Urban Natures

For more than three centuries, from the first gardens opened to the public at the end of the 17th century, such as the Tuileries in Paris or Hyde Park in London, to contemporary urban forests, architects, engineers, landscapers and their sponsors have seized the question of nature in the city. The responses provided are inseparable from technical, social and political concerns.

The “Urban Natures” exhibition explores this long history with multiple dimensions, positioning the issue of nature in the city from the angle of planning, health, a nourishing function or even aesthetics.

Inseparable from questions of use and maintenance, each facet of nature in an urban environment highlights the interdependence between humans and plants. Through a selection of paintings, engravings, maps, books, photographs and the presentation of plant tools, “Urban Natures” reveals the links woven between nature and architecture and the perspectives of this necessary relationship.
From marginal to omnipresent, the presence of plants in architecture today tends to be reinforced with the resurgence of a “need for nature”. Eminently political witnesses of their times and vectors of models of society, landscaping can be one of the keys to the salvation of cities at the dawn of a new climate regime and, why not, stimulate a new social-plant contract.