A City Is Not a Park – Natural Landscape as Urban Design

• In Event: Social Sciences of the Artificial: Interrupting and Interrogating the Meanings of Design

Abstract

In 2019, London became the world’s first National Park City, the endpoint of a campaign to re-orient the city as a specifically natural environment – indeed, to turn urban design in London away from ‘industrial sites, houses, roads and rail lines’ and towards ‘a richly woven tapestry… of gardens, rivers, parks, woodland, nature reserves, canals, meadows, woodland, allotments, streams and lakes.” In support, the international “luxury architecture” firm WATG released an image of Fleet Street, showing the north of the iconic street, looking toward St Pauls, with the road and footpath replaced by a highly manicured garden; in the computer-generated scene, couples check their phones on decking surrounded by shrubbery; eighteenth-century buildings are covered in carefully-pruned leaves and vines; a lone cyclist moves silently between the plants.

In this paper, drawing on interviews with designers, architects and psychologists, as well as archival research on the history of urban greening in London, I work through the speculative and imaginary economy of the green city in urban design. Starting with Christopher Alexander’s famous declaration that the city ‘is not a tree,’ and the distinction between the articular and natural city that this distinction relies upon, I ask what it means to ground the design of the contemporary city in committedly anti-urban and post-artificial tropes. Rooting this movement in particular histories of psychological thought, I ask: how might we re-think the politics and technics of urban design, if the city becomes a park?

Author

• Des Fitzgerald, Cardiff University