MODERNITY, COMMUNITY AND THE LANDSCAPE IDEA1

Landscape has recently achieved a broad intellectual prominence as a theor-etical concept across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Its complex roots and meanings are scrutinized with particular attention given to the pictorial and scenic aspects of landscape, which are here historicized in relation to processes of cultural modernization. Landscape’s roots in terri-torially based community governed by customary law have never been wholly destroyed and an analysis of the evolution of landscapes in Southern California suggests that they are being recovered in certain respects in the context of hypermodernity. Key Words ◆ community ◆ landscape ◆ Los Angeles ◆ modernity ◆ picturesque My evening walk leads me up a steep hillside, along a turning road and past an assortment of houses whose styles, as much as their prices, would astonish most visitors, towards open upper slopes covered by the grasses and shrubs of a degraded California chaparral. From the summit of my hike, depending on the clarity of the Los Angeles basin’s infamous air, I gaze across high-rise offices, commercial boulevards, palm-lined residential streets, billboards and red tiled roofs that stretch to the horizon. My view from the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills sweeps from the snow-covered San Gabriel Mountains to Pacific beaches and on to the offshore islands. At night, when city lights pick out the grid of streets that structures this vast urban field, I am looking at one of modernity’s iconic landscapes (Krim, 1992). Many of the properties on my walk have been sited and designed t