Urban Natures: A Technical and Social History, 1600–2030

or over three centuries, from the first public gardens of the end of the seventeeth century (such as Paris’ Tuileries and London’s Hyde Park) to contemporary urban forests, architects, engineers, landscape designers, and their sponsors have undertaken to bring nature back into our cities. The responses they provide are fundamentally intertwined with technical, social, and political concerns.

The “Urban Natures” exhibition scrutinizes the extensive, multi-faceted history of the place of nature in cities through the lenses of urban planning, public health, food systems, as well as aesthetics.

Inextricably linked to the issues of use and maintenance, every aspect of nature in urban environments underscores the interdependence between humans and plants. Through a selection of paintings, engravings, maps, books, and photographs, as well as a showcase of tools used in plant husbandry, “Urban Natures” reveals the ties that have evolved between nature and architecture, as well as the prospects of this crucial relationship.

From being marginal to being ubiquitous, the presence of plants in architecture is now on the rise, aligning with a resurgence of a “need for nature.” Serving both as potent political witnesses of their times and catalysts for new societal models, landscaping projects have the potential to save our cities amidst the onset of a new climate regime, and perhaps even to foster a new covenant between society and the botanical world.

Under the direction of Antoine Picon, Director of Research at École des Ponts ParisTech and Professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design

Exhibition in French and English