Landscape Literacy and Design for Ecological Democracy: The Nature of Mill Creek, West Philadelphia

Abstract

"Nature" is the word Raymond Williams called "perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language." 1 In English, the word "nature" originally described a quality-the essential character of something. Williams identified two additional areas of meaning: "the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both" and "the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings." Nature is an abstraction, writes Williams, a set of ideas for which many cultures have no one name, "a singular name for the real multiplicity of things and living processes." The abstraction of the word itself conceals radical differences in definition from culture to culture, even among individuals within the same culture. 2 Language structures how one thinks, what kinds of things one is able to express, and how one acts. Language makes it possible to conceive ideas and see new meanings. It can also suppress thought, disguise meaning, and make people blind. Someone's definition of nature influences whether they think cities are part of the natural world, or separate from it, and how they act to shape cities. Someone who believes that the city has degraded "nature" is apt to see only pollution there. Someone who assumes that the city has destroyed or displaced "nature" is not likely to see the effects of the natural processes that still shape its landscape. Ideas of nature have profound effects on how cities are designed, built, and sustained (or not sustained) over time. 3 Given conflicting definitions and their consequences, I use "nature" sparingly, deliberately, and explicitly. For me, nature is not a place, like a park or a wilderness, and not a particular feature, like a tree or a river. For me, nature consists of the creative and life-sustaining processes that connect everything in the biological world and the physical universe, including humans. These chemical, physical, and biological processes interact with social, economic, political, and cultural processes, over time, to produce landscapes. I use the word "landscape" as freely as I use "nature" sparingly, for I hope to recover the original meanings of the word in Old English and Nordic languages: the mutual shaping of people and place. 4 Landscape, in its original sense, is not mere scenery. It encompasses both the population of a place and its physical features: its topography, water flow, and plant life; its infrastructure of streets and sewers; its buildings and open spaces.