Department of Architecture - University of Thessaly

2025-26

MACHINE IN THE GARDEN: Wanderings through the Countryside

ΘΚ0918, URBAN DESIGN AND PLANNING,
Elective at semester(s) 6, 8, ECTS: 3

“Suddenly a shrill, humming sound reached my ears. I looked, and within the calm of the rural landscape, like a frozen avalanche, a large whitewashed factory rose before me.” This scene, from the book The Machine in the Garden (1964) by Leo Marx, condenses the central question of the course: what happens when the mechanical sound — and the material presence of a machine — enters an agro-pastoral landscape? What, ultimately, is the “machine,” and who or what is the “garden”?

In The Machine in the Garden (1964), Leo Marx repeatedly describes this moment of rupture: the sound of the train, the steamboat, or the factory intruding into an apparently idyllic “garden.” The “machine” operates as a metaphor for progress, mechanization, and capitalist expansion, disrupting the agro-pastoral ideal of harmony and self-sufficiency. Yet Marx does not simply reproduce the binary of nature versus technology. He critiques the romantic myth of a lost countryside and proposes instead a “middle landscape”: a hybrid space where natural and technological elements coexist and co-constitute one another.

From this perspective, the “machine in the garden” becomes an analytical lens through which we explore the complex rural territories of the Greek periphery. Following the “sound of the machine,” we investigate how peripheral landscapes are entangled with processes of extended urbanization, global flows of capital, and productive infrastructures — often discontinuous and seasonal, yet deeply embedded in broader networks. At the same time, we recognize that an existing agro-pastoral world persists and, at times, resists beneath its idealized representations. The “machine in the garden” is therefore not merely a symbol of rupture, but also a point of encounter — a sonic trace that allows us to read the intricate interactions among species, economies, and ecosystems in the contemporary condition.

As farmers and their machines move “outside the garden,” into roads, infrastructures, and cities, we open a discussion on the agrarian question in the Greek countryside. Beginning with productive spaces located in places familiar to us, the course raises these concerns and proposes new ways of seeing and narrating the complex territories of the rural realm: gardens and machines, production processes, transformations, and the interwoven relations of life and coexistence that unfold there.

Through theory, methodology, and experimentation, we seek alternative perspectives and tools that help us rediscover the periphery and rethink it differently. The aim is to explore theoretical and methodological frameworks that connect research with design, through mapping practices, narrative tools, and collaborative methods.

By challenging traditional dichotomies — between theory and practice, research and design, machine and garden — the course proposes a pedagogical process in which these elements develop in relation to one another. In doing so, it seeks to enrich the field of urban studies with new perspectives for research and to encourage a critical and creative engagement with the peripheral landscapes of the countryside.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:

Understand key theories of extended urbanization, processes of transformation beyond the city, and the significance of the “urban outside.”
Critically identify and engage with traditional dichotomies (city/countryside, urban/rural, theory/practice, research/design) and reformulate them in creative and synergistic ways.
Apply methodological tools such as mapping, narrative techniques, and ethnographic research methods to the analysis and design of peripheral landscapes.
Connect theoretical approaches with applied design through group work and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Produce research and design outcomes that contribute to understanding and addressing the social and ecological challenges of rural and peripheral territories.

The course is addressed to students who wish to synthesize theoretical, research, and design approaches; to research through design and to design through research. It offers tools that can be further developed and applied in their research projects or final thesis work.

SUBJECT

Machine in the Garden. Sensory Wanderings in Ypaithros Chora,
Feta Factory, Mountainous Arcadia, March 2022.

ASSESSMENT

Assessment is based on attendance and active participation in class, contribution to interim oral presentations, and the final project (Narrative Experiment), with emphasis placed on analytical ability and critical synthesis.

INDICATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973.

Gifford, Terry. “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral.” In Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry, 146–174. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004.

Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. “Planetary Urbanization.” In Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, edited by Neil Brenner, 160–163. Berlin: Jovis, 2014.

Brenner, Neil, and Nikos Katsikis. “Is the Mediterranean Urban?” In Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, edited by Neil Brenner, 428–459. Berlin: Jovis, 2014.

Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Schmid, Christian, and Milica Topalovic, eds. Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2023.

Markaki, Metaxia. “Expropriation and Extended Citizenship: The Peripheralisation of Arcadia.” In Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles, edited by Christian Schmid and Milica Topalovic, 197–234. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2023.

Bathla, Nitin. “A Methodological Pluriverse: An Introduction.” In Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies for Landscape and Urban Studies. Zurich: gta Verlag, 2024.