Geography 595

where is nature exactly? December 11, 2008

After a brief discussion of Concrete and Clay Trevor asked if he should be expecting an “angry Sasha post.” Upon further review of my thoughts I will attempt to avoid “anger” in my review of Gandy. However I was a touch disappointed. Perhaps the expectations game had something to do with. Concrete and Clay is talked about in the same way as Nature’s Metropolis and while it similarly traces the relationships between a city and its hinterlands it is no Nature’s Metropolis (do I need to cite Lloyd Benson on that one?) 

Concrete and Clay is a very astute urban study the teases out how the problematization of “nature” is still a very key issue in understanding contemporary urban politics. Gandy lays out a broad and ambitious theoretical framework in the introduction (one of those chapters that probably merits a rereading) that suggests that capitalist urbanization is not the same as modernism and that the history of New York is the history of multiple modernities I’m not exactly sure what he means by this, but I think it has something to do with his equating of nature with ideology. That is, ideology is what becomes naturalized (6-7). In this way, the manipulation of nature or rather the contesting visions of how exactly and to what ends nature should be manipulated should not be seen as modern and anti-modern, but rather as competing forms of modernism, that all essentially naturalized certain arrangements of social power. 

This argument is perhaps best explained through his discussion of the Young Lords and the various tactics that were deployed. While they evolved to espouse a socialist agenda, they clearly did not reject the subordination of nature. Instead they offered up a different plan for how it should be organized. 

I was most impressed by his exploration of water politics in New York. 

What I was frustrated with was what I perceived to be an absence of nature in his explanations or at least an absence of the uncanny aspects of nature, that is, the proliferation of hybrids that escape the modern constitution (See Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern for a discussion of this). While he suggests that the focus on the social construction of space has been misleading in understanding urban nature, I agree with Erin that he seems to explain most of the transformations by referring to capital accumulation. The following quote perhaps best represents the constructivism that Gandy seems to revert to.

The factors that determine the long-term viability of cities and regions rest ultimately not with natural limits, which are in any case largely culturally and technically determined, but with the strategic significance of places within a wider set of social and economic dynamics. (51)

I’m not quite sure what to make of this except to express my disappointment. His curious epilogue  about West Nile Virus is hard to understand in light of this quote. On the one hand he suggests that “the premodern, the modern, and the postmodern are all jostling for position simultaneously” and that “urban nature is a collage of past and present” yet this collage seems to consist of the various constructed or at least symbolically colonized natures. Thus what counts is what is called nature and what is discounted are those things that are “real” – that is, they do stuff – but aren’t recognized. It is easy to see this in the discussion of sanitation. While germ theory had not been developed, germs still were what was making people sick, but Gandy’s story is largely about the sorts of politics that stemmed from a conception of nature that was based on miasma theory. This is important, but I would argue that this is not really the whole story.