Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City / Edition 1

by Matthew Gandy

Overview

An interdisciplinary account of the environmental history and changing landscape of New York City.

In this innovative account of the urbanization of nature in New York City, Matthew Gandy explores how the raw materials of nature have been reworked to produce a "metropolitan nature" distinct from the forms of nature experienced by early settlers. The book traces five broad developments: the expansion and redefinition of public space, the construction of landscaped highways, the creation of a modern water supply system, the radical environmental politics of the barrio in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the contemporary politics of the environmental justice movement. Drawing on political economy, environmental studies, social theory, cultural theory, and architecture, Gandy shows how New York's environmental history is bound up not only with the upstate landscapes that stretch beyond the city's political boundaries but also with more distant places that reflect the nation's colonial and imperial legacies. Using the shifting meaning of nature under urbanization as a framework, he looks at how modern nature has been produced through interrelated transformations ranging from new water technologies to changing fashions in landscape design. Throughout, he considers the economic and ideological forces that underlie phenomena as diverse as the location of parks and the social stigma of dirty neighborhoods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262572163
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	08/29/2003
Series:	Urban and Industrial Environments
Pages:	358
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.69(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Matthew Gandy is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (MIT Press), recipient of the 2003 Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, and The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (MIT Press), recipient of the 2014 Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography, given by the American Association of Geographers, and has published widely on urban, cultural, and environmental themes.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	Introduction	1
1	Water, Space, and Power	19
1.1	Water and the Nascent Civic Realm	24
1.2	Engineering the Technological Sublime	32
1.3	Urban Decay and the Hidden City	52
1.4	Paranoid Urbanism	60
1.5	Hydrological Transformations	70
2	Symbolic Order and the Urban Pastoral	77
2.1	Cultural Anxiety, Land Speculation, and Public Space	81
2.2	Creating the Garden of a Great City	87
2.3	Olmsted's Urban Vision: A Fragile Synthesis	97
2.4	Olmsted Rediscovered: An Emerging Preservationist Ethic	102
2.5	Emerald Dreams	109
3	Technological Modernism and the Urban Parkway	115
3.1	The Automobilization of the American Landscape	118
3.2	Robert Moses and the Radiant City	126
3.3	The Demise of Technological Modernism	138
3.4	Fractured Cities	147
4	Between Borinquen and the Barrio	153
4.1	Landscapes of Despair	156
4.2	Space, Identity, and Power	162
4.3	Disarray in the 1970s	177
4.4	The Power of Memory	182
5	Rustbelt Ecology	187
5.1	Across the Great Divide	193
5.2	Pollution and the Politics of Resistance	200
5.3	Reclaiming the Social Environment	213
5.4	Trash Can Utopias	221
	Epilogue	229
	Notes	235
	Index	327

What People are Saying About This

Andrew Hurley

This is a masterful book: sweeping in its coverage of urban environmental issues, provocative in its critique of contemporary environmentalism, and economical in its execution. I can think of no other work that so effectively manages to sustain an analysis of the urban environment across such broad shifts in urban capitalism. By relentlessly bringing us back to the underlying patterns of capital accumulation and political power in cities, Gandy offers a powerful corrective to models of sustainability that invoke an organic ideal of urban nature.

Erik Swyngedouw

This remarkable book renders more visible the complex process of socio-environmental transformation that gives form and substance to the city. It is a great read—insightful and well-researched, yet accessible.

Sharon Zukin

This is a wonderful book—rich in detail and broad in analytic scope. Gandy uncovers the hidden intersections of nature, culture, and power on which the building of cities relies. He offers a dramatic new synthesis of what we know about New York City and the natural environment of water, waste, air, and parkland, framed by the continual struggle for democracy.

Endorsement

This is a wonderful book—rich in detail and broad in analytic scope. Gandy uncovers the hidden intersections of nature, culture, and power on which the building of cities relies. He offers a dramatic new synthesis of what we know about New York City and the natural environment of water, waste, air, and parkland, framed by the continual struggle for democracy.

—Sharon Zukin, author of The Cultures of Cities

From the Publisher

This remarkable book renders more visible the complex process of socio-environmental transformation that gives form and substance to the city. It is a great read—insightful and well-researched, yet accessible.

—Erik Swyngedouw, St. Peter's College and School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University

Roger Keil

Gandy does an excellent job of guiding the reader through the thicket of New York's societal relationships with nature. The study defies common conventions of urban historical narrative by allowing the reader to access New York's nature from a variety of perspectives: capital, technology, modernization, landscape, liberation politics, and environmental justice. Concrete and Clay is a major achievement in the field of urban ecology.

Editorial Reviews

...a fascinating overview of New York City's technological and social infrastructures.—Journal of Architectural Education—

Gandy has pieced together a fascinating environmental history of New York.

—Publishers Weekly—

Concrete and Clay is a towering achievement and a wonderful addition to the literature on the urban environment.

—Ari Kelman, American Studies—

Gandy deftly and provocatively connects issue of health, politics, economics, and urbanology in a compulsively readable and illuminating cultural analysis.

—Publishers Weekly—

From the Publisher

Gandy deftly and provocatively connects issue of health, politics, economics, and urbanology in a compulsively readable and illuminating cultural analysis.

—Publishers Weekly

Reviews

Concrete and Clay is a towering achievement and a wonderful addition to the literature on the urban environment.

American Studies - Ari Kelman

...a fascinating overview of New York City's technological and social infrastructures.

Journal of Architectural Education

New York has attempted to balance progress with health, safety and aesthetics during the course of its development, argues Gandy, a scholar in geography and urban studies at the University College of London. Gandy has pieced together a fascinating environmental history of New York along five specific axes: the creation of a workable system of water supply, the developing concept of public space, the establishment of landscaped highways, the profound changes that environmentalism had on the Latino barrio in the 1960s and '70s, and environmentalism as a political movement. The facts accumulate somewhat haphazardly: Aaron Burr's 1799 Manhattan Water company never delivered on its promise to bring clean water to the city, but did become a major banking concern; Olmstead's Anglophile vision of Central Park "was anathema to Irish political and intellectual opinion"; the post-WWII "spread of car ownership" spawned trips similar to the 19th-century railroad's "nature tourism," leading to landscaped parkways. But by the end, Gandy ties them all convincingly and neatly to issues in contemporary environmentalism. By examining, for example, how health issues embraced by such militant community groups as the Black Panthers and the Young Lords translated into environmental activism in the 1970s, and how an unlikely coalition between Latino and Hasidic activists against a proposed Brooklyn Navy Yard waste incinerator challenged and changed New York's community politics, Gandy deftly and provocatively connects issues of health, politics, economics and urbanology in a compulsively readable (for the more wonkily inclined) and illuminating cultural analysis. (Apr.) Forecast: As pundits, developers, administrators and activists enter the debate over what to do with the World Trade Center site and how to do it, this history of the city's politico-environmental nexus should find its way into many of their hands, particularly those concerned about the site's toxicity. Heightened New York interest continues outside the city; expect solid sales from campus and issue-oriented shops. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly