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As human populations inhabiting cities have grown dramatically, we have lost the ability to understand and even to see the natural world around us. We lack the vocabulary to describe our surroundings, and this lack of understanding limits our ability as citizens to contribute to political decisions about the landscape of cities, especially at the edges where land meets water. Bay Lexicon, a field guide to San Francisco's shoreline, is a case study in establishing a working language for hybrid landscapes. Centred on a walk along the edge of the iconic San Francisco Bay, it documents, deciphers, and classifies the places and phenomena a person encounters – and the forces, histories, and interactions that underlie what is visible. In a unique synthesis of text and drawing, Jane Wolff applies analytical and representational tools based in design and documentary work to findings from the fields of geography, environmental and cultural history, public policy, urban ecology, and landscape studies. As our cities face increasing pressure caused by climate change, we will need to reimagine them in terms that do justice to their complexity. Bay Lexicon's methods for building landscape literacy are meant for translation, adaptation, and use far beyond San Francisco Bay. Through activist scholarship that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and levels of expertise, this book examines how the landscape at the water's edge works, documents its historical evolution, brings its citizens' values to light, and frames conversations about how and why it might change.
As Christopher Columbus surveyed lush New World landscapes, he eventually concluded that he had rediscovered the biblical garden from which God expelled Adam and Eve. Reading the paradisiacal rhetoric of Columbus, John Smith, and other explorers, English immigrants sailed for North America full of hope. However, the rocky soil and cold winters of New England quickly persuaded Puritan and Quaker colonists to convert their search for a physical paradise into a quest for Eden's less tangible perfections: temperate physiologies, intellectual enlightenment, linguistic purity, and harmonious social relations. Scholars have long acknowledged explorers' willingness to characterize the North American terrain in edenic terms, but Inventing Eden pushes beyond this geographical optimism to uncover the influence of Genesis on the iconic artifacts, traditions, and social movements that shaped seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American culture. Harvard Yard, the Bay Psalm Book, and the Quaker use of antiquated pronouns like thee and thou: these are products of a seventeenth-century desire for Eden. So, too, are the evangelical emphasis of the Great Awakening, the doctrine of natural law popularized by the Declaration of Independence, and the first United States judicial decision abolishing slavery. From public nudity to Freemasonry, a belief in Eden affected every sphere of public life in colonial New England and, eventually, the new nation. Spanning two centuries and surveying the work of English and colonial thinkers from William Shakespeare and John Milton to Anne Hutchinson and Benjamin Franklin, Inventing Eden is the history of an idea that shaped American literature, identity, and culture.
The Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture considers landscape architecture’s increasingly important cultural, aesthetic, and ecological role. The volume reflects topical concerns in theoretical, historical, philosophical, and practice-related research in landscape architecture – research that reflects our relationship with what has traditionally been called ‘nature’. It does so at a time when questions about the use of global resources and understanding the links between human and non-human worlds are more crucial than ever. The twenty-five chapters of this edited collection bring together significant positions in current landscape architecture research under five broad themes – History, Sites and Heritage, City and Nature, Ethics and Sustainability, Knowledge and Practice – supplemented with a discussion of landscape architecture education. Prominent as well as up-and-coming contributors from landscape architecture and adjacent fields including Tom Avermaete, Peter Carl, Gareth Doherty, Ottmar Ette, Matthew Gandy, Christophe Girot, Anne Whiston Spirn, Ian H. Thompson and Jane Wolff seek to widen, fuel, and frame critical discussion in this growing area. A significant contribution to landscape architecture research, this book will be beneficial not only to students and academics in landscape architecture, but also to scholars in related fields such as history, architecture, and social studies.