Urban Planning and Other Laws Revealed in Paintings: Examples from Three Cities

Paintings of cityscapes provide insights into the urban planning laws that inform and govern the built environment portrayed. If, for example, we wish to understand why the streets of Paris in Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings are so broad and the apartment buildings uniform or why John Brack’s images of Melbourne suggest modernist order, while Danila Vassilieff’s works portraying parts of the same city hint at backstreet mayhem, we may usefully consider planning rules or, conversely, their neglect. These laws and regulations, which have legal effects on citizens, and the paintings of cityscapes, which have aesthetic and psychological affects on viewers, present a fruitful area for cultural legal studies research. Beyond planning ordinances, other laws may influence urban scenes. Gerard Sekoto’s paintings of Johannesburg’s Sophiatown, a vibrant cultural melting pot, later razed to be replaced by Triomf (Triumph in Afrikaans), a Whites-only suburb, reveals the distributive injustice of Apartheid-era legislation. Despite their unreliability as historical documents or planning blue prints, Sekoto’s paintings prompt reflection on dehumanised urban planning and act as a font of nostalgia for what has been lost and speculation on what could have been. This exploratory working paper uses three cities and four artists’ paintings that portrayed them – Paris (Caillebotte), Sophiatown, Johannesburg (Sekoto) and Melbourne (Brack and Vassilieff) – as studies of the effects and affects of planning laws and depictions of cityscapes.