ABSTRACT
What do we mean when we say that cities have altered humanity’s interaction with nature? The more people are living in cities, the more nature is said to be "urbanizing": turned into a resource, mobilized over long distances, controlled, transformed and then striking back with a vengeance as "natural disaster". Confronting insights derived from Environmental History, Science and Technology Studies or Political Ecology, Urbanizing Nature aims to counter teleological perspectives on the birth of modern "urban nature" as a uniform and linear process, showing how new technological schemes, new actors and new definitions of nature emerged in cities from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|26 pages
Introduction
part II|60 pages
Nature Into Urban Hinterlands
chapter 2|15 pages
Concepts of Urban Agency and the Transformation of Urban Hinterlands
chapter 3|22 pages
A Place in Its Own Right
part III|90 pages
Nature as Urban Resource
chapter 4|23 pages
Urbanizing Water
chapter 5|23 pages
Cities Hiding the Forests
chapter 6|22 pages
Energizing European Cities
part IV|62 pages
Nature as Urban Challenge
chapter 8|18 pages
Hydraulic Experts and the Challenges of Water in Early Modern Times
chapter 9|20 pages
Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape
part V|72 pages
Visions of Urban Nature
chapter 11|20 pages
Urban Fringes
chapter 13|21 pages
The Roots of the Sustainable City
part VI|22 pages
Concluding Essay