MODERNITY, COMMUNITY AND THE LANDSCAPE IDEA Denis Cosgrove, UCLA

Abstract Landscape has recently achieved a broad intellectual prominence as a theoretical concept across the arts humanities, and social sciences. Its complex roots and meanings are scrutinized with particular attention given to the pictorial and scenic aspects of landscape, which are here historicized in relation to processes of cultural modernization. Landscapes roots in territorially based community governed by customary law have never been wholly destroyed and an analysis of the evolution of landscapes in Southern California suggests that they are being recovered in certain respects in the context of hypermodernity. Keywords: Landscape, Modernity, Community, Picturesque, Los Angeles.

My evening walk leads me up a steep hillside, along a turning road and past an assortment of houses whose styles, as much as their prices, would astonish most visitors, towards open upper slopes covered by the grasses and shrubs of a degraded California chaparral. From the summit of my hike, depending on the clarity of the Los Angeles basin infamous air, I

gaze across high-rise offices, commercial boulevards, palm-lined residential streets, billboards and red tiled roofs that stretch to the horizon. My view from the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills sweeps from the snow-covered San Gabriel Mountains to Pacific beaches and on to the offshore islands. At night, when city lights pick out the grid of streets that structures this vast urban field, I am looking at one of modernitys iconic landscapes. (Krim: 1992)

Many of the properties on my walk have been sited and designed to capture this famous view. One of the most quoted examples of mid-century modernist domestic architecture, Pierre Koenigs Case Study House #22, is less than a kilometer away from where I stand. Cantilevered over the steep hill-slope, its entire spatial conception is governed by the illusion of flying over the city into an aerial field of twinkling lights.(Fig.1) The plate-glass walls that frame its picture view and erase the boundaries of internal and outdoor living offer just one example of the unique blend of cultural modernity and landscape that has shaped Southern California.

The Los Angeles metropolis is frequently cited as the locus classicus of an increasingly global popular culture. Not only is this true in the obvious

case of Hollywood with its constellation of cultural phenomena movies, television and popular music, celebrity journalism, street fashion, colloquial speech -- but of the citys diverse ethnic groups, languages and lifestyles, its cultural politics, its cult of the automobile, its suburban edge cities, and its residential morphology: in short, its landscape.

In these opening lines, I have used the word landscape in three distinct, if overlapping ways: to describe extended, pictorial views from the Hollywood Hills; as an idea that played a significant role in shaping Californias modernity; and as a shorthand for a blend of land and life, of physical and social morphologies, that constitutes a distinct region and community. Landscape, as Barbara Benders work so clearly demonstrates, is complex and multi-layered, difficult to categorize or to quantify. (Bender: 1993) Landscapes have an unquestionably material presence, yet they come into being only at the moment of their apprehension by an external observer, and thus have a complex poetics and politics. These characteristics make landscape frustrating for those preoccupied with conceptual clarity and definitional exactitude. From his extended treatment of the concept, the American methodologist/geographer, Richard Hartshorne (1939: 149-74, 250-84) came to the conclusion that landscape had little or no value as a

technical scientific term, adumbrating its long abandonment within his discipline. Contemporary scholarly thought, much focused on interdisciplinarity, strongly influenced by semiotics, and distrustful of rigid categorical thinking, is more responsive, so that today we see landscape revived as a significant concept in geography, architecture, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy and history. (Cosgrove: 1998, Olwig: 2002, Corner: 1999, Smith: 2003, Hirsch and OHanlon: 1995, Bender: 1993, Casey: 2002,)

The meaning of the English word landscape both encompasses framed views of specific sites and the scenic character of whole regions; it applies equally to graphic and textual images as to physical locations. (Daniels and Cosgrove: 1989) Through all these applications, landscape retains an unshakeable pictorial association, although this is no longer confined to the framed view or to aesthetic pleasure. But consistent too, as Chris Tilley (1994), Ken Olwig (2002) and others have insisted, is the sense that the pictorial in landscape incorporates a more visceral and experiential reference.

From a critical perspective, the pictorial dimension of landscape has frequently been charged with duplicity. Dissecting landscapes capacity to naturalize social or environmental inequities through an aesthetics of visual harmony, geographers and art historians have long recognized that Georgian landscapes, superficially paradigms of English social and environmental order, were often painstakingly constructed by rapacious landowners in the course of destroying more communal but less profitable fields, farms and dwellings. (Barrell: 1980, Bermingham: 1986, Daniels: 1999) In the creation of landscape, impoverished laborers were removed from the landlords view and relocated in model villages. In his ironically titled Lie of the Land, Don Mitchell (1996), has also used landscape critically, to expose the inequities of capitalist agriculture, migrant labor exploitation and racism hidden below the Edenic images of Californias agricultural scenery, while W.J.T. Mitchell (2002: 10) examined the complicity of landscape visions with colonial exploitation, referring to landscape as the dreamwork of imperialism. The politics of Stonehenge, a paradigm British landscape, has been one of Barbara Benders enduring interests. (Bender: 1998) We are not obliged to reduce landscape so completely to a hegemonic tool in the cultural politics of land in order to recognize that its semantic

evolution has been a linguistic expression of the complex cultural processes that mark the social evolution of the modern world. I refer to this as the history of the landscape idea, a characteristically modern way of encountering and representing the external world: in its pictorial and graphic qualities, in its spatiality and ways of connecting the individual to the community, as well as in such forms of representation as maps, paintings, photographs, and movies. Some twenty years ago I began exploring the roots of the landscape idea, laying quasi-exclusive emphasis on changing landed property relations in the mercantile urban regions of early-modern Europe. (Cosgrove: 1984, 1993) I want to revisit that discussion in order to explore why landscape remains potent enough today to shape not only the way I and others actually connect to such a quintessentially modern place as Los Angeles, but to help account for many of the forms and patterns that actually exist in the geography of Southern California, and which shape increasingly large parts of the contemporary world.

I open with a discussion of landscapes conceptual role in articulating a response to the characteristically modern question of community in its spatial expression, and seek to show how this constituted the original synthesis of the territorial and the pictorial. I then examine ways that

landscapes moral authority, articulated through landscape representations, has been extended spatially to territorializing the imagined community of the nation state. Finally, I discuss how landscape, thoroughly naturalized as a picturesque expression of utopian social and environmental relations, has played a role in shaping a wholly modern space such as Southern California, and has thus come full circle, generating social spaces that bear intriguing similarities in structure and process, if not in form, to the original and prepictorial meaning of landscape in the German Landschaft.

Landscape and community Landscape is a connecting term, a Zusammenhang. Much of its appeal to ecologists, architects, planners and others concerned with society and the design of environments lies in landscapes capacity to combine incommensurate or even dialectically opposed elements: process and form, nature and culture, land and life. Landscape conveys the idea that their combination is or should be balanced and harmonious, and that harmony is visible geographically. Balance and harmony carry positive moral weight, so that a disordered or formless landscape seems something of a contradiction. Scenic values thus come to act as a moral barometer of successful community: human, natural or in combination. Landscapes

moral authority has been applied to both wholly human and purely natural spaces. Frederick LePlays triad of place, work and folk was graphically expressed by the Scottish architect, ecologist and regionalist Patrick Geddes as the valley section, where human activities arise out of organic connections with the land and express themselves in an evolving series of settlement landscapes. (Steele: 2003) A similar idea was powerfully expressed in Martin Heideggers Building, dwelling, thinking. (Heidegger: 1978) In the USA, landscape has more often been applied to wilderness spaces, often wholly devoid of human presence (although commonly produced by the active removal of human communities), where balance and harmony are believed to depend upon the absence of permanent habitation. (Meyerson 2001, Neumann 1998) What the designation landscape brings to all these diverse spaces is the idea that their qualities as dwelling places (biotic, animal, human) are rendered visible in pictorial form.

The immediate question that arises from this is precisely how the pictorial form of space came to be so closely tied to ideals of natural and human community. Kenneth Olwig (2002) has recently argued that the Germanic Landschaft applied originally to quite specific locations in the North Sea and Western Baltic regions. Landschaft and its cognates in the

Scandinavian languages are still used as a descriptor for administrative regions in parts of Frisia and Schleswig-Holstein. The physical character of these low-lying marshlands, heaths, and offshore islands is, he suggests, important in understanding this foundational usage. These have always been relatively impoverished regions, marginal to the interests of monarchs and aristocrats, more concerned to control, own, and tax more fertile and accessible territories and mercantile cities. Location on the borderlands of the Danish kingdom and the German states reinforced the opportunities for considerable local autonomy, and Olwig (2002: 16) points out that their designation as Landschaften denotes a particular notion of polity rather than . . . a territory of a particular size. Critical to their designation as landscapes was that these were regions in which customary law, determined by those living and working in an area, extended over and defined the territorial limits of the Land. Custom and culture defined a Land, not physical geographical characteristics [nor fixed territorial scale]it was a social entity that found physical expression in the area under its law. (Olwig 2002: 17) The unity of fellowship and collective rights, and the physical area over which these held sway, constituted the Landschaft. It is a spatiality expressed by Heidegger in a key passage from Building, dwelling, thinking:

A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely, within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered by virtue of a location Accordingly, spaces receive their being from locations and not from space. (Heidegger 1978: 332. Original emphasis)

In this respect, the root sense of Landschaft finds parallels in most European languages, although the precise legal situation may vary from that to be found along the North Sea coasts. The English word countryside, the French payage, the Italian paesaggio and the Spanish paisaje are similarly social, and scale-flexible, denoting a collective relationship with land more than a specifically bounded territory.

The localized combination of community, custom, and land might be expected to give rise to visibly apparent morphological distinctions between individual Landschaften. But scenic aspects are not denoted by the Germanic word and its cognates. Landschaft thus points primarily to a spatiality constituted through social and environmental practice. In a pre10

modern world such practices were dominated by production, whether agricultural, artisanal or industrial. In todays landscapes, they are increasingly dominated by consumption.

Landscape and scenery The scenic dimension became attached to landscape in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The designation of landscape as a type of painting was first made by Italian connoisseurs, but was applied primarily to Northern European art works. (Gombrich 1966) It was in cities where Flemish and Italian cultural influences met and mixed most fully, and where map-making, engraving and printing became major industries by 1500 north east Italy and southern Germany - that schools of landscape paintings first become distinguished. (Gibson 1989, Alpers 1983) In Venice, the taste for paintings of landscape paralleled a demand for pastoral poetry, arcadian writing and actual landscape views among patrician families investing heavily in the land improvement through drainage, irrigation, new-word crops and new labour practices. Newly constructed villas were decorated with idyllic trompe loeil landscapes that harmonized imaginary scenes of ancient Roman villa life with views of the rustic world surrounding them. (Cosgrove 1993) In south German cities such as Augsburg, Ulm and

11

Nuremburg, landscape paintings and engravings reflected rather different commercial and political realities. On the one hand, appropriately in the city where the Fuggers capital financed political and commercial schemes of global reach, landscape paintings captured vast almost global scenes within tiny, jewel-like frames, often referred to as cosmographies. On the other, as chorographies expressing a desire for local connectedness, landscapes depicted and celebrated the countryside immediately surrounding the city. Referring to these images, Albrecht Drer claimed that 'the measurement of the earth, the waters, and the stars has come to be understood through painting. (quoted in Wood 1993: 46)

Drers words capture the shifting meaning of landscape in the early modern world: no longer the undifferentiated space of unreflective social dwelling and pagan attachment to land, but earth, sea and stars conceptualized; no longer space regulated through the customary practices of daily life, but nature measured across the surface of paintings and maps. Olwig (2002) has charted the political process whereby the early 17th century Stuart court sought to unify its new national territory the country under the natural authority of divine right and to subordinate local custom. An element of this was the emerging culture of measured and

12

scenic landscape: apparent in courtly theater and masque, in prospect poetry, in projects for mapping the realm, and in landowners commissions to Dutch artists for estate paintings.

The terminology and formal expression of landscapes shift to incorporate the graphic and pictorial varied geographically. But, whether applied to the estate, the city region or the national state, landscape was consistently reformulated as an idea that bounded and mapped territorialized spaces onto lands, paese, and pays, by means of such mathematical and graphic techniques as perspective, projection, geometry and trigonometry. A distanciated and aesthetic connotation was layered over the affective, quotidian relationship of land and social life.

Landscapes affective sense was not erased. Indeed, makers of landscape images commonly sought consciously to represent the supposedly organic relationship between community and land as enduring, even as they confined its signifiers to such marginal and decorative items as passing swains and their animals, quaintly rustic cottages and ancient ruins, commonly placed the dark side of the landscape, and harmonized the image of land and life through the sophisticated techniques of pictorial

13

composition, color and shadowing. Nor was Landschafts spatial flexibility lost, indeed through a scale jump landscape came to accommodate the newly significant idea of modern nationhood.

Picturesque landscape and the national community In the late 18th century the pictorial techniques developed for representing landscape were theorized in the aesthetics of the picturesque, a philosophical term born directly out of landscape discourse, and a fusion of aesthetics and moral thinking provoked directly by modernitys social and spatial disruptions. Often termed a mediation of Edmund Burkes aesthetic and moral binary of sublime and beautiful, the picturesques defining visual characteristics were roughness, wildness and irregularity. In the contemporary context of Romanticism and Jacobinism these words carried powerful social and moral as well as visual significance. The picturesque encapsulated a wide-ranging debate in late Georgian England about the social, political and moral health of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing nation facing the challenge of a revolutionary and territorially ambitious France. Touching in Britain on such contentious internal matters as enclosure of common lands, removal of village communities for emparkment, and planting conifers for short-term commercial profit rather

14

than oaks that would provide naval timber generations hence, and even on colonial slavery, the debate over the look of the land involved the patriotism of landscape improvement: its allegiance to various geographical identities, local and national, provincial and metropolitan, English and British. (Daniels 1999: 2) Pictorial, cartographic and parkland landscapes offered media through which questions of national identity were debated, in the period when the modern British state was being imagined and constructed. In this context, picturesque landscape quickly escaped the patrician confines of park design to become a field of concern for a growing bourgeoisie in the late 18th century. Picturesque was applied to a style of seeing and representing that took a nostalgic pleasure in the signs of roughening through age, longevity and decay; a sentiment that we can easily recognize as a response to the cultural uprooting and displacement associated with carboniferous modernization. The word nostalgia, a pseudoGreek neologism that combines the sense of bodily pain (algia) and returning home (nostos), was coined as a quasi-medical condition in these very years. Picturesque landscape images, while easily drained of the explicit social concerns of early theorists, sustained the dream of a harmonious, organic connection between a locality and its community,

15

visible in the historical depth of dwelling, but consistently threatened by, if not already lost to, the past. Positioned outside the pictorial landscape, materially and affectively, the viewers response to the image cannot be other than sentimental and nostalgic.

Study within geography, art and cultural history has demonstrated the consistency with which picturesque landscape became deployed in the construction and communication of nationalism in late 19th and 20th century Europe and colonial settler states. (Daniels: 1993, Mitchell: 2002, Schama: 1995) The process is a complex one, and it continues today. In every modern nation, pictorial icons of specific regional scenery have been generalized, often through the medium of art itself, as iconic of the whole nation. Thus in Britain, a home counties scenery of lowland chalk downs, wide river valleys with slow-flowing perennial streams, compact villages and stone churches set among a hedgerow mosaic of garden-like fields, sometimes with distant views of sea cliffs and bays, leaps scale through the popularity of paintings by John Constable, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and successor artists, to become figured as the whole nations vulnerable and feminized heartland. (Daniels: 1993)

16

The appeal of such iconic landscapes is overwhelmingly conservative, and commonly supported by that declensionist view of change that accompanies Modernitys commitment to progress. It is thus a simple and predictable step from promoting the pictorial or scenic qualities of specific regions as embodying essential qualities of a nations territory and people, to seeking to fix their origins and preserve and protect them from change. Precisely because such spaces are deemed to embody natural and immemorial qualities they become embraced as patrimony: archaeological and historical sites, ever threatened by the progress and modernization that also underpin nationalism. Landscapes are freighted with what Svetlana Boym (2002) calls reflective as opposed to restorative nostalgia. The former emphaisizes the bittersweet pain of longing and loss (algia) and dwells upon ruins, on the patina of time and history, on uncanny silences and absences, and on dreams. (By contrast, restorative nostalgia emphasizes nostos: rebuilding the lost home and patching the memory gaps). Of course, landscape conservation today can take both forms. Indeed, It is not therefore surprising that nations devote significant amounts of often scarce resources to maintaining not only the physical morphology but also the social form and expression of such iconic landscapes as Irelands gaeltacht west.

17

Preservation, protection, conservation, sustainability: while each of these terms parses a slightly differently a similar goal of arresting or at least negotiating the social and environmental impacts of change with the intention of sustaining values inherited from the past, they all reflect the same contradiction of modernity: the belief in improvement and progress generates its opposite in tradition, whose poignancy bespeaks a sense of loss commonly interpreted as a sign of a more existential alienation. This is a discourse that reaches through virtually every aspect of modern thought, from our approach to the threatened flora and fauna of the natural world, through scholarly disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology to cultural heritage and museology. Landscape is significant within this quintessentially modern discourse precisely because it puts into material form the matter of dwelling, to adopt Heideggers sense of pulling together earth, sky, the divinities (in the pagan sense of the life-sustaining natural elements and forces) and the mortals, individually and collectively.

California: landscape and the dialectics of modernity With these thoughts in mind, we can return to Southern California. With a permanent settlement history of scarcely two centuries, lacking any tradition of pre-modern agriculture, a 20th century experience of explosive,

18

hypermodern urbanization, and unprecedented topographic, hydrographic and ecological transformation, California, and especially its southern, semidesert zone, represents for many observers the very antithesis of landscape as a local integration of community life and regional nature. Indeed, Southern California has consistently been held up by cultural critics from Evelyn Waugh and Gertrude Stein through Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco to Paul Virilio to Michel Aug as the poster-child for hypermodern, placeless space. The regions historic and geographic reality is, predictably, more complex. And ironically, in its very hyper-modernity, contemporary California may be returning us to something remarkably parallel, if not exactly similar, to the premodern experience from which the landscape idea diverged.

It is not possible to offer here more than a brief synopsis of Southern Californias settlement history. None of its pre-Columbian peoples engaged in permanent agriculture, and their impacts on the land were ecological more than architectural. (Gutirez & Orsi: 1998) The short-lived Spanish-Mexican settlement may be traced today as remnant forms in the toponymies and cadastral patterns of the rancho system, and in the spine of mission, presidio and pueblo settlements, but it lacked the intensity of occupance necessary to

19

leave a lasting landscape impression. Indeed it endured principally in the mythic Spanish culture and romantic lifestyle through which Anglos marketed Southern California as a Mediterranean arcadia within a mere three decades of having erased the Californios world. Warm climate, balmy air, natural beauty, and a leisured life were promoted to financially comfortable mid-westerners as an escape from the rigors of Prairie winters, crowded, smoky and tuberculosis-ridden industrial cities, and their growing ethnic diversity for a bucolic life in a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant cottage community set among citrus groves against the backdrop of snow-capped Sierras. Competitively cheap rail fares and exotic landscape images on rail posters and orange boxes played no small role in bringing large numbers of these people and their capital into Southern California. The region was from the start conceived as much as a space of consumption as of production, and a principal object of consumption was the natural landscape itself.

A characteristic settlement form emerged in Southern California during its first period of rapid urbanization between 1880 and 1920. Former rancho land grants were subdivided and sold as small-scale communities, often with a distinctive character: Anaheim was a utopian German settlement, Hollywood a temperance community, Malibu an artists colony,

20

Pasadena a wealthy health and retirement resort, Venice a bohemian seaside development. Permitted by the states relaxed constitution to incorporate as an independent municipality with a mere five hundred citizens, individual communities gained considerable control over property regulations and landuse statutes, often adopting exclusionary tactics to prevent the influx of undesirable ethnic or religious groups. However indefensible, these actions bear some resemblance to the customary practices that once defined the European Landschaft. Around the former pueblo of Los Angeles, a network of electric tramways opened land for such developments, linking them into a loose regional settlement pattern. (Banham: 1971, Hise: 1999, McLung: 2000)

Southern Californias settlement morphology reflects fin-de-sicle ideas of the model community, which drew heavily on picturesque precedents. Ebenezer Howards Tomorrow, a peaceful path to real reform, was one of many tracts offering a solution to the ills of industrial modernization. (Howard: 1902) His garden city was to be a self-governing municipality of no more than 60,000 people, designed with large areas of open space, boulevards, zoned land uses and residences individually set in gardens. Domestic architecture took the nostalgic, anti-modern form of the

21

arts and crafts movement, reworking the form of the bungalow adopted from colonial India.(King: 1984) The impact of these ideas on the generally well-educated, monied and often self-consciously progressive settlers of Southern California remains visible in the regions craftsman style bungalows, large lots, wide, tree-lined boulevards and early zoning ordinances controlling non-conforming land uses.

Early, widespread ownership of automobiles allowed individual communities to expand well beyond the constraints of the light rail system, and by the 1940s had lined the boulevards with the gas stations, motels, drive-in gas stations, restaurants and movie houses, and billboards of the American strip. This was a truly modern landscape of consumption, designed to be accessible by car and viewed and experienced kinetically and serially, from the automobile windscreen. (Figs.2,3). Ott: 2000) The automobile also opened up an extensive region of mountains, deserts and forests to leisure hungry Southern Californians. Parkways and highways were constructed with the principal goal of servicing the consumption of landscape and scenery. Wartime industrialization and the huge population growth of the Fordist 1950s would see the orange groves, nut orchards and bean fields that surrounded the original settlements subdivided for new

22

suburbs of standardized, mid-century modern bungalows, on restricted garden lots to be sure, but with picture windows designed to bring the external scene into domestic space.(Fig.4) Today indistinguishable within the urban field, except by their signed designation on the roadside or on the political map, and overlain with the markers of very different ethnic and cultural groups from their original residents, these communities nevertheless retain traces of the social and scenic ideals that the modern suburb owes to the picturesque tradition of landscape.

It was at the extreme edges of the Los Angeles metropolis, in the desert and oasis settlements of the Coachella Valley, that the landscape idea helped define the elements of a settlement form that increasingly characterizes 21st century urban neighborhoods globally. In the late 1940s a group of screen actors and movie industry associates, attracted to Palm Springs as a relaxed vacation spot within easy automobile reach of Hollywood, purchased the Thunderbird Ranch for development as a country club, and initiated a novel way of financing their venture. (Culver: 2004) The golf course at the core of the development would be financed by the sale of residential lots marked out along its fairways and around the greens.(Fig.5) House design would be restricted to single story, low,

23

rambling ranch houses, while a homeowners association enforced deed restrictions governing the maintenance and appearance of the visible spaces of the community, both private and public. The entire development was gated to exclude all but residents and guests, while the golf course, green with imported fescue and watered from deep desert wells, was the focus of its civic life.(Fig.6) Air conditioning and fast freeways to Los Angeles allowed the recreational home in the desert to become a permanent family residence. Partly through the national televising of its Bob Hope golf tournament, the Thunderbird Ranch soon came to represent a leisured lifestyle option promoted and desired across America, beatified when Ford Motor Companys chose Thunderbird as the name for its 1955 sports car.

Landscape in all its various meanings and representations is the defining feature of the covenant, gated, golf-course suburb that, from its Palm Springs origins has now evolved into the dominant form of exurban community in North America and across many parts of Asia and the Pacific Rim. In the pictorial and picturesque sense of landscape, the golf course whose form controls the overall settlement plan, and whose originating morphology was the turf-covered glacial dunes, or links of the Scottish east coast, is the anodyne successor of 18th century English picturesque

24

parkland, with its combination of gentle grassy slopes, serpentine pathways, copses and rough land edges. The house style of the golf-course suburb is determined by its views over the greens or natural scenery beyond. The scenic sense of landscape is thus the design Leitmotif to this form of settlement. The second sense of landscape, as an idea, which so powerfully shaped early Anglo settlement in Southern California, continues in this contemporary materialization of the dream of community, realized in pleasing physical surroundings. Finally, landscape as a harmonious balance of nature and culture shapes the settlements design language, if not its environmental practices. Although the verdant rolling hills, sandy bunkers and rough of the golf course are almost always engineered spaces, often alien to the surrounding natural environment, and requiring vast outlays of resources for maintenance, and while the residential architecture has become entirely standardized and largely disconnected from local climate, topography and tradition, the formal illusion of leisured consumption is carefully inscribed in all visible features of these spaces.

Conclusion It is easy to criticize the exurban, gated community, with its exclusionary restrictions, master-planned picturesque design conceits and

25

contingent connections with the history and physical geography of its location as inauthentic and placeless, an unhomely (unheimlich), pastiche landscape that utterly fails to pull together earth, sky, the divinities and other humans into true dwelling. (Heidegger: But it is more accurate to see it as one expression of the characteristic modern sensibility of nostalgia. It expresses the restorative nostos - return to home - rather than the reflective algia, the bittersweet pain of loss and ruin. And a more measured look at these residential consumption spaces discloses some noteworthy parallels with those premodern Landschaften from which the pictorial sense of landscape historically diverged. These are self-regulating communities, quasi-independent politically from the major cities to which they are functionally attached, raising revenues and purchasing such public services as police, waste disposal, education, health and welfare, and developing customary local laws to regulate land uses and appearance. Land is a dominating concern in their community life, although it produces capital value and amenity rather than subsistence. As in Olwigs designation of Landschaft, the exurban community is a social entity that [finds] physical expression in the area under its law. (2002:17) Significantly, such communities have prospered as the social welfare character of the modern

26

state has eroded, and its public revenues and moral authority weakened, and they are located in the interstices of regulated metropolitan space. It appears that we have come full circle. A defining historical feature of modernity has been rural depopulation and the destruction of Landschaften. Karl Marx saw modernity as the capture of the countryside by the city; and Henri Lefebvre wrote of the complete urbanization of society. (Lefebvre: 1970) But in many parts of the world this process has reached a point where city, country and urbanization are of diminished analytic value. Suburb, an arcadian middle space of dwelling, has emerged since the early 19th century as the authentic spatial expression of modern consumption. (King: 2004) And, through the visual language of the picturesque, landscape is the suburbs geographical expression as a consumption space. If such landscape is duplicitous, it is less through obscuring the realities of production, for these have been globally displaced, than in masking a scale and rapacity of material consumption that threatens the sustainability of physical and bio-geographies and thus of dwelling.

Spread before me on my evening walk therefore, is more than a visual icon of 20th century hypermodernity. The Los Angeles metropolis represents one albeit signal - stage in the complex and historically

27

extended evolution of cultural transformation in which visions of social order and homeliness, and ideals of harmony between land and human life become instantiated in the material forms of landscape. Cultural dismissal of such spaces is conservative and reactionary. (Hayden: 2004) The task is to exploit the ambiguities embedded in landscape, as dwelling and picture, to discover ways of understanding and engaging with its varied and always rich meanings.

Alpers, Svetlana (1983) The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Banham, Rayner 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, London: Allen Lane. Barrell, John (1980) The Dark Side of the Landscape. The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bender, Barbara (1993) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, London: Berg.

28

Bender, Barbara (1998) Stonehenge: Making Space, London: Berg. Bermingham, Ann (1986) Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Boym, Svetlana (2002) The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books. Casey Edward S. (2002) Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Corner, James (1999) Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Theory, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cosgrove, Denis (1998 (1984,)) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, 2nd edn., Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Cosgrove, Denis (1993) The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth Century Italy, Leicester: Leicester University Press. Culver, Lawrence (2004) The Island, the Oasis, and the City: Santa Catalina, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, and Southern Californias Shaping of American Life and Leisure. Unpublished PhD dissertation, UCLA. Daniels, Stephen (1993) Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States. Cambridge: Polity Press.

29

Daniels, Stephen (1999) Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Daniels, Stephen and Cosgrove, Denis (1989) Introduction: Iconography and Landscape, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, pp. 1-10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, Walter S. (1989) Mirror of the Earth The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gombrich, E.H. (1966) The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape in Gombrich, E.H. Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, pp. 107-21. London: Phaidon. Gutirrez, Ramn and Orsi, Richard J. (1998) Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Hartshorne, Richard (1939) The Nature of Geography Lancaster, Penn: Association of American Geographers. Hayden, Dolores (2004) A Field Guide to Sprawl, New York/London: W.W. Norton.

30

Heidegger, Martin (1978) Building, dwelling, thinking in David Farrell Krell ed: Martin Heidegger: Basic writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking, pp.319-340. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Hirsch, Eric and OHanlon, Michael (1995) The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hise, Greg (1997) Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century City, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Howard, Ebenezer (1902) Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Reprinted 1946, edited with a Preface by F. J. Osborn and an Introductory Essay by Lewis Mumford, London: Faber and Faber. King, Anthony D. (1984) The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. King, Anthony (2004) Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture Urbanism Identity, London and New York: Routledge. Krim, Arthur (1992) Los Angeles and the anti-tradition of the suburban city Journal of Historical Geography 18: 121-38. Lefebvre, Henri (1970) La Revolution Urbaine, Paris: Gallimard. McLung, William Alexander (2000) Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press.

31

Meyerson, Harvey (2001) Natures Army: When Soldiers Fought for Yosemite, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press Mitchell, Don (1996) The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2002) Landscape and Power 2nd ed., Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Neumann, Roderick P. (1998) Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa, Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press. Olwig, Kenneth (2002) Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic: From Britains Renaissance to Americas New World, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ott, John (2000) Landscapes of Consumption: Auto Tourism and Visual Culture in California, 1920-1940, in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein and Ilene Susan Fort (eds) Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 19002000, pp.51-68. Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press. Schama, Simon (1995) Landscape and Memory, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Smith, Adam T. (2003) The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority

32

in Early Complex Polities, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Steele, Tom (2003) Patrick Geddes: Geographies of the Mind, the Regional Study in the Global Vision <http://melior.univmontp3.fr/ra_forum/en/people/steele_t/steele.html#Anchor-35882> Tilley, Christopher (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments, London: Berg. Wood, Christopher S. 1993 Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, London: Reaktion Books.

Figure captions Fig.1 Case Study House #22 by Pierre Koenig. (Photo by Julius Schulman; Getty Research Institute; Reproduced with permission) Fig.2 View East along 3rd Street at Fairfax Avenue in 1921. The La Brea oilfield occupies lands formerly occupied by bean fields and pasture. (Spence Air Photo collection; Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA) Fig.3 View East along 3rd Street at Fairfax Avenue in 1954. Within thirty years both agricultural and oil fields have been replaced by an auto landscape. The citys first drive-in gas station may be seen to the bottom left, and a drive in movie centre right. (Spence Air Photo collection; Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA)

33

Fig.4 Post-war suburban development in the Los Angeles basin. Tract houses at Lakewood 1950. (Spence Air Photo collection. Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA) Fig.5 Residential development along the fairways at Thunderbird Country Club, Rancho Mirage, California, 1959 (Spence Air Photo collection. Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA) Fig.6 The original golf-course suburb: Thunderbird Country Club, Rancho Mirage, California, 1959 (Spence Air Photo collection. Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA)

34