Why Ian McHarg Makes Me Angry

I can recall many images in my life that I have considered beautiful. I have watched the colors of sunrise reflect off of the Hudson River. I have traveled to the Grand Canyon and felt small above the incomprehensibly large expanse. The most striking image I ever saw, however, I observed in New York City. It was one o’clock in the morning, and I was sitting next to a high school friend on a bench in Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The park, which is relatively small in size, contains an esplanade from which one can look down upon the East River, and beyond to Roosevelt Island and further to Astoria, Queens. Interspersed with the areas across the river are the majestic Queensboro and Triborough (now the Robert F. Kennedy) Bridges, the latter rather ironically the work of the man responsible for the highways that separate much of Manhattan from its aquatic surroundings, Robert Moses.  Sitting on this bench with my friend, with the soft light of night lamps shining down on us and the lights of Queens and the Triborough Bridge in front of us, I could not help but feel a profound sense of wonder and pride in being from the New York Metropolitan Area.

So informed by first hand experience of the potential of the urban landscape to intermingle with nature in a manner that transcends the means of its conception, I felt a mix of pity and rage directed towards noted landscape architect Ian McHarg after reading a sampling of his reflections on the “modern city”. A quote from his 1963 essay Man and Environment affords my resentment a tangible source, suggesting that the modern city, “inhibits man as an organism, man as a social being, man as a spiritual being, and that it does not even offer adequate minimum conditions for physiological man… indeed the modern city offers the least humane physical environment known to history.” Considering that the modern city, in its many manifestations, each with their own histories, forms, and relationships with the “natural” environment he champions, is extraordinarily difficult to generalize, McHarg’s dismissal of the modern city as “the least humane physical environment known to history” is much easier to dismiss as ignorant. It is clear the negative impacts of suburban living on the human psyche had not been evident to him at the time.

However, McHarg’s background in landscape architecture, and understanding of historic trends in land use evident in his writing do not beget an ignorance of the potential of the urban form. Rather, it is his distaste for the concept that man can triumph over nature. In this sense, McHarg has a point. Urbanism, as it has taken form since the Industrial Revolution, has frequently emphasized economic and physical growth over consideration of the natural environment, and its place in the city. The aforementioned Robert Moses and his use of land abutting the East River in Manhattan serves as a prime example. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt East River Drive along the eastern coast of Manhattan Island has closed New Yorkers off from the beauty of one of its major waterways since the mid 1930’s (http://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/historical-signs/listings?id=12179).

The problem with McHarg’s perception of the modern city is his unwillingness to accept that the modern city has produced areas of great beauty, anthropogenic or otherwise. Walking around New York City, and other cities around the country, I have often found myself more inspired by the alternating charms and grand statements of successful urban areas, which necessarily interact with nature at some scale, than by natural wonders that McHarg assumes are more worthwhile. Even blights in the urban form excite me, because they provide further potential for innovation, innovations that may, in time, have solutions create a better harmony between the man made and the natural. McHarg is not incorrect to suggest that the city is a form that could do more to interact synergistically with the environment. It is his pessimism and disgust for the urban form that cause me to pity him for not finding beauty in what man has been able to accomplish through the modern city.