Introduction

Several significant developments in material cultures and social imaginaries point to the turn of the 1960s–1970s as nurturing a paradigmatic shift in the representation of urban and natural environments. This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on urban planning in Lisbon, Portugal, tracing the history of parkways and greenways in the city at the turn of the 1960s. It explores the interstices in the representations of nature found in the writings of the Obscure Poetry group in China during the 1970s. The book considers particular in the forms of erasure produced by global shifts and trans-industrial mutations, and the memories that linger in the aftermath of landscape and habitat transformation. It examines the lingering effects of the complex colonial history of New Zealand as it has manifest in two significant urban natures: Christchurch Botanical Gardens and Riccarton Bush in Christchurch.