Why Gardens? explores the garden as an urban landscape strategy as well significant artifact and mode of expression that is essential to the well-being of individuals, communities and cities.

The garden as city, as the fundamental fabric of the city, foregrounds the multi-layered landscape as essential to city building, and challenges the current norm of New Urbanist practice that privileges neutral objects such as the block, lot, building and street as basic elements of city building. Urban Design Associates: Louisiana Speaks: Planning Toolkit outlines strategies for rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina that focus on mobility, neo-traditional housing types, big box development and general convenience. According to the Planning Toolkit, scales of development relate to the region in terms of land management and use; the city in terms of a framework of systems; the neighborhood in terms of elements like streets and open space; the block as a configuration based on uses; and the lot as a place for “preparing sites and placing structures on them” (Urban Design Associates, 17). The assembly kit framework is limited in that it does not account for the subtleties or nuances of a particular place. Rather, the planning proposals are outmoded strategies that fail to celebrate natural and cultural idiosyncrasies of Louisiana’s many and varied landscapes.

Given that the garden “is a medium that has been with us more or less since the beginning of recorded civilizations,” John Dixon Hunt asserts that gardens “must presumably reflect, answer, even create certain human needs and concerns” (Hunt, 13). As a cultural product that is of, but set apart from the surrounding landscape, gardens express time, place, activity, material, creativity, hope, desire, necessity, and nourishment. Gardens are embodied fabrics of culture and nature as they attempt to represent an individual or culture’s relationship with the natural world. Reflected are multiple meanings and layers of association. Multiple scales of territory, time, material, climate, history, experience and culture are woven into intricate stories. Understood as a richly layered idea as well as an idiosyncratic place that is imbued with implications of survival, creativity, experience, contemplation and hope; the transformative power of the garden is undeniable.

In his work Greater Perfections, Hunt inquires about the significance of the garden in the future practice of landscape architecture, “landscape architecture… has lost touch too, with gardens not as items to be designed and built but as models or ideas for larger enterprises” (Hunt, xi). As a means for moving away from the city as a loose and undefined sprawl of objects and open spaces, Rowe and Koetter in Collage City suggest a new potential for the garden in the organization of cities: “if the garden may offer the presence of a constructed situation independent of the necessity for any buildings, than gardens may be useful; and we think not so much of the acknowledged set pieces … as of the impacted Hadrianic disarray…” (Rowe and Koetter, 175). In response, this study of the urban garden as essential and incremental implies a rich mosaic of urban ecologies, past and present, and suggests a new kind of urbanism that privileges the multi-layered landscape over New Urbanist models that privilege objects, neotraditionalist aesthetics, and abstract systems.


Balmori, Diana and Morton, Margaret. Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Helphand, Kenneth. Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. Trinity University Press. 2006.

Hunt, John Dixon. Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Rowe, Colin and Koetter, Fred. Collage City. Boston: Birkhauser, 1984.

Urban Design Associates. Louisiana Speaks: Planning Toolkit. Louisiana Recovery Authority, 2007