Urbanizing nature : actors and agency (dis)connecting cities and nature since 1500 / edited by Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid, and Bert De Munck.
Introduction : did cities change nature? : a long-term perspective / Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid and Bert De Munck -- Long-term transitions, urban imprint and the construction of hinterlands / Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll -- Concepts of urban sgency and the transformation of urban hinterlands : the case of Berlin, eighteenth to twentieth centuries / Christoph Bernhardt -- A place in its own right : the rural-urban fringe of Helsinki from the early nineteenth century to the present / Marjaana Niemi -- Urbanizing water : looking beyond the transition to water modernity in the cities of the southern Low Countries, thirteenth to nineteenth centuries / Ellen Janssens and Tim Soens -- Cities hiding the forests : wood supply, hinterlands and urban agency in the southern Low Countries, thirteenth to eighteenth centuries / Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne -- Energizing European cities : from wood provision to solar panels : providing energy for urban demand, 1800-2000 / Dieter Schott -- Re-use and recycling in Western European cities / Georg Stöger -- Hydraulic experts and the challenges of water in early modern times : European colonial cities compared / Karel Davids -- Stockholm's changing waterscape : a long-term perspective on a city and its flowing water / Eva Jakobsson -- Air pollution as urban problem in France, from the mid-nineteenth ventury to the 1970s / Stéphane Frioux -- Urban fringes : conquering riversides and lakeshores in the nineteenth century : examples from Austrian and Swiss medium-sized cities / Christian Rohr -- Twentieth century wastescapes : cities, consumers, and their dumping grounds / Heike Weber -- The roots of the sustainable city : the visible waters of the city in modern Mainz and Wiesbaden / Michael Toyka-Seid -- Beyond cities, beyond nature : building a European urban stratum / Chris Otter.
Summary:
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.