ABSTRACT
How do we conceptualize the longue durée environmental history of European cities? The essays in this book, taken cumulatively, suggest that the processing and transformation of ‘natural’ materials—wood, water, animals—has a complex, contingent and non-linear history which cannot straightforwardly be divided into ‘premodern’ and ‘modern’. Problems of pollution, resource depletion and waste management did not simply appear in the nineteenth century. Indeed, these essays complement the work of climatologists and ecologists who have argued for the much longer-term effects of humans upon the wider earth system. Nonetheless, fossil fuels significantly transformed the relationship between cities and natural resources: hinterlands greatly expanded, metabolism intensified, and waste and pollution were magnified. The combination of organic and mineral power produced larger, greedier, and more dispersed, diffuse cities. This conclusion frames this discussion by utilizing several relatively recent concepts drawn from a variety of disciplines. First, it argues that urbanization is a central process driving the Anthropocene, and that the organic and mineral phases of urban development correspond to the more nuanced multi-stage Anthropocene being proposed by some historians and scientists. Second, it depicts the past five hundred years of urban history in terms of an emergent, growing ‘urban stratum’ of global geological significance, one which slowly expands and congeals into a ‘technosphere’ which transcends the urban as traditionally understood. Third, this technosphere is conceptualized as a ‘meganiche’ in which human biological development increasingly takes place. Urbanization is thus a process with complex long-term ecological and biological consequences. Fourth, this conclusion argues that the idea of agency alone, whether singular or divided into human/non-human modalities, might be insufficient to grasp the range, scale and diversity of activities constituting these processes.
