The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments

by Michael Bennett (Editor), David W. Teague (Editor)

Cities are often thought to be separate from nature, but recent trends in ecocriticism demand that we consider them as part of the total environment. This new collection of essays sharpens the focus on the nature of cities by exploring the facets of an urban ecocriticism, by reminding city dwellers of their place in ecosystems, and by emphasizing the importance of this connection in understanding urban life and culture. The editors—both raised in small towns but now living in major urban areas—are especially concerned with the sociopolitical construction of all environments, both natural and manmade. Following an opening interview with Andrew Ross exploring the general parameters of urban ecocriticism, they present essays that explore urban nature writing, city parks, urban "wilderness," ecofeminism and the city, and urban space. The volume includes contributions on topics as wide-ranging as the urban poetry of English writers from Donne to Gay, the manufactured wildness of a gambling casino, and the marketing of cosmetics to urban women by idealizing Third World "naturalness." These essays seek to reconceive nature and its cultural representations in ways that contribute to understanding the contemporary cityscape. They explore the theoretical issues that arise when one attempts to adopt and adapt an environmental perspective for analyzing urban life. The Nature of Cities offers the ecological component often missing from cultural analyses of the city and the urban perspective often lacking in environmental approaches to contemporary culture. By bridging the historical gap between environmentalism, cultural studies, and urban experience, the book makes a statement of lasting importance to the development of the ecocritical movement. CONTENTS
Part 1—The Nature of Cities
1. Urban Ecocriticism: An Introduction, Michael Bennett & David Teague
2. The Social Claim on Urban Ecology, Andrew Ross (interviewed by Michael Bennett)
Part 2—Urban Nature Writing
3. London Here and Now: Walking, Streets, and Urban Environments in English Poetry from Donne to Gay, Gary Roberts
4. "All Things Natural Are Strange": Audre Lorde, Urban Nature, and Cultural Place, Kathleen R. Wallace
5. Inculcating Wildness: Ecocomposition, Nature Writing, and the Regreening of the American Suburb, Terrell Dixon
Part 3—City Parks
6. Writers and Dilettantes: Central Park and the Literary Origins of Antebellum Urban Nature, Adam W. Sweeting
7. Postindustrial Park or Bourgeois Playground? Preservation and Urban Restructuring at Seattle's Gas Works Park, Richard Heyman
Part 4—Urban "Wilderness"
8. Boyz in the Woods: Urban Wilderness in American Cinema, Andrew Light
9. Central High and the Suburban Landscape: The Ecology of White Flight, David Teague
10. Manufacturing the Ghetto: Anti-urbanism and the Spatialization of Race, Michael Bennett
Part 5—Ecofeminism and the City
11. An Ecofeminist Perspective on the Urban Environment, Catherine Villanueva Gardner
12. "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman": The Political Economy of Contemporary Cosmetics Discourse, Laura L. Sullivan
Part 6—Theorizing Urban Space
13. Darwin's City, or Life Underground: Evolution, Progress, and the Shapes of Things to Come, Joanne Gottlieb
14. Nature in the Apartment: Humans, Pets, and the Value of Incommensurability, David R. Shumway
15. Cosmology in the Casino: Simulacra of Nature in the Interiorized Wilderness, Michael P. Branch

Genres: Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Michael Bennett, an associate professor of English at Long Island University, is the co-editor of Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women and The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments.

(Source: Amazon)

Reviews

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

When we think of nature, most of us think of the countryside, the outback, the jungle, the desert, the mountains and beyond. This book reminds us how nature is very alive, but not always well, around us in the cities and it is important for us, as the main 'stewards' of the planet, to make an effort to look after it.
This book contains a range of disparate essays that are all urban-themed. Some focus on parks, the use of green spaces in the city, others focus on more political topics such as gentrification and the demonization of certain locales labelled as 'ghettos' etc.
While this book is for academics, its language is very accessible (which is not always the case when it comes to scholarly works). Worth a read if you are interested in cities and the various ways of looking at city-nature dichotomies.

[Candy Wood]

Until I read this collection of essays, I thought ecocriticism focused on literature, but more of these are about politics and society than about texts of any kind. The editors' introduction establishes the broad focus: they want ecocritics to consider urban environments, and they want city dwellers to remember "our place within ecosystems and the importance of this fact for understanding urban life and culture" (4). Some of the essays are text-based, particularly the three in the section devoted to "Urban Nature Writing": Gary Roberts's examination of walking in London in 18th-century and earlier poetry is interesting, and so is Joanne Gottlieb's comparison of 19th-century utopian and dystopian texts with 20th-century ones including an X-Files episode. The last essay, by Michael Branch, focuses on the simulacra of nature in a casino to show that in 21st-century America, the "nature" of cities has been replaced by more convenient, "hyperreal" fakes, and thus provides a fascinating but distressing conclusion to the volume.

[Benjamin]

Edited by Michael Bennett and David W. Teague; I read the introduction, the interview with Andrew Ross (of techno-culture studies fame; chapter 2), and the one essay on the underground of the city (chapter 13).

Introduction: here they lay out in brief the questions (though not the answers) asked in the essays, seeking to fill the urban gap in the recent cultural/ecological studies movement (social ecology, eco-criticism -- basically, an attention to the dual unknowableness of nature and its systematic organization: there are rules, we just don't know them; it's a system, it's just not organized for us). The introduction is uninteresting and untheoretical, though they do the right thing by giving an actual overview of the many, disparate topics/essays covered in the book: nature-writing in the city, city parks, the urban wilderness (where the natives are savages -- a long-standing trope of both racial and industrial discourse, cf. Slotkin on The Fatal Environment), feminist ecocriticism, and theorizing urban space.

"The Social Claim on Urban Ecology," Andrew Ross (interviewed by Michael Bennett), pp. 15-30: Ross is a techno-cultural studies person, so his interest in eco-criticism seems a good way to start this off with a reminder that technology and the city are parts of our nature. He goes through some of the motions with good will, reminding us of the strange bedfellows of ecological politics (white flight often goes together with the preservation of green land -- people preserve green land from black families [16]). Ross is against the Chicago School of sociology, claiming that they look to socially-constructed images of nature to buttress their sociological arguments/observations, a criticism that is part of his push for a New (socially just) Urbanism, a pluralist movement (not all environmentalists are the same [28], and environmentalism cannot be a single-issue topic for him [17, 19, 22]); most curiously, his Green Urbanism is a post-scarcity image, a reminder that all scientific constructions are scientism, inextricable from the cultural moment (25), and our desire to limit our desires is not something we can implement safely without examination (27). (I especially like his note that post-scarcity has become a dirty word: "People look at you as if you had two heads" [26].)

Joanne Gottlieb, "Darwin's City, or Life Underground," pp. 233-254: between her quick and uninteresting readings of Wells, "The Host" (The X-Files' fluke-man episode), 12 Monkeys, etc., Gottlieb does make some interesting remarks on the underground's multiple valences in the city: both the place we shovel everything we don't want to deal with (basically, shit and the dead) and our hope for rationally dealing with that (segregating and rationalizing each element) and our fears of what would happen if that rationalizing/segregating broke down. Aggravatingly, her interest in the utopian frisson of the underground is expressed in two areas, the underground train and the sewer, and the former structures her imagination (time that goes forwards or backwards or nowhere at all) when her most interesting remarks are about the latter (as for instance, in the comparison between the visceral "porcelain telephone" network of Newark in "The Host" and the agents' ephemeral cell phone connections [239]). Ultimately, she concludes that we've lost the ability to imagine the city and the ability to imagine the future (hence, the utopian urge of the late 90s found its way into cyberspace, where everything was rational).