Nature, Aesthetic Values, and Urban Design Building the Natural City
Glenn Parsons
Abstract In this chapter, I consider the relationship between the aesthetic appreciation of the built environment and the aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment, with an eye to pursuing its implications for the role of design in urban planning. In section 1, I describe some ways of thinking about the aesthetic, common in traditional environmental thought, according to which very different forms of aesthetic appreciation are appropriate for each sort of environment. In section 2, I outline a somewhat different approach to understanding the aesthetic, one that holds out the promise of a more unified approach. In section 3, I attempt to deliver on this promise by pointing out a similarity between the ‘visual order’ of the natural environment and that of the built environment. This also reveals an important similarity in their aesthetic character. Section 4 consists of an effort to clarify this claim, and to draw out some of its ramifications for our broader understanding of urban design processes. In section 5, I conclude by considering three objections to my claim.
Much classic environmental thought rests on a sharp distinction between the natural environment, especially wilderness, and the human, or built, environment. In attempting to draw attention to the value and importance of pristine nature, many environmental thinkers have focused on what they take to be its unique qualities: ecological harmony and sustainability, for instance, as well its capacity to allow the realization of human values such as authenticity and freedom. As a contrast, they have often portrayed the human environment in a more negative light, as inherently unsustainable or ecologically destructive, for example, and construed life in the
G. Parsons, Ryerson University human environment as a technologically mediated, inauthentic, and spiritually crippling experience.131 This dichotomy remains a powerful conception, tangible in everything from the symbolism used in advertising campaigns to the rising value of cottage real estate near highly urbanized areas.
One aspect of this traditional wilderness/built-environment dichotomy, and the one I will focus on here, involves the aesthetic character of these environments.132 Whereas pristine nature, or certain parts of it at least, has become a paradigm of aesthetic appeal, the built environment is more frequently associated with ‘eyesores’, visual blight and other forms of ugliness.133 Indeed, some environmental thinkers have gone so far as to assert that the aesthetic character of wild nature, unlike that of the built environment or of art, is universally and even necessarily positive: i.e., there is not, and perhaps could not be, anything ugly in wild nature. This view, often called ‘Positive Aesthetics’ about nature, remains controversial among philosophers.134 Nonetheless, its endorsement by many within the environmental movement vividly illustrates the current tendency to see the aesthetic character of nature as categorically different from that of the built environment.
Even putting this radical view aside, one can find within the mainstream tradition of philosophical aesthetics important reasons to view the aesthetics of nature and the built environment as distinct. One of these is the central role played by the sublime in our conception of the aesthetic character of nature.135 Emerging in the early eighteenth-century as a sub-category of aesthetic experience, distinct from the beautiful, sublime experience was typically associated with vast and/or powerful phenomena in nature. As Kant describes:
Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we willingly call these objects sublime ... (1790, §28)
As Kant’s description indicates, pleasure in the sublime, unlike pleasure in the beautiful, involves a ‘negative moment’, a feeling of being overwhelmed or threatened. Yet through our removal from immediate danger, the overwhelming or threatening aspects of the object become elements in a pleasing experience, one typically described in terms of awe or rapture. In its classical form, as described by Kant, Edmund Burke, and other eighteenth-century theorists, the sublime has always been associated primarily with wilderness. Given that practical considerations mandate the removal of dangerous elements from the built environment, the sublime must be sought beyond its confines. Manicured parks, colorful songbirds, and even bustling city squares may be beautiful, but they cannot be sublime in the classical sense.
Even beauty, which is generally not taken to depend on any quality unique to either environment, has seemed to lead toward a distinction between them. For example, one influential way of understanding beauty is that offered by Formalists, who understand aesthetic experience in terms of a certain property of objects called ‘Form’. As Clive Bell explains: “Lines and colors combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of form, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call ‘Significant Form’” (Bell, 1913).136 Accounts of aesthetic appreciation focusing on Form urge the appreciator to attend to, and take pleasure in, the particular arrangements of shapes, lines and patterns in an object. On this conception of the aesthetic, a distinction once more arises between the aesthetic character of the natural and built environments, given that these environments consist of quite dissimilar forms. It is true that there are resemblances: a skyscraper may loom above a commercial street as a mountain looms over a forest, for example (Berleant, 2005, 42-43). Architects have sometimes taken inspiration from natural forms and explicitly tried to mimic them. However, these instances are by and large exceptions, and generally, the resemblances between natural and built form remain weak. An obvious example of the pervasive and fundamental variance between them is the humble right angle, a form ubiquitous in the built environment but virtually non-existent in nature (Vogel, 1998).
As mentioned, these aesthetic considerations are but one facet of a broader view of the relationship between the wild and built environments, a view on which, in the words of Holmes Rolston, “civilization is the ‘antithesis’ of wilderness” (Rolston, 1991). However, recently there has been a move to re-evaluate this view. This movement has been driven by theoretical concerns regarding the viability of the traditional wilderness/built-environment distinction, as well as a growing awareness of the extent to which our conceptions of wilderness have been shaped by, and used to defend, various political views (Cronon, 1995). As well, Andrew Light has argued that there is a more practical motivation for re-evaluating this distinction: whatever its faults may be, humans are not abandoning the urban environment. Rather, they are embracing it (Light, 2001). This means that, increasingly, the health of our overall environment will be determined by the character of cities. Consequently, any view that treats the built environment as an ‘unnatural’, and therefore unredeemable, place is unlikely to be helpful in addressing environmental concerns.
132
In keeping with common philosophical practice, I will use “aesthetic character” and “aesthetic appeal” as the most general aesthetic terms, taking “beauty” to be a specific form of aesthetic appeal. However, I do recognize that “beauty” is commonly employed as a generic term of aesthetic appraisal, and that some philosophers employ it in this way as well (Nick Zangwill, for example: see his (1995)).
133
Perhaps, as Walter (1983) suggests, this is so for North American cultures more than it is for others. The view is evident, for instance, in E.O. Wilson’s well-known ‘biophilia’ hypothesis. Wilson writes that “artifacts are incomparably poorer than the life they are designed to mimic. They are only a mirror to our thoughts. To dwell on them exclusively is to fold inwardly over and over, losing detail at each translation, shrinking with each cycle, finally merging into the lifeless fagade of which they are composed” (Wilson, 1984, 115).
134
For defenses of various forms of this idea, see: Carlson (1984), Hargrove (1989), Godlovitch (1998), Saito (1998), and Parsons (2002). For criticism, see Budd (2002).
136
On Formalism as a general view of the aesthetic, see Carroll (2001). Note that some theorists include color in the concept of form as well (Zangwill, 1999).