ABSTRACT
When the American cultural historian Leo Marx in 1964 wrote The Machine in the Garden as a work of literary criticism, he used the concepts of “garden” and “machine” to explain how the American people through generations have tried to reconcile two very different views on their country: on the one hand, the uncomplicated rural paradise, and on the other hand, the industrialized and urbanized nation. By doing this, Marx brought attention to an underlying conflict between pastoral and progressive or utilitarian ideas in the American ideology of space* and observed how the machine was accommodated in the garden (see Figure 7.1). Although it is fair to say that today the machine is not so much in the garden as it is indistinguishable from the garden, they are inexorably intertwined (Strang 1996), and this set of concepts still seems to possess an explanatory power. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to explore how the concepts of garden and machine might inform our understanding of the complex relationship between infrastructure and nature.
