Concrete and Clay
Reworking Nature in New York City
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- £18.99
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- £18.99
Publisher Description
An interdisciplinary account of the environmental history and changing landscape of New York City.
In this innovative account of the urbanization of nature in New York City, Matthew Gandy explores how the raw materials of nature have been reworked to produce a "metropolitan nature" distinct from the forms of nature experienced by early settlers. The book traces five broad developments: the expansion and redefinition of public space, the construction of landscaped highways, the creation of a modern water supply system, the radical environmental politics of the barrio in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the contemporary politics of the environmental justice movement. Drawing on political economy, environmental studies, social theory, cultural theory, and architecture, Gandy shows how New York's environmental history is bound up not only with the upstate landscapes that stretch beyond the city's political boundaries but also with more distant places that reflect the nation's colonial and imperial legacies. Using the shifting meaning of nature under urbanization as a framework, he looks at how modern nature has been produced through interrelated transformations ranging from new water technologies to changing fashions in landscape design. Throughout, he considers the economic and ideological forces that underlie phenomena as diverse as the location of parks and the social stigma of dirty neighborhoods.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York has attempted to balance progress with health, safety and aesthetics during the course of its development, argues Gandy, a scholar in geography and urban studies at the University College of London. Gandy has pieced together a fascinating environmental history of New York along five specific axes: the creation of a workable system of water supply, the developing concept of public space, the establishment of landscaped highways, the profound changes that environmentalism had on the Latino barrio in the 1960s and '70s, and environmentalism as a political movement. The facts accumulate somewhat haphazardly: Aaron Burr's 1799 Manhattan Water company never delivered on its promise to bring clean water to the city, but did become a major banking concern; Olmstead's Anglophile vision of Central Park "was anathema to Irish political and intellectual opinion"; the post-WWII "spread of car ownership" spawned trips similar to the 19th-century railroad's "nature tourism," leading to landscaped parkways. But by the end, Gandy ties them all convincingly and neatly to issues in contemporary environmentalism. By examining, for example, how health issues embraced by such militant community groups as the Black Panthers and the Young Lords translated into environmental activism in the 1970s, and how an unlikely coalition between Latino and Hasidic activists against a proposed Brooklyn Navy Yard waste incinerator challenged and changed New York's community politics, Gandy deftly and provocatively connects issues of health, politics, economics and urbanology in a compulsively readable (for the more wonkily inclined) and illuminating cultural analysis.
