This time I’m focusing on something that I guess I should have covered already, like years ago. I remember reading years ago how J. B. Jackson wrote about all kinds of topics related to landscape. One of them was about cars and landscapes, which will be the topic of this essay.
Right, so, interested in the topic, I made some queries, checking if my memory serves me right. It does. Jackson covers this topic in ‘The Vernacular Landscape is on the Move … Again’. It’s a short, illustrated article from the early 1990s that addresses how the landscape changed in the US, simply because the way people moved changed.
Right, he (24-26) starts somewhat counterintuitively by discussing interiors, rather than exteriors. This can be a bit puzzling if you think of landscape only as something that is outdoors, like what you see out of a window, as I pointed out in the previous essay. Okay, that’s how most people think of it, fair enough, but as I’ve pointed out in the past, and as I’ve discussed in my own published work, landscape is not something that is out there, waiting for us to see it, if we are just brave enough to go out and see the world. Jon Goss’ articles ‘The “Magic of the Mall: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment’ and ‘Once-Upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America’ are good examples of research where indoors are addressed as landscapes.
Anyway, Jackson addresses the interiors or, as he (24) refers to them, “enclosed spaces” because, in his view, humans spend much of their lives indoors. Now, he doesn’t explain it this way, but, yeah, that makes sense, considering how indoors provide shelter and allow people to control their environment better. His (24) point is more on how different enclosed spaces have specific, formalized functions, so that they not just homes, but also churches, schools, libraries and various workplaces. This is not to say that he doesn’t recognize the shelter aspect, but rather that it’s, perhaps, a bit too rudimentary point for him to make. He (24) does, however, state that home is sacred to Americans, and, I’d say, to people in many other countries as well, and enclosed spaces are what separate them from “the street and street life”.
By juxtaposing the home and the street, he (24) wants to emphasize how the latter is thought of as this unorganized, if not unruly space, whereas the former is thought of as this well organized and segmented space where each room and passageway in between them serves a specific purpose. In addition, homes and, I guess, other enclosed spaces as well, are for only some people, whereas the street is open for everyone, as he (24) points out.
He (26) also wishes to emphasize that not all homes, nor enclosed spaces are alike. To be clear, he (26) acknowledges that they are remarkably alike, so that you expect to encounter certain rooms in homes. That said, as he (26) also points out, this is very much a middle- and upper-class matter. For the working-class people, such formal organization of their homes is not really a thing, as (26) pointed out by him, largely because they don’t have large homes and, instead, spend their free time in other enclosed spaces that they share with other working-class people.
In his treatment, landscape is everywhere, but only the shared spaces that lack a formal purpose count as what he (26) calls the vernacular landscape. It can be exterior or interior, open or closed, but what matters is that the space in question has “no specific function”, so that, for example, a house that a medieval peasant lived in was merely something that provided shelter, as he (27) points out. The thing he is saying is that back in the day, in the feudal system, no one actually owned anything. You could say that the monarch owned it, be it a count, a duke, a king or an emperor, fair enough, but it would be even more accurate to state that it was actually God, yes, the Christian God, that owned it all and the monarch was just taking care of it all in the absence of God, as a Viceroy, if you will. Also, even if we ignore the religious aspects of it, the monarch had obligations to everyone who swore fealty to that monarch. It was about titles and what you were then entitled to, not about ownership and what you owned. That meant that even if you didn’t own anything, even if you were a mere peasant, you still had certain rights to what these days they’d viewed as having ownership of. What he (27) is getting with this is that, in a way, everything was owned in common.
He (27) also makes note of how a lot of people, especially the poorest of people, those doing manual labor, hunting, fishing, farming, herding, etc., were often rather mobile. In fact, they were nomadic. This doesn’t mean that they were always on the move, but rather that they moved when it was apt to move. They weren’t sedentary, like just about everyone is these days. For example, if you exhausted the resources of a certain area of land or if your place on that land was threatened, you moved to some other area of land, as mentioned by him (27) in reference to the Hamaxobii, a tribe of Scythians known for living in their wagons.
Interestingly, for nomads, all land and water, and all that belonged to them, belonged to no everyone and no one at the same time, or, as he (27) puts it, “were held in common.” This also meant that no one was allowed to alter anything, except temporarily, for example to fence certain areas to keep the cattle grazing in a certain area, as he (27) goes on to exemplify.
Now, this is, of course, a strange, if not an absurd thing to point out these days, because all land and much of the water, and what belong to them, are owned by someone and it is commonly believed that they have the exclusive right to do whatever they like with it, just because it is theirs, whereas others therefore have no right to anything with it. Okay, it’s not actually that clear cut, but I think you get the point.
He (28) adds to this that while medieval peasants weren’t actually nomadic, they still had that lifestyle in which the living arrangements weren’t as important to them as they are to people these days. It was the street, which is a shorthand for all the commonly shared areas, such as the church and its yard, and the green areas of villages back then, that people spent much of their days, when they were not working the fields, as he (28) points out.
In ‘J.B. Jackson and the Love of Everyday Places’, a documentary featuring him, he adds to this that the nobility couldn’t stand this peasant lifestyle. To be more accurate, he states that they wanted to distance themselves from the peasants and the street, so that they “house is detached from the street life.” More contemporarily, we don’t have nobility, but “this is fine for middle-class and upper-class.” In his view, the “the upper-class has always hated the street” and therefore preferred staying indoors as “they like very much this isolation.” To put it bluntly, he reckons that they detest the street and associate it with “everything that is bad, or common, and vulgar and loud, and disorderly”. Everything about it is simply in poor taste, be it the “street smarts, street language, street dress”, you know, whatever it is that you may run into out there, as he goes on to add.
In the article, he (28) indicates that, as we know, as I expect you to know, it was the middle- and upper-classes that had their way. The streets were cleared of the lower-classes, so that everyone had to live their lives in enclosed spaces, shifting between the home and the workplace, albeit if you were part of the upper-classes, you probably didn’t work a day in your life, but that’s another story. It also meant that streets were no longer the wide-open space between the various enclosed spaces, that is to say the buildings, but rather dedicated to traffic. The streets were no longer buzzing with life. All these people, all these stalls and vendors were no longer there as they had to make way for transporting people and goods.
This is his segue to cars and landscapes. While the middle- and upper-classes had their way and it all became a matter of private property, clearing the streets turned out to have unexpected consequences, as he (28, 33) goes on to add. He (33) notes that he didn’t really pay much attention to any of this before the Second World War, but it was the car or, as he likes to put it, the automobile, to emphasize the mobility aspect, that profoundly altered the American landscape. Now, I bet this isn’t news to people. They are well aware of how much of the continent is built for the car in mind.
Cars change the way people live their lives, which is what he is after in this article. The gist of this is that by clearing the street, removing the people spending their days there, made people mobile again, perhaps even more mobile that ever before. Now, of course, this applies to horses and carriages, bicycles and motorcycles as well, as they all made people more mobile. This is not just about cars, but, of course, they are what the country is known for, much more than other modes of transportation.
At the same time, cars also change the landscape. It’s not that there weren’t any streets, nor roads, before cars, but rather that they weren’t as important, nor as numerous before. In addition to streets and roads, that need to be properly paved as well, there needs to be ample parking space, not only at home, where that can be easily accommodated by the middle- and upper-classes, but also just about everywhere. This gives rise to what he (33) refers to as the commercial strip. If you ask me, it’s like a giant outdoor mall, where you drive around, from one parking lot to another, often without parking the car and having to walk anywhere, so that you get this instant, informal access to all kinds of drive-in-services, as he (33) points out.
This is also the case outside of North America. While everything hasn’t been designed to cater for the cars, much of the landscape is reserved for the streets and the roads, as well as parking spaces. It’s tough to find a place that doesn’t have them. Even if you visit a national park or, better yet, a nature park, it’s going to have a parking lot (unless it’s an island or the like).
Now, this doesn’t mean that all interiors are suddenly redundant. No, no. Not at all. Instead, you get these large shopping malls, kind of like miniature cities themselves, covered and protected from the elements, and separated from the street, as he points out in another documentary ‘Figure in a Landscape: A Conversation with J.B. Jackson’.
He also mentions them in ‘J.B. Jackson and the Love of Everyday Places’, only to find them and pedestrian streets and plazas too sanitized for his taste. He isn’t fond of how leisurely they appear, even though they involve plenty of work. It’s just that the work that you could find on the street back in the day, before the streets were cleared, is these days nowhere to be seen.
This actually connects quite neatly to what Raymond Williams had to say about landscape in ‘The Country and the City’. In his (120) view, “[a] working country is hardly ever a landscape”. He also addresses this in another book, ‘Border Country’, when he (89) points out that “[t]he visitor sees beauty; the inhabitant a place where he works and has his friends.” To connect this to Jackson’s remarks about American cities, those who work there don’t think of them as landscapes, at least not when they are working. They are just too busy to do that. The people who spend their time in the cities aren’t working. They are the visitors mentioned by Williams (89). For them, landscape is indeed leisurely, as Jackson points out in ‘J.B. Jackson and the Love of Everyday Places’.
To Jackson, what most people call landscape, which, to be clear, isn’t what he calls the vernacular landscape, is actually what he refers to as the landscape that is designed and maintained by the establishment. We might call that landscape the establishment landscape or the established landscape. He explains all this in ‘J.B. Jackson and the Love of Everyday Places’ and exemplifies how the establishment deals with space and landscape. Space is gridded, marked by straight lines that form squares, and designed to last, by the established, which he characterizes as highly educated people who think very highly of themselves.
In ‘Figure in a Landscape: A Conversation with J.B. Jackson’, he complicates this by stating that vernacular landscapes are autonomous spaces, in the sense that it is the community that makes the rules and runs them, there and then, albeit the establishment landscapes may also be such autonomous spaces, in the sense that back in the day monarchs designated forests as their wild game reserves or, more contemporarily, corporations operate office buildings and some people live gated communities. He contrasts the vernacular and the establishment further by noting that in the past autonomous spaces were vernacular and inclusive, by which I mean that everyone in the community had rights and responsibilities, like it or not, whereas nowadays they are established and exclusive, by which I mean that there is no community, only a select privileged few who enjoy certain rights in exchange for certain responsibilities. To be clear, he isn’t being all doom and gloom about this. People still have a sense of community, here and there. He exemplifies this with how minorities who come together in various informal get-togethers. We might add to that list people who go to their local pub, to give you a more British and Irish example, and skateboarders who do their tricks in environments that weren’t built for the purpose.
Anyway, back to cars. In the article, he (34) makes note of how cars are everywhere, which is why he (34) refers to the contemporary landscape as the auto-vernacular landscape. They are usually not thought of as landscape elements, and I admit that I haven’t thought of them as such, thinking of them as too ephemeral, coming and going. They are often considered unsightly, as he (34) is willing to admit himself, but what makes them interesting is that they challenge also challenge the seemingly static nature of landscape, with the house as its centerpiece, as he (34) is happy to point out.
So, in a strange way, like it or not, you know, with all the more contemporary talk about climate change and the roles cars play in that, he (34) reckons that cars allow a more nomadic lifestyle. I’d say that’s actually the campervan, but, okay, fair enough, you can just drive around, sleeping in the car or in some motels and hotels. He (34) is also willing to express his fondness of this landscape, as well as what he calls the agro-vernacular landscape marked by vast fields and tractors and what we might call the aviation-vernacular landscapes of airfields and planes, because there is this combination of mobility and the wide open-space. He (34-35) is willing to defend them, all of them, while acknowledging that they are not unproblematic, because they come with a sense of community and solidarity. People who are into cars generally get along with one another, just as farmers tend to get along with one another and pilots tend to get along with one another, even if they have just met.
To conclude, with something, this article and the related documentaries impressed me. They made me think. They gave me ideas. It’s not that they are entirely unproblematic, nothing ever is, but they provide such a different and refreshing spin or spins on landscape. Totally worth reading and totally worth watching.
References
- Calo, B. ([1989] 2015). J.B. Jackson and The Love of Everyday Places. In J. Mendelsohn (Pr.), J.B. Jackson and the American Landscape. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources
- Goss, J. (1993). The “Magic of the Mall”: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 83 (1), 18–47.
- Goss, J. (1999). Once-Upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89 (1), 45–75.
- Jackson, J. B. (1991). The Vernacular Landscape is on the Move … Again. Places, 7 (3): 24–35.
- Marino, C., and J. Mendelsohn (Pr.) ([1988] 2015). Figure in a Landscape: A Conversation with J.B. Jackson. In J. Mendelsohn (Pr.), J.B. Jackson and the American Landscape. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources.
- Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Williams, R. ([1960] 2006). Border Country. Cardigan, United Kingdom: Parthian.