The Landscape of Utopia

Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design

Tim Waterman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000538496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

A collection of short interludes, think pieces, and critical essays on landscape, utopia, philosophy, culture, and food, all written in a highly original and engaging style by academic and theorist Tim Waterman.

Exploring power and democracy, and their shaping of public space and public life, taste, etiquette, belief and ritual, and foodways in community and civic life, the book provides a much-needed critical approach to landscape imaginaries. It discusses landscape in its broadest sense, as a descriptor of the relationship between people and place that occurs everywhere on land, from cities to countryside, suburb to wilderness.

With over fifty black and white illustrations interspersing the twenty-six chapters, this is a book for professionals, academics, and students to dive into and spark discussion on new modes of thinking in the wake of unfolding global crises, such as COVID-19, climate change, fascism 2.0, and beyond.

1IntroductionTaste, democracy, and everyday life in landscape imaginaries

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164593-1

A project takes place

Human being and human becoming should be directed towards betterment. Our task as humans, as a sentient species, is to overcome our worst instincts and drives and to strive towards an ethical and customary relationship with each other and the world. In the last century revolutionary geographer and polymath Peter Kropotkin elaborated this idea as ‘mutual aid’ (1987 [1902]). In recent years the study of evolution and cultural evolution as both an evolutionary principle and a human value has both vindicated and renewed interest in Kropotkin’s work. Human life, from the scale of the individual to family, community, and planet, is, for a species that makes and builds consciously, a project, and conviviality defines it. All the wars and aggressions of the human past are mere moments—aberrations, even—in the many long stories of people making peaceful lives together in and with landscapes.

History, it is said, takes place. But even before the Enlightenment sense of history came into being, cultures have told their stories through words, songs, painting and drawing, weaving and pottery, dancing; through journeys, through rites, through the contact between human bodies and the interaction between those bodies and with lived landscapes (see Abram, 1996; Dissanayake, 1992; Ong, 1982). All modes in which human stories are transmitted take place. It is useful to speak of stories rather than History (with a capital H), for another valuable habit is to move from capitalized singulars in study to lower-case plurals. History is certainly not, or shouldn’t be, one Western, imperial story. Knowledge, too, is not a monolith, but there are many ways of knowing; many knowledges. And for [A]rchitecture, the formulation ‘architectures’ or ‘the architectures’ poses work(s) of educating, building, making, designing, developing as a platform for creation and becoming, instead of a rigid structure or an inexorable logic. Even the oft-repeated anarchist slogan ‘another world is possible’ benefits from this treatment, as other (life)worlds are not only possible, but already exist to be learned from. Other lifeworlds are indeed possible: in fact, many are tangibly present and available as material from which future worlds may be imagined. The place of the body and the imagination in the world are most closely addressed in Chapter 14: ‘Making meaning: Utopian method for minds, bodies, and media in architectural design,’ and it explains how the full, sensate ‘mind’s body’ (not merely the mind’s eye) may be employed in the propositional imagination, simulations, and scenarios to better engage designers both with practices of dwelling in everyday life and with human and planetary betterment.

The essays in this book explore modes of making and building, dwelling, educating, the construction of professions, politics, and cultures (also epistemic cultures: see Knorr-Cetina, 1999). What underlies this range of subjects and gives cohesion to the whole is the question of how individual and collective imaginaries are created and employed in each process, and how taste, democracy, and a utopian horizon are imperative to them. People inhabit their lifeworlds as much through the direct experience of the senses as they do through the imaginary constructs that they, as individuals and members of collectives and cultures, project into those worlds. At a time of environmental crisis, when altering lifeworlds and life practices everywhere across the planet is crucial to the continued flourishing of our species and all others, it is vital to question the ways in which practices have been imagined. As Donna Haraway writes, “It matters what worlds world worlds,” (2016: 35) and it is the realm of the imaginary and the epistemological at the root which must be understood in order to change the systems, processes, and forces through which our physical and cultural worlds are constructed, what stories people tell each other about them, and what lives they lead as a result.

Imaginaries may be very quotidian, a vision of the next meal and all its multisensual delights, perhaps; they may be very complex and far-reaching, from total, paracosmic worlds created in literature (Middle Earth, perhaps), to filmic utopias or dystopias from Metropolis to The Truman Show; or they may be ways in which collectives have envisioned the whole ordering of human life, from the building of nations to the operation of political economies. To understand imaginaries, we must understand how they frame questions, more than examine the answers arising from them. In the words of the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, “we must begin by reinventing questions wherever we have been converted to believing in the power of answers” (2010: 83). The dialogue between the fantastic and the ordinary consists in the posing and framing of questions in scenarios, and importantly, these “allow us to test potentially dangerous scenarios without endangering actual subjects” (see Chapter 14). And Kathleen Stewart frames the interpenetration of questions and practices and feelings in an appropriately kaleidoscopic way in the following passage from Ordinary Affects, worth quoting at length:

The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life. Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.

(Stewart, 2007: 1–2)

At the very heart of my work is a founding opposition, or oppositional imaginaries, which again must be understood in order to provide for future human and planetary flourishing. Both comprise a dialogue between the mundane and the fantastic in the propositional imagination, and in the projection of expectations that may be considered to be utopian. On the one hand is the whole range of ideas and practices which, in modernity, produced the structures of state that spawned capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and their more recent evolution in neoliberalism and competitive individualism in postmodernity (see Bauman, 2000; Curtis, 2013; Gilbert, 2014; Harvey, 2005; hooks, 2000; Linebaugh, 2014; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000; Makdisi, 1998; Mbembe, 2019; Scott, 1998; Toulmin, 1990). On the other hand is the burgeoning body of thought which, countering the modern conception of mind–body duality in which thought precedes action, proposes that thought and action, sense and emotion, are simultaneous, relational, and inseparable. This embroilment of mind and body in world (and ecology of mind or ecological thinking), is at the heart of the study of situated and embodied knowledges and the emerging and related field of practice theory (see Barnes, 2001; Haraway, 1991, 2016; Johnson, 2007; Ortner, 2006; Schatzki, 1996; Schatzki et al., 2000; Warde, 2016). In this ground are all the relational practices that are constitutive of place and the institution of the social: democracy, publicity and propriety (and, by extension, trespass and transgression), representation (all senses of this word), spatial justice, landscape/architecture, design, ecology, rurality and urbanity, the commons, pedagogy/education.

It is difficult for me not to see the entirety of the first, high state modern construct as largely dystopian, and the precondition or pretext for war, dispossession, inequality, and terror. And in the second relational construct I see whole worlds of both utopian possibility alongside the possibility to learn from the construction of landscapes as works over time (the Lefebvrean oeuvre: see Lefebvre, 2008 [1947]: 131–135) and the construction of cultures (including those of various indigenous peoples whose modes of knowing and being are discarded or erased by colonialism) as constructions of culture in timespace (see Bhabha, 1994; Casid, 2005; Gardiner, 2000; Lefebvre, 2008 [1947], 2005 [1981], 2002 [1961], 2000 [1968]; Soja, 1996; Stanek, 2011; and on decolonialism and indigenous studies Driskill et al., 2011; Smith, 2012). The first is a dystopia arrived at from the projection of a totalizing capitalist utopia, whereas the second is conditional, relational, composed of fragments and constellations of ideas, places, forms, and possibilities.

Though seemingly less significant, the study of taste (both gustatory and psychosocial/cultural) is worthy of far more research than it receives, as it shapes the sociocultural, political, and affective interactions between people and place. Aesthetic taste functions in metaphoric and analogical ways that mirror the metaphoric construction of human cognition (see Johnson, 2007; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Combined with utopianism and striving, taste centres upon an understanding of fulfilment, human and planetary flourishing, good lives, and the paths through which these might be (at least partially) achieved. In design terms, utopianism employed as method allows for the propositional imagination to be exercised in acts of estrangement, transgression, supposition and simulation, prototyping, and narrative. An anarchist approach¹ here provides a radically different starting point (and thus different answers) from much other research and theory in this area, asking first the question: “How are people to help each other to govern themselves and avoid domination, compliance, and control?”

In the next pages, all of these themes will be elaborated and related to the body of work presented in this book, with reference to the contemporary idea of landscape, the study of everyday life (in particular the study of taste and foodways), utopianism, anarchism, and the use of the propositional imagination in design, fiction, and politics.

Landscape, philosophy, cognition

The contemporary philosophy of cognition shows how thought does not precede action, but rather is concurrent with it, and further how thought and action take place in a continual dialogue with space. The geographer and philosopher Theodore Schatzki (2010) calls this “activity timespace,” and this relates to other framings such as sociologist Jean-Pierre Poulain’s (2017) “food social space” and economic anthropologist Stephen Gudeman’s (2001) “reason-in-action” (see Waterman, 2018). Useful comparisons may also be made with Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the literary and dialogic imagination, in particular in his “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1981: 84–258). The gustatory (and ultimately the sensate in general as well as all the particular senses) and the psychosocial and cultural construction of taste are all projecting individual and collective hopes and expectations (as well as fears and limitations) which inflect the timespace of human activity. The all-at-onceness of such thinking is also reflected in theorizations and conceptions of landscape. Landscape relations are practised in everyday life in customary ways that allow complex imaginaries or scenarios to be used from historical and sociospatial example to work through ethical questions for the present and future. The European Landscape Convention provides a useful if imperfect frame, defining landscape as “an area whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (Council of Europe, 2000: n.p.), and Kenneth Olwig’s work (Olwig, 2019, 2011, 2005, 2002, 1996; see also Olwig and Mitchell, 2009) (both through his writing and my long-standing friendship and correspondence with him) has also provided a deepening and broadening of this frame by philological methods to describe land-scape as not merely the shape of land, but a landship, and that the two suffixes are etymologically linked (Olwig, 2019: 25–26). A landship/landscape thus describes not only the condition or constitution of a place, but the nature of the relations through which it is created and constituted; relations between people and between people and the organic and inorganic milieus they inhabit; and the hopes, fears, expectations, and limitations people project (as imaginaries) and encounter there. And, finally, landship/landscape also describes the place itself and/or the view of that place.

The work of Chiara Bottici reminds us, too, that the ethical is also political and that the imaginal acts upon the lived world’s mutual construction and inhabitation: “The fact that politics has always been imaginal is perhaps a banality that immediately appears if we consider that images are consubstantial with our being in the world, because there could be neither a world for us nor a subject for the world without them. Politics is imaginal because it needs a world in order to be in the first place” (2014: 104). When Bottici speaks of ‘being in the world’ it is useful to remember that this being is processual, performed, and enacted in space—what Theodore Schatzki calls “activity timespace” (2010: passim) and through what economic anthropologist Stephen Gudeman refers to as “reason-in-action” (2001: passim). Bottici draws a strong distinction between the imaginary, which she sees as purely occupying the fantastic: the imaginary “primarily means what exists only in fancy and has no real existence and is opposed to real or actual” (2014: 7), and the imaginal, which is composed of images. In tune with the relational qualities of my work, I find such firm distinctions to be at best unnecessary and at worst inhibiting. Bottici’s narrow definition of the imaginary is created to give strength to the idea of the imaginal, which is, for Bottici, “that which is made of images” (ibid.: 5). This leaves too little room for forms of the imagination or im...