Concrete and Clay

Concrete and Clay has another quality I admire in historical works, which is that it has a lot of pictures in it.  Other than that, it seems to be lacking in terms of its theoretical contributions, it seems, and what the overall scope of the work should be.  There is a wide discussion on theory in the introduction, particularly of the role of nature and capitalism, but a lot of this seems to be subsequently dropped later in the book (or not emphasized enough).  For example, the only discussion of the role of capital in creating those upstate waterworks projects in the second chapter is that it was done so that the city could be a greater site for capital accumulation.  Gandy writes that “urban growth instituted a brutal logic of its own, which necessitated the physical transformation of the landscape”; but the chapter seems to be mostly about the legislative and technocratic battles that emerged in building the Catskills Aquaducts.

Furthermore, the role of nature seems to only make a cameo throughout the book, making only fleeting appearances from time to time.  There seems to be a greater proportion of each chapter devoted to governmentality and ideas of the time than there is not how nature is remade (in this, it reminds me of Don Mitchell’s talk, which only briefly mentioned “violently remaking landscapes” even though that was the title; it was an exciting title, though).   It seems like the book works much better as a discussion for urban planners and how design theories go in and out of fashion at various points than it does of a book that discusses how nature is remade in crafting the city.

That said, I enjoyed the anecdotal style of the writing, and the ways in which the narrative included broad scope (at least in the chapters about waterworks and Grand Central Park) and then moved to more specific instances, retelling the struggles of the Young Lords and Latino and Hasidic communities in Brooklyn.  But I’m not quite sure how the first part (large infrastructure projects) can be explicitly linked to the second part of the book (environmental justice) in an overarching narrative about “Reworking Nature.”  The fact that the book moves from talking about how power to determine the urban enviroment has devolved from technocrats like Robert Moses to, now, empower activist groups is something very obvious, I feel.  Perhaps the last two chapters were added to provide sort of a “feel good,” human-agents-as-resisting-hegemony narrative.  I still like the last two chapters, but they feel distance from the previous two.

A strength of the book, like Cronon’s, was Gandy’s ability to retell the dominant theories and ideas of a certain time.  This is especially evident in the chapter about Grand Central Park, where different visions of what the relationship between nature and the city ought to be like are excavated by his writing.  We are expertly reminded of how these thinkers thought the city could have, and it is difficult for me to not sympathize with some of these egalitarian visions, misguided as they might be.