CITYSCAPE

CITYSCAPE

(urban landscape, German: Stadtlandschaft). A type of landscape formed as a result of the urbanisation processes.

The cityscape is understood by cultural geographers and architects as a variant of the cultural landscape, manifested in the urban order, architectural complexes, permanent elements of urban space and green areas. As a result of global urbanisation (metropolitanisation, but also suburbanisation) covering an ever-increasing swathes of built-up and natural areas adjacent to cities, it is becoming a dominant landscape. It is more than just an architectural urban space, although it is a permanent component of it as a sphere of influence and shaping certain cultural, historical and aesthetic values and meanings, as well as the interpenetration of various political and economic interests. In this sense, the urban landscape acquires community significance as a space of dispute, conflict and compromise. It is formed historically and socially, subject to planned activities, but also to everyday, grassroots practices of the city’s inhabitants (e.g. civic gardens).

The cityscape is one of the subjects of urban studies (Rewers). In cultural and aesthetic research, the urban landscape is a visual phenomenon that reflects the character of the city and defines its identity. The cityscape is affected by all factors influencing the perception of urban space, including the sensual aspects of the city (images, sounds, smells) and as such it is a space of polysensory experience. In this respect, the most advanced is research into the sound landscape (sound sphere, soundscape) of the city.

The sources of understanding the city as a landscape should be sought in the Renaissance way of depicting the world as a painting (“Alberti’s window”, painting perspective), the ideal city concepts (Alberti, Piero della Francesca) and 17th-century northern European painting (e.g. Vermeer), which popularised the panoramic view of the city (veduta). In this sense, painting was the first to define urban space as a landscape. On the one hand, the 19th-century development of cities as a result of accelerated industrialisation (especially London) and technological progress (e.g. the invention of photography), and on the other hand, new cultural processes related to the advent of modernity (Simmel, Benjamin) contributed to the consolidation of the understanding and perception of the city as a picture. Impressionistic painting and photography, among others, attempted to reflect the dynamics of the city in the captured frame (Atget). The moment intensifying the development of the urban landscape was the period of reconstruction of Paris, the so-called haussmannisation, which in the second half of the nineteenth century caused an urban transformation of the city centre and the emergence of new architectural forms (boulevards, shopping arcades, shop windows). Haussmann’s urban plan was to demolish the medieval city centre, build it up again with tall tenement houses, but also to create green areas: numerous small squares and large parks. As a result, a new type of inhabitant of the city emerged – the stroller (flâneur). In cultural research, the flâneur is an interpretive figure of the city. Flâneur is a figure who sees a kind of spectacle taking place in the city, analyses urban space and its elements, and treats the city as a type of palimpsest hiding the signs of the past (Baudelaire, Benjamin, Bauman). In this sense, the urban landscape is also shaped in memory as a memorable image. Benjamin’s analyses, starting from the indication of panoramas that contribute to the perception of the city in terms of landscape, aim at indicating the idea of a labyrinth as a form of city topography (Paetzold).

In Benjamin’s view, flaneurism is a way of participation in urban life, which emphasises the visual perception of the city as an image and as a phenomenon. Thus, the cityscape is expressed both in architectural forms such as passages, railway stations, urban parks (permanence of the urban landscape), as well as in what is diverse, variable and temporary in urban space: crowds, advertising, reflections in shop windows, light (transience of the urban landscape). In this respect, the analyses of the city conducted from the viewpoint of multiplication and unreality of the city in mirrored reflections of glass architecture also deserve attention. This approach had already been initiated by Benjamin, who studied them on the basis of “glass architecture”, but their intensification did not occur until the second half of the 20th century, with the development of architecture and urban glass complexes (e.g. the Sony Centre in Berlin), as well as with the emergence of various forms of urban screens (billboards, light advertisements, glass facades).

The cityscape is also a space of multisensory experiences, an area influenced by sensory stimuli (Simmel), which not only affect the perception of its image, but also overlap, strengthening their power and creating together a polyphony of images, sounds, smells, tactile sensations. It is a collage of individual sensual landscapes, which, even if interpreted in isolation, do not exist in isolation. Since the 19th century, an important aspect of the urban landscape has been public urban parks, which, as green islands, were to play the role of “urban lungs” in the face of deepening overcrowding, industrialisation and urban pollution. (Sennett). In connection with the emergence of the idea of leisure time, as opposed to working time, they were to be a surrogate of what is natural in the place of residence. Parks created in the landscape style were inspired by the best models.

In urban planning, composing an cityscape means striving for visual spatial harmony, linking architecture (views and landscape dominants) with the natural environment, taking into account environmental qualities. This idea appeared already in antiquity in cities located on the rocky slopes with a panorama of the surrounding area (Rhodes, Pergamon, Assos) and returned in various historical periods: in Baroque in Versailles, etc. and in the twentieth century in Milton Keys, among others. Recent trends in urban design underline the importance of urban landscape for the search for ways to integrate a modern (post-industrial), diverse city based on a strategy of landscape continuity and the integration of the city with natural suburban areas (e.g. the Bella Centre in Copenhagen). This is also the result of the trend to create city-regions as a new town-planning form (urban landscape), where not only is the boundary between the city and the out-of-town area blurred (in-betweencity), but their interpenetration is expected.

[B. F., M. K.]

Literature:

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960.

Madurowicz, Mikołaj. Ciągłość miasta. Prolegomena. Warszawa: WUW, 2017.

Paetzold, Heinz. Miasto jako labirynt, Walter Benjamin i nie tylko, trans. A Zaporowski. In:  Przestrzeń, filozofia i architektura. Osiem rozmów o poznawaniu, produkowaniu i komponowaniu przestrzeni, ed. E. Rewers. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Fundacja Humaniora,  1999.

Simmel, Georg. Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In: The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New. York: Free Press, 1950.

Rewers, Ewa (ed.) Kulturowe studia miejskie. Warszawa: NCK, 2014.

Rewers, Ewa. Post-polis. Wstęp do filozofii ponowoczesnego miasta. Kraków: Universitas, 2005.

Rewers, Ewa (ed). Miasto w sztuce- sztuka miasta. Kraków: Universitas, 2010.

Paszkowski, Zbigniew. Miasto idealne w perspektywie europejskiej i jego związki z urbanistyką współczesną. Kraków: Universitas, 2011.

Changing Places, Contemporary German Landscape Architechture, BDLA, Birkhauser, Basel-Berlin-Boston 2005.

Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone. The Body And The City In Western Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.