Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris’s New Parks, 1977-1995

By Amanda Shoaf Vincent

Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City is the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city’s program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Thanks to laws that gave the city more political autonomy, Paris’s local government launched a campaign of park creation in the late 1970s that continued to the turn of the millennium. The parks in this book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context.

Archival research, interviews, and analyses of the parks reveal how postmodern debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature’s presence in an urban setting influenced their designs. In sum, the city adopted the garden as a model for public parks, investing in complex, richly symbolic and representational spaces. These parks were intended to represent contemporary twists on traditional designs and serve local residents as much as they would contribute to Paris’s role as a world city.

The parks’ development process often included points of conflict, pointing to differing views on what Parisian space should represent and fundamental contradictions between the characteristics of public space and the garden as it is traditionally defined. These parks demonstrate the ongoing cultivation of the city over time, in which transformed sites not only fulfil new functions but also engage with history and their surroundings to create new meaning. They stand for landscape as a form of signifying cultural production that directly engages with other art forms and ways of knowing. Just as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, and the Buttes-Chaumont parks exemplify their eras’ cultural dynamics, such parks as the Jardin Atlantique, Parc André-Citroën, and the Jardin des Halles express contemporary French culture within the archetypal space of their era, the city. Finally, they point the way to current trends in landscape architecture, such as citizen gardening and ecological initiatives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512823868

Amanda Shoaf Vincent

Amanda Shoaf Vincent is Assistant Professor of French Studies at Wake Forest University.

Book preview

Cover: Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City, Paris’s New Parks, 1977–1995 by Amanda Shoaf Vincent

PENN STUDIES IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

John Dixon Hunt, Series Editor

This series is dedicated to the study and promotion of a wide variety of approaches to landscape architecture, with special emphasis on connections between theory and practice. It includes monographs on key topics in history and theory, descriptions of projects by both established and rising designers, translations of major foreign-language texts, anthologies of theoretical and historical writings on classic issues, and critical writing by members of the profession of landscape architecture.

The series was the recipient of the Award of Honor in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects, 2006.

Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City

Paris’s New Parks, 1977–1995

Amanda Shoaf Vincent

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2385-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2386-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vincent, Amanda Shoaf, author.

Title: Constructing gardens, cultivating the city : Paris’s new parks, 1977–1995 / Amanda Shoaf Vincent.

Other titles: Penn studies in landscape architecture.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2023] | Series: Penn studies in landscape architecture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022043320 | ISBN 9781512823851 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Parks—France—Paris. | Gardens—France—Paris. | Gardens, French—France—Paris. | City planning—France—Paris. | Landscape architecture—France—Paris.

Classification: LCC SB485.P24 V56 2023 | DDC 635.0944/361—dc23/eng/20220928

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043320

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Jardin Atlantique: From Modernism to Postmodernity in Maine-Montparnasse

Chapter 2. Jardin des Halles: A Garden at the City Center

Chapter 3. Gardening and Meaning in the Parc André-Citroën

Chapter 4. Bercy’s Jardin de la Mémoire: Ruin, Allegory, Memory

Chapter 5. The Promenade Plantée, or Coulée Verte: Practices and Perceptions of Movement

Conclusion. The City as a Site of Constant Cultivation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

When asked to name Paris’s most famous parks, most people would immediately mention the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries Garden, or the forests of Boulogne and Vincennes—that is, palace gardens and royal hunting forests dating to the Ancien Régime. Next, they might name the Buttes-Chaumont Park, a legacy of the Second Empire’s renovation of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s. Next, a more recent park, La Villette, a controversial, high-theory design by the Franco-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, might come to mind. Only after citing these older and more well-known parks would those familiar with contemporary Paris name the Jardin Atlantique, Jardin des Halles, Parc André-Citroën, Parc de Bercy, and the Coulée verte (also known as the Promenade plantée), all products of the city’s campaign to develop new parks starting in the late 1970s. This group of large parks inaugurated at the end of the twentieth century has escaped significant public attention, despite their scale and their importance both to the city and also to landscape and garden history.

These parks were part of a larger initiative by the city to increase its green space. Over the last two decades of the twentieth century, Paris’s city government claimed to have increased park area by 40 percent, including the creation of 141 new parks, gardens, and squares and the expansion of existing ones. A map published in 2000 highlighted recently created parks in red, contrasting with green tones for older parks. On this map, the Parc de la Villette, Parc André-Citroën, and Parc de Bercy are immediately visible, while the Jardin Atlantique can be discerned at the terminus of the southern Montparnasse rail line and the Jardin des Halles is visible as the only new space of any size in the central Right Bank. Among several red threads denoting linear promenades, the Coulée verte is the longest, connecting the Bastille neighborhood to the Bois de Vincennes in the east (figure 1).¹

Figure 1. Paris, Parcs et jardins publics, 2000. ©APUR

Among the parks created during this time, this book focuses on the five spaces whose designs best illustrate changes to park development practices, theoretical debates, and public perceptions in their shared time and place. These parks appear different from each other in many ways. The Parc de Bercy and Parc André-Citroën are four times as large as the Jardin Atlantique and Jardin des Halles. The Coulée verte, constructed from four kilometers of railroad right-of-way, inaugurated a new typology for parks. Different people, in teams composed of artists, landscape architects, architects, and urbanists, designed each park. Visually, their appearances vary widely, from the traditional details and naturalistic plantings of the Promenade plantée to formal gardens and modernist or postmodernist features in the Parc de Bercy, Parc André-Citroën, and Jardin Atlantique. Despite these differences, they all share a family resemblance thanks to the late twentieth-century Parisian context within which they were built. In this book, each park will serve to illustrate a different facet of this cultural and historical context. In each park, gardened space crystallized debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature’s presence in an urban setting. As these debates unfolded, they influenced planners, designers, and the everyday urban environment.

While there has been scholarly attention to these parks within the field of landscape architecture, they have not all been examined with the same degree of intensity. For example, the architectural and urban planning press of the time covered the Les Halles renovation from 1969 to 1985, and the recently completed second renovation led to a new wave of historiographical work. Yet the Jardin des Halles and its constituent spaces have never been the focus of these texts. Further, English-language critical reception of these parks has been dismissive at times. For instance, the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit organization that has consulted on community spaces in numerous American cities, placed Parc de la Villette, Jardin des Halles, and Parc André-Citroën on a list of the world’s worst parks in 2004.² More importantly, unlike notable parks and gardens of previous centuries, these parks have not been the object of scholarly publications in French Studies.³ This field has much to gain from incorporating landscape, gardens, and parks among its objects of study. An examination of the conditions of park production in the late twentieth century can provide insights about the translation of broad cultural shifts into the built settings of everyday life.

These parks are far from unloved or unused by Paris’s residents, but beyond their popularity and the basic need for open space that they aim to satisfy in a densely constructed city center, they deserve closer attention for their significance to the contemporary history of landscape architecture and French culture. They are constructed spaces—that is, they arise from the convergence of political, intellectual, social, and cultural factors. They illustrate how the city adopted garden design as a model for public parks, but they also underlined the fundamental contradictions between the characteristics of public space and the garden as it is traditionally defined. They demonstrate the ongoing cultivation of the city over time, in which transformed sites not only fulfill new functions but also engage with historical and spatial context to create new meaning. They stand for landscape as a form of signifying cultural production that directly engages with other art forms and ways of knowing. Just as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, or the Buttes-Chaumont parks exemplify their eras’ cultural dynamics, these parks express contemporary French culture within the archetypal space of their era, the city.

To lay the foundation for an in-depth analysis of each park, this introduction will provide historical and theoretical context, surveying the evolution of ideas about cities and urban public space; changes to Paris’s political landscape, administrative structures, and city planning regulations; and significant recent developments in the practice and study of landscape in France. We will then examine the Parc de la Villette, a park project that both illuminated the central role parks could play in the urban context and contrasted with the city’s approach to park design traced in this book. The significant differences between this park and the other parks examined here, many of which are evident thanks to the volume of prior scholarly work on La Villette, lead to a targeted reading of the park as a foil that sets off the specificity and significance of the parks analyzed and announces, in part, by contrast, the book’s major themes. The introduction will conclude with chapter overviews that introduce the main themes guiding each park’s analysis.

Turning Points for Paris and for Parks

In Paris, park creation illustrated broader cultural movements, expressing them with greater intensity compared to the situation in France’s other major cities at the time. This is likely due to its status as the exponentially magnified center of French identity. Even as the Paris region far surpassed the historic city itself in population, and efforts began to decentralize political and economic life in the 1980s, Paris remained the heart of cultural and intellectual life for the French. The city remained exceptional, as the trope of the Paris-province opposition underscored, and embodied the most concentrated site of French-ness in the world’s gaze. This overdetermined city identity meant that any changes to Paris held enormous symbolic weight as changes to the very image of France. In addition, Parisian space is the ground on which theorists of the modern city, from Baudelaire onward, have worked out their ideas. However, these new parks are not an embodiment of an imagined, eternal city spirit. The city’s elected officials and municipal administration, landscape architects, and citizens all followed motivations that were intrinsic to their fields or positions, and often entered into conflict. The parks’ visible stylistic diversity and representational richness is an expression of this in retrospect fruitful conflict, more than of an individual or collective intentionality. Efforts to establish historical continuity with Paris’s past, stylistic continuity with past aesthetic movements, or spatial continuity with the surrounding urban fabric must be read as constructed through language, visual representations, and landscape elements rather than flowing from inevitable natural or cultural causes.

This wave of parks creation marked a turning point in French urbanism from high modern planning to postmodern city design. In its broadest sense, postmodern refers to a recent phenomenon, the political and social situation that arose after the collapse, in the mid-twentieth century, of the modern metanarratives of universal progress that had underpinned Western civilization. In the absence of these narratives, according to the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, humanity confronted persistent social inequality and accelerating techno-scientific complexity without any sense of a guiding framework or progress.⁴ In France, the era after May 1968 reflected increasing tension between a centralized technocratic state and local political structures that adopted a variety of responses to the contemporary era’s complexification and growing inequality at their own smaller scale.

In Paris and its region, the transition from technocratic state planning to a more diffuse local authority was particularly dramatic, as illustrated by the first two chapters, on the Jardin Atlantique and Jardin des Halles, two projects launched in the 1960s. The first phase of these two projects, undertaken by a regional planning authority administered not by local governments but by the state, hewed to modern large-scale, functionalist doctrine and techniques, while the interface between massive new construction and the adjacent historic built environment and existing community received little consideration. Rather than seeking insight from residents about the conditions of their everyday lives, planners looked to analyses prepared by experts that prioritized the basic city functions dear to modern planning. In the Maine-Montparnasse development, this doctrine devalued the presence of green space, so that the Jardin Atlantique was not constructed until decades after the initial renovation had been completed, at the initiative of the city and with the help of private financing. In the neighborhood of Les Halles, the future green space, claimed by both the nation and the city, became bound up in the political upheaval around this transition from nationally to locally based governance and planning. These parks demonstrate key tenets of postmodern urbanism: locally adapted but necessarily partial solutions; modification within an existing environment; and, absent a broader social project, the intent to improve the qualitative lived experience of city-dwellers.

The changes that occurred within Paris’s municipal administration and the process through which parks were designed during this period reflect postmodernism’s political aspect. A 1975 law transferred political and administrative power over the capital from the national government to local elected officials.⁵ In 1977, Parisians elected Gaullist Jacques Chirac to be their first mayor of the modern political era.⁶ Chirac, reelected twice, remained in office until he was elected president of France in 1995. Prior to this time, the municipal administration’s technocratic bureaucracy, headed by an appointed préfet of the Seine département, had administered Paris’s green spaces. Like other branches of the city administration, its Sous-direction des parcs, jardins et espaces verts had rationalistic, hierarchical planning and management practices. The changes to the city’s electoral system and to its administrative structure forced changes to the parks service, manifesting the city’s turn toward postmodern urbanism. The period 1977–1995 thus represents a period of political continuity but, more importantly, a sustained era during which the city pursued a coherent policy of park expansion and improvement.

Art Urbain

The backlash against the negative consequences of the post–World War II era’s modernist urbanism included a revived perception of the city as an aesthetic composition, not merely a series of functionalist spaces. Originally associated with the nineteenth-century architect Camillo Sitte, the idea of art urbain made a tentative reappearance in design literature, beginning in the late 1960s. Architects and urbanists adopted the term to refer to historically conscious, human-scaled urban design that viewed the city as a work of art.⁷ This idea appealed not only to landscape architects such as Pierre Donadieu but also to architects interested in landscape, including Parc de Bercy’s designer Bernard Huet, who stated that art urbain directly concerns the construction of the city as a physical entity: its form, its public spaces, its architecture; and is transmitted via the project.⁸ For Huet, planners should give art urbain as much consideration as urbanism, which deals with regional planning, with the management and distribution of the major planning functions.⁹ Violating the modernist dictum, Huet declared his engagement with architectural and urban form as more than a direct consequence of function. In Paris, the city’s approach of creating architecturally coherent new neighborhoods in the redevelopment zones around the Parc André-Citroën and the Parc de Bercy, in which new construction and public spaces were designed in concert, represents the return of attention to art urbain. This consideration of the city’s public spaces as a work of art represented a specifically French (and Parisian) response within postmodernity.

Due in part to the renewal of art urbain, public green spaces ceased to be considered purely as municipal infrastructure or utilities, as they had been in recent history. Prior to the 1970s, Paris’s city administration had treated public parks primarily as part of the city’s infrastructure, part of the systematic distribution of hygiene and leisure for citizens, and only secondarily as aesthetic compositions. Like clean water, sewers, or roads, parks contributed to city dwellers’ health and wellbeing. Certainly, Paris’s historic public parks were often also beautiful. The Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens, originally ornaments of the royal palaces they adjoined before progressively being opened to the public, represented the aesthetic and social codes of their eras. Moreover, nineteenth-century parks, the first green spaces designed from the start to be public amenities, were hygienic but also beautiful spaces. As Antoine Grumbach has pointed out, Parisian parks redeveloped or created under the Second Empire, such as the Bois de Boulogne or Buttes-Chaumont, were intended to contribute to a system of beauty.¹⁰ In the twentieth century, however, this aesthetic element had diminished. Further, when planners considered green space, it was generally associated with new suburban construction. The role of gardens within a postmodern vision of art urbain in the 1980s appears to be unique to Paris.

Concours

In addition to a changed vision of the city, modifications to the process by which new park development was carried out influenced park design during this time. In particular, competitions to select park designers have transformed the city’s green space production. Since 1986, French law has required that the professionals contracted for publicly funded architectural and engineering work be selected via a competitive process, a concours.¹¹ Even prior to this legislation, the designers of certain large public parks had been chosen by concours, notably for the expansion of the Parc de la Courneuve in 1972 and the Parc du Sausset in 1978 (both located in Seine-Saint-Denis) and, most famously, the Parc de la Villette in 1981. Through the concours, the city chose landscape architects and architects in private practice to design many new parks instead of entrusting them to the parks department’s Service des travaux neufs. Designers for the Jardin Atlantique, Parc André-Citroën, Parc de Bercy, and the viaduct supporting the western half of the Promenade plantée were all selected through this competitive design process.

The concours process implemented in Paris had several key effects on park design. First, it raised the projects’ profile, typically leading to various education, information, and public awareness campaigns, with the effect of widen[ing] the debate and involv[ing] people who would probably otherwise not be involved.¹² At the least, the concours for each of the parks analyzed resulted in a round of publicity, not only in professional journals but also in newspapers and other mass media. The competition system also brought previously unknown young designers into competition with experienced ones.¹³ La Villette was Tschumi’s first public commission and Jardin Atlantique’s designers, recent graduates from landscape architecture school, won their commission over established landscape architects as well.

Next, the concours required the city to produce a written program or brief for the future park. The La Villette brief, written by the polymath cultural administrator François Barré, revolutionized the genre. Landscape architect François Brun, one of the Jardin Atlantique’s designers, commented, We were coming out of a period during which there wasn’t a program for gardens; people said, ‘Make us a garden, that’ll be enough, the idea suffices for itself.’ ¹⁴ According to Brun, during the La Villette competition, "they said, ‘gardens can illustrate something more specific, in a more particular way.’ The competition had shown that in a concours for a park, there could be a very broad range of proposals, and gardens could be elaborated in very different directions. Five or ten years before, they would have said, ‘we want a big lawn, we want functional elements.’ "¹⁵ Despite the fact that French landscape architects felt slighted by the choice of an architect for La Villette, the competition increased the sophistication of landscape and garden discourse and contributed to the image of parks as cultural spaces.

Though experts evaluated the technical aspects of competing proposals, the ultimate decision rested with a jury including elected officials, who were intended to represent the public, alongside specialists. In Paris, municipal park juries included representatives of the city’s urban planning study department, the Atelier parisien d’urbanisme (APUR); the city parks department; city councilmembers; and arrondissement mayors. The proposals’ written texts, graphic documents, and, in some cases, oral arguments, therefore had to appeal and be comprehensible to these non-specialists. Sociologist Françoise Dubost has found that this emphasis on persuasive visual representations prioritized the form of the future park over the ways that users’ needs would be met and desires satisfied. The concours also tended to reinforce a more aesthetic approach to landscape—that is, an approach in which composition and the manipulation of visual elements took precedence over the engineering and logistical skills necessary to properly organize and carry out landscape construction—allowing ‘artists’ to take their place next to ‘professionals.’ ¹⁶

As architecture scholar Frédéric Pousin has observed, the French design concours resulted in particular types of written and visual texts produced by competitors. Competition documents were translations, Pousin noted, of the social, economic, and political objectives of the client into a design.¹⁷ In addition, these documents also had to translate complex technical features into language and images that a non-specialist jury could interpret. They further attempted to persuade jury members of their qualities, even though attractive, apparently accessible forms of architectural representation did not necessarily communicate the specificity of a team’s approach.¹⁸ Pousin’s analysis of the various strategies by which competition images and text articulate meaning draws on Roland Barthes’s analyses of the interplay between word and image, and serves as a model for such analyses in this book.¹⁹

The concours process facilitated the transformation of Paris’s parks into self-consciously cultural objects through the briefs prepared by the city, the projects submitted by competitors, and the inclusion of non-specialists in the jury. By calling upon outside designers rather than parks service professionals steeped in a century of municipal tradition, the city surrendered the visual unity of the landscaped park style it had followed, with few variations, since its origins in the Second Empire. This style, as illustrated in the engravings in Alphand’s Promenades de Paris, included sinuous paths around undulating terrain, with clumps of shrubbery and trees framing perspectives and camouflaging urban eyesores.²⁰ Fixed catalogues of plant species, park furniture, and architecture imposed a uniform visual identity from the humblest neighborhood square to the Parc Monceau’s gilded gates. In contrast, novelty and audacity, not uniformity and discipline, were the watchwords of these new parks.

Gardens

Paris’s late twentieth-century parks broke with the city’s tradition while being designed to be aesthetically pleasing. As several other commentators have noted, the late twentieth century saw a revival of the garden as model for French public parks.²¹ Michel Conan’s definition of jardin highlights its etymological connotation of an enclosed or delimited space that contains a choice of vegetation of which the arrangement, the cultivation, and the maintenance obey intentions of refinement.²² Horticultural techniques, uses of the garden, and varieties of plants, all convey this refinement. The parks examined in this book include a stunning array of vegetation in sophisticated arrangements that require constant attention from gardeners, for the pleasure of visitors willing to conform to the Paris parks department’s famously strict regulations. However, they have something more. The Florence Charter, which lays the groundwork for historical garden preservation, calls gardens the expression of the direct affinity between civilisation and nature, a place of enjoyment suited to meditation or repose, and an idealised image of the world, a ‘paradise’ in the etymological sense of the term, and yet a testimony to a culture, a style, an age, and often to the originality of a creative artist.²³ This definition emphasizes the meaningful nature of gardens: they express, present an image, and testify to the conditions that produced them.

Expanding on this fundamental characteristic of gardens as spaces of intentional meaning, garden historian John Dixon Hunt’s 1991 essay The Garden as Cultural Object proclaimed, Gardens … mean rather than are. Their various signs are constituted of all the elements that compose them—elements of technical human intervention like terraces or the shape of flowerbeds; elements of nature like water and trees—but they are nonetheless signs, to be read by outsiders in time and space for what they tell of a certain society.²⁴ Hunt’s essay situates gardens as signifying spaces that transform their spatial contexts, create invented tradition through manipulation of historical references, and synthesize nature and human intervention into a third nature.

Hunt’s essay provides a lens that illuminates the representational and signifying intentions of the park designers discussed in this book. Part of the park visitor’s pleasure would be the adventure of decoding the parks’ signification and interpreting their meanings. In many cases, official tour group leaders, books and other publications about the gardens, not to mention nomenclature, labels, and signs found within the parks themselves, guide visitors’ interpretations. Because of this representational intentionality, the present book is not merely an effort to provide additional explication or exegesis of these meanings but to consider what it means for these gardens to be meaningful in the time and place of postmodern France.

As cultural objects that are self-consciously meaningful, these parks can be qualified as aesthetically postmodern. They refer to the traditions of French garden art brushed aside by landscape architects of the modern period, including in their quotations of earlier stylistic elements. These quotations rework such ideas as nostalgia and memory in the Parc de Bercy, the relationship between the sciences and the arts in the Parc André-Citroën, or the relationship between site and context in the Promenade plantée. This reworking justifies the use of the term postmodern despite the negative connotations that cling to the term when used as a stylistic label. Instead, these parks participate in a critical postmodernity called for by architectural historian and critic François Chaslin, one that would avoid archaism and nostalgia, and would claim an ongoing modernity of incessant critique.²⁵

Landscape as a Profession and a Discipline

In parallel to the changes described above, the academic field and professional discipline of landscape also evolved during the last quarter of the twentieth century in France. While the impact of the May 1968 uprising did not spark the immediate revolution in pedagogy and educational institutions in landscape that it had in architecture, the 1970s were a period of transition for the field. The French national horticultural school, housed in Versailles’ royal vegetable gardens, developed first a landscape design track, then a separate landscape school, the École nationale supérieure de paysage (ENSP). This school trained students as designers who would develop landscape projects expressing abstract ideas through words and images. The Jardin Atlantique’s landscape architects, François Brun and Michel Péna, and Gilles Clément, one among the four laureates of the Parc André-Citroën concours, were all graduates of the ENSP, as were many of the other competition finalists. The origins and evolution of the ENSP will be examined in Chapter 1, on the Jardin Atlantique. However, the location of the school at Versailles points to the weight of the historical garden tradition in contemporary French pedagogy. Beyond pragmatic obstacles such as the language barrier, profound differences exist between how landscape architecture is taught and understood as a field in France versus other European countries and North America. Contemporary design criticism tends to give short shrift to cultural and linguistic differences, one of the reasons Parisian parks were frequently panned by English-speaking landscape critics. This book aims to re-situate the parks studied within this historical and cultural context.

Landscape and the environment had begun to interest researchers in various academic disciplines of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences in the 1970s. The ENSP sought to develop a research program whose questions and methods would be pertinent to landscape architects and designers.²⁶ Bernard Lassus, who had been a key figure in the ENSP’s foundation, went on to launch the Jardins, paysages, territoires research laboratory in 1991 at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de la Villette, one of the architecture schools created in the wake of May 1968. The laboratory was also affiliated with the École des hautes études en sciences sociales; its name change in 2003 to Architecture, milieu, paysage reflected its orientation toward the relation of a society to its environment, expressing both hermeneutic approaches, or searches for meaning within a particular culture, but also efforts to consider differences among cultures.²⁷ In addition to this laboratory, a number of other universities and architecture schools have launched doctoral programs that encompass landscape studies.

Garden History

Accompanying the pedagogical transformation, research expansion, and theoretical development of landscape, the idea of the garden began to attract renewed interest in French cultural, artistic, and intellectual spheres. Garden history had lain fallow for several decades since it had taken on an antiquated air tainted by a whiff of reactionary politics in the early decades of the twentieth century.²⁸ In the postwar reconstruction era, the garden tradition seemed irrelevant, as landscape architects had sought new design approaches for the green spaces that accompanied the suburban extension of France’s major cities, surrounded the new towns of the Paris region, and inserted themselves in the gaps between modernist blocks and Paris’s historic streets.²⁹ Scholarship on gardens from this era did little more than sing the praises of France’s glorious historical gardens, while Paris’s parks service turned its attention to the scientific evaluation of its green space’s hygienic qualities.³⁰ Signaling a sea change in history, theory, and contemporary design, Traverses, the avant-garde journal of the Centre Georges Pompidou’s Centre de création industrielle, dedicated a special issue to Jardins contre nature in 1976.³¹ Garden historiography began to expand rapidly in the last decade of the twentieth century, primarily as a subfield of art and architectural history.³² Concurrently to researchers’ scholarly activity, ICOMOS, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, and the International Federation of Landscape Architects published the Florence Charter in 1981, establishing principles and guidelines for historic garden preservation. The French government likewise undertook surveys and inventories of historical gardens in view of conservation efforts.³³ This interest in gardens accompanied the turn to garden models in Paris’s new parks.

Discussions surrounding Paris’s two most publicized new green spaces of the late 1970s and early 1980s reveal the garden model’s instability as a reference. In his entry for the Parc de la Villette’s international design competition, hailed as An Urban Park for the 21st Century in northeast Paris, the eventual laureate, architect Bernard Tschumi stated, The inadequacy of the civilization versus nature polarity under modern city conditions has invalidated the time-honored prototype of the park as an image of nature.³⁴ In this statement, Tschumi articulated a polar opposition between civilization and nature in order to proceed with his deconstructive approach. In contrast, the Les Halles garden designers, François and Claude Lalanne and Louis Arretche, articulated a return to the traditional idea of garden as synthesis of nature and culture, or terza natura, as evidenced by François Lalanne’s statement that it was necessary to create a garden that remained urban, that never ceased to be the city but a garden that still remains a garden.³⁵ All of the parks studied in this book grapple with this question of how to integrate a garden, traditionally an enclosed space, designed and cultivated with intentions of refinement, into the contemporary city both spatially and conceptually.

Transversal Theory and Methodologies

This book’s analyses employ tools and methods of French cultural studies, while aiming for relevance for landscape architecture. This approach is situated within the spatial turn in the humanities that sees space as more than a passive reflection of social and cultural trends, and instead, constitutive of these phenomena.³⁶ The foundational choice to group together Parisian parks, as opposed to writing a monograph about a particular designer or a park type found in various French or Francophone cities, reflects this vision of spaces as actors.³⁷ The spatial turn is both topical and theoretical: numerous other recent books in French Studies have explored what specific spaces or types of spaces reveal about the society that constructed them.³⁸ Meanwhile, French theorists of space, especially city space, have been fundamental to the development of these analyses. The influence of works by Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others, goes beyond citations at pertinent moments to permeate any consideration of French urban space.

A vision of parks as cultural phenomena that signify and produce meaning in profusion, that are the work of people, institutions, and places that they in turn shape, requires the interdisciplinary theoretical framework and methodological tools of cultural studies and cultural historiography. In his editorial for the first issue of the landscape journal Carnets du paysage, Pierre-François Mourier remarked, Landscape has the particularity of needing, it seems to us, a voluntarily transversal attitude on the part of those who study it—no doubt, simply, because of the complexity of the notions that must be integrated into it, and which must be brought into play with it.³⁹ Under this sign of transversality, the analysis of these parks as cultural objects draws from a number of approaches and methods. If, as Monique Yaari argues, French cultural studies encompasses three approaches, socially and politically inflected cultural studies, cultural history, and cultural analysis, this book’s method is situated closer to the last two types.⁴⁰ Rachel Mesch has argued for an approach that combines critical analysis, which in French studies traces its roots back to Roland Barthes, and historiographical techniques to contextualize this analysis, building a methodological bridge between the historiographical and analytical poles.⁴¹

As historians of urbanism have noted, historiographical methods can address some of the specific difficulties of understanding the contemporary city. First, a historical approach can find points of intersection or axes of reading that gather together the effects of processes at work in the contemporary city.⁴² Parks serve as points of convergence between broad social and political movements and changes within disciplines such as urban planning and landscape architecture. Next, the compact space-time of the city influences social life and movements as varying demographic, political, administrative, and economic rhythms set a complex beat.⁴³ As illustrated most dramatically in the Les Halles renovation, urban transformations take decades but a single day’s events can transform the entire history of a project. Confronted with the difficulty of understanding local political forces, this project does not recount the biography of a personified Paris-as-actor that brought other people and entities together to transform its spaces, but rather as a convergence of multiple institutional and individual actors whose varying methods and intentions are not always clear or harmonious. Finally, historiography seeks to account for both completed and incomplete or canceled projects.⁴⁴ Such projects abound in Paris, and they are brought into the discussion on occasion. This broad historical contextualization, with its political, cultural, and social components, is an aspect that is often absent from landscape design analysis.

This research began with the aim of reading these parks as cultural text-images, in the broad definition of the term proposed by Mieke Bal for the practice of interdisciplinary cultural analysis.⁴⁵ Bal’s framing of this approach collapses the distinction between verbal and visual forms of representation and highlights objects that are publicly accessible, semantically dense, pragmatically intriguing, visually appealing and insistent, and philosophically profound while also remaining transient and possessing a quality of insistent presentness.⁴⁶ As texts, they may be understood through analytical tools taken up by theorists across literature, the arts, and architecture that explore the construction of signification through signifier and signified and a relationship, however arbitrary, slippery, or complicated, between the two.⁴⁷ Further, parks-as-texts dialogue with other types of texts, most notably the visual and verbal discourses that surround them, produced by their designers, various state entities, the media, and the people who encounter them as they are planned, built, and then used. A number of the arguments made in this book are not arguments about the parks themselves, but rather about how these parks are represented through words and images, and how these visual and verbal representations participate in or contest other discourses about city space and city life. Despite the linguistic model’s productivity for cultural analysis, the analogy of reading a text does not do justice to parks’ full complexity. Landscape experiences include sensations and phenomena that fall outside a linguistically based semiotic framework, a point explored in relation to the Promenade plantée.

My embodied experience within the parks is as fundamental to the elaboration of my arguments as the primary source documents cited and the theoretical frameworks deployed. Through repeated visits, I sought to observe how these parks did or did not conform to the city’s and its designers’ intentions. I