EXTRAORDINARY VIENNA: LANDSCAPE AND POWER IN THE METROPOLIS
To download, use the save file command in your web browser to save the file is a format compatible with your word processor.  You can then print it out on your printer. 

The author holds copyright to this article.  "Fair
use" guidelines permit downloading and reading.  For any
other purpose, please contact the author for permission. 

This article is in two parts.  This is part 2

EXTRAORDINARY VIENNA: LANDSCAPE AND POWER IN THE METROPOLIS--PART II
Robert Rotenberg
DePaul University
Gardens of Reform. [Slide: Schweizergarten playing field]  The gardens of reform seemed to emerge as the city was wrestling to retain a foothold on the rapidly disappearing Gegenden, unplanned, unmanicured surroundings, that the Enlightenment had so idealized in its gardens.  Yet, they are places of power.  Each garden proclaims the rescue of nature for people, when this nature is already gone.  The parks are symbols of plenty, of deprivation denied, even though they are build during a period when the discrepancies in wealth between the rich and poor were the greatest they had ever been.  The nature offered here was not one of free and unfettered growth, but a domesticated nature in which different activities were defined by different sites with the parks: a ball field here, a picnic area there, a swimming pool over there.  This collection of botanicals towed the line, obeyed the demands of the users, and showed discipline in rebounding after hard use.  The message of the garden is a hymn of praise for the good that can be wrought by planning and design.  It was a hymn to the power of the manager and coincides with the emergence of that job title in the corporate structure and the metropolitan experience of Vienna at the turn of the century.  
Gardens of Reaction.[Slide: Wildgarten] Gardens of reaction are places of control.  A significant portion of the young, bürgerlich Viennese population had turned against modernism by the first decades of the twentieth century.  They looked at the world that industrial production had created and were repulsed by it.  They sought a return to a simpler life.  They looked for the model for what metropolitan life ought to be in the past rather than the future.  To symbolize this life, they evoked its landscape, which they defined as the antithesis of the industrial city.  Unlike those that preceded it, the gardens of reaction were ones that society could not construct.  People discovered them somewhere outside the city and inhabited the sites on their own terms.  Young people wandered the countryside in search of such landscapes.  This social movement set in motion a new landscape aesthetic that would influence all the gardens of the twentieth century.  The theorists of this movement worked primarily in Germany.  Antimodernism in Vienna at this time was as universal as modernism.  
Gardens of reaction fulfill the dream of the return to the pre-industrial world.  The design integrates human society into the living community.  This community follows rules that disregard human history.  One goal of this reintegration into nature is to end history.  A second was to halt the destruction of nature through pollution.  People would return to agriculture and hand crafts as their means of subsistence.  A third goal was to reduce the tension of social life by eliminating ethnic pluralism.  Not all living communities are appropriate for all human groupings.  People must sort themselves according to kind, undoing the mixing of groups that the migrations of the modern era had engendered.  Properly sorted, groups would find the communities from which their ancestors sprung, reconnecting with their native soil.  Once connected to the proper soil, humans could begin to build the kinds and sizes of settlements appropriate to their native inclinations.  They would finally become Naturmenschen, like the "tribal" peoples written about in the ethnographies and ethnographically inspired novels.  By following nature's laws instead of human law, inequality and resentment would disappear.  One only needed the strength to renounce the luxuries of the industrial life.  The Wandervogel movement with its self-imposed privations, provided people with the confidence that they could live with this renunciation.
[Slide:  Wandervogel masthead]The most powerful symbol of the garden of reaction was the view from the high look-out.  It wiped away the clutter and obstructions of the cityscape to afford the seeker a clear view of the interrelationship of landscape and human community.  To have this view required effort.  The physicality is that of youth and heralds the beginning of a new age.  The physicality resonates with the rootedness and harmony with nature that people are looking for in the garden of reaction.  The rootedness belongs to the native firmly implanted in the soil of home. Together with others, the robust native feels of the synergy of the community.  Their works become the product of the Volk, the romantic ideal of cultural homogeneity and social harmony.
Gardens of Refuge.[Slide: Kleingarten in Gartensiedlung] The small garden colonies and the garden settlements were the fulfillment of a very different image of urban life than any that had preceded it.  These were gardens of control of infinite variety.  As self-conscious attempts to build community and urban housing as the same time, they were a serious departure from the bürgerlich model of building the housing first and letting the market determine the core values of people who ended up living together.  The garden communities brought people together through their common feelings of jeopardy.  They first sought refuge from poor housing, starvation, and alienation.  They built their communities cooperatively, taking collective responsibility for the quality of the roads, the common buildings and each other's houses.  Once in place, the common adaptation to the garden life reinforced and reproduced this spirit of cooperation, allowing it to influence all aspects of family life.  Such neighborliness may have existed in the regional towns from which people claimed ancestry, but they had ceased to exist for those who moved to the worker's districts of the city from the provinces.   In large part, they did not exist in the bürgerlich cottage districts or the few, still intact, pre-industrial neighborhoods of the central city.
People sum up the ambivalence they feel toward the small garden is in one of two phrases: das kleine Glück, the little stroke of luck, or  mein eigenes Stückchen Land, my little piece of land.  The first refers to the reward of participating in a garden experience that is only possible through one willingness to cooperate with others.  The second speaks of the desire to secure some means of self-determination through the garden.  These prove to be complex themes in Viennese culture.  One hears a number of metaphors for the tension between the private and the communal  garden experience.  People who have gardens can be categorized as Pioniere, pioneers, Gärtner, gardeners, or Siedler, settlers.  Pioneers were the generation that established the Gardens of Refuge and the cooperative colonies in which these gardens were located.  They are almost all gone, but their image continues to be invoked as representing desirable community values.  The implications of being a gardener are that you have committed yourself to the ideals of the Schrebergarten as the source of health-giving exercise, as the source of healthy foods, and as the symbol of your personal diligence.  The connotations of being a settler are that you have committed yourself to improving your family's housing conditions by establishing a home in the garden.  The garden becomes the miniature estate of the ordinary metropolitan, a source of capital, and a symbol of one's success in life.
The gardens of refuge view nature as a source of security, a safeguard against the dangers of metropolitan life.  The first world war and the economic disaster that followed made these dangers real to the most vulnerable grouping of people in the city, the working poor.  In the bounty of nature, these people saw away of insuring a steady supply of food.  Combined with the housing that could be assembled in the garden, nature became a safe haven.  Unlike the reactionary back-to-the-land movement of the previous generation, these families saw no moral salvation in nature itself.  Rather natural systems became the means toward an expressly social goal: the forging of a support community.  The membership in his community depended on one's willingness to garden.  These were "soup-green communities," in which reciprocal exchanges of home grown ingredients reinforced neighborly ties and kept up the channels of cooperation.  The gardener is tied to nature in the same way that a craftsman is tied to his tools.  Just as the tools permitted the craftsman to produce things, so nature permitted the families to produce the community and then reproduce from daily and seasonally.
Gardens of Renewal. [Slide:  Backyard] Erholungsgärten, the recreational gardens, are those in which the owner gardens voluntarily.  The rewards of this work are personal instead of economic.  There is a physical and a spiritual reward.  The physical reward is a restoration of the body's strength through compensatory activities (moving about instead of sitting still), through the breathing of fresh air, and through the shining of sunlight on the body.  The spiritual reward is the contact with the plants and animals who live their lives aside those of people.  The singing of birds, the growth of plants, the maturation of fruit, the passing of the seasons, provides a contrasting rhythm of life that the gardener can juxtapose to that of wage work.  The ability to participate in two totally different temporalities is liberating because it exposes the dominant temporality, the public schedule of urban life, diminishing its power to define peoples experience in time.  Urban gardeners are different from non-gardening city folk in the same way that bilingual people are different from monolingual people: they have an alternative system of reference by which to measure and judge the events of their lives.  For the gardeners the alternative system is the quietude, satisfaction and challenge of the garden.  
Until late 1970s, the number of Viennese who could afford to live in self-standing houses remained very small.  This number has increased slightly, but the gardens of renewal are almost entirely identical in location, size and organization as the gardens of refuge: parcels in garden settlements and garden colonies.  People converted them from gardens of refuge when they felt that the emergency conditions of the War were safely behind them.  Throughout the post-War period, parcels in garden colonies increased.  Within the city limits, these were the greatest source of new gardens of renewal.
The image conveyed by the gardens of renewal was not a moral treasury waiting for humans to return, but the anti-symbolic extensions of the real world of the worker, a world fraught with threat and striving.  The garden of renewal is a symbol of health and vigor.  The beauty of the garden is an ornament to effort, rather than to status, power, or rank.  To look at a beautiful garden is to see the commitment and diligence of the gardener.  The well-kept garden is a direct reference to the well-kept body, to self-respect and self actualization.  One cannot have a beautiful garden without have accomplished an inner personal harmony.  The symbols are social as well as existential.  The values of the world of wage work now dictate how every form of work is judged.  A gardener worthy of renown exerts control over the space and he plants in the same fashion that the manager controls the forces of production.  The abstract fastidiousness of the lawn free of all variety and clipped to a uniform height tells a different story about its caretaker than the relaxed diversity of the backyard meadow.  Gardens become moral duties, responsibilities that once voluntarily take on cannot then be evaded.
Gardens of Discovery. [Slide:Biotop] The present reaction to the environmental effects of economic development in Austria is occurring in a period of general public health, affluence for the overwhelming majority citizens and a relatively high level of consensus on democratic solutions to political issues.   The present situation produces greater clarity in which to envision the environmental issues and the relationship between economic well-being and their eventual solution.  The more people become aware of the complex interrelationships between physical comfort and environmental quality, the more they adapt the established  measures. Domestic gardens that employ the discourse on discovery in its fullest sense often evoke public distaste and even anger.  Green space is an important issue in the Öko-welle because it is a tangible sign of a healthy environment.  The logical solution for ecologically sound gardens remains as difficult to realize in landscape as equitable and sustainable habitats are to achieve nationally.
Gardens of discovery reject most of the symbolic mainstays within the discourse on landscape.  The symbolic valences that remain have the meditative qualities of both the aristocratic gardens of liberty, without the melancholia, and the mystical gardens of reaction, without the yearning for purity of essence.  The meditation in the garden of discovery is one of an equal partnership between human intellect and natural energy.  Some have called this synergy and raised it to a spiritual practice, a unity between the human and universal.  The efforts of the ecological gardener symbolize a willingness to engage nature first as an equal, but ultimately as the master of the garden, of the gardener's non-gardening life, and of the urban community in which the gardener lives.  The garden itself is the material form of the symbolic action.
Moral Universes
What the Viennese know about their landscape, and what we non-Viennese can only wait to discover in our own metropolises, is that urban space is filled ideological messages.  Each of these gardens justified their model of the relations of dominant and subordinate power groups through a legitimating concept of nature. The contemporary landscape echoes fragments of meaning from even the oldest among them.  The period of absolutist ascendancy produced gardens that extolled  the glories of the aristocratic state.  It evokes an image of the security and harmony that only can emerge out of aristocratically imposed order. The period of the Enlightenment produced gardens in which nature was given its head and allowed to develop in whichever way it saw fit.  Today, too, this site calls forth unrestrained speech, movement, and thought.  
These two extremes remain the wellspring for symbolic elaboration throughout the next two hundred years.  Order or chaos, as geometry or natural growth, come to symbolize groups struggling to define their identity in the political landscape.  The Biedermeier view of nature emerged from the perceived threat to the family or its members from outside forces. The placement of the house between the gardens and street still produces a feeling of seclusion.  Instead of offering a contemplation of a power that remains beyond the human capacity, the designers of the Neo-Romantic landscape turn nature into a contemplation of emptiness, powerlessness.  It reassures people even today that the powerful forces have been domesticated.  The reform era sponsored an ideology that established nature as a commodity for people to consume with their eyes and ears, and with the movements of their bodies.  Nature as a resource to be used, as an opportunity for growth, and as a common inheritance of all who claimed native attachment to a place remains the dominant views among most Viennese today.  
The dialectic between order and chaos became even more complex in the twentieth century.  A significant portion of the young, bürgerlich Viennese population sought a return to a simpler life in the first decades of the twentieth century.  To represent this life, they evoked landscapes that society could not construct, but must discover somewhere outside the city.  This is a very real concern for all those Viennese, and there are many of them, who tramp through the Wienerwald every weekend and in every season. The first era of democratic socialism viewed nature as a source of security, a safeguard against the dangers of metropolitan life.  Among the garden settlements and small garden colonies today, nature and community are inextricably intertwined.  The post-War era's view of nature stressed the interrelationships between people and nature that are knowable and manageable.  The systemic relations can be understood as open, connecting the domestic landscape to the wider botanical community, or as closed, permitting the intimate development of the garden house and family in isolation from others.  Nature becomes important in human affairs only because of the use that people have for it.  Finally, in the most recent era, the ecology movement has created a challenge to the existing regime that is every bit as radical as that posed by the Enlightenment gardens to the Barock.  
The same model of nature that legitimated the relations of power, could be used to justify the special circumstances of the metropolitan life. Absolutist landscapes preserve the city as a sacred aristocratic precinct.  The Barock landscape dwarfed the individual, reduced their wills and desires to insignificance and proclaimed the glory of the men who would build and maintain such places. The Enlightenment aristocrats saw the city as the realm of the apostate.  The appeal to higher, natural law immediately unravels the claims to special legitimacy by the state.  Furthermore, it  places all people on an equal legal and social basis with each other.  In the face of this landscape, the absolutist state could not stand.  
These polarized views of the possibilities for urban life continued to work their way through the nineteenth century.  In the Biedermeier, the people who could afford to build gardens were a threat the existing power structure.  The garden served as a surrogate for the public arena, the agora that was no off-limits to citizens.  The gardens of pleasure shut out the industrializing city from the view of the families that were extracting the greatest amount of profit from the transformation.  Even as the countryside around Vienna was being polluted by factory smoke and workers were being housed in cold, dangerous barracks, the Bürger could gaze upon the semblance of nature from the upstairs window of his shiny new villa.  Nature was being destroyed as the Bürgers sat in gardens that painstakingly repressed nature by forcing it to pose as the likeness of itself.  The essence of the late century reform program was that nature should take its proper place in the emerging industrial landscape.  The goal of the design was to optimize usefulness at the expense of both ornament and natural growth.  The garden is always part of a larger, urban plan in which it plays an integral part.  It is configured so that its meaning does not become clear unless the context for its existence is also known.  
In the twentieth century, the possibilities for a city in the garden or a garden in the city were radicalized even further.  Gardens of reaction fulfill the dream of the return to the pre-industrial world.  They integrate human society into the living community.  The destiny of the metropolis is to become a large village.  On the other hand, the small garden colonies and the garden settlements offered a very different image of urban life than any that had preceded it.  Once in place, the common adaptation to the garden life reinforced and reproduced a spirit of cooperation, allowing it to influence all aspects of urban life.  Instead of establishing a boundary between the urban and rural, the cultural and the natural, the gardens of renewal integrate nature within the constraints of metropolitan life.  Even those gardens that are enclosed offer people the possibilities of engaging nature's strength through progressive resistance to human movement, shade and sun, and infinite visual variety in color and leaf.  In Ecology gardens everyone who uses a garden can contribute to its design, and every active designer is simultaneously a user.  Each can realize a creative potential spontaneously and playfully, free from the dictates of a fixed plan.  The creation of the urban society lies in the creativity of everyone who works on it.  
Conclusions
The meaning of landscape in Vienna developed over a three-hundred-year long discourse on how best to represent the relationship between culture and nature in the city. When different groups come to power in the city over the last three hundred years, each uses the landscape as a canvas on which to paint their social theories. The formal design elements become so intimately associated with the historical social conditions of their production that one can read the various worldviews of contemporary gardeners from their gardens. Landscape ideas have phrases and formulas that echo through contemporary Viennese descriptions of private and public gardens.  In the language of gardens, there is a relationship between the formal elements, the experience of the gardeners, and what the landscape means to them and their fellow metropolitans.
References
HÖsl and Pirhofer
Hannerz, 92
Foucault, 84
Rotenberg 92, 95

condor.depaul.edu:80/~rrotenbe/aeer/articles/-- Revised 2/11/96

Copyright © 1995  DePaul University

Robert Rotenberg, Managing Editor