Metropolitan nature

摘要

New York's Central Park looks like a natural environment, perhaps even an isolated fragment of the original landscape of Manhattan, locked in a forest of skyscrapers. It is often portrayed in films and books as a sylvan idyll, but its creators Olmstead and Vaux sculpted and dynamited hard granite for five years to build it; and today, highspeed roadways dive under and through it. In his fascinating new book, Concrete and Clay, Central Park is what Matthew Gandy calls 'metropolitan nature'. In order to understand urban landscapes like this, says Gandy, one must see them as a new kind of mediation between nature and culture. The park was meant to be a model of 19th-century liberal democratic hopes for life in the city, but its English picturesque design was anathema to much Irish political and intellectual opinion at the time. Yet Olmstead's aesthetic vision proved acceptable to the city's elite because it powerfully inflated land values at the moment the city was becoming a major urban centre.