I periodically engage in a thrifty activity my wife has named "Read Your Own Books," in which rather than buying a new book--a compulsion of mine--I take an already-bought one down from one of our bookshelves and, well, read it. It works best if I close my eyes and pick at random.

The other day I  was doing a little RYOB at the living-room bookshelf and happened to take down Landscapes: Selected Writings of  J. B. Jackson, University of Massachusetts Press, 1970—and a flood of memories and current interests came over me.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909-1996), to give the writer his full name, was one of those wonderfully unclassifiable American thinkers and writers who influence many areas of thought and endeavor without officially belonging to any of them—think Henry David Thoreau, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Goodman. He wrote beautiful essays about the American landscape—not the natural landscape in its pristine form, but the landscape as molded by human endeavor. He was a geographer without the number-crunching of professional geography, an architecture writer who went beyond the esthetics and technicalities of architecture, a naturalist who always factored in human needs.

In a career of writing, editing, and teaching that spanned more than sixty years, Jackson taught us to look at every detail of our urban and rural landscapes, from the curvy, serpentine layout of suburban streets to the urban "stranger's path" (the cityscape that once greeted urban newcomers around train stations and bus depots) to the changing position of garages vis-à-vis houses. By taking such details seriously, and showing how they reflected changing American values and needs, I believe he helped lay the groundwork for what we now call "placemaking"—the conscious creation of livable, enjoyable public places via attention to real human need and urban detail.

The Vernacular Landscape

In an era mostly dominated by grand, top-down urban planning by egocentric visionaries—Frank Lloyd Wright's ultra-suburban Broadacre City, Robert Moses' concrete-heavy remaking of Manhattan—Jackson, like Jane Jacobs, had the chutzpah to speak for the "vernacular" shaping of place: the myriad small ways ordinary people collaborated with larger forces in making livable space. Jackson loved beauty—he was an erudite student of Baroque architecture—and he was never slow to denounce the ugliness of parts of the American landscape. But he didn't make the mistake of thinking that beauty should trump usefulness, or that only geniuses like Wright can create beauty.

I was introduced to his writing by a grad-school friend, the New York arborist and writer William Bryant Logan, who interviewed him more than once for New York magazines. I tried my hand at Jacksonian-style landscape study in my single-chapter contributions to two books about the Iowa landscape, Take This Exit (Iowa State University Press) and Take the Next Exit (University of Iowa Press). I tried to define the special qualities of the landscape at the edges of small towns, and discuss how old-school cafes functioned in those same small towns. It was a thrill to see that Jackson himself gave Take This Exit a laudatory blurb.

Mainly, though, I've been inspired by Jackson's whole approach to landscape study, a discipline he practically invented. Never formally credentialed in geography, architecture, urban planning, or landscape architecture, he made the most of a varied early career that included a year of interdisciplinary study at the University of Wisconsin, three years of humanistic studies at Harvard--where he was taught by T. S. Eliot's mentor, Irving Babbitt--military mapmaking, wide travel, and intense self-directed study.

Though an innovator with wide influence today in cultural geography, planning, and urbanism, he was essentially a somewhat old-fashioned humanist--which means, among other things, that he learned to write superbly well--with a vision of people living comfortably and productively in a built environment that meets their needs without abuse of the natural world. And he made curbs, fire hydrants, the layout of gas stations, and a hundred other apparently mundane details of our daily lives vibrate with interest.

The Line readers might be interested in what he had to say about the bicycle: "The bicycle had, and still has, a humane, almost classical moderation in the kind of pleasure it offers. It is the kind of machine that a Hellenistic Greek might have invented and ridden. It does no violence to our normal reactions: It does not pretend to free us from our normal environment."

And anyone interested in the balance of culture and nature might ponder this:  "The older I grow and the longer I look at landscapes and seek to understand them, the more convinced I am that their beauty is not simply an aspect but their very essence and that that beauty derives from the human presence."