J. B. Jackson, Two Landscape Ideals

The Political Landscape

The Vernacular Landscape

Man is a political animal: we engage in debates about good and evil, justice and injustice, the good life

Man is an inhabitant of the earth, who spends time providing for food, clothing, shelter, and security (social, but not political, activities)

Political, from polis, the city of citizens who participated in the decision-making process

“Vernacular” derives from verna, a slave born in the house of his master, hence a native, “one whose existence is confined to a village and who was by tradition remote from the larger world of politics and law

“By political I mean those spaces and structures designed to impose or preserve a unity and order on the land, or in keeping with a long-range, large-scale plan"

The vernacular landscape is “one where evidences of a political organization of space are largely or entirely absent’ (150)

Examples: fifth-century Greece, Republican Rome, 15th-century Renaissance Europe, 17th-century France, early 19th-century America;


Public buildings and monuments, elements of the infrastructure, e.g., interstate highway, hydroelectric dam, the airport and power transmission lines

Examples: medieval Europe, early 17th-century America (which was a continuation of the medieval mentality), the Pueblo communities of the Southwest, and aspects of contemporary America, 

The suburb, the trailer court, the resort area, the condo, the mobile home, the pre-fab house

Large, public buildings, designed by architects, with an eye to fashion and innovation and sophistication

The traditional rural or small-town dwelling of the farmer or craftsman or wage-earner, designed by a crafstman, not an architect, built with local techniques and materials, with no pretention to stylistic sophistication; it is loyal to the local forms and region

Generally life in an urban setting

Generally life in nature

Civic-minded

Harmony with nature

“the landscape which evolved partly out of experience, partly from design, to meet some of the needs of men and women in their political guise” (12)

“A vernacular landscape . . . is an impressive display of devotion to common customs and of an inexhaustible ingenuity in finding short-term solutions” (151)

Permanence is its central characteristics: Its elements—walls, boundaries, highways, monuments— insure order and security and continuity to give citizens a visible status and remind us of our rights and obligations and our history (12)

Mobility and change are the key to the vernacular landscape, but of an involuntary, reluctant sort; not the expression of restlessness and search for improvement but an unending patient adjustment to circumstances” (151)

Universal law

Local custom

Rational: emphasis on order

“Irrational,” “disordered”

Legally established, premeditated, permanent

The ephemeral, the mobile

Well-defined territories, public spaces, e.g., plaza, square, agora

Absence of defined, permanent spaces

The Establishment, the aristocracy

The “people,” the common folk, the peasants

In the political landscape, the natural environment has no inherent identity; it is a means to an end, and space is organized for political purposes; the political landscape is indifferent to the topography and the culture of their inhabitants, hence the grid ignore topographical features

Space is organized for economic or ecological reasons; the inhabited landscape sees itself as the center of the world, an oasis of order surrounding by chaos; insularity gives it its character; it is a law unto itself (54)

Universal law, political justice (think of nation-state and national identity)

Custom and habit (think of family and tribe and ethnic identity); Identity derived not from permanent possession of land but from membership in a group or super-family

Usually larger, more impressive, more permanent, and easier to spot

Likely to be poor, small, hard to find (42)

Deliberately created to make it possible for men to live in a just society

Merely evolves in the course of our trying to live on harmonious terms with the natural world

Newer, modern

Older, traditional, and more common, and coming into fashion again as more people develop attachment for nature

A product of planning, the realization of an archetype, a coherent design inspired by philosophy or religion, with a distinct purpose in view

A product of incessant adaptation and conflict, between groups with dissimilar views as to how to make the adaptation to the environment; an existential landscape that achieves its identity only in the course of existence, and we can say what it is only when it ceases to evolve (43)

Boundaries of many sorts: Its spaces, rural and urban, are clearly and permanently defined and made visible by walls and hedges or zones of open greenery or lawn, designed to be self-contained and shapely and beautiful (152)

Natural spaces—meadow, moor, forest—and elements—air, water, land—cannot be permanents divided into individual holdings; no individual can fence a portion; The only permanent walls are those sanctified by myth—the communal fields, the village itself—and all other walls or fences are only temporary, e.g., to contain grazing animals

Definite boundaries, permanent, autonomous, the creation of political or legal decisions

Small, temporary, crudely measured spaces, frequently changing hands, shape, size

Visibility and sanctity of boundaries, importance of monuments and centrifugal highways, close relationship between status and enclosed space

“the essential characteristic of Landscape Two is its belief in the sanctity of place. It is place, permanent position both in the social and topographical sense, that gives us our identity. The function of space according to this belief is to make us visible, allow us to put down roots and become members of society” (152)

It has a cultural poverty, lacks purposeful continuity; it thinks not of history but of legends and myths; it is a landscape without visible signs of political history, without memory or forethought, without collective purpose or collective memory

Land means property and permanence and power (152)

Land in Landscape One meant being a member of a working community; it was a temporary symbol of relationships (152)