ABSTRACT
Cities are shaped, at least in part, by movements and settlements. As we have seen in the previous chapters, these movements and settlements are formed by, and help to produce, cities of difference and diversity. Furthermore, all the chapters in this book have so far agreed that movements and settlements help to make many cities exciting and frustrating places. This chapter plots a similar course, except that here we will try to think of cities as not just socially and culturally diverse places—a definition of cities based largely on the people that pass within, through and between them. We will be considering other movements and settlements that make up cities: we will encounter some of the animals, plants, materials and energies that pass between, flow through and linger within cities. My aim will be to suggest that cities are often characterized by environmental as well as social diversity. Just as we saw in Chapter 3 that cities of social difference have often produced possibilities for new political movements, so the heterogeneous collections of species and materials that I speak of here have the potential to refigure what we mean by cities and by urban-environmental politics. Far from arguing that cities are necessarily anti-nature, cities contain the possibility for some exciting changes to human relations with nature.
