Standing atop a skyscraper, gazing out over the sea of buildings below, we may be tempted to call what lays before us an “urban landscape.” After all, we are admiring the stunning effect of the setting sun, the undulation of light it creates on the rooftops below at different heights, similar to the experience we have when standing on a hilltop or on a cliff by the ocean. However, what we are doing is transposing a peculiar type of experience to a context that is alien to its specificity. Landscape is used in an array of fields as an illustration of something it is not, namely, a mere visual—even two-dimensional—setting: a scenery, a view, or worse, a framework. We hear about the political landscape, the emotional landscape, or even a reduction to the suffix -scape (mindscape, tablescape) which, to put it bluntly, has not much to do with the landscape proper. Such designations strip landscape of its substance and density; it becomes an empty shell.
Green cities, no matter how environmentally friendly or sustainable, are still urban, organized for human purposes. A tree and a flower, certainly elements of nature, are not yet a landscape. Landscape is something else. It does not need to be “pristine,” uninhabited, or devoid of any mark of human labor. Nevertheless, it is essentially composed of nature, ruled by the cycles of day and night, rain and sun, growth and decay, with an abundance of life-forms beyond the human.
Landscape is neither a span of the horizon nor a background and certainly never an enclosed space. It is closer to an encounter (both subjective and objective) with the intuition of the flow of life. We seek the landscape in search of “free” nature: to experience nature as a whole or the whole of nature in one go. Although it is already a human mediation and object of subjectivation, the landscape stems from an idea of nature as the source and sustenance of biological life. That is why it is not merely a view. More than a visual composition, the landscape is about the experience of a vital realm that eludes human control (and in that sense it is the alterity of the human or technological sphere), a vital realm that we experience in direct contact, as as object of aesthetic contemplation.
Undoubtedly, cities can provide fulfilling and enriching opportunities for aesthetic perception and (not only aesthetic) encounters: walking amidst cars and tall buildings; navigating the hectic activity all around; the nuisance, adrenaline, or indifference of speeding vehicles; the sounds of rails, hoots, motors, people coming and going; entering and exiting transportation and buildings; cars; ambulances; machines; and construction work. It can be a thrilling or upsetting, even distressful, experience. The experience and impact is not at all similar if one is visiting, leisurely walking around, or if one lives or works here, rushing to be on time. The attention (or lack of) given to it makes it an aesthetic experience or not. In any case, in its base lies a different order of experience than the one triggered by standing on a clearing surrounded by trees and wildflowers, up in the mountain on a rainy day, on a windy coast, strolling across a field of lavender in the warm breeze of a summer evening or through the cultivated fields and orchards of the countryside. The difference stems from the fact that the city is anchored in a predominantly technological realm, ruled by rationalized abstractions that distance us from organic life and inorganic forces and processes that sustain it.
In the densely packed overpopulated urban domains where most of the world population is currently living, the landscape becomes an increasingly distant and alien reality. Certainly, not all cities are gray deserts. There is more nature in them than what we may notice at a first glance. Not just plants but animals and insects thrive in urban environments, in “pockets” of nature that resist or recolonize the city. Some of these pockets work as bridges to the landscape while others work as doors.
I think of bridges and doors in the footsteps of Georg Simmel, who stressed that besides connecting, bridges are objects that also separate (by building a bridge between two riverbanks, for instance, we connect the margins, but by so doing, we make their separateness more patent; we reinforce it); a door is used to open and to close, signaling the threshold between two clearly defined spaces (outside/inside). We step from one into the other, in the same movement entering one and exiting the other.
In this sense, a derelict house, a vacant lot, are doors. Be it a dandelion piercing though cracked tarmac, a fig tree growing on a weathered roof, nature grabs hold of any door left ajar and seizes it to enter the city. It is a display of vitality of those forces and processes that escape human control (just as the ruin overturns the precarious balance between human intent and gravity, mirroring the forces that shaped mountains). A rainwater puddle on a dusty ground is a world in anticipation; a whole new ecosystem can develop in it.
A bridge extends this threshold and makes it visible. While crossing it, the separation between the two sides is not only visible but experienced. We can stop and observe both ends midway, neither in one nor the other. This is a vantage point to observe both; it is the place we can see their differences (and perhaps what binds them) more acutely. By saying that a certain element in the city is a bridge to the landscape means that there is a conceptual separation that can be alleviated or shortened but not eliminated by the bridge.
The urban orchard, I believe, is one of these bridges.
Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Ovid, Guillaume de Lorris, and Luíz Vaz de Camões are a few of the authors that through time gave form to the idea of orchards as places of abundance and bliss. Be it the Odyssey with the garden of Alcinous, Ovid’s account of the myth of the Golden Age, or Plato’s Statesman, these texts speak of a blessed time when humans lived in harmony and enjoyed the bounty of delicious fruits “flowing” from trees without the need for hard work. Fruit trees planted in parks and gardens evoke this idea of effortless enjoyment and are an opportunity to broaden our aesthetic awareness and sensibility.
Especially if managed by a community, orchards constitute a ground for an augmented aesthetic experience. Augmented because soliciting a different form of engagement—here one does not simply observe, as a passer-by, but is invited to come near, to care, to pluck and taste.
Strolling along an orchard we admire colors, textures, shapes, organized in neat rows or in a motley assortment of trees, smelling the fragrance from the herbs crushed upon our walking, listening to the birds and bees and the sound of the waving branches. When we are in the orchard we are fully engaged; we actively involve all our sensory modalities simultaneously. Kinesthesia plays a role and so does the proprioceptive awareness of our internal sensations, as Arnold Berleant rightly points out. We touch the trunks, feeling their different roughnesses; we stroke leaves, noticing their thickness increasing as they grow in the season. We feel the hardness or softness of the soil, its dampness or dryness, and we notice how our body feels differently if in the shade or sun. And then we reach and pick some fruit. We touch it, observe it, smell it, and we taste it. It is not about sight only. Grabbing a pear and savoring it right there, under the tree, is part of its aesthetic richness, yet it is not merely a gustatory treat either: It is an experience that speaks to us about time.
The time in the orchard is slow, with different plants developing at different paces—strawberry, lemon, and orange trees develop so slowly that when they bloom, last year’s flowers are now, finally, maturing fruits. This is especially noticeable when we are frequent visitors of the orchard. The perception of time is a key component of what makes the orchard a “bridge.” The gradual pace of the orchard calls for an extended contemplation. Repeated visits are necessary to appreciate the richness and intensity of all that is progressively taking place. This long-term observation connects us with the different rhythms of the landscape.
In winter there is a dormant period when the orchard appears to be frozen or dead, but beneath the ground something is being prepared. Before we can notice the growing daylight, teeny spots of light green erupt in the branches. From them, flowers and leaves spring out. As the tree canopy develops, tiny buttons appear, almost invisible at first, difficult to spot hidden between the leaves, gradually developing into juicy maturity. This differs from the daily urban rhythm that seems to continue fast and steady no matter the weather or the season—deadlines must be met, deliveries completed, tasks accomplished, clock in, clock out.
The urban orchard is experienced in a multisensorial way, but it is not reducible to aesthetics. By physically interacting with it (even more if we garden it, if we participate in its care) we appreciate how different that space is from the busy streets just outside. When we stroll through the orchard, spotting ripe fruits, we are not just admiring beautiful trees, flowers, and fruits. They echo the rural fields that feed the city, and they take us there. We are reminded of what it feels like to be in the (rural) landscape, and we value our dependance on it for food, air, clean water, and also for our mental well-being. The sensorial and sentimental lead to ethical (and political) reflection: Who and what feeds the city?
Moirika Reker
Moirika Reker is a researcher at the Practical Philosophy Research Group (Praxis) of the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon. She works on aesthetics with a particular interest in the philosophy of landscape, the garden, and ruins.
