Geoscience Reference
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not just the Gothic church but also the lawn in front of it. Lawns have a curi-
ous logic and function, and environmental historians have examined what
happens when the ideologies about the lawn get separated out from the par-
ticular (wet and rainy) ecosystems that spawned the ideal of the English
lawn.
4
For one thing, in the western U.S. deserts, the ubiquity of lawns leads
to wasteful water usage (outdoor water use often accounts for half or more of
all residential water demand, especially in the hotter inland areas of Califor-
nia where population growth is now fastest).
5
In the postwar context of
American suburban development, the lawn represented the glories of the
single-family home, domesticity, and a “Father Knows Best” normative
gender politics. One scholar of Western-themed suburban landscape argues
that, at its heart, “traditional” Chinese architecture was focused on repli-
cating natural landscapes, most famously in the imperial and private gar-
dens of old historic dynasties. h us, the move to “appropriate power”
through architectural mimesis is not as much an anomaly as it fi rst appears.
6
But, I would suggest, the form of that nature is historically distinct. h ames
Town's lawns represent the eco-desire for green towns and open spaces that
are held out as the antithesis of Shanghai.
7
“Nature” and “nation” are confl ated for particular ends in particular
ways that connect concretely with Dongtan and the 2010 World Expo.
Dongtan and h ames Town are also pragmatically linked through their
political architect, as h ames Town was a central part of the “One City, Nine
Towns” project associated with the disgraced Shanghai mayor and Party
chief Chen Liangyu. h us, the representation of nature that h ames Town
embodies is a historical artifact of Shanghai's urban development and eco-
nomic planning, through a process that began in 1994. One City, Nine Towns
was not just any ordinary plan for urban development: in a unique cultural
twist, each of the nine towns was modeled after a European nation or city.
According to Shanghai planning o' cials, politicians, and their overseas
designers, foreign visitors would be unable to tell “where Europe ends and
