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. Landscape’s 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

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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 modernity’s 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 Koenig’s 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

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case of ‘Hollywood’ with its constellation of cultural phenomena – movies,

television and popular music, celebrity journalism, street fashion, colloquial

speech -- but of the city’s 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

California’s 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 Bender’s 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

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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 O’Hanlon: 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.

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 From a critical perspective, the pictorial dimension of landscape has

frequently been charged with duplicity. Dissecting landscape’s 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 landlord’s 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 California’s

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 Bender’s 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

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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 landscape’s 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

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landscape’s 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 pre-

pictorial 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 landscape’s 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. Landscape’s

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moral authority has been applied to both wholly human and purely natural

spaces. Frederick LePlay’s 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 Heidegger’s ‘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

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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:’

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 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 pre-

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modern world such practices were dominated by production, whether

agricultural, artisanal or industrial. In today’s 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 l’oeil 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

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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 Dürer claimed that 'the

measurement of the earth, the waters, and the stars has come to be

understood through painting.’ (quoted in Wood 1993: 46)

Dürer’s 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

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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 landscape’s 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.

Landscape’s 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

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composition, color and shadowing. Nor was Landschaft’s 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 modernity’s social and

spatial disruptions. Often termed a mediation of Edmund Burke’s aesthetic

and moral binary of ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful,’ the picturesque’s 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

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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 pseudo-

Greek 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,

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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 viewer’s 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 nation’s vulnerable and

feminized ‘heartland.’ (Daniels: 1993)

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 The appeal of such iconic landscapes is overwhelmingly conservative,

and commonly supported by that declensionist view of change that

accompanies Modernity’s 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 nation’s 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 Ireland’s gaeltacht west.

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 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 Heidegger’s 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,

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hypermodern urbanization, and unprecedented topographic, hydrographic

and ecological transformation, California, and especially its southern, semi-

desert 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 Augé as the poster-child for hypermodern,

placeless space. The region’s 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

California’s settlement history. None of its pre-Columbian peoples engaged

in permanent agriculture, and their impacts on the land were ecological more

than architectural. (Gutiérez & 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

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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 Californio’s 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 artist’s colony,

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Pasadena a wealthy health and retirement resort, Venice a bohemian seaside

development. Permitted by the state’s relaxed constitution to incorporate as

an independent municipality with a mere five hundred citizens, individual

communities gained considerable control over property regulations and land-

use 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 California’s settlement morphology reflects fin-de-siècle

ideas of the model community, which drew heavily on picturesque

precedents. Ebenezer Howard’s 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

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‘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 region’s ‘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

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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,

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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 Company’s 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

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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 settlement’s 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 Olwig’s 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 suburb’s 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.

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Century, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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English Painting 1730-1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Berg.

28
Bender, Barbara (1998) Stonehenge: Making Space, London: Berg.

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Tradition 1740-1860, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

Press.

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Maps. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.

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Landscape Theory, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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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.

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Catalina, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, and Southern California’s Shaping of

American Life and Leisure.’ Unpublished PhD dissertation, UCLA.

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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.

Gutiérrez, Ramón 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 O’Hanlon, 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.

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Culture, London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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– Identity, London and New York: Routledge.

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city’ Journal of Historical Geography 18: 121-38.

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Mythologies of Los Angeles. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of

California Press.

31
Meyerson, Harvey (2001) Nature’s 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

Britain’s Renaissance to America’s 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, 1900-

2000, pp.51-68. Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California

Press.

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in Early Complex Polities, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of

California Press.

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and Monuments, London: Berg.

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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 city’s 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