At the Landscape Foundation's website (has anyone encountered this?!), I've just come across a set of fascinating tensions between "landscape" and "environment." The two landscape cases nominated for attention to their endangerment are endangered by classic environmentalist projects: a stream restoration at the Rockefeller Park & Cleveland Cultural Gardens 
and a Dan Kiley landscape in Burlington threatened by the expansion of a public transit facility.
Given that the Cultural Landscape Foundation defines Cultural Landscapes in terms of providing a sense of place and of "reveal[ing] our relationship with the land over time," I'm curious about the preservationist impulses and failure to engage more explicitly with the tensions between the things like the impulse to restore a stream and the desire to save the cultural landscape of a park.
I've been thinking about the eruv impulse and where I've seen it (surreptitious stations of the cross, guerrilla gardening), and the ways that such subtle markers make claimable space for people, or manifest and create comfort with the ideologies expressed. The concept of cultural landscape -- even if I'd like to see it in more critical and dynamic form -- does seem to create more space than the usual restoration imperatives for the subtleties of the struggles of placemaking between a stream made picturesque (or channeled) and a stream made ecological.
And to add the other usual layer: the call to preserve here is centered around the "cultural" of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens -- 23 gardens representing the various ethnic backgrounds of Cleveland. But this illustration is sheer picturesque -- Treib's "asian touch for your garden," perhaps, but not the image of 23 "cultural gardens," for which image searches turn up awfully little. Fascinating.
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