Urbanizing Nature

Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature Since 1500

Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid, Bert De Munck, Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid, Bert De Munck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367110864
• eBook ISBN: 9780429656224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

What do we mean when we say that cities have altered humanity's interaction with nature? The more people are living in cities, the more nature is said to be "urbanizing": turned into a resource, mobilized over long distances, controlled, transformed and then striking back with a vengeance as "natural disaster". Confronting insights derived from Environmental History, Science and Technology Studies or Political Ecology, Urbanizing Nature aims to counter teleological perspectives on the birth of modern "urban nature" as a uniform and linear process, showing how new technological schemes, new actors and new definitions of nature emerged in cities from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Part I
Introduction

Introduction

Did Cities Change Nature? A Long-Term Perspective

Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid and Bert De Munck

The City Is Nature

Cities—like society and culture generally—have often been seen as sites of human activity that are opposed to nature. This conceptual division between nature and culture, and hence between nature and the city, is probably one of the most prominent features of ‘modernity’ as it emerged from the seventeenth century onwards. In literature, science and policy-making nature began to be thought of as something out there, something which could be isolated, measured, managed, and controlled (Glacken, 1967, pp. 461–499). Since the 1980s and 1990s such a conceptual distinction between society and nature has been challenged in many areas of the social sciences. Constructivism and postmodernism saw nature, just like culture, as no more than a social construct, a discursive invention (Sörlin and Warde, 2009, pp. 8–9). In Nature’s Metropolis—the seminal work of William Cronon on the environmental history of Chicago and the American West—it is shown that both the urban-rural and the urban-nature dichotomy have to be superseded to understand how the rise of a great city transformed a vast region, from the endless grain fields in the plains to the most distant woods (Cronon, 1991, pp. 18–19). The woods in the far north of Wisconsin proved as urban as the wood-paved streets of downtown Chicago, which for their part remained as natural as the water of Lake Michigan. A few years later, the same author launched a vigorous attack on the very idea of ‘wilderness’ as a place opposite to culture, denouncing pristine nature as a historical—and profoundly urban—construct, which in no way could be deemed superior to more visibly constructed ‘natures’ such as gardens (Cronon, 1996). Other authors have depicted cities as ‘organic machines’ (adapting a concept originally introduced by White (1995) for rivers in industrial societies), ecotechnological (Hughes, 2004) or envirotechnical landscapes (Pritchard, 2011), each of them arguing against the nature-culture dichotomy, and in favor of a ‘hybrid’ idea of the city.

Most of the contributors to this volume would indeed agree that their object of study—be it urban water, urban air, urban bodies or the city as a whole—is such a hybrid, partly natural and partly social. The hybridity of urban air, for instance, results from the way it is perceived, measured, controlled and regulated by humans and human technologies (Frioux, this volume). This hybridity of urban air is perhaps best visible when discussing, for instance, the deadly industrial fogs that haunted industrial river basins in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it is as true for the clear blue sky in a mountain resort. Nevertheless, demonstrating hybridity is not the aim of the historian. The ubiquitous presence of water in the Stockholm archipelago can be considered a socio-natural hybrid in the sixteenth century as much as today, but of course this hybridity might have taken a completely different form, as the precise configuration of humans, water and land has changed profoundly over the past centuries (Jakobsson, this volume). Turning socio-natural hybridity into an analytical concept which can be applied in historical analysis, Verena Winiwarter et al. (2013, pp. 108–109, building on early work by Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz, 1999; Schatzki, 2003) recently advanced the concept of ‘socio-natural sites’, which they called ‘nexuses of arrangements and practices’—the practices being ‘routinized types of behaviour’, ‘doings and sayings’ and the ‘arrangements’ the material imprints of these practices. Both practices and arrangements are socio-natural hybrids themselves, configurations of humans and the material world which do not evolve independently from one another. From such a perspective, the city can be conceived as an assemblage of individual socio-natural sites, in which human practices materialize into more permanent arrangements, using technologies and infrastructures.

Admitting that the city is nature also allows for a type of history which is not just about humans altering the physical environment but admits natural forces as a historical driving force throughout the urban past. Looking again at the water of Stockholm analyzed in this volume by Eva Jakobsson, we see that for over eight centuries these waters have been modified directly by humans, with the aim of enhancing flood protection, transport facilities, or the quality of the scenery. Nor was the water just something constant ‘out there’ waiting to be modified by men. This water also shaped urban livelihoods, and the way it did so evolved over time, partly in response to human alterations in the water system, but partly also as a result of hydrological and geophysical dynamics beyond the direct control of man. In the case of Stockholm, land elevation—currently about 0.4 meters per century—constantly reworked the urban waterscape and hence the city. New and unforeseen ‘wild nature’ can originate even in the most controlled urban environments (although this ‘wild nature’ is, of course, as hybrid as the rainforest). The waste landfills discussed by Heike Weber in this volume offer an excellent example, and so do many abandoned—and sometimes toxic—industrial sites (see also Jørgensen et al., 2013).

Cities Also Changed Nature

Even though cities are as ‘natural’, or as ‘hybrid’, as the rainforest in respect of their composition and embeddedness, most authors would agree that cities also altered humanity’s interaction with nature. ‘When cities appeared in the landscape’, Donald Hughes argues, ‘a new split between culture and nature entered human minds’ (Hughes, 2009, p. 48). This split, which Hughes traces to the earliest urban civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, consists of a profound reorganization of the regional ecosystem, which had to generate surpluses of food, fuel and building materials flowing toward the city. The idea of ‘flows’ as an essential feature of urbanization is echoed in much of the literature on either the urban ecological footprint or the urban metabolism. Since the work of Wackernagel and Rees (1996, 2008), the ecological footprint is usually calculated as the area of land needed to produce the inputs (food, water, raw materials, etc.) consumed by a city and to absorb the city’s outputs. By definition, the urban footprint exceeds the urban territory by far. In 2002, London even had a footprint three hundred times the size of its territory. The analysis of material and energy flows to and from the city is also central to the studies of the urban metabolism. While the concept of metabolism—the chemical transformations within living organisms—had already been used by Karl Marx, the concept was applied to cities for the first time in the 1960s by Abel Wolman. Today, there is a wide range of studies mapping the social metabolism of regions or cities and their evolution over time (see Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2007; Barles, 2010; Weber, 2012). While one can distinguish between different ‘socio-metabolic regimes’, based on the energy base of a society (see the following), one can also argue that cities are socio-ecological systems with a specific metabolism, one which is characterized by permanent ‘externalization’ (Barles and Knoll, this volume). The ‘life’ of the city depends on a never-ending flow entering the city, transformed in and by the city, and released from the city.

This giant mobilization of nature as flows of resources is without doubt a vital component of the way cities changed nature. The contributions in the volume present various examples of such metabolic externalization by European cities, ranging from the deep forests in Alpine mountain regions, which were opened up by large-scale infrastructural development, including tunnels through mountains or canals for logging, and suddenly became subject to clear-cutting and wood cultivation for rather distant urban markets (Schott, this volume), to the waters of Lake Mälaren near Stockholm, controlled, manipulated and treated for hydropower or drinking water (Jakobsson, this volume). Looking at cities and nature through the prism of metabolic urbanization has proven to be very fruitful, but it also generates some problems. First of all, the process becomes almost self-evident. As the mobilization of resources is a by-product of urbanization itself, the actors and driving forces behind the process remain largely hidden. Whether resources are allocated through the market, the state or direct provisioning by citizens seems almost irrelevant, as the results would be extremely similar. However, this is not necessarily the case. The whole process of ‘metabolic urbanization’ is imbued with power and asymmetrical relationships. As Eric Swyngedouw notices, the idea of an urban metabolism based on externalization not only presupposes a reorganization of the relations between humans and nature, but also a ‘hierarchic’ reorganization of these relations, privileging the city and certain actors within the city. Furthermore, the whole idea of metabolism conceptualizes nature as a store of resources which can be traded as commodities in an exchange economy. As a result, ‘the urbanization of nature is largely predicated upon a commodification of parts of nature while, in the process, producing new metabolic interactions and shaping both symbolic and material socio-natural interactions’ (Swyngedouw, 2006, p. 36). Therefore, revealing the asymmetries of actors and power relations behind the metabolic urbanization of nature is one of the fundamental challenges of this volume.

Furthermore, even when accepting metabolic externalization (see above) as a basic feature of urbanization, the process did not remain constant over time. Major changes occur in the degree and geographic range of externalization, not only depending on the scale of the city but also on the amount of internal ‘recycling’ of resources and on the size of the hinterland which produces the input or receives the output of the city (Barles and Knoll, this volume). Quantitative and qualitative changes that occurred over time might be related to urban population growth or changes in energy regimes but these changes also took place in very specific historical conditions with variations in time and space, and they were put into effect by very real historical actors. Unraveling these processes of change is another ambition of this volume.

Finally, the urbanization of nature cannot be limited to the mobilization of flows of resources. Cities have changed nature in other ways too. According to Samuel Hays (1998, p. 70), ‘the city is the focal point of increasing human congestion with its accompanying changes in urban environmental circumstance […]. Cities generated increasing loads on the wider environment which, in turn, established the tension in larger environmental conditions. The city is also the starting point for new attitudes about the wider environment’. The birth of new ideas and new narratives with regard to urban nature also occupies a central place in this volume. For instance, in his contribution Christian Rohr analyzes how new ideas about risk interacted with changing property rights to land and new romantic ideals of bourgeois living on panoramic spots to pave the way for the territorial expansion of cities into the traditional floodplains of rivers, with huge flood problems as a result. The discovery of nature—in this case the scenic river—as something out there which can be appreciated, but also has to be controlled (through technology) hints at essential features of a process which is often labeled as ‘modernity’, and whose birth is usually located in the city.

Looking Beyond Modernity

Even though urbanization has had an impact on nature since the Neolithic Revolution, modernity still constitutes a major turning point in most long-term analyses of city-nature relationships, distinguishing the ‘pre-modern’ or ‘organic’ city and the ‘modern’ or ‘industrial’ city. This gap is also reflected in historiography, with most literature concentrating on one of the two epochal stages of urban development (see the overview in Platt, 1999; Schott, 2014 offers a rare exception, discussing thousand years of European urbanization from an environmental perspective). Modernity is, of course, a vague concept. In discussions of urban nature, it can be seen as the product of three interrelated processes: the transition in energy regimes toward fossil and mineral fuels; the separation of society and nature and the development of a technological relationship with nature.

The most visible watershed is without doubt the transition from an organic economy based on biomass, to a mineral or inorganic economy based on a combination of fossil fuels and minerals. This energy transition—which occurred more or less in tandem with the industrial revolution—is often conceived as a transition in (socio-)metabolic regimes, defined as ‘socio-ecological systems sharing a common energy metabolism, that is, common sources and conversion technologies of energy’ (Kraussmann et al., 2010; see also Sieferle, 2001; Barles, 2010; Billen et al., 2012). Industrialization and use of fossil fuels, due to the much higher energy density, allowed an unprecedented increase in scale and impact of urbanization. Whereas economic production and hence urbanization remained contained within well-defined physical environmental margins in the organic economy, the age of coal and oil allowed for unprecedented and seemingly unlimited growth. In 2014, there were 488 cities exceeding one million inhabitants, twenty-eight of which were megacities of ten million or more. In the eighteenth century there were only two cities—Edo, present-day Tokyo, later followed by London— with more than one million inhabitants (World Urbanization Prospects, 2014, p. 13; Clark, 2013, pp. 11–12). Providing minimal levels of food, drinkable water, fuel, and health to an ever-expanding urban labor force and liberating an equally expanding urban bourgeoisie from the nuisances of stink, smoke, and filth, asked for new solutions.

In the ‘modern’ city such solutions usually came in the disguise of ‘networked’ infrastructures. The ‘networked city’ is defined by Dieter Schott in this volume as the result of ‘a successive build-up of comprehensive systems of technical infrastructures, serving for the provision of water, gas, electricity, the disposal of sewage, for urban transport and communication’ (see also Schott, 1999 and 2004; Coutard and Rutherford, 2016). The networked city is the ultimate celebration of the technological approach to nature that became prevalent in the modern city, and which leads Chris Otter (this volume), for instance, to equal urbanization with the rise of the ‘Technosphere’. This ‘Technosphere’ may be defined as the global sum of all large-scale networked systems, which, according to Peter Haff (2014), both escape intentional human control and provide the basic conditions for human (and animal and plant) life: current human populations could not survive outside the Technosphere. As such, the Technosphere is both an extension of, and a parasite on, the modern Biosphere (Williams et al., 2015, p. 208). The development of infrastructural networks undoubtedly changed the urban interaction with nature. Consider, for instance, the energy provisioning of cities, discussed in this volume by Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne, and also Dieter Schott. In a wood-dependent city, energy was visible and its manipulation was extremely labor intensive. Sometimes it required a collective effort of the entire urban community, such as the yearly ‘Wäldchestag’ of the city of Frankfurt, when the citizens gathered in specific places in the municipal woods, and received their allotted share of wood, cut by municipal woodworkers. By the sixteenth century, such direct provisioning of energy had of course become exceptional. Wood was provisioned through the market which lengthened the supply chains considerably. Within the city, however, wood still had to be carried to houses and stores, sawn, brought up from cellar or sheds to the stoves and fire places within the house and, after burning, ashes and unburnt cinders had to be removed. An apparent dematerialization only occurred with the introduction of gas and electricity networks which brought energy directly into urban households and to the heating and cooking equipment in these households; requiring almost no effort and largely invisible, it did, however, carry a cost, which soon started to be calculated by unit of consumption. Of course, electricity and gas were derived from material sources as well, but to the consumers they certainly appeared less material compared to the old stocks of wood and coal stored in the house.

Such a process of ‘dematerialization’ brings us to the third aspect of modernity: the ‘modernity project’, as defined by the history of science, social and cultural studies, in which the rise of ‘nature’, as conceptually separated from society and subject to human knowledge and control, takes center stage. According to Bruno Latour (1993a), modernity can be summarized as a purifying process in which the myth of autonomous subjects with an independent existence apart from objects and matter is constructed. The ultimate goal of Latour and adherents of the Actor- Network Theory thus becomes denouncing the artificial distinction between the human and the non-human, culture and nature, and point to the historical contingency of these categories. The modernity project was fatally flawed, as Nature and Society cannot be separated, and are bound together in permanent co-evolution. Nevertheless, the idea of nature being separated from humans provides a compelling narrative. Take, for instance, the example of drinking water, discussed in this volume by Janssens and Soens. For most urbanites in medieval and early modern cities the provisioning of drinking water...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Nature Into Urban Hinterlands
• Part III Nature as Urban Resource
• Part IV Nature as Urban Challenge
• Part V Visions of Urban Nature
• Part VI Concluding Essay
• Contributors
• Index