ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects upon the modes through which Western socio-philosophical discourse has critically explored Nature and the City. It aims to show how images of the City as 'artifact,' which surfaced in the 1960s–1970s–in parallel to the postmodern turn and the rapid planetary urbanization of the world, have been progressively detached from their original reference to Nature. In postmodernity, the roles of Nature and the City dramatically change as the notion of 'paysage,' the landscape ceases to exists. The chthonic nature of the city, its underground base and its submarine image are among the favored themes to appear in the fragments collected by the German thinker of modernity. The modes of representation of human environments are still based on Nature, but only as manipulated artificial products of a post-urban or even post-human Epoch fully dominated by technology and market logics.
