Nature and City

In 1904, the young landscape architect Jules Buyssens was appointed as Parks and Plantations Inspector by the City of Brussels. During the exercise of this office, he was responsable for some major projects such as the restoration of the gardens of the Abbey of la Cambre/Ter Kameren and the construction of Osseghem Park as part of the 1935 World Expo. As a champion of the “New Picturesque Garden”, he devoted a great deal of attention to floral decorations, which under his policy increased considerably in number, and introduced new species. However, this article delves beyond the projects that he did within the framework of his office. It outlines the scope and diversity of his mission and places the urban policy of the City of Brussels in a national and international context.

L’histoire de la création et de la préservation des espaces verts bruxellois fut marquée, depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle, par une tension constante entre deux courants. Le premier, plus ouvert à la modernité et à l’urbanisation, envisageait l’aménagement comme la suppression d’espaces verts dans une perspective de rationalisation de l’espace urbain et périurbain répondant à des exigences esthétiques, mais également économiques, sociales et hygiénistes ; il était au surplus favorable aux influences étrangères et à une certaine standardisation européenne du style de l’art des jardins. La deuxième tendance, davantage tournée vers le passé de la ville, et notamment vers les époques médiévale et renaissante, était hostile à toute urbanisation à outrance et particulièrement soucieuse de la préservation des espaces verts anciens ; elle était également moins perméable aux apports extérieurs – que ce fût du point de vue de la gamme des végétaux ou du style de l’art des jardins – et entendait encourager la recherche et la définition d’un « goût » national ou régional en matière d’architecture du paysage.

The essays collected in Aesthetics and Environment comprise a set of variations on art and culture guided by the theme of environment.  The essays deal with the physical reality of environment such as the city, the shore, the water and the garden, but also with the virtual environment and the social one.  Environmental aesthetics is a theme whose variations are as endless as the possibilities of the human performers and conditions from which it is fashioned. 

This enticing set of essays testifies to Berleant's special talent in moving easily between both natural and human environments and opens out the contemporary discussion beyond that of the wilderness to the cultural and social environment.  Berleant argues that neither the natural nor the human environment stands alone and both are best understood as distinctions that are coextensive in experience, that one can only speak of environment in relation to human experience.  The theme of this book is that such experience suffuses the so-called natural world and shapes the human world.  He maintains the idea that in as much as people are embedded in these worlds, relationships, including human relationships, are part of them.  The melding of these two worlds leads Berleant to defend ultimately what he as termed 'social aesthetics.'

CONTENTS

I  ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS
    1  A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Environment
    2  Aesthetic Dimensions of Environmental Design
    3  Down the Garden Path
    4  The Wilderness City:  A Study of Metaphorical Experience
    5  The Fluid Environment
    6  The World from the Water
    7  Is There Life in Virtual Space?
    8  Is Greasy Lake a Place?
    9  Embodied Music

II  SOCIAL AESTHETICS
    10  The Idea of a Cultural Aesthetic
    11  The Social Evaluation of Art
    12  Subsidization of Art as Social Policy
    13  Morality and the Artist: Toward an Ethics of Art
    14  Getting Along Beautifully: Ideas for a Social Aesthetics

Can we analyze Asian cities starting from the concept of limit, although they seem intended to extend to infinity and grow in an unsustainable way? The Laboratory Nature-City of Matera, University of Basilicata (IT) is trying to answer to this question. By identifying ten urban phenomena for the reading of the nature-city, which also allow to assess its degree of resilience, the laboratory is working to verify the existence of the nature-city also in the Asian context.
Today Asian cities represent chaotic and complex urban realities, increasingly compressed into situations "at the limit" (of livability, management, control, sustainability) and always close to collapse, especially in light of recent natural disasters affecting them. The urban regeneration processes in Asian centers cannot ignore the existence of this limit and its nature, which, paradoxically, transform it by element of obstruction into a containing element, capable of releasing new spaces and times.
The detection inside of them of certain nature-city categories, such as Temporality, Insularity and Domesticity, shows how they are involved in phenomenal dynamics relating to Time, Limit and House, as for the city of Guanhzhou, which is living great transformations and whose character of vitality and intensity of differences make it a privileged field of experimentation in architecture.

The aim of this paper is to re-determine the relationship between natural and man-made elements in urban design by proposing that they be melded dynamically in the heart of the city. We formulate a design direction in which nature is treated as an equal component in shaping the urban environment. The idea that runs through our proposal is that natural and man-made elements both constitute valid components in designing the urban landscape. This proposal is made as part of the discussion about the new relationship between the natural and the artificial which has been caused by extensive urbanisation; it raises new questions and sets new terms in the relationship between the city and nature. It also brings the idea that the urban and natural environment, nature and cultural elements are interwoven and interdependent. The aim is to restore and reinforce the natural topography in the existing solid urban fabric to ensure that nature enhances the city. In other words, this is a proposal for active coexistence in which the natural element is put forward as a constituent of the urban environment and at the same time reveals the actual ground on which cities are built. In this dynamic melding of man-made and natural features, functional sites emerge for human habitation that are rich in significance and based on sustainable development.

1 INTRODUCTION - This paper traces the origins of our proposal and explains its direction as urban design based on the merging of artificial and natural elements. Our arguments are developed in the context of concerns about the new relationship between the artificial and natural that is caused by extensive urbanisation and urban sprawl. They relies on transcending the distinction between nature and culture and on the concept of a unified process that shapes the social and natural environment. The question we are raising is: how can an urban design be used to incorporate concerns about sustainable development, the idea of merging natural and urban space, the necessity of the times for dispersion, and the logic of a dynamic process? Recent design approaches venture to determine a closer relationship between the constructed and the natural world, either through an "organic" concept, or giving precedence to ecological concerns, or even revealing the land on which new structures are "accommodated". Our approach is not focused so much on new buildings or on the renewal of suburban or abandoned urban areas, but rather on the densest part of the urban landscape, and treats natural features as component "materials" on an equal basis with artificial ones. It restructures present-day barricaded and circumscribed enclaves of nature (parks, gardens, trees), placing the natural environment in the heart of the urban fabric in such a way that the subsoil (the buried physical substratum) is brought to the surface to claim an equal position in shaping the human environment. This approach goes beyond the traditional logic of treating natural features in cities as "second nature". It goes together with contemporary paradigms of planning, an example of which is presented here. Our proposal for the dynamic coexistence of nature and city, and for showing the land on which cities are built, is presented through a design direction which, having Athens as case study, can become a direction in which urban landscapes can evolve on the basis of synergy with natural elements.

A written text does not read the soul of its readers, and it does not have a question and answer relationship. Since the author is absent, they also cannot correct the misunderstandings made by the reader, which makes the text inferior to true rhetoric. But what does this mean for Plato’s own work? Scholars like Daniel Werner believe that Socrates does not elude us to think that Plato’s work is meaningless, but is rather a kind of philosophy of a lesser degree. However, if we analyze the exact words of Socrates at the end of the Phaedrus, we will see that Socrates breaks the fourth wall between character and the reader, by indirectly telling us that if Plato follows the true rhetoric criteria as much as possible, and admits the written work is philosophically worthless, then he can be called a lover of wisdom, or a philosopher. This is exactly what Plato does by making Socrates say that his discussion with Phaedrus was playful amusement.

Over the last years, in metropolis all over the world, the upsurge of new types of public spaces, created in vacant lots, has been revealing the tendency for the search of a closer connection of urbanites to nature and rurality.
The success of the High Line in New York or the growing of urban farming are just two examples of multiple phenomena happening in urban areas, related to the context of economic and social crisis and to a change of paradigm concerning the concept of "urban living."
A significant number of these new nature-related spaces are generated by local communities committed to create useful and meaningful collective spaces, open to all. Very often, they start as informal spaces. Sometimes, they involve the collaboration of external participants, such as artists, architects, research groups or universities. In other cases, they are adopted by public bodies and become institutionalised. Some of these spaces are ephemeral; others endure for a long time.
Which motivations, dynamics and interests lay behind these phenomena? Is there somehow, over time, a loss of the social meaning which generated the initial transformation of the space? How are the principles of public participation – enunciated by the European Landscape Convention (ELC) -, present in these processes?
Based on the study of Lisbon’s case, we will try to understand these complex processes and the place of landscape in the informal creation of public green spaces, for a new urban paradigm in the Portuguese context.