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La nature citadine en France et au Royaume-Uni Concevoir, vivre, représenter
Edited by Marie Mianowski, Sylvie Nail & Pierre Carboni
Collection Interférences Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015 Paperback. 212 pp. ISBN
978-2753542853. €17
Reviewed by Hugh Clout University College
London
As a suburban
Londoner, my word association game gives the following results when I think of
‘urban nature’: private back gardens with grass and flowers, municipal parks,
open commonland, city ‘squares’, wild birds feeding in the back garden, urban
foxes snoozing in the day and prowling at night. Some but not all of these
verbal cues appear in La nature citadine,
which adopts more of an ‘arts and humanities’ approach than a ‘social sciences’
one. Edited by colleagues from the Université de Nantes, the collection is
composed of eleven essays drafted by fourteen authors based in a range of
disciplines from civilisation britannique
through history and ethnology to architecture, languages and literature. As the
editors explain, the collective enterprise is transdisciplinary in perspective: L’objet du présent ouvrage est premièrement de dépasser la double
opposition technique-art, et nature-culture et de montrer comment, au fil des
siècles et selon les aires géographiques, l’homme a construit un environnement
urbain dans lequel la place laissée à la nature a traduit l’ambition plus ou
moins affermée de développer un humanisme paysager. [12] Following a preface
by Bernadette Lizet, the first cluster of essays appears under the heading
‘Entre pittoresque et entropie’, with a sharply focused sub-heading: ‘Nature et
esthétique en Écosse au XVIIIe siècle’. John Lowrey opens the volume with an
examination of three parliament buildings in Edinburgh, with particular
attention being given to the former Royal High School at Calton Hill. From this
close view of individual buildings and their interior, the second essay, by
Clarisse Godard Desmarest looks out to the construction of suburban mansions
around the city, many of which commanded views out into the strikingly diverse
surrounding countryside. The third contribution, by Pierre Carboni, adopts a
very different approach by presenting some of the works of James Thomson
(1700-1748), a little-known poet and propagandist of Whig ideology, who was
fascinated by the presence of nature in the urban environment. Carboni concludes: En dépit de l’étrangeté de son expérience et de l’obsolescence de son
esthétique, l’œuvre de Thomson, archétype méconnu de l’éco-poésie moderne, ne
laisse pas d’interroger notre sensibilité et notre conscience contemporaines de
citoyens de la biosphère. [69] The second cluster of extremely diverse essays, entitled ‘La nature
urbaine : un humanisme pour qui ?’, adopts an interrogative stance. In an
extremely interesting piece, Hélène Ibata throws light on ‘panoramas’ that were
used to depict British landscapes and townscapes in the early nineteenth
century. This particular form of representation was invented in 1789 by a
Scots-Irish painter named Robert Barker. An abrupt change of theme brings the reader
to Claire Boulard Jouslin’s discussion of depictions in British magazines for
ladies during the second half of the eighteenth century of landscapes, plants
and animals found in exotic parts of the world. Thus, ‘la géographie
est donc perçue comme une science de la diversité physique mais aussi de la singularité
visuelle’ [89]. A real leap through time and space then introduces the
tragic loss of population in Liverpool between 1930 and 1980, when the city’s
inhabitants declined by half. War damage and slum demolition policies caused
this collapse; subsequent regeneration schemes introduced public open space as
well as improved housing at lower densities than before. Sylvie Nail charts the
creation and evolution of Everton Park as part of a programme for ‘greening the
city’. Crossing the Channel, Renaud Bécot shows how the small town of Fougères
faced the challenge of de-industrialisation in the 1960s and 1970s, and devised
a scheme to transform its old working-class image by enhancing its environment
of buildings and open spaces with the promotion of tourism in mind. Similar
thinking lay behind the designation in 2004 of the Liverpool waterfront as a
World Heritage Site. In the fourth essay in this section, Anne-Solange Muis and
Hasim Pittavana Ranarivelo turn to cités-jardins
around Paris, best translated as ‘garden suburbs’ rather than ‘garden cities’. The
ancestry of both forms of residential milieu was close but garden suburbs never
aspired to provide employment for their inhabitants, unlike garden cities.
After a discussion of some English cases, attention is focused on the seventeen
cités-jardins built around Paris
between the two world wars, and especially on the example of
Champigny-sur-Marne, with its trees, grassy open spaces and hedges. Four essays on the ‘Métamorphose de la nature au creuset du langage :
le paysage comme métaphore et modèle’ form the third part of the book. Joanny Moulin
explores the work of Edgar Morin and ‘the ecology of action’; then more
familiar territory is covered in Pascale Guibert’s discussion of urban
environments in the poetry of William Wordsworth. His famous work ‘Composed
upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ declared: ‘Earth has not anything
to show more fair’. Sarah Brottier’s essay on nature in Anglo-American poetry
of the twentieth century includes a close examination of the work of D.H.
Lawrence. Finally, Marie Mianowski uses Robert McLiam Wilson’s novel Eureka Street (1998) to reveal stark
social and environmental contrasts in Belfast between (broadly) Protestant east
and Catholic west, between territories of peace and nodes of conflict, and
between densely-packed housing for the working class and leafy suburbs of
detached houses and spacious gardens for the middle class. An interesting point
is made by showing how the place name ‘Béal Feirste’ (Belfast) proclaimed the
settlement at the mouth of the Farset, and then by revealing the many culverted
streams that flow beneath the urban fabric, forming a kind of ‘hidden nature’
that might well be incorporated into ‘place-making’ strategies designed to
encourage tourism in this city in sure need of economic diversification: Belfast est donc une ville dotée de nombreux parcs, irriguée en surface par
la mer et la rivière Lagan et traversée en profondeur par des rivières
souterraines et invisibles, témoins du passé et dont seul désormais le nom
atteste. [195] This collection
offers an interesting array of loosely connected essays set between the covers
of a single book, which certainly relate to conceptions, lived expressions and
representations of urban nature. The spatial balance is tipped emphatically
toward the British Isles, with only two and a half essays (Fougères,
Champigny-sur-Marne, and Edgar Morin) being emphatically ‘French’. Even the
‘British’ treatment is weighted heavily toward Edinburgh and Belfast; those
seeking information on London and other English cities will be disappointed.
The book’s sub-title is not, of course, inaccurate, but it might be taken to
imply more even-handed treatment of subject material. Eleven illustrations are
provided, but in only three essays (Edinburgh’s parliament buildings, Everton,
and Champigny-sur-Marne). A few decent maps of eighteenth-century Edinburgh,
contemporary Belfast (perhaps a ‘mental map’ of the city), the cités-jardins around Paris, and even
Fougères would not have gone amiss.
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