Landscape and Power in Vienna

Book excerpt: Each of the groups that has held political power in Vienna over the past three centuries has left its mark on the city's history, institutions, and architecture. In Landscape and Power in Vienna, Robert Rotenberg shows how such groups--monarchists and republicans, fascists and socialists--also influenced another, equally vital aspect of urban identity in this central European metropolis: the landscape. Working as both a historian and an ethnographer, Rotenberg examines the relationship among human experience, landscape design, and the ideas that design was meant to represent. Understanding this relationship, Rotenberg explains, makes it possible to examine a Viennese garden today and deduce the ideology of those who planted it. From "Gardens of Order" and "Gardens of Liberty," to "Gardens of Reaction" and "Gardens of Renewal," the chapters of Landscape and Power in Vienna show how leaders and citizens shared ideas about landscape emerge in the kinds of gardens they produce. "Landscape itself is a language," Rotenberg concludes. "People learn the meanings of landscape in a city from the landscape itself."