 2010a); the superimposed structural
and infrastructural network and territory (Camporesi 2016)3 produced by tangible
and intangible fluxes of energy, matter, people, and societal interchange; but also the
overall intersubjective and cultural framing of the ensemble (cultural landscape4),

1
This metabolist terminology more simply refers to the ‘manmade’ and ‘natural’.
2
See the ‘A corollary note to the Introduction’ at the end of this section.
3
The term contrade, used by Piero Camporesi in his book Le belle contrade about the ‘birth of
Italian landscape’, is evocative of the transition from a medieval to a modern entendement of a land
entity that could be translated as ‘shires’. Camporesi asserts that the notion of landscape in the
Cinquecento was that of the ‘paese’, somewhat correspondent to today’s notion of territory. See
further elaboration on this central issue in Chaps. 2 and 7 of this book.
4
We have reconstructed in previous publications, the formation of the conventional notion of
‘cultural landscape’ until its adoption by the highest international institutions, among others
UNESCO. Further articulations of the terminology referring to landscape are being coined at
sustained pace, such as the notion of ‘cultural routes’ introduced by the Council of Europe. See:
the European Landscape Convention of the Council of Europe, Florence 2000; Roberto Pasini,
‘Triclini sul mare e rotte culturali’, in: Graphie n. 66, 2014; Eleonora Berti, Itinerari culturali del
Consiglio d’Europa tra ricerca di identità e progetto di paesaggio, Firenze University Press 2012.

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 1

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_1
2 1 Introduction: Defining a Symbiotic …

Fig. 1.1 Photochrom print of Ludwig II’s Schloss Neuschwanstein on the background of the
Bavarian Alps, Germany. The Neuschwanstein castle was built between 1868 and 1884 after drafts
by Christian Jank, scenic painter and stage designer at Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Opera. It was
used as main set for Luchino Visconti’s film Ludwig, third episode of his ‘Teutonic trilogy’. It is
interesting to compare the Neuschwanstein photochrom with the panoramic views of the Grand
Budapest Hotel in Wes Anderson’s homonymous film of 2014. As detailed in an article by
Mekado Murphy, the movie stills of the Grand Budapest Hotel are realized by digitally mounting
the foreground of the building’s handmade miniature onto the backdrop of a Caspar
Friedrich-inspired painted landscape. According to production designer Adam Stockhausen, the
authors’ aim is “a filtered way of looking at the world” (see: Murphy, Mekado. ‘You Can Look,
but You Can’t Check In’, New York Times, 28 Feb 2014). The Neuschwanstein photochrom is a
real view selected and processed to coincide with an idyllic landscape fantasized by the Romantic
monarch. The Grand Budapest stills are a fictional product assembling fragments of collective
imaginary layered and dispersed following the Romantic era. The movie stills aim at providing a
displacing experience by immersing the audience into an illusory landscape. In both cases, the
landscape results from the combination of real and mental components. (image color photo
lithograph, author unknown, 1890–1905, PD legal notice at end of chapter)

its interpretation, reflection, and overall vision, that is, the cultural self-awareness of man
as a collective inhabiting subject (Fig. 1.1).

1.2 Mixed Space

We live in increasingly mixed spaces. On the one hand, the digital revolution inter-
weaves our reality with a pervasive plot of circuits that produces a material/virtual
universe, expanding our consciousness to a new sense of intangible proximity. On the
1.2 Mixed Space 3

other hand, structural and infrastructural networks extend across open spaces, generating
a natural/artificial continuum. We face the need to design planetary macro-ecologies on a
geographic scale in order to envision a possible future for our species, while we are urged
to reintroduce micro-ecologies in the city space at the human scale to re-naturalize the
scenario of our days.5 ‘Cognitive-metabolist’ and ‘aesthetic-territorialist’ approaches to
the problem, respectively, preferring environmental engineering versus cultural com-
ponents of the landscaping construct, have been clashing over the symbiotic field from
opposite fronts. In the end, the aggregate result is a general drift towards novel regu-
lations of space based on soft and living systems, casting scenarios for the hybridization
or, more radically, the demise of hardscapes.6

1.3 Post-urban City

The main purpose of this essay is not to venture out in search of practical planning
and urban design strategies to enhance the sustainability of the present order of
things. This research rather arises from elemental questions such as: Can a novel
landscape paradigm prefigure a space where natural and man-made systems fuse
into a synthetic entity? Can it overcome the persistence of explicit and implicit
urban-oriented models embedded in the debate on human settlement? With refer-
ence to the respective etymological roots of ‘city’ (civitas or the community of
citizens) and ‘urban’ (urvus or the area contained inside the curved foundational
trench), how can we envision a post-urban city, i.e., a community of citizens,
endowed with a novel set of privileges of physical and intangible exchange,
dwelling in a non-contained natural/anthropic terrain?

1.4 Centrality of Landscape and the Symbiotic Field

In a time when the natural/man-made dichotomy appears destabilized, the aim of

this book is to fundamentally question the irrevocability of the urban and its
attributes. The book contributes to the formation of a vision incorporating ground,
flora, fauna, and man in a ‘symbiotic field’, a space where social forms of human
dwelling emancipate from anthropocentric perspectives. The vision is supported by

5
Examples are, respectively, the National Ecological Security Pattern, recently adopted by the
Chinese government to secure survival of the national territorial system undergoing an unprece-
dented anthropic pressure and the Air Trees, cyborg-trees designed to reintroduce environmental
quality in the metropolitan periphery of Madrid.
6
In ‘Journey Through the Picturesque (a Notebook)’, I-ñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros present
“hybrid models [generated by] the interaction between natural and artificial materials” as the basis
for a ‘new naturalism’ that replaces public space with a “hybrid, crossbred, entropic, humanized
conglomerate” (Ábalos and Herreros 2003, pp. 56–57).
4 1 Introduction: Defining a Symbiotic …

a multilayered spatial construct instrumentally built up by merging diverse para-

digms of the strategic concept of ‘landscape’.
An early researcher of the merging of city and countryside into one uninter-
rupted space (Tunnard and Pushkarev 1963), Christopher Tunnard comes to a
precursory understanding of the strategic centrality of the notion of landscape in the
interpretation and management of that contemporary continuum: “we must pay
special attention to all parts of it as ‘landscape’ and not isolate the term by thinking
of it as applicable only to wild or rural terrain” (Tunnard 1978, p. 116). However,
Tunnard’s idea of landscape remains firmly anthropocentric, since his adoption of a
poetics of ‘scenic values’ implies a prominence of the human cultural perspective
over cognitive diversity. The natural/artificial continuum is, in fact, for Tunnard a
‘human habitat’.
The recent widespread concurrence of the design disciplines onto the sphere
landscape, and the consequent generation of an extended interdisciplinary debate,
offers a propitious momentum to propel our disciplinary repositioning and transi-
tioning from the idea of a smart retrofitting of the obsolete shells of the urban past
towards the aim of a symbiotic redetermination of the relationship between man and
living space.7
The symbiotic landscape construct proposed in this book supports, like the
‘ladder of Rome’, a surreptitious ascent and an incursion into the more general
‘symbiotic field’ of the contemporary continuum. The ladder can then be thrown
away. What remains is an entendement of the mixed surroundings of our days and a
scenario for a possible symbiotic future, foreshadowed in the Symbiotic Matorral8
installation in the Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico illustrated in the final part of this
book.

1.5 A Corollary Note to the Introduction

Wittgenstein says:
6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes
them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so
to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (Wittgenstein 2010, p. 90)

In his philosophical novel The Name of The Rose, Umberto Eco rephrases
Wittgenstein via his medieval detective William of Baskerville. In an exemplary
postmodern literary work, Eco’s plot alludes to the rhizomatic nature of contem-
porary knowledge, where truth does not exist if not as a fragmented bundle of

7
The symbiotic necessity is a by-consequence of human species’ self-proclaimed emancipation
from the animal state evoked by calling the product of its own actions artificial, that is, nonnatural.
8
The matorral submontano is a low, dense ecosystem of great diversity. See relative note in
Preface and Chap. 8 of this book.
1.5 A Corollary Note to the Introduction 5

possible routes corresponding to its multiple and unascertained semiotic interpre-

tations. William says:
I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which
to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs. […]
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But
afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful,
it was meaningless. […] The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.
(Eco 1984, pp. 287–8)

The same theme of a chaotic reality only explorable through a superstructural

hypertext is epitomized in the verse affixed by Adso, the fictional narrator, in his
youth William’s apprentice, to seal his manuscript: “stat rosa pristina nomine,
nomina nuda tenemus” (‘the rose of old stands in name; we hold mere names’,
according to the translation by Roland Pepin). As reconstructed by Pepin in his
article about the closing line of the novel (Pepin 1986, p. 151), Eco’s formulation is
an erroneous variant of a verse from Bernard de Morlaix’s De Contemptu Mundi
replacing ‘rosa’ for the original ‘Roma’, notoriously cited before by Johan Huizinga
in his The Waning of the Middle Ages of 1924. “Stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina
nuda tenemus” (‘the Rome of old stands in name; we hold mere names’) is then the
original version, whereby the ‘ladder of Rome’ is the equivalent of ‘Wittgenstein’s
ladder’.
This book traces routes across the relational carpet that interfaces the most
delicate works of nature with the grand cities edified by man—so that the name of a
simple rose is interchangeable with that of immortal cities. By virtue of names put
on things of the natural and man-made realms, the volatile confessions of man’s
soul can confront even awful, immutable orographies. Names are, in fact, vehicles
for a scientific analysis that does not come at odds with the reveries of an afternoon.

References

Ábalos I, Herreros J (2003) Journey through the picturesque (a notebook). In: Mostafavi M,
Najle C (eds) Landscape urbanism: a manual for the machinic landscape. Architectural
Association, London
Böhme G (2006) Atmosphere as the subject matter of architecture. In: Ursprung P (ed) Natural
histories. Lars Müller, Zurich
Baccini P, Brunner P (2012) Metabolism of the anthroposphere. The MIT Press [1991]
Berti E (2012) Itinerari culturali del Consiglio d’Europa tra ricerca di identità e progetto di
paesaggio. Firenze University Press, Firenze
Camporesi P (2016) Le belle contrade. Nascita del paesaggio italiano. Il Saggiatore, Milano [1992]
D’Angelo P (2010a) Estetica Ambientale. Enciclopedia Treccani. Istituto dell’Enciclopedia
Italiana, Roma
Eco U (1984) The name of the rose (trans: Weaver W). Warner Books [1980]
Montaner JM (2000) Espacio. In: de Solá-Morales I (ed) Introducción a la Arquitectura.
Ediciones UPC, Barcelona
Pasini R (2014) Triclini sul mare e rotte culturali. Graphie (Il Vicolo) (66)
Pepin R (1986) Adso’s closing line in the name of the rose. Am Notes Queries 24:9–10
6 1 Introduction: Defining a Symbiotic …

Rossi A (1982) The architecture of the city. The MIT Press, Cambridge [1966]
Sauer CO (1925) The morphology of landscape. Univ Calif Publ Geogr 2:19–53
Tunnard C (1978) A world with a view. Yale University Press, An Inquiry into the Nature of
Scenic Values. New Haven
Tunnard Ch, Pushkarev B (1963) Man-made america: chaos or control?. Yale University Press,
New Haven
Wittgenstein L (2010) Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Introduction by Bertrand Russell (trans
Ogden CK). Project Gutenberg [1921]

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 Part I
A Disciplinary Panorama
Chapter 2
Metropolitanism, Its Filiations,
and Its Consequences

Abstract By analyzing a series of territorial paradigms proposed by theorists,

critics, and designers, this chapter offers a critical overview of the recent transition
from metropolitanist to regionalist perspectives over today’s expanded dwelling
space in the global debate. The analysis tackles metropolitanist models related to
Manhattanism and neo-nomadism with reference to their avant-garde and radical
parentages. The text critically investigates models derivative of metropolitanism,
such as landscape urbanism, urban age, and post-metropolis, along with models that
present themselves as alternative, such as sub-urbanism and mega-regionalism. The
text confronts metropolitanist models and their filiations with the principles of the
disciplinary refoundation based on the idea of urban space, such as those of
Tendenza, and with the traditional constructs of territory and landscape, such as
those of the Italian landscape and the trio of natures, which they propose to subvert.
The theoretical elaborations of landscape urbanism are then confronted with their
geophilosophical references. The text proceeds to observe the process of expansion
of the idea of city over the geographic scale. A novel form of expanded urbanity,
surfacing from the analysis, finally suggests the opportunity to identify a set of
novel attributes relative to the citizenship of the contemporary built/natural con-
tinuum. The conclusions identify the idea of a territorial mythology, unawares and
fragmentarily building up in the contemporary continuum, as a possible field of
future research and design work.

Keywords Metropolitanism Manhattanism Sub-urbanism Landscape






urbanism Picturesque Mega region Paris French revolution


Urban age Middle landscape

2.1 Introduction

The first 15 years of the new millennium have seen a laborious repositioning of the
general interest in the field of design, switching from metropolitan glamor
(Fig. 2.1) to mega-regional environments. Richard Florida’s controversial reading

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 9

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_2
10 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

of The Rise of the Mega Region (Florida et al. 2007), completing his theory of the
‘creative class’ (Florida 2002), intercepted this shift in the disposition of the wider
architectural audience.

2.2 A Critique of Metropolitanism

2.2.1 Metropolitan Spell

The spell of the ‘metropolitan promise’ had begun to propagate in 1978, riding on
the planetary success of a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York,
and relying on Rem Koolhaas’ rhetoric ability, lyric puissance, and analytical
potence. The aloof announcement of the “imminent segregation of mankind” into
the tribe of ‘Metropolitanites’, graduates of the gigantic locker-room skyscraper,
multitasking ‘metropolitan bachelors’ self-redesigned at the price of sterility, and
“the remainder of human race” (Koolhaas 1978, pp. 152–60), had seduced the
undifferentiated multitude.
For the Metropolitanites, Koolhaas manufactures a new groundbreaking typol-
ogy, the Manhattanist Skyscraper, by means of a critical reinvention operated on the
Downtown Athletic Club. If Koolhaas is the deus ex machina establishing
Manhattan’s missing mythology, his Skyscraper is the machina set on the theater of
critique for the congestions of metropolitanism to burgeon and the individuals to
surrender to “the definitive instability of life in the Metropolis” (Koolhaas 1978,
p. 157). However, Koolhaas’ lyric enacts the individual’s surrender to compulsory
dissatisfaction and obsession for material and immaterial consumption, alongside
Manhattan’s ‘floor by floor conquest of the Skyscraper by social activity’.
In a rhetoric apotheosis, the American way of life, significantly made of
‘know-how’1 and ‘initiative’ (i.e., capitalist entrepreneurship), “definitively over-
take[s] the theoretical lifestyle modifications that the various 20th-century European
avant-gardes have been insistently proposing, without ever managing to impose
them.” Koolhaas’ typology, the Manhattanist Skyscraper, is explicitly identified
with a “Constructivist Social Condenser [that is] a machine to generate and
intensify desirable forms of human intercourse” (Koolhaas 1978, p.152). Using
Benjamin de Cassares’ words, Koolhaas celebrates “the black mass of Materialism”
of the Metropolitanites, ‘male to the core’, who ‘divinize matter, energy, motion,
change’.
The wishful future of a captivated global design scene is, by that, cast into a
dense, congested, and dazzling space: the ‘metropolitan’ estate.

Cfr. Ernst Jünger’s reflection on the notion of ‘technique’.

1
2.2 A Critique of Metropolitanism 11

Fig. 2.1 Looking east from Shin-Marunouchi’s mezzanine: Tokyo’s 1914 Central Railway
Station on the glazed backdrop of the business district (photo rp)
12 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

2.2.2 Machina diaboli

Referring to Lévi-Strauss, John Berger comments on how the widespread success

of oil painting from the sixteenth century on responded to the identification of
‘seeing’ with ‘possessing’. Buying an oil painting allows the owner to possess the
things it represents, such as “landscapes, women, food, dignitaries, mythology”
(Berger 1972, pp. 83–4), which results unlikely with both ancient frescoes and
modern murals. According to Berger, in ancient oil painting as in modern media
“the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is
designed to flatter him” (Berger 1972, p. 64). If “a man’s presence is dependent
upon the promise of power which he embodies” and exerts on external subjects, by
contrast “a woman’s presence is intrinsic to her person”, recalling in a very delicate
analogy “an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura” (Berger
1972, p. 46). We could conclude that Koolhaas’ Skyscraper is a machinic system of
possession exerted upon the matter and the woman, animate and inanimate subjects,
a machina diaboli that perpetrates domination.

2.2.3 Lenin’s byt

Molded as an anti-utopian palimpsest erected on Constructivist grounds, Koolhaas’

Skyscraper for the metropolitan bachelor is presented as a frontal attack on the petit-
bourgeois social structure based on the family unit. In An Archeology of Socialism,
Victor Buchli analyzes Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis’ Narkomfin communal
housing in central Moskow (1928–32) as the epitome of the ‘social condenser’, that
is a spatial arrangement inducing the implementation of Vladimir Lenin’s agenda of
social and feminist emancipation for the achievement of the byt, the Soviet lifestyle
(Buchli 1999, pp. 63–5).2
The achievement of the byt by means of implementing standardized communal
housing types had been commissioned by the Russian Republic to Ginzburg and
other architects associated to the Constructivists groups in 1928. The Narkomfin is
the most prominent example among only six such buildings implemented before the

2
The idea of flatly sweeping out petit-bourgeois households through new collective housing types
constituted the architectural embodiment of the theories for a collectivist reformulation of life that
permeated the avant-garde art milieu in the years before and after the Bolshevik revolution (Buchli
1999, pp. 63–76). A more capillary campaign opened another front inside the petit-bourgeois
household. Coping with the lack of budget to plan the replacement of the actual structures, a series
of housewife’s manuals were meant to sweep out at least the petit-bourgeois values from the
domestic sphere, associating hygiene and taste for clean order with socialism (Buchli 1999,
pp. 41–2, 52–5). On Alexander Bogdanov’s and Alexei Gastev’s collectivist theories, see also
Anatole Senkevitch Jr.’s ‘Introduction’ to Moisei Ginzburg’s Style and Epoch (Senkevitch 1982,
pp. 29–31).
2.2 A Critique of Metropolitanism 13

Stalinist counter-directives reject the full socialization of the living pattern in favor
of the preservation of the petit-bourgeois ‘domestic heart’, that is the familial
structuration of society.

2.2.4 Stalin’s VOPRA

The ends of the byt reform would soon then be called ‘leftist’ or ‘Trotskyist’ with
the consolidation of Joseph Stalin’s power in the Central Committee of the
Communist Party during the First Quinquennial Plan (1928–32). The projects are
silenced and dissolve along with the Russian constructivists, one of the most tal-
ented generations of modern architecture. Vittorio De Feo is probably the first
author to propose an articulate study of Russian Constructivism in URSS
Architettura 1917–1936 (Officina 1963), reconstructing the trajectory of Soviet
avant-garde architects starting in 1920 from the Muscovite art ateliers of the
VKhUTEMAS and the competing MVTU.3 It is no coincidence that
VKhUTEMAS’ Higher Art and Technical Studios are established by Lenin’s direct
decree to pursue the same emancipatory agenda in the crafts and industrial pro-
duction and management. The progressive programs of Nikolai Ladovsky’s
ASNOVA (Association of New Architects) and Ginzburg’s OSA (Organization of
Contemporary Architects) are rooted in those ateliers. By 1932, their ‘deterritori-
alizing’ action will be already suppressed at the hands of Arkady Mordvinov’s
VOPRA and then Union of Soviet Architects. The reactionary agenda of the
association, created in tune with the tyrant’s purpose of normalization, is based on a
neo-academic monumentalism as a design parallel to the refoundation of the con-
ventional family structure at the core of societal stability (De Feo 1963, pp. 29–45,
55–8).

2.2.5 Manhattanist Condensers

Koolhaas’ seminal manifesto of Metropolitanism is structured on the assertion/

denial model, consisting in first asserting and then denying daring critical ideas via
flamboyant lyric figures. After having celebrated the implemented apotheosis of a
Constructivist socio-spatial revolution through the reformulation of the

3
Among the major figures active in the field of architecture at the VKhUTEMAS, worth of
mention are Vladimir Tatlin, Nikolai Ladovsky and his 1928 graduate Georgy Krutikov, El
Lissitzky, Kostantin Melnikov, Ilya Golosov, Berthold Lubetkin, Alexander Vesnin, Leonid
Vesnin, Moisei Ginzburg and his 1927 graduate Ivan Leonidov, while engaged at the MVTU
Alexander Kuznetsov and Victor Vesnin, although many were active in both institutions. For
details about the structure of academic programs at VkHUTEMAS, see: monoskop.org/
Vkhutemas.
14 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

Manhattanist social condenser, the illustrated account of ‘The Story of the Pool’ at
the closing of Delirious New York (Koolhaas 1978, pp. 307–10) represents dia-
metrically opposite conditions of daily life in Manhattan, at odds with the ingen-
uous Constructivist ideals. Koolhaas depicts the imaginary journey of a community
of Constructivist architects seeking escape from the Stalinist regime in the early
‘30s, onboard a visionary floating pool capable of auto-motion designed in the
radical revolutionary milieu a decade before. For the special locomotion system of
the pool, the Constructivists swim backwards towards America, reaching
Manhattan 40 years later to find out that the same crude uniformity they are fleeing
from has soaked Manhattan’s capitalist society. So, they take off again in an endless
anarchist’s drift. Koolhaas’ apologue of the pool, just like his chant of the
Manhattanist social condenser, is an attempt at rooting his rhizomes deeper down
into the corpse of Constructivism and steal its soul.
The arborescent model of society founded on the base unit of the family, had
been attacked by the Constructivists on behalf of Lenin’s revolution just to be
surreptitiously readopted a couple of years later for the edification of Stalin’s
monumental eversion. Similarly, Koolhaas’ pseudo-constructivist social condenser
does not accommodate liberated socialist individuals of both genders, but rather
aggressive bachelors, obsessed with the exploitation of woman as a natural service
within the severe frame of entrepreneurial depredation.

2.2.6 Of New Nomads

Accounting of the early appearance of American suburbia along the expanding

metropolitan railways and motorways in the 1920s, Peter Rowe links the phe-
nomenon to the “radical restructuring of households […] during the progressive era
(1890–1920)”, which had comprehensively replaced the extended Victorian family
structure with nuclear units of simplified hierarchical complexity in the fabric of the
urbanizing American society (Rowe 1991, p. 4). In fact, the diffusion of the city
beyond its urban boundaries, is from the beginning, even though inadvertently,
linked to a thorough social restructuration of metropolitanist character.
Toyo Ito’s Pao 1 and Pao 2 dwelling units for the Tokyo Nomad Woman
(Ábalos and Herreros 1995, pp. 32–7, 47)4 of 1985 and 1989 respectively, elaborate
on the same concept of a molecular metropolitan society where ‘home’ is replaced
by ‘pod’. If ‘home’ implies rootedness and place, ‘pod’ recalls a technical support
installed on an incidental location. Ito’s paos are ‘anti-homes’ designed for a mutant
society. Tokyo woman’s nomadism is supported by light platforms serving dried-up

In El Croquis dedicated to Toyo Ito 1986 1995, see in particular the section ‘The Tokyo Nomad
4

Woman’.
2.2 A Critique of Metropolitanism 15

functions such as ‘style’, ‘snack’, and ‘intelligence’, depowered projections and

occasional episodes derived from the fundamental acts of hygiene, nourishment,
and culture. Resting is the only fundamental act to be supported by the pao, while
any other primary activity is performed in the collective facilities variously dislo-
cated in the metropolitan continuum, daily crossed by the nomadic trajectories of
metropolitanites. If Ginzburg’s Narkomfin collectivizes basic functions such as
cooking, eating, studying, leisure within a community aimed at a reformed society
of liberated individuals, Ito’s paos disintegrate the identitarian activities of the
metropolitanite into a diffuse metropolitan space.
“In any age, a dream for a new life leads into a new space” and the paos
“depicted an image of an urban life which daily loses reality in proportion to the
rate of visualization of the city life”—says Ito (Ito 1995, p. 10). In fact, Ito’s paos
narrate the city drifting from reality towards simulation, while sedentary urbanity
becomes nomadic and female, and paternal arborescence becomes rhizome (Ito
1995, pp. 6–15). The metropolitan nomad, however, is not re-achieving a pristine
state previous to that of sedentary, but rather a machinization of the human body
and its acts symmetrically opposite to the machinization of the human body per-
formed by Koolhaas’ Down Town Athletic Club. Ito’s metropolitan machinization
of the body is a vaporous female diffusing in the atmosphere,5 while Koolhaas’
machinization is a voracious male living for the sole cult of matter.

2.2.7 Of Other Nomads

In his 1954 movie La Strada,6 Federico Fellini narrates the journeys of a vagabond
strongman and the fragile, credulous young woman he has bought from her wret-
ched mother for 10,000 Italian Lire. Zampanó and Gelsomina traverse the coun-
tryside and the mountains of the Italian immediate post-war, a preindustrial world
littered of haggard villages, peopled with sparse peasants, publicans, and nuns, stray
dogs and gaunt hens, immersed in a constant wintry light. Their poor belongings are
packed on a derelict Davis tricar, onto which Gelsomina casts the attributes of a
conventional home. “I have in it everything like in a house”—says Gelsomina to a
nun, taking naïve pride on the domestic items packed in the tricar’s caisson.7
Zampanó, instead, sleeps indifferently indoor or outdoor stretched out amidst the
weeds and the debris of the wasteland.

5
With reference to woman’s presence defined by Berger as a “heat or smell or aura”, see
sub-chapter ‘Machina diaboli’.
6
La Strada is an Italian movie of 1954 directed by Federico Fellini, screenplay by F. Fellini,
T. Pinelli, E. Flaiano.
7
Scene of the convent form La Strada.
16 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

Zampanò is a visionary assemblage, made possible by Fellini’s filming tech-

nique of ‘numerological diction’8 combining the brutish corpulence of Anthony
Quinn and the cavernous voice of Arnoldo Foà. Zampanò is a myth that shares
some fundamental characteristics with Ernst Jünger’s venerable figure of the
Waldgänger (the one who goes back to the woods),9 mauled by the hailing of
expanding technique, which Storm of Steel and Sturm describe in form of the war
crossing the world. Like the Waldgänger, Zampanò is thus cast into a mythological
world, regressing back before the dwelling of sedentary civilizations, to recover the
pristine state of nomadism. To that state, he forcefully drags naïve Gelsomina, who
wastes away in a constant pallor and ends up destroyed.
The mythical nomad Zampanò stands in sharp contrast with the metropolitan
nomads. He is antipodal to the Manhattanist bachelor as to the Tokyoite woman.
Zampanò is equally incompatible with the radical figurations that precede
metropolitanism: No-Stop City’s neo-nomads, who walk across a comprehensively
technified world with no need for a motive system, as well as Supersurface’s
liberated hippies that roam around over their endless vivifying grid, wearing beat
clothing and growing beards, enjoying merry company and fraternity. The
neo-nomads are freed, emancipated from work and any practical obligation, master
magic technology and their lifestyle lysergic.10 Zampanò has no privilege of
election: he struggles to fulfill primary needs. He has no privilege of fairness: he
steals, cheats, and brutalizes. Zampanò is not entitled to freedom, he drifts along an
anarchic route throughout untamed chaos.

2.2.8 Site and Program

In his Sub-urbanism and the Art of Memory of 2003 Sébastien Marot describes
Koolhaas’ approach as ‘super-urbanism’ entailing a complete role reversal between

8
The ‘numerological diction’ is a filming technique that mounts in studio the audio tracks of effects
and voices onto mute footage. The method allowed Fellini to direct a diverse cast of international
actors that would roam the scene spelling out nothing but numbers or speaking each in their
mother language. He could even intervene live in the scene shouting orders and suggestions
through a loudspeaker. Fellini took large advantage of the virtuosities of the audio technicians at
Cinecittà, arousing acrimonious criticism from American colleagues, who considered his method
unorthodox.
9
In an interview to Antonio Gnoli and Franco Volpi, Jünger asserts: “Ho cercato di mettere a fuoco
tutto ciò nel saggio Der Waldgang (Trattato del Ribelle), in cui il Ribelle, l’Anarca, «passando al
bosco», cioè ritirandosi nei penetrali di sé stesso, affronta e vince l’angoscia, il dubbio e il dolore.
[…] Dal punto di vista dell’Anarca, del grande Solitario, totalitarismo o democrazia di massa non
fanno molta differenza. L’Anarca vive negli interstizi della società, la realtà che lo circonda in
fondo gli è indifferente” (Jünger 2006, pp. 53–5).
10
About the ‘erotic manipulation’ of space in Superstudio as well as in Loos and de Bastide, see:
sub-chapters ‘Unsolicited attentions’, ‘Baker is the landscape’, and ‘Uneven parallels’ in Chap. 5
of this book.
2.2 A Critique of Metropolitanism 17

the major project categories of ‘site and programme’ (Marot 2003, p. iii). The ‘great
question’ in the design field posed by Alberti of “how to choose a site where a city
or a programme will be built” (Marot 2003, p. i) has been transformed into “the
programme […] envisioned, shaped and built as site” (Marot 2003, p. iii). Faced
with the uncontested primacy of super-urbanism, Marot launches the
‘sub-urbanism’ alternative with a plea for a symmetrical role reversal whereby “the
site becomes the regulatory idea of the project” (Marot 2003, p. iv, note 1) without
resurrecting passéiste formulae.

2.2.9 Memory and Verticality

As much as super-urbanism operates on the metropolitan, sub-urbanism operates on

the ‘third territorial state’ between city and country, the suburban. To derive a series
of ‘heuristic principles’ applicable to design work on this third condition, Marot
draws on Frances Yates’ investigation of the ancient art of memory11 and John
Dixon Hunt’s work on the history of the art of gardens.12 As ancient rhetors used to
associate a sequence of concepts to places within an imagined architecture or
anthropic landscape, the art of garden can be regarded ‘as a medium for the
semantization of the land, lending to nature the status of landscape’ by means of
plotted correspondences of “a fountain to a spring, a grotto to caves, […] the
parquetry of flowerbeds to the divided plots of cultivated fields” (Marot 2003,
p. 20). A point by point correspondence of the imprint of thought and action,
interpretation and manipulation, analysis and design, characterizes Marot’s
sub-urbanist approach, whereby the ‘heuristic principles’ or ‘precepts’ of memory
and depth elaborate on both the temporal and spatial stratification of the site (Marot
2003, p. iii). This weft of projected correspondences eventually precipitates into the
idea of the ‘verticalization of landscape’ in multiple layers, vertically reorganizing
entities traditionally arranged along a horizontal distribution (urban, political,
agricultural, wild/divine nature, timeline). The verticalization of landscape through
superimposed geo-memory layers is the core of a long-gestated sub-urbanist
manifesto, Palimpsestuous Ithaca, enwoven by Marot over several years as a
specular narrative to Koolhaas’ retroactive manifesto for Manhattan.13 For Marot,
the geological stratification deep down in the profundity of Ithaca’s glacial lake is
the specular counterpart to the programmatic congestion building upwards on top of
Manhattan’s bedrock.

11
Marot is referring to Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1966.
12
Marot is referring to John Dixon Hunt, L’Art du jardin et son histoire, Odile Jacob 1996.
13
See online: Marot’s F.L. Olmsted Lecture at Harvard GSD 2010; Berlage Public Lecture
Program at TU Delft 2013.
18 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

2.2.10 Horizontal Syntax

A counterpart to the metropolitanist vision, New Urbanism, sees its charter pub-
lished in 2000 (Leccese and McCormick 2000). Since 1993, the new urbanists have
assembled retrograde visions in analogy with a Christopher Alexander’s ‘pattern
language’ (Alexander 1977), arranged according to the three scales of ‘region:
metropolis, city, and town’, ‘neighborhood, district, and corridor’, and ‘block,
street, and building’. In attacking the sprawling of American suburbia and infras-
tructural dispersion, new urbanism calls for the consolidation of a totally ‘hori-
zontal’ hierarchy, a backward-looking network of urban nodes with syntactical
structure (Yaro 2000, p. 22), and a return to past figurations on the ground (Rossi
1982, p. 51). New urbanism’s horizontal hierarchy forges re-enactments of the
‘persistent plan’ mentioned by Rossi with reference to Marcel Pöete’s work. The
recipe of ‘new urbanism’ can be regarded as an adapted version of the traditional
syntax of urban space, expanded over the horizontal dimension to the point that any
vertical articulation results irrelevant. The loss of vertical articulation denotes the
disappointing insubstantiality of a counterfeited solution.
Landscape urbanism and new urbanism can be interpreted as antipodal per-
spectives within the same field of an asserted novel ruralist, socially aware, and
ecological sensitivity, which is starting to erode the metropolitanist aura by
exploring space from a ‘regionalist’ perspective.

2.3 A Critique of Landscape Urbanism

2.3.1 Machinic Landscapes

The idea of the landscape as a framework, the productive interrelation between

multiple layers of interdependent variables, involving first of all the nature/artifice
systemic commingling and material interfacing, the interaction of cultural imprints
and environmental mechanics, the poietic concepts, the locale and their assembled
in situ transcription are, in fact, the novelty of ‘landscape urbanism’ announced in
James Corner’s Recovering the Landscape of 1999.14 The idea of landscape
urbanism will be later broken down into practically identifiable actions in Moshen
Mostafavi and Ciro Najle’s manual for the machinic landscape (Mostafavi and
Najle 2003, pp. 6–9). There, Mostafavi’s introductory essay cursorily summarizes

14
The work investigates “the inevitable constructedness of landscape (that is neither natural nor
given) and how productive reciprocities among ideas, representations, and physical spaces may be
better understood” (Corner 1999, p. ix).
2.3 A Critique of Landscape Urbanism 19

its characteristic points, further elaborated in essays by other authors, such as that of
the dissolution of the distinction between city and countryside, and those of the
temporality of the ever-incomplete landscape opposed to the implicit finitude of
zoning, the landscape as a framework of imagination, the territory as a dialogue
between buildings and landscapes where each term is simultaneously present to be,
or to be construed as, the other. Furthermore, the combination of urbanism and
landscape by way of “transposition of techniques and vocabulary […] on a meta-
phoric and metonymic register” produces a multilayered aggregate of cultural,
social and political agents interacting with the ‘formal and aesthetic performance’.
Finally, the idea of the landscape’s process-based temporal relativeness (the
ephemerality of instant configuration inseparable from the long span of the overall
succession) and the idea of the operational productiveness adopted from the ven-
erable practice of agriculture (where visual appearance is under-arched by func-
tioning) engender the demise of formal contextualism. The shift is from typological
manipulation to management of processes and relational assemblages.

2.3.2 The Role of External Forces

However, one of the most debatable issues brought over by Mostafavi as the very
core of landscape urbanism’s proposal is the necessary ‘openness’ to “the role of
external forces in the shaping of our cities”, forces such as “the opening and closing
times of international financial markets” (Mostafavi and Najle 2003, p. 9). The
impact of the international financial markets in the shaping of cities would show its
drawbacks after the explosion of the 2007 crisis generated by the planetary
financialization of territorial transformations. The concept of ‘openness to external
forces’ is constructed upon the logics of the infinite growth model applied to the
field of space production on the wake of the uncritical embracement of Wall Street’s
and the City’s neo-hedonism of the early 2000s, a diffuse attitude among the design
academia and practice pushing to partake in the globalization banquet. The New
York High Line urban regeneration initiative, led by the Friends of the High Line
civic association and propelled by the Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Corner’s pro-
ject, was saluted worldwide as the highest achievement in the virtuous rehabilitation
of abandoned urban heritage in metropolitan environments. It now becomes
interesting to reassess such an enterprise, combining the virtues of societal activism,
public space generation and private profitability, not simply for its generic recon-
ciliation of public and private interests or grass-root and design-driven processes,
but also on the basis of a more articulated analysis of the redistribution of its
benefits over the material and social fabric at a regional scale beyond the
metropolitan ambit. That is reconsidering the operation in terms of the intensifi-
cation of public amenities in privileged environments parallel to the dispersal of
by-consequences over the suburban area.
20 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

2.3.3 Athens

Such initiatives, identifiable with “the alternative models of urbanism […] open to
[…] participation by all citizens” demising “the nostalgic yearning for lost models
of public space, monuments, piazzas” (Mostafavi and Najle 2003, p. 9) mentioned
in Mostafavi’s conclusions to the manual, explicitly spell out the diametrical col-
lision of the principles of landscape urbanism with the modes of construction of the
architecture of the traditional western city. We should therefore investigate whether
this “redefinition of the public sphere” is fit to “set the scene (albeit momentarily)
for democracy in action” as announced.
By advocating the shift “from the deliberate manipulation of typological con-
figurations […] to the systematic management of virtually open relational assem-
blages”, Najle clearly formulates landscape urbanism’s proposed alternative,
representing a novel ‘browsing across contingency’ as opposed to a traditional
‘ideological positioning’, with the intention to bury Rossi’s theory of the city.
However, the idea of the High Line as a Manhattanist agora of novel modes of
democracy falls short of articulation compared to the Arendtian exploration of
logos-action space of the Greek polis (Arendt 1998, pp. 192–8),15 as well as of
auto-poietic depth before Aldo Rossi’s epics on the mythical manifestation of
public space in Pericles’ Athens (Rossi 1982, p. 131).

2.3.4 Elitist Strolls, Autocratic Recreations

In this regard, we could assess the comprehensive virtues of the High Line enter-
prise (1999–ongoing) with the virtues of the Lion Mountain project by Tom Leader
Studio of 2016. On the one hand, the elitist civic activism of Manhattan residents
opens the way to bulks of private profits along the non-programmed trajectory of a
design of contingencies that yields a hyper-park for Metropolitanites16 and tourists.
On the other hand, a large scale territorial transformation, heavily top-down pro-
grammed by the institutions of an authoritarian regime and hetero-directed by a
design platform based on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, operates on the
obsolete structures of a run-down amusement park in the peripheral area of a
Chinese conurbation. The Lion Mountain project includes the recreation of pic-
turesque landscapes combining a mountain and an artificial lake, the creation of a
series of open or enclosed artificial biomes controlling both flora and fauna, a
number of varied activity zones recovering visual connection to lost geographic

15
See in particular ‘The Greek Solution’, in section ‘V. Action’.
16
Regarding the earlier elitist tribe of sterile metropolitan bachelors described by Koolhaas as
intent on redesigning their own body (see sub-chapter ‘Metropolitan spell’), we can interpret the
redesign of the High Line sparked by a participative process as a self-redesigning action, applied to
the inherent habitat of the group.
2.3 A Critique of Landscape Urbanism 21

features. The project also reconstitutes cultural continuity with the loci of an ancient
lifestyle enshrined in surviving painting, such as the Prosperous Suzhou scroll.
Elaborated by designers with no relationship to the resident community, the project
tends to reconnect the alienated mega-city agglomeration with its orographic sub-
strate at the geographic scale. An archeological reconstruction/reinvention of the
city’s lost cultural heritage is the bearing idea of the project, that is the reinstating of
a supporting mythology alternative to the unrooted drives of finance.

2.3.5 Dissensus or Barbarism

Despite the open reference to Félix Guattari’s ‘relational assemblages’, the

attempted ‘agorafication’ of the High Line does not mark any divarication from the
phenomenon of globalization. In his The Three Ecologies, in fact, Guattari intro-
duces the concept of ‘relational assemblages’ to propose a possible ‘social ecology’
in sheer response to globalization (Guattari 2000, p. 60). ‘Living autopoietic
machines’ (Guattari 2000, p. 61) formed by groups of individuals perform “pro-
cesses of continuous resingularization [that makes them] more united and
increasingly different”. That is a social phenomenon of ‘heterogenesis’ (Guattari
2000, p. 69)17 aiming to enact “a multifaceted movement, deploying agencies […]
and dispositives that will simultaneously analyse and produce subjectivity”
(Guattari 2000, p. 68). The ‘autopoiesis of subjectivity’ is for Guattari destined to
install itself in the ‘realms of environment’, ‘social and institutional assemblages’,
and ‘landscapes and phantasies of the most intimate spheres of the individual’
(Guattari 2000, p. 69).
The Italian biologist Almo Farina links globalization to a ‘loss of diversity’ and
consequent production of ‘heterogeneity’ (Farina 2009, pp. 143–53). Gilles
Clément describes the same phenomenon as a new Pangea condition incumbent on
the planet due to the vertiginously increasing mobility of humans (Clément 2015,
p. 26). Yet, the apparent increasing richness within an area, due to unintentional or
planned dissemination of alien seeds from every corner of the Earth, cannot
compensate for the real decreasing bio-diversity of the planet. The increasing local
bio-diversity of any area and the decreasing overall bio-diversity, in fact, are the
two sides of the general loss of order of the planetary ecosystem due to global-
ization, tending towards entropy, chaos, heterogeneity, that is background noise.

17
It is worth mentioning that by ‘heterogenesis’, Guattari refers to the ‘increment of diversity’
counteracting globalization and not to the opposite notion of ‘heterogeneity’, used in biology to
mean ‘chaos’ and ‘entropy’ in a background that becomes indistinct. See Chap. 7 in this book.
22 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

It is by ‘cultivating dissensus’ (Guattari 2000, p. 50) towards the ‘Integrated

World Capitalism (IWC)’,18 whose contemporary manifestation is identified with
globalization, that the autopoietic subjectivity can rehabilitate the three spheres of
environmental, social, and mental ecology.19 Dissensus towards IWC is dissensus
towards globalization as to a novel barbarism. Therefore, the ‘relational assem-
blages’ mentioned by Najle, despite his implied references, don’t resemble
Guattari’s “collective assemblages of enunciation” (Guattari 2000, p. 61) (syntac-
tical assemblages of autopoietic subjectification). Najle’s ‘relational assemblages’
are rather aligned with the opposite agency of the Guattarian system, the “imaginary
crowd aggregates” (Guattari 2000, p. 60) of standardized subjectivity generated by
IWC’s conversion to syntax production.

2.4 A Critique of the Urban Paradigm and Its Territory

2.4.1 Of the Continuity of the Production Matrix

in the Territory

The idea of a territory supported by “a [recognizable] structure of invariant formal

matrices”20 capable to produce ‘durable wealth’ advocated by Alberto Magnaghi
and the scuola territorialista (Magnaghi 2010, p. 299), is in fact aligned with
Guattari’s description of the Japanese and Italian virtuous models of ‘reindividu-
alization’ by means of “grafting high-tech industries onto a collective subjectivity,
while retaining ties to a sometimes very distant past”. Here, individualized col-
lective subjectivity is inseparably implanted into the persisting territorial ‘matrix’ of
“certain archaic features of the pre-capitalist era [that] have been inherited and
maintained” (Guattari 2000, p. 63).
Magnaghi’s formulation of “a structure of invariant formal matrices” supporting
the territory certainly draws upon Rossi’s idea of the permanence of form in urban
artifacts. However, the long-term productive quality installed upon that structure
evokes the stability of an Arcadian condition in history.

18
According to Guattari, IWC, or post-industrial capitalism, tends to move away from the pro-
duction of goods and services in favor of the production of signs, syntax, and subjectivity (Guattari
2000, p. 47) standardized in three tiers including serial subjectivity of the salaried, mass subjec-
tivity of the uninsured, and elitist subjectivity of the executive (Guattari 2000, p. 61).
19
Guattari calls ‘ecosophy’ the complex of the three ecological spheres (Guattari 2000, p. 41).
20
Translation by the author from the Italian original.
2.4 A Critique of the Urban Paradigm and Its Territory 23

2.4.2 Of the Continuity of the Spatial Substance

in the Industrial City

According to Rossi, the vision of a permanent Arcadia falls into the stream of
‘romantic socialism’ traced back to William Morris and the Modern Movement that
naively consider “the problem of modern urbanism […] as determined by the city’s
historical relationship to the Industrial Revolution”. Where an Arcadian vision
evokes the problem of the modern city as the problem of the industrial city, per
Rossi, instead, “the problem of the large city” precedes the industrial period and is,
in fact, “the problem of the city itself”. He maintains, in fact, the principle of the
essential continuity of urban problems, that is the refusal of any change of quality
between classical, ancient, modern, and post-modern spatial conditions. Friedrich
Engels is quoted with respect to this very point as an inerrable authority, while his
dialectic materialism is the compass that orients the whole of Rossi’s theory of the
city (Rossi 1982, pp. 154–5).

2.4.3 City as Field of Application of Economic

and Political Forces

The historic chain of violent downfalls and ruthless upheavals accumulated onto the
city’s material register, including demolitions, reconstructions, urban reforms, equal
for their destructive effects to war and bombings, are nothing but “accidental
occurrences” capable to “accelerate certain tendencies that already exist” and permit
“a more rapid realization of intentions that are already present in economic form”
such as “building, acquiring, and selling of land”. The underlying dialectic of the
‘constant forces that unfold throughout history according to occasional directions
offered to them’ is a dialectic of “normal economic forces”. A shift in the quality of
the city, that is the appearance of a distinct spatial stuff, might only have a chance to
occur in the transition from the capitalistic to a perfect Socialist city induced by the
abolition of the private property. But Rossi’s analysis is engaged and rooted in the
existing state of things, not projected into a possible future (Rossi 1982, pp. 141–4).
The application of economic forces to the structure of the capitalistic city is, in
fact, manifested in “speculation”, which largely determines the city’s growth and
ultimately its ‘form’ in combination with another underlying agency, that of the
‘political choice’. The ‘political choice’ can be identified with the ‘plan’, which
throughout Rossi’s reflection is attributed an autonomous self-agency. The political
choices in fact are converted into ‘plans that impose themselves with the force of an
urban artifact’, or the “deeds of certain individuals whose wills acted as historical
forces”. Political forces converted into plans and deeds join the economic forces to
shape the underlying dynamic of the urban formation (Rossi 1982, pp. 140–2).
24 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

2.4.4 Speculation as Vehicle of Trans-historical Aspirations

Rossi’s notion of ‘speculation’ regarded as the application of economic forces to the

process of urban formation, relies on Maurice Halbwachs’ analysis of the deep
transformations impressed by the transition from ancien régime to modernity in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.21 Halbwachs punctually reconstructs the
reform of Paris’ layout of boulevards, avenues, and streets, implemented across the
whole of the nineteenth century, originating from visions that started surfacing as
far back as under the reign of Luis XIV. Those visions are then systematically
(although incompletely) formalized during the revolutionary regime, partially
implemented under the First Empire, continued during the Restauration and the July
monarchy, to be monumentally completed under the direction of Baron Haussmann
during the Second Empire.
Formations of trans-historical, even more than collective, aspirations for a novel
spatial order hover catalyzing until circumstantial conditions occur to offer the
chance to precipitate. The large land acquisitions operated by the revolutionary
regime after the decrees for the nationalization of clerical and monarchic property
and for the confiscation of émigré property between 1789 and 1792, with conse-
quent sales and redistributions over the following two decades, are the gate that
channels the materialization of the urban reform of Paris and consolidate the
practice of expropriation for the action of the Prefect of Seine in the third quarter of
the century. According to Halbwachs, the term ‘expropriations’, beyond its plain
legal notion, comes to represent a more general class of land property dynamics
driven by economic forces caught in the act of their materialization into urban
space. Rossi consequently resorts to ‘expropriations’ to refer to ‘purely economic
phenomena’ producing ‘total acts’ of urban transformation, whose specific cir-
cumstances are irrelevant (Rossi 1982, p. 143). More generally, we could think of
‘expropriation’ as the deeper dynamic driving a chronologic trajectory to perturb a
spatial surface, by which history precipitates into geography.

2.4.5 The Monographic Studies on the Trans-historical

Aspirations of a City

In ‘Les plans d’extension et d’aménagement de Paris avant le XIXe siècle Paris’ of

1920, Halbwachs analyzes the ambitious Plan des Artistes pour Paris proposed by
the temporary commission of artists of the revolution in 1793 to find that it results
surprisingly coherent with the urban renovation implemented by Haussmann in the

21
Rossi refers to Les expropriations et les prix de terrains à Paris (1860–1900) published by
Cornély in 1909 and its second extended edition La population et les tracés de voies à Paris
depuis un siècle published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1925.
2.4 A Critique of the Urban Paradigm and Its Territory 25

1850s and 1860s (Halbwachs 1920).22 What is a spatial manifesto of the seize of
power enacted by the bourgeoisie over the ancien régime is implemented by a
‘regime promising the extension of material prosperity while practicing the
restrictions of political rights’ (Rossi 1982, p. 142). Haussmann’s vast program of
boulevards in Paris, in fact, can be considered the formal occurrence exhibiting the
economic hegemony of that same bourgeoisie over the working class (Rossi 1982,
p. 142), sanctioned by the massacres of the Communards in 1871.
The implementation of the urban axis of Rue de Rivoli, is the epitome of
Halbwachs’ urban thesis. Halbwachs had already reconstructed how plans for the
reform of the urban front north of the garden of the Tuileries can be traced back to
Louis XIV (Halbwachs 1909, 1920). The Plan des Artistes of the Revolution, which
had just guillotined Louis XVI, revives those intentions and plans an urban axis on
the north side of the gardens from Place de la Concorde, alongside the Palais du
Louvre. From there, the axis shifts south to realign itself with the front façade of the
palais. The façade of the palais becomes the west terminal of a grand boulevard
extending eastwards up to the monumental circus of Place de la Bastille by cutting
through the medieval fabric of Paris. The monarchic and revolutionary plans would
then be implemented with secondary variations at a later phase, when the institu-
tions that had traced them had been overturned.
Napoleon will in fact extend eastwards the codes imposing a uniform façade that
had already been set half century before over the private buildings on the north front
of Place de la Concorde. The constructions on the north side of the Tuileries
gardens up to the front of the Louvre are then completed according to a similar
urban uniformity, celebrating then name of one of the emperor’s first victories
against the Austrians at Rivoli. The restored monarchies and the Second Empire
will complete the urban axis from the Louvre onwards. Haussmann will revise the
impracticable alignment proposed by the Plan des Artistes to more simply extend
the existing segment overriding the winding alleys to join Rue Saint-Antoine. The
new alignment will more practically take advantage of the ecclesiastical expropri-
ations of the revolutionary period. Solid masses will be pierced and reshaped into
façades to eventually reconnect the Concorde to the Bastille.
Moreover, Rue de Rivoli, ideally connecting the Bois de Boulogne with the Bois
de Vicennes, becomes the central segment of the east–west urban axis of the grand
croisèe, the cross that refounds the urban structure of a novel Paris according to
Haussmann’s monumental schemes (Halbwachs 1920, pp. 12–3). Halbwachs
concludes that:

22
Halbwachs’ essay, appeared in the journal La vie urbaine, is largely based on the 1913 Aperçu
historique edited by Louis Bonnier and Marcel Pöete gathering the work of the Commission de
l’Extension de Paris of the Prefecture de la Seine, in-charge of the preparatory work for the city
plan competition of 1919. The Aperçu studies the movements of the population of Paris towards
the suburbs in the nineteenth century compared to the same phenomenon in other French cities as
well as London and Berlin. Pöete is also founder of the journal La vie urbaine.
26 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

… les tracés de voie et le changements de la estructure superficielle de Paris s’espliquent

non point par les desseins concertés d’un ou plusieurs individus, par des volontés
particulières, mais par des tendances ou besoins collectifs auxquels les constructeurs,
architects, préfets, conseils municipaux, chef d’État ont obéi, sans prendre, de ces forces
sociales, une conscience bien claire, et, quelquefois, avec l’illusion qu’ils s’inspiraient de
leurs conceptions propres.23 (Halbwachs 1920, p. 20)

Transitioning from rationalism to modernity via empiricism, from aristocracy to

bourgeoisie via revolutions, from monarchy to empire via revolutionary republic,
the urban transformations (or expropriations) of the city constitute the material
register of French history in general, epitomized by the accumulation of monuments
on the east-west axis of the croisèe, therefore axe historique, from La Bastille to La
Villette.

2.4.6 Dialectic Materialism and Globalization

The acceptance of the violence of the historic process over the territory charac-
terizes Rossi’s vision, where radical degradation opens the way to spatial refor-
mation. The 1859 plan Cerdá for Barcelona exemplifies for Rossi an
‘expropriation’, in which the economic forces of speculation are offered the
opportunity to fulfill their aims only once the plan lends itself to a profound
degradation. The original plan, a technological vision ‘too advanced for its time’
informed to an ‘untenable’ low density, has to convert its illes into massively
constructed blocks, ‘magnificently lending themselves to the aims of speculation’,
in order to produce the unparalleled urban environment of Barcelona (Rossi 1982,
p. 150). It is a ‘total act’ of transformation freeing the flow of ‘normal economic
forces’ regardless of the miserable compromises of its ‘accidental occurrences’.
Rossi’s vision of the economic forces unfolding over the urban space is construed
on the same dialectic materialism that will inform the endless deterritorialization
and reterritorialization cycles, rewriting the geographic canvas of Deleuze Guattari.
Rossi’s idea of speculation as the motor of urban formation, on the one hand,
reaches beyond accidental circumstance and toward the dynamic of fundamental
forces of a non-pulse history in the process of becoming geography, in a leap
analogous to Deleueze Guattari’s tension towards the Plan(e) of Immanence. On the
other hand, Rossi’s dialectic materialism renounces to face the expansion of
globalization and remains bound to pre-globalization conditions, under which the
negotiation with nature is localized and unique even in the sprawling suburbs. The
city remains to Rossi a ‘fact in nature’ and a ‘work of art’, that is the greatest good,

23
In English: “… the street layout and the changes in the superficial structure of Paris are explained
not at all by the practical designs of one or more individuals, not by personal wills, but rather by
collective tendencies or needs, which the builders, architects, prefects, municipal councils, heads
of state have obeyed, without apprehending, of those social forces, a clear awareness, and,
sometimes, with the illusion to be inspired by their own conceptions.” [translation by the author]
2.4 A Critique of the Urban Paradigm and Its Territory 27

the “human achievement par excellence”.24 Tellingly, in the introduction to the

American edition of The Architecture of the City, he claims that “American
architecture is above all ‘the architecture of the city’: primary elements, monu-
ments, parts” (Rossi 1982, p. 15). “Amorphous zones do not exist in the city, or
where they do, they are moments of a process of transformation […] as in the
suburbs of the American city”, awaiting “redevelopment”. His explanation of the
American city is that of English matrixes transplanted into the New World, noting
by Peter Hall that the “idea of the precinct” has been practiced for centuries in
London’s colleges and inns of court, up to Patrick Abercrombie’s post-war plan for
the peripheral detouring of through traffic for the Westminster and Bloomsbury
areas (Rossi 1982, p. 95).

2.5 A Second Critique of Landscape Urbanism

2.5.1 A New Ethos for the Machinic Landscape

Despite Mostafavi and Najle’s overall edition, the ideology of the ‘machinic
landscape’ is construed in the essays by Christopher Hight and James Corner. Hight
elaborates on several fundamental concepts that define the identity of landscape
urbanism through transdisciplinary contagion between architecture, planning and
landscape design.
Among these concepts, central is the replacement of the ethics of architecture,
operating through ‘stasis, truth, wholeness, and timelessness’, and the ethics of
planning, based on ‘control, determinism, and hierarchy’, with an ethos of land-
scape design, operating through ‘temporality, complexity, and soft-control’ (Hight
2003, p. 24).
The reformulation of a new sense of temporality of the project in the direction of
the management of an open, dynamic, and impermanent process, rather than the
definition of a completed configuration fixed forever, is probably one of the highest
contribution of landscape urbanism to the recent discourse on the contemporary

24
Rossi refers to “human achievement par excellence” (Rossi 1982, p. 33); or “human creation par
excellence” (Rossi 1982, p. 57); or “human thing par excellence” (Rossi 1982, p. 112, 163). Here,
Rossi is rephrasing Lewis Mumford defining the city “a fact in nature [and] man’s greatest work of art”
(Mumford 1938, p. 5) in conjunction with Claude Lévi-Strauss aphoristic formulation “La ville … la
chose humaine par excellence” from p. 122 of the classic 1955 Plon edition of Tristes Tropiques. Rossi
discusses the two mentioned definitions respectively in notes 1 and 2 to Chap. 1 of his book (Rossi
1982, p. 180). Tristes Tropiques assembles the recollections of Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological, as well
as auto-analytical, explorations in South America (Lévi-Strauss 2012). In the same book, Lévi-Strauss
recounts of the aborted foundation of a fortified colony predating Rio de Janeiro by the hand of a
riotous French/native bunch led by Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon. The construction of Fort Coligny
off the Bahía de Guanabara will end up catastrophically in an extenuating turmoil of somber insanity
and reciprocal treacheries. The story forms a grotesque pendant in relation to the triumphal claim of
excellence rendered to the construction of cities.
28 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

continuum. Succession mapping-based plans such as Michel Desvigne’s

Thirty-Year Planting Development for Guyancourt (1989), centered on the natural
succession of the ecosystem, opened the way for Corner’s elaborations on tem-
porality and certainly constituted the foundations for projects by phases such as
Field Operation’s Downsview Park in Toronto (1999) and Fresh Kills Park in New
York (2003–ongoing).

2.5.2 Simulacrum-Depiction and Model-Encoding

Another significant replacement of traits proper to the ethics of architecture with

those of landscape that is claimed by Hight to landscape urbanism relies on the
project’s contamination with the scenographic character of landscape as opposed to
the idea of the project as a ‘model of order’. The reference in this case is to the
inferiority attributed by Reyner Banham to the landscape designer vis-à-vis the
architect, consequent to the ethically subordinate condition of the act of ‘depicting
an order’ to the act of ‘operating on the order’ (Hight 2003, p. 25).
As a result of the ethical contamination, the design of the phenomenological
simulacrum can be admitted into the field of action of the novel architect dealing
with softness and impermanence across time. The depiction of the world is after all
an act of analysis, a way of organizing the magma of reality into an order. To this
respect, Corner’s role in emancipating the landscape architecture practice from a
conventional twofold-indirect agency is evident.
The origins of landscape design are conventionally described as following a
twofold-indirect agency, orchestrating a scenery by imitating a mimesis of a natural
context as depicted in a painting. As a multiverse agent, the emancipated landscape
architect, conversely, controls the eidetic-strategic hybridization of ‘simulacrum
depiction’ and ‘model encoding’ (Hight 2003, p. 27), eventually acting on both
ends of the landscape construct: what in Farina’s cognitive model is described as
the observer and the ecosystem (i.e.,the ‘cognitive’ and ‘physical’ properties of
landscape) (Farina 2009, pp. 15–6). The opposition ‘depiction of the simulacrum’
versus ‘encoding of the model’ again refers to the Deleuze-Guattarian duality of the
series tracing-arborescence-history versus mapping-rhizome-geography (Deluze
and Guattari 1987, p. 296) and that of the ‘plan(e) of transcendence’ (subjectivities
and identifications) (Deluze and Guattari 1987, pp. 265–6) versus the ‘plan(e) of
immanence’ (intensities and speed) (Deluze and Guattari 1987, pp. 254–5), whose
plotted interface casts a comprehensive reflection of the world.
We will come back to the construct of the two plan(e)s further on, as it results
fundamental in the merging of scientific-cognitive with geophilosophical-territorial
paradigms. As of now, we can identify a proportionality between the series of
‘tracing/subjectivity/horizontal-organization-of-facialities/simulacrum depiction’ and
‘mapping/intensity/horizontal-continuum-with-degrees/model-encoding’ (Deluze and
Guattari 1987, p. 296), leading from a picturesque to a metabolist approach to the
contemporary continuum promoted by landscape urbanism.
2.5 A Second Critique of Landscape Urbanism 29

The most relevant contribution from landscape urbanism to the contemporary

discourse on landscape is certainly the consolidation of this idea of temporality and
dynamic formation both through theoretic and critic elaboration.

2.5.3 Of Planes and Rotations

The same coherence cannot be found instead in Hight’s discourse advocating for the
rotation of the operational plane of design from a vertical to a horizontal alignment. On
that rotation, the ‘orientalization’ of architecture through landscape as its ‘adjacent
other’ (Hight 2003, p. 23), attributed to landscape urbanism, finds its foundation. As
we propose to illustrate, what Hight presents in the core of his essay as a reformulation
of the subjectivity of architecture operated by landscape by way of rotating the pro-
ject’s organizational plane from the asserted vertical alignment of architecture to the
horizontal alignment of landscape, appears to be the exact opposite. That operation
represents, in fact, the adoption of the traditional organizational horizontality of
architecture into the practice of landscape. A colonization of landscape of such a sort
operated by architecture, corresponds to the imposition of a conquering regime
(reterritorialization) while excluding a specular destabilization of the conqueror’s
condition (deterritorialization) deriving from the exposition to the conquered.
Hight starts from Walter Benjamin’s intuition of the ‘longitudinal and transversal
cuts through the world’s substance’ (Fig. 2.2), intended as, respectively, the pictorial
(picturesque) representation that encloses things and the symbolic graphics (dia-
gramming, mapping) that encloses signs (Hight 2003, p. 29). Canonic art theory, says
Higth referring to Rosalind Krauss, has generally identified the longitudinal cut with
the verticality of painting’s canvas and the transversal cut with the horizontality of
graphic printing’s flatbed (Fig. 2.3).25 A geometric discrepancy is yet generated
when Krauss uses Benjamin’s powerful intuition to backup her equally powerful
image of the transition from canvas to flatbed, as per Benjamin, both longitudinal and
transversal cuts are conspicuously operated by vertical planes, one longitudinal and
the other transversal (Fig. 2.4). The correspondence between the two visions can be
one of proportion, while their actual geometries diverge. On that geometric dis-
crepancy is actually elaborated Hight’s notion of the ‘rotation of planes’.

2.5.4 Of Planes and Masochism

Hight, in fact, follows to draw a parallel with Deleuze Guattari’s description of the
landscape as made of a horizontal expanse (milieu) of vertical facialities stating that

25
McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, Richard Cavell proposes the same consideration
(Cavell 2002, p. 125).
30 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

Fig. 2.2 Benjamin’s model of the longitudinal cut of things and transversal cut of signs (diagram rp)

“if the vertical face is aligned with the human subject, then the horizontal landscape
is the mode for all their processes of anti-Oedipalization: the ‘body without organs’,
the ‘becoming animal’, the rhizome, nomadology, the war machine” (Hight 2003,
p. 30).
With reference to Deleuze Guattari’s resourcing to a ‘masochism’ for the con-
version of a vertical organization, i.e., an Oedipal figuration or faciality, into a
horizontal organization of intensities and desires, i.e., a ‘body without organs’ or
landscape, Hight calls the rotation of axes that he describes a ‘masochism upon a
body of knowledge’ (Hight 2003, p. 31).
After identifying architecture with the vertical position of the Oedipal subject,
Hight concludes that “the proposition of landscape urbanism […] attempts to rotate
architecture out of its vertical alignment as a model of order, to deterritorialize […]
not the physical space of the city but the discipline’s precepts and ethos”.
Landscape urbanism is, in fact, first of all a ‘modality’ and an ‘attitude’ (Hight
2003, p. 32).26

26
At the same time, Hight also regards the prevalence of horizontal diagramming in landscape
urbanism as a groundbreaking rotation of the traditional vertical alignment of landscape painting.
2.5 A Second Critique of Landscape Urbanism 31

Fig. 2.3 Rosalind Krauss’ model of painting’s vertical canvas and graphic printing’s horizontal
flatbed (diagram rp)

2.5.5 Planes Galore and Diverse Temporalities

In truth, Deleuze Guattari’s description of the processes of anti-Oedipalization in

plateau 10 ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…’
of A Thousand Plateaus is probably the most adherent to the issues at stake and
articulate among their various narratives where landscape comes into play.27 Plateu 10,

27
Plateau 10 seems more relevant to the matters of landscape than plateau 6 ‘November 28, 1947:
How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?’ quoted by Hight. In plateau 6, Deleuze
Guattari are defining the term ‘Body without Organ’ as a Batesonian ‘continuous region of
intensity’ or ‘piece of immanence’ (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 158) that overcomes Couvierian
and structuralist taxonomies of the world. It is the narration of the term’s essential, rather than
spatial, characters that is the object of plateau 6. Plateau 10, instead, constitutes a much more
substantial volume centered on the spatial exploration of natural unfolding. There, the sequence of
Linnean serial, Couvierian/Levi-Straussian structuralist, and Batesonian immanent systems of
classification of the spatial field is elaborated in greater operative detail (Deluze and Guattari 1987,
32 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

Fig. 2.4 An observing mind and a walking observer introduced to interpret Benjamin’s model
(diagram rp)

in fact, interfaces two plan(e)s that are then, to our understanding, both horizontal.
Deleuze Guattari describe in fact the ‘plan(e) of immanence’ (introduced as ‘plan(e) of
consistency’ and also referred to as ‘plan(e) of haecceity’ or ‘the Octopus’, i.e.,the
‘Body without Organs’) regulated by the non-pulse time of Aeon (that is geography), as
coexisting with the ‘plan(e) of transcendence’ (the genetic plan(e) or teleological plan
(e) or ‘the plan(e) of subjectivities’) regulated by the pulse time of Chronos (that is
history) (Deluze and Guattari 1987, pp. 251, 254–5, 265–6). Although not explicitly
stated, it seems quite ascertained all through the narrative that the construct envisions
processes of ‘becoming’ converting the latter plan(e) into the former and vice versa in
cycles of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In any case, if the two plan(e)s are
coexisting, they must be parallel and therefore both horizontal. In fact, the incipit of
‘Memories of a Plan(e) Maker’ reads “Perhaps there are two planes, or two ways of
conceptualizing the plane” (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 265), prefiguring a planar
coincidence.

pp. 236–7). Also, the compared anatomy of the Plane of Immanence and the Plane of
Transcendence is explicitly formalized in sub-chapter ‘Memories of a Plan(e) Maker’ (Deluze and
Guattari 1987, pp. 265–6).
2.5 A Second Critique of Landscape Urbanism 33

The vertical alignment at stake in A Thousand Plateaus is relative to the ‘sub-

jectivities’ or ‘facialities’ and their individual organizations, while their distribution
remains over a horizontal plan(e).

2.5.6 Bartering Ethos

In architecture, the operational, organizational, metabolist, and functioning cut is,

traditionally, that of the horizontal plan, way before that of the vertical section.
After the plan, there comes the vertical silhouette of the façade, which is pictorial,
picturesque, and aesthetic. Landscape painting, instead, projects the longitudinal
organization of things onto the vertical canvas. In simpler words, far from regis-
tering a rotation of operative design planes, Hight’s discourse is registering land-
scape urbanism’s preference for horizontal symbolic diagramming over perspectival
figurative representation and exploration of the landscape, that is landscape
urbanism’s adoption of architectural modalities in the practice of landscape. The
‘ethos’28 of architecture is in this case colonially (heteronomously) applied to the
practice of landscape rather than the opposite. In Saidian terms, that corresponds to
an action of reterritorialization by the colonizer on the colonized, prevailing over
the specular deterritorialization of the colonizer produced by the exposition to the
‘Orient’.29 Indeed, it is more of an action of heteronomous colonization over the
practice of landscape design, rather than an autonomous reformulation of archi-
tecture, despite secondary reciprocal contagions. To this respect, landscape
urbanism turns landscape manipulation into a more profitable practice. Using
Deleuze Guattari’s phraseology, we could describe this passage in the practice of
landscape design as “the serial theme of sacrifice [yielding to] the structural theme
of the institution of the totem” (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 237): a figuration
representing the action of modernization operated by Levi-Strauss tending to
replace the analogy of series with the analogy of proportion in the interpretation of
the world. Deleuze Guattari’s BwO lies a step further.

2.5.7 Horizontal Organizations of Vertical Facialities

In an alternative interpretation, we propose that Benjamin’s ‘longitudinal cut of

things’ be the horizontal axis along which the observer slides ahead in its dynamic
exploration of the assemblage (distribution) of subjective entities (vertical faciali-
ties) performed through a continuous visual capture. The longitudinal cut of the
world is thus a diachronic (Chronos) and naturalistic cut. The ‘transversal cut of

See sub-chapter ‘Masochist planes’.

28

See sub-chapter ‘The colonial perspective of landscape urbanism’ in Chap. 5 of this book.
29
34 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

signs’, instead, is the punctual perception, or mental section of reality, operated not
by the sight, but rather by the mind of the immobile observer, nailed onto its
vertical axis (Aeon). The transversal cut of the world is thus an instant and abstract
cut. Once ascertained that in Benjamin’s image both planes are vertical, we could
even convene that the perception of the ‘transversal cut’ is prevalently vertical,
while the observation of the ‘longitudinal cut’ is prevalently horizontal as it is
performed through a trajectory sliding over the horizontal plane.
The ‘longitudinal cut of things’, no longer projected onto the picturesque canvas,
is thus identified with the horizontal organization peopled with vertical facialities
(Fig. 2.5).

Fig. 2.5 Benjamin’s model of the longitudinal cut of things and transversal cut of signs combined
with Deleuze Guattari’s description of the landscape as a horizontal organization of vertical
facialities (diagram rp)
2.5 A Second Critique of Landscape Urbanism 35

2.5.8 Multiplication of the Transversal Plane

The ‘transversal cut of signs’, instead, is encoded into the vertical stratification of
multiple horizontal operative diagrams, where the interactions among different
levels constitute the relational fabric of the landscape. The prevailing verticality,
then, is not that of pictorial facialities, but rather the vertical stratification of hor-
izontal operational diagrams that interpret the region. That vertical multiplication of
planes interlocks both temporal states and thematic mappings.
Multiple transversal cuts register the vertical projection of the perspectival and
subjective perception of the horizontal organization. The transversal plane is
multiple since it is different for each subject and also since the perception of the
same subject changes along the trajectory of exploration. A trajectory of exploration
also implies a longitudinal timeline, but just a secondary subjective timeline in
relation to the comprehensive timeline relative to the region. The longitudinal axis
registers this subjective temporal unfolding, whose character is fundamentally
figurative, by projecting the facialities of the region onto the picturesque canvas at
discrete times (Fig. 2.6).
The horizontal plane registers, by means of symbolic diagramming, the operative
organization of the region under various themes. The vertical multiplication of the
horizontal plane registers the primary temporal unfolding of the region at given
moments. This model of verticality is compatible with the construct of verticality
we have described while discussing Marot’s sub-urbanist proposal. George
Descombes’ project for the park of Lancy analyzed by Marot in ‘Between Garden
and Map’ (Marot 2003) shows the potential of a ‘verticalizing’ design to become an
in situ map: that is a multilayered cultural machine capable to rehabilitate a land-
scape as a repository of collective memory, while orchestrating its environmental
re-engineering.

2.5.9 For a Technocratic Governance of the Environment

In Landscape Infrastructure (2012), Pierre Belanger traces the roots of a noble

American lineage for the metabolist model of landscape urbanism. Lewis
Mumford’s identification of the ‘foundation role of landscape’ in shaping ‘urban
economies’ implies in fact the centrality of a technocratic governance of the
environment. Belanger refers to the “three main ways of modifying and humanizing
the visible landscape: agriculture and horticulture; […] city development and
architecture; […] works of engineering” (Belanger 2012, p. 310, note 1). However,
the implementations of landscape urbanism have often conceded to fashionable
formalisms, whereby conventional park designs deploy the abundant presence of
vegetation within metropolitan contexts to veil hetero-directed operations.
Munford’s work is a convenient base for both metabolist and culturalist elabo-
rations, as for Rossi’s monumental poetic construction dedicated to the city,
36 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

Fig. 2.6 Alternative landscape model implying the multiplication of the observers, the free
rotation of the axis of the transversal planes, and the vertical accumulation of horizontal
organizations of facialities and processes (diagram rp)

founded on the antipodal assertion that “the city is a fact in nature, […] [but] with
language itself, it remains man’s greatest work of art”30 (Rossi 1982, p. 180).
Mumford’s investigation of landscape formation, however, is bound as much to the
environmentalist/machinic apparatus model as it is to a semanticizing model,
evoked by Marot and Hunt on ancient bases, and to Patrick Geddes’ anthropo-
logical ‘Valley Section’ fresco.31 The ‘Valley Section’, in fact, is a militant

30
As we mentioned before, Rossi is quoting Mumford’s formulation along with Claude
Lévi-Strauss’ remarks about la ville as standing “at the point where nature and artifice meet”. Rossi
summarizes Lévi-Strauss’ take as “an object of nature and a subject of culture”.
31
See the double illustration: ‘The Valley Section and its social types: in their native habitat and in
their parallel urban manifestations’ (Geddes 1949b, pp. 166–7). See also the accompanying text:
“This relief and contour is also associated with a kindred diagrammatic picture of the primitive
occupations conditioned by this relief. This serves as an introduction to Rational Geography of
2.5 A Second Critique of Landscape Urbanism 37

manifesto depicting the dwelling space of man, the landscape at large, as the result
of the unfolding of collective sociocultural dynamics, rather than a technocratic
initiative, over the topographic platform (Geddes 1949b, pp. 163–7).

2.6 Crossing Culturalist Terrains

2.6.1 Embedding Semantic: For an Aesthetic Mastery

of the Surroundings

As Marot notes referring to Cicero via Hunt, in a semanticizing landscape model,

“thought can lodge [in earth] its own signs and display the full range of its states
and moods” (Marot 2003, p. 20), that is landscape as a manmade nature, rather than
a matter of design, is a matter of embedding semantic, or language into the land.
Undoubtedly, the idea of embedding semantics into the land has ancient roots. In
his Greater Perfections, Hunt reinterprets a letter of the sixteenth-century Lombard
humanist Jacopo Bonfadio to retrace the origin of the landscape model based on the
idea of a ‘trio of natures’. By this model, the first nature is fundamentally a cultural
perception of a pristine real or legendary wilderness, the second is the space trans-
formed by man for productive purposes, the third is a space where a linguistic for-
mulation, something we have referred to as mythology, is embedded, as in the garden
(Hunt 2000, pp. 32–75). The first nature is born at once with the second when the
agricultural turn spins the transition from the hunting-gathering to the
herding-cultivating condition. The appearance of a manmade space illuminates the
presence of the wilderness beyond its limits. Pristine nature is loaded with mythical
values and can be colonized by means of hierographies to inscribe the ‘numinous’ in it
(Hunt 2000, pp. 53–4, 61). The third nature descends from the demise of exclusively
productive purposes in the manipulation of land. A contemplative attitude, allowed by
the surplus accumulation of resources, seeks aesthetic and cultural pleasure in grace,

Cities, in terms of their regional origins. These are best studied and understood, to begin with, by
beginning with the Valley Section and its resultant occupations and corresponding types of set-
tlements. Note the Miner, the Woodman, and the Hunter on the heights; the Shepherd on the
grassy slopes; the poor Peasant (of oats or rye) on the lower slopes; and the rich Peasant (with
wheat, and in south it may be wine and oil) on the plain; finally, the Fisher (sailor, merchant, etc.)
at sea-level. For thus it is that cities have arisen and still arise. As the merchant nobles of Venice
sprang from the fishing-boat, or the millionaires of Pittsburg now arise beside the forge, so surely
also do their cities retain the essential character, that conditioned by their environment and
occupation.” (Geddes 1949b, pp. 165–6). The text of the 1949 edition is from the catalog to
Geddes’ first “Cities and Town Planning Exhibition”, London, Edinburg, Belfast, Dublin 1910–
1911, while the drawings are from the second exhibition, Madras 1915, assembled in India after
the sinking of the first exhibition en route to India.
38 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

that is the “Greater Perfections” of the garden, according to Francis Bacon’s definition
that gives the title to Hunt’s essay (Hunt 2000, p. 63). 32
The incipit for Hunt’s discourse on the three natures is Bonfadio’s epistle to
Plinio Tomacello of 1541, describing his country retreat on Lake Garda. Hunt
elaborates on the use of the expression ‘terza natura’ (third nature) referring to the
gardens where the ‘industria de’ paesani’ (the industry of the villagers) has ‘in-
corporated’, that is merged, nature and art (Hunt 2000, pp. 32–4). Analogies with
Pliny’s epistle to Domitius Apollinaris describing his Tuscum estate are noted by
Hunt but not elaborated upon.
It results quite clear from the original text that, by ‘third nature’, Bonfadio
plainly refers to a ‘third thing’ that is the combination of the two terms ‘nature’ and
‘art’. However, upon what is little more than a pretext, Hunt builds his sophisticated
formulation by tracing back wishful threads to Cicero’s description of an ‘alteram
naturam’ (‘other nature’) in his De natura deorum. Cicero’s ‘alteram naturam’ is
‘created’ by man’s hands ‘in rerum natura’ (‘within the natural world’) by sowing
crops, planting trees, redirecting rivers for irrigation purposes.33 The replacement of
the terms ‘nature’ and ‘art’ from Bonfadio’s epistle with Cicero’s ‘natural world’
and ‘other nature’ (for Hunt ‘primal nature’ and ‘agricultural land’), allows the
‘third nature’ of Bonfadio’s gardens on the lake to acquire a different sense and cast
the prefiguration of the ‘trio of natures’, that is a ‘cultural landscape’ notion. The
‘industry’ that the Garda villagers infuse into primal nature to create the alternative
nature of their gardens is the cultural agent that molds the landscape. The result is a
material narrative, exceeding the productive purposes of agriculture, aimed to
account for a community’s origin and reason in the world, that is villagers’ own
material mythology.
Bonfadio’s subsequent descriptions of the “world of citrus and olive groves,
orchards and green pastures” on the shores of Lake Garda, in opposition to the
surrounding “arduous […] and menacing mountains” (Hunt 2000, p. 34), acquire a
different projection in Hunt’s discourse, composing the ‘trio’ of primal nature,
agricultural land and garden into a sophisticated idea of landscape. Hunt knows

32
Marot’s references to Hunt are frequent and explicit. See his critical reading of Michael van der
Gucht’s etching, frontispiece to the Curiositez de la nature et de l’art sur la vegetation by the
Pierre Le Lorraine Abbé de Vallemont in ‘Envisioning Landscapes’ on Harvard Design Magazine
(Marot 2013, p. 92). The etching is described by Hunt as the explicit representation of his ‘trio of
nature’ interpretative model of landscape-making (Hunt 2000, p. 40).
33
Around 44 BC, Cicero states: “Terrenorum item commodorum omnis est in homine dominatus:
nos campis, nos montibus fruimur, nostri sunt amnes, nostri lacus, nos fruges serimus, nos arbores;
nos aquarum inductionibus terris fecunditatem damus, nos flumina arcemus, derigimus, avertimus;
nostris denique manibus in rerum natura quasi alteram naturam efficere conamur” (Cicero, De
natura deorum, par. 152). In English: “All the useful terrains, also, are mastered by man: we take
advantage of the fields and mountains, ours are the rivers and lakes, we sow corn and we plant
trees; we give fertility to the lands by channeling the waters, we coerce, divert, and redirect the
rivers; by our hands, eventually, we almost attempt to create another nature within the natural
world” [translation by the author].
2.6 Crossing Culturalist Terrains 39

well the Renaissance practice of summoning wishful authorities from the past to
backup new ideas. He probably follows a similar pattern for the pleasure of a subtle
intellectual construction.

2.6.2 Of Lovely and Horrid Epiphanies

The intense interest from famous or obscure humanists in the observation of the
territory throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has been extensively
explored by Piero Camporesi in Le belle contrade as the incubator of the modern
notion of landscape (Camporesi 2016, p. 5).34 In ‘Vaghezze e orridità’ (Lovely and
Horrid Epiphanies), Camporesi discourses on the descriptions of the idyllic grooves
on the shores of Lake Benaco (or Garda) from Ludovico Carbone, Pietro Cataneo,
or Agostino Gallo, while lines from Gio. Francesco Tinto’s La nobiltà di Verona of
1590 transfigure the incumbent horrors of Mount Baldo’s peaks into a shrine of
herbal treasures, whose deep valleys are frequented by ‘physicians, surgeons, and
apothecaries’ from all over (Camporesi 2016, p. 143 and p. 198, note 21). The
‘precious hortus sanitatis’ of Mount Baldo bears the signs of a slow but incipient
transition towards a sentiment of sublime, whose aesthetics will be formulated by
Edmund Burke almost two centuries later (Camporesi 2016, p. 148).
In ‘Paesaggio e lavoro umano’ (Landscape and Human Action), Camporesi
reconstruct the novel gaze shed over the lands in the mid-sixteenth century to
acknowledge man’s modifying action on nature through a myriad of literary
fragments. We learn how, before, the late capital of the Western Roman Empire,
Ravenna, had become a “fragment of the Orient plunged into the marshes”,
“Byzantium on the hazy Adriatic”, “aborted prototype of Venice”, “paradoxical
city”, “inverted world” (Camporesi 2016, p. 165),35 and its lands “cloaca foe-
tidissima Galliae Cisalpinae” (Cisalpine Gallia’s filthy cloaca), where “sitiunt vivi,
natant sepulti” (the living thirst, the dead float) (Camporesi 2016, p. 165).36 It is the
Dominican preacher Leandro Alberti that first “reconnoiters the real country” fol-
lowing the “long hydraulic strive” that had reclaimed the lands of the Bassa
Romagna into the “very fertile plains” later to be noticed along Michel de
Montaigne’s precursory Grand Tour in 1580 (Camporesi 2016, p. 164). According
to Camporesi, through his descriptions of those lands, Friar Alberti recognizes the
confluence of the “history of the work of man”, his “industrious knowledge” and
the “impassible power of nature” in the notion of “territory” that he deploys largely
in his descriptions of the Italic peninsula. As in his description of the agrarian

34
In Chap. 1 (Introduction) of this book, we have argued for the translation of the Italian term
‘contrade’ to English as ‘shires’ for its capacity to evoke the transition from a medieval to a
modern thought on the landscape.
35
Translations by the author from the Italian original.
36
Camporesi’s first quote is from Giovanni Boccaccio’s letter to Francesco Petrarca, the second
quote from C. Sollii Apollinaris Sidonii’s Opera.
40 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

landscape of the Campania Felix around 1550, where “art, that is intelligence,
ability to devise as to implement” and the “powerful nature” have “collaborated to
the construction of an admirable ‘earthly paradise’ (from Alberti’s Descrittione di
tutta Italia), an enormous outdoor villa” (Camporesi 2016, pp. 166–7).
The same amoenitas (beauty) descending from the “domestication of wilder-
ness” is to be found in the “sharp visions of a laborious landscape” from Andrea
Bacci, archiater to Pius V, distinguished scholar of thermal waters, of Tiber, of
natural history, and, most of all, of the “history of the cultivation of grapevine and
wine, of which civil history has been said to be an appendix”. As in his description
of the ager of Cesena around 1595, where the perfect organization of olive groves,
orchards, and vines in quinconce according to the precepts from Columella, and
some more ancient pre-Etruscan practices, ‘overtakes any other most exquisite
spectacle of the countryside’ (from Bacci’s De naturali vinorum historia)
(Camporesi 2016, p. 168).
With “the scent of the myrtle, laurel, jasmine, roses, and rosemary”, Camporesi’s
recount of the ‘belle contrade’ absorbs from his sources the physical and human
geography of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, as to be neither a historical, nor a
critical analysis, but rather a material evocation in the space of literature.37

2.7 A Second Critique of Metropolitanism as Urban Age

2.7.1 The Urban Age

According to Ricky Burdett, the 2004–06 Urban Age project started to debate the
relationship between physical form and social well-being, at the turn of a century in
which ‘world’s population living in cities’ passed from 10 to 50% of the total, a
share projected to raise rapidly to 75% by 2050 (Burdett and Rode 2007, p. 8).
Burdett’s narrative universally identifies the physical form of generically anthro-
pogenic space with the urban form, while the social referent remains specific, that is
the urban society, by that generating a deceiving parallel: the identification of the
metropolitan with the urban.
The project strives to bring together four technocratic categories of agents, active
in the process of transformation of the city, namely city leaders, policy-makers,
design professionals and academics, building a formal network. Across eight itin-
erant conferences the project focused on the six global- or mega-cities of New York
City, London, Berlin, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Johannesburg, showing an
idiosyncratic selection of cases that underrepresents South- America and the
Mediterranean, probably due to utilitarian tactics.

37
All quotations from Camporesi in this sub-chapter are English translations by the author from the
Italian text.
2.7 A Second Critique of Metropolitanism as Urban Age 41

The representation of the chaotic expansion of the Latin-American global- or

mega-city is delegated to Mexico City anomalously sitting in North -America. The
outdated case of Curitiba’s BRT bus network recurs, along with Bogotá’s
Transmilenio bus, as a constant reference for “less-onerous” (Burdett and Rode 2007,
p. 22) solutions of public transport in developing regions. The bus system’s ineffi-
ciency and the consequent spatial fragmentation and social seclusion are disregarded
in the construction of a false myth that substantially contributes to the edification of a
positive image of the global city outside of the developed world. The flat mystifi-
cation stating that “Bogotá’s bus lanes represent an ideal of easy movement for the
masses” (Sudjic 2007, p. 44) seems to derive from a naïve postcolonial perspective in
tune with the immediate interests of the agencies financing the project.
The Urban Age project celebrates at once the apotheosis and the epitaph of
metropolitanism, while smuggling its exclusive narrative as a promise of demo-
cratic urbanity.

2.7.2 Total Khéops: la misère est moins dure au soleil

Moreover, the unresolved expansion of vast peripheries around historical centers

still bound to the suffering but resilient urban tradition of the Mediterranean, is
disregarded in the study. The plotting of the system of the ‘opposed but accessible
shores’ originated from the coastal centers, proposed by Hashim Sarkis as a
region-forming process in accordance with David Abulafia’s ‘human history of the
Mediterranean’, will be analyzed more in detail later.
The urban landscapes of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Khéops render a glimpse into
the deep complexity of the theme (Izzo 1995). By describing the existence of a
Mediterranean hinterland of timeless poverty beyond the globalized periphery of
recent marginalization of Marseille, Izzo delineates two distinct and hardly com-
municable spheres of poverty and marginality grounded in the region, one mitigated
by the sun, the other not.
Fabio Montale, the ‘macaroni’, son of Italian immigrants become policeman,
lives in a little house, the miserable inheritance from his parents, just a cabin of
bricks, planks, and tiles built on the rocks of the shore of Les Goudes, South of the
city. Across the sheer cliffs of Les Calanques, Montale treks down a short trail to
see again the fishing boat at the moonlight. He knows that the bouillabaisse38 is
waiting in a pot prepared by Honorine the old fisherman’s widow.

38
The bouillabaisse, bolhabaissa, bugliabasciu, jajabiά, or kakavia, contains the whole of the
Mediterranean, its fish and its souls, as an hortus conclusus mirrors the totality of the universe.
Greek colons of Phocea, fleeing civil conflicts from the coast of Asia-Minor, came to found
Marseille on the coast of present-day Provence between France and Italy. Their fishermen prob-
ably first prepared the kakavia in the sixth-century BC using the fish that could not be sold on the
market. The bouillabaisse has Greek, Middle-Eastern, Franc, and Italic roots. The bouillabaisse
can span from basic to sophisticated preparations without losing its identity.
42 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

Up North, in building B7 of the modern project of Cité La Paternelle, a family of

North-African immigrants is dispossessed of their Mediterranean identity and
Mouloud’s young daughter Leila is handed-into an ominous destiny to be annihi-
lated. At Cité La Paternelle
Not a tree, nothing. The housing. The parking. The terrain vague. And in the distance, the
sea. L’Estaque and its port. Like another continent. I remembered that Aznavour used to
sing: La misère est moins dure au soleil. No doubt he had never come here. Up to these
clumps of shit and concrete (Izzo 1995, p. 22).39

2.7.3 Massif Les Calanques and Concrete Plateau

The topography of the massif of Les Calanques is opposed to the concrete slab of
the project’s plateau: the tearrain vague of the banlieue40 is an incommensurable
‘continent’ to the terrain of poverty of Les Goudes, as it is to L’Estaque. Spaces
made of a different stuff, or quality. The immigration waves of Italian ‘macaronis’
fleeing fascist purges, along with Greek and Spanish republicans escaping francoist
dictatorship, remapped their topographies over the terrains of the Panier and Vieux
Port in the ancient center, as well as in the anciennes hameaux along the seashore,
from Les Goudes to L’Estaque. It is the miserable accumulations of Mediterranean
urbanity that receives the lives of these Southern European refugees, while the
Maghrebi clouds of outcasts and unprotected youth are alienated over the concrete
plateau of the post-war era. In Histoire universelle de Marseille, Alèssi
Dell’Umbria reconstructs the metamorphosis that converted the anciennes hameaux
from fishermen villages to villages d’ouvriers at the end of the sixteenth century
and then their touristic gentrification by the beginning of the twenty-first century
(Dell’Umbria 2006). By reinventing the psycho-geography of Marseille, Izzo’s
trilogie marseillaise contributes to grounding the physical geography of the
northern shore of the Mediterranean at the end of the twentieth century.
The surviving nuclei of the production of urban space in the Mediterranean, and
their resilient ambits, resisting expansion, tourism, and gentrification, exact a
specific consideration in the face of the later production of globalized metropolitan
space. As well as exact specific treatment the urban myths, deeply ingrained in the
history of urbanity, as for the locus of Rome or Paris, disregarded by the
metropolitan model of urbanity.

39
Translation by the author from the French text.
40
By terrain vague, Izzo does not refer to Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ notion, claiming to the
metropolitan spaces of abandonment aspirations that anticipate by a decade Gilles Clement’s tiers
paysage. He rather refers, here, to a more general meaning of the French expression associated to
the banlieue, to the very absence of the city in its terrain rather than to its absence as a space of
possible form. See Presente y futuros. Arquitectura en las grandes ciudades (de Solà-Morales
1996).
2.7 A Second Critique of Metropolitanism as Urban Age 43

2.7.4 Pick Your Urban Age à la carte

The Urban Age project analyzes six models of global city, through the lens of five
‘deeply-connected’ binaries that matter to the “environmental, economic and social
sustainability of global society”: ‘social cohesion/built form’, ‘sustainability/
density’, ‘public transport/social justice’, ‘public space/tolerance’, ‘good
governance/good city’ (Burdett and Rode 2007, p. 23).
Mexico City “epitomizes the tensions between spatial and social order” of a
land-consuming endless expansion whose recipe lies in policies for region-wide
growth containment, redensification of the consolidated center, rail-based public
transport (Burdett and Rode 2007, p. 11).
Johannesburg’s mosaic of “walled shopping centers and gated residential
communities” seceded from its demised down-town composed of the urban ruins of
dilapidated condominiums turned into makeshift-kitchen apartments, is a “physical
landscape that monumentalizes separation over inclusion” (Burdett and Rode 2007,
pp. 11–2). For “a place where public space fails to perform its democratic potential
as a place of interaction and tolerance” the recipe is to prioritize public transport,
invest in retrofitting the center’s social spaces and facilities, and contain suburban
expansion (Burdett and Rode 2007, p. 18).
New York core’s status of minority-majority melting-pot city testifies about the
capacity of “built form in sustaining cycles of urban change” in conjunction with an
efficient metro network. The recipe is the strategic coordination of its fragmented
governance to retrofit the brown fields of the “derelict industrial sites” surrounding
Manhattan into a “blue belt of linear parks and open spaces” (Burdett and Rode
2007, p. 18).
The “heroic scale of pace and change” leading the “Shanghai urban experiment”
accumulated 200 towers per year for 25 years in the pursuit of economic progress,
on the one hand doubling the per capita floor area in fifteen years under the
“overpowering demand” from emerging middle classes, on the other hand at cost of
the “forced relocation of inner city dwellers to remote high-rise estates”, had a
radical impact on the public realm at ground level, producing a terrain of “isolated
point blocks” surrounded by motorized mobility infrastructures (Burdett and Rode
2007, p. 19).
London’s early-2000s challenge to “accommodate all growth within the city’s
existing boundaries” was centered on the rehabilitation of the semi-central
brownfields of the docks introducing high-rise constructions dedicated to busi-
ness and mobility hubs combined with cultural programs of excellence. The
rehabilitation was mainly linked to large public investments for the extension of
underground Jubilee Line favoring financial speculation of private groups. In spite
of the 50% of housing quotas reserved for social housing, processes of gentrifi-
cation can be recognized in the transformation of the inner areas of a city where
50% still live in poverty (Burdett and Rode 2007, pp. 19–20).
“Poor but sexy” Berlin attracts “young, adventurous and bohemian” new resi-
dents by capitalizing on both the “all-encompassing lustre of […] the reborn center
44 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

on both sides of the former Wall” and the consequent stagnant economy produced
by the money “run out for the museums, opera houses, and theaters”, an unusual but
consequent combination. Super-efficient public transport on rail, lavish equipment
of parks and green areas, high spatial quality of the urban form and correspondent
maintenance, coupled with a regime of affordable rents in the absence of corporate
economy, favor a high birth rate, café culture, promiscuous night life (Burdett and
Rode 2007, pp. 21–2).

2.7.5 Globalization, cet obscur objet du désir

Across the review of the case studies, the dialectic among the five mentioned
binaries of ‘cohesion/form’, ‘sustainability/density’, ‘transport/justice’, ‘space/
tolerance’, ‘governance/city’ could be reduced to a confrontation between a global
North and a global South, at least strictly in terms of urban form. In fact, the
“resilient urban structures” of New York City’s grid with mixed-use multi-story
buildings, London’s terraced houses, and Berlin’s perimeter blocks, capable to
absorb large part of the effects of globalization behind their “active street fron-
tages”, are confronted with the sudden and dramatic shifts affecting the physical as
well as the intangible contexts of the world cities of Shanghai, Mexico City,
Johannesburg. Globalization, described as a phenomenon with “positive impact on
local economic development”, but “negative physical effects on income disparity,
social exclusion, and an increasingly ghettoizing landscape”, remains indeed the
occulted focus and cet obscur objet du désir of the Urban Age project (Burdett and
Rode 2007, p. 22).

2.7.6 Anachronism

The Urban Age agenda that descends from the study results even more simplified,
summarized in a “compact, mixed-use, well-connected, complex, and democratic
city” taking up the challenges of “globalization, immigration, jobs, social exclusion,
sustainability” to turn them into opportunities (Burdett and Rode 2007, p. 22). It is,
in fact, only one model of global city that is promoted by the Urban Age corpo-
ration, to which every city on earth is called to homologate. It is in fact a model of
global city, or world city, or Cosmopolis, as opposed to the ‘city-world’,41 func-
tional to the cultural as well as economic forces of globalization, characterized by
the univocality of the process of conformation of the global South to the global
North, excluding the possibility of any miscegenation.

See Chap. 3, sub-chapter ‘Making the world’ in this book.

41
2.7 A Second Critique of Metropolitanism as Urban Age 45

Realistically the LSE Urban Age project elaborated between 2004 and 2006 and
published in 2007, is an optimistic picture of the big city definitely bound to the
time before the 2008 recession, a vision that now, after only few years, results
anachronistic.
The projected image indulges the false myth of globalization seen as a phe-
nomenon of economic and material progress that can be canalized and controlled in
order to diffusively take advantage of the possible economic growth, equally in the
congested environment of Manhattan or the metrosexual borough of Brooklyn and
in the segregated townships of Soweto and Alexandra. The negative impacts of
globalization on communities and their landscapes, such as economic, social, and
spatial fragmentation, are described as amendable, if not collateral, side-effects,
controllable by means of a smart strategic coordination of technocratic élite sum-
moned by the project, composed by the political, administrative, professional, and
academic corporations active in the city-making process.

2.7.7 Dioscuri of Globalization

‘Dissensus’ to globalization is flogged by obloquy, as Sudjic states that “[…] it is

possible to see the whole anti-globalization narrative, with its curiously irrational
distaste for innocent companies such as Starbucks (who, after all, dispense coffee
rather than napalm), as a contemporary twist on the same xenophobic themes that
have made rural peasant communities suspicious of big-city ways throughout the
centuries” (Sudjic 2007, p. 48). Furthermore, in Burdett’s essay, the blatant process
of conglomerate centralization in finance as well as all sectors of industry is con-
trasted with the phenomenon of diffusive networking of the world via information
systems, occurring at an equally vertiginous and even disruptive pace. Although, it
is certainly open to debate whether the latter corresponds to a real form of demo-
cratic empowerment of people or to a narcotizing mass-delusion complementary to
the former.
While the false myth of metropolitan urbanity is built upon the narrative of
globalization, it is also dependent on the apparent opposite narrative of happy
informality. As a mondialist rhetoric, the latter is usually narrated by people
comfortably living in the first world or cruising the globalized skies depicted in
each day more recurrent maps of air-travel global connections as part of the con-
temporary jet-élite of fast mobility.42

42
See for example (Burdett and Rode 2007, pp. 30–1). Metropolitan urbanity and happy infor-
mality are novel Dioscuri, reciprocally bound like the half-brothers Pollux, divine offspring of
Zeus, and Castor, son to cheated mortal Tyndareus.
46 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

2.7.8 The Other Half

The disregarded half of the London School of Economics and Political Sciences,
which does not find hospitality in the LSE acronym, proposes a radically alternative
narrative of the urban phenomenon in the age of globalization. Consistent research
work has been consolidated in the last 20 years by Sunil Kumar on the problem of
housing production for the unprotected masses of the urban poor in the global South
(Kumar et al. 2001) and the surprisingly non-conflictive dynamics of public policies
and speculation and rental markets (Kumar 2008). Kumar explores the housing
problem in the global South in its tight links to the issues of labor market
exploitation, often disregarded internal migrations, and high fragmentation within
the very scenarios of inequality (Kumar and Fernández 2015). Kumar asserts that
the programs of social mobility tending to emancipate the lowest strata of urban
society do not bring definitive solutions to the emergencies of the global South, but
rather generate a vacuum that is going to be soon filled up by domestic and foreign
migration of new groups, attracted to the periphery of the global city in search for
economic amelioration. Parallel policies should tend to elevate the economic and,
generalizing, living conditions as well as the dignity associated to jobs, functions,
activities of the lowest and most unprotected sectors of the labor market. The
acknowledgement of the unavoidable permanence of the unglamorous monolith,
onto which the flamboyant crystal of metropolis is edified, is constantly over-
shadowed in the optimistic fresco propounded by the urban age adepts. While
Koolhaas coaxes the masses with the elitist narrative of the advent of the
‘Metropolitanites’, the Urban Age project clouds the impossibility of the universal
emancipation under the conditions of the global city system.

2.8 Chapter’s Conclusions: A Novel Cityness

2.8.1 Cityness

At the demise of the century-old nation states as protagonist of the world economy,
the LSE Urban Project identifies the new leading forces with the primordial entities
of the millennium-old cities, although on an expanded scale. By opposing the
reading of a dramatic change in the character of the contemporary settlements of
geographic scale, under the various names of mega-regions or agglomerations, a
substantial continuity of the urban space is advocated. While dismissing the pos-
sibility of a “post-urban form”, that is a formulation accounting for the alterity of
recent spatial organizations, Sudjic claims that only the traditional attributes of
urbanity, such as “pedestrian public spaces” and “casual interaction between
strangers” discern what can be called ‘cityness’. Those principles must be reinjected
2.8 Chapter’s Conclusions: A Novel Cityness 47

into the expanded settlements, in order for those environments to be able to offer “a
menu of shared experiences” (Sudjic 2007, p. 51). The implicit dispute here jux-
taposes the idea of the city as permanent center of economy to Florida’s idea of
diffusion of the leading forces of the world economy over mega-regions, novel
habitat of a creative class producing scientific innovation and its patented
applications.43

2.8.2 Geopolitical Post-metropolis

While recollecting the results of the Urban Age project, Edward Soja and Miguel
Kanai mention Florida’s work explicitly (Soja and Kanai 2007, p. 61), considering
him a later epigone in the wake of earlier territorial models, such as Geddes’
‘conurbation’, ‘world city’, and ‘city region’ of 1915,44 Jean Gottmann’s ‘mega-
lopolis’ of 1961, and Constantinos Doxiadis’ ‘eperopolis’ of 1968. However,
according to Soja and Kanai, Florida highlight a primarily economic transformation
that destabilizes the boundaries of traditional national economies by decentralizing
consolidated industrial geographies (Soja and Kanai 2007, pp. 63–4). Cutting out a
more critical reading of globalization in the context of the generally complacent
Urban Age project, Soja and Kanai describe a sequence of phases of globalizing
capitalism that go from the ‘commercial capitalism’ that created “mercantile world
cities such as Amsterdam and London”, ‘financial capitalism’ spreading worldwide
with imperial colonialism establishing its ‘global command posts’ in London, Paris,
and New York. The sequence is completed by today’s information technology
revolution originating the latest metamorphosis of a ‘post-Fordist flexible capital-
ism’. The picture shows the novel centrality of ‘information-based creative indus-
tries’ as well as a true globalization of productive capital and the consequent
formation of a “new and different global geography of economic development”
(Soja and Kanai 2007, p. 63). Soja and Kanai describe the replacement of a ‘First,
Second, Third World’ development paradigm with a new ‘Global Division of
Labour’, tripartite in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, as the wave of
expanded ‘techno-poles’ causing the territorial imprinting of the novel
mega-regional geography of ‘metropolitan industrialism’.
Thus, Soja and Kanai regard the phenomenon of ‘urbanization of the world’, that
gives the title to their essay as a process moving geography from more material to
less material structures. On the one hand, Burdett clings to the attributes of urbanity,

43
See tables ranking mega-regions according to the number of scientific citations and technological
patents (Florida 2002, pp. 30–31).
44
In 1915, Patrick Geddes had described the formation of regional settlements that he calls ‘city
regions’ in the chapter ‘World Cities and City Regions’ of his Cities in Evolution (Geddes 1949a,
pp. 22–31).
48 2 Metropolitanism, Its Filiations, and Its Consequences

or the enhanced urbanity of metropolitanism, the ‘cité à la carte’, to unfold the

scenarios of a merry ‘urban age’, relying on an expanded version of the traditional
attributes of the public space. On the other hand, Soja and Kanai describe a
metamorphic state of spatial order, where the urban/suburban divide fades (called
‘exopolis’, meaning ‘outside of the perimeter’), the ‘urbanization of the world’
corresponds to the ‘globalization of the urban’, and the configuration on the ground
corresponds to the restructuration of the social order.
Despite Soja and Kanai’s adhesion to the Urban Age mission expressed through
their refusal of ‘post-urban’ formulations,45 all the above calls for a set of different
attributes to discern ‘novel urbanity’, or ‘novel cityness’, that overthrow the
paradigms of ‘new urbanist’ and ‘metropolitanist’ coexisting in Burdett and Sudjic’
formulations.

2.8.3 Metropolitan Demise: Retrofitting, Region-Forming,

Physio-digital Responsiveness

Scenarios related to the demise of the exhausted ‘metropolitanist’ agency are being
widely pursued. Authoritative academic institutions have cast varied horizons of
reform of metropolitanism. Among other proposals: the convergence of all planning
and design efforts towards the systematic retrofitting of existing structures and
infrastructures on the territorial scale; the ecological retrofitting of informal set-
tlements within never-completed vertical ruins of the metropolitan promise; the
overcoming of “two decades of seeing architecture and urbanism as the spatial
manifestation of the effects of globalization”, focusing on the “emergence of the
geographic” as today’s “expanded agency of the designer” and regarding con-
temporary geographic configurations as traces of the action of anthropic forces; ‘full
scale prototyping’ of systems ‘responsive’ to both ‘political and cultural conditions’
as well as fluctuating ‘environmental factors’, an attempt at bridging physical and
digital spheres by “mak[ing] visible the invisible forces that shape our world” and
architecture’s potential to respond in real time.46
The process of opening to the geographic dimension, in fact, has crossed the
field of design and overridden its agenda. A general reflection on the relationship
between man and nature has escalated the list of priorities of the debate on design,
pivoting on the issue of the transforming notion of landscape in the post-urban age.

45
“Globalization and the formation of a New Economy have not been leading to a post-industrial
or post-urban era, as many have claimed, but rather to a new and different round of urban
industrialization that, in turn, is creating a new and different global geography of economic
development” (Soja and Kanai 2007, p. 61).
46
Respectively from: MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism, ETH’s Urban Think Tank, Harvard
GSD’s New Geographies research, Columbia’s Living Architecture Lab.
2.8 Chapter’s Conclusions: A Novel Cityness 49

2.8.4 Semiotics of the Vicarious Encounter

That of the possibility of a novel ‘cityness’ and its reformulated attributes in the
expanded post-urban space is a crucial issue. To this respect, Rowe refers to a
deeper semiotic dimension of man’s inhabitation of space to discern the funda-
mental attributes of its hospitability. He appeals to the possibility of what he calls
“vicarious encounter with special places that cause us to pause and truly reflect”,
that “certain depth and significance” (Rowe 1991, p. 59) provided to our life by the
townscape. The semiotic layer, which Rowe calls the ‘myth’, marks in fact a
profound divide between the idea of the ‘middle landscape’ and metropolitanism,
new urbanism, sub-urbanism, on which we will elaborate in the next chapter.

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Chapter 3
The Geographic Prospects of Human
Habitat and the Attributes of a Novel
Urbanity

Abstract This chapter describes the expansion of the human settlements at the
scale of mega regions and the consequent dissolution of the city/country division.
The text also analyzes the concurrent expansion of an idea of city over larger
territories, specular to the retreat of the relevance of urban space in such expanded
contexts. The text discusses the emergence of a novel form of diffuse urbanity,
articulating the synthetic considerations in the previous chapter. The spatial pro-
duction overflowing the physical perimeter of the urban walls and, beyond those
walls, trespassing the limits of a space commensurable with that of the urban
paradigm, generates a distinct environment. The idea of a set of novel attributes
defining the new form of citizenship is outlined, opening a vast field of future
research work. The potential for the formation of a novel semantic and mythology,
to endow the expanded territories with a new sense, is debated through the com-
pared analysis of a set of spatial paradigms, such as the world city, city world,
cosmopolis, and postmetropolis. Among these, particular attention is reserved to the
model of the ‘opposite but accessible shores’ and its world-making ability. The
bearing platform adopted for the compared analysis is constituted by a free reading
of Rowe’s ‘middle landscape’ construct, and its evolutions, such as the ‘emergent
architectural territories’ that have been rising in East Asia, interpreted as a
humongous experiment for the implantation of a fabricated mythology for a novel
citizenship.

Keywords Mega region Novel urbanity Urbanity attributes





Middle landscape Territorial effect Beijing Shanghai Territorial



mythology City world Cosmopolis

3.1 Introduction

A varied set of contemporary territorial conditions can be inferred from the

observation of the mapping of present-day population diffusion across the plani-
sphere: large regions inhabited at high density rates spreading across Asia;

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 51

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_3
52 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

interconnected networks thickening around highly congested metropolitan nodes,

while exhibiting secondary urban centers and suburban zones, over geographic
portions of North America; finer anthropic structures interconnecting cities, towns,
villages and interlocking agricultural territories in Europe. Today over one half of
the world’s population is considered ‘urbanized’ (UNESCO 2015, pp. xxi, 7),
although the majority spends their life in environments that can hardly be defined
‘urban’.1 An extended literature describes how the sensed border between city and
countryside has disappeared (Fig. 3.1).

3.2 The Expanding City

3.2.1 Expanding City Attributes Over Non-urban Space

For a long time now, natural components, such as mountains, valleys, islands,
forested plains, interlocked within hyper-expansive anthropic systems and crossed
by infrastructural weavings, have increasingly become part of new dwelling sce-
narios and have grown to a geographic scale. Richard Florida has identified those
scenarios from an economist’s perspective as novel economic units constituting the
“underlying driving forces of the world economy” run by a novel class of creative
professionals, and termed them ‘mega regions’.2 His mapping of mega regions on
all continents is based on a simple system that interprets light-emission intensity
and contiguity data derived from night satellite photographs as a measure of
effective socioeconomic integration across a region. While the mere correlation
between light emission and socioeconomic-interdependency can misinterpret
complex geopolitical and territorial articulations, it is quite efficient at highlighting
more elemental dynamics.3 Alain Thierstein and Agnes Förster’s The Image and
the Region analyzes the ‘emerging phenomenon’ of ‘mega-city regions’ and their
images with a higher level of disciplinary articulation by mapping more canonic
interdependency diagrams of the Munich area (Thierstein and Förster 2008, pp. 14–
8, diagrams). The common ground, though, is recognizing the geographic expan-
sion over non-urban areas of basic spatial qualifications traditionally restricted to

1
“[…] the concept of the urban agglomeration, [referring] to the population contained within […]
contiguous territory inhabited […], is favoured over other concepts” (UNESCO 2015, p. 4).
2
In 1915, Patrick Geddes had described the emergence of regional conurbations that he calls ‘city
regions’ in the chapter ‘World Cities and City Regions’ of his Cities in Evolution (Geddes 1949,
pp. 22–31).
3
With the plan for the creation of the Pearl River Delta administrative unit, north of Hong Kong,
englobing 50 million inhabitants stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, including Foshan,
Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou, and Zhaoqing, the Chinese government has
destined financial resources to launch a real-life experiment on the socioeconomic competitiveness
of mega-regional entities under a socio-political regime whereby a ‘creative class’ is not officially
contemplated.
3.2 The Expanding City 53

Fig. 3.1 Sparrow poacher’s trap in an area of matorral impacted by infrastructural elements in the
expanding outskirts of Monterrey. Flower corollas, berries, and fruits are arranged in a semantic of
symmetrical, facial patterns to lure birds into the cage (photo rp)
54 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

dense urban centers, such as access to social, information, commercial provision or

mobility networks. The urban is retreating while the city is expanding.

3.2.2 Geographic Opening

The diffusion of human settlements in very large formations over the last century
has evoked an escalating series of denominations: metropolis (monocentric
metropolitan environment), megalopolis (multicenter metropolitan environment),
and mega city (metropolis on steroids).4 ‘Mega region’, the latest term in the urban
lexicon, has recently become so prominent as to be widely adopted by the UN-
Habitat’s State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011 report. In a mega-regional poly-
centric network “interlocking economic systems, shared natural resources and
ecosystems, and common transportation systems” (borrowing the definition from
the America 2050 Project), ‘non-metropolitan’ conditions recur more often than
‘metropolitan’ conditions, with wild, natural, rural, and suburban areas more
extended and even more capacious in absolute population than contained
metropolitan centers. As a matter of fact, most of the 200 million inhabitants of the
central European mega-regional network5 do not live in metropolitan environments.
The World Urbanization Prospects 2014 shows how 65% of the urbanized
Europeans dwell in cities below 500,000 inhabitants in the face of larger dwelling
formations (UNESCO 2015, p. 14, Fig. 10). In the absence of custom data, we can
assume that, under European circumstances, the quoted figures are probably
coherent with the distribution of ‘non-metropolitan’ versus ‘metropolitan’ dwellers.
The distinction depends on the level of congestion, speed, intensity, and diversity
(Manhattanism), as well as available access to interpersonal exchange, cultural
offer, qualified service facilities, as well as supra-local mobility networks of the cité
à la carte (Sudjic 2007).6

4
‘Metropolis’, conventionally referring to a city beyond the threshold of 1 million inhabitants,
defined by UNO ‘middle-size city’ up to 5 million; ‘megalopolis’ (introduced by Gottmann in the
‘50s for the Great Lakes agglomeration, owing to MacKaye’s research of the ‘20s and ‘30s and
later elaborated by Doxiadis), an urban aggregation with multiple centers of metropolitan level;
‘mega city’, recent upgraded category for monocentric systems over 10 million, a metropolis on
steroids, counting 28 centers worldwide according to UNO’s World Urbanization Prospects 2014.
See also Carbonell’s Introduction to America 2050 Project Report (Carbonell 2007, p. 5).
5
The figure includes the population of Greater London (49.1 millions), Greater Paris (14.6 millions),
Euro-Lowlands (50.0 millions), Euro-Sunbelt (24.8 millions), Euro Heartland (22.0 millions),
Urb-Italy (46.9 millions), as broken down in table ‘Megalopolitan City Regions’ (Soja and Kanai
2007, p. 63).
6
See previous Chap. 2 of this book.
3.3 A Novel Urbanity, Its Attributes, and Its Mythology 55

3.3 A Novel Urbanity, Its Attributes, and Its Mythology

3.3.1 Making the Middle Landscape

Europe is prevalently non-metropolitan as much as America, described by Peter

Rowe as “a nation of prevalently suburban dwellers” since at least the ‘60s (Rowe
1991, pp. 4, 28). While unswervingly convinced of the inherent possibility to
re-conduct recent spatial organizations to urbanity, Rowe is thus photographing the
prevalence of the territorial expanse characteristic of geographic entities over the
concentration of services intrinsic to urban locales. A capital work in the explo-
ration of post-urban environments, Making a Middle Landscape describes the
manifestation of such a novel environment over the American continent and for-
mulates principles for the making of “a newfound sense of place” (Rowe 1991,
p. 264). Rowe sees the ‘suburban’ as the spatial production generated by the
confrontation of ‘pastoral perspective’ and ‘modern technical orientation’, which
coexist in alienated dualities such as social monolith/social diversity, private
commodity/public good, placelessness/place.

3.3.2 All-American Terrain Vague

The emergence of a novel American landscape had been illuminated in the

groundbreaking work by Christopher Tunnard and his then assistant Boris
Pushkarev Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? (Tunnard and Pushkarev
1963),7 and dissected into three functional categories of spatial artifacts, namely
suburban housing (referred to as ‘low-density housing’), infrastructures for the
motorized mobility (‘the paved ribbon’), as well as the presence of both industrial
and commercial constructions of monumental character in the landscape (respec-
tively ‘industry as an element of urban design’ and ‘commercial facilities in the
urban fringe’).8 The groundbreaking novelty of Tunnard and Pushkarev’s work is
the transversal crossing of these functional axes of housing, mobility, industry, and
commerce with an all-pervading urge for the establishment of a novel aesthetics,
poised between numbing ‘chaos’ of cheap heterogeneity and technological ‘control’
of sophisticated complexity. That novel aesthetics for the vague vastness of

7
According to Pushkarev’s own reconstruction appeared in RPA’s website in October 2015, the
authorship of the work has to be attributed to Tunnard with the exception of Part Three dedicated
to the infrastructures for motorized mobility, The Paved Ribbon, that he had personally written.
8
Part Two, The Dwelling Group, and Part Three, The Paved Ribbon, are dedicated to housing and
motorized infrastructures, while Part Four, The Monuments of Technology, combines both
industrial and commercial uses under the aegis of a novel monumentalization of technology.
56 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

contemporary American landscapes, an all-American terrain vague, generated by

the unrepressed clash of monumental technology and anti-graceful beauty, is what
shapes the new space of the ‘urban region’.

3.3.3 Pastoral Perspectives and Technological Orientations

The theme of man-made technology and natural beauty clashing to generate modern
landscape will also be the major axis bearing the structure of Rowe’s middle
landscape, under the denominations of ‘pastoral perspective’ and ‘technical ori-
entation’ reconciled in the proposed solution of a possible ‘modern pastoralism’
(Rowe 1991, pp. 216–34).9 Thus, “modern pastoralism is a symbolic construct”
capable to mirror the dynamics of ‘pluralist’ versus ‘majoritarian’ instances that, in
Rowe’s formulation, conform contemporary American society (Rowe 1991,
p. 216). The significance of Rowe’s elaboration in the broader international debate,
and in particular to this investigation, will be treated further.

3.3.4 Mythopoeia

However, Rowe presents ‘modern pastoralism’ in tight relation with Tunnard and
Pushkarev’s “poetic doctrine concerned with technological interventions within a
rural field”, that is “a consistent poetic framework based on careful articulation of
man-made elements set against a uniform natural landscape, where material con-
trasts and spatial intervals play prominent roles”. In fact, Rowe regards modern
pastoralism as a poetic doctrine or framework governing man’s spatial production
in the landscape, or in his words “a potentially progressive, critical ideology that
can adequately form a mythopoetic context for design in a middle landscape”
(Rowe 1991, p. 250).
While Tunnard and Pushkarev’s chaos/control dialectics is all internal to the
man-made production of space, the unresolved dialectics of ‘paradise’ and ‘pan-
demonium’ (Rowe 1991, pp. 244–8)10 presented by Rowe in the projected scenario
of the modern pastoral is a matter of semantic implantation as much as material
production of space and it involves the idea of a possible Arcadian state of nature.

9
See sub-chapters ‘The Pastoral Perspective’, ‘The Modern Technical Orientation’, ‘Modern
Pastoralism’ of Part Three ‘Poethics and Making’, Chap. 7 ‘Myths and Masks’ in Making a Middle
Landscape.
10
See sub-chapter ‘Paradise and Pandemonium’ in the same book.
3.3 A Novel Urbanity, Its Attributes, and Its Mythology 57

3.3.5 The Looks and the Conduct

Rowe resorts to Mumford’s words from The Culture of Cities to describe the
socio-political precincts of the ‘middle landscape’ as “a collective effort to live a
private life” (Rowe 1991, p. 290). The sense of Munford’s formulation
under-arches Rowe’s final invocation for “the establishment of a shared landscape
—one that extends well beyond the front or backyard of an individual house”
(Rowe 1991, pp. 251–2). Rowe’s recipe, meant to requalify the residential, com-
mercial and infrastructural environments of suburbia, focuses primarily on the
formal and functional restructuring “of the spatial realms in between [them]”. That
restructuring is concerned with the embedding of “an appropriate aesthetic form, or
‘language’, of expression […] of modern pastoralism” in the suburban mosaic and,
by that, realigning the “look of things” and the “conduct of things” (Rowe 1991,
pp. 215, 217). Rowe is, thus, proposing a formula analogous to the ‘semethic’ space
envisioned by Almo Farina, produced by both ‘semiotic’ and ‘ethic’ configurations
(form) and processes (function). This implies the coincidence of linguistic and
actional contents, on both the direct level of form and the derivative level of process
(Farina 2009).

3.3.6 All-East-Asian Expanses

In later works, Rowe switches to analyzing the contemporary production of space in

East Asia, where the emergent expanses of East-Asian cities, large cityscapes that
exceed the category of urban space, are referred to as ‘architectural territories’
(Rowe 2011). The expansion of those cities has been generally concurrent with the
creation of “architectural geographies” of spectacular objects, both intended “as
tract of land and sphere of action”, in as much as their identity is based on a
“discourse or accepted manner of engaging in topics” (Rowe 2011, p. 9).

3.3.7 Beijing’s Artificial-Lake-Lace

On the one hand, according to Rowe, the spatial production of Beijing responds to
“the situational logics and underlying principles of [the city’s] persistence of place”.
The persistence of place consolidates the North–South celestial axis of monuments/
values and the East–West axis of modern opening up along Chang’ha (Rowe 2011,
p. 17), whose intersection on the Tienanmen Square is surrounded by five circles of
ring-roads. Rowe sees Beijing “from the outset as an artifice, for symbolizing a
cosmic, social, and moral order, as well as for organizing social and political space
with the objective of achieving permanence, harmony and prosperity”. Its new
compounds, even belittling the old ones, are as large as not to be connected to a
58 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

recognizable locale, but rather to the composition of a celestial assemblage of

values. However, the celestial condition is achieved by means of the “technological
temperament”, equivalent of the ‘technical orientation’ that Rowe opposes to the
‘pastoral perspective’ in the middle landscape. The technological temperament that
anciently forged the lace of artificial lakes of Beihai, Zhonghai, and Nanhai, is the
same that harnesses contemporary experiments on “the representational possibilities
of infrastructure and large-scale entrepreneurial building ventures, […] technical
prowess and its display” (Rowe 2011, p. 40).

3.3.8 From Remnin to Lujiazui

On the other hand, Rowe summarizes the recent spatial production of Shanghai
with an idea of movement, developed along a non-perspectival (i.e., escaping visual
capture), top-down-planned axis. The movement aligns the ancient reterritorialized
areas of Yan’an Park and Remnin Precint in Puxi, with the new territories of
Lujiazui and Century Avenue, Huamu district and the Century Park in Pudong, on
the other bank of the Huanpu River. New Shanghai corresponds in fact to the
historically ingrained “aspiration to cross into Pudong” to strike a geographic
balance poising over the Huanpu River. Therefore, New Shanghai’s genius loci is
bound to super-local rubrics such as legibility of building layouts, disintegration of
architectural objects in spaciousness, and, finally, spatial experience of a scenog-
raphy (Rowe 2011, p. 74), which refer to a geographic scale.

3.3.9 The Presence of a Mythology

As mentioned in the previous chapter of this book, Rossi’s theory of the city openly
denies any discontinuity or change ‘in quality’—that is in spatial substance—
between the urban and the metropolitan conditions. In response to Jean Gottmann’s
claim for the death of the urban nucleus and its absorption by the economic region
(Gottmann 1964), espoused by an entire “school of American ecologists”, Rossi
asserts that “the reading of the city […] with reference to primary elements, his-
torically constituted urban artifacts, and areas of influence permits a study of the
growth of the city in which such changes of scale do not affect the laws of
developments” (Rossi 1982, p. 160). The city’s deepest substance does not reside in
its being separated from the neighboring area by an ancient or modern urvus, but
rather in its capacity to establish its locus (Rossi 1982, pp. 103–7), that is the unique
relationship between the site and its buildings. Moreover, the establishment of the
locus is the coincidence of “the event and the sign that marks it” (Rossi 1982,
p. 106), that is the historical sedimentation and its monument—the physical artifact
that shapes and preserves a piece of collective memory, being both the place and the
myth that describes it. The primary condition for the existence of the city is, thus,
3.3 A Novel Urbanity, Its Attributes, and Its Mythology 59

not the establishment of a delimitation, but rather the presence of a mythology

embedded in its space. Framed in our present circumstances, Rossi’s discourse is in
favor of the installation of a mythology over the larger scale of the geographic
settlement, beyond the urban (urvus-based) condition.

3.3.10 Confluence of History and Geography

The locus is also the point where history becomes geography, the pulse time of
Chronos meet the non-pulse time of Aeon. In fact, “the history of the city is always
inseparable from its geography” (Rossi 1982, p. 95). As we saw earlier, Halbwachs’
idea of trans-historical aspirations, developed by a social group dwelling across
time on an area, culminates in Rossi’s use of the notion of ‘expropriations’ to
indicate the confluence of history and geography. Drawing on Pöete’s analysis of
historical sedimentation of urban spaces, the idea of the trans-historical aspirations
will later develop into Halbwachs’ theory of the collective memory bond to urban
areas and entail Rossi’s osteological theory of the city as fossil memory layered in
the locus. Incidentally, the idea of the project as reinvention of locus does not
substantially differ from Marot’s idea of the project as in-situ mapping of itself.
If Gothic art, according to Henri Focillon, has created France more than geology
or Capetian institutions, the matter of a mythology for today’s metropolis is that of
‘fashioning a new past’ and a ‘new uniqueness’ for ‘our existence in the built
environment’ (Rossi 1982, p. 106).

3.3.11 In Civibus et in Parietibus

Rowe’s vast exploration of the emergent territories of East Asia refers the ‘pro-
duction of architecture’ to both their ‘geographies’ and ‘discourses’. The production
of space is regarded both “as site or parcel of land and as courses of action”.
Combining flamboyant appearance and conservative approach, the celebratory,
spectacular, coarse-grain masterplans of breath-taking scale conjure up the ‘narra-
tives of modernization’ of expanding populations over geographic regions (Rowe
2011, pp. 198–9). The territorial grounding in action could, in fact, be described as
a humongous experiment for the implantation of novel attributes of ‘cityness’ over
geographic regions. The observed phenomenon is the interlaced metamorphoses of
two cities, one made of people, the other made of constructions.
Jacques Le Goff comments on the medieval city recalling Saint Augustine’s
icastic verse “civitas in civibus est”, according to which the city doesn’t stand in its
stones but in its citizens (Le Goff 2011, p. 79). Le Goff is describing the early
medieval urban imaginary, dominated by verticality both as a mundane power
60 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

statement and mystic momentum. In terms of Deleuze Guattari’s faciality/

organization dialectic, Saint Augustine’s urbanity could be interpreted as an
assemblage of vertical facialities without horizontal structure (i.e., without plan),
describing a type of space much closer to a landscape than to an urban plan. Saint
Augustine’s verse is, moreover, taken from his discourse De excidio urbis Romae
(Patrologia Latina, XL, 721 ff., sub. 6.6) in which the Punic bishop discusses the
losses after the sack of Rome of 410 at the hands of Alaric the king of the Visigoths.
The dramatic event that shakes the souls of the subjects of the Western Roman
Empire to the point that it is diffusely interpreted as the premonition of the end of
the world becomes a symbolic turning-point in the transition between antiquity and
the middle ages. From the African coast of the empire, Saint Augustine uses the
topic to emphasize the inextricable binary City of God/City of Man, also identifi-
able with Christianism/Paganism, spirituality/materialism.11

3.3.12 Applying Attributes

A new contemporary urbanity can be in sum regarded as the civitas spread out,
independently from the nominal question of whether it is the city expanding to
incorporate the attributes of the ‘rure’ or the landscape reformulating to incorporate
the attributes of the city. The two processes can be envisioned in a serial succession
of ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’. The former process starts when
green cities strive to incorporate regenerative attributes of nature and openly
question the consolidated regime of contained urbanity. That urban regime had
already been destabilized by the expanding boroughs of the industrial city as the
mapping of Vienna’s growth phases exemplifies.12 Altogether, this process deter-
mines a phase of prevalent deterritorialization. The latter process, instead, the
landscape incorporating attributes and ‘ethos’, or ways, of the city, can be identified
with the forces of reterritorialization regaining momentum to reverse instability into
a novel regime. As components of the reterritorializing movement, we can regard
the action of Manhattanism and landscape urbanism, while sub-urbanism, land-
scape ecology, landscape aesthetic, and the scuola territorialista stand on the
deterritorializing front.

11
Saint Augustine’s The City of God was composed to confute the diffuse belief attributing the
capture of Rome at the hands of the Visigoths to the demise of the ancient pagan cults in favor of
Christianism.
12
In The Architecture of the City, Rossi describes Vienna’s growth phasing as proposed by Hugo
Hassinger (Rossi 1982, p. 66). Rossi also presents Hassinger’s 1910 map of Vienna (Rossi 1982,
p. 68, Fig. 42).
3.3 A Novel Urbanity, Its Attributes, and Its Mythology 61

3.3.13 Capital or Geography

On the one side, Manhattanism replaces nature with the materialization of capital,
landscape urbanism replaces the principles of landscape design with the laws of real
estate, while, on the other side, sub-urbanism reorganizes the project around the
centrality of site’s stratification by in-situ mapping, and the scuola territorialista
reacts to the immediate certitudes of globalization tending towards a long-span
temporality bordering with eternity. We could say that reterritorializing forces strive
to expand urban space over larger extents and therein incorporate some sort of
nature, either protected oases or taxidermic prosthesis, while the deterritorializing
forces strive to define and incorporate novel attributes of urbanity into the landscape
governed by the laws of geography.
Whether by “placing the machine in the garden or the garden around the
machine” (Rowe 1991, p. 291), the open question is about reconciling two opposite
and simultaneous processes of landscape-making by means of implanting a novel
mythology in the geographic space.

3.3.14 About Mythology

According to Rowe, the myth is “a story that expresses or symbolizes deep-seated

and exemplary aspects of human existence” (Rowe 1991, p. 244). Mythopoeia, or
mythmaking, is finalized to reconciling the inconsistencies between ‘abstract
principles of social organization and conduct’ and ‘actual practices’ (Rowe 1991,
p. 217), or more simply “two otherwise antithetical positions” (Rowe 1991, p. 244).
Coherently, the dialectics between the transcendent orientations of romantic pas-
toralism and laic technocracy permeates the suburban environments of North
America, grounding into its geography the confrontation of majoritarian and plu-
ralist democracies that under-arch its post-colonial history. The space of suburbia
can be thus imbued with its mythology as a language of legible signs.

3.3.15 Constellations of Sense

By plotting a missing territorial mythology, the semantic layer of Rowe’s ‘middle

landscape’ certainly points out opportunities to plot constellations of sense in
the mat of North American suburbia, punctuated with infrastructural and ser-
vice accretions. However, as we noted before in Life without Monuments, the
‘middle landscape’ is also liable to illuminate a much larger field at the global scale
(Pasini 2011).
62 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

In the middle-realm, “the physical formation, or morphology, of either an urban

area or territory” are equalized, indifferently describable “by way of building, urban
block, or environmental types” as Rowe notes in his Methodological Notes (Rowe
et al. 2013). The type is a “unique combination of a suite of characteristics that sets
a particular artifact or piece of geography apart from neighboring [space]” (Rowe
et al. 2013, p. 127). Not by chance, the type coincides, according to Rowe, with the
notion of eco-tope as generally applied in geographic and landscape ecology
mapping, and, therefore, assumes a more general and versatile nature.

3.3.16 All Becomes Landscape

Influenced by different forces under disparate geographic coordinates, the

super-local middle-realm can absorb the sophisticated territorial fabric in between
the traditional European town and its intensively rural land, as well as the novel
terrains of Asian mega-cities made of non-visual axes and compounds, the masses
of anonymous buildings equally heralding the wasteland of Shanghai’s abandoned
hinterlands or the fabulous jungles inhabited by monkeys of Hong Kong’s New
Territories.
In their essay ‘Journey Through the Picturesque (a Notebook)’, I-ñaki Ábalos
and Juan Herreros define ‘wasteland’ as the “land that has lost its attributes before
the approach to the city, that is sterilized as the occupation proceeds”. But precisely
by virtue of this spoliation of attributes, according to the authors, the wastelands
become ‘areas of impunity’ where the gaze of new social subjects can prefigure new
forms of urbanity. This ‘new urbanity’ means for them the “rediscovery, through
architecture, of the contemporary human position in [a] world” where the “oppo-
sition between nature and artifice” has dissolved (Ábalos and Herreros 2003, p. 55).
The idea of the jungle populated by monkeys refers to an era previous to agri-
cultural domestication and taxonomic ordination of nature, the era of nature’s
‘inscrutable and threatening force’ (Ábalos and Herreros 2003, p. 57).
In fact, both the idea of wasteland and the idea of jungle destabilize architec-
ture’s ‘anchorage to the place’, that is the project as the complete re-transcription of
the locus, in many possible variations such as the long-hegemonic structuralist or
regionalist versions formalized by Rossi and Kenneth Frampton respectively
(Ábalos and Herreros 2003, p. 55). From the wasteland/jungle equivalence, so
established by the fatal touch of the expanding metropolis, derives the assimilation
of the locus with the landscape, indifferently natural or artificial to various degrees,
which becomes direct ‘subject of transformation’ through design, no longer back-
drop for modernist architectural composition, nor social or cultural palimpsest
(Ábalos and Herreros 2003, p. 56). This novel medium acquires the attributes of an
‘eco-terrain’, where architecture’s raison d’être dissolves and all becomes
landscape.
In general terms, the idea of a mega-regional realm is the center of a process of
opening up to a geographic dimension.
3.3 A Novel Urbanity, Its Attributes, and Its Mythology 63

3.3.17 The Geographic Opened

In fact, Rowe defines the space of the middle landscape starting from the obser-
vation of the phenomenon of the expansion of the suburbia over the landscape into
the American ‘rure’ (a neologism derivative of the Latin rus, rural space) charac-
terizing especially the 1920s, 1960s, and the 1980s. Rather than to ‘suburbs’, by
‘sub-urbs in rure’ Rowe refers to the creation of a ‘symbolic landscape’, through
which transfigured ‘mythic themes’ of traditional architecture along with the con-
tradictory paradigms of modern ‘pluralism in society’ have been ‘geographically
inscribed’ in the American space by erasing the distinction between ‘urbs’ and ‘rus’
(Rowe 1991, p. 1).

3.3.18 Spatial Operations

The maniphestation of the ‘middle landscape’ is described as the result of simple

spatial operations, namely the “extensive deconcentration of urban population”
(Rowe 1991, p. 3) in favor of the prevalently residential expansion of a “uniform
network of urbanization moving out over the landscape” (Rowe 1991, p. 28), and
the consequent accretion of “agglomerations of [high] intensity and difference in
function” (Rowe 1991, pp. 28–9) and the subsequent transformations. The three
material operations of ‘deconcentration’, ‘expansion’, and ‘agglomeration’ applied
to the American landscape do coincide with the base components of the more
general concept of the ‘territorial effect’ developed between 2004 (Rowe and Pasini
2004) and 2013 (Rowe et al. 2013) with the intention of establishing a general
theory of spatial transformation in relation to changes in governing regimes.

3.3.19 Phenomena and Principles

Rowe sees the process of formation of the suburban, fundamentally, as the result of
four main concurring phenomena linked to four principles: expansion of residence—
the ‘ordinary pastoral’13; raw mobility infrastructuration—the ‘indifferent abuse of
land’; accretions of novel polarities—the ‘cheap semantic’; and the apparition of the
corporate campuses in the wild—the ‘techno-Arcadian’.
According to Rowe, the middle landscape appears in four spatial movements.
First, the spread of the pastoral residential occurs along railroads first and later
vehicular mobility infrastructures. Second, the infrastructures are characterized by
bleakly indifferent and functionalist abuse of the territory they cross, while the
successive ramification is gated into the semi-private road network of secluded

13
Quoting Leo Marx.
64 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

subdivisions. Third, the establishment of one-stop commercial centers in conve-

niently accessible positions to serve the multiple necessities of the suburbanites
including shopping and leisure occurs at the expenses of the old urban centers. This
generates a new species of polarities, where the semiotic of the traditional urban
space characterized by permanence converts into the pop overflow of fluctuating
ephemerality, mobile and impermanent as linked to instant uses. Fourth, the
establishment of corporate headquarters campuses, as modern machines placed in
the garden, reclaiming their own introverted patch in the metropolitan mosaic,
accrues in spread out areas.

3.3.20 Interstitial Inhospitality

Finally, the interstices in between the patches of the novel geographic mosaic are
the space of abandonment (Rowe 1991, p. 245) that Rowe sees as the real
opportunity for the regeneration of the novel space and its endowment with the
civic attributes of the city.14
That interstitial space is liable to produce the modern pastoralism that Rowe
advocates for. That interstitial space of relation in between the patches is the
significant relational matrix of the middle landscape that Rowe identified as
the novelty. That middle landscape is the peculiar trait that does not exist in the
overflowing of urban matter off the city walls that has been occurring since
antiquity.

3.3.21 Overflows of Different Qualities

Rossi refers to urban matter overflowing and retreating in and out the walls of the
Gallo-Roman cities in antiquity, as well as in and out the oval arcades of the
amphitheater in Nimes and Arles after the fall of the Roman Empire. The boroughs
of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and San Gottardo thrive extra muros, on the fields across
the Seine from the Petit Pont and outside Milan’s Porta Ticinese since the Low
Middle Ages respectively (Rossi 1982, pp. 87–8).
However, the urban matter that flows in and out of the boundaries, according to
Rossi, remains of the same ‘quality’—the same urban substance—as mentioned in
the previous chapter. Even in the case of the industrial city of the nineteenth
century, when the periphery rarifies, becomes thinner and produces the “Weichbild”

14
Rowe insists on this theme in various points, noting with Leonardo Benevolo the interstitial
origin of many revered spaces (Rowe 1991, p. 264) and suggesting the “integration of circulation
[…] into the sequence of public spaces” (Rowe 1991, p. 286).
3.3 A Novel Urbanity, Its Attributes, and Its Mythology 65

of Vienna depicted by Hassinger’s 1910 map,15 he rejects the appearance of an

essential gap by which the city and its region would be subjected to distinct laws of
space formation. Rossi only admits the manifestation of a distinct tendency towards
the city/land divarication during the grave urban decadence of late antiquity.
However, the installation of Christian Church’s consolidating institutions over the
old structure of the imperial territory is the agent that perpetuates the built relics of
Greco-Roman antiquity bridging the permanence of its forms into modernity.
To elaborate his osteological theory, Rossi embraces Henri Pirenne’s historic
analysis of the relationship between the city and its civic institutions. With the
reduction of interconnectivity among centers and consequently of commerce (in
Rossi’s lyric: “exodus of the merchants”), the “great agricultural domains” presided
by the castles of feudal nobility exist autonomously from the almost deserted urban
centers, whose remaining prestige rests in the “immobile nature of the ecclesiastical
office”. At this point, in fact, only the installation of the Bishops of the Cristian
Church in the ancient centers in ruin preserves the permanence of some forms
across the ‘anarchy of the tenth and eleventh centuries’.16 At the “economic and
industrial reawakening of Europe”, the modern cities of the bourgeoisie can be born
again out of the corpses of the old Roman centers that reunite the necessary
“conditions of geographic order” at the intersections of the “indestructible roads of
Ceasar” (Rossi 1982, pp. 92–3). Again then, the city and its land are one body, as
Carlo Cattaneo notes over a century before Heidegger: “The German language uses
the same word for the art of building and the art of cultivating: […] the colonist is a
builder (Bauer)”.
Despite the institutional discontinuity that trades imperial municipia for barbaric
fortresses out in the countryside and civic homogeneity of the imperial territory for
feudal hierarchy, the installation of the Christian dioceses contribute to the
preservation of deep forms. The structuration of the Church in the territory allows
for the primordial urban semantic to pass over to a next renaissance (Rossi 1982,
p. 181, note 4).

3.3.22 Urban Reforms, Material Continuity,

and Semantic Shifts

While Carlo Cattaneo celebrates ‘the region’ as man’s work of art17 in the mid
nineteenth century, Vienna is demolishing its walls and moats. Constructed after the
siege laid by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1529, the walls had resisted the Ottoman

15
See previous note on Hassinger’s Vienna in sub-chapter ‘Applying attributes’.
16
Pirenne powerfully evokes the image in which the Pope makes of Rome the center of
Christianity by continuing to live in it when it has been abandoned and, in turn, Rome’s historic
prestige makes Saint Peter’s successor appear larger in his isolation.
17
See sub-chapter ‘Historical continuity of landscape’ in Chap. 7 of this book.
66 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

expansion in Europe until the definitive Turkish defeat of 1683. Between 1857 and
1872, by order of Franz Joseph I, the city center breaks out and converts the circular
glacis into its lofty Ring, a crown delimited by the elegant multiple-tree-lined inner
boulevard of the Ringstraße and the functional outer boulevard of the Lastenstraße.
Occupied by the new seats of Vienna’s institutions, the Ring interfaces the old
center with the bourgeois districts consolidating outside the 1529 walls. Barcelona
demolishes its walls in 1854 and implements its ensanche beyond that perimeter
starting in 1860 along the plan by Ildefons Cerdá. In Florence, the demolished
urban walls are replaced by circumferential boulevards crowning the old center
north and west between 1865 and 1870, inaugurating the thorough urban reform
called risanamento lead by Giuseppe Poggi.
During the Second Empire, Paris is certainly the model for the metropolitan
improvements of the expanding European cities. Between 1853 and 1869, the
Prefect of the Seine Department Georges Eugène Haussmann conducts one of the
most massive plans of urban renovation recorded in history at the order of
Napoleon III. By dismantling the mur des Fermiers généraux, a 62-toll-barrier
enclosure built on a project by Claude Nicolas Ledoux starting in 1784 and com-
pleted right before the French Revolution, in 1860, Haussmann expands the number
of the arrondissements of Paris almost by the double through the annexation of
surrounding Communes. The cyclopean works of sanitation and infrastructuration
include the construction of the Gare de Lion and Gare du Nord, Les Halles, the
Paris Opera, the metropolitan parks of the Bois de Boulogne west and the Bois de
Vicennes east, as well as numerous neighborhood parks over 16 and a half years.
The uniformity of façades, materials, and colors precipitates in 80 km of circum-
ferential and axial tree-lined boulevards, producing one of the most characteristic
constructs poised between urbanity and metropolitanism: Paris’ ‘atmospheric
perspective’.
According to Rossi, all throughout these urban upheavals, redesigning the major
cities of Europe (as for the passage from antiquity to middle age and from middle
age to Renaissance), the discontinuity of the institutions corresponds to an inherent
continuity of quality and structure, or form, and therefore syntax. Rowe, instead,
proposes to map the fluctuation of man’s material production of space in coinci-
dence with the fluctuation of the regime governing it. That Rossi’s institutions
ought to identify with Rowe’s regimes tout-court, is not granted, but per Rowe, the
governing regime of a territory can be read in its language, or semantic, signaling a
change in quality and marking an alternative stance. Vienna’s Weichbild, if not as a
fracture in the laws of spatial formation, can be probably regarded as a shift in the
quality of the territorial semantic, or mythology, and therefore the forerunning
manifestation of the middle landscape.
3.3 A Novel Urbanity, Its Attributes, and Its Mythology 67

3.3.23 Territorial Effect

Rowe’s Methodological Notes, a synthetic compendium of a numerous suite of

territorial, urban, and architecture analysis techniques, summarize the concept of
‘territorial effect’ (Rowe et al. 2013, p. 171), whose elaboration had started with the
study on the process of ‘territorialization’ in Romagna (Rowe and Pasini 2004,
pp. 76–82). The idea of the ‘territorial effect’ is an attempt to capture ‘linguistic’
characters of space through exclusively numeric factors. By ‘linguistic’ we refer to
a set of characterizations of space that are relational, determined by the relation
between and among the parts and the whole, perceptive, depending on variable or
multiple observer, phenomenological, proper of manifestations rather than entities,
and fluctuant, that is varying across time. Rowe’s concise introduction to the
methodological notes mentions in fact Martin Heidegger’s ‘hermeneutic turn’, the
drop of positivism in favor of relativism, leading to the post-structuralist “spatial
turn in geography”, where the space becomes “a foreground participant […] of the
agency of action” culminating in Michel Foucault’s ‘linguistic space’ formulation
(Rowe et al. 2013, p. 30).

3.3.24 Measures of Linguistic Change

Not by chance the ‘territorial effect’ is intended to capture the ‘significant turning
points’ (Rowe et al. 2013, p. 171) in the fluctuating regime of ‘deterritorializing
forces’ and simultaneous ‘reterritorializing forces’ forging our space in a place and
a time, referring to the fundamental space-making categories introduced by Deleuze
Guattari. The numeric and graphed transcription of phenomenological character-
istics is technically performed by registering along the three coordinate axes x, y, z,
the measure of three basic classes of spatial transformation, ‘expansion’, ‘evacua-
tion’, and ‘intensification’, occurring in a delimited area in a sequence of discrete
periods. The frequency and amplitude of the fluctuation in the sequence of vectors
corresponding to each period, show a quantitative expression of the varying ‘lin-
guistic’ character of space,18 in analogy with the succession ‘geometric plan/
topological diagram/permeability graph’ (Rowe et al. 2013) after “Michael
Ostwald’s mathematics of spatial configurations” (Rowe et al. 2013, p. 25).

See in particular chapter ‘g. Type and Urban or Territorial Morphology’, (Rowe et al. 2013,
18

pp. 127–43).
68 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

3.3.25 Numeric But Morphologic

Even though Rowe’s methodologies of spatial analysis appear to be colored with a

‘positivistic’ aura in the array of geo-referenced grid, sieve, dendrogram, and graph
techniques for the systematic computational and interpretative processing of data,
they are, instead, primarily oriented towards the interpretation of emergent phe-
nomena equally at the scale of geographic, urban, and architectural morphology.
Thus, the Euclidian space of a dendrogrammatic matrix, homologous and infinitely
extensible like ‘kora’, is nevertheless loaded with phenomenological, syntactical, or
linguistic qualities. Extending over the geographic space to register classes of
natural, rural, urban, and architectural spaces, the matrix is, in fact, deployed by
Rowe as the applied derivation of the middle landscape construct.

3.3.26 Diverse Mosaics of Uniform Patches

After all, the idea of the middle landscape visualizes a spatial organization of
geographic opening. In Rowe, the interpretation of the urbanized network opening
to a regional scale resorts to paradigms typical of the geographic or ecological
description of a region, which will later become recurrent also in the design field. In
Making a Middle Landscape, the notion of ‘mosaic’ is central: the metropolis is “an
urbanized landscape made up of enclaves and separate land use fragments” (Rowe
1991, p. 38), where the overall diversity of patches grounds the overall hetero-
geneity of society and service functions (Rowe 1991, p. 36), while intensifying the
physical and social homogeneousness “on the smaller scale of the subdivisions and
developments” (Rowe 1991, p. 38). The structure of the ‘middle landscape’ cor-
responds to the overall diversity of a landscape mosaic at a large scale, composed of
homogeneous eco-topes at a smaller scale. A heterogeneous geographic mosaic of
homogeneous ‘urban realms’ (Rowe 1991, p. 63) transfers much of the complexity
of traditional urban morphology, arranged on multiple layers within a contained
area, into the unlimited geographic horizontality (Rowe 1991, p. 62).

3.4 The World as One City

3.4.1 Making the World

In The World According to Architecture: Beyond Cosmopolis, Hashim Sarkis

retraces the origins of the recent interest of designers in geographic aspects focusing
on the central concept of ‘city-world’. The essay consolidates the notes started in
preparation of his course New Geographies first taught at Harvard (Sarkis 2011,
p. 108, note 1). The debate on the region-forming process at the geographic scale
3.4 The World as One City 69

catalyzes now contributions around the New Geographies series. Sarkis’ essay
centers on the concept of ‘city-world’ defined as the specular antipode to the ‘world
city’ produced by globalization.
As it results clear from the title, Sarkis is referring to the concept of globalized
world city, ‘cosmopolis’, articulated in Edward Soja’s monumental book on the
‘postmetropolis’ (Soja 2000). In the second of his ‘six discourses on the post-
metropolis’, ‘cosmopolis’ is regarded as the product of the globalization of the city
space, what Sarkis calls world city (Soja 2000, pp. 189–232). The broad scope of
Soja’s ‘geohistory of cityspace’, the trajectory of urban space in history and
geography, starting to learn from Jericho and Çatal Hüyük and ending with
exopolitan Los Angeles, exceeds the objectives of this research. But, incidentally,
by ‘postmetropolis’ Soja refers to a ‘postmodern metropolis’ rather than to a
post-urban condition. Like Rowe, Soja makes use of Deleuze-Guattarian
deterritorialization-and-reterritorialization dynamics to map the spatial structure as
a grounding of the sociopolitical regimes governing a region. However, Rowe’s
interpretation of the territory is based on the analysis of its physical configuration,
backed by graphic and numeric data, focusing on the embedded semiotic text that
describes the governing regime. Soja’s spatial geography is the result of an
anthropological discourse.
According to Sarkis, the city world corresponds instead to the aspiration to
“think the world as one architectural entity”, or “the capacity to understand and map
the living environment” (Sarkis 2011, p. 106).

3.4.2 Radical Lineages

If the world city is proposed as the result of the normalizing modernist model of the
International Style, consolidated by the centralizing postmodernist models, the
city-world lineage is tracked back to neo-avant-garde (or proto-radical) prefigu-
rations. Rooted in Jean Gottman’s megalopolis, Constantinos Doxiadis’
Ecumenopolis, Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale, Buckminster Fuller’s world-
mapping geoscopes, the Situationists’ Unitary Urbanism, and Constant
Nieuwenhuis’ New Babylon, the worldly character of the city world reaches its
fully radical unfolding in Superstudio’s Supersurface. The city world (as opposed to
the world city or cosmopolis or metropolis) recovers “the project of being in the
world from the suffocating impositions of globalization” (Sarkis 2011, p. 107) and
turns the ‘sameness in the world’ from ‘a sign of poverty of form’ to ‘an untapped
richness’ of inspiration. The city world in fact opens into a ‘discourse on cos-
mopolitanism’ where ‘the subject’ is a ‘positively nomadic stranger’ with
world-making powers and where, consequently, the world is ‘the scope of indi-
vidual imagination’ (Sarkis 2011, p. 107).
70 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

3.4.3 Opposed But Accessible Shores

Sarkis proposes to extend David Abulafia’s ‘Mediterranean paradigm’ to a total

reading of the world. In the Mediterranean “geography of opposed but accessible
shores”, edges consisting of dotted lines of cities and towns are “loosely connected
with their [domestic] hinterland” while strongly linked to the opposite, stranger, and
often conflictual, shore via trading routes (Sarkis 2011, p. 107). The Mediterranean
mercantile centers that generate Abulafia’s paradigm of the ‘opposed but accessible
shores’, in fact, are cities and towns such as Cordoba, Valencia, Tunis, Palermo,
Mazara, Alexandria, Cairo, forming the Islamic expansion on the southwestern
shore, Barcelona, Montpellier, Marseille, Genoa, Pisa, Naples, Amalfi, delineating
the Christian territories surrounding the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian Seas, Venice,
Corfu, Thessalonica, Athens, Constantinople, Antioch, Cyprus, forming the
Byzantine domination over the Adriatic and Aegean areas, as well as Tyre, Sidon,
Acre, Jaffa, Jerusalem, the contended strongholds of the Crusaders’ states in the
Levant (Abulafia 2011 ).19
Abulafia develops the paradigm of the ‘opposed but accessible shores’ in his
monumental book The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Oxford
2011). After the shattering in the sixth century of the political and commercial unity
of the mare nostrum achieved in antiquity by the Roman Empire, “some historians
observe decline at the same moments as others detect expansion” in a ‘painfully
slow’ process of re-integration of the Mediterranean as early as 9th and tenth
century (Abulafia 2011, p. 241). Even acknowledging the ‘resilience’ of the
‘Byzantine East’ and the basic continuity of the Islamic lands stretching from Syria
to Portugal, the Mediterranean ranges “enormous regional variation” well beyond
the ‘puzzle’ of the Christian West (Abulafia 2011, p. 241). What Abulafia describes
as the ‘Third Mediterranean’ could be regarded as the process of formation of the
urban Mediterranean, precipitating in particular between the tenth and the four-
teenth centuries.20

19
See maps on pp. 260–1, 272–3, 288–9, 320–1, 336–7.
20
See in particular Part Three, Chap. 2 ‘Crossing the Boundaries between Christendom and Islam,
900–1050’ (Abulafia 2011, pp. 258–70). There, Abulafia reconstructs the weft of ‘a Mediterranean
society’, using Shlomo Dov Goitein’s definition derived from the exploration of the Cairo Genizah
collection of Jewish traders’ documents. As Abulafia explains, the Ben Ezra synagogue of Old
Cairo was rebuilt in the eleventh century by the Jewish population of ‘Palestinian’ liturgy (ancestor
of the liturgy used by Italian and German communities and rival to the ‘Babylonian’ liturgy
adopted by the Sephardi), incorporating a storeroom, genizah, on an upper floor only accessible
through a ladder. The genizah was used to stuff discarded documents, mainly commercial papers,
bearing Hebrew characters whose destruction would have been sinful. The Cairo Genizah col-
lection of traders’ documents is a chaotic assemblage that, after Goitein, Abulafia calls ‘the
opposite of an archive’. However, the Cairo Genizah collection replots that mosaic of
cross-boundary connections conforming the varied mosaic of Mediterranean society coincident
with its geographic space. The analogy between the geographic vision derived from the apparent
chaos of the Cairo Genizah collection and the explorations of the geographic space through
apparently illegible ‘big data’ is quite manifest.
3.4 The World as One City 71

3.4.4 Smooth Passages

In Part Three, Chap. 5, Abulafia reconstructs the voyages across political bound-
aries in the Mediterranean, undertaken in the second half of the twelfth century by
Jewish rabbi Benjamin of Tudela and Muslim high-ranking bureaucrat Muhammad
ibn Ahmad ibn Jubair,21 respectively from Navarre to Jerusalem and from Granada
to Mecca.22 Benjamin courses the Christian lands of eastern Iberia down to
Barcelona, reaches the lands of the Franks at Marseilles and from there by boat
arrives in Genoa. In spite of some discrepancies between the account and the route
provided by Abulafia,23 Benjamin probably proceeds from there overland, skipping
navigation to Pisa due to its constant state of conflict with the Genoese, visiting
Rome on his way to Norman Bari. Through Corfu, he then leaves Christendom to
start his march, overland again, across the Byzantine dominion towards
Constantinople. Over Cyprus, again he crosses the crusaders kingdom in the
Levant, leaving vivid descriptions of Acre, before reaching the holy city of
Jerusalem. He probably fancies a further trip to explore Mesopotamia, whose
descriptions might be product of fantasy. Southwards from there, crossing into the
Muslim sphere, he reaches Alexandria. From Alexandria, he can easily embark for
his return journey home via Sicily. Noting down eager commentaries about all the
places and peoples encountered, the Jewish traveler Benjamin offhandedly passes
from Christendom to Byzantine Empire, from Constantinople to the Christian
Levant, to just smoothly cross over to Islam and then sail back to the Christian West
again, over the waves of the Mediterranean.

3.4.5 The Formation of the Urban Paradigm

The voyage of ibn Jubair is more troubled due to a series of accidents culminating
in a shipwreck off the port of Messina during the wintry return lag. However,
despite the tribulations of the journey, his crossings over the Christian–Muslim
divide occur with equal ease. Ibn Jubair’s description of the ‘civil and respectful’
search on the Muslim travelers at the Christian customs at Acre is even contrasted
with the ‘harsh and unfair’ treatment received by them from the Muslim officers in
Alexandria. In spite of a conventional diffidence among ethnic groups, and beyond
episodes of friendly relationships between individuals, all his accounts report of
unabridged commercial convergence of the ethnic groups of the Mediterranean
mosaic, essentially Jews, Christians, and Muslims, in the teeming ports that are in

21
In literature more commonly transliterated as Ibn Jubayr.
22
See the classic editions of The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, being the Chronicles of a Mediaeval
Spanish Moor Concerning His Journey to the Egypt of Saladin, the Holy Cities of Arabia
(Broadhurst 1952) and Viajes de Benjamin de Tudela (De Llubera 1918).
23
See map (Abulafia 2011, pp. 306–7) and Cfr. Viajes de Benjamin de Tudela.
72 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

the process of regenerating the spatial identity all around the Great Sea. The
description of crowds of diverse origins and their intense commercial interchanges
in Barcelona are paralleled to analogous circumstances encountered in
Constantinople, Acre, and Alexandria (Abulafia 2011, pp. 304–17).24
What is described by Abulafia here, is, thus, a process of formation of a geo-
graphic region indissolubly rooted deep in the urban paradigm, despite different
regimes, religions, and magnitudes, that so drastically impacts the way in which
man sees the surrounding world still today.

3.4.6 Geographic Aesthetics

Sarkis recognizes in the modes of imprinting of the Mediterranean as an urban

region, a geographic modality (landscape urbanism would term it ‘change in ethos’)
of space production that can be opposed to that of globalization. That is a modality
of exploring the geographic dimension alternative to the globalizing expansion of
the world city over the geographic dimension. In fact, while modern geography, the
discipline risen from the “history of discovery and colonization” with the aspiration
to be the synthesis between “the physical, the economic, and the social” has dis-
integrated into other disciplines, according to Sarkis, today, “a geographic aesthetic
dominates formal pursuits” and designers are called to “transform larger contexts”
addressing “infrastructures, urban systems, rural and regional questions” (Sarkis
2011, p. 108, note 1).
The special interest in the natural realm is witnessed by Philip Ursprung’s
Natural Histories (Ursprung 2006) characteristic of our time is well expressed by
Josep Lluís Mateo: “whereas in the recent past the paradigm by which architecture
was measured was the city, now, the collective reference surrounding our design
activity is the relation to nature”. “After Rossi and Koolhaas, a manifestation of the
operational impracticability of nostalgia and delirium, the city appears as a second
nature”—Mateo glosses (Mateo and Sauter 2014, p. 8).

3.4.7 Vice Versa

The Soja/Sarkis issue can be interpreted more as of a dialectics rather than an

exclusive alternative. Despite nominal juxtapositions, no sharp separation stands
between the idea of the city that becomes global, Soja’s world city, and the idea of
the world that become one city, Sarkis’ city world, inasmuch as the processes that
generate the latter imply symmetrical processes that generate the former and vice
versa. Also, although the phenomena described by Soja and Sarkis are specific to

Chapter 5 of Abulafia’s book is titled ‘Ways across the Sea, 1160–1185’.

24
3.4 The World as One City 73

the contemporary upheavals investing global space, their generative principles are
more general. The core of the question is the idea of a globalized cityscape, cos-
mopolis, that contains a city world beyond cosmopolis and vice versa. The
dynamics of deterritorialization (city world) and reterritorialization (world city) are
never exclusive, but always reciprocal and simultaneous, only characterized only by
the prevalence of one or the other force.25 To this respect, it might be useful to
introduce an idea of cosmopolis, construed from a disciplinary perspective separate
from that of design.

3.4.8 Ancient Cosmopolis

“The spectacles produced in the vast arena [of the Colosseum] paraded the city’s mastery of
the world.” The diversity of the spectators in the Colosseum, as the diversity of the city’s
population, “embodied the vastness […] of the Roman empire [and] Rome’s power to draw
people to itself over distances almost unimaginable, from cultures thrillingly alien.”
(Edwards and Woolf 2003, p. 1)

In Rome the Cosmopolis, historians Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf set off
to investigate “the nature of the relationship between the city and the world” in
Roman classical antiquity via a composite fresco of essays (Edwards and Woolf
2003, p. 3). The idea of ‘Cosmopolis’ is not necessarily aligned with the conven-
tional concept of cosmopolitanism that permeated the ancient Roman empire as it
permeates our globalized reality. Exceeding the implications of cosmopolitanism,
Edwards and Woolf’s work excavates a set of timeless nuclei from Roman antiq-
uity, pertinent to the idea of the city world as a contemporary continuum in need of
a mythology.
In fact, according to Edwards and Woolf, the identification between Rome and
the world goes beyond the idea of the ‘cosmopolite’, the “wise man, transcending
local attachments to identify with all of humanity as a ‘citizen of the world’”. They
use Ovid’s Fasti 2.684 stating that “the world and the city of Rome occupy the
same space” to start a deeper exploration of the relationship Rome/world summa-
rized in the critical term ‘Cosmopolis’, unknown in ancient literature (Edwards and
Woolf 2003, p. 3).

3.4.9 Synecdoches and Metonymies

A constant paradox is at the basis of ‘Cosmopolis’. ‘Cosmopolis’ rises from the

irreconcilable binary of the City simultaneously dominating and epitomizing the

25
“Deterritorialization is always double [exhibiting] a deterritorializing force and a deterritorialized
force” with the relative roles of “expression” and “content”. We can identify the mentioned
‘deterritorialized force’ with a ‘recessive force of reterritorialization’. See ‘Theorem Five to
Theorem Seven’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 306–7).
74 3 The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat …

world. Rome is synecdoche for the world, being its dominating head, caput mundi,
but also metonymy for the world, as the City tends to absorb its totality. While the
whole of the world is to be found in Rome, Rome drains off the world of all its
beautiful possessions and talented inhabitants. Ancient Rome is a cité à la carte,
where all the produce and products of every region of the world are available.
‘Cosmopolis’ is a mixed system of coexisting dynamics of violence and
absorption. While Rome is extending its rule over the world (domination) and
spoiling its treasures (depredation), the City is simultaneously refining its civility
and culture (adaptation) and expanding the attributes of its urbanity (diffusion,
redistribution), primarily its ius and security.26 The domination/adaptation dialec-
tics marks its climax with the ostension of Agrippa’s imago mundi27 in the northern
Campus Martius, displaying in and before the city the entirety of the conquered
world, in correlation to the forma urbis,28 the cadastral map of the city carved on
marble panels to be exposed in the forum pacis.
Edwards and Woolfs conclude that the global flourishing of ‘Cosmopolis’ would
also mean the eclipsing of the world, in line with Strabo’s commentary in
Geography 5.3.8 according to which, after seeing the monuments of the City, “you
would easily become oblivious to everything else outside. Such is Rome”.

3.4.10 Layer and Relayer Space with Identitarian

and Heteronomous Myth

While converting into ‘Cosmopolis’, Rome is fulfilling its destiny born of spon-
taneous and forceful miscegenation of Italic, Asian, and Etruscan peoples, casting
the ‘heterogeneous Rome’ as the urban other to the ‘autochthonous Athens’. To
stand against change, the City needs deeper roots in antiquity, but, at once, to
“persist as a faithful epitome of the world” (Edwards and Woolf 2003, p. 9), the
City has to keep pace with the multiple changes across it.
In order to become ‘a fixed point in the Cosmos’, the City ‘layers and relayers’
its space with identitarian and heteronomous ‘myth and history’, to produce ‘a
theater of memory’ and at the same time ‘a stage for the actions of the future’
(Edwards and Woolf 2003, p. 8).
In her essay ‘Incorporating the Alien: the art of conquest’, Edwards leads us
through a colorful voyage across the statuary of ancient Rome, as numerous and

26
Edwards and Woolfs quote Aelius Aristides praising in the second century “the Romans for
extending the security associated to urban life through the empire” and Rutilius Namantianus
considering in the fifth century that, by expanding justice over the lands, the Romans “have made a
city of what was once a world” (Edwards and Woolf 2003, p. 3).
27
Dating back to the last years of the first-century BC, often cited by Pliny the Elder in his Natural
History, and probably the base for the Peutinger Table as for many other Roman and medieval
maps (Friedman and Figg 2000, p. 8).
28
Beginning of the third century.
3.4 The World as One City 75

multiform as to compose a ‘second population’ of the City rivaling with the human
population (Edwards 2003, pp. 44–70). By that, Edwards draws an alternative
topography of ‘Cosmopolis’, centered on the process through which “alien was
appropriated and incorporated into the fabric of the City, until it became a per-
manent mnemonic of the empire” (Edwards and Woolf 2003, p. 19).
Roman statues are intermixed with statues looted from the conquered territories
of the empire forming a physiognomic and cultural babel. As for the obelisk of
Heliopolis, depredated with the spoils of Augustus’ victory at Actium to be
re-erected in the Campus Martium to commemorate the conquest of Egypt, urban
elements from the ruled world undergo a process of ‘appropriation’ and ‘recon-
textualization’. It is a process of urban miscegenation through which “the city had
absorbed the world” (Edwards and Woolf 2003, p. 2), poised between counteracting
aspirations to diversity and Romanness, exoticism and identity, alien and self.

3.5 Chapter’s Conclusions: Mnemonics of the World

The idea of ‘Cosmopolis’ as the ‘mnemonic of the world’ is a poetic transfiguration

of a possible contemporary space, compatible with both Soja’s dialectics of glob-
alization through the fractal terrain of postmetropolis, as well as Sarkis’ autopoiesis
of a geographic space of complexity across the city world. Not by chance, Pirenne’s
idea of the coincidence of ‘municipal life’ and ‘national life’ as well as ‘city’ and
‘Imperial system’ in Roman antiquity, is the base on which Rossi founds his notion
of the permanent continuity of the spatial formation, city and its land, city and its
region.

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Broadhurst RJC (1952) The travels of Ibn Jubayr, being the chronicles of a mediaeval Spanish
Moor concerning his journey to the Egypt of Saladin, the Holy Cities of Arabia, London
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De Llubera IG (1918) Viajes de Benjamin de Tudela. Madrid
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Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
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encyclopedia. Routledge, UK
Geddes P (1949) Cities in evolution. Williams and Norgate, London [1915]
Gottmann J (1964) De la ville d’aujourd’hui à la ville de demain. La transition vers la ville
nouvelle. Prospective (11)
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Pasini R (2011) Life without monuments. Forum A+P (11), 78–93
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721 ff., sub. 6.6 [after 410]
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Soja E, Kanai M (2007) The urbanization of the world. In: Burdett ER, Sudjic D (eds) The endless
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Chapter 4
The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors

Abstract This chapter identifies ten behaviors, or operative methods, adopted by

contemporary designers confronted with problems of spatial reform in regions of
the contemporary continuum. The analysis proceeds through the compared anatomy
of a set of case studies, tackling spatial problems in a diversity of scales and
contexts. The cases include a majority of implemented projects, but also speculative
visions, figurative compositions, and performances to explore the tangible and
intangible layers of the contemporary continuum. By arraying operative approaches
spanning from metabolist to geophilosophical, the ten behaviors conjure up a
‘symbiotic field’ layering the ecological, societal, psychic, aesthetic, cultural,
semiotic, geographic, and mythological: built macro-ecologies of geographic scale;
artificial micro-ecologies implanted into the metropolitan platform; ecological
installations raising awareness through aesthetic performances; cybernetic scenarios
preconizing the control of natural/anthropic metabolism; atmospheric assemblages
dealing with the cultural and the transient; experiments of psychic and sensorial
manipulation of the landscape; explorations of the transculturation process in a
utilitarian modernity versus symbiotic culture dialectic; formation of alternative
spaces in the folds of the language; geopolitical plans representing the geography of
power; geophilosophical excavations aiming at reimplanting a mythology into the
landscape. Furthermore, the chapter analyzes the radical utopias that constitute the
recurrent reference for many of today’s visions of the contemporary continuum.
The text also argues on how the utopian visions of the 60s and 70s have unawares
become today’s quotidian living contexts.

Keywords Macro-ecologies Micro-ecologies Cybernetic control



Atmospheric assemblages Sensorial manipulation Utilitarian modernity



Geopolitical Geophilosophical Agronica Tirana

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 77

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_4
78 4 The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors

4.1 Introduction

Despite sharing a perspicuous interest in the great osmosis of theory contents

between the field of design and numerous disciplines spanning ecology, geography,
sociology, statistics, economics, philosophy, aesthetics, logistics, infrastructural
engineering and territorial management, this research also intends to ground its
notions in concrete reality (Fig. 4.1).
This chapter analyzes an anthology of design cases loosely fitting categories
compatible with the landscape construct described in Chap. 7 ‘Reconciling Cultural
and Cognitive’ and previous theoretic elaboration. By avoiding any tendency to
rigid prescriptiveness, this selection constitutes a brief compared anatomy. The
selected projects decode the interaction of natural and artificial, physical and
intangible systems from individual standpoints.1
Borrowing an image from Sébastien Marot, each project represents an original
trajectory to venture out in the landscape continuum “like someone who plunges
into an unknown jungle with no map at hand” (Marot 2003, p. ii). Moving from
disparate starting points, the assemblage of the different trajectories, altogether,
conjures up the missing map.
A time of transition from metropolitan to regional, from urban to post-urban,
from anthropic/natural to symbiotic, that is a ‘crisis’ in its original meaning of
transformation, offers the opportunity to form radical questions and the liberty to
interpret them: Can we come to an armistice with our planet and abandon archi-
tectural construction as we have practiced it? Can we stop creating individual
buildings locally integrated with their sites and suppress the concept of artificial
prosthesis implanted onto the territory? Can we, on the contrary, coordinate our
efforts in the collective pursuit of a general Fullerian ‘pattern of integrity’ for
identifiable territorial organisms? Can we stop designing buildings and start engi-
neering functioning environmental entities such as a valley, a mountain, a forested
plain, and a watershed, including their exposed and hidden systems, capable of
supporting life: flora, fauna, and humans?

4.2 Ten Behaviors Before the Contemporary Continuum

4.2.1 Geotechnics or Applied Geography

Kongjian Yu’s large-scale landscapes realized in China with Turenscape deal, in

various conditions and contexts, with the theme of hydrogeological systems

1
Several authors of the designs analyzed further on, participated in the TeleTalks conference series
curated at the University of Monterrey in the period 2014–16, some events in collaboration with
Laura Cipriani of IUAV. Extensive documentation of the conferences is collected in a separate
publication.
4.2 Ten Behaviors Before the Contemporary Continuum 79

Fig. 4.1 View of ‘weak-metropolitan’ territory looking southeast from the cafeteria’s terrace of
Polis University at km 5 on the Tirana-Dürress autostrada, exhibiting an assemblage of
infrastructures, large industrial plants, cultural institutions, fine residential fabric, agricultural
fields, cattle (photo rp)
80 4 The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors

Fig. 4.2 Qunli Stormwater Park, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China, Turenscape 2011 (photo
courtesy of Turenscape)

redesign. These landscapes are real implementations of ‘geotechnics as applied

geography’, according to the synthetic definition by Benton MacKaye. MacKaye in
fact attributes its conception to Patrick Geddes, who reportedly coined it during a
joint hike in 1923.2 Applied geography, however, or geotechnics, corresponds to
the ‘machinic’ quality applied to nature (Fig. 4.2).
These cases of ‘applied geographies’ are a symmetrical ‘analogous’ to the
English picturesque, which “began to dream of identifying itself with nature”
(Marot 2003, p. 20).3 On the one hand, the picturesque recomposes the surface of a
phenomenological scene from an imaginary landscape of geotechnical stability. On
the other hand, geotechnics redesigns, from underneath, a functioning environ-
mental machine that is capable of autonomously covering itself with a phe-
nomenological skin. And that skin takes the form of a possible landscape.
While the artificial topography at Stourehead is implemented to freeze in situ a
combination of scenes from Claude Lorraine’s Mediterranean visions, the artificial
hydrogeology at the Houtan Park in Shanghai is engineered to kindle a process of
transformation on a multilayered piece of landscape, which is let free to evolve into
diverse phenomenological phases.

4.2.2 Machinic Micro-Ecologies

Ecosistema Urbano designs machinic apparatuses capable to reproduce funda-

mental functions of natural systems, creating microenvironments with controlled

2
“Geography […] is a descriptive science; it tells what is. Geotechnics is applied science; it shows
what ought to be” (MacKaye 1950–1, p. 439). In the same text, Benton MacKaye also accounts of
how he had retrieved in a Webster’s International Dictionary of the ‘40s the famous definition
often erroneously attributed to him: “Geotechnics—the applied science of making earth more
habitable”. That definition reportedly orchestrates in the most effective form a series of three terms
that had been agitating in his mind for about 40 years: ‘geotechnics’, ‘habitable globe’, ‘greater
habitability’.
3
Marot is quoting John Dixon Hunt.
4.2 Ten Behaviors Before the Contemporary Continuum 81

conditions. Two projects focus on the machinic reproduction of vegetation and its
microclimate-regulating functions aimed at rehabilitating peripheries of relatively
high density with insufficient urban installations. The designers implemented Air
Trees focusing on the control of climate conditions in a strategic site in order to
promote social interaction among alienated communities. Variations of the original
type were also developed by elaborating on the potential of ludic interplay to
reconstitute the social fabric among youth, or focusing on the potential of an
interlaced information platform connecting local and global levels. The installation
of Air Trees is strategically planned to support the gradual growth of an abundant
provision of natural vegetation. These machinic micro-ecologies are not envisioned
as an alternative to nature, but rather as means to further the reappearance of living
systems within derelict man-made precincts and eventually to bridge the nature/city
divide (Fig. 4.3).

4.2.3 Aesthetic Prostheses for an Operative Metabolism

Studio Roosegaade’s Smog Free Tower has the appearance of a technological

monolith, whose slowly retracting doors offer cunning glimpses into an inner
technology veiled in obscurity. It is presented as a hippie totem installed amid a
neglected open space invaded by returning vegetation and surrounded on all sides
by the skyline of some indistinct urban or metropolitan formation. The tower is a
large air-purifying apparatus supposed to work outdoor at the scale of the
metropolis. Its filter captures the carbon dioxide in the air and its hidden machinery
compacts it into small solid cubes, which, like ‘diamonds’, can be later be mounted
onto jewelry pieces. The totem catalyzes around its mystic presence liberated social

Fig. 4.3 MediaTree, Madrid Ecoboulevard, social occupation of the space, Ecosistema Urbano,
2007 (photo Emilio Doiztua, courtesy of Ecosistema Urbano)
82 4 The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors

Fig. 4.4 Smog Free Tower, Daan Roosegaarde Studio, 2015 (photo courtesy of Studio
Roosegaarde, CC)

dynamics reminiscent of those orchestrated in Superstudio’s imageries of the

Supersurface series (Fig. 4.4).
Conceptually, the Smog Free Tower is a prosthesis installed onto the hybrid
metabolism of a natural/artificial system, groundbreaking for its elemental
straightforwardness. However, its practical applicability appears to be evidently
improbable. Just like for other projects by the same office, the Smog Free Tower’s
most manifest aims largely remain those of an aesthetic performance that moves
consciences and triggers good practices.

4.2.4 Cybernetic Utopias

Part of Project Solana, the Montenegrin contribution to the Venice Biennial 2016
curated by Bart Lootsma and Katharina Weinberger, ecoLogicStudio’s Open
Aviary envisions a technological network capable to control the complex ecosystem
of the abandoned saltworks of Ulcinj, embracing soil, water, flora, fauna, and
humans. A computing station instantly processes the data stream from ESA’s
Sentinella2 satellite, forming a high-resolution mapping of the geographic area
around the saltworks. An algorithm is capable to separate the data stream into
various information levels, rendering instant images of the changing environmental
conditions at the site, spanning from mineral, to hydraulic, biochemical, and
4.2 Ten Behaviors Before the Contemporary Continuum 83

Fig. 4.5 Solana Open Aviary bio-digital substratum, ecoLogicStudio, 2016 (image courtesy of
ecoLogicStudio)

vegetational processes. Additional data are fed from ancillary systems capable,
through sensors and detectors, to monitor the movements of the aviary fauna at a
local, regional, continental, and intercontinental scale. The station has the potential
to implement spatial transformations through a set of controlled robots on the field
in response to various environmental conditions. Similar stations around the world
can be interlaced in a global network (Fig. 4.5).
If brought to the ultimate consequences, the project casts the promise of a future
pacification of the environment, when the constant satellite monitoring of infinite
variables returns the total photograph of the planetary metabolism to a wise computing
center, capable to regulate the overall course of things within the anthroposphere.
A cybernetic utopia seems to be implied, where, by virtue of responsive systems, the
control of immaterial information bestows the control over physical reality.

4.2.5 Atmospheric Assemblages

A tiny, very poetic, gif movie illustrates the implemented ExpoGate by Alessandro
Scandurra in front of the esplanade of the Castello Sforzesco in the heart of Milan
84 4 The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors

Fig. 4.6 ExpoGate, Universal Exposition Milan, Alessandro Scandurra 2014 (image composition
of still frames from gif file courtesy of SSA)

(Fig. 4.6). The ExpoGate is at once a physical place and a place of otherness
(Foucault 1984). The pavilion is a physical architectural apparatus installed on
today’s dense relational platform of the castle, once the interface between the urban
and nonurban conditions is historically delimited by the lost city walls.
Housing the info-point of the Universal Exposition of Milan 2015, the ExpoGate
is also by its function a wormhole raised to the square. It opens, in fact, a virtual
passage into the dislocated space of the Expo fairgrounds, which is, in turn, another
physical place as well as another ‘otherness’, mentally transferring the visitors into
disparate locations around the world, associated with the pavilions.
The landscaping multiplicity and profundity of this simple design is revealed by
the tiny motion file recording the clumsy gait of a dog, comforting urban fauna, and
crossing the frame of the image. Its gracious trajectory precipitates the layers of
city, construction, atmosphere, air, rain, and fountain spray until they intersect,
merge, and coexist in a phenomenological and relational construct, the atmosphere,
which is the diaphanous material of Scandurra’s work.
The metal structure of the ExpoGate was recently dismantled. Not gently, but
swept away with bulldozers and trashed. This does not diminish the pavilion’s aura,
but rather rarefies its atmospheric qualities. Its ephemerality is elevated to that of the
mist floating over the fountain.

4.2.6 The Psychic Sphere

François Roche and new-territories.com’s cyber-fantasies envision blurred entities

whose nature stretches from object to ecosystem. Roche has directed his research
towards the limits where the categories of natural and artificial hybridize until they
become indistinct. He works on informational, perceptive, and psychic layers to
conjure up manifestations of ‘new territories’, which coincides with the name of the
collective. The explicit identification of subject and object, whose relational play
produces the landscape, not only expands over the geographic extent of physical
space but also replots the physical point by point onto the virtual territory of the
worldwide web represented in the ‘.com’ suffix in the name of the office.
Mythomanias is a stream of consciousness, interweaving lyric texts, generative
narratives as well as posthumous commentaries, with sequences of video-recorded
projects, installations, and experiments (Lab M4 et al. 2015). The doors of perception
4.2 Ten Behaviors Before the Contemporary Continuum 85

Fig. 4.7 Alterate State,

dissemination of a cocktail of
physiological pheromonal
substances, New-Territories,
2013 (photo courtesy of
New-Territories)

are opened, the psychic state of the beholder is altered, and epiphanies of anomalous
subjects/characters/users traverse the wilderness of the Thai jungle or the wasteland
of Bangkok’s abandoned skyscrapers with improbable trajectories, converting the
physical/psychic/virtual environment into a multiple landscaping construct (Fig. 4.7).

4.2.7 Creole Horizons

Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15 by Lola Sheppard and Mason White’s Lateral

Office can be described by referring to the linguistic paradigm of creole.4 Presented
in the Canadian Pavilion at Rem Koolhaas’ Venice Biennial of Architecture, Arctic
Adaptations marks the 15th anniversary of the founding of Canada’s newest ter-
ritory, Nunavut. The ‘creole’ is the language of the new natives, generations after
the more or less violent fusion of ethnic groups following substantial relocations.
Not a language one can adopt by will, it is a cultural confluence in which one is

4
For ‘creole’ and ‘miscegenation’ see subchapters ‘La idea del mestizaje’ and ‘El nacimiento del
criollismo’ (Bernal 2015, p. 46, 312). See also next Chap. 5 in this book.
86 4 The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors

born. The work in fact accepts the exhibition director’s request to address the theme
of Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014 and to show “the process of the erasure of
national characteristics in favor of the almost universal adoption of a single modern
language”. Arctic Adaptations records the rapid confrontation of Canada’s newest
territory, Nunavut, with modernity, termed “a transition ‘from igloos to Internet’ in
40 years” (Sheppard and White 2017). Revealing powerful native traits of adap-
tation and resilience, the project records the capacity of native culture to elaborate
modernity in a novel creole. The Arctic creole is traced in the mapping of refor-
mulated architectural artifacts and novel intersubjective dynamics, as well as in the
redesigned cloud of tools and practices surrounding man in the arctic icescape
(Fig. 4.8).

4.2.8 Semiotic Landscapes

Perry Kulper uses the graphic transcription of the process of design to explore it as a
stratified accumulation of information. Aggregations of heterogeneous entities,
afferent to disparate categories ranging from physical presence to intersubjective
perceptions or individual memories, find a virtual space where surprising concep-
tual, combinatory, and logic relations can interweave. It is the exclusively human
‘eco-field’ associated to the cultural trait, described by Farina (2009).
The trans-categorical profundity of the composition expands the potential of the
design process to the investigation of a state of reality as well as to the prefiguration
of surreal alternatives. It is an investigation of the virtual and relational space of
language, which interferes with reality in the phenomenological and intellectual
framing of the physical space, revealing additional unfolding. Kulper’s earlier
bidimensional explorations, such as David’s Island (Fig. 4.9), have expanded into
tridimensional experiments, such as the flying paint experiments realized with Nat
Chard (Kulper and Chard 2013). By mixing virtual and physical elements in
visionary compositions, their landscaping character results enhanced. These
experiments fathom ‘the folds of difference’, as Kulper puts it, that is, landscapes of

Fig. 4.8 Kimmirut, Canada, Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15, Lateral Office 2014 (photo Billy
Aakavak, courtesy of Lateral Office)
4.2 Ten Behaviors Before the Contemporary Continuum 87

Fig. 4.9 David’s Island Competition, strategic plot, Perry Kulper, 1996–7 (image courtesy of
Perry Kulper)

instrumentality, made up of diverse entities ranging from graphic, informational and

conceptual, to physical, natural, or artificial, all transcribed into shared platforms of
communication.

4.2.9 Geopolitical

By synthesizing the spatial vision of Albania 2030 Manifesto (Aliaj et al. 2014),
Besnik Aliaj deploys a geopolitical reading of the present and future of the
Albanian territory throughout a series of sharp diagrams drafted by Eranda Janku.
This manifesto aimed at prefiguring a broader scenario of territorial governance for
the country also stimulates a reflection on the compatibility of geopolitical aspi-
rations with the prerogatives of an architectural territorial vision. The expanding
and simultaneously thinning role of the designer and planner, everyday less
involved in construction and more concerned in addressing participative processes
of socio-spatial requalification, shifts towards an intentional political agency. The
geopolitical field is often one where politics invites architectural prefigurations as
vehicles for its cannier maneuvers. The manifesto revolves around the idea of
territorial development, de facto identified with that of economic development,
based on the definition and enhancement of a hardcore horizontal hierarchy, able to
88 4 The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors

Fig. 4.10 Rural area in the

municipality of Belsh,
Albania, from Albania 2030
Manifesto, Aliaj et al. (2014)
(photo courtesy of Eranda
Janku)

enweave natural, social, and cultural heritage at different scales. The resulting
landscape is a geopolitical scenario in which soft components are prevalent
(Fig. 4.10).

4.2.10 Geophilosophical Excavations

The Espai Barberí in Olot is the in situ mapping of a geophilosophical field, poised
between stratification and construction. Many of RCR’s designs are dominated by
the concept of ‘excavation’. By virtue of excavating, the project is embedded into
the geologic stratification, which is the repository of long-term history beyond the
historical time of man. From that superhuman succession, the project’s monolithic
metal slabs surface from blast furnaces as from the cave of Vulcan.
Springing out of the ultraslow-forming geology, the project cuts through the
geophilosophical accumulation of the landscape. That landscape is man’s history,
layered and relayered over topography to convert into geography (Fig. 4.11).
4.2 Ten Behaviors Before the Contemporary Continuum 89

Fig. 4.11 View from vegetated patio into Espai Barberí, RCR Arquitectes’ self-designed office,
Olot, Spain (Image courtesy of Hisao Suzuki)

The excavation of the geological is intersected with the excavation of the

osteological. The fragmented skeletons of architectural artifacts interspersed in the
geological material are rediscovered as the remnants of remote existences in an
archeological repository. Moldy brick walls, semi-crumbled septa, rusty cast iron
columns and trusses, with their naïf decorations of a nostalgic past, are redeemed
from the condemnation of waned ages and recuperated to an extended life that
seems miraculous, next to crystal panes and heavy bronze plates. The landscape and
the ruins of man are interlocked with the obscure foliage of the woods in a benign
labyrinth enjoying endlessness. The woods are admitted into the inhabitable space,
or even constitute the very stuff with which the project is built. It is the construction
of the Jüngerian woods, den Wald zu bauen, the place of hermitage of the Anarch.
The project is firmly set at the fault between orography and the plains, where the
dark woods that cover the Pyrenean hillsides with the slow succession of a dense
vegetation meet the open fields of fat crops and fine grapes. The Espai Barberí,
made of woods and ruins, is an incessant excavation, observation, recuperation, and
reinvention of a human/natural mythology in the landscape of sparsely inhabited
regions.
90 4 The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors

4.2.11 A Bundle of Feebler or Bolder Routes: The Symbiotic

Field in Ten Behaviors

On an axis stretching from metabolist to geophilosophical, these projects line up in

a quite comprehensive sequence of the operative approaches towards contemporary
landscape’s manipulation. The symbiotic field that is being conjured up altogether
is a composite of ten distinctive behaviors, or methods, intersecting the ecological,
societal, psychic, aesthetic, cultural, semiotic, geographic, and mythological:
(1) macro-ecologies at the geographic scale are obsessively focused on the issue of
built ecologies and productive landscapes (Qunli Stormwater Park); (2) artificial
micro-ecologies implanted into the metropolitan platform are about ushering the
return of pacified nature as much as about reviving social interaction (Madrid
Ecoboulevard Air Trees); (3) ecological installations aim at raising awareness about
natura/anthropic metabolic processes, while staging prevalently aesthetic perfor-
mances (Smog Free Tower); (4) staging of cybernetic scenarios aims at envisioning
the control-through-information of natural/anthropic metabolism in regions of the
anthroposphere (Solana Open Aviary); (5) atmospheric assemblages deal with
cultural as well as meteorological mists, the exploration of space through the
exploration of the transient time of the meteors5 (Milan ExpoGate); (6) sessions of
collective—human–human and human–machine—psychic alteration test the sen-
sorial manipulation of the landscape (Alterate State); (7) anthropological explo-
rations of the transculturation process following the colonization of a symbiotic
culture by a utilitarian modernity aim at reactivating social dynamic capable of
novel identitarian dynamics (Nunavut at 15); (8) proliferating linguistic environ-
ments aim at reformulating alternative spaces in the folds of the discourse (David’s
Island); (9) geopolitical plans deals with the geography of power (Albania 2030);
(10) excavations of the landscape as a geophilosophical accumulation, relayering
geology, vegetation, ruins, osteology aim at the reimplantation (recovering and
reinvention) of a mythology (Espai Barberí).
These designs explore the present transitional phase in the discourse on human
settlement on the planet in search of a new aesthetic paradigm, framing the cultural
perspective of inhabitable space, as well as an implementable model at a time when
the dismantling of the urban-centered vision is advanced.
Altogether, their trajectories trace a bundle of feebler or bolder routes in the
novel geography of the expanded field of landscape and conjure up a
multi-perspectival collective observation. The overall result is meant to fathom
fragments of our relationship to nature and project new scenarios of symbiosis,
combining aggregates of artificial and living systems, psychological and physical
spaces, and machinic and cultural landscapes.

5
About the ‘time of the meteors’, positioned by Michel Tournier between the extreme ‘speed of the
asters’ and the extreme ‘slowness of geology’, see Chap. 6 in this book.
4.3 Past Utopia and Present Everyday 91

4.3 Past Utopia and Present Everyday

4.3.1 Failed Leaps into Artificial Paradises

The contemporary behaviors before the landscape that we have discussed share
common foundations in the imageries propagated by the radical collectives in the
60s and 70s.
Supersurface (a video, installation, and design piece by Superstudio), in analogy
with other ‘non-work continuum’ (Tafuri 1972, p. 398) precedents, such as
Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon and Archizoom’s No-Stop City, reveals a
utopian scenario of technological advancement whereby the primordial natural
platform becomes obsolete, totally replaced by a man-made grid able to support
forms of collective dwelling. These days, Superstudio’s Supersurface is enjoying a
particularly favorable revival, being celebrated worldwide in numerous publica-
tions, exhibitions, and even recreations of the original installation at the famous
MOMA exhibition of 1972. Radical architectural prophecies of a future field rec-
onciling nature, technology, and humans were instantly torn down as a “private leap
into the sublimated universe of artificial paradises” by Manfredo Tafuri from within
the very catalog of the exhibition where they were showing, for delusively resting
on a utopian technological advance and the consequent emancipation from work
(Tafuri 1972, p. 394).6
Andrea Branzi’s Agronica (Branzi et al. 1995), or Weak Metropolis, from 1995
marks both the last evolution of that kin and the beginning of the dissolution of the
myth of metropolitanism. An anthropic infrastructure expanding over vast exten-
sions, thinning, and dispersing its artificial limbs of factories, Agronica interweaves
with agricultural patterns to form a double-productive dispersed territory. Despite
its ideological content, disciplinary abstraction, and allegations of ecological
unsustainability, Agronica’s productive territory is, according to Branzi, sustained
by an alternative conception of ecology, whereby transcendent intersubjective
values redirect the ordinary physical sustainability balance.

4.3.2 Tirana: A Case of Quotidian Agronica

Agronica is less a utopian vision than one might think. The mixture of rural and
industrial activity characterizes large portions of the European province. In the case
of the Albanian territory around Tirana, the brutality of the clash is made more
stunning by the archaic characters of its rurality congealed by the communist

6
Generally referring to radical architecture, or neo-avant-garde, or counter design, or anti-utopias,
Tafuri chiefly addresses his repeated invective against Achizoom’s No-Stop City and secondarily
Superstudio’s Continuous Monument.
92 4 The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors

regime vis-à-vis the rough impatience for a process of privately-fancied-of Balkanic

modernization.
In the last decades, since the transition to democracy, following the long
immobility administered over the territory by the communist regime, Tirana has
undergone a fierce process of both uncontrolled densification and expansion. The
interstitial spaces of the consolidated urban organism have been chaotically occu-
pied while the rural and agricultural environments outside the urban boundaries
have been extensively littered with the informal proliferation of incongruous con-
structions. The heritage of urban and rural systems resulting from century-long
processes of territorialization was abruptly threatened of almost complete erasure by
the emerging phenomena related to either the aware or unconscious adoption of
‘metropolitanist’ models. Hegemonic ‘metropolitanist’ models have conveyed a
universal promise of flamboyant happiness along with a delusory offer of congested
modernity. More recent paradigms, born from the analysis of the global economic
and productive system, have drawn attention from the role of the metropolitan
centers to that of the much broader mega-regional formations encompassing nat-
ural, rural, urban, and sprawling features, much in accord with models of
low-density anthropic/natural coexistence.
Expanded areas around Tirana are quite representative of a contemporary
Agronica condition. The zone stretching from the Paskuqan Lake plains up to
Mount Dajt, encompasses parts of the city proper, agglomeration of various natures,
from suburban to informal, the breathtaking system of the natural water bodies, the
surviving relics of the traditional rural fabric and the natural theater of the moun-
tains. The hybrid landscape on the Tirana-Dürress Autostrada presents analogous
features. The infrastructural networks interwoven with the rural fabric and industrial
structures of varying size, mixed with agricultural and cattle-breeding activities,
configure the ‘double-productive’ landscape preconized by Branzi. The garish
marquees of commercial brands pop up amidst higher education facilities, factories,
grazing fields, haystacks, and cows, offering a vision into what could be defined
unresolved ‘modern pastoralism’ (Rowe 1991, pp. 215, 217).

4.4 Chapter’s Conclusions: Domestic Landscape

in Biotechnological Field

However, if we accept Branzi’s hint to a mystic form of sustainability, the

present-day uncontrolled plotting of an interface between production and infor-
mation, and the subsequent ongoing dematerialization of the production system,
might offer an opportunity for a ‘new domestic landscape’ (Ambasz 1972 ) within a
wider biotechnological field of symbiotic character.
Advanced biotechnological applications for the creation and regulation of a
symbiotic landscape made of man-made and natural systems interfaced at the
genetic level, as well as the level of information/command exchange is a
4.4 Chapter’s Conclusions: Domestic Landscape in Biotechnological … 93

breathtaking open abyss that future generations will have a chance not only to
explore but even fill up, invent, and engineer. Cybernetic landscape scenarios of
hybrid systems exhibit today just a shy shadow of their future potential.

References

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vision! Polis University, Tirana
Ambasz E (ed) (1972) Italy: the new domestic landscape. MOMA, New York
Bernal R (2015) Mestizaje y criollismo en la literature de la Nueva España del siglo XVI. Fondo
de Cultura Económica, Ciudad de México [1994]
Branzi A et al (1995) Symbiotic metropolis Agronica. In: Susani M, Manzini E (eds) The solid
side. V+K Publishing, Rotterdam, pp 100–121
Farina A (2009) Ecology, cognition and landscape. Linking natural and social systems. Springer,
New York [2006]
Foucault M (1984) Of other spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (trans: Miskowiec J). Architecture/
Mouvement/Continuité [1967]
Jünger E (2006) Il filosofo e l’Anarca. Intervista a Ernst Jünger. In: Volpi F, Gnoli A (ed) L’ultimo
sciamano. Bompiani, Milano
Kulper P, Chard N (2013) Pamphlet architecture 34: phatoming the unphatomable. Princeton
Architectural Press, New York
Lab M4, Lacadée C, Roche F (eds) (2015) Mythomanias: a series of psycho-architecture case
studies. Punctum Books
MacKaye B (1950–1) Growth of a new science, geography to geotechnics (series of articles).
The Survey (magazine)
Marot S (2003) Sub-urbanism and the art of memory. Architectural Association, London
Rowe P (1991) Making a middle landscape. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Sheppard L, White M (2017) Many norths spatial practice in a polar territory. Barcelona,
New York, Actar
Tafuri M (1972) Design and technological Utopias. In: Ambasz E (ed) Italy: the new domestic
landscape. MOMA, New York
 Part II
Dealing with the Composite
Chapter 5
Miscegenation: Culture-
and Region-Forming Processes

Abstract While contained urban space, as reviewed in the first section of the book,
suggests series of binaries deriving from the original dichotomy city/nature, a
geographic expansion favors the commingling of composite or opposite principles.
The second section of the book analyzes ways in which elective or imposed coex-
istence of diverse agents on a geographic field kindle a process that evolves from
juxtaposition to reciprocal permeation and eventually miscegenation, both in cul-
ture- and region-forming. This chapter describes apparently unrelated phenomena as
concurrent manifestations of miscegenation: (1) the auto-reformulation of Josephine
Baker’s self-agency, unfolding in the sequential transformations of her celebrated
banana skirt resonating in artistic expressions of the early-twentieth-century primi-
tivist modernism; (2) the formation of open space ensembles in the colonial cities of
Nueva España from the fusion of the Mesoamerican and Mediterranean ideas of
place-making; (3) the implementation of the monumental metropolitan boulevard of
Reforma in Mexico City, linking the colonial historical center to the pre-Hispanic
hill of Chapultepec and its venerated forest. These productions of urban and
metropolitan beauty stand in sheer contrast with the violent transformations of the
territorial land patterns of the hinterlands of Mexico, displaced derivatives of the
land expropriations of the French revolutionary period that shape the dreary face of
the new nation through the transition from colonia to estado nacional. The text
draws parallels between the cultural and spatial implications of the colonizing action
brought forth by conquering over conquered groups in a territory.

Keywords Miscegenation Colonization Culture-forming
Primitivism



Region-forming Expropriations Reforma

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 97

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_5
98 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

5.1 Introduction: Geography, Discovery, Colonization,

and Miscegenation

In Mestizaje y criollismo en la literatura de la Nueva España del siglo XVI, Rafael

Bernal identifies the origins of miscegenated entendement in the awe of the Spanish
explorers-conquerors before “la presencia de América” (Bernal 2015a, p. 323),1
with its unknown natural entities of unprecedented magnitude and variety (Bernal
2015a, p. 73)2 to put names on. The natural, botanic, zoological, and ethnological
observations exact new terms since the very beginning, imposing the expeditioners
to draw on the tongues of the (otherwise erased) cultures of the Caribbean islands as
well as on Nahuatl and Maya parlances on the mainland.3 It can be argued that the
urge to put a name on a new thing triggers a process of reciprocal contamination
that culminates in the first utterance. When the name is spoken, a miraculous aura is
spelt over a location, where physical and mental worlds make contact, astounding
the subject.
The aghast contemplation of the ‘presence of America’ is, thus, followed by
mental interpretation, hazardous exploration, physical interaction. Spatial explo-
ration is intertwined with cultural and anthropological exploration. According to
Bernal, when Hernán Cortés sets sail from Cuba towards the mainland in 1519, not
only is he already intentioned to convert the short commercial expedition he had been
commanded into sedentary expansion, but he is also aware that the great undertaking
of the colonization of the New World is conditioned to a necessary miscegenation
between Spaniards and indigenous. He will phrase that condition in the principle of
the ‘conservación de los naturales’ (Bernal 2015a, p. 114),4 which implies coexis-
tence and reciprocal safeguarding between two belligerent ethnic groups.
According to Bernal, Cortés had been predisposed to cultural miscegenation
from his witnessing of the tragic fate of previous Spanish foundations on the
mainland, devastated by unknown illnesses and surrounding hostility of unknown
natives. More deeply in his soul, the century-long conflict/exchange with the
Moors, losing and reconquering lands in a permanent region-forming succession,
separating and connecting the two opposite shores of the Mediterranean, had
already eradicated racial scruples from the Spaniards (Bernal 2015a, p. 56).
Flocks of missionaries, humanists, and soldiers, then, could pour over the new
lands with the purpose of colonizing as well as understanding. Columbus’ motive
for the exploration was that of tracing new commercial routes and possible bases for
trades, while Cortés imagined the territorial expansion of the nation. The drive for
the appropriation of lands, resources, and riches of various sorts was inseparable
from the momentum pushing towards the ethnological and anthropological

1
In English: ‘the presence of America’. For the Spaniards, it was still the ‘Indias’, but Bernal refers
to the sparked trajectory that will turn the continent into the New World.
2
See entire sub-chapter ‘Las cartas de Colón y el asombro de las Indias’.
3
See entire chapter ‘Las voces caribes de los Españoles’.
4
In English: ‘preservation of the natives’.
5.1 Introduction: Geography, Discovery, Colonization, and Miscegenation 99

investigation. The conquest of the New World was, thus, generating modern
geography, made up of economy, space, and anthropology. The driving counte-
nance of the Mediterranean model of the ‘opposed but accessible shores’ had been
transplanted into new continents.
The anthropological succession described by Bernal lines up Indian Spaniard,
criollo, that is creole, and mestizo, that is ‘miscegenated’. At first, the displaced
Spanish colon transformed by the experience of the New World lives in constant
dissatisfaction for purportedly insufficient recognition of the pioneering work done
to the benefit of the nation. Then, the offspring from Spanish parents born on
American land is imprinted with a sense of superiority towards the natives and a
diametrical complex of inferiority towards the Europeans, which feeds
anti-indigenist resentments. The final achievement of a dispassionate miscegenated
awareness, which sees its own identity before the world in the integral assimilation
of indigenous, Spanish, and creole characters, is identified by Bernal in the Mexican
society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Bernal 2015a, p. 323).
This latter euphemistic representation probably corresponds to a rhetoric com-
patible with Bernal’s diplomatic office in the service of Mexico on various shores of
the Pacific and to his reactionary, corporate political positions.5 The sociological
reality is of course else, in a nation still segregated on the basis of economic
circumstances as well as somatic characters. However, the model proposed by
Bernal to interpret the linguistic and cultural succession during the process of
Hispanization of America is surprisingly compatible with the scope of contempo-
rary design practice intended as a contribution to the region-forming process at a
geographic scale.
In particular, Hashim Sarkis’ reformulation of David Abulafia’s Mediterranean
paradigm of the ‘opposed but accessible shores’ constitutes a powerful tool in the
interpretation of the evolving landscape.6 It represents a form of embedment of a
collective and anonymous design agency in the region-forming process, way more
convincing than any proposed version of mild-determinist metabolism.
Several are the correspondences between the structures and contents of
Abulafia’s The Great Sea (Abulafia 2011) and Bernal’s El Gran Océano (Bernal
2012), which for the amplitude of the matters exceed this research and offer great
room for future work.

5
Bernal’s political activism in the filo-fascist, nationalist, and rhetorical movimiento sinarquista
had lead him to sojourns in the Mexican prisons around 1948. His monumental work El Gran
Océano was mainly elaborated in the years 1960–65, when deployed to the diplomatic missions in
Honduras, the Philippines, and Peru. Through his missions, he had the opportunity to explore
firsthand ‘el campo histórico inteligible’ of the transculturation processes, between the opposite
shores of the Pacific rather than across their aquatic medium. His cultural action in the diplomatic
service focused on the promotion of international collaborative studies, resulting in a considerable
‘transpacific intellectual flow’ between Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, China and Japan. (De Maria
and Campos Castelló 2015) As a counterpoint to his diplomatic and political stances, in his
contemporary fictional production, Bernal is otherwise a sharp castigator of his homeland’s
hypocritical rhetoric (Bernal 1969, 2015b).
6
See Chap. 3 of this book.
100 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

5.2 Cultural Miscegenation

5.2.1 A Glittering String of Artificial Bananas

Since her Parisian years, the glittering figure of Josephine Baker has been tied to the
world of architects through subterranean exchanges, recurrent and unexpressed,
which despite intense critical exploration have retained an essential obscurity. In
her essay ‘A House for Josephine Baker’, the Australian feminist architecture
theorist Karen Burns argues that ‘criticism’s nominal project’ (Burns 1997, p. 70),
that of deciphering spaces for ‘unimpeded visibility’, would fail in interpreting the
architectural constructs generated in Baker’s name and their exterior/interior
dialectics, if attention is not turned to a “discourse [on] the biography of Josephine
Baker” (Burns 1997, p. 63). We should, in fact, go beyond Burn’s suggestion to
align architecture and Baker’s life, and align architecture and Baker’s very body
(Fig. 5.1).
Born in Saint Louis, USA, from a couple of vagabond music performers, she is
an abused live-in domestic at 8, a street child scavenging food from the garbage at
13, a street corner dancer at 14, and a last-chorus-line dancer7 in Harlem at 15,
where her clowning dance moves8 gain attention. At age 19, offered an adventurous
contract by an emissary of the Theatre des Champs-Élysées, Baker sets sail to Paris
along with a company of 20 African-American revue musicians and performers. ‘La
Revue Nègre’ is an all-black musical show, whose conception is generally attributed
to Fernand Léger’s excitement before the African sculpture exhibition at the
Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of Paris 1925 (Sweeney 2004, p. 44). In the wake
of the ‘negrophilie’ (Negro fever) fascinating the Parisian Avant-Garde culture of
the ‘20s, the modernist elite ends up attending rehearsals and premiere in large
number.9
Perfectly fitting the openly erotic canons of the Parisian music halls of the ‘20s
that indulge colonial curiosity focused on exposed nudity, bizarreness, exoticness
and sensuality of black feminine (but also masculine) bodies, Baker happens to be
unexpectedly promoted from her chorus girl post to sharing the role of vedette few
whirlwind days before the premiere (Roueff 2006, p. 67).
There she opens the show doing splits in the air while being carried on
comedian-dancer Joe Alex’s shoulders, with nothing but a pink flamingo feather

7
The comedy chorus girl at the end of the line is a traditional persona of black vaudeville. She
cannot get the step upon entering the stage, but gets it better than anyone else ‘breaking the place
out’ in the encore, as narrated by Patrick O’Connor in the BBC documental Josephine Baker
(Broughton and Phillips 2006, frame 5′40″).
8
Interviewed in the same documental, Brenda Dixon Gottschild enumerates the ‘shimmy’,
‘mooch’, ‘mess-around’, and ‘Charleston’.
9
Sweeney mentions Man Ray, who took photographs of the cast, Jean Cocteau, Robert Desnos,
Blaise Cendrars, Francis Picabia, Paul Guillaume, Fernand Léger, Kees Van Dongen (Sweeney
2004, p. 45).
5.2 Cultural Miscegenation 101

Fig. 5.1 Josephine Baker in Un Vent de Folie wearing a glittering banana string, Folies Bergères
1927 (photo Lucien Waléry, PD legal notice at end of chapter)
102 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

Fig. 5.2 Photo of Baker and Alex performing the ‘Danse de Sauvage’ number of the Revue
Nègre showing at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, probably taken during the promotion of the
show before the press in 1925. The iconic power of the image relies on the embodiment of the
unconscious fancies of the primitivist cultural milieu. Alex’ figure, the combination of brute force
and supreme agility of an ideal natural state, effortlessly supports the flying evolutions of Baker’s
plumed nudity while drawing the aerial fresco of nature’s invincible beauty (photo courtesy of
akg-images)

between her legs for the canonic ‘loufoque’ (crazy) choreography.10 Her body
shaking in a tiny kilt of plumes, climbing onto Alex’s ebony mass and swinging
around it, closes the show with the other expected topos, the erotic choreography,
interpreted in ‘la danse sauvage’ (Fig. 5.2). Perpetuated by Paul Colin’s posters
and, later, his lithographic album Tumulte Noir,11 ‘la danse sauvage’ projects the
entire company in a European tour until an abrupt interruption in Berlin. There,
enticed by the director of the Folies Bergère Paul Derval, Baker breaks her contract
and returns to Paris to feature as the uncontested diva of the production La Folie du
Jour, where she first appears dancing in a banana skirt as Fatou in 1926. Fatou is a
gracious sexy little savage that descends from a tree in the jungle to tease a white
explorer by shaking her bananas (Barnwell 1997, p. 85). That first banana skirt with

10
“She made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was
being carried upside down and doing the splits on the shoulder of a black giant. Mid stage he
paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow
cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood… She was an unforgettable female ebony statue.”
(Flanner 1925)
11
On Paul Colin’s Tumulte Noir album of 1927, see (Dalton and Gates 1998).
5.2 Cultural Miscegenation 103

Fig. 5.3 Baker in a Fatou-model rubber banana skirt, during her Copenhagen tour of 1928 (photo
Tage Christensen, courtesy of Ritzau Scanpix)

the primitivist looks of a natural tuft of small bananas jiggling curved towards the
inside in various rows (Fig. 5.3), will be replace in next year’s production Un Vent
de Folie. A sophisticate string of longer bright yellow bananas, elegantly spaced,
pointing outwards, and beautifully lined with sparkling crystals, comes to embody
the manmade improvement of the natural, the work of art elaborating on the pri-
mordial, modern primitivism. A Freudian representation of the playful empower-
ment over a multitude of erected phalli, the banana costume will become a topos of
104 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

Baker’s artistic self-agency in numerous variations (Sowinska 2005–06).12 The

artful string of beautiful bananas, however, can be regarded as a striking mani-
festation of the tension towards a mètissage (miscegenation), equally permeating
the Parisian avant-garde art scene and the European late-colonial society that had
expanded its violence over vast exotic territories and was now returning a gaze
imbued with a different desire.

5.2.2 Modernist Primitivism

According to Oliver Roueff, Baker’s seduction is based on three unresolved

ambiguities elaborating upon eroticism, namely savage and civilized, feminine and
androgynous, sensuality and innocence (Roueff 2006, p. 70). The black feminism
and cultural studies theorist Mae Henderson also speculates that the vast interest
instantly raised by Baker’s primitivist performances are to be situated in the context
of the French belle-époque colonialism colliding with the explosion of modernity at
the beginning of the XX century.

5.2.3 Colonial Geographies

The colonial tradition of ‘ethnographic display’ of primitive manifestations pre-

cipitates, in fact, into the modern ‘erotic/parodic performance’ of the Revue Nègre
producing a ‘powerful iconography’ of the métissage of ‘modernist primitivism’
(Henderson 2003). Henderson, thus, identifies the binary voyeurism/exhibitionism
with the binary colonizer/colonized, as the obsession of the former for looking
(male) opposed to the desire of the latter to be looked at (female).
On a larger geographical scale, the three ambiguities suggested by Roueff can be
equally referred to as binaries plotting the colonial dialectic between colonized and
colonizer that generates the miscegenated space of new continents. Those binaries,
in fact, plot the geographic divergence between the ‘rhizomatic’ and the ‘arbores-
cent’ models, the East and the West envisioned by Deleuze and Guattari (1987,
p. 18). The various articulations of that divergence, such as ‘Oceania’ versus

12
Sowinska describes Baker’s banana skirt as a collective creation to which one of Paul Colin’s
posters for the Revue Nègre must have contributed with a fundamental intuition. There first
appears a transfiguration of Backer’s body in animalistic countenance, veiled by a tuft of bananas.
Jean Cocteau’s artistic direction and many other characters peopling the music hall scene of the
‘20s, confusedly mentioned in Baker’s autobiographies including herself, must have variously
contributed to the gradual evolution of the costume from the jingling rubber tuft to the glittering
bananas string.
5.2 Cultural Miscegenation 105

‘Europe’, the ‘steppe-and-garden’ or ‘desert-and-oasis’ versus the ‘forest-and-field’,

the ‘replanting-of-offshoots’ versus the ‘sow-and-reap’, correspond to the fracture
through which liberated sexuality gets rid of the genealogic imperative (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, p. 18). The process of ‘becoming-’ through masochist practice
indicates sexuality as the field of deterritorialization/reterritorialization parallel to
geographic imprinting.

5.2.4 Mythic Persona

The string of artificial bananas precipitates, then, the transfiguration of Baker,

stricken by worldwide celebrity, into a mythic persona and a symbol of transcultural
miscegenation. The fact that 2 years later, after long vocal training, she is ready to
play the lead role in Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Creole, sanctions the for-
midable transformation from ‘petit danseuse savage’ to ‘grande diva magnifique’,13
or the ‘creole goddess’.

5.2.5 Cet obscure objet du désir Colonial

Baker was the object of desire of an entire generation, the muse of among others
Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Dior. Carole Sweeney elaborates on the
relation between ‘aesthetic modernism’ and ‘imperial capitalism’ to note that the
“cosmopolitan access to subordinate cultures that European modernism enjoyed
[was simultaneous to] the concentration of capital in colonial territories” (Sweeney
2004, p. 48). According to Sweeney, ‘radical innovators of architectural form’ such
as Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos among the modernist avant-garde, were inspired
by Baker’s ‘denaturalized’ body for its participation in both modernist and primi-
tivist aesthetic (Sweeney 2004, p. 48).
Cultural historian Brenda Dixon Gottschild anchors the body of Baker to a
spatiality that rhizomatically reconnects the microscale of the object-subject to the
macro-scale of geography by stating that “[Baker’s] black dancing body [disrupted
the picture of] the monarchical, hierarchical, vertically aligned, body of European
ballet”. Baker’s ‘denaturalization’ is performed by overriding the verticality of the
sedentary subject with the obliqueness of the nomadic subject through movements
that go back to the primordial salvage and the baboon that swings on a liana. While
overthrowing the European mode, the ‘awkward becomes beautiful’, the ‘silly
savvy’, and ‘everything sexy’ (Broughton and Phillips 2006, frame 12′30″).

13
A popular quote from British singer Shirley Bassey.
106 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

By Deleuze-Guattarian terminology, to move from the sphere of art to the

geophilosophical plateau, Baker’s ‘denaturalized’ body can be better said to be the
‘body without organs’, or the ‘line of flight’, that rhizomizes and miscegenates the
territory of modernity.

5.2.6 The Colonial Perspective of Landscape Urbanism

Our view over the landscape is tightly related to colonial perspectives. Mostafavi
and Najle’s ‘manual for the machinic landscape’ (Mostafavi and Najle 2003), the
collection of essays and projects intended to be foundational to the movement of
landscape urbanism, was reviewed earlier as a regressive counterpart to Rowe’s
concept of the ‘middle landscape’ and Sarkis’ idea of the ‘region-forming’ process,
while formulating a contemporary idea of landscape continuum in this research.
In it, Hight’s ‘Portraying the Urban Landscape: Landscape in Architectural
Criticism and Theory, 1960–Present’ (Hight 2003), far from being the announced
historical-critical reconstruction, represents the systematic manifesto of the move-
ment following Corner’s conceptual foundation. Hight’s analysis of landscape
relies on the concept of ‘orientalism’ derived from Edward Said. “The ‘other’ […]
plays a constituent part in constructing the identity of the imperial power” (Hight
2003, p. 25, note 4), in order to describe the relationship between landscape practice
and architecture. The parallel between the binaries ‘colonizer/colonized’ and
‘architecture/landscape practice’ results extremely pertinent to our matters.
Our earlier discourse on ‘miscegenation’14 constitutes a construct specular to
that of the ‘orientalism’, that is the possible role-reversal in the architecture-
landscape contamination of ethos advocated for by landscape urbanists. In fact, if
landscape is the ‘adjacent other’ to architecture, then, in line with the ‘orientalist’
formulation, it is architecture, the colonizer, the term that is being redefined by the
‘adjacent other’, the landscape, the colonized. The actor of the self-reformulation is
in this case architecture, the colonizer.

5.2.7 Miscegenation

On the other hand, the ‘miscegenation’ model implies the specular contamination of
the colonized, landscape, from exposition to the colonizer, architecture. In the
‘miscegenation’ model, the colonized is the protagonist. The colonized is, in fact,
the agent of its own reformulation on the basis of the hybrid knowledge acquired.
Rather than exclusive alternatives, the ‘orientalism/miscegenation’ dialectic is
more of a reciprocity, recording prevalence of movement in one direction or the

See: sub-chapter ‘6.1 Geography, discovery, colonization, and miscegenation’ in this book.
14
5.2 Cultural Miscegenation 107

other. After all, the colonizer/colonized dynamics can be seen in

Deleuze-Guattarian terms, where both deterritorialization and reterritorialization
processes imply the secondary presence of the other. But, despite this reciprocity,
the construct proposed in this research is, thus, that of ‘miscegenation’. It can be
described as a self-operated reterritorialization of the colonized, following its
deterritorialization produced by the exposition to the colonizer. That is a prevalence
of emancipatory cosmopolitanism of the colonized over auto-absolutory exoticism
of the colonizer.
We therefore advocate for the prevalence of the virtues of ‘miscegenation’ over
the hypocrisy of ‘orientalism’, that is, in strictly disciplinary terms, the prevalent
self-redefinition of landscape practice over its colonization by transplants of
architectural ‘ethos’.

5.2.8 Self-reformulations

As of Baker, we could conclude that she is self-reformulating herself after the

deterritorialization operated on her by colonialism. As the colonized, Baker is the
main subject of the unrequested disruption operated on her by colonialism (het-
eronomous deterritorialization), as much as she is the main subject of the
self-reformulation (autonomous deterritorialization) that she is operating on herself
by redefining her characters. We can consider that ‘miscegenation’ records the
prevalence of self-deterritorialization of the colonized, for which heteronomous
disruption is the triggering factor. Both disruption (heteronomous deterritorializa-
tion) and self-reformulation (autonomous deterritorialization) combine in a process
of deterritorialization culminating in the self-reformulation of Baker’s persona and
body.

5.2.9 Unsolicited Attentions

In 1928, Loos designed for Baker a famous unbuilt black-and-white-striated house

on the Parisian Avenue Bugeaud, for which neither trace of a commission, nor of
reaction exists. Le Corbusier fell to Baker’s feet the next year, in 1929, during his
transatlantic journey from Buenos Aires to Bordeaux on ocean liner Lutétia.
A photo shows him in a black-and-white-striated costume staring at Baker during a
fancy-dress reception. He would later insistently write to solicit a reunion and
receive a polite rejection penned by Baker’s husband, Pepito Abatino (Birksted
2009, p. 345, note 143). Both episodes can be qualified as unsolicited attentions,
paralleled by the black and white stripes, a coincidence in which some read Le
Corbusier’s derisive parody to Loos’ project.
108 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

Loos’ design for Baker house, however, has been the subject of extensive critical
exercises across time, as telling of the relationship between Modernism and one of
its most conspicuous muses.
Farès el-Dahdah’s classical reading of Loos’ project appeared on Assemblage
26, briefly retraces “a narrative history of an architecture complicit with a subject’s
affects” (El-Dahdah 1995, p. 73). El-Dahdah evokes a number of buildings struc-
tured as ‘metaphors of the protagonist’s love’ starting with the oneiric ruins of the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to end up focusing on Le petit maison, the architectural
fantasy described by Jean-François de Bastide in his amorous novel of 1763.
The parallel between the unimplemented architectural compositions of petit
maison and Baker House elaborates on several levels, but mainly on the corre-
spondence of the building’s distribution with the topography of the occupants’
sentiments. However, while in the case of Bastide’s novel the unfolding distribution
of Marquis Trémicour’s petit maison corresponds to the fluctuating topography of
his guest Mélite’s affects, in the case of the Baker House the architecture’s com-
position ends up transubstantiating the desire of its own creator. Loos is, thus,
trying to compensate for the absence of, or refusal from, the object of his colonial
desire, Baker, by fantasizing her architectural transcription.

5.2.10 Baker Is the Landscape

El-Dahdah describes Loos’ design as ‘an admirateur’s letter’ (El-Dahdah 1995,

p. 75), remarking the parallel with Le Corbusier’s written avances. As an ‘instru-
ment of tactile extension’, laden with no specific meaning but that of yearning, the
amorous gift of the project is “a metonymic object to occupy the space where the
other is not” (El-Dahdah 1995, p. 76). More than a machinery of seduction, it is,
thus, a fetish prosthesis accompanied by Roland Barthes’ formulation: “with this
object, I touch you with my phallus”. In fact, we could say that Baker is the
landscape and Loos is trying to colonize her by architecture.
The metonymic character of the design is remarked also in the “flagrant script of
Josephine’s body” ‘daubed’ on the outside (El-Dahdah 1995, p. 77) in horizontal
black stripes over the blank façades of Loos’ architecture. The black stripes echo
the livery of exotic zebras, macabrely flayed to line the walls with an animalier
living tapestry. The black stripes also recall the horizontal line of the feminine body
waiting to be penetrated by virile verticality. In Ornament and Crime Loos narrates
that a primordial penetration informs the cross. In that, he retraces the primitive
origin of decoration. The ‘Papuan’ tattoo, the primeval decoration of the aboriginal
body, Loos’ constant reference along his essays, daubs the striped exterior of the
house with its mark of primitivism as it were transferred from the very skin of
savage Baker.
Loos’ construction is, however, an onanistic fantasy, an impotent’s autoeroti-
cism of which the colonial prey seems even unaware. He wants her to “wear the
stairs” (El-Dahdah 1995, p. 79), he designs for her a grotesquely windowed pool to
5.2 Cultural Miscegenation 109

exhibit her nudity, as an exotic animal in a zoological cage or a nineteenth-century

brothel’s “tableau vivant” (El-Dahdah 1995, p. 79). But in private she probably
aspires to sobriety as much as her public persona is exuberantly breaking the rules
of civilization, since Loos’ gift does not receive any documented reply, not even at
the hands of Abatino.

5.2.11 Uneven Parallels

El-Dahdah’s petit maison/Baker House parallel is, thus, quite uneven, for assimi-
lating a bachelor’s machinery of seduction with an onanist’s apparatus of
self-deception. However, the nucleus of the suggested correspondence between the
XVIII century’s topos of the boudoir within a hotel particulier and the pool con-
struct in Baker House is equally relevant.
Both are specially intimate rooms, hidden in the interior of the architectural
body, accessed from the sleeping quarters, and firmly “codified as a woman’s
territory” (El-Dahdah 1995, p. 80), where in some cases a lover can be allowed.
Illumination is indirect and includes special effects of reflection, which in one case
are produced by the mirror cladding of the walls, in the other by the protean
multiple reflexes of water, whose suspended volume is pierced through by porthole
windows. In both cases the real space is transfigured. The walls of Trémicour’s
boudoir are “covered with mirrors whose joinery was concealed by carefully
sculpted, leafy tree trunks […], heavy with flowers and laden with chandeliers”
(Bastide 1994, p. 75), so that it “could have been mistaken for natural woods”
(Bastide 1994, p. 76). Rodolphe El-Khoury and Anthony Vidler retrace the
architectural model of Bastide’s literary fantasy in Jaques-François Blondel dis-
tributive and decorative lessons published in Paris in 1738 (El-Khoury 1994, p. 9;
Vidler 1994, p. 19), starting a longer correspondence between the two.15 The real
manmade space of the boudoir is thus artfully converted into a fictitious natural
environment. Similar is the case of Baker House’s pool. In both cases a refined play
of light dissolves the box of the room.
This expansion of a physical interior into a mental exterior, such as the endless
space of Baker House’s pool and petit maison’s boudoir, is a composition tech-
nique that would be largely adopted under different circumstances by Italian radi-
cals starting with Archizoom’s No-Stop City project of 1969. A miniature-like

15
Along with El-Khoury, Claudia Conforti also notes that Bastide’s account, initially published on
a newspaper in 1760, might have a physical model in the Pavillion de Laboissière, or Hôtel de La
Bouëxière, (Conforti 2017, p. 19) built for the tax collector Charles-François Gaillard de La
Bouëxière, son of Jean, by Antoine Matthieu Le Carpentier in the mid-eighteenth century as a folie
in the gardens designed by Jean-Michel Chevotet (Wikipédia 2018). Freely inspired by Bastide’s
original, Vittorio De Feo, the subject of Conforti’s essay, had written a literary ecphrasis elabo-
rated upon his own project for a little house, incarnating his lofty interpretation of architecture as a
playful pleasure. See Tre racconti di architettura (De Feo 2010).
110 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

territorial module is endlessly multiplied by the reflections of the four mirroring

sides of the containing box.
Commenting on the petit maison and its machinic furniture, Vidler attributes the
dropping of the traditionally intended ‘fiction of architecture’ “in favor of an art of
endless mechanical manipulation of space”, among others, to the Marquise de
Sade’s mise-en-scène for the rituals of the Cent-vigint jours de Sodome (1785)
(Vidler 1994, p. 15). The same erotic manipulation of real space is made more
sophisticated and aware in Superstudio’s mirror chamber of the Supersurface
installation at MOMA in 1972, in which the visitor is immersed. Manfredo Tafuri’s
accusations of senseless auto-eroticism and psychedelic delirium targeting the neo-
avant-garde, are referred to the production of such fictitious spaces by means of a
depraved manipulation of architecture, tending to replace the entire reality with
‘communication’ (Tafuri 1972, p. 394).

5.2.12 Re-Paradigmed Worlds

One Saturday afternoon, Danielle De Niese had just finished her performance at the
New York Metropolitan Opera playing Despina in Così Fan Tutte to shed some
light on Baker’s seductions over the world of architecture.
My friend and music connoisseuse Miss O., insists that Susanna Phillips, the
other soprano and actual primadonna, has a more powerful voice. But De Niese
sings the Italian lyrics with a spell—I hardly catch a few words—that transmutes
the language into an unknown birdsong flashing plumage all around.
Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera buffa of 1790 is set in Naples and tells the story of
two ladies from Ferrara engaged with young army officers. The daring young men
improvidently accept a wager from Alfonso, an old cynical philosopher, who
challenges the faithfulness of their dames. At the end of a series of amusing
turnarounds, deftly managed by the young housemaid Despina, both ladies end up
falling to the court of two mysterious suitors, whose noble Albanian disguise
conceals no one else but their fiancées.
During the Glyndebourne Opera House Festival, De Niese accepts to shoot an
interview on her unique voice warming up exercises. “Airflow—Trilling—Nasal
Resonance… open up cheek muscles, loosen up tongue…”, but with De Niese
‘trilling’ becomes a ‘tongue-to-lip trilling’, among a bunch of other variations.
A Sri-Lanka Burgher of Dutch descent, when De Niese ‘machines’ her voice, she
embodies ‘the creole’. With reference to linguistic paradigms, the creole is the
overcoming of the pidgin. Consequent to the relocation of European groups along
colonial patterns in the ‘New Worlds’, the pidgin is a plane displaced fusion of two
or more languages. The creole, instead, is the language of new natives, generations
after that fusion. Not a language one can adopt by will, it is a cultural confluence in
which one is born, that allows the subject to reformulate their horizon by
re-paradigming new worlds, where the ‘creole’ is a more simply spelled substitute
for ‘miscegenation’.
5.2 Cultural Miscegenation 111

5.2.13 The Reign of Birds

Deleuze Guattari discuss the “problem of the machining of the voice” as related to
the “becoming-woman” and “becoming-child” of music, with reference to
Dominique Fernandez’ Porporino ou les mystères de Naples16 (Grasset 1974), a
novel on the life of a castrato opera singer. The concept of the ‘machining of the
voice’ is specifically related to reformulations of opera singing modalities: with the
‘head voice’ the countertenor sings above his voice and his voice “operates inside
the sinuses and at the back of the throat and the palate without relying on the
diaphragm or passing through the bronchial tubes”, while with the ‘stomach voice’
the castrato “gives carnal matter to the imperceptible, impalpable, and aereal”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 303).
Marcel Moré’s Le Dieu Mozart et le monde des oiseaux17 (Gallimard 1971) is a
second reference to draw a parallel between Mozart’s musical and vocal innova-
tions and a process of “becoming-horse” and “becoming-bird” that characterizes the
opera production in the second half of the XVIII century and the first three decades
of the XIX century. Mozart’s accenti18 draw large diagonals transfiguring by
analogy the horse’s movement over the scores, while through ‘embellishments’
such as gruppetti, appoggiature, staccati, o spiccati19 “the human musician is
deterritorialized [that is transfigured] in the bird” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
p. 304).
Mozart’s Così fan tutte, composed little before his death, can probably be
regarded as the epitome of the “becoming-bird” of baroque music. The deflagration
of the ‘embellishments’ appears to be interpreted as potently by De Niese’s
‘tongue-to-lip trilling’ as it had been by Porporino’s androgynous voice in the
1770s. Porporino, Mozart, Baker, and De Niese are gods and demons of the ‘reign
of birds’, who re-paradigm new worlds.

5.2.14 The Reign of Insects

In the ‘30s of the nineteenth century, it will be the rise of Verdi’s and Wagner’s
voices, reterritorialized in the dual-gender system, to sanction the demise of the

16
In English: Porporino or the Mysteries of Naples.
17
In English: God Mozart and the World of Birds.
18
An accento is an emphasis placed on individual notes.
19
A gruppetti, appoggiature, staccati, spiccati are musical ‘ornaments’ not strictly necessary to
carry the line of a melody. Subtracting from a principal note’s time-value, an appoggiatura is an
added higher or lower note. A gruppetto, or ‘turn’, is a figure composed about a principal note,
assembling a higher note, the note itself, a lower note, and the note itself again. The staccato, is a
sequence of notes of shortened time-value for each to be detached from the next, applying chiefly
to wind instruments, while the spiccato is the technique of bouncing the bow on the strings to
detach one note from the other.
112 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

Baroque musical wave, the oblivion of the androgynous option interpreted by

castrati such as Porporino, and the early overshadowing of Rossini’s and Bellini’s
modes (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 307–308).20 According to Deleuze Guattari,
despite their capitalistic and bourgeois drive, Verdi’s and the Wagner’s reformu-
lations will eventually result in the diffusion of ‘new molecular flows’ leading to
Debussy’s ‘molecularization of the motif’, by virtue of their chorality and lyricism,
and the consequent ‘dissolution of form’. The reign of the voice is thus succeeded
by the reign of the orchestra, where the voice is integrated.
The “reign of birds”, vocal beings, is succeeded by the “reign of insects”,
instrumental beings, with “their vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking,
scratching, and scraping”, which seems to acoustically allude to the expansion of
contemporary ‘emergent’ systems and diffusive occupation of the territory in the
XX century.

5.2.15 Légion d’Honneur

The aura of Baker’s persona would be publicly recognized after the end of the
Second World War, when she is awarded the ‘Croix de guerre avec palmes’, the
‘Rosette de la Resistance’, and the ‘Légion d’Honneur’, after repeated obstructions
from the military authorities under the mandate of French President Charles De
Gaulle. Starting at the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, she had worked as an
undercover agent for the French intelligence, digging secret information from
Italian, Japanese, and German diplomatic sources. Braving out immediate execu-
tion, she had been transferring the documents hidden between her music sheets or in
her panties, crossing the boundaries of Europe, South America, and Africa. Baker’s
civic figure would surprisingly consolidate, then, with her speech/performance
delivered in her Free French Army uniform, in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963, upon invitation from Martin
Luther King.21 Baker had self-reformulated herself twice, first from exploited
juvenile to creole goddess, then from grand diva magnifique to icon of feminist,
social, political, transnational, and racial emancipation, and twice her body had
re-paradigmed new worlds.

20
In fact, Rossini (1793–1868; Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1816, prequel of Mozart’s Le nozze di
Figaro, from the homonymous dramas of 1775 and 1784 by Pierre-Augustin Caron de
Beaumarchais) was active until the fourth decade of the 1800s, while Bellini (1801–1835; Norma,
1831) did not survive the early triumphs of Verdi (1813–1901; active 1839–1893; Nabucco, 1842)
and Wagner (1813–1883; active 1832–1882; Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy, 1869–83).
21
Still in 1936, Baker had been called ‘negro wench’ by the New York Times upon her unac-
claimed return to America, with the intention of relegating her to the censured space of segre-
gation. Several black activists would in turn regard her artistic roles as degrading for the
Afro-American community.
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 113

5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España

A review of the typical arrangement of Nuevo-Hispanic public space grounds

abstract notions of ‘miscegenation’ into practical terms of our discipline. The
process of hybridization between the Mesoamerican open space model and the type
of the Euro-Mediterranean plaza, overlaid throughout the Spanish conquest,
(Wagner et al. 2013) is the spatial correspondent of the equivalent process of
cultural ‘miscegenation’ described by Bernal and, graciously, precipitating in
Baker’s glittering string of bananas.
The Mesoamerican open space is an uncontained liquid expanse, a material
referent of the ‘primordial sea’ of genealogic myths, identified by a distribution of
masses, sculptural pieces or buildings that transfigure characteristic arrangements of
rocks, mountains, or other natural features. It is a manmade transcription of sur-
rounding landscape assemblages. The type of the Euro-Mediterranean plaza is a
contained zone, in which the traditions of the Greco-Roman agora-forum, the
medieval market place, the Vitruvian ideals reinvented by the Renaissance, and the
Islamic maidan have confused.
The spatial organization at the core of the colonial cities founded by the
Spaniards in Neuva España during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, always
imply a composite assemblage that, intentionally or not, hybridizes the type of the
Euro-Mediterranean plaza with an openness characteristic of Mesoamerican
arrangements. An exemplary case is that of the zócalo of Oaxaca, where the central
public square is flanked north by the side of the cathedral occupying large part of an

Fig. 5.4 Public space system in the historical center of Oaxaca, Mexico, with zocalo square,
cathedral, atrium, and alameda within Hippodamian grid (photo images ©2018 Digital Globe, Map
Data ©2018 Google INEGI Mexico)
114 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

urban block. A residual C-shaped area left open around the pronaos of the cathedral
functions as the sacred atrium while retaining a civic use. The alameda, a rect-
angular plaza densely planted with trees attached to the west side of the atrium,
reinforces an east–west axis perpendicular to the north–south axis of the main
square. The result is an L-shaped urban ensemble formed by the open spaces of the
zócalo and atrium-alameda jointed by the cathedral. The zócalo and the atrium-
alameda are fluidly connected on a southeast to northwest diagonal (Fig. 5.4). The
Oaxacan zócalo area is a ‘miscegnated’ urban assemblage resulting from the
hybridization of spatial types of diverse origins. The same spatial organization, due
to intentional and unconscious instances of the collective memory of miscegena-
tion, governs the urban ensembles of the zócalos of the centro histórico and
Coyoacán in Mexico City. The former case shows a subtler stratification of the open
space system, articulated in plaza, cathedral, and Templo Mayor—the last term
being a latent pre-Hispanic presence, slightly recessed from the manifest compo-
sition of the Hispanic complex.
A similar process of miscegenation is represented by Nuevo-Hispanic types such
as the enclosed courtyard, combining Mesoamerican triad-centerings, quincunxes,
and, quadrangles with Mediterranean cloisters, horti conclusi, and madrasas.

5.3.1 Expropriations in the New World

We have discussed in Chap. 2 of how the locus can be interpreted as the confluence
of history and geography, where trans-historical aspirations are developed by an
identitarian group dwelling across time on a region. The territorial dynamics carried
forth in France between 1789 and 1871, referred to as ‘land expropriations’, show
surprising analogies with the expropriation policies enacted and fragmentarily
implemented in Mexico between 1786 and 1857. In the former case, we can
consider the outbreak of the French Revolution and the carnage of the Paris
Commune as the precipitating points of a broader historical wave. In the latter case,
the Bourbons’ Real Ordenanza de Intendentes for colonial Nueva España and the
Leyes de Reforma starting with the liberal constitution for independent Mexico
provide the reference.
As Pöete’s and Halbwachs’ analyses describe how the historical sequence ancien
régime-French Revolution-Empires22 grounds itself into the urban area of Paris, in
his substantial monograph of 1997 about collective identities in Mexico, Enrique
Florescano brings together a broad historical fresco of the transient regimes
unfolding from the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations to the Porfiriato via

22
We can identify a complete historical sequence by lining up: ancien régime; 1789 revolution;
1792 terror; 1794 white terror; 1801 First Empire; 1815 Restauration; 1830 July Monarchy; 1848s
Republic; 1851s Empire; 1870 Third Republic with the 1871 parenthesis of the Communes.
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 115

Virreinato, Independencia, and Reforma.23 By analyzing the implemented and

aborted reforms on the structure of the immense Mexican nation, with its endless
geographic and ethnic diversity, Florescano sheds light over a miscegenated
accumulation of layered fragments and traces. Alongside the expanded sociological
narrative, collateral frames of the century-long region-forming can be retraced.

5.3.2 Merciless Dissection of a Country’s Destiny

Florescano’s comprehensive historical reconstruction in Etnía, Estado y Nación24

proposes to contribute to an unbiased understanding of the campesino rebellion
breaking out across Maya lands under the flags of the Zapatista movement in 1994.
The focus of the analysis is on the dynamics involving the collective identity of the
dwelling groups, the lands of the fathers, and the structures for their government.
Florescano is often assimilated to ‘subaltern historiography’ for his interest in the
perspective of native communities and refusal of both post-colonial nationalism and
neo-Marxist social readings.25 However, compared to other subaltern histories, his
work exhibits a more detached gaze over the human events, by neither idealizing
the pre-Colombian nor the colonized native. He seems to observe, rather than
condemn, violence and conflicts as agents of the historical unfolding. For this very
character, his anti-third-worldist vision can be considered compatible with both
Sergio Romano’s nostalgic reconstruction of the colonial process of territorializa-
tion in La città europea fuori d’Europa that we will touch upon further on in this
chapter, as well as Pöete-Halbwach-Rossi’s model of interpretation of spatial
transformations based on Engelsian dialectic materialism described in Chap. 1.
Other authors before Florescano have reserved darker tones to the estado
nacional of the Reforma compared to the colonial regime of Nueva España,

23
A complete historical sequence, in this case, lines up: Mesoamerican civilizations; 1325 foun-
dation Tenochtitlán future capital of the Aztec Empire; 1519 Conquista; 1521 colonial Virreinato
de Nueva España; 1810 war of Independence; 1821 Independencia; 1822 Imperio de Iturbide;
1823 United Mexican States; 1824 Republican Constitution and Primera República Federal
Mexicana; 1836 centralized reform of Santa Anna and dictatorship; 1846 US Mexico war; 1846
Segunda República Federal Mexicana; 1847 Yucatan’s guerra de castas start; 1848 loss of a half
of the territory to the USA; 1854 Plan of Ayutla; 1855 liberal government; 1857 liberal consti-
tution; 1858s dictatorship of Santa Anna; 1859 Leyes de Reforma; 1861 liberal government of
Juarez; 1864 French intervention and Second Empire; 1867 Liberal Government of Juárez; 1872
Liberal Governemt; 1876 Porfiriato; 1810 Mexican Revolution; 1917 Constitution and civil war;
1929 Maximato; 1934 PRI one-party rule.
24
In English: Ethnicity, State, and Nation.
25
Florescano intends to override the politically interested reconstructions of the 1994 events and
their motives: on one hand, the perpetuations of the positivist nationalism that has kept the country
under authoritarian rule, excluding the authentic participation of native groups; on the other hand,
the celebrative salutations from the neo-Marxist intellighencija, which subject the interpretation of
the historical dynamics to alien ideological superstructures.
116 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

dismantling the edifice of a conventional narrative (Hale 1968, 1989). Others, such
as Jacques Lafaye in his classical book Quetzacoatl and Guadalupe, have previ-
ously described the ethnic miscegenation of Pre-Columbian and Marian compo-
nents, which would deliver the Mexican nation through the transition from colonia
to estado nacional (Lafaye 1976). Florescano’s offhand synthesis covering the span
of two millennia has gained him conflicting critiques about the bending of historical
factuality in favor of a vision. What makes Florescano’s work particularly relevant
to this research, however, is the fact that it can be used to relate the trajectories of
the ethnic identities in Mexico to the fluctuations of the territorial structures of the
country that is its spatial transformations.26
Florescano’s analysis is organized in the three historical phases of the
pre-Columbian era, the colonial society of the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, and
the nineteenth-century national state, to conclude that the discontinuities in the
Mexican sociological regime—that we hereby try to interpret for the consequent
territorial shifts—occurring with the advent of the national state are, for many, even
more dramatic than those descending from the advent of the colony. Despite
exerted on the past, the work is a merciless dissection of Mexico’s destiny projected
into the country’s future.

5.3.3 Altépetl: Sowing, Monuments, Land Rights

When the bands of hunters-gatherers start their process of independization from

nature by settling to cultivate and cattle in the Mesoamerican cone, the first per-
manent centers are formed. By 1200 AC, the Olmec culture has edified the
1-km-long monumental terrace of San Lorenzo (in today’s state of Veracruz) and,
from there, irradiates towards the territories of the present-day Mexico valley,
Morelos, Guerrero, Oaxaca. In a later phase, the Olmecs implement a series of
pyramidal constructions of rammed earth flanked by flooded patios on islets in the
Río Tonalá. While the ponds correspond to the primordial ocean, the tri-stepped
pyramids are the ceremonial correspondent of the primigenial mountain, stacking

26
Ethnicity is defined as a group of individuals historically settled in a territory, with a common
language and culture, who recognize their own peculiarities before other groups and identify
themselves by an own name. The state appears with the legal system intended to exert sovereign
power over a territory and the individuals in its jurisdiction. The nation, which anciently coincided
with the ethnic group, is reformulated into the new idea of citizenship by the overturns of the
French Revolution. Since then, the members of a nation reciprocally recognize themselves mutual
obligations and rights by virtue of their common belonging to a community of peers, that is not by
virtue of birth, but social edification of the citizen. To formulate the notions of ethnicity, state, and
nation, Florescano relies respectively on Tamara Dragadze, Colin Renfrew, Anthony Smith;
Norberto Bobbio; Eric Hobsbawm. This ideal of a modern nation of citizens, governed by equal
laws, corresponds to an “imagined community” (after Benedict Anderson), in which the inhabi-
tants of the country, with all their disparities, are unified by similar ideals, share a territory, have a
common past, and venerate symbols of identity (Florescano 2001, pp. 14–16).
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 117

up underworld, earth, and sky along the cosmic axis. According to Florescano, “al
sembrar la tierra de cultivos y colmarla de monumentos, los pobladores adquirieron
un ‘derecho’ de propiedad sobre ella; la tierra se convirtió en territorio de la
comunidad y se vinculó a los antepasados y los dioses protectores” 27 (Florescano
2001, p. 31).
These basic elements will be recurrent in all the Mesoamerican cultures. The
pyramid is the artificial equivalent for the surrounding mountains, set onto an
expanse of flat land representing the originary waters. The monumentality of the
complex is sanctioned by the ancestral rites perpetuating the memory of the group’s
origins. The primordial myth is thus implanted into the territory along the vertical
axis underworld-earth-sky. This structure is immortalized in numerous
Mesoamerican bas-reliefs, representing the divine ancestors in the act of surfacing
from the underworld through the sacred cave at the foot of the water-filled mountain
with the seeds of maize in hand.28 The seeds will be scattered over the territory to
generate common people as well as crops, while the nobles are direct offspring of
the ancestors or variously born from tree trunks or aquatic turtle carapaces. The
town-territory identity in Mesoamerican cultures is a strong reminder of the agri-
cultural origin of the city and its bounds to the countryside. Water-filled mountain
equals chief town equals territory equals people equals crops, by virtue of the ethnic
memory deposited in mythology and vertically organized along the cosmic axis.
In Nahuatl, the word ‘altépetl’ summarizes this composite notion. Made up of
‘atl’ meaning water and ‘tepétl’ meaning mountain, the ‘mountain filled with water’
is the term that refers to a state as a whole territory subjected to the rule of an
ethnically determined group settled in the chief town, as we will discuss more in
detail further on.

5.3.4 Vertical Axis: Ethnicity, Territory, Cosmos

The Zapotecs start consolidating their villages in the Oaxaca valley since the
seventeenth-century BC. By the twelfth-century BC, the chief centers gathering
the resources of the subjected territory are ruled by caciques of noble lineage. In the
structure of the cacicazgos, the condition of equality among the members of
the nomadic band is broken and the hereditary character of power is sanctioned.29
The Zapotec culture exhibits its climax between the first-century BC and the

27
In English: “by sowing crops in the land and filling it up with monuments, the dwellers acquired
a property right on it; the land became territory of the community and was bound to the ancestors
and patron gods” [translated by the author].
28
See the San Lorenzo basalt throne, the toponymical glyph of Mount Tláloc in the Códice
Borbónico, and Olmec steles, murals of Teotihuacán, Oaxacan bas-reliefs, Cholulan drawings
(Florescano 2001, pp. 36, 268, 270).
29
Cultures based on the cacicazgo regime settles between the sixteenth- and the thirteenth-century
BC in the area of Soconusco, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
118 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

Fig. 5.5 Acropolis of Danibaan (today, Monte Albán), Oaxaca. The vertical apparatus of the
cosmic axis in its conspicuous manifestation. On the background, the built masses/orography
correspondence (photo rp)

second-century AC, immortalizing the structure of its state in the monumental

acropolis of its capital Danibaan, today Monte Albán (Florescano 2001, p. 29)
(Fig. 5.5).30
The Maya cultures flourish between the fourth and the tenth century in the areas
of Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatán, Belize, and Guatemala, imposing an urban layout
to their confederated centers, such as the prominent states of Tikal and Kalak’mul,
with a formalized plaza surrounded by pyramidal monuments. In plazas such as the
one of B’aakal (today, Palenque), the natural and the architectural components are
combined in a grand scenery for the ritual representation of power and the iden-
tification of the governors with the divine ancestors,31 the state’s territory with the
Earth, and the city with the cosmos (Florescano 2001, pp. 49–50, 53, 60, 63). The

30
Danibaam will decay by the eighth century.
31
See the famous bas-reliefs from Palenque representing Kan Balam’s ascension and the transfer of
power and ritual tools from his father Pakal in the seventh century.
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 119

ethnic principle is therefore anchored onto the territory and aligned with the cosmos
by the vertical axis, the spatial manifestation of the myth of the origin.32

5.3.5 Permanence of the Collective Character

Teotihuacán in the Mexico valley is the first settlement to pursue and achieve the
concentration of a substantial part of its people within the urban precincts. The
construction of the monumental axis of the ‘Calzada de los Muertos’ in the first
century will remain the major feature of the settlement throughout the evolution of
the city state until its destruction in 750 AC. The second phase of the evolution of
the city starts around 300 AC with the transition from the traditional monarchic rule
to a regime centered on a set of religious collective values. The further development
of the city is implemented on an ambitious plan, for the first time in Mesoamerican
history extended to the residential areas. Large urban streets and blocks are meant to
receive the entire population orbiting around the city, including the farmers
(Florescano 2001, pp. 66–72).33 However, the development is anchored to the
ancient monumental complex of the political-religious Citadel and to its myths. The
Pyramid of the Sun covers the cave of the ancestral myth of creation, seat of the
Goddess of the Waters, while the Pyramid of the Moon carries the temple of Tlalóc,
the God of the Storms, and at the north end of the Calzada is set the temple of
Quetzacoátl.
Teotihuacán and the emblem of the Plumed Serpent become the image of power
in the Post-classical period expanding its influence as far as the Maya regions in the
south and the lands of the nomadic hunters in the north. The post-classical Maya
city of Chichén Itzá erects its grandiose monumental complexes in the ninth and
tenth centuries exhibiting evident Toltec influences. The plumed serpent, in fact,
descends the steps of the Kukulkán pyramid as it decorates the government palace
of Tula. The collective character of the regime, like in Teotihuacán, results con-
spicuous from the bas-reliefs apparatus (Florescano 2001, pp. 87–9).
When the frontier between the bands of nomadic hunters of the north and the
sedentary farmers of the plateau disappears in the seventh century, groups of
Chichemecs descend into the Mexico valley, merge with groups from the
Teotihuacán culture and settle in Tula,34 or Tollán in Nauhatl, with the name of
Toltecs. Tula, the legendary place of the origin in the Aztec mythology, is described
as a grandiose center irradiating art and culture, quite in contrast with the modest
archeological evidence. Tula’s assimilation with the greatness of the ancient
Teotihuacán could be explained by the presence of prevailing cultural components

32
The state of B’aakam, along with the Maya cultures, decays in the 9th century.
33
The city trace included even a district exclusively inhabited by Maya communities, which has
led to consider Teotihuacán the first multiethnic state of Mesoamerica.
34
Ah Puh in Maya.
120 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

from the old capital (Florescano 2001, p. 80). By that, the Aztecs are also
acknowledging the collective regime of the ancestral state.

5.3.6 Mythic Peregrinations from Nomadic to Sedentary

A characteristic trait of the myth of the origin in Mesoamerican cultures is that of

the peregrination, which the Aztecs formalize in their ancestral codices. In the
Códice Boturini,35 the fatherland on the island of Aztlán becomes a golden age
myth, forged as a specular construct on the image of their homeland of
Mexico-Tenochtitlán, built on the islet amid the Texcoco lake after their
century-long and perilous migration. The Codex Xólotl, a 16th century copy of an
older pictographic manuscript,36 shows the migrations of Chichimec tribes led by
warrior-leaders from the north into the region east of the Texcoco lake.37 The
miscegenation between Chichimec groups and sedentary tribes is vividly illustrated
by the Mapa Quinatzin,38 another sixteenth-century pictorial document in three
sheets recording the history of the region. The first sheet shows barbaric
Chichimecs, covered with furs and carrying bow and arrows, meet civilized
Acolhuas, dressed in fine textiles and devoted to the care of their intensively
cultivated territory. In the merging, the barbarians apprehend the engineering of
irrigation and the Nahua language while granting fierce courage and military
prowess.
While the island of Aztlán is clouded in the fogs of the legend, the March of the
Aztecs from Tula to the Texcoco basin can be historically reconstructed (Florescano
2001, pp. 98–102). Their migration can, in fact, be considered a peregrination. The
Aztecs are purportedly following an idol carried at the head of the procession,
representing Huitzilopochtli, their god associated with the sun, and his prophetic

35
See the Códice Boturini or Tira de la Peregrinación, Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e
Historia de México, amatl paper (ficus bark) with Mexica writing, 21-folds 20  542 cm, con-
ventionally dated 1530/41.
36
Codex Xólotl, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Mexicain, amatl
paper (ficus bark), 10 folios 40  50 cm, conventionally dated 16th century. The document
accounts the history of the Acolhuas, from the arrival of the Chichimec tribes into the area of the
Texcoco lake (first folio) until the conquest of Azcapotzalco, on the west shore of the lake, at the
hand of Netzahualcóyotl of 1428 (tenth folio).
37
The lake is named by the capital of the Acolhuacán state, Texcoco.
38
Mapa Quinatzin, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Mexicain,
amatl paper (ficus bark), 3 folios 34.5  43.5 cm, conventionally dated 1543/48. About this
document see the detailed and valuable analysis by María Mohar (Mohar 1999). We refer in
particular to the first folio illustrating the encounter between the new Chichimec peoples and the
native dwellers of Acolhuacán and aspects of their life. The second folio describes the palace of
Netzahualcoyótl, emperor of Texcoco, and the third crimes and relative punishments of Acolhua
legal system. Both the Codex Xólotl and the Mapa Quinatzin were part of the collection of the
‘erudite chronicler of the Acolhuas’, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1568/80–1648).
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 121

prediction of a new homeland. While marching, they change their name to Mexicas
to acknowledge the profound transformation of state their people is undergoing.
Upon reaching the western shores of the Texcoco lake, the Mexicas try to settle
in various locations, including the cliff of Chapultepec, being expelled by the
groups settled in the area. They are pushed to take refuge onto an islet (tetl) hidden
by bulrushes at the center of the lake, where they see an eagle poised upon a nopal
intent on eating its prickly pears (nochtli), as it had been predicted to them. There,
they found their capital of the Mexicas, México-Tenochtitlán (tetl-nochtli-tlan, or
place where prickly pears are found on an islet) in 1325 or 1345 (Florescano 2001,
pp. 101, 119).39 The legendary narration of the peregrination from Aztlán, can be
read as the way in which the Aztecs envision their own process of becoming
sedentary.

5.3.7 A Water-Filled Mountain and an Empire

By lending their military services to the Tepanecs of Atzcapotzalco, settled on the

western region of the lake, the Mexicas can start the consolidation of their state in
the shadow of a dominating nation. Through a policy of strategic marriages, they
also interlace alliance with the opposed front of the state of Texcoco based on the
eastern shore of the lake. Finally, profiting from an internal feud for the succession
to the throne of Atzcapotzalco,40 the Mexicas rout the Tepanecs in alliance with the
Acolhuas in 1428. The imperial expansion of the Mexicas can start under the
leadership of their fourth tlatoani, Itzacóatl. It will lead them to put together a vast
territorial entity expanding over the Mexican plateau from the Atlantic to the Pacific
bordering with the lands of the Chichimecs north and the lands of the Zapothecs
south.
The Aztec empire is organized as a system of tributary territories formally ruled
by an alliance of three cities, the so-called Triple Alliance, but in practice hege-
monized by Tenochtitlán. The empire even includes areas detached from the main
entity, such as Soconusco in the Isthmus of Tehuanepéc, which in fashion of
colonies supplies the capital with exotic cargos of the most exquisite cacao. The
structure of the Aztec empire, however, is quite different from that of European
models. It is organized on the base unit of the altépetl, the water-filled mountain,
that is the city-territory that the Mexicas had adopted from the sedentary groups of

39
See also Códice Mendoza, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 71 folios with later expli-
cation notes in Spanish, dating back to the 1540s, three sections: listing the Mexica governors and
their conquests from 1325 to 1521; showing the altepemeh under Mexica rule and their tributes;
daily aspects of the life of the Mexicas. See folio 2 illustrating the foundation of Tenochtitlán.
40
First, they manage to re-establish their ally Nezahualcóyotl on the throne of Texcoco and then
attack Azcapotzalco with the alliance of the atépemeh of Texcoco and Tlacopam, then known as
Triple Alliance, base of their future empire.
122 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

the plateau, also common, as mentioned before, among the Maya peoples of the
south.41
The altépetl is a ‘territorial unit’ on which ‘one or more ethnic groups with a
common past and traditions’ are dwelling, governed by a ‘dynastic lord’ called
tlatoani. At the center of the altépetl rises a temple, both ‘house to the tutelary god’
and ‘symbol of the territorial sovereignty’ concentrated in the primordial mountain,
and a monumental plaza is the ‘ceremonial and market center’. From the plaza
outwards, the districts are laid-out at the four cardinal points (Florescano 2001,
pp. 267–8).42 Urban and rural lands irradiate from the chief town of the altépetl
reaching the border where other altepemeh43 come together to cover the territory in
a net of interlaced patches. The interlacing of the patches is nested in descending
levels of subordination from the capital to minor commons.

5.3.8 Of Massacres and Foundations of Cities

We have already mentioned of the landing of Cortés on Maya shores in 1519. In La

cittá europea fuori d’Europa (Benevolo and Romano 1998), the magnificent
anthology that interprets the European colonization of the New World through the
urban foundations imposed onto it, Romano epitomizes the colonial history by
aligning a series of figures that perpetuates it: Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del
Castillo, Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, Rodrigo de Bastidas, Vasco Nuñez
de Balboa, Diego de Velásquez, Alvaro Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Hernando de
Soto…
“questi e altri sono gli uomini che conquistarono un continente. […] Ebbero molti vizi.
Massacrarono gli indios, ne tradirono i capi, si arricchirono senza pudore […]. Ma ebbero
anche straordinarie virtù. Furono soldati, esploratori, amministratori, fondatori di città e
organizzatori di provincie. A dispetto di certe versioni bigotte e politicamente corrette della
cultura terzomondista degli ultimi anni la conquista spagnola del Nuovo Mondo fu una
delle più straordinarie pagine della storia d’Europa”.44 (Romano, Dopo il trattato di
Tordesillas: l’emisfero spagnolo (introduction to Part III), 1998, pp. 61–2)

41
While Zapotecs and Mayas prefer to represent their states by the toponymical glyph of the
capital, the Toltecs and Mexicas represent their territory by identifying its boundaries. The
emblems of the surrounding states are aligned all along the territorial limits in a diagrammatic
mapping that also traces the center of the state and the principal paths, places, and rivers.
42
Florescano bases his description of the altépetl on James Lockhart’s sociopolitical studies on the
Nauha communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
43
Plural of altépetl.
44
In English: “these and others are the men who conquered a continent […]. They had many vices.
They massacred the natives, betrayed their chieftains, enriched themselves shamelessly […]. But
they also had extraordinary virtues. They were soldiers, explorers, administrators, founders of
cities, and organizers of provinces. Despite certain bigot and politically correct versions of the
third-worldist culture of recent years, the Spanish conquest of the New World was one of the most
extraordinary pages of Europe’s history.” [translation by the author]
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 123

It is fair to mitigate Romano’s sharp claims by also recalling the alternative

‘vision of the vanquished’, after the title of Miguel León-Portilla’s celebrated
collection of Nahua sources prior to or immediately following the Spanish conquest
of Mexico (León-Portilla 2008 [1959]), that is the vision of the conquest from the
point of view of the conquered. León-Portilla’s anthology of native voices presents
several excerpts from Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas
de la Nueva España. The Historia has been qualified as the result of a precursory
anthropological research, conducted by the fray through direct inquiries among the
elders of native communities and reports collected by his informantes, his former
students at the Colegio de Santa Cruz Tlatelolco members of the Nahua elite, a class
of trilingual intellectuals equally in control of Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin.
Sahagún’s monumental work, relentlessly compiled and edited both in Nahuatl and
Spanish across a period of about thirty years until 1577, is officially aimed at
understanding the cultural context of Nueva España to facilitate its evangelization
by the action of the Catholic missionaries. In the process, the author inevitably falls
fascinated by a sophisticated culture at the brink of annihilation whose traits the
work ends up perpetuating. The Historia presents two parallel texts, opposing a
complete version in Nahuatl, transliterated in the Latin alphabet, to an abridged
Spanish translation. Despite Sahagún’s astutely orchestrated discrepancies, retain-
ing the sharper comments from a native perspective within the Nahuatl text, the
Historia would fall into the century-long oblivion of inaccessible archives decreed
by Spanish censorship.
The narration of the carnage of Cholula in the translation from the Nahuatl text
by León-Portilla’s mentor, Ángel María Garibay, presents the voice of the natives
with shaking intensity. In ‘la matanza de Cholula’, thousands of armless inhabi-
tants are massacred at the order of Cortés, with the sole purpose, according to the
Cholultec version, of intimidating the Aztec emperor in Tenochtitlan and har-
nessing the discords among native peoples45
“Hubo reunión en el atrio del dios. Pues cuando todos se hubieron reunido, luego se
cerraron las entradas: por todos los sitios donde había entrada. En el momento hay acu-
chillamiento, hay muertes, hay golpes. ¡Nada en su corazón temían los de Cholula! No con
espadas, no con escudos hicieron frente a los españoles. […] Y en tanto que todo esto se
hacía, todo se le hacía llegar, se le decía, se le hacía oír a Motecuhzoma. […] Es como si la
tierra temblara, como si la tierra girara en torno de los ojos.” 46

45
Following the Cholultec account presented here, León-Portilla also reports the excusatory
Tlaxcaltec version accusing the Cholulas of being the cause of the massacre for refusing to submit
to the Spaniards and killing a Tlaxcaltec emissary. According to the Spanish accounts of the
events, instead, the Spaniards act to foil a lethal complot being prepared by the Cholulas.
46
From Garibay’s Spanish version presented in León-Portilla’s Visión de los vencidos: Relaciones
indígenas de la conquista of 1959. In English: “Assembly had been called in the temple of
Quetzalcoatl. As soon as all had gathered, the entrances were taken and death was given by sudden
stabbings and hits. Nothing the Cholultecs had feared in their hearts, no swords, no shields had
they carried. […] All the turmoil was reported to Motecuhzoma at once, by messengers running
back and forth on the routes. […] It was as though the earth trembled and swirled before one’s
eyes.” [translation by the author]
124 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

Lysander Kemp’s English translation is as intense as Garibay’s version

When the massacre at Cholula was complete, the strangers set out again towards the City of
Mexico. They came in battle array, as conquerors, and the dust rose in whirlwinds on the
roads. Their spears glinted in the sun, and their pennons fluttered like bats. […] Some of
them were dressed in glistering iron from head to foot; they terrified everyone who saw
them. Their dogs came with them, running ahead of the column. They raised their muzzles
high; they lifted their muzzles to the wind. They raced on before with saliva dripping from
their jaws.47

The massacre is followed by the ruthless pillaging of one of the largest cities in
Mesoamerica and the destruction of its pyramidal complex.

5.3.9 Territorial Continuity in the Age of the Vice-reign

Despite crossing the Atlantic in opposite directions, Romano’s and Florescano’s

voices resonate. Florescano’s distinctive idea, for the sake of our thesis, induced
from Charles Gibson’s and James Lockhart’s sociopolitical analyses (Gibson 1995;
Lockhart 1992), is that the territorial reorganization of Nueva España following the
Spanish conquest pivots on the adoption of the altépetl as the base unit and its
network as the bearing structure as “the cell upon which the institutions that
organized the life of the native villages during the Vice-reign were built: first the
encomienda, then the distrito parroquial and later the cabildo español”48
(Florescano 2001, p. 271).
With the Vice-reign, the Spanish encomenderos collect a large part of the tri-
butes leaving a minor portion to the native cacique, that is a tlatoani divested of the
administration of government and justice, while the altépetl retains its territorial and
social structure (Florescano 2001, p. 272). After all, the encomienda, introduced by
Cortés following the take of Tenochtitlán, is probably the most effective policy to
control and exploit a nested system of territorial levels with over 10 million sub-
jects,49 abruptly taken over by a coup led against its head by a contingent of a few
thousand aliens. Cynical and pitiless, the encomienda relies on the conveniences of
the privileged among localized ethnic groups, and consequently on the existing
structure. Eventually, the encomienda installs parasite agents at the head of the
existing territorial units.
The repúblicas de indios, sort of rural municipalities surrounding the newly
founded colonial cities governed by Spanish, soon replace the encomiendas, con-
sidered an inhuman regime leading to individual accumulation of disproportioned

47
From Lysander Kemp’s English translation of 1962. See The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account
of the Conquest of Mexico, Boston: Beacon Press.
48
Translation by the author.
49
The native population of Nueva España would suddenly drop down to 1 million, due to
well-known epidemics by the end of the sixteenth century to then rise to 2.5 million at the end of
the colonial era.
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 125

riches. The system of the repúblicas de indios allows for ambits of autonomous
administration by part of the native groups, and is supported by a simultaneous
action of cultural permeation operated by the church through the correspondent
religious jurisdictions of the parroquias indígenas. Repúblicas and parroquias still
coincide, by and large, with the old territorial structure of the altépetl.
The rediscovery, formalization, or fabrication of the títulos primordiales of the
local communities is a distinctive phenomenon of the colonial regime of Nueva
España in the seventeenth and eighteenth century until the end of the colonial era.
The documents, written in Spanish or native languages, claim the rights of a
community over a territory with particular emphasis on the communal lands. The
‘titles’ are customarily constituted by virtue of a historical reconstruction of the
state of land jurisdiction and property in pre-Hispanic times, and subsequently
sanctioned by the new Spanish colonial authorities. Often, the figures of
pre-Hispanic ancestors of the community and first Spanish authorities overlap,
(Florescano 2001, p. 277) so that the collective memory of before and after the
conquest results relayered onto a territorial structure that remains largely permanent.

5.3.10 Territorial Discontinuities in the Age

of Enlightenment

However, after the first violent wave of the colonization, the Spanish Crown
introduces rebalancing measures that grant some sort of tutelage and some margins
of autonomous administration in the rural areas. The grievances and denunciations
of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, a former conqueror who had renounced to his
encomiendas, result in the 1542 promulgation of the Leyes Nuevas prohibiting the
enslavement of natives at hand of encomenderos under the tutelage of the crown
and the surveillance of the friars. De Las Casas will then serve as bishop of Chiapas
and Universal Protector of All the Indigenous. The natives are kept in a permanent
state of tutored minority. To this respect, Florescano asserts that the idea of a
colonial government as a monolithically repressive power onto the natives is an
‘ideological creation’ of the nineteenth-century creole historians who are edifying
the narrative of the national state (Florescano 2001, p. 241).
A major disruption of the settled territorial regime occurs in coincidence with the
wind of the Enlightenment blowing from Europe, which announces itself with the
Real Ordenanza de Intendentes of 1786 emanated by the modernizing rule of the
Bourbons. The Enlightenment, led by the faith in the rights of the individual,
counters the corporative forms of medieval origin as well as the ancestral rights on
communal properties. The ordenanza establishes functionaries to oversee the
administration of the communal funds and lands of native communities.
Its consequences are the loss of the management of the collective patrimony of
the native communities and the rights of access to woods, grazes, quarries, aquifers,
hunting-gathering grounds. The implementation of such measures has the effect of
126 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

coalescing the natives with the criollos and mestizos50 in an opposing front at the
turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Florescano 2001, p. 224).
The ethnic diversity in the Spanish colonies had become very articulated during
the previous two centuries. European colonizers, Mesoamerican natives, African
slaves deported to work on the plantations, and later also the Filipinos and Chinese,
immigrated as cheap workforce on the west coast, would interbreed generating a
nested series of mixes. The colonial society would try to organize the results of the
miscegenation of the three major groups, Spanish, blacks, and indigenous, in a
system called castas, that is ‘races’. It is a deterministic system of attribution of
each American inhabitant to a specific ethnic group, on the basis of their genetic
ascendency, and a correspondent social role, but does not prevent contiguity and
intercourse. The cuadros de castas is a painting genre that develops during the
eighteenth century to offer an articulated panorama of the racial diversity of the
Spanish colony to the European elite on the other side of the Atlantic. The first
systematic castas series is commissioned by the viceroy Fernando de Alencastre
Noroña y Silva from Juan Rodríguez Juárez to show king Felipe V the varied racial
miscegenation of Nueva España at the beginning of the eighteenth century.51
However, the contiguity among distinct ethnic groups within the social
ensemble, where each part is acknowledged certain roles and rights, is a corporative
construct on which medieval Europe and pre-Hispanic order overlap. The
enlightened drop of social corporativism marks the discontinuity that will also affect
the territorial regime.

5.3.11 Restructuring the Role of the Individual

The winds of the Enlightenment bring a profound restructuring of the role of the
individual within the social body, ideally transitioning from a system of inequality

50
By the name of criollos went the ones born in the colonies of pure European descent, while the
mestizos are the ones born to mixed couples, generally European and Mesoamerican native.
51
The Galería de Castas Mexicanas of the Lydia Sada de González collection at the Museo de
Historia Mexicana of Monterrey, among other pinturas de castas, includes a typical 16-canvas
series by the Pueblan painter José Joaquín Magón where the racial mixes of the three major
groups, Spanish, black, and indigenous, are associated to standardized physical traits and psy-
chological and personal characteristics: Español + India = Mestizo (humble, quiet, simple);
Mestizo + Española = Castizo (attachment to horse); Español + Castiza = Fructo bello (alike his
father); Blanco + Negra = Mulato (pride, disdain); Español + Mulata = Morisco (to be and doc-
trine); Español + Morisca = Albino (short-sighted, weak, soft, benign); Albino + Española =
Torna atrás (figure, genius, customs); Mulato + India = Calpa Mulato (indocile, strong, stocky
body); India + Calpamulato = Gibaro (restless, arrogant); Negro + India = Lobo, mala ralea
(squanderer, hustler); Lobo + India = Cambujo (heavy, indolent, dull); Indio + Cambuja =
Sambayga (the one for whom there is no guile he doesn’t understand); Mestizo + Mulata =
Cuarteron (capcious); Cuarteron + Mestiza (always quarreling) = Collote (strong, daring);
Collote + Morisca = Albarazado (inclined to jokes and letdowns); Torna atrás (adult
female) + Albarazado = Tente en el aire (ungrateful, evil).
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 127

to one of equality, but simultaneously moving from an organization based on ethnic

state to one based on economic faculty (Florescano 2001, p. 229). The principle of
the ‘communal’ is put under siege in favor of the ‘individual’. The communal is
contrasted even within the structure of the church. The suppression of the
Inquisition is preceded by the expulsion of the Jesuites in 1767 and the suppression
of thousands of confraternities, which had proliferated during the first evange-
lization effort at the cost of forms of syncretism with pagan credences adopting the
fashions of a simple communal life in rural communities. The pillar of the colonial
regime, the church, had offered the justification of the conquest and facilitated the
inclusion of the natives in the social assemblage of the Vice-reign (Florescano
2001, p. 242). While the Neoclassical replaces the Baroque style, the intended
restructuration of the church corresponds to a correspondent restructuration of the
territory.

5.3.12 Forming the Image of the Patria Criolla

On the other hand, the Enlightenment brings the yearning for the rationalization of
the administration of an “immense and poorly connected territory” (Florescano
2001, p. 244),52 the govern of its many ethnic groups, and the exploitation of its
resources. This leads to a vast collective effort of geographic exploration and
mapping, started with a myriad of partial maps elaborated by criollo engineers until
an overall chart of the homeland is put together by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora in
1748 and later improved by Francisco Díaz de León (Lombardo de Ruiz and Terán
Trillo 1996, p. 33). Góngora’s map will be the base for the delineation of the new
administrative sub-divisions of intendencias and provincias internas. The elite of
enlightened criollos, presiding the new cultural institutions of the colony and
preparing for the struggle for independence, is the source that supplies Alexander
von Humboldt’s encyclopedic assemblage of the sociopolitical Atlas of the king-
dom of New Spain, which will render the first overall image of the Spanish colony
of worldwide diffusion.53
Intellectuals such as José Mutis, a Spanish-born botanist established in Bogotá,
and Francisco de Caldas, a criollo naturalist from Popayan who will become a

52
Translation by the author.
53
Humboldt’s work on Nueva España, published in Paris in 1811 is composed of three parts: a
series of tables of data, titled Tablas geográficas políticas del Reino de Nueva España que
manifiestan su superficie, población, agricultura, fábricas, comercio, minas, rentas y fuerzas
militares; a series of twenty geographic maps and various diagrams, profiles and vistas, titled Atlas
géographique et physique du royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne; and a critical essay synthesizing
information from multiple fields, titled Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne.
128 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

martyr of the independence of Nueva Granada,54 part of the same enlightened elite,
had already supplied von Humboldt with all the available information during his
adventurous exploration of the equinoctial regions. While the cultivated European
public acclaims von Humboldt’s presentations and books about the exotic conti-
nents of the Spanish colonies, his majestic inventory of the ‘natural resources,
developments of the cities, advancement of mining activities, circulation of goods,
and progress of craftsmanship and industry’ is saluted by the elite of Nueva España
as the “irrefutable proof of the grandiose destiny reserved to the patria criolla”55
(Florescano 2001, p. 246).

5.3.13 The Construction of the Estado Nacional

The fracture in the territorial regime, starting to surface with the Enlightened
Bourbons, becomes conspicuous at the consummation of the independence in the
1820s, when the martyrized fathers of the patria criolla yield the way to the
law-makers of the estado nacional. The idea of the patria criolla leads the criollo
elites, in Mexico as in all the Hispanic colonies, to rise against the Spanish dom-
ination at the beginning of the nineteenth century seeking independence. The estado
nacional is the institutional construction brought forth after the independence by the
same criollo elites for about a century until the Mexican Revolution.
When Miguel Hidalgo adopts the ensign of the Virgen de Guadalupe to combine
“ancient Mesoamerican resonances with Christian religion” in 1810, and José María
Morelos attaches “the emblem of the foundation of Tenochtitlán” onto the insur-
gents’ flag in 1812, the fathers of the patria criolla are summoning the idea of a
‘mythical native nation’. But when Augustín de Iturbide proclaims the indepen-
dence in 1821, the “historical project of the independence” converts itself into the
project of “creating a modern nation and state” by using “a mix of ancestral myths,
traditional patriotic drives, and religious symbols of identity”56 (Florescano 2001,
pp. 282–3).

5.3.14 Redistributing Ecclesiastic Properties

After the disastrous defeat in the US-Mexico war and the consequent 1848 cession
of over a half of Mexico’s territory to the United States of America, the persistent

54
De Caldas was the first director of Bogotá’s astronomical observer built in 1803 in the precincts
of the botanical garden constituted by Mutis following the multiple botanical expeditions in the
Nuevo Reino de Granada started in 1873.
55
Translation by the author.
56
Translation by the author.
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 129

attempt at a thorough restructuration of the remaining territory occurs along two

major lines: the redistribution of ecclesial lands, including a half of the national
territory in application of the Leyes de Reforma during an extended period from the
late 1850s until the turn of the century; the violent occupation of lands cultivated by
native groups for their own subsistence according to communal regimes and offi-
cially unclaimed, operated by the criollo regional elites.
The civil war that breaks out from the permanent conflict between the federalist
liberals and the centralist conservatives will see the liberals eventually prevail. In a
period of uncertain fate between 1854 and 1873, the Leyes de Reforma are pro-
mulgated by the liberal government from the capital or from exile, a series of
radical laws inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution.57 Initiated and insti-
tutionalized by Sebastián Lerdo and principally actuated by Benito Juárez, the laws
concern the separation of state and church, including the suppression of all religious
orders and the nationalization of the ecclesial property that extended over a half of
the country. While conceived for an equitable redistribution of the ecclesial prop-
erties, the implementation of the Reforma will result in auctions to the best offeror
favoring the accumulation of latifundia in the hands of few, largely foreign, hold-
ers.58 The Leyes de Reforma are substantially confirmed by the conservative
governments of the Second Empire, supposedly ally of the church59

5.3.15 Against the Communal Ways of Life

The idea of dismantling the ‘ecclesiastical’ probably lies on the conviction that the
pillar of the colonial regime is not anymore necessary to the national state. At the
demise of the colonial, even the ‘real native’ is replaced by the mythical native

57
Rosa María Martínez writes that when the cycle of the Leyes de Reforma are completed in 1873
with the annexation into the Constitution, five short articles sanctioned: independence of the State
from the Church; secularization of marriage and civil state; prohibition for religious institutions to
possess estates other than churches and residences for priests and bishops; replacement of the civil
for the religious oaths (Martínez 2008, p. 142). To this, we can add the secularization of ceme-
teries, suppression of monasteries, exclaustration of nuns and institution of the calendar of laic
public holidays.
58
Martínez asserts that the Ley de Nacionalización de Bienes del Clero y su Reglamento delib-
erated by the Juárez government in 1859 happened to be much more effective than any previous
laws, almost resulting in a general confiscation. The law’s preamble states how the practical
purpose is to pass all the possessions of the Church into private ownership through immediate
auctions and destine the profits to cover civil war expenditures. This leads to the consideration that
the spirit of the Ley de Nacionalización is not that of increasing the federal patrimony, but rather to
render the properties available to entrepreneurial initiative, while rapidly cashing to cover a
substantial national debt (Martínez 2008, pp. 140–1).
59
According to Martínez, the Second Empire (April 1846 to July 1867) does nothing but con-
solidating Juárez’ nationalization model, which will then be confirmed once again with the
restauration of the Republic. Therefore, the State had been confiscating and selling religious
properties without interruption. (Martínez 2008, pp. 141–142).
130 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

nation of the past. The redistribution of ecclesial lands is then tackled in parallel
with a violent aggression onto the lands of the natives and their communal ways of
life. “At the fall of the colonial State and with the disappearance of the Leyes de
Indias, which protected the peasant republics”, the communal lands of the
indigenous remained unprotected. “By declaring equal citizens all the inhabitants of
the republic”, the Leyes de Reforma follow the same trans-historical instances
stripping the ethnic groups of the rights to their communal living forms. In its
complex, the process of edification of the Estado Nacional can be said to move in
the direction of “appropriating the land of the indigenous, destructing the institu-
tions that cohesed their ethnic identities and combating the traditions, the culture,
and the values of the indigenous” (Florescano 2001, pp. 429–31).60
As for the expropriations that change the urban structure of Paris in the same
years, these territorial transformations embody trans-historical tendencies imple-
mented across time by different and even opposed groups of power: in the case of
Mexico, the aspiration to the forging of a modern national state that we have
mentioned.

5.3.16 Lost Idylls of the Yucatan Peninsula

In the southern peninsula of Yucatan, during the colonia subsistence agriculture had
been practiced by rural communities on communal or unclaimed lands in parallel to
the obliged service for the commercial economy of encomiendas and estancias.
This activity suddenly drops when in 1825 a law facilitates the acquisition of
unclaimed lands by part of large and medium land owners, in 1844 new taxes are
charged on the peasants, and in 1847 new laws reduce the extension of the com-
munal lands by imposing the erection of property boundaries. The new laws are
meant to favor the formations of larger haciendas for the production of sugar and
henequen. The indigenous unrest that shakes Yucatan in the second half of the
nineteenth century has various motives, among which the drastic drop of the quality
of life of the communities. In this scheme, the bloody Guerra de Castas of Yucatan
cannot be simply explained on the grounds of racial resentment. The ethnic vio-
lence has to be rather framed within the conflicts among opposite criollo elites for
the supremacy on the territory, in which the indigenous are enlisted in one or the
other faction with vane promises (Florescano 2001, pp. 425–9).
The attacks of the indigenous groups against the whites are then a defensive
response to the attempt at the violent occupation of the ancestral lands, the oblit-
eration of the ancient communal agricultural costumes and ways of tending the
land, and finally the thorough alteration of the territorial structure.

60
Translated by the author.
5.3 ‘Miscegenated’ Spaces of Nueva España 131

5.3.17 Bucolic Communes Alongside the Yaqui River

The violent struggle of the Porfiriato against the Yaqui people in the northern
Mexican state of Sonora, at the geographic antipodes of Yucatan, is another blatant
attack of the modern estado nacional onto the communal life of indigenous cul-
tures. As for the case of Yucatan, however, the material object of the attack is the
structure of the land, in which the communal regime is embedded.
The Yaqui people form an indissoluble unity with their lands alongside the
Yaqui River. They conduct a productive communal life settled in eight towns
governed by collective institutions. In 1875, in the face of the advancing estado
nacional, they claim independence to their homeland under the charismatic leader
Cajeme. The fertile fluvial lands of the Yaquis will soon attract the attention of
Mexican and foreign investors. The army of the Porfiriato smashes the Yaqui utopia
in 1887 and Cajeme is killed. Rather than being subjected to a capitalistic economy
and the consequent territorial restructuration, the Yaquis abandon their lands on the
banks of the river and disperse in the mountains. Lured into coming back as
workforce with void promises ten years later, they find their communal homeland
subdivided into individual plots, crossed by artificial canals and modern infras-
tructures, and occupied by the national army. To their demands for the liberation of
their indivisible land, the Porfiriato responds with a brutal repression and the mass
deportation of the Yaqui people to serve as enslaved workforce in the plantations of
Oaxaca (Florescano 2001, pp. 407–13).

5.4 The Body of the Metropolis

5.4.1 The Leyes de Reforma Resemble an Elegant

Boulevard in French Style

Should the practical consequences of the Leyes de Reforma on land patterns be

evaluated through the microhistories of the diverse territories of the country,61 their
univocal urban embodiments can be found aligned along the Paseo de la Reforma in
the capital. The implementation of the paseo can be summarized in three main
phases: the first is relative to its conception, tracing, and foundation; the second to
its implementation as an urban infrastructure in the service of the new urbanites,
equivalent to the analogous programs of metropolitan improvement of European
cities; the third to its monumentalization and relayering with the symbols of the

61
At odds with the case of the Yaqui lands, in The Reform in Oaxaca 1856–76, Charles Berry
concludes that the liberal revolution in Oaxaca is, by and large, a movement of the middle-class,
urban and elitist, which did not show any interest in the effects on the life of the peasants and
natives. Its effect on the social and territorial structure is only noticeable in the areas closest to the
capital of Oaxaca and its institutions (Berry 1981).
132 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

identification of the Reforma with the construction of the modern estado nacional.
The three phases are brought forth by political regimes of opposed orientation,
respectively the Second Empire, the liberal government of the República, and the
conservative government of the Porfirian dictatorship, imprinting trans-historical
aspirations onto places and spaces of the Mexican capital.
As part of a French-inspired plan for urban axes irradiating from the zócalo, the
monumental boulevard is conceived at the beginning of the Second Empire to
connect the city center and the residency of the Habsburg emperor in the castle of
Chapultepec. By 1867, a suburban way reserved to exclusive use of the monarch is
roughly laid down over lands reclaimed from the Texcoco lake and occupied by
crops and cattle farming and crossed by canals.
After the fall of Maximilian’s regime, the way is open to the public and by 1870
its first half, from the central Alameda to the Glorieta de la Palma, is turned into a
boulevard with tree-lined sidewalks. In the following two years, under the restored
republican government of Lerdo, the plan of an elegant boulevard reaching the
forest of Chapultepec is finally implemented with lavish amenities including broad
sidewalks equipped with benches and abundant vegetation on both sides and
monumental glorietas. The development of elegant residential districts of French
taste, the Colonia Americana on the south side and the Colonia Cuauhtémoc on the
north side of the boulevard, are promoted. In 1872, the boulevard is eventually
renamed Paseo de la Reforma by president Lerdo, sanctioning a correspondence
between the law-making action and the reinvention of the monumental topography
of the capital, to secure the space for democracy that Arendt elaborates on.
However, it will be the conservative president Porfirio Díaz, and de facto dictator
of the country for about 30 years, to run a vast sculptural program for the decoration
and monumental equipment of the paseo. Among numerous pieces, the installation
of the monumental statues of Cuauhtémoc and Columbus on two glorietas in close
proximity, is particularly representative of the distinct and coexisting drives at the
basis of the construction of the estado nacional. A modern entity that simultane-
ously pretend to rise from the mythical pre-Hispanic nation and the European
lineage of the criollo and mestizo elite. The consolidation in consistent French style
of the new residential areas on the two sides of the urban axis will end up forming
the colonias of La Condesa, Hipódromo, and Roma, the most elegant neighbor-
hoods in the historical city today. The completion of the Paseo de la Reforma is
ideally established with the installation of the Puerta de los Leones, the cast iron
gates to the forest of Chapultepec in 1892.
As for Rue de Rivoli in Paris, the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City is the
material precipitation of trans-historical aspirations across changing regimes. The
monumental transcription of the modern national state’s edification into the struc-
ture of the Mexican capital, echoes, in grand symbolic forms, the process of cultural
miscegenation imprinted into the productive organization of land of the Mexican
territory at the geographic scale.
5.4 The Body of the Metropolis 133

5.4.2 The Venerated Forest of Chapultepec

Based on the histories of Juan de Torquemada and Diego Durán, Miguel Angel
Fernández tells us that, long before becoming the terminal of a metropolitan axis,
Chapultepec had been the mountain (petl) of the grasshopper (chapul), sitting on a
cave of crystal waters and surrounded by a forest of tall cypresses of the ancient
accounts. The cave, the forest, and the mountain had been venerated as a living
deity since the first inhabitants settled on the shore of the lake. They had been
caring to the place by pruning their divine forest and cleaning the cave. Fresh
springs and fertile lands had nourished the crops and flowers of an idyllic place that
could donate eternal life. At the same time, it had been also the scenery of imperial
burials and human sacrifices (Fernández et al. 1988, pp. 15–9).
Chapultepec is then the ancestral altépetl, the cosmic axis aligning the depths of
the lake, the forested and fertile land, and the rocks of the relief pointing towards
the sky. By placing the monumental portals to the sacred forest of Chapultepec,
modern Mexico expresses the unconscious aspiration to reconnect the criollo edi-
fication of its estado nacional, to the ancestral structure of a mythical pre-Hispanic
nation.

5.5 Chapter’s Conclusions

5.5.1 Correspondences and Divergences Between Patterns

of Space-Forming

Divergences prevail over correspondences in the space-forming patterns of Mexico.

The offended and wasted hinterlands of the Republic do not resonate in the creole
livery of the zócalo of the Marquesado del Valle, the urban ensemble of the city of
Cortés, nor in the monumental transcription of the nation along the metropolitan
axes of the capital and their grand narrative equipment.
In their moving book about the Mexican plaza (Wagner et al. 2013), or more
precisely about the nature and formation of urban open space in Mexican urban
settings, Wagner, Box, and Morehead reconstruct the transformative sequence that
the Mesoamerican centers are subjected after the fall of the Aztec empire at hand of
the waves of mendicant friars that scatter into the hinterlands, nestle in the most
remote location and devote their existence to the parallel implementation of an
unprecedented campaign of proselytism and the “largest campaign of town
founding the world would ever experience” (Wagner et al. 2013, p. 49). The first act
of what we could call the reterritorialization of Nueva España is the erection of a
Christian cross onto the summit of the Mesoamerican pyramid, new axis mundi to
replace the Tree of Life. Then a rudimentary altar sheltered by a thatched-roof that
134 5 Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

will be identified with the entrance to the primordial cave. A wall will be drawn to
enclose the sacred patio of the atrio, and four chapels set at the corners to form a
quincunx while serving the ceremonial stops of the counterclockwise procession of
the via sacra. The atrio is probably the epitome of the religious and spatial mis-
cegenation of the Mesoamerican and Spanish cultures: the ancient peregrination is
transcribed into the via sacra, the corner chapels of the Christian cult mark the
Mesoamerican X from intercardinal points across the sacred ground, as the pri-
mordial ocean, and all revolves around the focus of the cross, new axis mundi,
replacing the venerable nopal laden with prickly pears. The direct visual relation
with the natural world and its deities, the mountains, the forests, the waters, the sky
is unimpeded in the open spatial formation of the atrio. Man’s footpaths across it
also remain legible. The convent will be built starting with the cloister, the most
private open space of the town, and terminating with the nave of the church last,
since the open space of the atrio perfectly suits the Mesoamerican customs of open
air religious and civic celebrations in the meantime. Then comes the secular plaza
next to the religious complex, and also the market place, the plaza de armas (parade
ground), separated of fused in one urban space (Wagner et al. 2013, pp. 47–48).
Last term of the sequence is the alameda, the provision of natural services for the
urbanite, Hispanic version of the metropolitan public park of the bourgeois city.62
From that nucleus the colonial city would expand a square grid of urban blocks that
subdivide the communal lands of the natives often erasing the layered memory,
sometimes adapting to preexisting elements and formations. The Relaciones
Geográficas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through which the religious
and civic functionaries of the colony are required to illustrate the state of the new
territories, are accompanied by diagrammatic pictorial boards mixing planar and
tridimensional illustrations showing the rigid urban grid over-imposed onto the
natural topographies and fluid footpaths following its curves.
On one hand, the urban assemblage of the zócalo of Oaxaca and the metropolitan
accumulations along the Paseo de la Reforma culminating in Chapultepec’s forest
and mound, are the spatial manifestations of the most sublime achievements of the
ethno-cultural miscegenation that has molded the centers of Mexico through waves
of deterritorialization and reterritorializations. On the other hand, large hinterlands
of the country represent the aborted evidence of a historical sequence of collective
convulsions that have tragically envisaged the progressive reform Mexico’s
geography, while seizing its land for the henequen plantations in the Yucatan
peninsula or ripping it in pieces along the Yaqui River, and rapaciously marauding
its immense natural variety.

62
About the introduction of public parks (Volsksgarten) as supplies of natural services for the
metropolitanites of modernizing cities since the beginning of the eighteenth century, see Chap. 7
of this book.
5.5 Chapter’s Conclusions 135

5.5.2 A Doleful Stream of Trans-Historical Aspirations

and the Geography of Miscegenated Continents

What converts the complex Mesoamerican ethno-geography into the present

post-colonial territory is, by and large, a doleful stream of simultaneous histories of
brutal hybridizations culminating in the ‘sad waltz’63 of the Mexican Revolution
and its massacres. But the superb image of the patria criolla summoned by the
Humboldtian enterprises still rises from it, upholding the grandiose destiny of the
New World. It is in fact von Humboldt’s words that Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros
resort to, to describe the magnificent promise disclosed by the New World: the
geography of ‘miscegenated’ continents will only be depicted by the landscape
painting “when the great artists cross the frontiers of the Mediterranean […], when
they are able to embrace the immense variety of nature.” (Ábalos and Herreros
2003, p. 52) In that miscegenation, the conglomerate of nature and artifice con-
fused, will then illustrate the “dark zones of the atlas of the picturesque [and an]
immediate, unified sense of beauty” (Ábalos and Herreros 2003, p. 57).
The creole self-agency of Baker, doing splits in the air veiled by nothing but a
pink ostrich feather, shimmying behind a shiny string of artificial bananas, hiding
war secrets in her music sheets, receiving the Rosette de la Resistance, and speaking
in her Free French Army uniform at the March on Washington, embodies the
culture-forming struggle, parallel to the region-forming struggle, kindled by the
violent action of colonization. Thereby, the colonized re-determines a self-agency,
re-molds an own body and a novel behavior, and conquers the colonizer in turn. We
are then allowed to conclude that Baker’s creole self-agency is the equivalent of the
spatial complex of the zócalo in Oaxaca and the axial composition of the Avenida
de la Reforma in Mexico City, that is the summits of the physical stratifications of
culture- and region-forming processes of miscegenation. On the other hand, are the
Mexican hinterlands, dominated by unresolved exploitative behaviors of man over
geography, preventing the solution of the struggle in a ‘unified sense of beauty’ and
obstructing the tracing of an atlas of the picturesque.

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Banana”, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.
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Chapter 6
Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between
Topography and Its Mythology

Abstract This chapter uses the construct of the garden to explore the correspon-
dences between physical topography and its mythology, reality and its transcription,
in contained and uncontained landscapes. The text analyzes the articulate assem-
blage of the ancient landscape in the Bay of Naples stretching from the urban spaces
and art apparatuses of the city of Pompeii, across the semi-wild terrains of the shore
beyond its walls, and out into the atmosphere above the waters. Elaborating further,
the text also articulates the reciprocal reflection of man-made and natural wefts and
the confluence of history and autobiography in an atmospheric time proper of the
Pompeian landscape. The text, then, discusses two alternative ideas of garden, the
nature garden and the people’s garden, corresponding to a shift in ethos and two
opposite ways of regarding nature in more general terms. The latter corresponds to
man regarding nature as a provision of natural services, the former to considering
man as an observer immersed in the natural ecosystem. The text, then, interprets the
historical transition converting the hunting parks into metropolitan parks in the
European capitals, going from game hunting to service providing, as a consolida-
tion of the feudal structure of thought into the modernity. In conclusion, ethical
alternatives to the unsustainable exploitation of natural services can replace the
understanding of the world’s relational dynamics for the careless action of con-
sumption of its resources.

Keywords Nature garden People’s garden Pompeii

Parietal painting



Painted garden Meteorological time Hunting garden
Subtle hunts

6.1 Introduction

This chapter renders a vision of the contemporary continuum as a broken mirror

reflects the image of the world: each shard of the mirror reflects a complete image of
the universe, while it is also part of an overall mosaic. Fragment and totality coexist.
In the mirror of the landscape, the garden plays the role of the shard. It plots the
correspondence between fragment and totality (Fig. 6.1).

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 139

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_6
140 6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology

Fig. 6.1 Frontispiece of Social Life in the Insect World, London 1912, English anthology of
Jean-Henri Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques. Étude sur l’instinct et les moeurs des insects, a
series of books published in the period 1879–1909. The illustration summarizes observations about
various ‘social’ attitudes of the Mantis (image source social Life in the Insect World, London, T.
F. Unwin 1912, Not in Copyright, PD)
6.1 Introduction 141

In his posthumously fortunate essay Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias

(Foucault 1984),1 Foucault refers to the garden as the most ancient example of
heterotopia that is a heterotopia where several juxtaposed sites coexist in the same
real space.2 According to Foucault, if the traditional Persian carpet is a symbolic
representation of a garden, the garden is also a carpet in which the universe
achieves its symbolic perfection. Therefore, the tiniest parcel of the world, the
garden, coincides with the totality of the universe. The garden carpet, third artic-
ulation of the taxonomy of heterotopias, revolves about the indissoluble coexistence
of the real site and its symbolic transcription. The same construct can be easily
applied within or beyond the garden fence.
The remapping of a landscape assemblage through the garden paradigm shows
the cracks in reality that lead to the cavities between the site and its semantic
narrative.

6.2 Writing the Universe Within and Beyond

the Garden Fence

6.2.1 Phenomenon and Text, Gardens of Pelion

The short description of the communal garden at Agios Ioannis, on the coast of the
Pelion region, and its quiet dynamics, lends the title to the notebook of quotidian
observations Il giardino del Pelio by Pietro Bellasi (Bellasi 1987, pp. 17–9). The
Pelion observations draw a phenomenological representation of the interstices
generated by the coexistence of reality and its writing. Bellasi’s notebook records
the ‘intellectual art’ of an uninterrupted observation of the quotidian, as subjectively
and affectively vibrant as to uncover the forms that write our incessant day-by-day
narratives (Bellasi 1987, pp. 13–4). Bellasi describes a peculiar garden, as a gash
opening a rural oasis in the urban fabric of a Greek small town. Contained by the
rears of diverse houses and hotels, the site shares the characters of both the wild and
cultivated garden, where dismissed urban junk accumulates in a novel rural life and
ushers the return of Mediterranean maquis. There, a kid runs following a trail barely
marked through sagging fences, casual fruit trees that compose woods instead of
orchards, clumps of shrubs and herbs. Clothed by the foliage of a group of pear and
apple trees, the kid’s trajectory does not reappear where the path suggests, but
rather dashes for a moment much further away, before definitively vanishing from
sight. The acoustic perception of the observer is also deceived by the same

1
The text was published in the magazine Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité in 1984, but
presented as a conference with the title of Des espaces autres at the Centre d’Études architecturales
in Paris in 1967. The reference here is to the English translation by J. Miskowiec.
2
Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf’s idea of Cosmopolis also falls into such a type of hetero-
topian space (Edwards and Woolf 2003).
142 6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology

obstacles. By nesting wormholes in the perception of the scene and generating

‘labyrinths’ in the transcription of the quotidian, such little everyday mysteries
illuminate the discrepancies of phenomenon and text, or artifact and plan, as well as
the ways of their coexistence.

6.2.2 Beyond the Garden Fence

By letting our gaze slip beyond the fence, we extend the garden construct over
uncontained landscape assemblages and their narratives. A thin fine book by
Annamaria Ciarallo has been sitting on my desk for years. Il giardino pompeiano.
Le piante, l’orto, i segreti della cucina (Ciarallo 2002) could be described as a
sentimental exploration of Roman gardening seen through the lens of Pompeian
archeological heritage. The book is structured in three main parts.
First, a critical excursion through Lucius Columella’s treaty on agriculture (De
re rustica, first century BC) focuses on Books X and XII dedicated to horticulture
and food preparation. The characteristics of a good suburban hortus are described
along with an almanac of the seasonal activities, methods for a long conservation of
the produce, and its preparation in homemade recipes.3 A second part reviews a set
of physical characteristics of the Roman suburban garden, which, collected through
a series of Pompeian cases, results in the determination of a type. The final part
presents a catalog of ancient Pompeian flora, reconstructed from parietal paintings
and paleobotanic analyses, compared with the present-day flora of the archeological
area. The archeological area at Pompeii has, in fact, retained a remarkable biodi-
versity compared with its environs affected by the agricultural use of chemicals.

6.2.3 Insula Occidentalis 42

The book is illustrated by a splendid apparatus of photographs that reproduce the

vivid garden scenes frescoed on the walls of Pompeian villas. The series of stunning
images from the open triclinium and oecus of the House of the Golden Bracelet
plunges the entire book in an oneiric dimension.
In another book, ‘Insula Occidentalis 42’ (Ciardiello 2006, pp. 69–256), Rosaria
Ciardiello documents with philological detail the archeological analysis of that
house. At the end of the second century BC, the geopolitical stability of Campania
allowed for the development of an insula occidentalis, a residential block, on the
western hillsides of Pompeii, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. The houses of the

3
As Ciarallo notes, in the De re rustica, a literary tradition of agricultural almanacs that remounts
back to Hesiod’s eighth-century BC Works and Days is combined with a practical manual for
Victorian ladies. On the other hand, Virgil, Columella’s contemporary, keeps his Georgics on a
lyric key.
6.2 Writing the Universe Within and Beyond the Garden Fence 143

insula in fact could be installed atop the by-then-unnecessary fortified walls used as
substructures. We could say that the convergence of nature, topography, monument,
and architecture was starting to accumulate upon that location a unique series of
spatial characteristics generating a locus. The subsequent phases of extension and
refinement of the residential structures until the eruption of 79 consolidated an
extraordinary sedimentation of a primordial natural platform and urban artifacts
with unparalleled spatial works of art, including sophisticated gardens, statuary, and
parietal paintings.

6.2.4 Open Your Summer Triclinium and Oecus

The House of the Golden Bracelet in the insula occidentalis constitutes an

extraordinary assemblage of architecture and art within the bearing frame of that
natural/urban locus. Located at the very end of the Via Thermarum, the architectural
machina of the house led the visitor through three levels, from the buzzy urban
environment above to a sphere autre below, where one was projected into an idyll
with nature. The very architectural interface between urbanity and nature, or
anthropogenic and geogenic realms, precipitated in a condensed space at the bottom
level. There, the façade exhibited the concavities of a triclinium and a summertime
oecus, open onto a terraced garden overlooking the shore. The barrel vaults of both
rooms still establish an uninterrupted transition that projects the beholder’s per-
ceived space from the interior of the building out onto the platform of the terrace.
From there, the spatial perception follows the sloping hillside covered with
Mediterranean maquis down to the shore, to then be cast into the airy and watery
atmosphere above the Bay of Naples.

6.2.5 Water Whirls and Lava Foam Spring Out

of a Vitreous Recess in the City Wall

The triclinium is the very center of the overall assemblage and the privileged
vantage point of the perspectival space that unfolds. There, the architecture of the
house merges with the environmental system. The back wall of the room opens in a
curved niche occupied by a nymphaeum. In its center, a stepped fountain in the
shape of a cascaded spring is recessed deep into the substructures. From it, water
used to stream out into a rectangular basin. The niche was covered with vitreous
tiles arranged in polychrome mosaics representing plants, while the cascade was
clad in lava foam mimicking a natural cave. The cisterns alimenting the water
features were built in the interstice between two septa of the unused defensive
walls, so that the assemblage of architectural, urban, and natural elements orches-
tated in the grotto was indissoluble.
144 6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology

6.2.6 ‘Parietal-Garden-Paintings/Cultivated-Vines/
Spontaneous-Maquis’

The fixed beds of the triclinium are still intact, U-shaped around the rectangular
basin and separated from the outside by another fountain pool with metal nozzles
that used to sprinkle water. The interior walls were covered with garden paintings of
a hyperrealistic vividness. Large lacerti of the paintings have survived mounted on
panels in the restoration laboratories of the superintendence of Pompeii. Luxuriant
vegetation, flowers, birds, and various exotic figures, such as hermae, pinakes,
oscillae, cupids, Egyptian and Greek sphinxes, were framed by the slender columns
and light structures of an illusory wooden canopy. The painted canopy extended
into a real pergola projecting out onto the terrace garden to provide shade. The
garden was flanked north by a high wall covered with cultivated vines that rambled
over the pergola, so that the real foliage mixed up with the painted vegetation in the
interior. Therefore, the flora and fauna depicted in the parietal paintings resonated in
the ‘second nature’ of the cultivated plants of the terrace garden and, beyond it, in
the ‘first nature’ of the spontaneous maquis covering the western hillsides of
Pompeii.

6.2.7 Longitudinal Trajectory Through Vertical Facialities

The larger assemblage of ‘lava/urban-walls/water-cisterns/cascade/vitreous-nym-

phaeum/parietal-painting-garden/hanging-garden/maquis-covered-hillside/Tyrrhenian-
shore/open-sea/mist-of-airy-and-watery-atmosphere/nocturnal-asters’ organizes the
totality of a landscape around the synesthetic perception of the civilized beholder lying
on the triclinium. The Pompeian landscape kindled by the House of the Golden
Bracelet is a vertical accumulation of layers allowing for a longitudinal projection of
the beholder. A longitudinal trajectory of reconnaissance through the organization of
‘facialities’ (birds, flowers, patricians, hermae, slaves, Egyptian gods) spans the Jungian
series nature-culture-nature (‘wild-maquis/cultivated-garden/garden-paintings’) that
organizes the collective imaginary.4

6.2.8 Of Meteors Between Lava and Asters

Poising in-between lava and asters, the Pompeian landscape is suspended in the
atmospheric time of water moving in waves, whirling air, weather, turmoil of
multiple particles, clouds forming. It is the ‘time of meteorology’ that Deleuze

4
About the nature-culture-nature series, see subchapter ‘Analogies by resemblance and proportion’
in Chap. 8 of this book.
6.2 Writing the Universe Within and Beyond the Garden Fence 145

Guattari comment upon: between “the extreme slownesses and vertiginous speeds
of geology and astronomy, Michel Tournier places meteorology, where meteors
live at our pace” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 261). Tournier closes Gemini, his
novel of the man/natural correspondences, by returning to the refrain of the
description of the transient evolution of the ‘meteors’.
A depression moving from Newfoundland to the Baltic had opened Tournier’s
book. ‘Masses of warm, moist oceanic air are pushed into the corridor of the
English Channel and a gust of wind from west-southwest turns over, among other
things, eight pages of Aristotle’s Meteorologica that the author is reading on the
beach at Saint-Jacut.’5 (Tournier 1997, p. 9).
Episodes from the life of two anticyclones close the book. ‘One situated off
northern France, the other off the southwest of England, Arctic fortresses—glacis of
still, cold air—stoutly withstanding the onslaught of the Atlantic currents moving
into fill a deep depression. The one off Cornwall surrendering to warm air, breaking
and teetering on the edge of the gulf of low pressure. The Flemish one remains
impregnable, “strong in a high-pressure area of 1021 millibars”, directing a calm,
clear flow of dry, freezing wind towards the author. Yet the covering of snow on the
fields is thinning due to the bright, keen sun causing the snow to evaporate without
thawing. A phenomenon known as sublimation’6 (Tournier 1997, p. 452).
In Tournier, the unfolding of man’s life is like the formation and dissolution of
nimbuses: “A cloud forms in the sky like an image in my brain, the wind blows like
I breathe, a rainbow spans the horizon for as long as my heart needs to reconcile
itself to life, the summer passes like vacation drifts by” (Tournier 1997, p. 450). The
same meteorological dimension has governed the landscape assemblage of the Bay
of Naples.

6.2.9 Of Forms and Language

The conjunction of collective history and autobiographical memories occurs in the

meteorological assemblage, where the scientific observations of the object corre-
spond to the subject’s aesthetic contemplation—science and autobiography no
longer at odds.
I bought the little book with the parietal garden paintings during a summertime
Neapolitan trip. I was lodging in an eighteenth-century villa uphill of the historic
Rione Sanità in Naples. Every morning I walked downhill the tiny streets from
Capodimonte to Plebiscito. Moiariello, Morisani, Riccia, Miracoli, Cristallini,
Antesaecula, Sanità, Vergini: architectural gems popping out of the miserable
ensemble stratified over the hollow topography of the mound, beauty spilling from
the portals of churches in waves of glittering ex-voto, velvets, and molded stones.

5
Paraphrased by the author from Gemini
6
Paraphrased by the author.
146 6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology

Along the descent to the sea, I used to recall Wilhelm Tischbein’s letters
recorded by Goethe in the Italian Journey. A Moorish lady had been once kept
captive on a seized boat in that same bay before my eyes. Crowds drifted on
dinghies to see her, some affording a prize.7 Along with this urban narration,
another one is set outside of the city amid the surfacing ruins of Baia Domitia.
A goatherd had come onto the seashore at the mouth of the Garigliano River. The
goats dove into the water. There arrived a swineherd too. While the herds sought
refreshment in the waves, the shepherds lay in the shadow playing music.
Eventually, a handsome young man came forward on horseback and submerged
himself so deeply into the sea that even the horse seemed to disappear with him.
Only the horse’s head and the youth’s shoulders were out of the water. (Tischbein
1993, pp. 446–7)
Inside or outside of the city, the ‘beautiful spectacles’ are about the spell of
interacting forms, that is, constructions, topography, objects, and bodies of men and
animals, which shape the language of the observer. “From Italy, rich in forms, I was
thrust back into formless Germany—writes Goethe several years after his return—
and obliged to exchange a bright sky for a somber one. [M]y friends brought me to
the brink of despair. My rapture over objects that were far away […] seemed to
offend them; […] no one understood my language”8 (Goethe 1993, pp. 572, 542
note 1). Goethe’s passage points out the correspondence between the forms of the
landscape and the language that transcribes it.

6.2.10 Meteorological Mysteries

Of the visit in Pompeii, I remember a straining anxiety that did not leave me for
days afterwards. It had started at the Villa of the Mysteries. To reach the villa, you
exit the urban circle of Pompeii northwest and walk the monumental Way of the
Tombs. Then you cross the marine dunes along the diagonal pattern of the reliefs.
Only a few steps from the archeological site, the villa was left neglected, the
windows open. The unparalleled fresco cycle unguarded. A couple of sagging straw
curtains barely blocked direct sunbeams. The paint had faded in a spot hit by the
light oozing through a gash in the weft. Visitors walked around indifferently.
Anyone could destroy that priceless surface without effort nor motive. That anxiety
had cast me into a transient time of uncertainty, permanent fluctuation, weather and
atmosphere, currents and nimbuses.

7
The Italian version of Tischbein’s letter reads: “Il padrone della nave ha fatto un lauto bottino: ha
trovato danaro e merci in quantità, seterie, caffè, e inoltre dei ricchi gioielli, appartenenti a una
giovane mora. Era interessante vedere la folla che a migliaia si spingeva sui canotti per vedere da
vicino i prigionieri e specialmente la mora. Vi erano anche alcuni che avrebbero desiderato
comprarla…”.
8
Translation by the author.
6.2 Writing the Universe Within and Beyond the Garden Fence 147

That psycho-cosmic instant was for me the sensing of possible incommensurable

losses in the plural journey of many lives, transient states, temporality, inscrutably
mutable circumstances that subtend the space of landscape as opposed to the
eternity of architecture.

6.2.11 Essential Continuity of Garden and Landscape

There is an essential continuity in the spatial assemblage that we have described

between the constructs of the Pompeiian gardens and the maritime landscapes of the
Parthenopean bays. A continuity that stands in the fluxes of matter and people that
cross the waters, the energy traversing the atmospheric events, the currents that
move the liquid masses of the sea, the winds that propel the sails, the succession of
the Neapolitan flora and its inhabiting fauna on the shores scattered with relics and
ruins, in the urban centers and in the sprawled coasts, but, also, it stands in the
mythology that has been disseminated over the lands across centuries. From the
city-land fringe of the western hillsides of Pompeii and the urban space of the Bay
of Naples, to the extra-urban seashore of Baia Domitia in the Gulf of Gaeta, an
uncontained garden is determined by a functioning metabolism and an imbued
mythology.

6.3 Bartering Symbiosis for Service

At a point in time, the construct of the garden suffers a disruption. The idea of the
garden as part of a broader atmospheric assemblage that interfaces man and cosmos
is lost. A more utilitarian vision rises to flatten the natural components and systems
harnessed by man within the built space, into services. A positivistic attitude, in
fact, still today calls ecological services any natural resources useful to man. This
shortsighted interpretation of the surrounding world becomes hegemonic when the
period of the great explorations of the New Worlds yields to systematic research,
the privileged time of the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism yields to
overt Romanticism, the formation of the image of the patrias criollas yields to the
constitution of the estados nacionales in the Spanish colonies, and the cities start to
equip themselves for their metropolitan metamorphosis implementing large and dull
public gardens at the service of a broader number of urbanites.
148 6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology

6.3.1 Rousseau, Goethe, Humboldt, and the Picturesque

Olmsted

In ‘Rousseau, Goethe, Humboldt: Their Influence on Later Advocates of the Nature

Garden’, Jost Hermand identifies a line of involution that in the first half of the
nineteenth century converts the Enlightened-Sentimentalist (of the Enlightenment’s
Age of Sentimentality) idea of the ‘nature garden’ into the ‘vulgarized’ model of the
‘English garden’, epitomized by Peter Joseph Lenné’s design for the Volksgarten in
Magdeburg of 1824, considered the first example of a people’s garden in Germany
(Hermand 1997).
Hermand notes that Julie’s garden at Clarens in Rousseau’s epistolary novel of
1761, Julie, or the New Heloise, is the place of Enlightened liberation from the
constraints of ‘absolutist’ (‘feudal’) society and religion (‘clerical chains’) in har-
mony with, or approximating the wild growth of, a pristine state of nature, an
Elysium or Arcadia, “reminiscent of the lifestyle of the Golden Age” (Hermand
1997, pp. 35–7) The Volksgarten of Magdeburg, instead, trades the ideal of indi-
vidual liberation for the planning of public parks that strain the city budget as little
as possible by implementing cheap “large lawns, randomly interspersed with groups
of bushes and trees” (Hermand 1997, p. 45) of low maintenance.

6.3.2 Gardens and Revolution

According to Hermand, the historical turning point that “dashes all hopes of
equality and fraternity” (Hermand 1997, p. 38), converting the Enlightenment into
proto-modern capitalism for the maximum benefit of the upper middle class, is the
victory of the Gironde of 1794, in the upheavals of the French Revolution. Known
as the Thermidorian Reaction, a coup d’état starts with the order to execute
Maximilien Robespierre issued by the Girondins’ majority of the National
Convention, aimed to smash the hegemony of the Montagne in the Committee of
Public Safety.9
The earlier involution in the conception of the garden, converting a culturally
sophisticated tension towards the emancipatory ideals of liberation into a practical
preoccupation for the provision of some basic natural services to the urban popu-
lation, is, then, the consequence of that reactionary twist in the course of the
revolutionary events in France.

9
In a generalized panic, generated in truth by the clash between two institutional bodies and the
reciprocal suspicion among the individuals that formed them, rather than by the conflict between
two political factions, the Gironde prevails. The scheme is brought forth by means of indis-
criminate massacres that replace the Reign of Terror with the equally bloody regime of the White
Terror.
6.3 Bartering Symbiosis for Service 149

6.3.3 Gardens and Metropolitan Aspirations

From a different point of view, in his late testament on the scenic values of the
landscape, A World with a View (Yale University Press 1978), Tunnard identifies
the implementation of people’s parks, along with street widening, paving, and
lighting (a broader ‘municipal vade mecum’ includes more generically a number of
new avenues, malls, bridges, residential squares, terraces) as the characteristic piece
of the ‘metropolitan improvement’ undertakings, dating from the mid-eighteenth
century to become “a mark of the 19th century cities everywhere” (Tunnard 1978,
pp. 127–8). What Hermand calls the vulgarized English garden, as opposed to the
utopian nature garden, is in fact the mirror of a diffusive desire for ‘metropoli-
tanization’ that corresponds to the structuration of industrial society.
No metropolis exists without a full erasure of nature. The metropolis is the
replacement of nature with an artificial environment, which in turn implies the
necessity of a man-made recreation of nature within the metropolis itself. In his
retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Koolhaas claims that the de-Witt-Morris-
Rutherford Grid of 1807 announces the ‘obliteration of nature’ (Koolhaas 1978,
p. 20) in keeping with the worldview ingrained in the fabricated motherland of the
first Dutch colonists (Koolhaas 1978, p. 17).

6.3.4 Gardens and Taxidermy

In 1853, with a “colossal leap of faith” the Manhattaners foresee the not imminent
but incumbent day when “the picturesquely-varied, rocky formations of the island
will have been converted into formations of rows and rows of monotonous straight
streets, and pile of erect buildings”,10 and an undeferrable need surges for a
“taxidermic preservation of nature”, where preservation stands for “manipulation
[…] performed on nature saved by its designers” (Koolhaas 1978, p. 21). That is
Central Park, which reformulates a “synthetic Arcadian Carpet” from “a catalogue
of natural elements […] taken from its original context” (Koolhaas 1978, pp. 22,
23). Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’ plan for Central Park, otherwise a
‘picturesque’ landscape composition, exceeds the model of the vulgarized
nineteenth-century people’s park by virtue of the colossal magnitude of the enter-
prise and by virtue of its position in place and time, at the heart of the epochal
Manhattanist edification. To Manhattan’s built up mosaic, the park constitutes a
fabricated otherness.

10
Here, Koolhaas is quoting John Reps’ The Making of Urban America (Reps 1965, pp. 331–9). It
is a multiple-indirect quotation, since Reps’ passage is, in turn, quoting Frederick Olmsted and
Calvert Vaux’ project statement ‘Description of a Plan for the Improvement of the Central Park’,
registered in the archives of the Commissioners of Central Park of 1858, as published in Frederick
Olmsted Jr. and Theodora Kimball’s book about Olmsted (Olmsted Jr. and Kimball 1928).
150 6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology

6.3.5 Gardens, Effects, and Deep Forms

Olmsted and Vaux’ project statement reported by Reps proceeds as follows:

“Then the priceless value of the present picturesque outlines of the ground will be distinctly
perceived, and its adaptability for its purpose more fully recognized. It therefore seems
desirable to interfere with its undulating outlines, and picturesque, rocky scenery as little as
possible, and, on the other hand, […] to increase and judiciously develop these particularly
individual and characteristic sources of landscape effects.” (Reps 1965, p. 336)

The perception of the site as a ‘scenery’ and the conception of the project as an
enhancement of the sources of ‘landscape effects’ are explicitly stated. The pre-
mises set out by Olmsted and Vaux actually coincide with landscape urbanism’s
claims in favor of the use of the simulacrum as a design tool, contained in its
‘manual for the machinic landscape’ (Hight 2003, p. 27).
However, those premises differ from the sense that the term ‘scenic’ acquires in
Tunnard’s A World with a View. Tunnard’s ‘scenic’ refers to the overall ensemble
of deep forms as perceived in its truth by the beholder, while the ‘picturesque
simulacrum’ refers to the perception of a scenery orchestrated in its surface char-
acteristics to induce a desired effect.
In fact, Tunnard uses Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s Die Gestaltung der Landschaft
durch den Menschen of 1916 to lay the bases of an idea of scenery inherent to the
deeper structure of landscape. In his study, the classification of a series of landscape
cases “by type and detail” cross-relates man-made and natural components
(Tunnard 1978, p. 119). Where the industrial territories “possess confused, vague
traits”, Schultze-Naumburg proposes the mass of the town of Tubingen, “built on a
slope and seen from an opposite slope”, as the virtuous example of a settlement
situation that combines clear recognizability and harmonic merging within a con-
text. A man-made entity part of the landscape when seen from a distance,
Tubingen’s built ensemble frames views of that landscape when the observer is led
into its core (Tunnard 1978, p. 121).11
Among pioneering researches on the ‘scenic values’ of landscape, Tunnard
mentions a romantic-picturesque field and a semi-scientific field. On the one hand,
in Italian Townscape of 1963, Hubert de Cronin Hastings drifts towards an
appreciation of the ‘picturesque effect’, rather than deeper compositional forms, by
deploying ‘romantic’ categories of landscape analysis such as ‘invitation’, ‘con-
vexity’, ‘precipitation’, ‘personality’, ‘action’, ‘inaction’, ‘remoteness’ (Tunnard
1978, pp. 122–3). On the other hand, Ian McHarg pursues an objective classifi-
cation of the ‘scenic values’ of the landscape.12 His principle of the ‘least social

11
Tubingen is, thus, as alternative to the industrial territory as to the man/nature divide advocated
by the American system of National Parks for the preservation of nature.
12
Founder of the Landscape Design Program at the University of Pennsylvania, McHarg’s work
would be used as a founding platform for the landscape urbanist movement.
6.3 Bartering Symbiosis for Service 151

cost’ concerned with the identification and protection of scenic potential and cul-
tural heritage would experience a particular success, being adopted in the highway
building programs worldwide. According to Tunnard, however, McHarg’s model
eludes the issue of ‘quality’ (Tunnard 1978, p. 123).
It is, instead, the Vedutisti that, according to Tunnard, still offer the most efficient
model for the investigation of the ‘total landscape’, where the city represents just ‘a
denser part’ of a continuum, composed according to ‘monumentality’, ‘relation to
topography’, ‘architectural quality’, ‘visual alignments’, ‘views’ (Tunnard 1978,
pp. 123, 126–7). Tunnard’s rappel à l’ordre for the reestablishment of “the lost
principles of urban design” (Tunnard 1978, p. 123) extended to the total compo-
sition of the architecture-topography continuum and made of ‘monumentality’,
‘view’, ‘architecture quality’ (Tunnard 1978, p. 127), recall Aldo Rossi’s disci-
plinary refoundation. Even remaining prevalently culturalist,13 Tunnard’s ‘scenic’
advocates for the combination of a “scientific approach to nature” (Tunnard 1978,
p. 182) with the “full development of the cultural patrimony” (Tunnard 1978,
p. 185) pursued through panoramic and detailed observation. Tunnard’s method, in
sum, prescribes a twofold investigation of the deep structure of the continuum,
building knowledge of both physical landscape development and landscape
imageability precipitated across its long-term cultural recognition. The scenic val-
ues are, thus, inherent to the deep forms, that is, structures, of the landscape, not its
effects.
We could eventually induce that Central Park and the High Line are closer to
Cony Island’s ‘technologies of the fantastic’, (Koolhaas 1978, p. 29–79) or to a
dissimulated standardized, industrialized subversion rather than an emancipatory
agenda for the liberation from feudal hierarchization of the world claimed to the
revolutionary nature garden by Hermand.

6.4 Game Hunting in the Garden

The gradual configuration of Berlin’s Tiergarten can be broken down in three

phases. First, its original establishment at the beginning of the sixteenth century
corresponds to the delimitation of the exclusive hunting grounds of the Great
Elector of Brandeburg, where a surrounding fence prevented the escaping of wild
animals from the inside and undesired incursions of poachers from the outside.

13
Culturalist is, in fact, Schultze-Naumburg’s idea of man/nature symbiosis on which Tunnard
elaborates: “anything manmade should be a harmonious part of the landscape”, aiming at the
restoration of the original “symbiosis […] undone in the second half of the nineteenth century” by
economic circumstances winning out the “understanding of nature’s beauty” (Tunnard 1978,
pp. 119–20).
152 6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology

6.4.1 Metropolitan Services Under the Tents

Second, the ‘urbanization’ of the garten, that is its intertwining in the bundle of
expanding urban dynamics, can be traced back to the time of the extension of the
Unter den Linden Boulevard to connect the Stadtschloss to the new Schloss
Charlottenburg. At the order of Friedrich Wilhelm I, the central Grosse Stern
roundabout and a pattern of radial boulevards are implemented at the turn into the
eighteenth century. The conversion of the hunting park to lustgarten, or garden of
pleasures, open to the public, is completed in the 1740s under Friedrich II along the
lines of Georg von Knobelsdorff’s plan, which equips it with the functional and
ornamental features of the French park. There appear pathways, flowerbeds in
geometrical layout, greenery salons, mazes, water ponds, and fountains. The access
is unrestricted. The park is thus regarded as a service to the urbanites, who by 1745
sense the opportunity of refreshments served under seasonal tents installed in a
circus. It is a circular esplanade on the northeastern limit of the area by the Spree
River bank, from which eight radial avenues depart to disappear in the forested
park. The concession for the refreshment tents is granted to Huguenot refugees,
whose heirs by 1786 can edify a permanent construction starting the consolidation
of a small urban ensemble.

6.4.2 Vulgarized Beautifications

In the third phase of the park’s evolution, in fact, Lenné’s intervention formalizes
the presence of the refreshment facilities by beautifying their urban front with a
lofty double-tree-lined street, the In den Zelten. The elegant establishments would
stand until the Second World War bombings.
Lenné’s intervention, largely realized in the 1830s upon commission from
Friedrich Wilhelm III, is generally intended for the beautification of the park, by
incrementing the number of major and secondary pathways over Knobelsdorff’s
general matrix. Forest swathes are characteristically reduced to clear open lawns
traversed by ornamental water features and spotted with shady clusters of trees. The
transformation of the Tiergarten in accordance with the model of the
nineteenth-century English park is completed with the creation of the Zoological
garden in 1844, both popularized curiosity grounds and educational facility for the
growing population of a city in the process of metropolitanization.14

14
The evolution of Berlin’s Tiergarten does not differ much from that of Hyde Park in London,
created as Henry VIII’s hunting grounds in 1536. The early eighteenth-century geometric gardens
of Kensington Palace were split in two parts with the introduction of the Serpentine River and
Long Water by Henry Wise and Charles Bridgeman at the request of Queen Caroline in 1728.
West lies the formal design of the Kensington Gardens, an Italian garden exhibiting a Dutch
garden core, east is the metropolitan park in the service of the urbanites. Hyde Park, admired by
the future Napoleon III in the years of his second exile, becomes the model for the implementation
6.4 Game Hunting in the Garden 153

6.4.3 Emancipation or Ecological Services

Lenné’s transformation of Knobelsdorff’s Tiergarten scheme in Berlin, is repre-

sentative of the vulgarizing attitude lamented by Hermand for the Volksgarten of
Magdeburg. The conversion of Rousseau’s aspirations to a natural idyll into the
plane provision of ecological services for the urbanites is, in fact, the apotheosis of
the anthropocentric vision of landscape that characterizes metropolitanism.15 But in
more general terms, we can regard the historical transition from the tiergärten and
hunting gardens to the metropolitan parks in the European capitals as the perpet-
uation of the feudal structures of the Middle Ages into modernity.
The metropolitan model, once more, propounds a predatory attitude towards
nature that results incompatible with an advanced phase of civilization, aware of the
overall metabolic balance in the ecosphere, and, even more, in the face of the
unsustainably growing human population on the planet. The idea of big game
hunting can be replaced today by more civilized forms of leisure, as its globalized
modern correspondent, the exploitation of natural services, can be replaced by an
alternative ethos.

6.5 Hunts of a Subtler Sort

6.5.1 Souvenirs Entomologiques

Jünger’s Subtile Jagden (subtle hunts) of 1980 are probably inspired by Jean-Henri
Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques,16 a collection of essays and memoirs of the
French entomologist, known for disregarding the Darwinian theory of evolution of
the species and focusing his natural observations on the behavior of animals alive in
the wild instead of the anatomical dissection of their dead bodies in the laboratory.
The emancipation from a positivistic analysis of nature takes advantage from two
principles that characterize Fabre’s work: the prevalent consideration dedicated to
the relational dynamics and the inclusion of the autobiographic data of the observer
as part of the system.

of the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vicennes in the frame of the urban renovation of Paris during
the Second Empire.
15
Landscape is identified with a provision of ecological services just like woman has been tra-
ditionally regarded by man as a provision of natural services. See, to this regard, the comparison
between the male bachelor of Koolhaas’ Manhattanism with the female nomad of Ito’s Tokyoism
in Chap. 2 of this book. Also see John Berger’s Ways of Seeing about female immanence (Berger
1972). Even today, nature is widely termed ecological services. Deleuze Guattari’s
‘becoming-woman’ and ‘becoming-animal’ processes advocate for a collective emancipation from
this anthropocentric, and androcentric, movement of history across geography.
16
See Fabre’s series Souvenirs Entomologiques. Étude sur l’instinct et les moeurs des insects,
1879–1909.
154 6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology

Fig. 6.2 Glass negative portraying Jean-Henri Fabre at his desk in the Sérignan-du-Comtat house,
around 1910 (image Bain News Service, Bain News Service, PD legal notice at end of chapter)

In fact, the Subtile Jagden closes with an account of Jünger’s visit to Fabre’s
museum-house of Sérignan-du-Comtat in Provence. Jünger was certainly equally
interested in the observation of the entomological form as the entomological
behavior, but his interest in natural dynamics, the system of relations among ele-
ments in the wild, is poetically narrated as the discovery of temporary fragments of
a universal harmony.
The assemblage of the poor instruments, box cutters, tweezers, and spatulas,
arrayed on Fabre’s desk, along with the names, dates, books, titles, and various
objects he had once handled in the museum-house, is associated with mortuary
equipment consumed by the unrestrainable decay of time and light (Fig. 6.2).

6.5.2 Gardens Grown Wild

In sharp contrast, the effects produced by the passing of time in the garden are quite
the opposite. The garden has grown wild, occupied by the Mediterranean maquis,
6.5 Hunts of a Subtler Sort 155

but that process has brought into it a new buzzing life of bees, lizards, birds that dart
crying through the bushes, herbs, and mosses. A life ‘forgetful of all scientific
names’ where ‘things speak with their force’ and even the dead master resurrects
from his museum-tomb with the surrounding nature, in the quiet of the full sun
(Jünger 1997, pp. 271–2).
Jünger’s description of Fabre’s garden is, historically, in line with the
Heimatschutz league’s call for the transformation of small bourgeois gardens into
nature gardens by letting grow wild at least a corner of them (Hermand 1997,
p. 50).17 But it is also reminiscent of Saint Francis of Assisi’s precepts to his
Orders, recommending that a ‘part of the friary garden always be left untouched’.18
By mirroring the beauty of the universe in wild flowers and herbs, a garden’s corner
grown wild affords a direct channel between material reality and supreme harmony.

6.5.3 Subtle Hunts

In Subtile Jagden, Jünger describes his passion for the entomological investigation
that he calls ‘subtle hunts’ as opposed to ‘big game hunting’. The book is the
autobiographical account of his colorful explorations across the globe driven by
entomological and botanical curiosity. The subtle hunts of the scientiae amabiles,
entomology and botany, are for Jünger a gymnasium to train the modes of the spirit
for the comprehensive observation of nature. The dynamic microcosmos of the
insects is the metaphor of the macro-cosmos.
As Alessandra Iadicicco notes in her short introduction, Jünger needs not to refer
to the sidereal distances of the asters to enjoy the plurality of the worlds, since a
perspective over the minuscule world of insects, prodigious creatures endowed with
the same organs as we do, and even winged, can shed light over their mysterious
relationship with the infinitum.

6.6 Chapter’s Conclusions

6.6.1 Darwinism and Technique

Maria Bellucci observes that, in Subtile Jagden, Jünger critiques Darwinism’s

leaning towards utilitarianism as an analogue to the implacable expansion of
technique and statistics that uniforms and, by that, desertifies the modern world

17
See also Wilhelm Bölsche’s Die and Become of 1913.
18
“For this reason, [Saint] Francis asked that part of the friary garden always be left untouched, so
that wild flowers and herbs could grow there, and those who saw them could raise their minds to
God, the Creator of such beauty” (Francis 2015, p. 11).
156 6 Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology

(Bellucci 2015). Jünger, in fact, stresses that the technical equipment that facilitated
Alexander von Humboldt’s geographic observations of the Orinoco River never
impeded his comprehensive gaze, nor prevented his perception of the earth’s
pulse.19 Contrariwise, Darwin’s gaze is oriented by the very concept of utility that
contributes to his profiling of creatures and their behavioral traits while impover-
ishing them.
Jünger laments that the same simplifying duality of ‘love’ and ‘war’, or ‘cou-
pling’ and ‘struggle for life’, that structures the Darwinian theory resonates in the
simplification of the industrial landscape and its few, reduced types shaped for easy
use (Jünger 1997, p. 109). In the industrial landscape, whose production charac-
terizes our epoch of technique, the simplification of building types appears along
with the rapid reduction of biodiversity and ‘a transformation of form hides behind
biological transformations’ (Jünger 1997, p. 110).
According to Jünger, mathematical calculus and the big numbers of statistics
insinuate themselves into the observation of nature through the efficient methods of
industrialized research, drying up the contemplation of the beholder and making
even the entomological determination of species ‘a matter of sophistication’ (Jünger
1997, pp. 168–9). ‘Economic desertification and its methods’ parallel the rise of
industrial research that in teamwork studies sophisticated poisons to be sprayed
onto enemy trenches as well as over the extended regions of industrialized agri-
culture, killing plagues along with wild fauna, and, by that, ‘terminating the time of
subtle hunts’ (Jünger 1997, p. 270).

6.6.2 Prey Mirrors Hunter

‘The ancients knew that prey is the mirror that ends up shaping the hunter’. And the
hunter’s soul is given form by the subtle modes of his unflagging hunt, becoming
eventually as subtle as the immaterial waft of the wings of the ephemerides and the
other minuscule preys he has been chasing after. (Jünger 1997, p. 270). Technique
is therefore terminating the hunter along with the prey.
Jünger’s message is that the hunter has to undergo a metamorphosis not to be
terminated by his own action over the planet. The idea of big game hunting can
make way to much subtler hunts, that is, the exploitation of natural resources can be
replaced by an action of observation and understanding of the world and its rela-
tional, that is, symbiotic, assemblages, and dynamics.

19
In his essay accompanying the edition of von Humboldt’s Geography of Plants, Stephen Jackson
gives a detailed description to the ‘Instruments Utilized in Developing the Tableau physique’ in
comparison to those used by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure for scientific measurement during his
explorations of the Alps a couple of decades before (Jackson 2009, pp. 221–6).
References 157

References

Bellasi P (1987) Il giardino del pelio. Segni, oggetti e simboli della vita quotidiana. Costa &
Nolan, Genova
Bellucci M (2015) Book review. Naturalmente, Fatti e Trame delle Scienze
Berger J (1972) Ways of seeing. BBC and Penguin Books, London
Ciarallo A (2002) Il giardino pompeiano. Le piante, l’orto, i segreti della cucina. Electa Napoli,
Napoli
Ciardiello R (2006) Insula occidentalis 42. In: Aoyagi M, Pappalardo U (eds) Insula Occidentalis
(Regiones IV–VII). Valtrend Editore, Napoli
Deleuze G, Guattari F (1987) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (trans: Massumi
B). The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis [1980]
Edwards C, Woolf G (eds) (2003) Rome the cosmopolis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Foucault M (1984) Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias (trans: Miskowiec J). Architecture/
Mouvement/Continuité 5:46–49 [1967]
Francis P (2015) Encyclical letter laudato si’ of the holy father francis on care for our common
home. Vatican Press, Vatican City
Goethe JW (1993) Il viaggio in Italia. In: Santoli V (ed) Goethe: opere (trans: Zaniboni E) Sansoni,
Firenze. [1813–7]
Hermand J (1997) Rousseau, goethe, humboldt: their influence on later advocates of the nature
garden. In: Wolschke-Bulmahn J (ed) Nature and ideology. Natural garden design in the
Twentieth Century. Dumbarton Oaks, pp 35–57
Hight C (2003) Portraying the urban landscape: landscape in architectural criticism and theory,
1960-present. In: Mostafavi M, Najle C (eds) Landscape urbanism: a manual for the machinic
landscape. Architectural Association, London
Jünger E (1997) Cacce sottili (trans: Iadicicco A). Guanda, Parma [1980]
Jackson ST (2009) Instruments utilized in developing the tableau physique. In: von Humboldt A,
Bompland A (eds) Essay on the geography of plants. The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, London, pp 221–226 [1807]
Olmsted Jr F, Kimball T (1928) Frederick law olmsted. New York
Rem K (1978) Delirious new york. Monacelli Press, New York
Reps John (1965) The Making of Urban America. Princeton University Press, New York
Tischbein W (1993) Lettera di Tischbein. In: Santoli V (ed) Goethe: opere, Il viaggio in Italia
(trans: Zaniboni E). Sansoni Editore, Firenze [1813–7]
Tournier M (1997) Gemini (trans: Carter A). The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
[1975]
Tunnard C (1978) A world with a view. Yale University Press, An Inquiry into the Nature of
Scenic Values. New Haven

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Template:PD-1923
Chapter 7
Reconciling Cultural and Cognitive

Abstract This chapter dissects a contemporary idea of landscape into its multiple
components. The text analyzes a series of landscape constructs in a conceptual sequence
moving from elemental to elaborate: ur-Landschaft; habitat; environment; territory;
cultural landscape; cognitive landscape. The chapter discusses various positions that
have been recently confronting over the notion of landscape, whose alternative land-
scape paradigms gather around two opposite fronts: the ‘culturalist-geophilosophical’
and the ‘scientific-cognitivist’. The text elaborates on a number of the diverse layers and
components referable to a contemporary landscape notion. Components and layers
derive from literature and practice, originating in the present and in the recent or remote
past. The text, then, examines with specific focus the contended character of continuity
or discontinuity of the notion of landscape and its evolution both in time and space, on
which the very essence of the notion is dependent. The text compares positions
describing the landscape as an aboriginal construct generated by the man/nature
interaction and others regarding landscape as a sophisticated construct only generated
when man’s manipulation of space drops any utilitarian purpose aiming at a greater
perfection. The text then construes a landscape paradigm capable to accommodate both
culturalist and cognitivist layers and components from previously analyzed models.
Reformed and recombined the layers and components conform a new ‘symbiotic
landscape paradigm’ that is described and graphically represented in a diagram.

Keywords Landscape paradigm Ur-landschaft Habitat Environment




Territory Cultural landscape Cognitive landscape Metabolist



Geophilosophical Symbiotic

7.1 Introduction

The concept of ‘landscape’ in several different conjugations has recently gained

concurrent centrality in the discourse on architecture as well as aesthetics, showing
surprising osmosis while consolidating the role of autonomous disciplinary bran-
ches in both fields: landscape and environmental design in the former and landscape
aesthetics in the latter (Fig. 7.1).

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 159

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_7
160 7 Reconciling Cultural …

Fig. 7.1 Imperial German Army Lieutenant Ernst Jünger portrayed with the Pour le Mérite, the
Order of Bravery instituted by Friedrich the Great, awarded to him in 1918 while convalescing
from the last of multiple combat wounds received in the World War I battles of Hauts-de-France.
Jünger’s intense countenance is framed by the large fur collar of the military coat. The image
condenses the idea of a relationship between man’s interiority and the landscape represented by the
hair, reminiscent of the shaking boughs of the woods and the animal world (photo courtesy of
Deutsches Literatur Archiv Marbach)
7.2 Breaking Down the Idea of Landscape 161

7.2 Breaking Down the Idea of Landscape

7.2.1 Fundamental Components

In his entry Estetica ambientale (2010) in the Enciclopedia Treccani, Paolo

D’Angelo focuses on the recent interest in ‘environmental aesthetics’ and ‘natural
beauty’, identifying a confrontational positioning of the research milieu around a
‘scientific-cognitivist’ model versus a ‘geophilosophical’ and ‘atmospheric’ model.
D’Angelo identifies the object of interest of the former model with the mechanics of
the environment, a physical-biological apparatus, and attributes to the latter
exclusive competence over the landscape proper, as a relational-cultural construct.1
The shortsighted juxtaposition of ‘philosophy’, which the discourse on the land-
scape supposedly pertains to, versus ‘ecology and architecture’, regarded as
improper interpreters of the theme,2 ends up ostracizing valuable contributions on
one front or the other. In fact, the orchestration of paradigms proceeding from
different disciplinary backgrounds shows great potential for tackling the novel
challenges posited by the extended notion of landscape.
The use of philosophical paradigms to inspire, support, or experiment new
design approaches has become quite common among architects producing both
earnest and specious operations. But the architects’ frequentation of the field of
landscape has also proved useful to philosophers and aestheticians.
In his contribution to Natural Histories, the catalog of the exhibition on Herzog
and de Meuron’s models and material archives curated by Philip Ursprung, Gernot
Böhme develops the concept of ‘atmosphere as the subject matter of architecture’
(Böhme 2006, pp. 398–406). Atmospheric architecture is, in fact, a derivation of his
more general paradigm of ‘atmospheric landscape’. Böhme situates architecture in
the modulation of perceptive subject/surroundings interaction. A subject explores
space through ‘bifocal vision’, ‘movement and focusing function’, and completes it
by sensing a ‘mood’ for taking part in the scene. A relational locus of ‘contiguity
and surroundings’ and a measurable spatium of ‘distance and scale’ are thus sub-
jected to multisensorial ‘concentrations’, ‘orientations’, ‘articulations’, and ‘defor-
mations’ due to the “incorporation of the subject’s physical presence” and the
experienced ‘atmosphere’ (Böhme 2006, p. 403). As noted by D’Angelo, Böhme’s
assimilation of architecture with the design of a larger stage, in the sense of a

1
“The ‘environment’ is a physical-biological concept, while the ‘landscape’ is a relational concept,
which has to do with the way in which we represent a territory and we feel in it […]. The
geophilosophical and the atmospheric models recover substantial parts of the history of the
landscape” (D’Angelo 2010a) [Translation by the author].
2
“The discourse on the landscape seems to have migrated towards other disciplines, such as
Architecture and Ecology […] The landscape is, however, a specific object of philosophical
reflection […] in consideration of its aesthetic dimension” (D’Angelo 2010b) [Translation by the
author].
162 7 Reconciling Cultural …

‘phenomenological landscape’, draws on both the romantic science of nature

(Goethe, von Humboldt, and Carus) and Husserl’s ‘intersubjective phenomenology’
(D’Angelo 2010a). However, the derivation of Böhme’s atmospheric paradigm is
clearly Nietschian with reference to the “vaporous region of the unhistorical” that is
“like an atmosphere where life alone can germinate” (Nietsche 1997, pp. 63–4).
The notion of the vaporous unhistorical passes over to Böhme via Deleuze Guattari,
who reformulates it into the idea of “geography as opposed to history” (Deluze and
Guattari 1987, p. 296) to lay the foundations of geophilosophy.

7.2.2 Atmospheric Perfumes

Ursprung’s introduction to the chapter Beauty and Atmosphere in Natural Histories

describes Herzog and de Meuron’s projects as “bursting in space like iridescent
soap bubbles” (Ursprung 2006, p. 364). Ursprung’s metaphor then unfolds in a
parallel between ‘architecture’ and ‘scents’. Both architecture and scents can be
regarded as libraries of memory that store the materials collected via the subject’s
physically involving experience. In these records of subjective materials lies the
faculty of the ‘aura of a place’ to conjure up a unique identity.
Ursprung’s description certainly sounds reminiscent of Saint-Augustinian
mnemonic repositories of available emotions and perceptions, tending to favor
the individual over the intersubjective dimension, the spiritual over the social and
structural. Saint Augustine says
And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of
innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. […]
There are all things preserved distinctly and under general heads, each having entered by its
own avenue: as light, and all colours and forms of bodies by the eyes; by the ears all sorts of
sounds; all smells by the avenue of the nostrils; all tastes by the mouth; and by the sensation
of the whole body, what is hard or soft; hot or cold; or rugged; heavy or light; either
outwardly or inwardly to the body. All these doth that great harbour of the memory receive
in her numberless secret and inexpressible windings, to be forthcoming, and brought out at
need. […] For even while I dwell in darkness and silence, in my memory I can produce
colours. […] Yea, I discern the breath of lilies from violets, though smelling nothing; and I
prefer honey to sweet wine, smooth before rugged, at the time neither tasting nor handling,
but remembering only. (Augustine 1909, pp. 173–4)

Analogies between Herzog and de Meuron’s designed repositories of phenom-

ena and Aldo Rossi’s idea of the ‘individuality of urban artifacts’ relying on the
subject’s experience and memories of a place are also as obvious as largely dis-
regarded by critics. In El Croquis n. 152–153, the editor Jean-François Chevrier
points out the atmospheric ephemerality of Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, a paradoxical
piece in the work of an architect who has always advocated for monumental per-
manence. The ephemeral character of the Teatro can be explained in the terms of a
7.2 Breaking Down the Idea of Landscape 163

phenomenological, atmospheric receptivity in capturing “water, air, the elements

[…] and light” of the Venice lagoon, transforming architecture in a “locus for life
and experience” (Chevrier and Herzog 2010, p. 39).

7.2.3 Using the Philosophy of the Landscape to Do

Architecture

Chevrier’s interpretation of Herzog and de Meuron’s recent work pivots on this

‘atmospheric paradigm’ referable to Böhme and to the philosophical reflection on
the landscape. The result is that of transferring any problem of architectural com-
position onto the larger field of landscape. Herzog and de Meuron’s claimed
resourcing to the “landscape [to replace even] context, ecology, nature” (Chevrier
and Herzog 2010, p. 40) in the contemporary city is evident in their latest archi-
tectural practice.
Abstinence from the architectural object’s formalization is intentionally pursued3
in favor of an experiential assemblage of social activities and landscape materials
that conjure up a formless space. The adoption of the ‘landscape’ paradigm is
explicitly formulated in recurrent statements for the demise of ‘style’,4 in favor of a
perceptual multiversity of architecture in accordance with the ‘complexity of nat-
ure’ (Chevrier and Herzog 2010, p. 22). Chevrier’s interpretative formula for
Herzog and de Meuron’s projects consists in what we could call a ‘hyper-urbanist’
structure with ‘sub-urbanist’ opening, where the ‘place’ is produced by the com-
bination of the ‘program’s activities’, while that program’s visibility is organized
over the structure of the manipulated landscape (Chevrier 2010, p. 8).

7.2.4 Ur-Materials

The ‘landscape’ model applies to the composition of the Plaza de España project in
Tenerife, where a monumental roundabout plaza on the neoclassical waterfront is
converted into an atmospheric ensemble recomposing the ‘ur-materials’ of the
geological generation of the volcanic island. Jacques Herzog openly words it: “the
Ocean is three thousand meters deep […] the summit of the Teide stands four
thousand meters above its surface. The volcanic emergence of the island is a
sculptural gesture of inexpressible violence” (Chevrier and Herzog 2010, p. 41).

3
“The working method has become a form […]. It is a method of working that has slowly become
architecture”, Jacques Herzog’s words (Chevrier and Herzog 2010, p. 33).
4
“We wanted to avoid style: the idea of perception is more open”, Jacques Herzog’s words
(Chevrier and Herzog 2010, p. 23).
164 7 Reconciling Cultural …

Countering the rhetoric of a Francoist stele, a water basin is conceived as both a

“flooded town square” and a “small shallow lake”. The brink of the depression
draws a white sandy shore in the dark paving with the texture of lava flows, while
“glass bubbles resembling water drops” are suspended for lighting, and elusive
small buildings are covered with ferns like rocks with musk and lichens. The
meager foliage of slow growing new plants establishes a divarication with the
abundance of the preexisting trees inscribing that “microcosmos into a temporal
dimension” resonating in landscape succession (Chevrier 2010, p. 14).
The manipulation of geographic elements in the Plaza de España reformation
acquires an exemplary stature for its location at the foot of the majestic Pico de
Teide. Halfway in the Atlantic between Europe, Africa and Amercia, the
4000-m-high Teide is the first summit climbed and observed by Alexander von
Humboldt and Aimée Bompland at the beginning of their legendary equinoctial
expedition.5 The ascent works for them as a rehearsal for the legendary Chimborazo
ascent and a field test for their new scientific instruments.

7.2.5 ‘North-Sea/Mercantile-Mobility/Water’

The Elbphilarmonie in Hamburg constitutes a grander example of a composition at

the territorial scale, where the landscape is vertiginously transcribed “into the
vertical dimension of an enormous optical machine” (Chevrier 2010, p. 19). The
‘multifunctional complexity’ of a daringly articulated program is allocated
according to the “(multisensorial) capacity of the human body immersed in the
world”, reaching up as far as to the production of metaphors’ (Chevrier 2010,
p. 21).
The architectural ensemble reconstructs a possible terrain for the exploded
Hanseatic landscape. The artificial massif of the existing docking warehouse
Kaispeicher A, at the very tip of the peninsula, is used to lift onto a podium the
immense crystal of the programmatic assemblage that encapsulates the auditorium.
As a territorial mirror, the crystal “captures and combines reflections from the sky,
the water and the city”.6 The undulating roofline rising up to +110 m, reflects the
waves of the North Sea as well as the curves of a nomad tent.
An articulated program of civil sociality and intersubjective play, is distributed
over the vast terraced platform contained in the profound fracture in between the

5
The island of Tenerife is reached in June 19, 1799 by the Spanish corvette Pizarro carrying the
expedition. The ascent is carried out two days later, testing for the first time the sophisticated
instruments commissioned to the most distinguished toolmakers of the time in London, Paris, and
Geneva.
6
See: Project 230 Elbphilarmonie Hamburg, Herzog and de Meuron’s website.
7.2 Breaking Down the Idea of Landscape 165

opaque podium and the translucent crystal. The macro-composition is thus legible
as a landscape construct vertically stacking assemblages of ‘ur-Landschaft/geology/
rock’, ‘North Sea/mercantile mobility/water’, with the web of ‘sociality/sedentary
city/air in between and throughout’.

7.2.6 Elective Belonging: Using the Architecture

of the Landscape to Do Philosophy

The ‘geophilosophical’ landscape paradigm of ‘elective belonging’ elaborated by

aesthetician Luisa Bonesio is equally founded on Deleuze Guattari’s geophilosophy
as well as on the decade-long work of the scuola territorialista of architect and
planner Alberto Magnaghi, which Bonesio extensively cites and credits (Bonesio
2002, p.6). Magnaghi’s vision of territorial heritage is based on a “structure of
invariant formal matrices producing durable wealth”7 as well as on their recog-
nizability and availability for adoption by non-indigenous agents (Magnaghi 2010,
p. 299).8 The opening to elective belonging tempers the regressive Heideggerian
roots of geophilosophy. However, the territory is a platform of interaction, inter-
section, and coexistence between ur-platform, the natural platform of the origins,
and the great assemblage of the structural and infrastructural networks, the intan-
gible fluxes and the social, economic, and geopolitical positioning, juxtapositions,
and dynamics. In the case of the geophilosophical model of the elective belonging,
in fact, the work of the scuola territorialista under-arches an aesthetic reflection and
an idea of territory supports a cultural interpretation of the landscape.

7.2.7 Metabolism, Tempered Cognitivism,

and Shape-Giving

The environment is a fundamental component of the ‘expanded landscape’ as are its

aesthetic and territorial layers. Peter Baccini and Paul Brunner’s ‘metabolism of the
anthroposphere’ aspires to calculate the flux and exchange of matter, energy,
populations, and dynamic activities through a defined field (or ecosystem) in
combination with cultural and institutional interaction (Baccini and Brunner 2012).

7
Translated by the author.
8
In fact, the individual’s belonging to a locale and a community does not exclusively depend on
the place of the individual’s birth, the ur-Land, generating an immutable bond, but rather on a
conscious election that can occur at a later moment of the individual’s life.
166 7 Reconciling Cultural …

The concept of ‘metabolism’ is fundamentally centered on a quantitative engi-

neering calculus, drifting by nature towards a form of scientific determinism.9
In Grounding Metabolism, Daniel Ibañez and Nikos Katsikis reformulate the
metabolist model10 while aiming to define some form of intentionality (albeit
collective or impersonal) implementing the shape-giving process on a regional
scale. They explore the material configuration of space as a “geographical imprint”
of intangible “metabolic processes” (Ibañez and Nikos 2014, p. 3). But in contrast
to any “metabolic determinism in which conditions on the ground are seen as a
mere reflection of metabolic processes”, grounded metabolism “interprets design as
a geographic agent [and is] focused on the physical configuration of human
occupation on the ground” (Ibañez and Nikos 2014, p. 6). The announced purpose
of reconciling the world-making agency implicit in design activity with the meta-
bolic determinism implied by its contemporary geographic scale points out a
substantial theme of the contemporary debate, which is then developed in convo-
luted rhetorical plots. Pointing towards the same direction, Erle Ellis’ radical
description of the replacement of ‘biomes’ (natural landscapes) with ‘anthromes’
(anthropogenic landscapes) over the surface of the planet11 addresses
non-catastrophic, progressive prospects (Ellis 2014b, pp. 21–7) with a more
effective and sober logic. If the anthropic impact on nature extends in proportion
with the sociocultural and technical capacity of increasing productivity as well as
environmental control, according to Ellis, a necessary novel role for design is
prefigured in the ‘stewardship of global sustainability’. That is intended as a
non-definitive, but rather constantly adjusting, management of the metabolisms of
the planet, or anthropic ecosphere, based on realistic technological know-how, with
concurrent aesthetic and ethic objectives and consequence.12

9
Discussing of Conrad Waddington’s legacy, Hadas Steiner concludes that the notion of ‘envi-
ronment’ augments that of ‘habitat’ by expanding the sphere of the immediate interactions of an
organism to a larger ambit, where interchanges can be prevalently intangible, based on the passage
of information, its processes and its networks. The ‘environment’, then, contains the idea of a
‘cybernetic interchange’ between organisms and their context, opening the way to bio/
technological hybridization (Steiner 2014, p. 89).
10
“In a condition of socio-environmental transformation […] urban metabolism [suggests] an
analytical basis for gauging the continuous flows of energy, material, and population exchange
within and between cities and their extensive operational landscapes” (Ibañez and Nikos 2014,
p. 3).
11
“In the Anthropocene, there is no possibility of removing human influence from ecosystems:
anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere is essentially complete and permanent”
(Ellis 2014a, p. 180). See also illustrations ‘a’ and ‘b’ (Ellis 2014a, pp. 170–171).
12
“We have never had more power to do great things, to design better landscape ecologies both for
sustenance and for nature, to create beauty, and to manage a biosphere that will nurture, please,
and honor our children, ourselves, and our ancestors” (Ellis 2014b, pp. 180–181).
7.2 Breaking Down the Idea of Landscape 167

7.2.8 Ur-Landschaft, Territory, Landscape

Referring to the notions that we touched upon at the beginning of the book, we can
reconstruct a conventional conceptual progression leading from ‘ur-Landschaft’, or
pristine natural site, to ‘environment’, or natural system with intelligible mechanics,
and ‘territory’. We can assume that the latter term, territory, has been knowingly
referring to the physical confluence and metabolic interaction between that natural
platform and the superimposed anthropic layers since when its Renaissance
equivalent ‘paese’ is put in use, as Piero Camporesi points out.13
According to Camporesi it is the “convergenza sinergica tra operosità creative e
visualizzazione della realtà”,14 detectable in the work of the mid-fifteenth-century
Tuscan technical treatisers, such as Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Antonio Averlino
Filarete, and Vannoccio Biringuccio, that denotes the occurrence of a common
‘way of regarding nature and reading the landscape’ shared by an ‘entire cultural
milieu’. The same perception of the surrounding landscape is reflected ‘in the eye of
the painter, the architect, the sculptor, as well as in the eye of the natural
philosopher, the metal prospector, and the mining engineer’15 (Camporesi 2016,
p. 23).
A ‘minute casuistry’ of the ‘landscape survey and reading’ accumulates through
the work of the traveling experts searching for the hidden veins of mercury, tin,
copper, iron, lead, silver, sulfur. ‘Every vein of minerals hidden underground leaves
particular signs on the surface, soil and rocks variously colored’, so that the
reconnaissance of the landscape of the surface is interfaced with the fathoming of
the geological profundities. The ‘masters of the foundries’ and the ‘masters of the
brush’ converge into ‘a common research focused on the colors, forms, and light
qualities’.16 The magnificent landscapes, backdrops to Mantegna’s Crocifissione
and Leonardo’s Vergine delle rocce, are the collective achievements of that com-
munity of ‘artieri’ (artists/craftsmen) equally, and prior, keen on the geological
stratigraphy and ‘mineralogical image of nature’ as on its superficial manifestation.
(Camporesi 2016, p. 21) It will be the Flemish and German masters of the 15th and
16th centuries, the van Eyks and Dürer, who complete the work of the ‘artieri’ by
“stripping nature its veil and stealing its true image” (Burckhardt 1876, p. 32).

13
“Nel Cinquecento non esisteva il paesaggio, nel senso moderno del termine, ma il paese,
qualcosa di simile a quello che per noi è oggi il territorio o, per i francesi, l’environnement”
(Camporesi 2016, p. 5). “In the Cinquecento the landscape, in the modern sense of the term, did
not exist, but rather the paese, something similar to what today is to us the territory or, for the
French, the environnement.” [translation by the author]. Camporesi notes how, in the
mid-sixteenth century, fray Leandro Alberti is already familiar with the term ‘territorio’, which he
broadly disseminates through his Descrittione di tutta Italia (Camporesi 2016, p. 166).
14
“the synergic confluence between creative industriousness and visualization of reality”
[Translation by the author].
15
Freely paraphrased by the author.
16
Freely paraphrased by the author.
168 7 Reconciling Cultural …

The ‘implacable observation of nature’ furiously practiced by Leonardo is the

highest model of the alliance of ‘aesthetic interest’ and ‘scientific curiosity’ that
produces the notion of the Italian landscape in the Quattrocento (Camporesi 2016,
pp. 24–5). Arisen in a still semi-ancient age, only later, that notion will evolve into
the Northern-European painting of the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth
centuries, in which the landscape moves from background to foreground.
It seems consistent to conclude that there is a notion of landscape that comes
directly from the ‘artieri’ of the Renaissance, some of them primarily architects,
that keeps together the deep structure of earth’s metabolism and the phenomeno-
logical manifestation of its surface. It is distinct from the landscape notion that
originates from the later Northern-European painting to inform the landscape design
of the picturesque fashion.

7.2.9 Cultural Landscape

Anthropic material networks with their rural, urban, and infrastructural shells and
the anthropic system of intangible fluxes of activities, energies, and information
traversing the ur-Landschaft compose a metabolist model of landscape. As recur-
rently noted, a mature notion of territory lies in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes in
the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, where the Effects of Good and Bad Government are
embedded in the topography of the anthropic hillsides surrounding the city. The
frescoes of Siena date back to 1334 and depict an intangible regime imprinted on a
spatial configuration. The very idea of landscape entails a cultural self-awareness
that, beyond the territory and its metabolism, implies an aesthetic, intersubjective
interpretation of its configuration and functioning. Be the frescoes just what we
would now call a diagram (nonspatial metabolism), or a pictorial representation of
the paese (spatial territory), or all that plus its cultural framing (cultural landscape),
the conventionally posited Sienese epiphany of landscape, is certainly debatable in
more than one sense (Fig. 7.2).

Fig. 7.2 Conventional landscape paradigm (rp)

7.3 Continuities and Discontinuities in the Landscape 169

7.3 Continuities and Discontinuities in the Landscape

7.3.1 Historical Discontinuity of the Notion of Landscape

The idea of landscape as a modern notion tout-court appearing in Western culture

from scratch with the Italian Humanists, derives from the title chosen by Jacob
Burckhardt for Subchapter III, Fourth Part, Second Volume of his monumental The
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, first published in German in 1860: ‘The
Discovery of Beauty in the Landscape’ (Burckhardt 1876, pp. 25–40). However, by
that, rather than the appearance of a totally novel concept, Burckhardt is primarily
determined to highlight a fracture in between antiquity and modernity, one could
say in between Saint Augustine’s late-antiquity, still laden with pagan legacy, and
the early Italian manifestations of Humanism in the poetry of the ‘wandering
clerks’, in the twelfth century (Burckhardt 1876, p. 27).
The term ‘discovery’ is, thus, marking a discontinuity in between the ancient and
the modern notions of landscape, rather than a new paradigm. Certainly, “among
the ancients […] art and poetry had contained themselves within the representation
of the full cycle of human life, before turning to compose the representation of
nature, and, even then, the latter was always restricted within a limited ambit”
(Burckhardt 1876, p. 25). Certainly, the ancient sentiment of the landscape is to
Burckhardt primarily exerted through a pantheistic acknowledgement of the
physical components of the surrounding nature, the spirit of a river, a cave, or a
mountain. Therefore, the Tuscan landscapes described by Aenea Silvius
Piccolomini in his Commentarii exhibit to him the shine of “modern taste, not
imitation or influence of Antiquity”. Aeneas Silvius “passes days of unclouded
happiness” sojourning with his papal court in the Longobard monastry of San
Salvatore near the summit of Monte Amiata, to escape the unbearable sultriness of
the summer of 1462 not less than the plague that makes the lowlands inhabitable,
and leaves seducing accounts of those delightful moments among other episodes
from his life. From the Amiata, he fancies of Sardinia and Corsica, while recog-
nizing faint profiles at great length off-shore, observes the hunt of an enormous deer
chased by his dogs, and enjoys “the green glaze of the meadow, where no thorns
wound the foot and no insects or snakes threaten man’s life”17 (Burckhardt 1876 ,
p. 36).

7.3.2 A Landscape of Antiquity

Despite the absolute modernity attributed by Burckhardt to Aeneas Silvius’ land-

scape scenes, those passages cannot sound oblivious of Pliny the Younger’s

17
Quotation from Aenea Silvius Piccolomini’s Commentarii in Burckhardt. Translation by the
author.
170 7 Reconciling Cultural …

epistolary descriptions of his estate of the Laurentinum and, even more literally, of
the tender grasses covering the hillside of his estate of the Tuscum. We have argued
in previous writings (Pasini 2014) that Pliny’s description of his Laurentine villa in
the epistle to Gallus (Pliny the Younger 1905a) contains a mature cultural per-
spective of landscape as a physical and cultural construct. Pliny writes to Gallus
From the middle of these porticoes you pass into a bright pleasant inner court, and out of
that into a handsome [triclinium] running out towards the sea-shore; so that when there is a
south-west breeze, it is gently washed with the waves, which spend themselves at its base.

Pliny’s image is particularly poetic and dense with meaning. The marine water
spray traverses the continuum ‘nature/architecture/man’. If we consider Pliny’s
description of the Laurentinum in conjunction with the larger description of the
‘site’ of the Tuscum (Pliny the Younger 1905b), architecture conforms to the
interface between the natural environment and its inhabitants as well as between
matter and the subject’s concept of order. Pliny writes to Domitius Apollinaris
You would be charmed by taking a view of this country from the top of one of our
neighbouring mountains, and would fancy that not a real, but some imaginary landscape,
painted by the most exquisite pencil, lay before you, such an harmonious variety of
beautiful objects meets the eye, whichever way it turns.

It is an aesthetic view expanding over the geographic space that generates a

landscape in its plenitude. Pliny’s poetic images demonstrate a conscious ‘cultural
topography’ existing in antiquity. In his letters, he extensively describes the aes-
thetic understanding of a mosaic produced by sociocultural forces acting on the
physical platform.

7.3.3 Recuperating the External Nature

It is certainly unnecessary to mention how the horizon of those Italian Humanists

evoked by Burckhardt is oriented by the polar star of Antiquity, which unavoidably
plays a substantial role in the modern ‘re-discovery of beauty in the landscape’.
Burckhardt’s work, in fact, celebrates the bonds of the Renaissance scholars to the
repositories of Antiquity, the ‘common source’, as much as the autonomy of a
modern sentiment of beauty. Furthermore, the special role of Italians in the evo-
lution of Western thought between the twelfth and sixteenth century is ascribed to
their belonging to “a semi-ancient people”, which seems the product of a misce-
genation between the prospects of modernity and the vestiges of Antiquity.18

18
“After all, in cosmography as in other matters, it is vain to attempt to distinguish how much is to
be attributed to the study of Antiquity and how much to the special genius of the Italians. They see
and treat the things of this world from an objective point of view, even before they were familiar
with ancients, partly because they still are themselves a semi-ancient people and partly because
their political circumstances predispose them to it; but they would not so rapidly have attained to
such perfection had not the old geographers shown them the way” (Burckhardt 1876, p. 11).
7.3 Continuities and Discontinuities in the Landscape 171

Dante’s “great power of observation” is the expression of an “empiricism” and a

“spirit of exploration” peculiar and characteristic of that semi-ancient people
(Burckhardt 1876, pp. 13–4). The spirit of observation that drives the formation of
the botanical gardens, pleasure gardens, zoological collections, zoology in general
and the selection of canine and equine races, and even the menageries sporting
‘savages’ of diverse ‘human races’ in the Italian courts, will spark the diffusion of
the modern interest in the exploration of the natural sphere and, beyond agrarian
utility, the art of gardening the landscape in the whole of Europe (Burckhardt 1876,
pp. 17–22).
The first source of Burckhardt’s analysis of the ‘Discovery of Beauty in the
Landscape’ is the accumulation of ardent explorations of the geographic space
contained in Alexander von Humboldt’s second volume of Cosmos, published in
German in 1847. According to von Humboldt, in fact, “after the destruction of the
ancient world—we find in the great and inspired founder of a new world, Dante
Alighieri, scattered passages which manifest the most profound sensibility to the
aspect of external nature.”19
Only to complete von Humboldt’s commentaries, Burckhardt proceeds to his
celebrated recount of Petrarca’s purported ascent of Mont Ventoux in the month of
April of 1336 and his subsequent pondering on Saint Augustine’s Confessions
(Burckhardt 876, pp. 30–1).
And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the
broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass
themselves by (Augustine 1909, p. 229)

In Petrarca’s recollection, these are the verses that move him towards what will
be called the modern ‘discovery of beauty in the landscape’. According to
Burckhardt, Petrarca is “one of the first perfectly modern men” (Burckhardt 1876,
p. 28) and, at once, one of those semi-ancient eager observers of their natural
environs. Via Burckhardt, his Mont Ventoux’ adventure will bridge over centuries
linking the ancient precedent of Philip’s ascent of Mount Emo in Macedonia,
narrated by Livy, and the modern sequel of von Humboldt’s scientific escalation of
the Chimborazo.20
What in Saint Augustine sounds like a sudden momentum, a contained impetus,
veiled in the moral call of Christianity for the abandonment of materiality in favor
of spirituality, is a surviving fragment of the sense of sublime of Antiquity and the
anticipation of its modern resurrection. That momentum will then resonate in the

19
From Cosmos, Burckhardt derives the sequence of Dante’s observations of nature: “the bursting
of the clouds and the swelling of the rivers”, “the sweet breath of morning, and the trembling light
on the gently agitated distant mirror of the sea”, “the pine forest near Ravenna […] where the early
song of birds is heard in the tall trees” (Humboldt, Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the
Universe 1848, pp. 50–51).
20
Burckardt’s quotations in this sub-chapter are translations by the author from the Italian edition
in the References (Burckhardt 1876) in confrontation with the classic English version of 1878 by
S. G. C. Middlemore.
172 7 Reconciling Cultural …

unconditioned surrender of the self to the landscape for the Romantic spirits of the
second half of the eighteenth century, re-appropriating the sublime by retracing,
through a modern sentiment, the laws of the metabolism of nature.

7.3.4 Sublime and Metabolic Landscapes

The sublime and the metabolic sentiments will be perfectly merged into one in the
magnificent representation of nature inscribed in the Géographie des plantes
équinoxiales: tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins,21 more than a graphic
board, a “colossus of information” (Jackson 2009, p. 25). The board does not
simply illustrate the Essai sur la géographie des plantes,22 but rather constitutes the
main part of the work, published in 1807, following Alexander von Humboldt and
Aimé Bonpland’s world acclaimed voyage to the equinoctial regions.
By interlacing graphic, textual, and notational information, the tableau physique,
as Humboldt comments, “contains almost the entirety of the research I carried out
during my expedition to the Tropics.” The tableau physique is a total vision of
nature that, well beyond exhibiting the continental section of the equinoctial
regions, aims at “connecting together all the phenomena and productions on the
surface of earth.” On the one hand, the tableau physique represents the mechanics
of the planetary metabolism: “the general equilibrium […] is the result of an infinite
number of mechanical forces and chemical attractions [and] the study of nature […]
demands the gathering together of all the knowledge dealing with modifications of
matter.” On the other hand, Humboldt reflects, “if my tableau were capable of
suggesting unexpected analogies […], it would also be capable of speaking to the
imagination and providing the pleasure that comes from contemplating a beneficial
as well as majestic nature […] lifting us to the most sublime considerations”
(Humboldt and Bonpland 2009, p. 79).
The tableau physique is the representation of the planetary mosaic: the relational
dynamics of the geographic (horizontal) distribution of plants, rearranged over the
vertical axis of the equatorial ascent of the Chimborazo. The planetary mosaic is
transfigured in a composition of luxuriant pictorial descriptions, precise scientific
measurements, concise empiric observations, and breathtaking lyric evocations,
scientifically describing poetic phenomena such as the ‘variation of the blueness of
the sky’. Von Humboldt’s tableau would literally inspire Johan Wolfgang von
Goethe’s Sketch of the Main Heights of the Old and New Continents of 1814, and,
more broadly, the great spirits of numerous generations pursuing “art and science as
complementary routes to understanding the world” (Jackson 2009, p. 18).

21
Geography of Equatorial Plants: Physical Tableau of the Andes and the Neighboring Countries.
22
Essay on the Geography of Plants.
7.3 Continuities and Discontinuities in the Landscape 173

7.3.5 Historical Continuity of the Notion of Landscape

Despite any possible intermediate discontinuities, the ancient gaze that Pliny
unfolds over the shore at the Laurentinum and the hillsides at the Tuscum overtly
embrace the landscape and interiorize its phenomenological and conceptual
understanding. Beyond the physical layers of the interaction between inhabitant and
context, Pliny’s passionate descriptions contain a conscious and sophisticated
cultural framing, locating the sites in the local surroundings as well as placing them
in the larger geographic and sociopolitical structure. This cultural self-awareness
cannot be disregarded as a byproduct of informational and social levels of inter-
action. By virtue of its spatial and aesthetic content, Pliny’s triclinium of the
Laurentinum converts into a fabulous time-capsule and casts the facies of the
ancient landscape onto the geographic perspective of the contemporary landscape.
The spatial assemblage around Pliny’s triclinium is consistent with the spatial
assemblage we described around the triclinium of the Pompeian House of the
Golden Bracelet a few hundred miles south on the Tyrrhenian coast. The two spatial
assemblages will also be linked by the geological events of the eruption of Mount
Vesuvius, via another Pliny, the older uncle, and his scientific observations.
In fact, while clouds of lethal gases and pumice-stones are covering the
Pompeian terraced gardens, Pliny the Elder, stationed at Misenum with the fleet of
Rome at his command, launches the warships towards the ascending column of
smoke, with the purpose of bringing help to residents of Stabiae, but equally enticed
by his ‘scientific acumen’ to collect empirical observations of the phenomenon. The
scientific spirit of those observations that would result fatal to him, as so emo-
tionally narrated by his young nephew (Pliny the Younger 1905c), does not
essentially differ from the spirit of von Humboldt’s empirical observations on the
Chimborazo, eighteen centuries later.

7.3.6 Other Continuities and a Novelty in the Notion

of Landscape

John Dixon Hunt’s model of the ‘trio of natures’ that we have discussed in Chap. 2
describes a double continuity of the landscape concurrently deployed in space as
well as in time. The axial geometry of an eighteenth-century English estate,
extending from the focus of the edifice through the parterres, gardens, vegetable
gardens, orchards, intensively cultivated ager, extensive fields, open nature, to
finally point at some distant natural emergence such as the untamed topography of a
mountain, records the gradual unfolding of man’s mastery over the landscape. We
have seen how that progression of visual, utilitarian, scientific, technical, and cul-
tural control over the surrounding space described by Hunt is kindled anew after a
rupture by the pleasurable observations following the first mountain ascensions of
the Humanists. In Hunt’s narrative, the spatial progression of the scheme from
174 7 Reconciling Cultural …

edifice to wilderness corresponds to the historical succession sparked by the first

terraced parterre of the Medici in Fiesole, through their grander Tuscan estates, the
villas of Latium, the French palaces with gardens, and the English landscape
master-plans with edifices, geometric gardens, and picturesque parks.
Hunt’s aristocratic model of double continuity (in space and history) of the
landscape is founded upon the intellectual platform of elevated Humanism and its
reinterpretation of the legacy of Antiquity. Equally elaborating on Burckhardt’s
critical reconstruction of the Renaissance, Camporesi’s landscape model relies,
instead, on the material culture of the poor, the industrious experiments of metal-
lurgic craftsmen and mining engineers, and the diaries noted by wandering friars
and even charlatans, rather than on the patrician epistles lingering on the pleasures
of natural and manmade sceneries. So that the sea-urchin lunch recorded by fray
Alberti in a day of May of 1526, during a stopover en route along the Neapolitan
Riviera, is a perfect counterpoint to Aenea Silvius’ commentaries of the Monte
Amiata. In Alberti’s vivid memories, the travelers gaily descend onto the shore of
the lost city of Baiae and restore themselves in the sprays of the breaking waves
while sea water torrents flow through the ancient ruins under their feet (Camporesi
2016, p. 116).

7.3.7 An Aboriginal Idea of the Landscape

As discussed at the beginning of this book, Hunt embeds in the landscape model of
the ‘trio of nature’ the idea of a continuous line of evolution starting with the
transition from the hunting-gathering to the herding-cultivating condition.23 With
the appearance of the manmade space of agriculture (second nature), also wilder-
ness itself (first nature) is born as a thinkable idea by virtue of gaining its antipode.
The new sedentary communities dedicated to agriculture will ground into the land
nuclei of urban space and territorial networks (further articulations of the second
nature) until they achieve a condition of surplus allowing to drop utilitarian
actions.24 Resources can be destined to the implementation of the ‘greater perfec-
tions’ of pleasure gardens and landscapes (third nature), a fully formed landscape.
Camporesi also bequeaths to us one of the most poetic recounts of the material
evolution of the territorial network into a lofty construct of landscape, a literary
allegory of the matter in its becoming. But landscape, in more elemental forms, can
be also recognized in an aboriginal construct simultaneously born with man’s
awareness of the surrounding space.

23
See Chap. 2 of this book.
24
The idea of the equivalence of the agrarian and urban space is developed in Aldo Rossi’s
discourse on The Urban Artifact as a Work of Art. Rossi quotes Carlo Cattaneo’s precursory
statement of 1845 on the ‘artificial’ character of any inhabited places (Rossi 1982, p. 34), ‘dis-
tinguished from wilderness’ inasmuch as they are an ‘immense repository of labor’ forging ‘our
artificial homeland’ (Cattaneo 1956).
7.4 Combining Metabolist and Culturalist Positions 175

7.4 Combining Metabolist and Culturalist Positions

7.4.1 A True Reflection of His Soul

According to Ellis, geogenic biomes, conventional types of homogeneous eco-

logical environments originally covering the full tessellation of the planet’s surface,
are in the present Anthropocene largely extinct and reduced to a theoretical clas-
sification (Ellis 2015). Biomes survive at best as meager relics of ages predating the
planetary expansion of man, in impervious margins. Since the appearance of
agrarian societies, in fact, the majority of space on earth has been composed of
environments generated by heavy anthropic impact on the natural platform.
The construct of landscape in general terms is, in fact, generated by the inter-
action of man with space on multiple levels, involving both metabolic and cultural
spheres: physical, intangible, relational, sociological, intersubjective, informational,
cultural, aesthetic, perceptive, and atmospheric, adding layers to the growth of
landscape paradigms. In many ways, landscape is the changing projection of our
image in space or ‘the faithful image of man’s soul’. In his short novel Sturm, Ernst
Jünger describes the transforming landscape on the Western Front due to the trench
warfare of World War I with the following words:
The flora of the landscape had become strangely altered, since scythes no longer cut it. […]
A different smell, hotter and wilder, lay over the fields now. And the animal world had
undergone a similar transformation. […] Man had done all of that. In his soul a change
occurred, and the landscape received a new face. Man was at the root of everything, yet [his
action was so violent that he sometimes failed to recognize himself] in it. These nights in
the wasteland, illuminated by flashes of lightning and dazzled by the uncertain shimmer of
flares, gave a true reflection of his soul. (Jünger 2015, Sect. 7.3)

When reading these lines, the exhausted visage of Lieutenant Christian Diestl in
The Young Lions25 comes to mind. He is gripping on to the handlebar of a military
motorbike drifting away in a desperate fugue through the North-African desert,
devastated by World War II’s furious bombings. Lieutenant Diestl is masterfully
impersonated by Marlon Brando. The transformation of Brando’s countenance
throughout the movie occurs in an extraordinary correspondence with the sur-
rounding landscape. The desert scene is specular to the opening scene of the movie
prior to war’s outbreak, in which the charming ski-instructor Diestl is courting a
pretty American tourist during a New Year’s Eve gala in a cottage amidst the
forests of the Bavarian Alps. The terse hillsides covered with a soft layer of snow,
the majestic conifers, the crystalline air under the light of the moon resonate in the
blond, lofty, and smooth elegance of Diestl’s poise. The movie offers a strong
representation of the correspondence between landscape and man’s soul.

25
The Young Lions, USA 1958, director Edward Dmytryk, adapted from homonymous novel of
1948 by Irwin Shaw.
176 7 Reconciling Cultural …

7.4.2 Cognitive, Semiotic, Semethic, and Cultural

The centrality of the human subject is implicit in the culturalist landscape models
that we have discussed, due to the constitutive apparatuses of intersubjective pro-
jections. The adoption of perceptive and semiotic schemes of cognitive landscape
models provides an alternative lens that mitigates the anthropocentric orientation. In
Ecology, Cognition and Landscape, Almo Farina develops the ‘eco-field’ paradigm
intended to reconcile the cultural construct of landscape with the scientific
approach, in the frame of a ‘semethic’ formulation of landscape (Farina 2009).
‘Semethic’ refers to a landscape mosaic containing ‘meanings’ both semiotic,
embedded in formal patterns, and ethic, embedded in behavioral or processual
patterns (Farina 2009, pp. 128–9).26 A semethic landscape implies interchange-
ability between the background scene and the organisms active on it (flora and
fauna, or site and population). The ‘semethic’ model interchanges the
‘meaning-carriers’ with the ‘meaning-utilizers’ (Farina 2009, p. 105), marking a
radical overthrowing of the anthropocentric perspective.
In keeping with the scientific-cognitive approach, Farina’s ‘eco-field’ is based on
the idea of the generation of the landscape from the perceptive relation between
landscape mosaic and observer (Farina 2009, pp. 108–10). In a non-anthropocentric
vision, the observers within a given landscape mosaic multiply exponentially in
consideration of each species retaining a species-specific perception of that mosaic.
The perception of each population and each individual within the same species also
may vary, as well as each functional trait associated with each individual may
modify substantially the perceived environment relative to different fundamental
functions. The eco-field model generates a proliferation of simultaneously coex-
isting ‘perceived worlds’ that precipitates in Farina’s definition of ‘cognitive
landscape’27 (Farina 2009, pp. 112–3, 122–4). The cognitive landscape embraces
the semiotic interaction of the animal world, that is the observer’s interpretation of
the perception, as well as the cultural interpretation of the landscape mosaic (both
natural and anthropic) proper of man’s conceptual constructions. The latter implies
the processing of perceptions and their intersubjective sharing within a community
of humans (Farina 2009, p. 137).

7.4.3 Multiplicity of Eco-Fields

Farina refers to Jakob von Uexküll’s use of the term ‘environment’ (‘Umwelt’) to
describe the multiple singularities of eco-fields as individual but interconnected
spheres. Generated as separate meaning-based structures, they link ‘meaning-carriers’

26
Farina derives the concept from Jesper Hoffmeyer.
27
About the cognitive landscape and its components, see Chap. 8 of this book.
7.4 Combining Metabolist and Culturalist Positions 177

and ‘meaning-utilizers’. Conventionally, it is an ‘animal subject’ that generates an

‘environment related to a functional trait’ (Uexküll’s ‘functional cycle’), such as
‘medium’, ‘nourishment’, ‘enemy’, and ‘sex’ (Uexküll von 2010, pp. 144–5).
Farina uses a well-known image from Uexküll, describing the spider’s web as an
idealized image of the fly, to represent one of the multiple perceptive environments
coexisting within the same landscape mosaic. Uexküll says that the spider is a
utilizer of meaning so precisely attuned to the fly as a carrier of meaning, that the
spider’s web can be described as a faithful rendering of the fly. The spider, in fact,
conforms “the size of its mesh […] to the size of the fly’s body”, “measures the
resistance of the threads it spins by the living power of the fly’s body in flight”,
“spins the radial threads of the web tighter than the circular threads, so that the fly is
enclosed upon collision by the flexible circular threads and must certainly get stuck
on their sticky droplets”, while the radial threads smoothly slide the spider into the
prey over the shortest path (Uexküll von 2010, p. 158).
Since the spider has not seen the fly before, Uexküll induces that its web cannot
represent the fly, but rather the fly’s primal image (‘Urbild’), which as a ‘primal
score’ is encoded in the ‘primal score’ of the spider. The structure of each envi-
ronment can be described as a plotted plan of consumption by which the
meaning-utilizer dramatically reformulates the meaning-carrier (Uexküll von 2010,
pp. 158–60).
If we compose the spider/fly plot with another image from Uexküll, describing
four coexisting environments in a blooming meadow, the cognitive landscape
composed of eco-fields acquire a vivid appearance. The construction plan of a
flower stem (meaning-carrier) in that meadow is disrupted while its components are
ripped apart to be inserted into completely different construction plans of a
‘flower-picking girl’, an ‘ant’, a ‘cicada larva’, and a ‘cow’ (meaning-utilizers) to
end up converted into respectively ‘ornament’, ‘path’, ‘spigot’, and ‘clump of food’
(Uexküll von 2010, p. 144).
“Anything and everything that comes under the spell of an environment” concludes
Uexküll “is either redirected and re-formed until it becomes a useful carrier of meaning
[while] the original components are […] crudely torn apart without the slightest consid-
eration for the structural plan which controlled them to that point”. (Uexküll von 2010,
p. 145)

As a model of landscape ecology developed on Uexküll’s formulations and

based on multiple eco-fields, Farina’s cognitive landscape forms an ample scien-
tific, non-anthropocentric construct, capable of encompassing the idea of cultural
landscape. Besides the eco-fields, the cognitive landscape construct involves
components such as NbL (Neutrality-based Landscape), IbPL (Individual-based
Perceived Landscape), and IbCL (Individual-based Cognitive Landscape) depend-
ing on the multiple levels of subjectivity involved (Farina 2009, pp. 18–20)
(Fig. 7.3).
 178

Fig. 7.3 Landscape paradigm combining scientific-cognitive and geophilosophic-atmospheric components (rp)
7 Reconciling Cultural …
7.4 Combining Metabolist and Culturalist Positions 179

7.4.4 Non-anthropocentric Mindsets

Farina’s model of the eco-fields is particularly significant to a contemporary insight

on landscape as it frames cultural perspectives in a perfectly describable,
non-anthropocentric paradigm neither resorting to mystic holisms nor to agnostic
relativisms. The core issues of today’s debate on ecological emergency are the
formation of a constructive mindset capable of overcoming the rapacious anthro-
pocentric bias that has under-arched the baleful exploitation of natural resources.
In his encyclical letter Laudato Si’, Pope Francis urges to care for our ‘common
home’ (Francis 2015). By that, he refers to earth as a habitable space, where
‘common’ does not simply mean shared by the human population, but rather shared
by the community of all the different living species and abiotic things that compose
the terrene assemblage, in concordance with the Franciscan inspiration of his
pontificate. Pope Francis warns explicitly against ‘misguided anthropocentrism’,
whose consequent ‘practical relativism’, guiding the lifestyle of our age, sets man’s
immediate convenience as a priority, while all else becomes relative (Francis 2015,
p. 90).
Regarding nature as a provision of ecological services and regarding subaltern
individuals as a provision of labor are equivalent postures that drive to environ-
mental degradation and social decay. Practical relativism, in fact, summons “the
invisible forces of the market to regulate economy, [considering] their impact on
society and nature as collateral damage” (Francis 2015, p. 91). The ‘external forces’
evoked to reshape the landscape-urbanist agoras of our days,28 can be regarded a
self-absolutory, manicured expression of this attitude.
The revision of the positioning of the human self in space is, thus, broadly
involving the contemporary conscience spanning from the mondialist, ecologist,
anti-globalization movements calling for a change in mindset. That means for us a
new ‘landscape construct’, reconciling the three ecological spheres of nature,
society, and mind that Guattari calls ecosophy.

7.5 Chapter’s Conclusions: Multiple, Fluctuating,

Simultaneous

Landscape cannot be seen as monocular, stable, or longitudinal, but rather ‘mul-

tiple’, as a composite aggregate of snapshots aiming from diverse viewpoints,
‘fluctuating’, as the shifting trajectory of a nonlinear metamorphosing construct,
and ‘simultaneous’, as precipitating into the vertical axis its entire set of diverse
layers and components, poising between the antipodal attraction of living and
mechanistic principles.

28
See Chap. 2 of this book.
 180

Fig. 7.4 Symbiotic landscape paradigm (rp)

7 Reconciling Cultural …
7.5 Chapter’s Conclusions: Multiple, Fluctuating, Simultaneous 181

The diagram that follows proposes a possible ‘symbiotic landscape paradigm’.

The diagram assembles the elements of a traditional construct of landscape with
others, derived from contemporary branches of the interdisciplinary debates
touching landscape-related themes appearing throughout this book. Its components
originate from a recent or distant past. Some of them are commonly in use, others,
for various reasons, have been left aside, intentionally discarded, or inadvertently
disregarded in the recent debate on landscape. The typical layers of a
‘culturalist-geopolitical’ perspective are combined with levels typical of
‘metabolist-cognitivist’ visions. Ur-Landschft, habitat, environment, metabolic
ecosystem, anthropic network, with tangible and intangible fluxes of matter, energy
and people, territory, and cultural landscape, are interfaced with a cognitive
pattern-and-process landscape mosaic resulting from the accumulation of multiple
eco-fields. By means of engrafting a series of semiotic, geographic, philosophical
metabolist, and cognitivist elaborations, the mixed paradigm becomes a ductile
instrument for material and discursive analysis of contemporary space (Fig. 7.4).

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Lars Müller
 Part III
Tests, Philosophy, Agenda
Chapter 8
Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

Abstract This chapter reports about the Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral landscape
installation, implemented in the mountains of northeastern Mexico. The installation is
located in a natural site of the Parque Ecológico Chipinque impacted by the infras-
tructures of the expanding metropolitan area of Monterrey. What follows is a char-
acterization of the installation as an in situ (physical and spatial) transcription of the
symbiotic landscape paradigm, proposed in previous chapters, combining culturalist
and metabolist components. The text describes the organization of the geophilo-
sophical (culturalist) and the cognitive (metabolist) spatial models selected as bases
for the project, respectively Deluze and Guattari’s ‘becoming’ and Farina’s ‘cognitive
landscape’ paradigms. Then, the text explains how the installation plots in space the
superposition and the coincidence between the two models. The landscape installation
is described both in its general structure and detailed articulations, as a natural nar-
rative where the physical topography resonates in an under-arching mythology. The
conclusions illustrate the social, educational, and scientific aims of the landscape
installation and its management in the frame of the campaigns of local institutions for
raising ecological awareness among the young generations.

Keywords Symbiotic Matorral Landscape installation In situ transcription



Deleuze Guattari Geophilosophy Metabolist construct Almo Farina



Cognitive paradigm Ecological awareness

8.1 Introduction

The research project on the built landscape that is narrated in this book, aims at the
reconciliation of ‘culturalist-geophilosophical’ and ‘cognitive-metabolic’ perspec-
tives over the contemporary continuum. To that end, we have proposed a symbiotic
landscape paradigm, combining elements and layers ascribable to both positions.
Beyond the theoretic elaborations, an exercise of physical transcription of the
symbiotic paradigm is being pursued through the implementation and subsequent
observation of a landscape installation in the Sierra Madre Oriental, described

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 185

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_8
186 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

hereby (Fig. 8.1). The installation is the in situ superimposition of two distinct
landscape paradigms: one geophilosophical, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming’
construct, and one cognitive, Almo Farina’s ‘cognitive landscape’ construct.
Eventually, the project advocates for a perception of our living space as both a
functioning ecosystem and a cultural landscape.

8.2 Overlapping Constructs

8.2.1 Becoming

On the one hand, the ‘becoming-’ process (‘becoming-animal’, ‘becoming-woman’,

‘becoming-child’) is projected over the BwO’s (Body without Organs) construct,
multiplied throughout Plateau 10 of A Thousand Plateaus into a cloud of
quasi-equivalent nomenclatures, such as the ‘plan(e) of consistency’, ‘plan(e) of
haecceity’, ‘plan(e) of consistency of Nature’, and ‘field of immanence’, containing
non-subjective individuations defined by latitude (intensity) and longitude (speed).
(Deluze and Guattari 1987, pp. 256–7) With the ‘plan(e) of consistency of Nature’,
Deleuze and Guattari represent an immense ‘Abstract Machine’ conformed as a
surface of immanence where all multiplicities exist according to degrees of inten-
sities and acceleration or deceleration. (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 254)
Furthermore, the multiplicity of plan(e)s of immanence are defined in sheer, but
also inseparable, juxtaposition to another multiplicity, that of the ‘plan(e) of tran-
scendence’ (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 256), or ‘structural plan(e) of formed
organizations’, ‘genetic plan(e) of evolutionary developments’, containing subjec-
tivities and forms organized in serial or proportional structures. The nebulization of
the ‘plan(e)s’ of immanence and transcendence responds to the authors’ ‘ethos’,
tending to replace both subjectivities and individuations with vaporous multitudes.

8.2.2 Cognitive Landscape

On the other hand, Farina’s ‘cognitive landscape’ construct involves base components
called ‘eco-fields’ (Farina 2009, pp. 108–9), combined into structures such as the NbL
(Neutrality-based Landscape), IbPL (Individual-based Perceived Landscape), and
ObL (Observer-based-Landscape) (Farina et al. 2005; Farina 2009, pp. 18–20). ObL
is replaced by two terms, IbCL (Individual-based Cognitive Landscape) and SbL
(Societal-based Landscape), in later formulations (Farina 2009, pp. 19, 74). Apart
from slight deflections of the meanings attributed to the terms in different versions,
Farina proposes an interpretation of landscape relying on semiotic mechanics.
Building upon Uexküll’s Umwelt, the ‘eco-field’ is defined as “the ecological space
where functional traits […] intercept the resource […] according to a cognitive per-
ception of the environment” (Farina 2009, p. 109). “If we sum all the eco-fields
8.2 Overlapping Constructs 187

Fig. 8.1 Installation site of the tests for a Symbiotic Matorral project in the Sierra Madre Oriental:
luxuriant matorral with large nopal laden with prickly pears, power-line pylon, and wanderers
(photo rp)
188 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

activated by an individual […] the range of all possible eco-fields [is] the cognitive
landscape of that species” (Farina 2009, p. 110). The comprehensive ‘cognitive
landscape’ is, then, the superimposition of the ‘eco-fields’ relative to all functional
traits, individuals, species, populations, communities within a given space.1
However, if we consider the combination of signal sources before perception, we
can construe in abstract terms the mosaic of a state previous to that of landscape.
Farina calls it NbL, a pattern of sources of unperceived signals, also described as
the ‘un-decoded landscape’ or ‘landscape background noise’ (Farina et al. 2005,
p. 236) (for the latter we must imagine a background without any foreground). NbL
is in fact the comprehensive landscape mosaic available as a potential only source
of sensorial perception and cognitive interpretation, therefore a permanent source of
information unperturbed by any observer (Farina 2009, p. 19).2
A number of signals singled out and perceived by the biological sensors of an
organism, instead, become a set of signs, IbPL, species-specific or even
individual-specific. Signs in fact do not exist within the source, but only within the
observer’s perception, where signals are organized in forms, as perceived ‘re-
sources’. A ‘more profound observation’ of the environment propelled by ‘culture’
produces ObL, that is “the anthropogenic way to perceive the surroundings”
(essentially analogous to SbL) (Farina 2009, p. 237). We could say that, through
culture, signs are organized in deeper forms, which exceed the identification of
resources to transfigure into intersubjective values.

8.2.3 Cognitive Landscape and Becoming: A Coincidence

The ‘cognitive landscape’ is always depicted as the comprehensive combination of

NbL, IbPL, and ObL (or its equivalents IbCL + SbL). In other terms, the ‘cognitive
landscape’ is the sum of all the individual-specific, species-specific, trait-specific
‘eco-fields’, including, for humans, the cultural (that is intersubjective and social)
interferences with biological senses. Within a determined space, or we could say
within a field, the ‘cognitive landscape’ accounts for all of the ‘scores’ and
‘melodies’ (Uexküll 2010, pp. 160–1) that enact the carousel of life. In
Deleuze-Guattarian terms, we could say that the ‘cognitive landscape’ accounts for
all the ‘forms’ and ‘subjectivities’ within the serial/structural organization of the
‘plan(e) of transcendence’. But simultaneously, it accounts for the whole distri-
bution of degrees of ‘intensities’ (latitude) and ‘speed’ (longitude), that is
‘non-subjective individuations’, over the BwO’s, ‘plan(e) of immanence’, immense

1
For a detailed definition of eco-field, see: Farina (2009, pp. 108–12). For a specific method of
combined evaluation of trait-specific eco-fields, see sub-chapter ‘Scoring the Cognitive
Landscape’ (Farina 2009, pp. 112–4).
2
The NbL is anyway another example of a ‘ladder of Rome’ (i.e., ‘Wittgenstein’s ladder’), as
Farina notes that the landscape is the result of an observer’s perception and, in the case of the
human being, a perception driven by culture (Farina 2009, p. 74).
8.2 Overlapping Constructs 189

‘Abstract Machine’, or ‘plan(e) of consistency of Nature’. Deleuze and Guattari in

fact say that “the plane of consistency cuts across [all] multiplicities […]. The plane
of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms” (Deluze and Guattari 1987,
p. 251). That intersection converts forms and subjectivities into latitudes and lon-
gitudes, i.e., non-subjective individuations, plotting the bi-univocal correspondence
between the separate spheres of immanence and transcendence.

8.2.4 NbL to Plane of Immanence as IbPL + ObL to Plane

of Transcendence

If the un-decoded signals of NbL are the equivalent of the non-subjective indi-
viduations of the ‘plan(e) of consistency of Nature’, the organized signs of the IbPL
and ObL (or IbCL + SbL) are the equivalent of the forms and subjectivities of the
‘plan(e) of transcendence’. As Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘plane of consistency is the
intersection of all concrete forms’ that converts them into the Abstract Machine,
Farina’s NbL is the abstract section through the multitude of ‘eco-fields’ that
removes all the interfering observers to return an un-decoded landscape, or perfect
background noise.

8.3 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral: A Landscape

Installation3

8.3.1 Reasons for a Landscape Installation

The Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral project is a linear apparatus of landscape

installations implemented in the Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico. The project
intervenes in a site of highly aesthetic value of the Parque Ecológico Chipinque,
where the expanding metropolitan area of Monterrey makes contact with the
pristine ecosystem of the matorral submontano.
The matorral submontano is a low, dense ecosystem covering the lower part of
the mountainsides in northern Mexico. Its flora is thicket and scrubland with a varied
fauna, presenting an extremely high biodiversity. A large share of the public opinion
in the city still considers the matorral nothing but wasteland to be cleared for future
constructions. The path pursues the aim of promoting awareness about the beauty

3
The Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral is a landscape installation, result of a research project
on the landscape. Research team: Roberto Pasini (principal researcher), Patricio Garza, Andrea
Ramos, Fernanda Rosas, et al.; design of installation: Pasini, Garza, Ramos, Rosas; stone carving
and on-site implementation: Rodrigo Legorreta; metal works: Jaime Islas; metal engravings:
Jopamec; support and funds: Universidad de Monterrey, DIECI, Parque Ecológico Chipinque.
190 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

and fragility of this ecosystem among young generations. The path offers the school
children of Monterrey a route equipped with informative signposting, illustrating
flora, fauna, and their ecological metabolism. Specific installations along the path let
the children hear like a rabbit, smell like a bear, see like a coyote, and fly like a green
jay, for them to understand that humans are not the only inhabitants of the planet.
Simple surveys, administered before and after the trek, monitor the change in the
perception of the ecosystem and evaluate the increment in ecologic awareness.

8.3.2 Site

The installation site is set in a point in which the expanding infrastructures of the
5-million metropolitan area of Monterrey clash against the dense cover of matorral
and its extraordinary biodiversity. The installation converts a 500-m-long segment of
an abandoned trail for the maintenance of a high-voltage line into a floro-faunistic
path through the luxuriant ecosystem. The access point to the intervention is marked
by the presence of an imposing truss pylon of the power-line.

8.3.3 Overthrowing Perspectives

The project converts the trail into a floro-faunistic observation route that overthrows
the conventional anthropocentric perspective. The route is in fact a linear apparatus
composed of a series of totally reversible installations in steel, wood, and rock, that
favor the observation of the ecosystem from varying vantage-points of different
species populating it. The multifocal vision that the project conjures up focuses on
‘deep forms’ of the ecosystem, in analogy with Farina’s construct of the ‘cognitive
landscape’, that is ‘spatial formations carriers of meaning’, where ‘functional trait’
meets ‘resource’ and ‘its cognitive perception’ enacted by ‘spatial configuration’.4
The installation combines in fact points of observation and sensorial perception
with functions and fundamental acts relative to diverse species.

8.3.4 A Route in Three Sections

The trail was originally traced by bulldozing a secondary topographic ridge. The
operations removed a superficial layer of soil, roughly flattening the rock bottom
and preventing the vegetation from obstructing the way on a section of about 2 m in

4
For a definition of eco-field as a ‘spatial configuration carrier of meaning’, where the roles of
‘builders’ and ‘users’ (traditionally, plants and animals) are interchangeable, see: Farina (2009,
p. 109).
8.3 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral: A Landscape Installation 191

Fig. 8.2 The route along the ridge of the Sierra Madre Oriental (photo Lgo Rodrigo Legorreta)

width (Fig. 8.2). The regrowth of spontaneous vegetation has long reoccupied the
passage, leaving only a narrow width of about 60 cm, where the rock surfaces from
the sediments accumulating on the sides.
The floro-faunistic route is subdivided in three sections: perceptive, experiential,
and informative. Respectively called the ‘fauna-trails path’, the ‘glade of becom-
ing’, and the ‘flora path’, the three sections are contained in between the ‘entrance
portal’ and the terminal ‘contemplation circle’.

8.3.5 Portal to Other Worlds

The entrance is through the first installation: a light metal structure in the shape of a
portal composed by a horizontal platform lifted 40 cm above ground and sur-
mounted by a slender square frame erected vertically. A squared rock of local
limestone provides a step stone to reach the platform, decked with a grid of thin
metal bars in a parallel arrangement. The left half of the vertical square frame is
occupied by a metal panel bearing engraved a topographic map of the area. The
map carries basic geographic information necessary for orientation, identifying the
three sections of the route and the fundamental components of both installation and
context. Further information about the elements of equipped paths and environ-
mental context is provided by texts engraved on a metal band anchored on the deck
of the platform, marking the actual threshold of the entrance to the route at the foot
of the squared frame. The threshold materializes the gate between the sphere of
192 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

Fig. 8.3 Portal to the floro-faunistic route, detail (photo rp)

ordinary spatial perception and the immersion into a novel ambient, where the
anthropocentric perspective will be overthrown and a different exploration of the
environment is favored (Fig. 8.3).

8.3.6 Path of Fauna Trails

The first section of the route is a long itinerary of about 400 m through the matorral
submontano with an inclination of about 15° west, on the north–south axis. It is
called ‘path of fauna trails’ from the transversal animal trails crossing the path
perpendicularly. The animal trails are identified by wooden stakes marking the
tunnels in the dense foliage produced by the crossing of fauna. Metal silhouettes
applied to the stakes identify the species compatible with the proportions of the
passages and provide ethologic information.

8.3.7 Glade of Becoming

At the end of the first section, the branches of the bushes from the two sides of the
path are interwoven to form a vegetal tunnel framing a human-sized passage
(Fig. 8.4). A metal arch of the same anthropomorphic dimensions at the end of the
8.3 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral: A Landscape Installation 193

Fig. 8.4 Gallery of the Interwoven branches installation (photo Lgo Rodrigo Legorreta)

vegetal tunnel marks the entrance into a glade. The glade is an ovoid area of about
10 m across by 30 m in length, smoothly bending to the right of the visitor rotating
the axis of the route by about 45° to the west. The glade represents the central
section of the installation.
A longitudinal track across the area traces a wavy trajectory that follows the
pristine topographic ridge. On the opposite side of the glade a wooden stake of
human height marks the exit point southwest. The metal arch and the wooden stake
are the two terminals, entrance and exit, of the trajectory of exploration offered to
the visitor. The longitudinal track through the glade is crossed by three transversal
animal trails called ‘becoming-animals’. As a sequence, they acquire a character of
longitudinal multiplicity that we will describe in detail later as a ‘becoming-demon’.
The matrix of intersected axes of the ‘glade of becoming’ captures the carousel
of Nature in the matorral. The matrix organizes the dynamics of the ‘plan(e) of
transcendence’ over which animalities and subjectivities slide, as well as the
dynamics of the ‘plan(e) of immanence’, the abstract section of all those forms that
are converted into degrees of intensities and speeds, ‘latitudes’, and ‘longitudes’.
Over the ‘glade of becoming’ the two plan(e)s of transcendence and immanence
reflect one another.
194 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

8.4 Deleuze-Guattarian Ascendancies

8.4.1 Oedipal, Mythic, and ‘of-a-Third-Type’ Animals

The visitor’s interaction with the animal sphere is organized on Deleuze and
Guattari’s anti-taxonomic subdivision of the animals into the three kinds of ‘do-
mestic’, ‘mythic’, and ‘demonic’. The ‘domestic’ animals or ‘anti-animals’, like the
‘family pets’, are ‘Oedipal animals’ that invite humans to regress into a ‘narcissistic
contemplation’ that we could define anthropocentric. This first kind is banned beyond
the entrance portal. Of the ‘mythic’ kind are animals with ‘characteristics and attri-
butes’ described ‘in the great divine myths’. In those ancient myths, they are treated
“in such a way as to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or models”. The
‘demonic’ animals are creatures ‘of a third type’ related to multiplicity, whose
determination we will discuss further on (Deluze and Guattari 1987, pp. 240–1).

8.4.2 Analogies by Resemblance and Proportion

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Carl Gustave Jung’s, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’
works is aligned with respectively the ‘serial and structural analogies’ that natural
history deploys in its classification of the world. The ‘serial analogy’ is governed by
the principle of ‘resemblance’ that requires ‘imagination’ and leads to the Linnaean
taxonomy, while the ‘structural analogy’ is governed by the principle of ‘propor-
tion’ and requires ‘understanding’ leading to Cuvierian compared anatomy. Both
through the ‘a resembles b’ and the ‘a is to b what a1 is to b1’ type of analogy,
nature is conceived as an ‘enormous mimesis’.
According to Deluze Guattari, Jung’s theory of the ‘archetypes’ uses serial
analogies, made of metamorphic progressions and regressions from one term to
another, to interpret the collective unconscious through the dream. In those meta-
morphic series, however, ‘man is no longer the eminent term’, but the eminent term
is an animal, vegetal, or mineral, ‘in relation to a given act or function’ and ‘in
accordance with a given demand of the unconscious’.
On the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari refer their ‘mythic animal’ notion to the
Jungian theory of the ‘archetype’ as ‘collective unconscious’, aiming at over-
throwing the anthropocentric vision of the world by means of a ‘serial organization
of imaginary’ (nature-culture-nature) (Deluze and Guattari 1987, pp. 235–6). On
the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari regard Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism as an
attempt to overcome the serial organization of the world with a symbolic and
structural order of understanding, thus based on proportional analogies, that is
correspondences of relationships (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 237).
In particular Lévi-Strauss’ theory of ‘totemism’ replaces Jung’s animalist pro-/
regression series of ‘nature-culture-nature’, with an analogy of proportionality
through which the characters of the totemic animal are not acquired by resemblance,
8.4 Deleuze-Guattarian Ascendancies 195

but rather introjected by means of proportional relationships. The ‘archetype of the

sacrifice’, where off-spring kills father feeding on his flesh to acquire his attributes,
organizes the world by metamorphoses, that is analogy of resemblance (Deluze and
Guattari 1987, pp. 235–6). Conceptual metaphors replace imaginative metamor-
phoses. The ‘institution of the totem’ marks, therefore, the symbolic structuration of
the world through metaphor (nature–culture relational continuity), where the attri-
butes are acquired by relational analogy: totem replaces sacrifice.

8.4.3 Sacrifices, Totems, and the Myth

In Deluze and Guattari’s formulation, Jung’s man says -“I am a wolf”, opening up a
serial theme made of collective archetypes that can be recurred back and forth by
virtue of metamorphic equations. Lévi-Strauss’ man says -“I am to another man
what the wolf is to the sheep” structuring an understanding by virtue of the ‘in-
stitution of the totem’ (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 237). One should then con-
clude that ‘mythic animals’ acquire their attributes either in a Jungian or
Lévi-Straussian fashion, that is by serial or proportional analogy, and therefore
myth is a narrative inhabiting a terrain in between the archetypal sacrifice and the
institution of the totem.5

8.4.4 Demons and Their Symbiotic Alliances

According to Deleuze and Guattari, to the third ‘demonic’ kind belong animals of
pack, school, band, whose identity is tight to a non-arborescent multiplicity,
non-filiative population, propagation by epidemic and contagion. ‘Demonic ani-
mals’ create non-familial assemblages capable of symbiotic alliances beyond the
taxonomic boundaries (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 241), such as that of the ‘wasp
and orchid’.
The ‘wasp and orchid’ imitation, where ‘the orchid forms a tracing of the wasp’
in a parallelism between a ‘plant organization’ and an ‘animal organization’
(Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 10), could be described as an analogy. But it is
simultaneously a ‘capture of code’ in which ‘the orchid forms a map of the wasp’
(Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 12). Such a ‘non-filiative’, ‘non-hereditary’ meta-
morphosis supports a ‘neoevolutionist’ perspective (Deluze and Guattari 1987,
pp. 238–9). While defining the ‘becoming-’, Deleuze and Guattri describe a ‘shared
deterritorialization’ of the wasp becoming a “liberated piece of the orchid’s

5
“Does it not seem that alongside the two models, sacrifice and series, totem institution and
structure, there is still room for something else, something more secret, more subterranean: the
sorcerer and becomings (expressed in tales instead of myths and rites)?”, (Deluze and Guattari
1987, p. 237). Tales, myths, rites are located between sacrifice and totem.
196 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

reproductive system” and of the orchid becoming “the object of an orgasm in the
wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction” (Deluze and Guattari 1987,
pp. 293–4).6
However, the multiplicity of the pack, school, or band is no obsolete social form
or anyway inferior to that of family and state, but rather it represents a deterrito-
rializing alternative. The multiplicity of the pack establishes an equilibrium with the
individuality through the presence of the pack-leader and borderline members (such
as the ‘sorcerer’ or the ‘shaman’), which produces what Guattari calls ‘social
ecosophy’ (Guattari 2000, p. 34), or processes of ‘continuous resingularization’
(Guattari 2000, p. 69) that cultivate anarchist dissensus to arborescent organization.
In Guattari’s vision, social ecosophy of the pack intends to replace IWC’s orga-
nization of ‘imaginary crowd aggregates’ (serial subjectivity of salaried, mass of the
uninsured, and élite of executives) with autopoietic ‘collective assemblages of
enunciation’ capable to constantly redefine their own singular identity (Guattari
2000, p. 61).

8.4.5 Human Alliances with Demons

The ‘demon’, as the borderline of the pack, is the central term of the process of
‘becoming-’ broken down by Deleuze and Guattari into four points (Deluze and
Guattari 1987, p. 61): ‘alliance with a demon’; ‘human being’s passage by conta-
gion into animal pack where demon is borderline’; ‘second alliance with human
group’; ‘human being (as borderline between animal pack and human group) guides
the contagion of the human-animal becoming’ (that is ‘symbiosis between
heterogeneous terms’) (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 249). As an alternative to
demonic animals such as werewolves and vampires, Deleuze and Guattari describe
the demon-shaman Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s accounts. Don Juan’s guides
Castaneda through the proportional-relational becoming-animal and becoming-
molecular characterized by the distinct micro-perception of the environmental
elements such as water and air (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 249).

6
Deleuze and Guattari also parallel the ‘wasp and orchid’ relation to Uexküll’s ‘spider and fly’
example of ‘transcoding’, where the spider ‘has a fly in its head’, or better the fly’s code, that
allows it to plot its net in perfect correspondence to the fly’s traits (see previous Chap. 7 of this
book). The transcoding of the ‘wasp and orchid’, reciprocal as in Uexküll’s description of ‘Nature
as music’ with melodies in counterpoint, each serving as a motif for the other, kindles a simul-
taneous, bi-univocal process similar to the deterritorialization/reterritorialization dynamic. (Deluze
and Guattari 1987, p. 314) A demonic symbiosis of the ‘wasp and orchid’ type is stunningly
represented in Carol Reed’s 1949 movie The Third Man, where Henry Lime and Anna Schmidt
(interpreted by Orson Welles and Alida Valli) form an unbreakable consortium through war,
famine, epidemic, crime, vampirehood, remaining indifferent to the moral principles of a society
struggling to redeem itself from the tragic fate of WWII.
8.5 The Glade of Becoming 197

8.5 The Glade of Becoming

8.5.1 Three ‘Becoming-Animals’ and One

‘Becoming-Demon’

We will now resume the narration of the landscape installation interrupted at the
glade of becoming. The longitudinal track through the glade is intended as the
trajectory of the visitors’ experience of the borderline guiding their ‘becoming-’ and
therefore called ‘becoming-demon’. Three transversal installations are aligned with
selected animal trails present in the site. Each animal trail connects a tunnel in the
vegetation on one side of the glade with a corresponding tunnel in the vegetation on
the other side. The tunnels are marked by a metal arch and a wooden stake on
opposite sides. Both arch and stake are dimensioned according to the size of the
animal species compatible with the tunnel. Ramps of varying depth are excavated in
the soil next to each stake, allowing the visitor to reach at the point of observation
of each specific animal species, namely hare, coyote, and bear.
The series of transversal installations, called the ‘becoming-animals’, constitute
a sequential apparatus of alliance with the ‘demon-animal’. The exploration of each
transversal installation favors, in fact, by metamorphic analogy specific
‘becoming-animals’, that is the acquisition of the perceptive attributes of a mythic
animal. Man belly-crawls into the first ramp, lies prone the face close to the ground,
scans the tiny leaves of the bush, their vibrations maul his/her ears through the hot
air. Hear like a ‘hare’. Then man scrambles along the second ramp, squats, sees the
preys moving, the rapid quivers of their nerves under the delicate fur. See like a
‘coyote’. Man finally walks down the third ramp, his/her eye level is that of the
bear. Man sees the purple prickly pears of the nopales, his/her nostrils smell their
sweet scent perturbing the air. Smell like a ‘bear’.
The three ‘becoming-animals’ can also be regarded as non-anthropocentric
‘eco-fields’, simulating the sensorial perception of other species in an unusual
assemblage, hear like a hare, see like a coyote, smell like a bear.
‘Becoming-animals’ overlap with ‘eco-fields’ (Fig. 8.5).

8.5.2 Animality

The sequential experience through ‘becoming-animal’ installations along the glade

favors an alliance, by metamorphic analogy, of the human visitor with the sensorial
attributes of multiple mythic animals (hare, coyote, bear). Across the longitudinal
sequence of multiple transversal installations, man’s alliance is, thus, not stricken
with one mythic animal, but rather with a polymorphic animality. That polymorphic
animality is the ‘demon’ that deterritorializes man from the conventional regime of
societal interchange to which he/she is anchored. The alliance with the ‘demon’ is
kindled, man is admitted into the pack. However, man poises over the borderline for
198 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

Fig. 8.5 Axonometric view of the Glade of Becoming from the Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral
project. Design Pasini, Garza, Ramos, Rosas; diagram rp; drawing Andrea Ramos Gándara

his/her anomalous anthropic nature. As the visitors are arranged in small groups
with no familial relations, the ‘second alliance with a human group’ proposed by
Deleuze and Guattari is also attained.

8.5.3 Functional Traits and Fundamental Acts

The sequence of the ‘becoming-animal’ installations unfolds along the

‘becoming-demon’ track, reaching its climax in its median point, where the track is
crossed by the transversal axis called the ‘functional-trait’, identifying the spot of
the ‘institution of the totem’.
The ‘functional-trait’ axis is represented by a track connecting two heteroge-
neous assemblages on the two opposite sides of the glade. Two large nopales
carrying purple prickly pears are mapped roughly half way the glade: an elongated
lower espalier of paddles loaded with bright mature fruits on the southeast side,
corresponding to a taller but less extended formation on the northwest side with a
more limited production. A flat carved rock resting on short metal feet is placed
next to the southeast nopal, while a taller stele is placed directly on the ground next
to the north-west nopal. The former assemblage can be described as: ‘medium/large
size animals come feed on prickly pears resting onto lifted rock, while small size
animals underneath it’. The latter assemblage is: ‘a significantly smaller number of
animals come feed on prickly pears leaning to rock’. For a multiplicity of species,
the feeding functional trait is accomplished at both ends, one corresponding to an
abundant-resources signal, the other to a less-competed-for-resources signal. In the
8.5 The Glade of Becoming 199

case of the human visitor caught in his/her process of ‘becoming-’, the axis of the
‘functional trait’ of feeding overlaps with the axis of the ‘fundamental act’ of eating.
The assemblage ‘functional-trait/resource-perception/within-a-field’ perpendic-
ularly intersects with ‘becoming-demon’ to ‘institute the totem’. Which also opens
the issues of how intense (capacity, or latitude) (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 260)
the flavor of the prickly pear in the mouth of the bear is tasting and how fast (speed,
or longitude) (Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 260) man is moving along the
‘becoming-demon’ axis (Figs. 8.6 and 8.7).

Fig. 8.6 View of the glade with horizontal nopal formation, Institution of the Totem installation,
and line of flight tower (photo Lgo Rodrigo Legorreta)

Fig. 8.7 Snapshots from the fauna-monitoring camera documenting the crossing and feeding of
wild animals over the glade of becoming: a wild boar roaming at dusk (left) and a puma hunting in
the deepest hours of the night (right) (photos Lgo Rodrigo Legorreta)
200 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

8.5.4 Institution of the Totem

At the climax of the overall ‘becoming’ apparatus orchestrated over the glade,
coinciding with the crossing between the transversal ‘functional-trait of feeding’ axis
and the longitudinal ‘becoming-demon’ track, a rock is lifted on three steel legs in a
zoomorphic assemblage. Carved with a diverse pattern of cavities varying in size, the
rock supports over its uneven surface a small vegetation of rupiculae plants and
cactuses attracting communities of insects and aviary fauna. At the middle point of
the functional-trait axis, the suspended rock with its small pensile flora and
fauna embodies the ‘institution of the totem’ with reference to the mentioned
Lévi-Straussian construct. It, in fact, represents a proportional/relational entendement
of the world alternative to Jung’s animal-based metamorphic series of archetypes.
A second rock lies on the ground at a short distance. The second rock is flatter and
uncarved. A shallow concavity on the surface allows for water to collect in occasions
of rains. As a sequence, the three transversal ‘becoming-animal’ axes can be con-
sidered a longitudinal assemblage. At the very crossing between this longitudinal
‘becoming-animal’ sequence and the transversal axis of the totem (functional trait/
fundamental act), the lifted rock casts its mobile shadow onto the ground. The shadow
variously intercepts the irregular profile of the ground stone and overlaps onto the
ground stone’s shadow to create further shades of darkness, changing reflections over
the surface of the water and generating refractions into its depth.

8.5.5 Myth and Shadows Interplay

The mobile interplay of the lifted rock’s shadow engaging the ground rock, its
shadow, the degrees of darkness and transparency, as well as the reflections over
and refractions through water, conjure up a natural narration that constitutes the
very core of the myth. The interplay, as the myth, is suspended midway in between
‘archetype’ and ‘totem’, ‘series’ and ‘structure’, ‘imagination’ and ‘understanding’,
‘resemblance’ and ‘relation’. The myth of the shadow, as a natural narration, lies at
the very center of the ‘becoming-demon’ journey.

8.5.6 Line of Flight

At the mythic climax of the ‘becoming-demon’ journey man has deterritorialized his/her
anthropocentric perspective and arborescent sociality. From a central position in the
glade, the visitor is aligned with two gashes in the surrounding curtain of the foliage,
which frame a view north to Cerro El Mirador and a view south to Pico Lobos. The views
reorient the visitor reconnecting his/her experience to the geographic scale (Fig. 8.8).
There starts a deviant track, called the ‘line-of-flight’, that spins diagonally
towards southeast to then circumvent a denser clump of shrubs, reaching a tiny
8.5 The Glade of Becoming 201

Fig. 8.8 View from the glade south towards Pico Lobos: the changing weather conditions
alternate sunlight, nimbus, and mist over foliage (photo courtesy of Patricio Garza)

hidden clearing where a light, vertical structure is anchored. The structure is an airy
truss of slender metal profiles that boxes a 3-m-high cylindrical volume sitting on its
1-m-diameter circular base. Three vertically shifted circular profiles define the
perimeter of the cylinder at the base, at an intermediate height of 2 m, and 1 m above
that, at the 3-m-high top. The circular profiles are vertically connected by eight
slender struts. The intermediate circular profile supports a light deck of thin metal
bars plotted parallel to one another. A small arched opening on a side of the deck
allows for a single visitor to climb up onto it using a ladder of metal bars spanning
between two vertical struts, while the top perimeter profile works as a bannister.

8.5.7 Avian Flight Lines and Melodies

The ‘line of flight’ structure is a small observatory that overlooks the dense foliage
of the matorral extending like the soft layer of a blanket on the varied topography.
The deck offers a convenient vantage point to observe landscape dynamics both
internal within the matorral eco-tope and of interchange with the surrounding
environmental patches through eco-tone boundaries. The structure is a ‘rhizome’7

7
“A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. It is evident
that the Anomalous, the Outsider, has several functions: not only does it border each multiplicity,
202 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

Fig. 8.9 Line of flight installation with school children overlooking the matorral (photo Lgo
Rodrigo Legorreta)

that sets man amidst the weft of flight lines of the matorral avian fauna, contained
within a height of 5 m from ground. Swathed in the cloud of avian flight lines and
melody scores, man is immersed in a space made of a soothing stuff that heals the
trauma of his/her deterritorializing voyage (Fig. 8.9).

8.5.8 Down the ‘Flora Path’

Down from the structure, man exits the glade to start the third segment of the
journey, the ‘flora path’, a shorter itinerary immersed in a denser and higher layer of
vegetation. As the initial segment of the itinerary followed a constant, ascension
towards the flat area of the ‘glade of becoming’, the final segment falls into a rather
abrupt descent. Along the ‘flora path’, signposting bears scientific information
about the ecosystem singling out exemplars of characteristic species of the matorral
sub-montano, among which a large blooming agave, a very old nopal, a young one,
carpets of slippery moss, encinos etc.

[…] not only is it the precondition for the alliance necessary to becoming, but it also carries the
transformations of becoming or crossings of multiplicities always farther down the line of flight”
(Deluze and Guattari 1987, p. 249).
8.6 Chapter’s Conclusions 203

8.6 Chapter’s Conclusions

8.6.1 Contemplation, Change, and the Waldgang

The immersion into the floral sphere of the matorral ends up hitting a steep cliff.
There, the route bifurcates spinning on both sides at the foot of the relief. Along
with the route, the walls of the matorral foliage also diverge, cut through by the
topography, giving ground to a flat triangular area occupied by medium and high
grasses. The triangular landing opens a transition zone in the ecosystem, the
eco-tone mediating between matorral sub-montano and bosque, the mountain
woods.
A 3-m-diameter circular clearing mowed in the grasses at the center of the
landing, called the ‘circle of contemplation’, represents the lightest installation of
the project and its termination. Standing in the circle, man faces dramatic discon-
tinuities of topography and vegetation, while the perceptions accumulated along the
voyage through the matorral sediment in his/her body. Interior upheavals resonate
in the changes of the environment (Fig. 8.10).
Unobstructed views suddenly appear on multiple directions. The route splits into
multiple possible trajectories. By making his/her way back, man can reverse the

Fig. 8.10 Circle of contemplation installation (photo Lgo Rodrigo Legorreta)

204 8 Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral

metamorphosis and rejoin human society. By abandoning the circle westwards, man
reaches deep areas of the Parque Ecológico Chipinque where the route disappears
and one gets lost. If man heads eastwards, he/she can follow a trail that reaches the
mountain woods: it is Jünger’s Waldgang (Fig. 8.11).

Fig. 8.11 The Waldgang (photo Lgo Rodrigo Legorreta)

8.6 Chapter’s Conclusions 205

8.6.2 Testing the Paradigm and Recording Response

The Symbiotic Matorral installation is meant to raise awareness about the disre-
garded richness of the matorral submontano and its exceptional biodiversity among
the population of Monterrey. Part of campaigns for the promotion of ecological
values and virtuous environmental practices directed to young generations, the path
is specially intended to receive students from the public and private schools of the
city, spanning from primary to university level. Under the supervision of guides,
visitors are allowed onto the route in small groups and left free to explore the
installations rather freely.
The overall landscape installation is conceived as an in situ transcription of the
symbiotic landscape paradigm. Further phases of the research will monitor the
response from the visitors through the recording of their impressions, commen-
taries, and feedbacks, along with the general reception of the initiative in the local
media. The elaboration will draw evaluations on the project’s impact on the
community’s consideration for the ecological and aesthetic values of the landscape
and test the practicability of elemental symbiotic model guidelines.

References

Deluze G, Guattari, F (1987) A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (trans: Massumi
B). The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis [1980]
Farina A (2009) Ecology, cognition and landscape. Springer, New York [2006]
Farina A, Bogaert J, Schipani I (2005) Cognitive landscape and information: new perspectives to
investigate the ecological complexity. BioSystems 79:235–240
Guattari F (2000) The three ecologies (trans: Suton P, Pindar I). The Athlone Press, London [1989]
von Uexküll J (2010) A theory of meaning. In: A foray into the worlds of animals and humans
(trans: O’Neil JD). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis [1934, 1940]
Chapter 9
Conclusions: Life and Death
of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda
for the Next Landscape

Abstract This chapter collects the conclusions of the book and traces a brief
agenda for future research work towards an entendement of the contemporary
continuum, referred to as the Next Landscape. The text illustrates three main
objectives marked in the agenda: the formation of a symbiotic vision, contaminating
the technocratic regime governing today’s physical and intellectual production with
a non-positivistic, non-systematic exploration; the determination of a set of novel
attributes to analyze, evaluate, and compare the contemporary condition of the
expanded citizenship and its varying contexts; the acknowledgement and imple-
mentation of a novel platform for the democratic interaction in the ‘post-urban
cityness’; the under-arching of the spatial platform with a reformulated territorial
mythology, to endow the expanded dwelling space with a new sense. The text deals
with the notions of residence, monuments, urban and territorial grid, and comes to
the idea of a network of interlaced ‘neo-monuments’. A few final considerations of
more general, philosophical nature close the chapter and open perspectives for
future work.

Keywords Agenda
Next landscape
Novel urbanity
Post-urban cityness

Soconusco Tokyo
Montreal
Marseille
Pseudo-urban
Neo-monuments

9.1 Introduction

Coming to the conclusion of this book, the following notes present a basic agenda
for what we could call the Next Landscape in the post-urban time. The challenges
ahead of us deal with: (1) mitigating the imperium of technique with a symbiotic
entendement of the surrounding space, unfolding in a non-positivistic and
non-anthropocentric vision; (2) determining the attributes of the novel urbanity, or
‘post-urban cityness,1’ expanded over the geographic scale in extremely varying
conditions; (3) implementing a novel physical platform for democratic interaction,

1
The term ‘cityness’ was coined by Sudjic (2007): see subchapter ‘Cityness’ in Chap. 2 of this
book.

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 207

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_9
208 9 Conclusions: Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda …

that is the new agoras of the post-urban city-civitas; which corresponds to the
simultaneous replotting of a novel mythology under-arching that territorial platform
and endowing it with a new sense.

9.2 Contaminating the Technological Structure

with a Symbiotic Entendement

9.2.1 Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’

In ‘The Man Born of a Tree: A Mixtec Origin Myth’, Thomas Ibach records the
Mixtec myth of ‘14 Strength’, the man born from a tree, dictated to him in 1976 by
Sr. Serapio Martínez Ramos, a 55-year old monolingual native and resident of
Santa Cruz Mixtepec in the region of Oaxaca.
Fourteen Strength went to the cave of San Lucas so that he could chase the stones from the
cave with a whip; because in the old times, the stones were like domesticated animals […].
And then when he arrived at the ‘cross of the avocado tree’ with the stones, the sun arose
and it killed him because until then there wasn’t a sun […]. When he died there, the stones
also died. (Ibach 1980, p. 247)

The literal translation of the oral account of the myth manifests in all the liquid
character of Mixtec thinking, especially in comparison with the free translation
supplied by Ibach. Evident are essential analogies with the liquidity of the
Mesoamerican idea of open space as a worldly transcription of the cosmogenic
‘primordial sea’ and its myth.
Free translation of the account:
1. With my humble pardon, I will give you some words about what happened very long
ago, what the ancestors have said. 2. A man went to the mountains, he was going to the
mountains. 3. He had been there for eight days when he saw the sacred tree there called tree
madroño. 4. He went to it and made a hole in its side; 5. and he had intercourse with it. 6.
After three or four months past he went and he saw that the tree was swollen. 7. And then
he knew that the stomach of the tree was swollen; 8. the stomach of the tree was swollen,
and he counted the months. 9. When the months were complete he went there; 10. and he
made a hole in the tree’s stomach and he saw a little man inside, it was a little man inside
there. 11. And then he took that little man and he carried him home. 12. And when he
arrived at his house the little man became alive; 13. and his name was “Fourteen Strengths”.
(Ibach 1980, p. 246)

Literal translation of the account:

1. Large become inside pluralizer you, going to give word when existed time old, say
dead-ones old giving them word. 2. Walked one man within mountains walked he, going
mountains, going he. 3. Left eight days going he mountains, and knowing he sacred within
one tree called-it wood-it madroño. 4. There went he, made-hole he rib-cage wood-it
madroño; 5. there and caused-numerator he wood-it there. 6. Pause-word left three, four
months, and went he, knowing he going-swollen stomach tree there. 7. Pause-word there
and went, knowing he swollen stomach tree there; 8. going stomach tree, and counted he
9.2 Contaminating the Technological Structure with a Symbiotic Entendement 209

months. 9. Face completed month, went he there; 10. and-then made-hole he stomach tree
there knowing he within demonstrative-pointer man small is man within there. (Ibach 1980,
p. 244)

In this Mesoamerican vision, man, flora, fauna, and minerals participate in a

comprehensive composite cosmos, allowing for the crossbreeding of humans and
trees and the taming of animate stones, while ineffable fates are delivered by the
asters (Fig. 9.1).

9.2.2 The Composite

We have reviewed certain spatial assemblages of Mexico as loci of the virtuous or

tragic merging of heterogeneous conceptions of living space, geography, and
eventually the world. As a heavy legacy of the laborious Spanish colonization, the
composite has become a central theme of the culture- and region-forming processes
of the nation. With the following words, Sergio Romano describes the pattern by
which the Mediterranean mythology has been transferred into the New World
through the miscegenation of diverse traits.
“[L’espansione dell’Europa nel mondo] è una singolare combinazione di curiosità e arro-
ganza. […] Nei quartieri stranieri a loro riservati o nelle nuove città che essi costruiscono
durante la grande fase della loro espansione, i ‘colonizzatori’ riproducono lo stile, lo spazio
e i principali edifici dei luoghi da cui provengono. […] Lo stile di questi edifici e i materiali
di costruzione sono spesso una dimostrazione della curiosità prensile e mimetica con cui gli
europei s’impadroniscono di tutto ciò che li circonda. Ma i palazzi e le case sono collegati
l’uno all’altro da una logica spaziale che riflette la cultura politica, civile, estetica dei
colonizzatori.”2 (Romano 1998, p. xi)

Although the ‘spatial logic’ that rules the new cities and towns of the colonia is
imposed by the colonizer, that logic is implanted into a territorial fabric that is
already embedded in the Mesoamerican space. The fact that the existing territorial
fabric of the Mesoamerican space is made more of a liquid mythology rather than a
solid structure does not deceive us about the depth of its roots. The indigenous
spatial logic, in fact, has survived through the centuries of the colonization by virtue
of adaptive resistance and metamorphosis. It is surfacing again today in the
movements for the recuperation of its cultural values.

2
In English: “[Europe’s expansion in the world] is a peculiar combination of curiosity and arro-
gance. […] In the foreign districts reserved to them or in the new cities built during the great phase
of their expansion, the ‘colonizers’ reproduce the style, the space, and the main edifices of the
places they come from. […] The style of these edifices and the construction materials are often a
demonstration of the prehensile, mimetic curiosity through which the Europeans seize all that
surrounds them. But the palaces and houses are related to each other by a spatial logic that reflects
the political, civil, aesthetic culture of the colonizers” [translation by the author].
210 9 Conclusions: Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda …

Fig. 9.1 Mixtec nobleman being born from a tree in a pictogram illustrating the myth of the origin
from the Codex Vindobonensis or Yuta Tnoho, page 37, dated between the fourteenth and fifteenth
century (photo courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)
9.2 Contaminating the Technological Structure with a Symbiotic Entendement 211

9.2.3 The Multiple Axes Addressing Man’s Presence

in Space

Promising or doomed aspirations to an emancipation of the indigenous are resur-

recting from the miscegentated spaces of Nueva España. Various initiatives propose
to intellectually and physically reformulate the postcolonial landscape through
in situ transcriptions of the processes of domestication, mythological implantation,
and remapping of the transculturation processes that have followed.
Among such initiatives, remarkable programs have been started in the open
landscapes of the area of Soconusco in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Having
domesticated the Theobroma Cacao since the early Pre-Columbian era, the com-
munities diffused in the submountain regions of the Isthmus have been living in a
pristine equilibrium with the semi-savage ecosystem regulated by the cultivation,
processing, and trade of cacao. The Aztecs had colonized a large region around
Soconusco to supply their empire north in the Mexico Valley with the finest cacao
produce. Under the influence of modernization (which has industrialized the cul-
tivation and relocated the plantations to different continents impoverishing quality)
and globalization (which has attracted the younger generations to larger urban
centers to fulfill induced necessities), the submountain regions of the Isthmus and
the cacao landscape had suffered a diffuse phenomenon of abandonment. Citizens
associations and local institutions have recently started to promote a modern
agro-alimentary cacao economy of low intensity, locally rooted while globally
connected, based on semi-wild growing optimization (in alternative to industrial
farming), in situ artisanal produce processing (such as chocolate processing, in
alternative to raw cacao trade), and fair product commercialization.
The Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca is another spatial manifestation of similar
initiatives, this time within contained precincts. Brought forth by a grassroots ini-
tiative started in 1993 under the leadership of anthropologist Alejandro de Ávila
and artist Francisco Toledo, the gardens recover the ancient complex of the Santo
Domingo convent for civic and cultural purposes. The garden in Oaxaca takes
advantage of the extraordinary heritage of both biological and anthropological
diversity of its region. The garden’s raison d’être is poetically narrated by de Ávila
in a book that followed the establishment of the garden (De Ávila and Salcedo
2006). The reformulation of a novel space and its bearing mythology in the
Oaxacan garden, and in more general terms in the Mexican territory, is plastically
molded in processes of domestications organizing man’s presence in space along
four axes: second nature/productive landscape; symbiotic ecology/man-flora-fauna
assemblage; psychic landscape/entheogen-perceived.
The first axis elaborates on the prehistoric domestication of maize and the
consequent man/plant mutual interdependence: man feeding on maize grains and
212 9 Conclusions: Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda …

maize relying on man’s labor to detach its seeds from the cob and reproduce.3
By stabilizing cochineal on nopal plants, a second domestication is meant to keep
the trifold rapport of man, plant, and insect in a munificent equilibrium, yielding
the precious dye that has propelled a vast economy.4 A third domestication links the
indigenous Mesoamerican communities to maguey, through a series of taboos
governing the extraction of sap and its processing into the traditional fermented
drink of pulque. The maguey with its derivatives is a central element of the com-
munity’s diet, economy, medicine, and system of values ruling social dynamics.5
The fourth axis addresses the subject’s perception of the environs, its organization
in a conscious entendement and the potentials of its psychedelic distortion or
expansion.
The ritual use of entheogen plants by native groups in the Oaxaca valley is
observed by Richard Evans Schultes since 1939, at the beginning of his research on
plant hallucinogens, later completed in the Amazon forest. Schultes’s observations,
disseminated through his teaching at Harvard, would inspire numerous relevant
figures of the psychedelic movements of the 60s. His work is eventually

3
The domestication of maize by prehistoric populations of the Oaxaca valley-starts from a variety
of teosinte, a wild grass with a simple fruiting structure composed of loose kernels on a single row
common in the region. Through still unclear anthropogenic manipulations, its fruiting structure
mutates as radically as to give form to the corn ear we know today. The anomaly of maize stands in
the structure of its ear, whose grains are so firmly attached to the cob in multiple rows and wrapped
in such a resistant husk of leaves that the plant has lost its ability to autonomously reproduce itself
by dispersion of seeds. While man becomes dependent on maize for daily survival, maize becomes
dependent on man to detach and sow its grains. The man/maize relationship has been reshaped into
a reciprocal interdependence (De Ávila and Salcedo 2006, pp. 16–8).
4
The nopal-cochineal domestication does not just involve a plant’s relationship with man, but is
rather performed on a parasitic connection bonding the prickly pear nopal and its plague, the
cochineal. A trifold rapport involving man, plant, and insect is reformed into a munificent equi-
librium that from cochineal extracts the ‘blood of the prickly pear’, according to its Nahuatl name,
a dye that had colored textiles and artifacts of indigenous peoples. The domestication that stabi-
lizes the parasite over the plant causes the insect to grow bigger and the nopal pads more delicate,
dropping their thorns. After the Spanish conquest, the production of ‘Spanish red’, performed
through indigenous labor, is at the basis of the worldwide trade that showers the Spanish crown
and merchants with immense wealth (De Ávila and Salcedo 2006, pp. 21–5).
5
An oral account in Mixtec, recollected in 1970 by linguist Cornelia Mak from a syncretic
Christian-animistic community of the Oaxacan highland, attributes to the maguey plant the feel-
ings of a sentient being. The man who cuts the maguey’s budding flower stem cannot be the one
who scrapes the heart of the plant to draw sap. The man who cuts cannot be the one who has
planted the maguey. The man who has planted it can be the one who scrapes. One can set a straw
to suck up the sap into a jug. One can cover the scraping with a stone to prevent foxes from
sucking the juice. If the scraping changes hand, the maguey stops yielding sap. If a man is hired to
cut someone else’s maguey, he must burn copal incense and chant to the Virgin of Remedies
before others can drink. An array of unfortunate to fatal occurrences expects the ones that do not
comply with the rules. The ritualization of maguey-tending activities is aimed at optimizing pulque
production, but also at harmonizing the social interaction of the social group before and during
consumption (Mak 1977, pp. 115–9).
9.2 Contaminating the Technological Structure with a Symbiotic Entendement 213

reorganized in 1979 in Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and

Hallucinogenic Powers, co-authored with Albert Hofmann, the creator of synthetic
LSD. In this milestone of ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology, the scientific
analysis of each plant’s chemistry is matched with the anthropologic observation of
the social dynamics associated to its use.6 Once more forming a symbiotic bond, the
shamanic use of entheogen plants serves the indigenous communities of the
southern Sierra Madre Oriental by favoring the opening of a shared perception of
their living space, in return for man’s stewardship securing the plants’ propagation.
The necessary reassessment of a non-positivistic dimension of reality and
reopening of the doors of mystic perception, in combination with a scientific
analysis of the world, is a broadly accepted idea today. Achieved through the
liberation movements, alternative cultures, and their naïf practices, the idea of a
necessary symbiosis with the cosmic forces has permeated the technological
structures of our contemporary society, being now conjugated in less ingenuous
fashions well beyond any confuse holisms. The Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral
project presented in this book7 aims at cutting a channel through the composite
assemblage of the surrounding space, establishing a symbiotic entendement of it,
and recuperating a glance over the hazardous world, that community with things
autres, which had once harbored the life of 14 Strength and has then been traded for
technique.8

9.2.4 Den Wald Zu Bauen

Both consciously and unawares, a collective action has already attacked the for-
mulation of the novel spatial platform for the societal interchange of the post-urban
civitas. As a consequence, landscape has become the privileged subject of disci-
plinary fields traditionally distant from each other, such as ecology and aesthetics,
as well as, among others, architecture.
The roots of this vast interdisciplinary upheaval go deep into the incrementally
mixed character of the space in which we live, of which the miscegenated spaces of
Nueva España are a precedent. The digital explosion interweaves the postmodern
natural/artificial continuum with a virtual weft (Chu 2004, pp. 74–97) that expands

6
Among other entheogen plants the salvia divinorum, or diviner’s sage, is one of the rarest
psychoactive plants, native to a limited natural habitat in the Mazatec region on the Sierra Madre
Oriental. The ‘Salvinorin A’ contained in the plant is considered as one of the most powerful
psychoactive substances in nature. The Mazatecs, a syncretic Christian-animist people, call it
María Pastora, as the female shepherd identified with the Virgin. As the plant’s natural repro-
duction through seeds dispersion is almost unknown, its propagation is obtained by means of plant
cuttings, which conditions its survival upon human stewardship (Schultes et al. 1992, pp. 164–5).
7
See Chap. 8 of this book.
8
See Ernst Jünger’s discourse on pervading technique in Chap. 6 of this book.
214 9 Conclusions: Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda …

the sphere of psychic landscape (Lab M4 2015). Recent elaborations on these

themes are grafted into the geophilosophical platform, founded onto Heidegger’s
idea of ‘bauen’, dwelling as ‘taking care of’ (Heidegger 1993, pp. 343–64),9 and
Jünger’s idea of the ‘Wald’ (the retreat into the woods).10 Contemporary geophi-
losophy has emancipated itself from anarchist individualism through the action of
‘molecular collective auto-subjectivization’ advocated by Guattari and reformed by
the scuola territorialista by virtue of the principle of the ‘elective belonging’ in
favor of an operative opening to diversity.
The open task is now that of acknowledging this collective movement, reading
its overall trajectory and components, and be ready to contribute to its adjustment
towards a higher quality of our physical and intangible space.

9.2.5 Symbiotic Paradigms

The Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral project is also the spatial transcription of a
theoretical model aiming at reuniting a disarticulated galaxy of landscape levels and
components floating in the international interdisciplinary debate. Through the
symbiotic landscape paradigm, this book contributes to the collective challenges of
the expanding living platform by proposing a comprehensive understanding of the
contemporary space as a composite assemblage, where elements and fragments
proceeding from apparently opposite orders coexist.
The compared analysis of theoretical models and applied cases proposed in the
research focuses on various levels of the landscape construct: ecological, cognitive,
semethic11 (Farina), metabolic (Baccini), machinic (Mostafavi), territorial
(Camporesi), cultural (Sauer), aesthetic (D’Angelo), semiotic (Rowe), social, psy-
chic (Guattari), etc. The proposed critical synthesis reconstructs a model of land-
scape, reconciling conflictual perspectives presently polarized on ‘cognitivist’ or
‘culturalist’ positions: a ‘symbiotic landscape paradigm’ that describes both
ecosystem and place, as congruent components of the same multifocal vision. This
assemblage of interdisciplinary components aims at contributing to the reformu-
lation of a possible future for the man/nature relationship where the technical is not
independent of the cultural. Systematic research, expression of the technocratic

9
Already expressed by Carlo Cattaneo over a century before Heidegger. See Chap. 3 of this book.
10
In ‘Il filosofo e l’Anarca. Intervista a Ernst Jünger’ with Antonio Gnoli, Franco Volpi, Jünger
defines the ‘Wald’ as “… per me il bosco non è soltanto come per Heidegger il luogo naturale
concreto in cui vivono e operano i contadini della Foresta Nera. […] Il bosco è per me soprattutto
una metafora: sta a indicare un territorio vergine in cui ritirarsi dalla civiltà ormai segnata dal
nichilismo e in cui l’individuo può ancora sottrarsi agli imperativi delle chiese e alle grinfie del
Leviatano” (Jünger 2006, p. 54).
11
For a definition of ‘semethic’ (semiotic + ethic), language and behavior, word and action, see
(Farina 2009).
9.2 Contaminating the Technological Structure with a Symbiotic Entendement 215

regime of physical and intellectual production, centered on quantity and automated

processing of large amounts of data, has to be mitigated by a subjective research
focusing on quality and the overall sense.

9.3 Determining the Attributes of the Novel Urbanity

A fundamental task in the agenda for the Next Landscape is that of determining and
evaluating the sets of characteristic attributes of the novel urbanity, pertinent to the
diverse conditions and contexts of the contemporary landscape continuum. It pri-
marily means to work on the access of post-urban communities to opportunities and
values such as: commerce, information, culture, random societal interaction
(Burdett, Sudjic); mobility, congestion, multiplicity (Koolhaas, I. de Solà-Morales);
vicarious encounter, implanted mythology, site in land and course of action, hab-
itability (Rowe, Marot, Hunt); control of environment, control of natural systems,
interconnectivity, cybernetics (Baccini, Ellis, Lootsma); etc.12

9.3.1 Contexts to Start with: Idyllic Global South,

Schizophrenic Global North, Welfare Global North,
Pseudo-urban Assemblages

Future research work should start from at least four contexts, exhibiting clearly
distinct conditions of novel urbanity (or post-urban cityness): (1) the small com-
munities sparsely dwelling in the surviving semi-wild landscapes of Mesoamerica,
the ‘idyllic global south’; (2) the opposite case of the seminomadic crowds floating
in the Asian megaregional mats, the ‘schizophrenic global north’; (3) the fully
developed and socially civilized metropolitan system of the metropolis of the
northern hemisphere, the global north of the welfare; (4) the pseudo-urban popu-
lation dwelling in the territories of the Mediterranean basin, where the surviving
urban space and the preservation of venerable rural and natural fabric coexist with
heavy metropolitan infrastructuration, as well as the terrain vague of social alien-
ation coexist with European models of safeguarded social space.
The idyllic global south of Soconusco, exhibiting pristine natural systems,
semi-wild cacao woods, farm fields, sparse dwellings, and archeological areas,
exemplarily represents contexts where, despite the anthropic presence, pristine
nature is still dominant and the prevailing geographic platform is that of the ur-
Landschaft. The landscape of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec is highly determined both
culturally and eco-systemically: the ancient regime supported by cacao tree woods
is now in decay alongside the ancient relationship of man with nature that used to

12
See Chaps. 2, 3, and 7 of this book.
216 9 Conclusions: Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda …

support all the fundamental acts of life. All in this context revolves around the
possible recuperation of an idyllic relation of man and nature, the perceived
proximity of the animistic divine, and the idea of gardening the planet. As Gilles
Clément puts it: ‘organizing the human territory while attending to living things’.13
At the very antipodes, the schizophrenic global north of Tokyo represents the
contexts where the geographic platform is constituted by an endless artificial
metropolis. The megacity is an artificial monolith grown at the geographic scale: in
it, pristine nature has been completely erased and replaced by an artificial nature
serving all the material needs of man. There, man wanders over an endless
all-providing grid, achieving a technological form of neo-nomadism, similar to the
condition evoked by the radical visions of the 70s. Well beyond the metropolitan
condition, in the megacity, the fundamental acts are bartered for aesthetic
behaviors.14
The northern metropolises that we might use as a third reference are Toronto or
Montreal, cities supported by a robust economy and efficient infrastructures at the
regional scale. But, contrary to analogous cases in the United States, these contexts
exhibit a progressive sociopolitical system that contemplates among its priorities
that of ensuring its citizens’ high standards of welfare and quality of life. The
socially civilized northern metropolis is a place where the metabolic exchanges
between city and nature are effectively monitored and oriented towards a virtuous
equilibrium, tending towards scenarios of cybernetic control over the environment.
This context is about endowing a large portion of the community with a convenient
living space.
Fourth context, the Mediterranean space is characterized by the coexistence of
different orders, among which the permanence of layered territorial fabrics with
articulated rural patterns and urban systems. As we have seen earlier, we can retrace
the grounding of the contemporary urban and territorial model in the Mediterranean
basin back to the middle ages, with the anthropic stratification molding the pristine
natural platform. Basically, it is about a hierarchic assemblage regulated by over-
lapping matrixes and primary components of some monumentality, intended the
latter as the capacity to precipitate collective values into space and supply a ref-
erence. Recent developments have overwhelmed the historical articulation of the
rural realm and suffocated the relatively small urban organisms within hypertrophic
proliferations. Only residual historical centers and few recent complexes enjoy the
qualities of traditional urban space. Equally limited portions of the countryside
maintain those deep-ingrained qualities that endow them with the capacity to
produce the long-term renewable wealth that Alberto Magnaghi advocates for.15
The result is the most complex context of this brief casuistry: a pseudo-urban spatial
system, where fragments of rural fabrics and scattered urban nuclei survive,
although interrupted, isolated, or functionally neutralized by the overwhelming

13
See Chap. 6 of this book.
14
See subchapter ‘Of new nomads’ in Chap. 2 of this book.
15
See Chap. 2 of this book.
9.3 Determining the Attributes of the Novel Urbanity 217

scale of recent undifferentiated growth, to the point of becoming delusive. As

mentioned before, despite its peripheries, disruptive infrastructures, undifferentiated
proliferations, a city such as Marseille is representative of contexts still grounded
into the history of urban space and its original topography. The terrain vague of
bleak cités looming at a distance coexists with the layered territory at the rim of the
Mediterranean, the venerable port city, and the anciennes hameaux nestled in the
recesses of Les Calanques.
Focusing on the determination, comparison, and evaluation of the various
attributes of the novel urbanity, the future work spans over a varied geography,
much broader than the basic instances described above, and a wide set of inter-
disciplinary implications, ranging from urbanism to sociology, anthropology,
ecology, etc., heading towards the comprehensive notion of life science. This
cursory description of an array of contexts and sites is meant to open the discourse
about the attributes of novel urbanity.

9.4 Post-urban Agoras, Neo-Monuments,

and a Novel Mythology

9.4.1 Urbs, Civitas, Cityness, Landscape: Recharging

a Fragmented Territory with a New Sense

We have observed how built systems extend today at the geographic scale of the
anthropic continuum. With the built systems, also some of the attributes of the
civitas (or ‘cityness’) have expanded. What prevails, however, is the removal of
the ‘vicarious encounter’, the casual interaction between people and spaces offered
in the pedestrian occupation of urban public space, source of self-awareness as
described by Rowe (1991, p. 59). Burdett equally focuses on the loss of random
societal interchange in the new condition.
While the terrains of the post-urban city expand, the urban space disappears
along with any trace of urvus, the curved trench traced by plough to separate town
from rurality and wilderness. The city-civitas of the citizens expands, while the city-
urbs, material platform of logos and action, disappears. Arendt16 says that for the
ancient Greeks “the lawmaker was like the builder of the city wall, someone who
had to do and finish his work before political activity could begin”, to describe the
classical coincidence of public space and democracy (Arendt 1998, pp. 192–8).
In fact, “before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure
built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm
of the polis and its structure the law; legislator and architect belonged in the same
category” (Arendt 1998, pp. 194–5).

See also subchapters ‘Athens’ on Rossi’s reading of Athens and ‘In Civibus et in parietibus’ on
16

Saint Augustine’s civitas in civibus formulation, in Chap. 3 of this book.

218 9 Conclusions: Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda …

Today, the architect and the legislator are no longer equated and an unbridged
gap has divaricated their fields of action. To avoid plummeting into fragmentation
and placelessness, we need to rethink our living space as a continuous landscape.
A novel gaze has to recharge today’s territorial fragmentation with an overall sense.
A novel mythology has to interweave the plot of a landscape carpet of geographic
scale: a landscape mosaic composed of forms and processes,17 both metabolic and
semiotic, that is ecological and cultural, formal and functional.

9.4.2 Life with Neo-Monuments

The implantation of a novel mythology over the contemporary continuum exacts

the reconsideration of the notion of monument and its reinvention in the new
context. Our need for novel forms of monument derives, on the one hand, from the
definitive demise of its traditional function within the urban and territorial structure
and, on the other hand, from the perpetuated necessity for a new civil platform to
support the dynamics of democracy. The laws of the formation of traditional urban
and territorial structures, anchored to the notion of monument and its physical
instantiations, as described by Marcel Pöete, Maurice Halbwachs, and Aldo
Rossi,18 have lost almost any applicability under contemporary circumstances.
However, the fundamental monument/residence dynamics, generative of inhabit-
able topologies, still hold the potential to be reformed into a diffuse democratic
platform within today’s disintegrated environment.
The contemporary challenge is, then, reinventing the novel agoras of the
post-urban time: the agoras of the expanded civitas corresponding to the expanded
landscape. Not the flamboyant agoras serving ‘external forces’ (such as the opening
and closing hours of the stock exchange inspiring the ‘manual for a machinic
landscape’19) rising in the heart of the privileged metropolis, but rather modest
capsules of the quotidian and their interlacing in fabrics and mosaics, networks of
empowerment for a diffuse community of non-metropolitanites. The post-urban
agoras are certainly to be reinvented by enhancing the ‘hospitality’, that is the
spatial quality, of the ‘interstices’ in-between suburban components, and also the
hospitality of suburban infrastructures, such as corridors of mobility and com-
mercial facilities, as Peter Rowe sharply points out.20

17
Almo Farina describes the ‘visible landscape’ as an assemblage where the visible spatial for-
mation of the mosaic is ‘coupled’, that is coincident, with the observed regime of processes that
generate it. In an ‘uncoupled landscape’, the regime of processes remains invisible. By that, Farina
establishes a distinction between the mosaic formations and process metabolisms composing a
landscape (Farina 2009, pp. 25–6).
18
See ‘A Critique of the Urban Paradigm and Its Territory’ in Chap. 2 of this book.
19
See ‘A Critiques of Landscape Urbanism’ in Chap. 2 of this book.
20
See subchapter ‘Interstitial inhospitality’ in Chap. 3 of this book.
9.4 Post-urban Agoras, Neo-Monuments, and a Novel Mythology 219

Fig. 9.2 Suburban vegetable gardens and orchards cultivated by residents in Ikuta, Kanagawa
prefecture, in the outskirts of Tokyo’s agglomeration (photo rp)

However, a new meaning for this idea of hospitality has to be achieved by means
of observation and understanding, for it to pervade the expanded dwelling space
and reform the canopy of the café at the outskirt of the provincial town, the stairway
along the side of a neighborhood library in Torre del Greco, the perfect niche
carved in the uppermost corner to provide room for imagination, the modest
ecosystem along the ravine dividing a poor neighborhood from a university cam-
pus, its surprising floral diversity spanning from matorral to bosque galeria, the
hidden garden of Gibellina, where the dreams of a disappeared generation have
been stored, the enclosed orchard where you recognize a redbreast and a bergamot
tree, the line of trees that once organized the field pattern and now obsolesces away,
as well as the suburban train station of Ikuta in the Kanagawa prefecture, where a
traditional shop outside the southern entrance sells tofu in various preparations and
the vegetable gardens attended to by the residents conform a hidden rural oasis, a
countryside the size of a postage stamp, secluded between retaining walls and the
back of the houses (Fig. 9.2).
The challenge is as much about the acknowledgement of the existent quotidian
references as it is about the installation of new pieces of what we could call
antiheroic ‘neo-monuments’. It is that of both recognizing and scattering quanta of
collective space in the service of democracy, over the residential expanse of the
idiosyncratic continuum, where history and autobiography blur into one another.
220 9 Conclusions: Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda …

9.5 A Final Note

The Mesoamerican myth of 14 Strength narrates of fates ineffably administered by

asters, whereby the sun rises and for no reasons kills the man born from a tree. The
opening quotation of this book, from Giacomo Leopardi’s Dialogue between
Nature and an Icelander, offers a western figuration of the human condition before
nature that does not result too dissimilar from that of the Mesoamerican myth:
“If I by chance exterminated your species, I should not know it”—says Nature.
Man is proliferating on the planet as an infesting species and has long adopted a
parasitic attitude. If control over the number of the human population is not enacted
and the parasitic behavior is not turned into symbiotic, a new aster will probably
rise, from nature or from technique, to hit the species.

References

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Oaxaca. Oaxaca, Artes de México
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(eds) L’ultimo sciamano. Bompiani, Milano
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Afterword

A Borgesian Tabula: The Symbiotic/Composite

as an Epistemological Rupture and a New
Paradigm in Landscape Research

This book by Roberto Pasini marks a point of methodological heterogenesis in the

context of the consolidated landscape literature: a conceptual alteration that sub-
stantially changes our relationship to the project, primarily intended as a cognitive
rather than a spatial practice.
After dismantling the traditional landscape theory, Pasini recomposes a
non-dichotomous edifice of quanta of deterritorialization, a non-anthropocentric
‘cognitive machine’ that allows for a continuous becoming of the contents. By
weakening the strong figures and abandoning Manicheism in favor of a conceptual
nomadism, the ecological thinking appears in a most complex and experimental
conjugation. The work combines a geo-philosophical and relational apparatus with
the purely scientific perspective, defining a new notion of ‘composite symbiosis’
that finds its transdisciplinary roots in the Deleuze-Guattarian ‘becoming-’ and
Almo Farina’s ‘cognitive landscape’. In an absolutely original way, Pasini elabo-
rates the combination of those opposed positions into a theoretical definition first
and then transfers it into the design world, breaking rules and taxonomies with more
wandering contents. As a ‘body without organs’, in fact, the new paradigm per-
forms a reorientation of the precepts of architecture towards other taxonomies of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization that generate a new ‘play of planes’: the
‘plane of consistency’ of the becoming, on which one commeasures the hetero-
geneous and Aeon’s and Kronos’ time (Deleuze 1969) overlap. It is a new theo-
retical space that entails an epistemological rupture in the world of landscape
design, embodied in the matorral installation in the Sierra Madre Oriental.

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 221

R. Pasini, Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces, The Urban Book Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7
222 Afterword

The disciplinary value of the text stands in fact precisely in the possibility of
defining and experimenting a new untrodden ramification of landscape ecology
capable to resolve, represent, and project the global and particular space—at once
heterogeneous and composite—in a symbiotic fashion, that is non-definitive,
relational, ‘miscegenated’ and non-anthropocentric. The value of the union of the
heterogeneous in an ecological perspective is thus the distinctive trait of this book,
in which the heuristic and spatial principles of the project are redefined alongside
the tools and glossary of landscape. The matorral project simultaneously is, and
this is again original, a theoretical hologram and an integral immersive space. In it,
biodiversity, sensoriality (implying the drop of vision as a synthetic and unifying
act) and both semantic ‘verticalization’ and geographic ‘surfaceness’ imply the
genesis of a theory not simply ecosophic, but rather based on a relational osteology,
on the paradox of the open and dynamic structure, that is a ‘body without organs’.

About the Symbiotic/Relational

In constructing his theoretical basis, Pasini tends to the overcoming of the exclu-
sivity of the scientific, allowing for a diagonalization: the mechanical and
neo-deductive model of pure ecology is overtaken as well as the purely narrative
model and the conventional disciplinary axioms are abandoned.
By passing from dialectic to dialogic, the text advocates for the elimination of
binary thinking in favor of real conditions and opts for a third way: Morin had
defined the “seventh way of complexity” as “the way of the crisis of closed and
clear concepts, that is the crisis of clarity and separation within explanation” (Morin
2008). Manichaean dichotomies as architecture/city, city/countryside, etc., or
conceptual oppositions such as order/disorder, full/empty, can be overcome for
landscape science to work with differential, simultaneous, and non-oppositional
contents. The play switches then from dialectic to a dialogic rapport among
agencies: from a thesis/antithesis order to an open system without final solutions
and discontinuities.
By eliminating the designative, the monadic and the self-referential, this theo-
retical project proposes a critique of the division of matter in separated bodies and
systems that results either in the designed object’s hyperthelia, epitomized by
Koolhaas’ production, or in the exclusive coherence of homogeneous elements. The
reflection leads to the idea that the relationships between the project and the world
exclude the project’s and its process’ claims to a substantial and conforming value.
The ancient principle of interrelation among things is rather reinstated. In La
Monadologie, Leibnitz had asserted that “tout corps se ressent de tout ce qui se fait
dans l’univers” and that “tout présent état d’une substance simple est naturellement
une suite de son état précédent, tellement, que le présent y est gros de l’avenir. Nous
n’avons que des définitions nominales provisionnelles” (Leibnitz 1714).
This spatially relational and timewise provisional mandate of the project con-
ducts to a multiplication of the characteristics of the space, which loses any
Afterword 223

principle of homologation and disconnects itself from the systemic theory, rather
embracing the metaphor of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). And the
elements of the symbiotic project, in its interpretation of the ‘becoming-’, present
themselves in the following acceptations: a reflection on the value of the horizontal
surface as opposed to the “metaphysical [conception] of the ground” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980, p. 18); the possibility to work in a topos of this relational system
without affecting its processual as opposed to substantial value; the substitution of
identity with the ‘singularization of multiplicity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980,
p. 555); considering the process of the project as ‘a’ moment in-between the
conditions and not as ‘the’ moment and obliterating the concept of beginning and
end; the idea of permanent deterritorialization of the contents and concepts. In this
sense, the design is treated as a method of knowledge, as a “network of connections
among the facts… the things of the world” (Bergson 1896), conscious of the fact
that “knowing is inserting something into the real; it is then transforming the real”
(Calvino 1988).
Pasini submerges the project into the flow of things, into a phenomenology that
includes the real and the imaginary, and strips the things of their parodic and
imitative value, passively received in common use and direct phenomenology,
exacting from the reflection on the landscape new duties and an alteration.

The Taxonomy of the Relational: The Symbiotic/Composite

If, from a theoretical point of view, the text innovates the apparatuses of landscape
as a cognitive practice, the terms ‘symbiotic’ and ‘composite’ articulate the
methodological consequences of that cognitive practice. ‘Symbiotic’ and ‘com-
posite’, as reconnaissance tools, seem to evoke Glissant’s éclat by summoning an
operative project that fluctuates between theory and practice (Glissant 1990). In line
with Farina’s notion of ‘semethic’ (meaning, sign, ethic) (Farina 2011), the two
terms retain a polysemous character and invite to explore routes of rupture. The two
terms, at once conceptual and operative, are then the interface between ‘things’ and
‘thought’, exactly as Carroll’s “eating and talking” (via Deleuze) (Deleuze 1969),
and synthesize both the drop of the dialectical contents and the opportunity to
institute a ‘temporarily foundational’ language. The symbiotic and the composite
therefore become the pivots of a new epistemology of the project, mot de passe to a
modality that allows the author to advance experimentally. The language becomes a
projective, experimental, multiple and concrete instrument, whose unexplored
design ‘figurations’ build the place of interchange between thought and phe-
nomenon, between deterritorialization and reterritorialization: an ever-reformable
interchange vis-à-vis diverse contexts, defined from the beginning as open and
potential.
224 Afterword

Overcoming the positivist/idealist definitions of ‘symbiosis’ and the

eclectic/organicist definitions of ‘composite’, the proposed model only retains the
sole meaning of the coexistence of organisms of diverse species. Beyond the
subsistence of the organisms involved, the discourse is about the expansion of
the material and immaterial faculties of living beings through reciprocal contami-
nation and modification. And, within this transfer, Pasini abandons any Linnaean
temptation of pure ecology, carrying the project onto a board that allows for the
coexistence of micro and macro, man and animal, natural and artificial. Even the
hybridization of different conditions of homogeneous categories, such as
natural/natural and cultural/anthropological, finds in the dialoguing plane of this
theory and design model a new relational space complex per-se: a rupture that
overthrows the plane of the discourse about the project.
Eventually, the symbiotic is a transversal and potentially universal method:
beyond the fusion of oppositional polarities, it is the reconciling principle of distinct
natures and elements in the local as well as universal project, intended as the
conceptual plane recollecting the different and, by that, transforming the thought
about the project. It is in this relational movement across the heterogeneous and also
the homogeneous that the method finds its significance through the determinations
of ‘miscegenation’ and ‘garden’ as metaphors of the project.
The transfer of the composite/heterogeneous into the notion of miscegenation
recalls again Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. By virtue of miscegenation, the axi-
ology of the proposed system becomes not only theoretical/methodological but also
anthropological/ethical, instituting a new space of signification for man’s diverse
cultures. By representing through miscegenation a vision of the world as “mi-
noritarian becoming” (Deleuze et al. 1985), the proposed model introduces a new
kind of relation to the other—poetically evoked through the figure of Josephine
Baker—and overpasses the demon of purity of systemic theories to open the
opportunity for a relation between “the same and the different” (Deleuze 1968).
The purported principle of Western authenticity no longer appears as an absolute
image, rather replaced by a terrain entailing alterity and difference: a “unity that
goes by the diversity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, p. 17). It is through this idea of
miscegenation that the entire second session of the book acquires a substantial
meaning: the possibility of a different relation among cultures and a new culture of
the project, in which “the ethos of the nomad and pilgrim becomes the ethos
par-excellence” (Lévy 1994) or the final embodiment of the “chaos/world” occurs.

The Matorral Project as a Theoretic Hologram:

The Becoming-Demon

The notion of miscegenation becomes spatial in the Tests for a Symbiotic Matorral
project, intended as both the place of the Deleuzian ‘becoming’ (a geographical
phenomenology) and a specific ecotope within a ‘cognitive landscape’.
Afterword 225

By materializing a rhizomatic structure, the matorral project transfigures the

dynamics of the local ecological resources into intersubjective parameters mediat-
ing between man and nature. The central section, called the Glade of Becoming, is
crossed by four transversal axes that introduce to the condition of various animals
by letting the visitor experience through their sensorial faculties. The longitudinal
path of the ‘becoming myth/becoming demon’ lines up the transversal axes in an
animal multiplicity. The distribution of resources/signals over the Glade of
Becoming, in which ecosystemic traits of flora and fauna coincide with the cultural
values of man, deploys a multifocal and anthropological vision culminating in a
total experience of ‘the other’, up to the point that, across the trail, the human
metaphorically transmutes into a demon as symbiotic and atavistic as werewolves
and shamans (see Chap. 8 in this book). The installations on the glade, in fact,
provide a tangible experience of the perceptive and cultural deterritorialization
advocated for at the beginning of the book, pointing to a new ‘anthropological
organization’ alternative to current social structures (family, community, etc.).
The project’s syntax leads from the experience of the single (the subject/visitor)
to that of the many (nature/animals). As places designed at variable intensities, the
installations unite the “sensorial perceptions of the observer with the functions and
the fundamental acts of the various ecological species” (Guattari 2000, p. 34): in
three sections—perceptive, experimental, informative—respectively called
fauna-trails path, glade of becoming and flora path, ushered by a portal/threshold
and concluded by the contemplation circle, man and animals intersect their longi-
tudinal and transversal trajectories experiencing each other. On the glade, the planes
of transcendence and immanence overlap on each other over the general plane of
consistency.
Regulated by the Deleuze-Guattarian anti-taxonomy of the animal world—do-
mestic, mythic, demonic—the visitor experiences this very passage moving from
one post to another in a metamorphic progression attaining to the physical and the
imaginary. The subject proceeds deeper and deeper through multiple thresholds on
the path of his transformation to finally reach the play of shadows and trans-
parencies of the central totem, a place of reconciliation of the multiple that
reconnects the dichotomies of man/animal, archetype/totem, series/structure,
imagination/comprehension, resemblance/relation. By dropping anthropocentrism,
the visitor crosses a sequence of displacing spaces where, dwindling and expand-
ing, rising and squatting, watching and smelling, like in Alice’s world, the names
are lost and the cogitating ego becomes the other. This process is formalized
through open devices, which innovate the compositional regime of the tradition to
let in Guattarian impermanence, weakness, fluidity, abdication to aprioristic figures
of order in favor of a mobile, multisensorial composition of space. In fact, the
composite symbiosis occurs by virtue of those devices: as the outcome of a heuristic
principle, the project is the topological manipulation of a conceptual and experi-
ential process that produces an anthropological transformation by way of space.
Despite its formal unrepeatability, this theoretical hologram becomes a general
manifesto for a post-urban space in which landscape theory is deployed as a way of
global cognition: in this space, symbiotic and composite, real and imaginary,
226 Afterword

natural and human, constantly reformulating itself, the project finds its own mutable
sense in relation with the world. On what could be described as a Borgesian
“tabula”1, Pasini seeks a new modality for landscape theory and design and for the
project as a category in-se: a new, efficient epistemological model that allows for a
project universal and particular, global and specific, far removed from common
approaches, systemic or ideological, that plague the science of landscape.

Milan, 2018 Elisa C. Cattaneo, Ph.D.2

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1
In the Preface to Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Michel Foucault
states that his book first arose out of a passage in Borges enumerating the surprising taxonomy of
animals from ‘a certain Chinese encyclopedia’. The Chinese taxonomy breaks up “all the planes
with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things […] What is
impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity
would be possible. […] What has been removed, in short, is the famous ‘operating table’: […] the
nickelplated, rubbery table swathed in white, glittering beneath a glass sun devouring all shadow—
the table where, for an instant, perhaps forever, the umbrella encounters the sewing-machine; and
also the table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them
in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their
similarities and their differences—the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has
intersected space.” (Foucault 2005, pp. xvi–xix)
2
Adjunct Professor, DAStU, Politecnico di Milano.