Tag Archives: order

An example of humans trying to bring order to nature

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I recently encountered this view at The Morton Arboretum:

Here is their mission:

The Morton Arboretum is The Champion of Trees.

The Morton Arboretum is an internationally recognized tree-focused botanical garden and research center. Its 1,700 acres of beautiful tree-filled landscapes are a place of enjoyment, a vibrant hub for nature education, and a world-renowned center for scientific research that studies trees and how to sustain them. Its vision is a greener, healthier, more beautiful world where people and trees thrive together. As a nonprofit organization, the Arboretum’s mission is to collect, study, display, and conserve trees and other plants from around the world to inspire learning, foster enjoyment, benefit communities, encourage action, and enhance the environment.

On a pleasant morning, this plaza was an enjoyable place to be. At the same time, there is very little “natural” about it. Concrete and other manmade materials are around. The landscape is shaped in particular ways to direct a person’s view and they ways they can move in the space. The grass, water, and plants and trees are where humans wanted them to be. The sound of the nearby highway is present.

A garden or park or plaza brings order to nature. Wild spaces can be inhospitable to human habitation or aims. We have lots of current examples of humans attempting to bring order to nature, ranging from green lawns to Central Park to guiding the flow of water to growing food.

Whether this order is good is open for debate. It may be pleasing for humans while disrupting wild settings and habitats. It may be order from a particular perspective but not from others. What is considered ordered natural settings may very well change in the coming decades though it is hard to imagine that humans would stop pursuing this goal.

Making art out of sprawl

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The Infrastructurist comments on a story about an artist who uses sprawl and suburbia as his subject. The Infrastructurist and the story commentator suggest these images are alienating and ultimately, tragic:

The suburbs are totally self-contained, labyrinthine, and generally terrifying. The Times describes them as “static, crystalline and inorganic. Indeed, some of these streets frame retirement communities: places to move to once you’ve already been what you’ve set out to be.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

I don’t think one has to see these images as tragic. A couple of possible defenses of such images (and the one The Infrastructurist has on the story is a good one):

1. These can be seen as very ordered places. Not ordered in the sense of traditional city grid ordered but they still have a logic. The streets may be more winding but these communities seem to be centered around retail centers or parks. They may even have their own kind of beauty.

2. If one already thinks sprawl is bad, then viewing these overhead shots may just be throwing fuel on the fire. However, these images can be read as the American manifestation of particular social and cultural values: individualism and privacy as built in single-family homes and suburban streets for our cars. In America, the particular expression of these values may be best exhibited in suburbs. There are other ways suburbs/sprawl could be structured to still support those values – or perhaps these commentators would suggest these values themselves should just be done away with. But that is not a problem with these images; it is an underlying issue with sprawl and suburbs.