Lisa Benton-Short

A useful introduction to the environmental impacts of human urbanism and the subtler ways in which nature interpenetrates and affects the development of the city, Cities and Nature lives up to the letter, if perhaps not the broader promise, of its title, sketching the history of the city-ecosystem and its ties to the “natural” systems surrounding it, looking at the effects of urban outputs such as solid waste and pollution of the air as well as the ways urban ecosystems alter the impact of natural disasters, and gesturing at the larger conceptual questions raised by an approach that stresses the socioeconomic effect of natural processes and the ecological impact of urban humanity.

The book is organized into three sections: 1) nature-urban relations in historical context, 2) impacts of urbanity on nature and nature on the city, and 3) realigning urban-nature relations. In their opening chapters, Benton-Short and Rennie Short concisely cover the rise of the city in three phases: the pre-industrial, “agricultural” city, the industrial “factory” city and the post-industrial metropolis. Each phase entails growth of the largest cities to a new order of size and attendant strains on ecosystems and infrastructure (which the authors present insistently as extensions of each other). Each phase also shows new adaptions in “urban nature,” from peasant gardens to monumental parks to modern urban riverbank and wetlands reclamation efforts.

The book’s middle chapters on “impacts” find their conceptual space in two semantic distinctions. The authors find a difference between “location,” which privileges a city’s position relative to other cities, larger political jurisdictions and cultural constructs, and “site,” which places the city as ecosystem within a physical geographical setting. Site and its alteration by humans have a mitigating or exacerbating effect on “natural disasters,” which the authors prefer to call “environmental hazards” to highlight the socioeconomic and political forces that mediate their effects.

The several chapters that follow on the effects of urban waste and pollution on city inhabitants and the surrounding natural ecosystems make for grim if somewhat over-specialized reading, drawing distinctions between types of solid waste and air pollutants that will be useful for urban planners and sanitation engineers but not for the generalist. A deeper concern is that these chapters tend to uphold an urban-nature dichotomy – “the effects of human pollutants on pristine nature” – which the authors denounce but which they have trouble moving beyond. Final chapters on racial and class issues in waste management (for instance, low-income housing built on contaminated ground) and the various movements for “sustainable cities” point toward a positive reimagining of the city as ecosystem, but the authors do not engage with topics such as sustainable architecture and the adaptation of non-human species to urban life on the same detailed level as they do the negative impact of urban pollution, which means that Cities and Nature is a good survey containing useful information and a powerful indictment of destructive human living practices, but feels underdeveloped on a theoretical and philosophical level.… (mais)