Another in the influential series of conference proceedings arising from the centre for scholarship on landscape design based at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, this handsome volume is the result of a joint working group bringing together Chinese and American scholars to consider the contribution gardens make to city life. Urban gardens can range from meditative retreats to ostentatious display, and, arguing that the relationship between the two is rather poorly understood, the editors have collected fifteen essays addressing the question of what gardens do in a city and how they affect the lives of the city's inhabitants.
The first part of the volume draws on expertise in garden and landscape history to provide a historical context for the question of garden space and its place in city life. Three of these first nine essays in the book depict the Chinese experience, including the commercial ‘for-profit’ gardens of 1900s Shanghai; others range from an essay on the gardens of Pompeii from Wilhelmina Jashemski (the late, world-renowned expert on the subject) to considerations of European gardens in Genoa and Vienna made by members of their respective financial elites. Jashemski's essay is an exemplary starting place, for her work on Pompeii materially changed the way that the archaeology of Roman cities was understood. Before Jashemski, little attention had been paid to how the Romans gardened, yet a third of Pompeii was green; the interplay between this green space and the built landscape is now much better studied across the empire, with attention to outdoor dining, both at home and in restaurants, space used for keeping animals and the role of green space in religious practice and cemeteries. In contrast, the essays on Chinese cities show how deeply local culture was engaged with China's extraordinarily rich natural heritage of plant species. The city is seen as a place for the display and appreciation of plant collections, and Georges Métailié makes an intriguing case that the exchange of valuable plants as cuttings followed Marcel Mauss’ model of gift exchange, strengthening urban social bonds. (However the focus on specific plant names and literary references may occasionally prove frustrating for the student of the urban fabric.)
Volume editor Michel Conan is on home ground in considering royal gardens in the city life of pre-revolutionary Paris, and his essay provides a convincing account of how gardens such as the Tuileries shaped social practices of the period, a reading informed by French theory and using details both from eyewitness descriptions and from topographical records. The conventions of such public interaction were complex and ever-shifting, as Conan shows, providing a particularly delightful account of the public ‘newsmongers’ who worked the gardens, a cross between town criers and storytellers. Shirine Hamadeh's essay on gardens in eighteenth-century Istanbul takes a line similarly informed by theory, with an emphasis on distinction, performance, ritual, consumption and public and private spheres. The discussion of the changing role of public fountains – from minor mosque adornments, to general meeting places – says much about the changing nature of public life in Istanbul at the time, as does the section dealing with the elaborate stipulations about behaviour and clothing in such spaces.
The second part of the book presents six essays on the subject of gardens in modern cities, here ranging from Tokyo to Marrakech. These essays are focused on the social functions of the gardened spaces within the nexus of city life: in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries these social functions were acknowledged explicitly and landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmstead and Joseph Paxton began to plan parks into the fabric of new building projects. An intriguing contribution by Thörbjorn Anderson considers whether public parks can be used to achieve ‘societal improvements’, as was attempted in Sweden during the mid-twentieth century. Nicholas Dagen Bloom's examination of the American new towns Columbia, Reston and Irvine finds such towns experience some of the same problems as Harlow and Milton Keynes: though planners specify large areas to be left in a ‘natural’ state, residents themselves often avoid such open spaces, finding them too wild and threatening. Sylvie Brousseau's essay on Tokyo gardens, written in strangely clunky English, forms an interesting contrast to the new town experience. Tokyo's open spaces in the post-war city have provided an extraordinary link between gardening practices of the past and future, with space for traditional practices such as the contemplation of the moon and the cherry blossom, in Western-style public parks which nonetheless provide continuity with the temple walks of the past. And an essay on home gardens in Kerala, India, particularly typifies a new kind of garden scholarship which seeks to combine techniques from anthropology to produce a descriptive account of how gardens are actually used by their occupants.
Overall the collection suggests intriguing avenues of departure for scholars of urban space who might previously have tended to underemphasize the gardened element. The range of essays shows how different cultures mediate the urban experience of the outdoors and of the ‘wild’ and the natural’, and how intentional interventions to direct behaviour in green spaces may often not achieve the desired effect. It also demonstrates how ‘structures of feeling’ may be inscribed in the city's fabric by extremely fleeting experiences, such as cherry blossom time. The politics of space are also keenly felt, as the authors show the extent to which the policies of city landscape planners have long-term implications for the fabric of conurbations and for their residents. We are left with a set of intriguing questions: to what extent do public green spaces mirror the psychic world of their inhabitants, and to what extent can they change them? For urban historians, the book adds a valuable layer to our seeing of the city.
