Landscape and Truth. Meaning and Mumbo-Jumbo in Landscape
Architecture Theory.
Abstract.
The concern that landscape architecture is insufficiently theorised has led both to attempts to
base the discipline upon the natural sciences, particularly the earth sciences and ecology, and
to a desire to rethink and deconstruct it from positions within postmodern critical theory. The
epistemological assumptions of these perspectives are radically different and very difficult to
reconcile. This paper argues that landscape theory should reject both the reductionist
simplifications of some natural scientists and the epistemic relativism of the postmodernists. It
draws in particular upon the arguments of the philosopher Mary Midgley to argue that human
beings are simultaneously animals with an innate ‘human nature’, rational and moral agents
and participant creators of culture. The world is one, but it is immensely complex. We need
multiple perspectives, both objective and subjective, in order to explain and understand it. The
implications of this view for landscape theory and practice are explored.
The Quest for Security.
One of the recurrent grumbles among those who teach and study landscape
architecture, though perhaps heard less among those who practise it, has
been that the discipline lacks a developed body of theoretical writing.
Thirty or forty years ago, landscape architecture looked covetously
toward the natural sciences Here were potent, evidence-based methods,
rationality and the rigorous testing of hypotheses. Here also were theories of
enormous explanatory power, such as the Theory of Evolution or the Theory of
Relativity. At that time the natural science model still held huge sway in the
social sciences, where statistical approaches flourished. The 1960s had also
seen the beginning of the ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography, which was
closely linked to positivist science: indeed, one of its proponents, Waldo
Tobler, even propounded a First Law of Geography: ‘…everything is related to
everything else, but near things are more related to each other’. (Tobler, 1970)
Those working in the humanities were often dazzled by science, though
sometimes at a loss to know how to respond. In Notes on the Synthesis of
Form, for example, Christopher Alexander went so far as to suggest that
architectural design could be reduced to systematic problem-solving, opening
the door to a future where buildings would be designed by computer programs
(Alexander, 1964)
But then dissatisfaction set in. What seemed to be missing from the
scientific worldview was any account of subjectivity. The cultural geographer,
Denis Cosgrove, protested that the attempt to subject landscape to rigorous
scientific analysis ‘denied the integrity of the insider’s experience, prising it
apart and subjecting it to the cold blades of classification and analysis’
(Cosgrove, 1984: 19). The validation of feeling and experience in human
geography was part of a much broader intellectual shift which has been
labelled The Revenge of the Humanities (Ward, 1995). It is associated with the
swing away from modernism, often regarded as heir to the Enlightenment
project which had attempted to base all knowledge on rational principles,
toward post-modernism and post-structuralism which, in many of their
manifestations, deny that objective knowledge is even possible. Poststructuralists deny that there is anything universal underlying the diversity of
human culture and say that there is no such thing as human nature. This
intellectual movement began around the time of the student unrest in Paris in
1968 (Charles Jencks dates the death of Modernism in architecture to the
demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in 1972) and it was, from the
beginning, driven by a politics of liberation.
On Theory
Nowadays, when academics – or at least those in the humanities – talk
about theory, they give it a capital T. This is Critical Theory - or just ‘Theory’ and it has next to nothing to do with science, evidence or rigour. The roots of
Theory are to be found in literary criticism and in the social sciences,
particularly in the Marxian approach of the Frankfurt School, Freudianism and
the Structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. All three of these
movements had pretensions to science and rightly belong to the Modernist
period and although we might now doubt their scientific credentials, there is no
doubt that Marx and Freud were seeking universal truths about the world and
the human relation to it. They failed to find them, and out of that failure arose
a scepticism concerning all ‘grand narratives’. ‘Theory’ has thus become
shorthand for the bundle of critical positions which emerged in the aftermath:
post-structuralism, feminism, post-feminism, semiology, deconstruction, postcolonialism, queer theory and the rest. They have their origins in political
commitment rather than detached inquiry.
Something which runs through much Theory, whether Modernist or
Postmodernist, is the desire to strip away deceptive masks and to reveal the
dark forces that are at work in culture, such as the machinations of power, the
workings of desire, or the hidden mechanisms of oppression. In many respects
these are laudable objectives, but they introduce their own distortions. We
might interpret a tall building as a phallic symbol, but this is not likely to be
what it means to those who live or work in it, nor do we have to interpret every
building we come across in terms of the Freudian unconscious. The gardens
of Versailles may be an obvious example of the cultural manifestation of
power, but it does not follow that every designed landscape has to be analysed
in terms of its power relations. Yet reading much contemporary criticism, this
is the impression that one often gains. Although grand narrative may officially
be dead, critical theorists often write as if their particular viewpoint is allpervading.
It is not uncommon for an academic these days to be asked ‘what is
your theoretical position?’, as if everyone who comments upon the world has
to see it through a particular set of lenses, nor is it surprising that a
commentator who has chosen, let us say, the lenses of feminism, will find
instances of male oppression (‘hegemony’ is the fashionable word)
everywhere he or she looks. A set of spectacles seems to be the requirement
for those who wish to play the Theory game – and the postmodern optician
has rack upon rack to choose from – Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic,
deconstructivist or whatever. To be truly successful one might devise new
lenses altogether, the point being that the world should look radically different
when considered through them. This fashion, it is widely believed, began in
departments of English Literature but has it swept through other disciplines,
including many that are close to landscape architecture. Any self-respecting
architectural bookshop or library, for instance, will now be groaning with works
by Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger, Irigaray et al , a veritable pantheon
of thinkers associated with the ‘postmodern turn’. Landscape architects
meanwhile scratch their heads and wonder if they are missing out on
something. If everyone else thinks these people are important, should not we
also be reading them? This worry is not about lack of foundations, but a worry
about missing the party (though reading Heidegger or Deleuze can be more
like purgatory than pleasure).
The Building Site Metaphor
Like most anxieties, our worry about theory – or our lack of it – arises from
insecurity. In its older form, the concern was not that landscape architecture
was an unfashionable outsider, but that it lacked a theoretical ‘base’, that the
profession had somehow been constructed without the necessary underpinning, and was therefore an unstable edifice likely to slip down the hillside or
sink beneath the mud. This sort of building-site metaphor also used to be
common in philosophy. In the seventeenth century René Descartes decided
that he must tear down his own private mental dwelling, which had grown
higgledy-piggledy because of defects in his education, in order to rebuild his
knowledge on absolutely solid foundations.
The sort of intellectual slum-clearance that Descartes advocated has
appealed to many other thinkers, particularly those inclined to build whole new
edifices of thought. Even in the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and the
young Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that they could find a deep logical
structure that would link human thought to the world and thereby deliver
unshakeable knowledge. There is a strong parallel between this attitude and
the sort of architectural radicalism of the Bauhaus, which sought to sweep
away a plethora of muddled styles, the baggage of history, and then to build
anew along pure, rational and ‘scientific’ lines. Indeed Wittgenstein, who had
trained as an aeronautical engineer before becoming a philosopher, built a
stark and unlovable house in Vienna for his sister, much in the style of Adolph
Loos, who once wrote that ‘ornament is excrement’ (Loos, 1908)
The search for bedrock can take many different forms. Descartes
thought he had found it in his famous Cogito ‘I think therefore I am’, a
statement he could not doubt. Russell and Wittgenstein thought they had
found it in logic and a theory of the way in which language represented the
world. Modern Movement architects underpinned their practice by giving
supreme authority to the notion of function. Those who think that the facts of
psychology can be reduced to facts about biology and in turn to facts about
chemistry and ultimately physics are driven by the same fear of uncertainty.
There is a name for this approach – foundationalism – and it is a
mistaken way of thinking. As the philosopher Mary Midgley has pointed out
‘the evidence that makes any proposition certain is seldom, if ever, supplied by
one single, more certain item. It always consists in a great mass of
connections that can be made on every side between it and the rest of our
experience.’ (Midgley, 1989: 136). However, as Midgley takes pains to show,
this does not mean ‘that there are no standards of evidence’ or ‘that truths
change all the time and are different for every person and every society’ (Ibid).
Foundationalists are rare amongst landscape architects. All practitioners have
an underlying set of values, of course, even if they are only dimly aware of
them, but many are pragmatists who get on with what they see as their job,
serving clients and users, without much self-examination. But in the middle
decades of the twentieth century, at about the same time that geography
swung towards quantitative methods, there was a concern that landscape
architecture should be placed on a scientific footing, and this accounted for the
success of Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969), which seemed to offer not
just rationally based techniques and procedures, but a whole, thought-though,
value system based upon ecological science. It is easy to see the appeal –
here was a theory which would help this small profession to punch above its
weight. The Ecological Approach which emerged in Britain in the 1970s and
the rise of landscape ecology from the 1980s onwards represented the same
yearning for scientific authority.
But the world has changed and the prestige of science has slipped to
the extent that universities can contemplate closing their departments of
physics or chemistry. Architects, like many in the humanities, have already
been won over by the wild writings of post-modernists and post-structuralists.
These texts rarely have the clarity of scientific prose, but they seem to be
saying terrifically exciting things, or things that are probably exciting, if only we
could decipher them. Is this the way that landscape theory should now be
going?
The Truth Wars.
As a discipline, landscape architecture sits between three massive empires the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. To push the
territorial metaphor a bit further, landscape is like a small neutral country which
has not made up its mind whether it should align itself with any of these great
powers. Perhaps landscape architects, like the Swiss, think it is prudent to
keep out of the struggle altogether. An Alpine metaphor is tempting here,
except that we do not have the lofty distain that mountain imagery might imply.
We are more like Belgium or Poland, flat and frontierless and frequently
worried that we might be overrun.
The academic world meanwhile is never at peace, contestation being at
the very heart of intellectual endeavour. The tranquil exteriors of most
university campuses do not reveal it, but we are currently in the middle of a
drawn-out struggle which might one day be called the Truth Wars. The order
of battle can be (roughly) represented in the following table:
Absolutists
Relativists
Traditionalists
Post-modernists
(including Modernists)
Objectivists
Subjectivists
Rationalists
Social Constructivists
Universalists
Contextualists
Natural Scientists
Many in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Analytical philosophers
‘Continental’ philosophers
Like all warfare it is a messy business. There are turncoats, unwilling
combatants, double agents, shifting alliances and collateral damage. It is
difficult to know, because of this complexity, what broad labels should be
applied to each side. I am going to call them the Objectivists and the
Subjectivists, because these names seem to go to the heart of the issue. The
Objectivists still believe that truth is attainable by rational means. The
Subjectivists think that all talk of truth is contingent and contextual. They often
put words like ‘truth’ or ‘reason’ inside sneer quotes, and are happier with
‘histories’ than with ‘history’. Since most of science and technology belongs in
the Objectivist camp, this remains the better-funded army, but since the
‘cultural turn’ the Subjectivists have fashion on their side. With bases in
unexpected places, like literature departments and architecture schools, and
provisioned by a caravan of post-structuralist philosophers, mostly French, the
Subjectivists have been waging an enormously successful guerrilla war for
over three decades.
Is this talk of warfare a bit extreme? Are these two camps really at one
another’s throats? I fear that they are. Each is eager to undermine and
discredit the other. In the middle of the last century, two philosophers of
science, neither one a Subjectivist, cleared the way for an assault on the
edifice of science. Karl Popper (1959) argued that scientists did not prove
things, instead they progressed by framing hypotheses and then subjecting
them to rigorous empirical testing. In other words, they disproved things; what
we call facts or laws in science are just the best hypotheses we have so far
come up with. They could be disproved tomorrow. Thomas Kuhn’s insight
was similar, in that he also realised that science was not a steady unveiling of
facts about the world. As revolutionary developments in quantum physics had
shown, there could be major shake-ups in our settled view of things. He called
these ‘paradigm shifts’, a term which has percolated into many discourses
outside the philosophy of science. What went on between these upheavals
Kuhn labelled ‘normal science’, but after Popper and Kuhn science had lost
some of its certainty, if not its methodological rigour.
The Subjectivists, however, bracketed natural science’s claims to
objectivity and truth, and looked at the whole scientific enterprise in an
anthropological spirit. The scientific community could be considered as a tribe,
with its own rituals and beliefs. Scientists value procedures like controlled
experimentation, statistical analysis and peer review, whilst a shaman might
seek revelation in trances or peer into the entrails for a sign. Perhaps scientific
‘truth’ is just something which scientists ‘construct’ when they get together.
If this sort of attack irritated the scientists, they were capable of some
high-handed imperialism of their own. Here are two examples, both of which –
unsurprisingly perhaps – come from biology, the science which is closest to the
humanities since it deals, inter alia, with the biological entities called human
beings. The first was the publication in 1975 of Sociobiology by Edward O.
Wilsoni, a book which sought to explain social behaviour in terms of evolution.
Whatever the merits of this project, Wilson created a storm by pressing his
ideas in militant fashion, even suggesting that ultimately sociobiology would
swallow the entire social sciences along with the humanities!
Richard
Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene (Dawkins, 1976) had a similar
project, arresting attention by suggesting that individual plants and animals,
including human beings, were little more than vehicles for their genes, which is
rather like saying that the chicken is just the means by which an egg
reproduces itself. Dawkins went on, however, to suggest in similarly reductive
fashion that there were such things as memes, basic building blocks of culture,
which, in the fashion of the genes on which they were modelled, replicated
themselves through culture. There is insufficient space in this paper for
detailed discussions of the pros and cons of sociobiology, selfish genes or the
theory of memes. For a critique see Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man (1979) and
her Science and Poetry (2001), especially Chapter 6. It is enough, for the
moment, to recognise what is going on here between the contesting sides. It is
rather like that children’s hand game in which each player pulls his hand out
from the bottom of the stack and tries to place it on the top. Or perhaps, to
revert to the military analogy, it is like two companies of sappers, each digging
deeper to get below the enemy’s deepest trenches.
Although there is occasional talk of ‘postmodern science’ or ‘post-normal
science’, natural science is still a continuation of the Enlightenment project,
while postmodernism defines itself in opposition to it. By its very nature, the
latter is a rag-bag, defined more by what it is against than by what it stands for.
Postmodernists not only avoid universalizing theories and think they think
there is something oppressive about such ‘totalizing’ explanations. If
Subjectivists are willing to talk about truth at all, the truths in question must be
partial, limited and contingent. Where the ‘grand narratives’ could be looked at
as a whole and judged accordingly, it is much more difficult to do this with
postmodern thinkers, and not just because they tend to write in an obscurantist
style. In place of all-encompassing explanations, there is a heady brew of
radical, anti-authoritarian rhetoric, scepticism and relativism. Part of
postmodernism’s attraction is that it pulls the rug out from beneath natural
science, which probably accounts for much of its appeal in the humanities.
Landscape Architecture and Science
It is clear that no one can be entirely neutral in these disputes, and if we look
at the kinds of theory which regularly appear in landscape architecture text
books, we soon discover that they are associated with one side or the other.
From science we get universalising theories of aesthetics based upon
ecological considerations similar to those which inspired Sociobiology. One of
the first to appear was the Prospect and Refuge Theory advanced by Jay
Appleton, then Professor of Geography at the University of Hull, and inspired
by the work of the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who argued that in evolutionary
terms it had been important for animals to ‘see without being seen’. In his
book, The Experience of Landscape (1975), Appleton argued that Lorenz’s
theory could explain present-day human landscape preferences. Similarly, in
1980, the behavioural ecologist Gordon Orions hypothesised that human
beings have an innate preference for savannah-like landscapes, since these
were the landscapes in which our species evolved and which we still recognise
as a habitat which will meet our most basic needs. Meanwhile the
environmental psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan suggested that the
evolutionary success of the human species was related to its capacity for
processing information; we are information-hungry creatures, they suggested,
and consequently favour landscapes where there is sufficient complexity. We
are also naturally inquisitive creatures who respond positively to a sense of
mystery (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1995)
The Other Side: Landscape Architecture and Culture.
One thing which all these evolutionary theories share is the notion that
there is such a thing as human nature, but this is one of the things which social
theorists of the 1960s and 70s were eager to deny. On the contrary, they
regarded human beings as the products of their culture. Nothing about them
had been determined at birth. They were infinitely malleable. Nurture, rather
than nature, would shape a person’s character, behaviour and beliefs. Support
for this point of view came from anthropology, which revealed a vast diversity
of social practices. In the global village such differences have become wellknown. It can be difficult for people from one culture to understand the beliefs
and practices of another. Mary Midgley gives the example of the samurai
warrior who, on receipt of a new sword, would go and test its edge by slicing
off the head of the first peasant he met along the road. Many anthropologists,
burdened with the guilty knowledge that, in the early years of their discipline,
their predecessors were complicit in colonialism, have adopted a position of
cultural relativism, whereby such an action could only be explained within the
terms of the society in which it took place. Midgley argues strongly against the
moral isolationism which attends this position.
Attitudes towards landscape also seem to cover a great range. A
landscape might represent different things to different groups – hills and
moorland might represent freedom and recreation to the city-dweller, for
example, while for the hill-farmer they represent the struggle to make a living.
The way in which a particular landscape is regarded can also change over
time. One of the first English travel writers, Daniel Defoe, thought that
mountains had ‘a kind of unhospitable terror in them’, but now the Lake
District, Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands are popular tourist
destinations. As Denis Cosgrove pointed out, in Social Formation and the
Symbolic Landscape, ‘Landscape is not merely the world we see, it is a
construction, a composition of that world. Landscape is a way of seeing the
world’ (Cosgrove, 1984: 13)
Landscape, Cosgrove argued, was an ideological concept: ‘It
represents a way in which a certain class of people have signified themselves
and their imagined relationship with nature, and through which they have
underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with
respect to external nature.’ (Ibid: 15). For Cosgrove landscape was not just
the consequence of a collective human transformation of nature, but it could
be deconstructed to reveal social relationships. In his rather bleak view
‘landscape remains at root the creation of the outsider, a signifier of power and
dominion over nature, and through nature over other men’ (Ibid p. 221). He
helped to usher in a ‘new’ cultural geography concerned with the landscape as
text, image and metaphor.
When contrasted with the art historical approach to landscape, which
often excised human beings from the picture, there is much to be thankful for
in Cosgrove’s approach, but he goes beyond historical and social analysis to
join the Subjectivists in their relativistic epistemological claims. When writing
of the humanist tradition he notes that:
‘humanists found employment as tutors, advisors, courtiers, professors.
They groomed the sons of the nobility to become leaders of men, as their
successors have done to our own day. Naturally the values to which they
appealed were rarely articulated in crude terms of authority and control.
They were declared as universal values, grounded in objective
understanding of the world, but of their real implications there can be little
doubt.’ (Ibid, p. 83)
The Philosophers Fight Back
The idea that is something deeply flawed about western science and that all
sorts of other knowledges should be given equal standing has become widely
accepted in the humanities, but a number of analytically trained philosophers
are starting to protest. What troubles them most is the relativism which seems
to accompany the social constructionist position. In his Truth, A Guide for the
Perplexed, Simon Blackburn mentions a strong argument that can be used
against the epistemic relativist. This is the Recoil Argument, a sort of
intellectual judo-flip. If, for example, a postmodern historian were to write ‘in
recent years, historians have discovered that there is no such thing as
historical truth’ one could point out that that statement could not itself be true.
Relativists are hoist with their own petards. It is no use them trying to claim
some sort of exemption for their own statements. Blackburn cites the
Australian philosopher, David Stove, who calls this the Ishmael Effect after the
narrator of Moby Dick, the only member of the crew to escape death when the
whaler was sunk: ‘Ishmael says that ‘I alone escaped to tell the tale’ –
something that, given the tale he tells, it was impossible for him to have done.
Equally a relativist cannot say that all human beliefs are subjective – except
the belief that all human beliefs are subjective.’ (Blackburn, 2005: 47)
In Why Truth Matters, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom also
mount a defence of science. They accept that social constructivism is in the
air, part of the zeitgeist, that to many it seems natural and unproblematic and
even that it works well when offering analyses of kinship, taboos and other
social practices, ‘but not when analysing the warranted findings of scientific
research’ (Benson & Stangroom, 2006: 73). Science manifestly works –
aeroplanes stay in the sky, mobile phones twitter like birds and patients
recover from by-pass surgery – but the very authority this gives it can also
make it seem oppressive or exclusionary: ‘…science is the locus of the most
powerful, influential, difficult-to-resist forms of expertise and authority, and
hence hierarchy and power, in the contemporary world. Therefore its claims
must be undermined and ‘demystified’ (Ibid: 49).
Coming themselves from a left-wing position, Benson and Stangroom
can understand the liberating sentiments that motivate the postmodern attack
on science, but they still believe that it is wrong-headed, and also politically
counter-productive since science has frequently been ‘the universal acid, the
great solvent of tradition (since tradition so often boils down to the traditions of
who gets to oppress which groups)’ (Ibid: 46). While accepting that much
good came from the vast rethinking of customary habits, gender roles, casual
injustices and social barriers which began in the late 1960s, Benson and
Stangroom argue that postmodernism and epistemic relativism are a form of
collateral damage. ‘If researchers aren’t after the truth,’ they suggest, ‘surely
they might as well hand in their badges and try a different line of work’ (Ibid:
164).
This is the sort of damage that so concerns the left-wing journalist
Francis Wheen who discusses what he calls ‘the enfeebling legacy of postmodernism’ in his book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (Wheen,
2004: 115). Wheen is an unrepentant rationalist who is happy to cite an
epigram from the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: ‘The truth
is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it’. (Ibid: p.
311). In Wheen’s view it was the Enlightenment project, so routinely trashed by
postmodernists, which was the truly liberating movement in human history.
Midgley has often criticised scientists for their reductionism and for their more
fanciful metaphysical speculations, but in general she too is a staunch
defender of science who recognises that the enterprise is both necessary and
possible: ‘Scientists do indeed aim at objective truth about the world and, like
the rest of us, they sometimes achieve it. Water really is made of hydrogen
and oxygen and the liver really does secrete bile’ ( Midgley, 2001: 59).
Empirical science gives us no transcendent cosmic guarantees. Much more
modestly it gives us provisional truth, but, as Bertrand Russell wrote: ‘Science
is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong and has, as a rule, a
better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific (Russell [1959]
1995: 13).
Which Way for Landscape Architecture? The Pros and Cons of
Postmodernism
By now it is probably becoming very clear where my sympathies lie. No one
who has studied or trained or practised over the past twenty years can be blind
to the influence of postmodernism and to some of its benefits, but it is also the
source of much obscurantist mumbo-jumbo and an attitude toward science
and rational enquiry that is quite dangerous, for if all knowledge is just local
knowledge, how are we ever to decide amongst competing views? How are we
ever to refute the ufologists, the creationists, the racists and those who deny
the Holocaust? And if science is just the practice of the scientific tribe, shall
we place our faith instead upon Feng Shui or astrology?
On the north-east coast of England, the island of Lindisfarne is linked to
the mainland by a causeway which is submerged at high tide. Sensible visitors
do not just trust their intuition, or consult their horoscopes or even ask
someone who appears to be a local. They consult the tide tables which have
been drawn up after careful empirical observation, and these tables are not
just free-floating texts or made up stories. They really do represent observed
regularities in nature.
I am critical of postmodernism, but I do not reject some of its gifts, for there is
no doubt that it has been a fecund source of new critical tools and
perspectives. As an counter-weight to the cool, distanced objectivity of
science, its political commitment involvement and sense of involvement has
undoubtedly had some huge benefits. The subjective view is no longer
ignored. Recognition of the myriad differences between human beings has
been a great corrective to the homogenising tendencies of Modernism, which
tended to treat people as objectivised standard units. In place of the crude
class antagonisms of traditional Marxism, postmodernism has recognised the
subtle ways that oppression works within the weave of all societies. As
Benson and Stangroom concede, ‘the community norms of the truth sceptics
are at least partly motivated by some decent altruistic ideas: perhaps chiefly
they want to carve out a space for people – sometimes other people to whom
the academics want to offer assistance and epistemic backup…’ (Benson &
Stangroom, 2006: 165)
This has had an influence upon landscape architectural practice. Sensitised to
such issues, practitioners now go to greater lengths to discover the needs and
aspirations of those for whom they design. Techniques for community
consultation and participation have greatly improved as ways are found to give
the marginalised and unrepresented a voice. It has also been recognised that
‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ can have different experiences of the same
landscape. The objectifying approach privileged the ‘expert’ outsiders over the
‘insiders’, but, if anything, the reverse is now the norm. Those who live in a
landscape are thought to know it more intimately, and they are usually those
for whom – or with whom – we should be designing. This does not, however,
mean that we should take everything they say uncritically. There may be
instances when the outside expert – perhaps an ecologist, a hydrologist or an
archaeologist – really does know more about a particular issue than anyone
who lives or works in the area. Furthermore, one can be a good democrat and
oppose social injustice without taking on board the Subjectivist’s epistemic
relativism.
We also owe to postmodernism the useful notion that a landscape is a
text, or a palimpsest that is constantly being over-written. This helps us to
understand the time-depth of the places we are asked to work with. It is
arguably a notion every bit as useful as hoary old injunction to consult the
genius of the place.
Landscape architecture critics might also employ Jean Baudrillard’s
notion of the simulacra, the hyperreal place that has no original (like the ‘town
square’ in the shopping mall which has no equivalent in the world outside the
mall) (Baudrillard, J. 1989). It is important for us to try to distinguish between
the authentic and the inauthentic, a task that is helped as much by careful
empirical investigation as it is by Baudrillard’s critiques of simulation or
Heideggerian notions of ‘dwelling’.
There also seem to be ways in which postmodern thinking can stimulate
innovation in design. Bernard Tschumi claims to have been influenced by
Jacques Derrida’s Deconstructionist theories when designing the Parc de la
Villette in Paris, Charles Jencks has built a garden in south-west Scotland
which was prompted by his reading of Chaos Theory and there is clearly great
imaginative potential in Deleuze and Guattari’s ramblings about plateaus,
vectors, desiring machines and rhizomes. But using theory in this way is
almost parasitic – the text is just the launch ramp for ideas and visions, and
anything else would do, whether a piece of fiction, a movie or an image clipped
from a magazine. The designer can duck the more unsatisfactory aspects of
postmodern theory.
A project like Latz + Partner’s Duisburg Nord, however, operates at the
intersection of nature and culture, recognising the layers and accretions which
have created social and ecological value upon the site, and taking account of
both empirical and subjective knowledge of place. Without a scientific grasp
of the principles of site remediation, the old steelworks could never have been
made fit for public use, yet the truly creative act was an abstract relabelling,
only later reinforced by physical cues. Visitors were invited to reconsider the
site: it was not a hideous and dangerous remnant of a dirty industry, it was a
park rich in memories, cultural associations and ecological interest. The
prescription for the treatment of toxicity had to be based on scientific evidence,
but the meanings of the site were culturally constructed and therefore
malleable, though not infinitely so.
In Britain the fusion of objective and subjective knowledge is at the
heart of much of the work done by the Groundwork organisation. Its local trusts
work in partnership with communities to improve the quality of their local
environments. The trusts can supply technical know-how and help to raise
funds, but their work relies upon the subjective knowledge of those who are
intimate with the landscape. For example, the Ridgeacre Canal in the West
Midlands was an unsavoury disconnected remnant of a once important system
of waterways. To the local authority it was an urban problem and, left to its
most likely fate, it would have been filled in. It took a group of local anglers with
local knowledge to recognise its potential. Now the towpath forms a popular
pedestrian route and fishing, pond dipping and dog walking are all popular
activities. There are lessons here for the treatment of all marginal and
stigmatised places.
Synthesis: Human Nature.
The Objectivists and the Subjectivists both seem to have something to offer to
landscape architecture. For our understanding of natural science, including
botany, geology, soil science, climatology and, most importantly, ecology, we
need to retain our confidence in the procedures of science. For understanding
the way that society and culture operate, and the way that meanings, including
those attached to landscape, are constructed and reproduced, we can learn
much from postmodernism and from cultural geographers in particular. We
can accept that landscapes generate multilayered meanings and that they can
mean different things to different groups of people at different times, and also
that such meanings may sometimes clash. Designers must understand that
the meanings they seek to invest in a project will not necessarily be those that
are received by the various groups who use the designed landscape. In this
sense landscapes really are like texts, open to different readings and
reinterpretations. We do not, however, have to sign up to the sort of extreme
social constructivism that suggests that scientists just frame their experiments
to confirm what they already want to believe.
To understand the human being, both as an individual and as a
member of a species, we need a synthesis of approaches. Behaviourism was
briefly in fashion in the 1960s and 70s, but it rapidly lost credibility when
psychologists recognised that they could not do without terms that expressed
intentionality and made reference to a subjective point of view.
Phenomenology lies as the opposite end of the metaphysical spectrum and it
is currently in vogue, but in concentrating upon the contents of experience, we
are in danger of forgetting that there is a world.
Mary Midgley is a philosopher who fully acknowledges the continuity of
humans with other species. ‘We are not just rather like animals,’ she wrote in
her seminal book Beast and Man, ‘we are animals.’ (Midgley, [1979] 1995:
xxxiv) . In contradiction of the sociologists who think that the human mind is
like blank paper to be written on (not a new idea, since John Locke said the
same in the seventeenth century) and the postmodernists who think that our
nature is socially constructed and thus infinitely malleable, Midgley is quite
clear that we do have an innate nature – human nature. ‘We are creatures of
a definite species on this planet, and this shapes our values’ (Ibid: xiii).
Though she has not written about landscape preferences, she would be
unlikely to take issue with Jay Appleton, for she too is an admirer of the
ethological studies of Konrad Lorenz. People, like many other animals, she
reminds us, dislike being stared at. Our territorial instincts are revealed by our
characteristic behaviour. ‘Everywhere, not just in our society,’ notes Midgley,
rich people who have made good in crowded cities move out and make space
for themselves.’
Midgley is a principally a moral philosopher and her main concern is to
show that humans, as animals, can also be rational beings and moral agents.
Nature and culture are not, for her, opposites: ‘Man is innately programmed in
such a way that he needs a culture to complete him. Culture is not an
alternative for instinct, but its outgrowth and supplement.’ (Ibid 286).
Adopting the view that nature and culture are complementary could
bring peace in the Truth Wars. The Australian geographer Steven Bourassa
tried to broker a similar truce in the study of landscape aesthetics (1991). He
also stressed that we are animals and that we have instinctive drives which
determine our preferences, but he argued that these drives are overlain by
cultural conditioning. While biological characteristics are transmitted
genetically, cultural rules are transmitted socially, but when looking at any
piece of behaviour or any preference it can be difficult to decide what comes
from instinct and what is contributed by culture. Midgley and Bourassa say
very similar things and both seem to be on the right track. Bourassa offers a
biological explanation based on brain structure for the different origins of
instinctive emotions and learned cognitive patterns of behaviour. Midgley
might find this sort of explanation too reductive, for she is always keen to
maintain the importance of both the objective and subjective positions, not to
explain away the latter in terms of the former. Culture is not just a layer of
cultural rules which somehow blankets our instinctive selves; it is something
which is actively produced by our natures. Our instincts are not closed and
determined, like those of the honey bee’s dance, but open in a way that allows
a wide range of different behaviours.
Another important part of Midgley’s argument is that in recognising and
accepting our animal natures we do not make ourselves any the less free.
Descartes was wrong to think of animals as automata – watch your pet cat for
a while and it is soon obvious that it has a form of inner life. Observed
behaviour and the first-person view are different aspects of the same thing.
Considering a human being is rather like looking at those figure-ground
illusions: one moment one is looking at the profiles of two heads, the next at
the outline of a vase. Sometimes we are looking at a biological entity, at other
times we are considering a conscious subject with a unique position in the
world.
Maps and Aquariums.
Has any of any of this discussion helped landscape architecture to decide its
position in the Truth Wars? We seem to need something from both sides. We
cannot do without the biological sciences, geosciences or engineering, but
equally our practice has much to gain from the exploration of the investigation
of subjective experience, something which phenomenology and some of the
qualitative methods of social science seem well suited to deliver. On both
sides there are perils we can avoid. We can steer away from the crude
reductionism and determinism that erupts from time to time within the natural
sciences; similarly we can decide to have no truck with the relativism and
obscurantism that infests so much discussion in the humanities.
Once again we can turn to Mary Midgley for some eminently sensible
advice in this matter. She has observed that the world is very complex – there
are complex variations of complexity. This might make us despair, but a
characteristic response has been to try to reduce everything to a single
conceptual scheme. To show why this will not work, she asks us to consider a
typical school atlas. There are maps which describe topography, others which
show political boundaries, some that depict population statistics, still others
which show climate, or vegetation type or areas where environmental
problems are likely to occur. All of these maps are useful, all of them depict the
same world. No one is likely to suggest that the vegetation map should be
translated into a human population map (although considering these maps,
side by side, might suggest interesting relationships and hypotheses). Simon
Blackburn uses the same analogy, when he says that ‘a unique world is one
thing, but it does not need a unique description’ and asks ‘does a landscape
tell us how it is to be mapped?’. In one sense it does not. It all depends upon
your purposes, ‘you can stress what you like and be as vague or as precise as
you like, and leave out what you like’, but in another sense ‘the landscape
indeed dictates something. It dictates how it is to be mapped, given a set of
conventions determining the meanings of the signs and shapes on the map,
and the meanings of their presence or absence. That is why, once a set of
conventions has been put in place, a map can be correct or incorrect’.
(Blackburn, 2005: 157)
Midgley’s second analogy, with which I will close, is of the world as a
giant aquarium:
In fact, human life is rather like an enormous, ill-lit aquarium which we
never see fully from above, but only through various small windows
unevenly distributed around it. Scientific windows – like historical ones –
are just one important set among these. Fish and other strange creatures
constantly swim away from particular windows into areas where we
cannot see them, reappearing in other places where different lighting can
make them hard to recognise. Long experience, along with constant
dashing about between windows, does give us a good deal of skill in
tracking them. But if we refuse to put together the data from the different
windows, then we can be in real trouble. (Midgley, 2001, 101).
Of course maps may be inaccurate and there might be inconsistencies
between them which need to be corrected by further surveys. The observers
looking into the aquarium might also have their disagreements, but in principle
they are looking at the same world from different perspectives, not at myriad
subjective worlds that cannot be compared and related to one another. In
terms of a complex phenomenon like landscape we need these multiple
perspectives. We must be able to combine objective information from empirical
science with the lived experience of human subjects. We need both the
insiders and the outsiders. Both, in their own way, are experts.
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