Landscape Architecture and Agriculture: Common Seeds and Diverging Sprigs in Israeli Practice

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores the intricate relationship between landscape architecture and agriculture, especially in Israel, where the special role of agriculture and agriculturalists in the emergence of the modern state makes this case unique. While landscape architecture and agriculture were bound together during the first years of the Zionist project (the late 19th century), later they diverged. Currently the resurgence of the symbolic agricultural landscape at Israeli sites of national significance, in city squares, gardens, and interchanges, is unique in its extent. The paper argues that, generally, with the disappearance of the working agricultural landscape agricultural patterns and plants have returned to the vocabulary of landscape architects in varying scales and modes of expression, from national and regional planning to landscape typologies. Thus agricultural landscapes have become the “contemporary picturesque”—objects of nostalgic yearning, a means of recovering a sense of place, and a reaction to the current global environmental crisis. The hegemonic state promotes an agricultural image in Israel’s landscape architecture as a “museal” artifact while the actual economic and social roles of agricultural practice are diminishing. Agricultural landscape presented in such “golden cages,” however, threatens the preservation of less “heroic” agricultural landscapes. And so, in fact, there seems to be an emerging need for nurturing these living landscapes as agri-culture and not solely agri-business.