Recent and Forthcoming Publications by Mark Haywood
Salt River Soliloquies, 2002
A catalogue essay on the metropolitan sublime of Cape Town written for Gavin Younge's exhibiton, ... more A catalogue essay on the metropolitan sublime of Cape Town written for Gavin Younge's exhibiton, Salt River Soliloquies at Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town.
Krysmanski, Bernd (ed.) '250 Years On: New Light on William Hogarth', Berlin, 2014.
This account draws on recent findings in the scientific study of physical attractiveness, evoluti... more This account draws on recent findings in the scientific study of physical attractiveness, evolutionary psychology and genetics to re-evaluate the meaning and significance of William Hogarth"s 1753 book, The Analysis of Beauty. 1 The Analysis is notable in many respects; but most relevant to the present argument is that it was a painter"s aesthetic theory based primarily on intuition and direct observation from life and, if writing today an artist might well choose to describe such a study as a "phenomenological investigation". Although, the Analysis also provides extensive and valuable delineation of historical precedents, these largely serve as supporting material for Hogarth"s empirical observations. This is because the painter was conscious of being regarded by his rivals as an autodidact and such precedents helped provide the necessary gravitas and supporting provenance. However, it can be argued that the earlier body canons and treatises on physical beauty that Hogarth cited were also cultural rationalisations of intuitive preferences, and it is only in recent decades that theories of physical beauty or cupiditas 2 have acquired plausible scientific explanations. A second notable aspect of the Analysis is that it was the first aesthetic treatise to include artefacts as well as art in the category of the beautiful. However in 1757, only four years after publication, this potentially valuable contribution to aesthetic theory was side-lined when Hogarth"s theories on beauty were subsumed and re-contextualised within a larger aesthetic system in Edmund Burke"s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Over the following decades, this innovative and potentially valuable aspect of the Analysis was rendered wholly untenable
'The Reception of Chinese Art across Cultures', Huang, Michelle (ed.) Cambridge Scholars Press. , Sep 2014
""Return of the Silent Traveller: Abstract
Over the past decade, Western interest in contempor... more ""Return of the Silent Traveller: Abstract
Over the past decade, Western interest in contemporary Chinese art has been well evidenced in the UK through exchanges like the British Council’s Artist Links (2002-6) and exhibitions such as Tate Liverpool’s The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China (2008). Inevitably, these foregrounded art made in China, but despite many Western artists having now undertaken residencies there, Chinese artists have usually made the reverse journey in order to exhibit, rather than to make art in a European context.
A striking exception was the CLEAR* project, Return of the Silent Traveller in which Haikou based artist, Weng Fen (aka. Weng Peijun) undertook an artist’s residency in the English Lake District. The project celebrated the seventieth anniversary of The Silent Traveller in Lakeland, an account of a visit to the region by the exiled painter-poet Chiang Yee. The latter's book remains popular because its first person narrative portrayed the familiar from an unfamiliar perspective and the author illustrated it with Lakes' landscapes executed in the Daoist tradition. Weng Fen’s mural sized photographs in turn offered a fresh, contemporary vision of the overly familiar, albeit by portraying the artist and his family as uncomprehending outsiders, ill at ease in a beautiful, but alien landscape.
The account also examines salient differences between Western, Romantic derived tropes of landscape, such as the male magisterial gaze and those of the two Chinese artists, one traditional, the other contemporary. Consideration is also given to formalist aspects such as the heightened colour saturation of the greens in Weng’s stunning photographs, a device he used to convey the striking verdancy of the Lake District landscapes. These images are doubly informative because Western photographers would intuitively eschew such a strategy as highly unnatural or artificial.
* Centre for Landscape and Environmental Arts Research
""
Pauknerova, Stella and Gibas (eds.) 'Non-Humans in Social Science: Ontologies, Theories and Case Studies' Prague, Pavel Mervart., 2014
This book chapter was developed from a paper given at the Prague conference, The Non-Human in Ant... more This book chapter was developed from a paper given at the Prague conference, The Non-Human in Anthropology, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies, The Charles University.
It relates to the author’s accounts of the semiotic relationships and differences between the architecture of imperial and colonial zoos. (Stellenbosch, 2008; Carlisle, 2009; Chicago, 2012) and the shifting social and cultural values reflected in the architectural rhetoric of a century of South African zoo lion enclosures (Tartu, 2011). Here a similar approach is applied to the contentious issue of nearly two centuries of European elephant houses designed by leading architects.
The earliest case study is of Decimus Burton’s Elephant Stables at London Zoo (1831) which was a hybridised fusion of African lapa thatch and Indian tented pavilion. The second concerns the world’s first modernist elephant house, a ‘rationalist’ design by Berthold Lubetkin at Whipsnade Zoo (1935) whose dimensions were based on the discovery that captive elephants tended to walk in small circles. This is followed by Hugh Casson’s ‘Brutalist ‘ building at London Zoo (1962-5) which is supposed to resemble a herd of elephants at a waterhole and whose roughly textured outer walls were intended to be evocative of elephant hide. The account concludes with Norman Foster’s much praised hi-tech structure at Copenhagen Zoo (2008) whose glass roof has a photo-etched pattern of leaves, which it is claimed simulates the light conditions of an African forest.
Throughout this time the animal framed within these structures has remained physically unchanged, in contrast to what has been projected on to it.
Whilst each building embodies the attitudes of its particular era, there appears to have been both a consistent concern for the animal, and an equally consistent failure to question the purpose, or indeed desirability of keeping these large, highly social, tropical mammals in extremely artificial situations at high latitudes.
Cimatti and Milani (eds.) Nature and the City, Società Italiana d'Estetica & Laboratory for Research on the City, University of Bologna.
In February 2008, the United Nations’ Revision of World Urbanization Prospects predicted that by ... more In February 2008, the United Nations’ Revision of World Urbanization Prospects predicted that by the end of that year, for the first time in human history, more than half the world’s population would be living in urban, rather than rural locations. Hania Zlotnik, Director of the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), which prepared the report, noted that, ‘Although Asia and Africa are the least urbanized areas, they account for most of the urban population of the world.’ It is frequently predicted that the archetypal city of the twenty-first century will be the non-Western (or southern hemisphere) megalopolis. This essay considers the changing roles of two urban zoos in the burgeoning South African metropolis of Gauteng (current population c.11,000,000)
South Africa is justly renowned for its game reserves, but many non-South Africans may be surprised to learn that the Johannesburg/Pretoria conurbation which makes up Gauteng province is also home to two large zoos. Over the past century, they have formed a shifting narrative of interplay between ‘nature’ and urbanisation, from colonial taxonomy and mastery over nature to the post-colonial re-presentation and re-construction of national identity. The account considers three distinct phases in this process: -
1) The 1900s when Johannesburg Zoo was created in the new suburb of Saxonburg, whose landscape had been Europeanised with 70,000 trees imported from Germany. This is considered as seemingly oppositional processes of erasing an indigenous landscape and flora while seeking to preserve and classify its disappearing fauna.
2) The late 1930s when the National Zoological Gardens in Pretoria created the Lowveld Enclosures from neighbouring indigenous bush it had purchased thirty years earlier and which had since become surrounded by the expanding city. We term this ‘non-architecture’ as animal enclosures intended to environmentally simulate the ‘natural world’ superceded the ideological architecture of the colonial period. The NZG pioneered a historic shift from buildings that housed animals for display, to ones from which humans observed animals.
3) The present day when Johannesburg Zoo has become a ‘secure recreational haven’ in a city with a high crime rate, inner city collapse and little safe public space. Whereas ever increasing numbers of international tourists are experiencing African wildlife in what remains of its natural environment, a rapidly rising population of urban Africans are replacing their ancestors’ traditional understandings of indigenous animals with ones gleaned from television documentaries and school visits to the zoo. However considered in this it light we may be able to offer an answer to the pertinent (though often evaded) question, do urban zoos serve any worthwhile purpose in the twenty-first century?
Haywood, M (2012) ‘3 Artists, 3 Cities, 3 Continents: Weng Fen, Hema Upadhyay and Bodys Isek Kingelez’ in Duyan (ed.) New Issues in Contemporary Art (Istanbul, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts U.), Apr 2012
Books by Mark Haywood
Viewing the Emergence of Scenery from the Lakes
The aesthetic emergence of the Lake District ma... more Viewing the Emergence of Scenery from the Lakes
The aesthetic emergence of the Lake District marked a major shift in how we perceived and valued landscape. It began in the latter half of the eighteenth century when a previously unvalued area of degraded, deforested countryside in northern England suddenly became ideal ‘scenery’, fit for aesthetic contemplation. Today the region is seeking World Heritage Site status for its landscapes, not simply on account of its so-called ‘natural beauty’, but because they exemplified new ideals in the history of Western culture and an increasing valuing of the ‘natural’ that is so in evidence today. Despite the best known artistic contributors to this change being writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Ruskin, its dominant aesthetic legacy resides in the scopic regime. Three enduring tropes will be considered, the earliest of which is the Picturesque idealisation of scenery and the second is the Romantic quest for ‘authenticity’ or exclusivity of experience. The second half of the chapter describe how the legacies of these historic viewing tropes remain evident in various forms of contemporary Lake District tourism and whose cumulative effect through the reiterative practice of aesthetic walking created the high-level foot paths of the region, which might be considered a linear form of ‘place’.
Papers by Mark Haywood
Vade Mecum : A Compendium of New Art, 1994
Twelve writers documents 15 Canadian and European artists' projects that took place outside g... more Twelve writers documents 15 Canadian and European artists' projects that took place outside gallery walls in Newcastle, England. Includes artist's statements. 10 bibl. ref.
South African Journal of Art History, 2007
Re-wilding is an important way in which certain land managers, nature conservationists, national ... more Re-wilding is an important way in which certain land managers, nature conservationists, national park authorities and others envision the future state of landscapes and nature reserves under their control. In some instances areas of land are allowed to revert 'naturally' to form some type of 'semi-natural' landscape. In others, specific land management practices, sometimes classed as 'traditional' are reintroduced to establish the preferred state of wildness. I have coined the term hyperwilderness to describe private re-wilding ventures which simulate 'wilderness' in an artificial tourist driven context. In South Africa, particularly in the malaria free zones of the Eastern Cape, there has been a rapid recent increase in the number of private re-wilding projects as white farmers shift from cattle farming to various forms of tourism based on indigenous wildlife. Inevitably this has also led to rising social tensions-Provincial Land Affairs and Agriculture Minister, Gugile Nkwinti has described game farms as "elitist" and said there had been a 're-colonisation of the countryside'. [Groenewald: 2005]. The paper considers the history of re-wilding sites based on former 1820 Settler farms, or 'manors'. Many Settlers migrated to South Africa after losing their traditional commonlands in the British Isles through the Enclosure Acts and the Highland Clearances. In the latter peasants were evicted from their smallholdings in order to create large grouse and deer hunting estates. In South Africa re-wilding, whilst ecologically desirable, can appear socially contentious by attempting to erase the history of colonial occupation, through yet another manifestation of the colonial gaze. The land reverts to indigenous bush, indigenous species are reintroduced, the farmer becomes invisible as the farm disappears, but so too do indigenous people, who are either excluded by game fences and economics, or become semi-invisible servants working in lodges which are often Hollywood inspired versions of colonial fantasy architecture.
Artist Mark Haywood features in this anthology of 28 artists and their projects, containing artis... more Artist Mark Haywood features in this anthology of 28 artists and their projects, containing artists' statements, contextual texts and extensive photographic documentation. In addition to Mark Haywood, the other artists featured are: Pat Naldi, Wendy Kirkup, Louise K Wilson, Lloyd Gibson, Sutapa Biswas, André Stitt, Daniel Biry, Mark Wallinger, John Newling, Virgil Tracy, Nhan Nguyen, Maud Sulter, Mary Duffy, Don Belton, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Stefan Gec, Ian Breakwell, Philip Napier, Shane Cullen, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, Steve Farrer, Richard Wilson, Jan Wade, Gregory Green, David Rinehart. Text is by Ray Modhowka
&... more "SAHS Abstract Dr Mark Haywood, Centre for Landscape & Environmental Arts Research (CLEAR) Cumbria Institute of the Arts, Carlisle, UK E: [email protected] T: (+44) 1228 400300x341 C: (+44) 7949 671789 Depicting Wilderness: re-wilding, or re-colonisation? An iconological / philosophical analysis from a current CLEAR project on two private re-wilding ventures in the Eastern Cape and Scotland that have striking historical parallels of colonisation and formal contemporary links. Both sites exemplify a trope of re-wilding where uneconomic farmland is expunged by reintroducing indigenous flora and fauna to create seemingly uninhabited terrain. The colonial farm(er) thereby disappears from view in a manner superficially reminiscent of colonial landscape painters’ omission of indigenous peoples (acts that often anticipated their physical erasure). In the post-colonial hyperwilderness indigenous peoples remain largely excluded, or marginalised – no longer by artists, but by economics and game fences. Alternatively they serve invisibly as cleaners or servants in colonial fantasy safari lodges, built on land owned by a now invisible colonist, where the most visible occupants are foreign tourists. Despite its proponents’ intentions and the environmental benefits ensuing from rewilding, it does not erase culture through reversion to some hypothetical pre-historical, or pre-colonial condition. Instead another stratum is added to the landscape’s history of occupation, as even in a changed political landscape the balance of land ownership often remains unaltered. Ironically re-wilding is often initiated through the progressive vision of wealthy landowners and offers a highly seductive, but morally complex alternative to the rural poors’ simple aspiration for smallholdings that are often ecologically and economically unsound. Rewilding projects re-introduce indigenous flora and fauna, but are unable to recreate the relationship indigenous peoples once had with their ancestral lands. Instead the seemingly post-colonial hyperwilderness is haunted by the ghosts of history and it is from these that lessons must be learnt. Successive layers of tragedies and mistakes, ideals and compromises have created these landscapes, and their traces will remain. Far from creating ‘wildernesses’, these private re-wilding ventures remind us that landscapes are cultural products whose true value lies in their being palimpsests of the historical changes that shape contemporary identities. "
Choice Reviews Online, 2012
The term "sense of place" is an important multidisciplinary concept, used to understand... more The term "sense of place" is an important multidisciplinary concept, used to understand the complex processes through which individuals and groups define themselves and their relationship to their natural and cultural environments, and which over the last twenty years or so has been increasingly defined, theorized and used across diverse disciplines in different ways. Sense of place mediates our relationship with the world and with each other; it provides a profoundly important foundation for individual and community identity. It can be an intimate, deeply personal experience yet also something which we share with others. It is at once recognizable but never constant; rather it is embodied in the flux between familiarity and difference. Research in this area requires culturally and geographically nuanced analyses, approaches that are sensitive to difference and specificity, event and locale. The essays collected here, drawn from a variety of disciplines (including but not limited to sociology, history, geography, outdoor education, museum and heritage studies, health, and English literature), offer an international perspective on the relationship between people and place, via five interlinked sections (Histories, Landscapes and Identities; Rural Sense of Place; Urban Sense of Place; Cultural Landscapes; Conservation, Biodiversity and Tourism).
Much has been written about how undifferentiated space, or ‘wilderness’, can over time coalesce i... more Much has been written about how undifferentiated space, or ‘wilderness’, can over time coalesce into the specificity of ‘place’ through the deposition of cultural sediment. The process usually entails some form of sedentariness whose origins may range from simple cessation of wandering to full-blown colonial settlement.¹ By contrast, the present account seeks to describe how a sense of place may also be engendered through dynamic means, particularly the action of walking.
E-motion: Sentiment and Technology, 2008
The proposed paper would consider the factors underpinning the unique affection the British publi... more The proposed paper would consider the factors underpinning the unique affection the British public display towards the Bluebird record breaking cars and boats of Sir Malcolm Campbell and his son Donald. The worldwide popularity of Formula 1 motor racing could be cited ...
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Recent and Forthcoming Publications by Mark Haywood
Over the past decade, Western interest in contemporary Chinese art has been well evidenced in the UK through exchanges like the British Council’s Artist Links (2002-6) and exhibitions such as Tate Liverpool’s The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China (2008). Inevitably, these foregrounded art made in China, but despite many Western artists having now undertaken residencies there, Chinese artists have usually made the reverse journey in order to exhibit, rather than to make art in a European context.
A striking exception was the CLEAR* project, Return of the Silent Traveller in which Haikou based artist, Weng Fen (aka. Weng Peijun) undertook an artist’s residency in the English Lake District. The project celebrated the seventieth anniversary of The Silent Traveller in Lakeland, an account of a visit to the region by the exiled painter-poet Chiang Yee. The latter's book remains popular because its first person narrative portrayed the familiar from an unfamiliar perspective and the author illustrated it with Lakes' landscapes executed in the Daoist tradition. Weng Fen’s mural sized photographs in turn offered a fresh, contemporary vision of the overly familiar, albeit by portraying the artist and his family as uncomprehending outsiders, ill at ease in a beautiful, but alien landscape.
The account also examines salient differences between Western, Romantic derived tropes of landscape, such as the male magisterial gaze and those of the two Chinese artists, one traditional, the other contemporary. Consideration is also given to formalist aspects such as the heightened colour saturation of the greens in Weng’s stunning photographs, a device he used to convey the striking verdancy of the Lake District landscapes. These images are doubly informative because Western photographers would intuitively eschew such a strategy as highly unnatural or artificial.
* Centre for Landscape and Environmental Arts Research
""
It relates to the author’s accounts of the semiotic relationships and differences between the architecture of imperial and colonial zoos. (Stellenbosch, 2008; Carlisle, 2009; Chicago, 2012) and the shifting social and cultural values reflected in the architectural rhetoric of a century of South African zoo lion enclosures (Tartu, 2011). Here a similar approach is applied to the contentious issue of nearly two centuries of European elephant houses designed by leading architects.
The earliest case study is of Decimus Burton’s Elephant Stables at London Zoo (1831) which was a hybridised fusion of African lapa thatch and Indian tented pavilion. The second concerns the world’s first modernist elephant house, a ‘rationalist’ design by Berthold Lubetkin at Whipsnade Zoo (1935) whose dimensions were based on the discovery that captive elephants tended to walk in small circles. This is followed by Hugh Casson’s ‘Brutalist ‘ building at London Zoo (1962-5) which is supposed to resemble a herd of elephants at a waterhole and whose roughly textured outer walls were intended to be evocative of elephant hide. The account concludes with Norman Foster’s much praised hi-tech structure at Copenhagen Zoo (2008) whose glass roof has a photo-etched pattern of leaves, which it is claimed simulates the light conditions of an African forest.
Throughout this time the animal framed within these structures has remained physically unchanged, in contrast to what has been projected on to it.
Whilst each building embodies the attitudes of its particular era, there appears to have been both a consistent concern for the animal, and an equally consistent failure to question the purpose, or indeed desirability of keeping these large, highly social, tropical mammals in extremely artificial situations at high latitudes.
South Africa is justly renowned for its game reserves, but many non-South Africans may be surprised to learn that the Johannesburg/Pretoria conurbation which makes up Gauteng province is also home to two large zoos. Over the past century, they have formed a shifting narrative of interplay between ‘nature’ and urbanisation, from colonial taxonomy and mastery over nature to the post-colonial re-presentation and re-construction of national identity. The account considers three distinct phases in this process: -
1) The 1900s when Johannesburg Zoo was created in the new suburb of Saxonburg, whose landscape had been Europeanised with 70,000 trees imported from Germany. This is considered as seemingly oppositional processes of erasing an indigenous landscape and flora while seeking to preserve and classify its disappearing fauna.
2) The late 1930s when the National Zoological Gardens in Pretoria created the Lowveld Enclosures from neighbouring indigenous bush it had purchased thirty years earlier and which had since become surrounded by the expanding city. We term this ‘non-architecture’ as animal enclosures intended to environmentally simulate the ‘natural world’ superceded the ideological architecture of the colonial period. The NZG pioneered a historic shift from buildings that housed animals for display, to ones from which humans observed animals.
3) The present day when Johannesburg Zoo has become a ‘secure recreational haven’ in a city with a high crime rate, inner city collapse and little safe public space. Whereas ever increasing numbers of international tourists are experiencing African wildlife in what remains of its natural environment, a rapidly rising population of urban Africans are replacing their ancestors’ traditional understandings of indigenous animals with ones gleaned from television documentaries and school visits to the zoo. However considered in this it light we may be able to offer an answer to the pertinent (though often evaded) question, do urban zoos serve any worthwhile purpose in the twenty-first century?
Books by Mark Haywood
The aesthetic emergence of the Lake District marked a major shift in how we perceived and valued landscape. It began in the latter half of the eighteenth century when a previously unvalued area of degraded, deforested countryside in northern England suddenly became ideal ‘scenery’, fit for aesthetic contemplation. Today the region is seeking World Heritage Site status for its landscapes, not simply on account of its so-called ‘natural beauty’, but because they exemplified new ideals in the history of Western culture and an increasing valuing of the ‘natural’ that is so in evidence today. Despite the best known artistic contributors to this change being writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Ruskin, its dominant aesthetic legacy resides in the scopic regime. Three enduring tropes will be considered, the earliest of which is the Picturesque idealisation of scenery and the second is the Romantic quest for ‘authenticity’ or exclusivity of experience. The second half of the chapter describe how the legacies of these historic viewing tropes remain evident in various forms of contemporary Lake District tourism and whose cumulative effect through the reiterative practice of aesthetic walking created the high-level foot paths of the region, which might be considered a linear form of ‘place’.
Papers by Mark Haywood
Over the past decade, Western interest in contemporary Chinese art has been well evidenced in the UK through exchanges like the British Council’s Artist Links (2002-6) and exhibitions such as Tate Liverpool’s The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China (2008). Inevitably, these foregrounded art made in China, but despite many Western artists having now undertaken residencies there, Chinese artists have usually made the reverse journey in order to exhibit, rather than to make art in a European context.
A striking exception was the CLEAR* project, Return of the Silent Traveller in which Haikou based artist, Weng Fen (aka. Weng Peijun) undertook an artist’s residency in the English Lake District. The project celebrated the seventieth anniversary of The Silent Traveller in Lakeland, an account of a visit to the region by the exiled painter-poet Chiang Yee. The latter's book remains popular because its first person narrative portrayed the familiar from an unfamiliar perspective and the author illustrated it with Lakes' landscapes executed in the Daoist tradition. Weng Fen’s mural sized photographs in turn offered a fresh, contemporary vision of the overly familiar, albeit by portraying the artist and his family as uncomprehending outsiders, ill at ease in a beautiful, but alien landscape.
The account also examines salient differences between Western, Romantic derived tropes of landscape, such as the male magisterial gaze and those of the two Chinese artists, one traditional, the other contemporary. Consideration is also given to formalist aspects such as the heightened colour saturation of the greens in Weng’s stunning photographs, a device he used to convey the striking verdancy of the Lake District landscapes. These images are doubly informative because Western photographers would intuitively eschew such a strategy as highly unnatural or artificial.
* Centre for Landscape and Environmental Arts Research
""
It relates to the author’s accounts of the semiotic relationships and differences between the architecture of imperial and colonial zoos. (Stellenbosch, 2008; Carlisle, 2009; Chicago, 2012) and the shifting social and cultural values reflected in the architectural rhetoric of a century of South African zoo lion enclosures (Tartu, 2011). Here a similar approach is applied to the contentious issue of nearly two centuries of European elephant houses designed by leading architects.
The earliest case study is of Decimus Burton’s Elephant Stables at London Zoo (1831) which was a hybridised fusion of African lapa thatch and Indian tented pavilion. The second concerns the world’s first modernist elephant house, a ‘rationalist’ design by Berthold Lubetkin at Whipsnade Zoo (1935) whose dimensions were based on the discovery that captive elephants tended to walk in small circles. This is followed by Hugh Casson’s ‘Brutalist ‘ building at London Zoo (1962-5) which is supposed to resemble a herd of elephants at a waterhole and whose roughly textured outer walls were intended to be evocative of elephant hide. The account concludes with Norman Foster’s much praised hi-tech structure at Copenhagen Zoo (2008) whose glass roof has a photo-etched pattern of leaves, which it is claimed simulates the light conditions of an African forest.
Throughout this time the animal framed within these structures has remained physically unchanged, in contrast to what has been projected on to it.
Whilst each building embodies the attitudes of its particular era, there appears to have been both a consistent concern for the animal, and an equally consistent failure to question the purpose, or indeed desirability of keeping these large, highly social, tropical mammals in extremely artificial situations at high latitudes.
South Africa is justly renowned for its game reserves, but many non-South Africans may be surprised to learn that the Johannesburg/Pretoria conurbation which makes up Gauteng province is also home to two large zoos. Over the past century, they have formed a shifting narrative of interplay between ‘nature’ and urbanisation, from colonial taxonomy and mastery over nature to the post-colonial re-presentation and re-construction of national identity. The account considers three distinct phases in this process: -
1) The 1900s when Johannesburg Zoo was created in the new suburb of Saxonburg, whose landscape had been Europeanised with 70,000 trees imported from Germany. This is considered as seemingly oppositional processes of erasing an indigenous landscape and flora while seeking to preserve and classify its disappearing fauna.
2) The late 1930s when the National Zoological Gardens in Pretoria created the Lowveld Enclosures from neighbouring indigenous bush it had purchased thirty years earlier and which had since become surrounded by the expanding city. We term this ‘non-architecture’ as animal enclosures intended to environmentally simulate the ‘natural world’ superceded the ideological architecture of the colonial period. The NZG pioneered a historic shift from buildings that housed animals for display, to ones from which humans observed animals.
3) The present day when Johannesburg Zoo has become a ‘secure recreational haven’ in a city with a high crime rate, inner city collapse and little safe public space. Whereas ever increasing numbers of international tourists are experiencing African wildlife in what remains of its natural environment, a rapidly rising population of urban Africans are replacing their ancestors’ traditional understandings of indigenous animals with ones gleaned from television documentaries and school visits to the zoo. However considered in this it light we may be able to offer an answer to the pertinent (though often evaded) question, do urban zoos serve any worthwhile purpose in the twenty-first century?
The aesthetic emergence of the Lake District marked a major shift in how we perceived and valued landscape. It began in the latter half of the eighteenth century when a previously unvalued area of degraded, deforested countryside in northern England suddenly became ideal ‘scenery’, fit for aesthetic contemplation. Today the region is seeking World Heritage Site status for its landscapes, not simply on account of its so-called ‘natural beauty’, but because they exemplified new ideals in the history of Western culture and an increasing valuing of the ‘natural’ that is so in evidence today. Despite the best known artistic contributors to this change being writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Ruskin, its dominant aesthetic legacy resides in the scopic regime. Three enduring tropes will be considered, the earliest of which is the Picturesque idealisation of scenery and the second is the Romantic quest for ‘authenticity’ or exclusivity of experience. The second half of the chapter describe how the legacies of these historic viewing tropes remain evident in various forms of contemporary Lake District tourism and whose cumulative effect through the reiterative practice of aesthetic walking created the high-level foot paths of the region, which might be considered a linear form of ‘place’.