Of criticisms strictly applicable to this paper as it stands, there are
really very few. I am confident that the chairman must be quite alone in
too modestly applying to his great work that description of London
itself, with which the paper (Section A, pp. 104-107) opens, since his
volumes offer really our first effective clue to the labyrinth, and his
method of intensive and specialised regional survey, the intensest
searchlight yet brought to bear upon it.
Taking, however, a concrete point of criticism, such as that of the
monumental planning of modern Paris as derived from forest rides, the
critic need only walk through any French forest, or even to consult a
Baedeker, or other guide-book, with its maps of any historic dwelling
and its surroundings, from Chantilly or Fontainebleau to minor ones, to
see that this plan, originally devised for the pleasure, success and
safety [Page: 137] of the hunt, and later adapted to domination and
defence, became next appreciated as affording the finest possible
perspectives of the palatially rebuilt chateau. So that it is not at all
a fantastic hypothesis, but an obvious and inevitable conclusion that
Napoleon's and Haussman's plans were not at all invented by them for
Paris, but were directly imitated from the familiar landscape
architecture of the preceding century, which again was but the simplest
development from the spacious forest rides of older hunting nobles, laid
out without any thought of the architectural and city developments they
were destined in later centuries to determine.
The citizen of Washington had till lately often forgotten that the
magnificent perspectives of his city are due to the French
landscape-architect (Major L'Enfant) whom Washington imported for the
express purpose of laying out his capital; yet it is no less clear that
this most magnificent of the New World city plans is derived from Old
World forest rides, than that its monumental edifices descend from
Renaissance and classic exemplars.
I plead indeed for such studies of the plans of any and every city from
the point of view of its natural development. The too purely abstract
and subjective sociology of the dwellers of great cities like London
would in this way be helped by the facts of their own topographic
history, already well known and clearly explained by geographer and
historian, towards again feeling with the naturalist that even the
modern city is but the most complex evolutionary expression and
development of the life of Nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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