L AWRENCE B UELL Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? During the lifetime of even my youngest reader, the percentage of earth’s population living in metropolitan areas has increased dramatically. It now exceeds fifty percent, and it is growing fast. With this has come a broad range of equally dramatic though often less immediately perceptible environmental impacts: to climate, public health, planetary biodiversity, and natural systems in general. The task of merely conceiving the phenomenon of worldwide urban growth from an ecological or environmental standpoint, let alone deciding how to respond to it at either individual or collective levels, boggles the mind. I admit to finding myself especially challenged as one who - like many of the professional and managerial classes in the developed world - prefers to live on the urban fringe rather than within the city proper. As a commuter from suburbia, I contribute to urban financial well-being but also to urban ecological stress, despite small-scale economies of recycling, residential energy consumption, shopping with an eye for locally-produced food, and driving a small hybrid car. But almost no matter where or how one lives, if one both depends on cities and desires their ecological betterment, one does well to start from a sense of conscienceful awareness of contributing to the problems one would address, given how much larger than every urban region is its ‘ecological footprint’ - that is, the area required to provide the resources the city consumes. Conscienceful awareness is all the more important when one stands to profit from one’s discourse. As Rüdiger Wittig of the Institute of Botany at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main sarcastically remarks of green urban planning, “‘Nature in cities’ is lucrative business. Many jobs depend on it, a lot of money is involved, and […] competition often leads to exaggerated promises.” So it behooves researchers to explore with great care “the question of whether, in which cases, and to what degree, the integration of nature into urban development is reality or fiction” (593). Of course we humanists are not his main targets. By contrast to urban planners and architects, our interventions as urban ecological or environmental thinkers are quite low-stakes in a financial sense. Yet they may be no less potentially significant on that account conceptually, ethically, and aesthetically. My own intervention here will be to identify and assess the pros and cons, ecologically speaking, of six common metaphorical encapsulations - not pretending that these exhaust the list of possibilities - to which both fictive and critical discourse resort for encapsulating the relation between built and natural elements in urban sites. Sometimes these are deployed self- L AWRENCE B UELL 4 consciously, as in a number of the examples from literature and the arts cited below. But no less often they circulate unreflectingly, indeed unconsciously, constituting the very structures in terms of which thought, expression, and even policy gets patterned - namely these: city/ nature as binary; city as holistic macro-organism; city as fragmentary assemblage; as palimpsest (i.e., as stratification of layers over time); as network; and as apocalypse. Except for the last, I shall discuss them in what seems roughly an ascending order of conceptual reach. Each, I argue, has its characteristic benefits and hazards. Admittedly, seriatim treatment of them as if they were discrete categories is potentially misleading, since these schemas are often deployed in combination, but I hope that the reductionism will seem a reasonable price to pay for clarity of focus. Before getting underway, I want to start with two further preliminary generalizations. First, having to do with the place of nature in cities, of nonhuman forms of life specifically. Although from a global-biocentric standpoint metropolitan growth has clearly been harmful and distorting for nature, at the same time - in ways this big picture tends to screen out - it can also be seen as potentially enriching. On the one hand, cities manifestly compromise ecosystems and extinguish species. No urban riverway can match the biodiversity of areas more pristine; and the plant and other marine life that survives in polluted waterways is more vulnerable to disease and malformation. On the other hand, just as cities promote diversity of human population and cultural style, so too, they function as “concentration points” and “distribution centers” for a striking array of animal, plant, and other life forms (Sukopp 2-3). In other words, cities are transcultural spaces biotically as well as culturally. Some of this influx is planned and managed, as with botanical gardens, zoos, pets, and the vegetation on so-called green roofs; some of it is accidental and also undesired, as with rats and other vermin and disease vectors; and some of it is fortuitous but also potentially enriching, including much of what urban ecologist Ingo Kowarik calls “nature of the fourth kind,” which “starts with cracks in sidewalks or in colonization of walls and buildings […] and leads to growth in abandoned areas and to impressive urban-industrial woodlands” (22). 1 Nothing is easier than to wishfully overstate such scattered instances of happenstance nature springing up in the city, as Kowarik begins to do here, or as Marie Winn does in her bestselling nonfiction narrative Red-Tails in Love (1999), about a pair of hawks that choose a Manhattan apartment building for a roost. But neither should we underestimate the combined impact of the planned and fortuitous copresence of the natural together with the built - both as a natural phenomenon (attesting to the inevitable interpenetration of the natural and the built) and as the potential satisfaction of a human need. It’s been well attested, for instance, that exposure to natural environments, or even images thereof, is 1 N.b. the first three kinds, in Ingo Kowarik’s taxomony, are 1.) primeval, 2.) managed agro-forestry, and 3.) urban parks. Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 5 helpful in alleviating stress and facilitating convalescence from illness and surgery. 2 So there is a strong prima facie case for the place of nature in the psychic and physical well-being even of confirmed urbanites. My other set of preliminary observations relates to the place of literary and other acts of urban imagination. Here a good starting point is Patricia Yeager’s summary defense of “a poetics of infrastructure” in her editorial introduction to the 2007 PMLA special issue on “Cities.“ Against Henri Lefebvre’s dismissal of represented space as “topoi removed from lived social space,” Yeager insists that “here literature has an advantage [over social theory.]” The intertwining of codes; the habit of overdetermination; the multiple mapping that accompanies condensation and displacement; the layering that comes with the use of compound plots, points of view, tonality, atmosphere, and meter; and the dense range of figurative speech: each plaited literary device gives the weird, defamiliarizing treatment of cities a space-mapping Lefebvre overlooks. (21-22) Yeager argues persuasively that the textures of literary representation defy Lefebvre’s programmatic view of material space and spatial representation as hegemonically regulated, even if this particular passage’s emphasis on fictive discourse as defamiliarizing nuanced complication doesn’t do full justice to what her essay also shows elsewhere about the immersive power of the fictive: the power to draw its readers into its imagined scenes, affectively and even sensuously, as against instilling a sense of mystified or critical distance. What’s arguably most distinctive about the delivery power of the urban (and for that matter all other socio-environmental) imaginaries of fictive discourse is the oscillation produced in those who seriously engage it between affective immersion in the fictive world’s as-ifness, its reality-effect, and the reflexive detachment inherent in the beholder’s position and reinforced by the elements of apparent resistance or opacity registered in the text. Enough by way of preliminaries. On to those six metaphors for encapsulating the place of nature in relation to cities: metaphors upon which both theory and fiction have often drawn but that in either case operate - so I believe - by a logic similar to the aesthetic credo I’ve just stated in mini-form. That is, it performs the double move in relation to the referent that Paul Ricoeur has defined with elegant simplicity in The Rule of Metaphor: by turns abstracting us away from the factical object or tenor and retrieving it with a richer heuristic plenitude (216-39 and passim). The oldest and most deeply embedded of these metaphors is the citynature binary. City as construct wrested from and standing over against nature, for better or for worse. For worse, as when romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge depicts his “gentle-hearted” friend Charles Lamb “having pined/ And hungered after Nature, many a year,/ In the great in the great City pent” (421), or when the young William Butler Yeats, ignited by hearing 2 The most influential scholar is Roger S. Ulrich; see for instance Ulrich et al (201-30). L AWRENCE B UELL 6 his father read aloud from Henry Thoreau’s Walden, vows to take off for the “Lake Isle of Inisfree,” and build himself “a small cabin,” “of clay and wattles made” and “live alone in the bee-loud glade.” Or for better, as when the aging Yeats dreams of being translated “out of nature” into the “holy city of Byzantium,” where he “shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing”(39, 191-92). Or, more complexly, for worse and yet also in a perverse sense for better, in the distant view of blighted Manchester, England, 1945, glimpsed by the fourth and last of W. G. Sebald’s emigrant protagonists in Die Ausgewanderten: From a last bluff he had a bird’s eye view of the city spread out before him, the city where he was to live ever after. Contained by hills on three sides, it lay there as if in the heart of a natural amphitheatre [above which shone] the last rays of sunlight […] Not until this illumination died […] did his eye roam, taking in the crammed and interlinked rows of houses, the textile mills and dying works, the gasometers, chemical plants and factories of every kind, as far as what he took to be the centre of the city, where all seemed one solid mass of utter blackness, bereft of any further distinguishing features [-which, however, prompts the intimation] that “I had found my destiny.” (168-69) Like Sebald’s outer narrator, the critical reader knows that such extreme country-city antitheses are false epistemologically, simplistic projections of desire - or in this case a kind of self-immolating surrender to holocaust memory not yet disclosed. Yet these antitheses also reflect a long history of actual landscape inscriptions, as ancient as the still-visible walls of Nanjing or the green zones that mark off the boundaries of certain contemporary cities like Portland, Oregon, for recreation and for maintenance of an agricultural green belt - and sometimes for memorial reasons too, as in the capital of Scotland Arthur’s Seat looms greenly above the intensely urban royal mile to the great Edinburgh castle, which in turn towers over the central district of the modern city. So the urban-nature binary isn’t false consciousness pure and simple but also has a historical basis as a longstanding arrangement of physical landscape, often if not always reinforced by an acculturated desire to keep nature both at a safe distance and within reach. As environmental historians often observe, the campaign to preserve nature intact from human encroachment began in cities, more or less in tandem with the rise of early industrial era urbanization. Protectionism depended upon the sense of a widening gap between city and nature (see Nash 96-107). The great urban parks of the nineteenth century reflect this same logic within cities: desire for green space both distinct and proximate. By no accident was America’s first great landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, famous both for his urban park and for his national park designs. An inverse variant of the city versus nature binary is the city in the desert, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico, which I happened to visit recently. A smallish but sprawling city of a quarter million in a desert setting, Albuquerque is a green amoeboid shape, replete with lawns and trees and parks, su- Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 7 perimposed on a plateau otherwise barren: green city versus brown nature. But this, too, expresses the desire to fashion an urban enclave distinct from the surrounding landscape. Indeed, some cities much more densely built than this, like my own, Boston, are also arranged so as to look distinctly leafy and green from the air, at least in summer, even though the surrounding landscape is much greener than in the American southwest. This “granite garden” effect (Spirn, The Granite Garden) is obviously not an unmixed good. To be sure, it may have not only aesthetic but even ecological benefits, as by mitigating pollution and the so-called urban heat island phenomenon. But in the Albuquerques of the world, binarism has grossly destabilizing effects. It giganticizes the slender natural oasis along the Rio Grande by drawing down the water table and creating huge “sacrifice zones” in the surrounding region (Short & Short 144). The increasing competition for dwindling water supplies - in which metropolis usually wins out over small town, industrialized agriculture over small farmers, and the United States over Mexico - is the biggest ecological problem facing the American southwest today. So let’s set aside the binary schema, whatever its historic legitimacy and hermeneutic advantages, as exacting too great an ecological price, and turn to the second trope of city as itself a kind of macro-organism: a holistic technoorganic entity. Urban personification also has a long literary history. Coleridge’s friend and fellow poet William Wordsworth, at dawn on Westminster Bridge, imagines London’s mighty heart beating still. Walt Whitman personifies “million-footed Manhattan.” Joyce’s Finnegans Wake mythicizes Dublin as a configuration of two primal land and river figures, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle. William Carlos Williams metaphorizes his city as Mr. Paterson, conflating it with his own persona. Such personifications have a long prehistory in urban design. Historical sociologist Richard Sennett goes so far as to argue that city “spaces [historically] take form largely from the ways people experience their own bodies.” He traces this alleged linkage from the theory of the polis in classical Athens to the fragmented multiracial metropolises of today, contending that at each stage architectural practice is inflected by predominant strategies of bodily display or concealment (Sennett 370). Urban theorist Elizabeth Grosz takes issue with this model as too purposively masculinist, contending that environment and body “produce each other” in mutually transformative ways (297). But her feminist critique only reaffirms the body-city analogy. Even more striking than these permutations of cultural theory is how often urban body holisms of one kind or another insinuate themselves into more empirical social and applied science, as when urban planners recycle the Olmstedian cliché that parks are “the lungs of the city,” or refer to “urban metabolism” or a city’s “ecological footprint” not merely as figures of speech but as quantifiable actualities. The obvious prima facie advantages of body-city personification are its appeal to a shared, collective urban identity on the one hand and on the other L AWRENCE B UELL 8 hand to an ethics of environmental well-being implicit in the assumption that metropolis should function like a healthy body. This would seem to take us closer to thinking about cities in ecological terms than binary thinking does. Not that it is without blind spots of its own. In particular, the different possible implications of urban body metaphor can easily pull apart from each other, as when architectural theorist Donatella Mazzoleni insists on defining metropolis as the “concretization of the great oneiric structures of our collective body” (285), or when the urban body is felt to be under attack by some pathology that can only be combatted by expunging its threatening human presences - “urban cleansing” (627-51), as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai sardonically calls it. In the first case, the collectivity of the perceivers’ tie to the ecosystem gets cut; in the second, implementation of a certain regime of ecosystemic health overrides the claims of human compassion and solidarity. Nonetheless urban organismal metaphor can still be defended as a heuristic via negativa, as a way of dramatizing how actual city falls short of what a city should be, or maybe once was. African American novelist John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990) provides a telling example. The novel turns on the irony of a black administration finally elected to run that majority African American city only after it has become too broken to fix. At one point the narrator performs a sardonic rerun of the Neoclassical locodescriptive prospect piece, showing the protagonist in a slightly tipsy state contemplating the city’s original geometric layout from the strategic location of the Parthenon-like art museum: He can see a hand drawing the city. An architect’s tilted drawing board […] The city is a faint tracery of blue, barely visible blood lines in a newborn’s skull. No one has used the city yet. No one has pushed a button to start the heart pumping. He can tell thought had gone into the design. And a person must have stood here, on this hill, imagining this perspective. Dreaming the vast emptiness into the shape of a city […]. The founders were dead now. Buried in their wigs, waistcoats, swallowtail coats, silk hose clinging to their plump calves. A foolish old man flying a kite in a storm. (44-45) The kite-flying old man is presumably Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia’s most ambitious designer. The image of the still-born techno-organic infant dramatizes the failure of the grand design, and the pathetic quixotism of the dead founders. Wideman’s deployment of this image reveals another limitation of bodycity metaphor, however, which applies to the city-nature binary also. Both underrepresent historical process. Body-city metaphor is the more dynamic, implying circulation rather than spatial arrangement. But neither quite gets at the evolution of urban form over time. This brings me to my third metaphor, city as palimpsest: city conceived in terms of layers or stages of growth in place through time. Palimpsestic thinking can be especially helpful in calling attention to overlooked ecological interdependencies, in some cases quite Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 9 effaced by later modification: its siting along riverways or harbors, or in relation to surrounding hills and climate conditions, as well as the logic - such as it is - of the stages of urban growth. This kind of eco-historical palimpsestic consciousness was the foundation for the theory and practice of the patriarch of contemporary urban green planning in North America, Ian McHarg. McHarg based his designs on a multidimensional, eco-historical analysis of the broader urban region. To that end, he would prepare multiple maps of the city’s underlying geology, its hydrology including both groundwater and water table, soil properties, the history of its forest cover and other plantform distributions, its historical susceptibility to erosion and other modifications of land structure, the historical distribution and momentum of human settlement, and the points of special historical interest in relation to all these. The underlying principle was to ‘design with rather than against nature’ by building upon the record of human use over time in relation to the environmental context and contingencies with as few compromises as possible (McHarg). Palimpsestic thinking has been adapted in more sophisticated ways by various subsequent urban designers and design thinkers. McHarg’s younger colleague, Anne Spirn, directed a fascinating long-term Philadelphia environmental restoration project at the same time Wideman was writing Philadelphia Fire. It involved comprehensive topographical mapping of a buried urban stream that wound through a number of mostly poor districts and converting it with the aid of community activists from a mysterious nuisance which produced “mysterious” backyard and basement flooding that in turn had caused extensive building damage into neighborhood gardens and an environmental education lab for local schools (Spirn, Language). Not all such projects get results. Spirn’s was eventually halted by funding problems and administrative regime change. Even permanently successful initiatives may get compromised by competing motives ranging from parsimony to consumerism to public anxiety about letting urban nature get so bushy or unkept that it seems aesthetically repellent or poses a risk to neighborhood security (see Jorgensen et al 95-116). But shortfall from the ecological optimum at the implementation level hardly negates the mind-expanding value of the palimpsestic thinking in counteracting the bias wired into human perception for defining environmental reality in terms of what’s in front of you at the present moment. Another provocative example is the Japanese landscape designer Ryohei Ono’s response to the prospect of turning the deindustrializing areas of big Japanese cities into parklands, as a historic memorial to a more paleolithic era and as a green amenity. This kind of thing has been done with at least partial success in the U. S., the U. K., and also Germany (e.g., in the Ruhr Valley and, as we shall see momentarily, also in Berlin). Yet Ono cautions that for cities like Tokyo and Hiroshima it would require a reorientation of ecocultural values, because the industrial sites in question are bunched along the coast and to convert them into parkland would reverse the symbolic geography of Japanese cities, which traditionally L AWRENCE B UELL 10 have been oriented inland toward the mountains rather than, as he puts it, in “the unknown sea-wards direction” (227). Perhaps this overstates the case, and even if not Ono’s caveat may go unheeded. But it is refreshing to see ecocultural considerations laid explicitly on the table. And at least sometimes ecohistorical literacy together with concerted activism can get productive win-win results, as in the capital city of Canada’s midwestern province of Saskatchewan, which managed to protect its central riverway’s wetland complex by a combination of monitoring species behaviour and appeal to a preexisting “Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds” (Holland, Prach 73). Literature and other creative arts can be powerful conduits of the palimpsest mentality and of environmental memory in general. Indeed there is a subgenre of environmental nonfiction given over to tracing the interactions between natural and built environment over time. For my own home region, a leading practitioner is John Hanson Mitchell, whose Ceremonial Time (1984) follows the shaping and reshaping of his own district of a small exurban Boston town from its geologic origins through Paleolithic prehistory to the present. Mitchell’s new “natural history of Boston” does the same thing for the city proper. In principle, that makes it a book of much broader than merely local interest because Boston is one of the most repeatedly and intensively re-engineered cities in the United States - from the leveling of its topography, to the widening of its isthmus and the recontouring of its river system over centuries, to the single most expensive urban public works project in history: the underground channeling of sections of its major freeways - the ‘big dig.’ Mitchell’s narrative also suggests the limits of the palimpsest metaphor, as in the following seriocomic reflection provoked by a freeway traffic jam: Stuck as we were in the tedious […] hour-by-hour run of linear time, it may be hard to imagine, but in reality, the solid earth is as ephemeral as a cloud. Mountains once rose from the seas in the place that is now Boston and then eroded to the hills; the hills flowed into the seas and the seas became land, and someday the rock lands will melt away again like a mist, and the seas will rise and cover all. (58) This feat of mind-expansion liberates the narrator from the scene of frustration, but at a price. To think so expansively about environmental change leaves one with no standpoint for adjudicating change, except to go with the flow. A version of this same problem of appropriate time-scaling bedevils environmental restoration projects: their goals are always already problematic, because it’s impossible, given a history of continuous environmental change, to stipulate unproblematically a particular status quo ante to which to try to return the landscape (see Higgs). In the passage at hand, against the background of geologic time, the era of the city seems so minuscule as to trivialize the biggest urban problems. To extend palimpsest to its outermost limits is to disenable it from performing any practical purpose. Indeed, not just palimpsest but also the other two frames discussed so far don’t closely Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 11 enough approximate the ground-level experience of an actual urban denizen. For this, I turn to the fourth trope, city as fragmentary assemblage. By city as fragmentary assemblage I mean to refer to two disparate phenomena that relate to each other along the lines of Michel de Certeau’s bifold conceptualization of how city space gets negotiated in everyday life under the sign of the two complementary rhetorical tropes of synecdoche and asyndeton - meaning, respectively, to experience the part as the whole or to experience the whole as a discontinuous series of bits (116-17). From the one standpoint, city seems comprised of districts of neighborhoods and/ or home ranges. This is the city of urban ethnic and local color fiction: the Irish- American slum of Stephen Crane’s Maggie, the tiny, Jewish-centered niches of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep and Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, the segregated districts of black and hispanic Chicago of Richard Wright and Sandra Cisneros, and the mixed immigrant neighborhoods of Boston depicted by Mary Antin in Promised Land. Most of these texts operate from mental maps of the city as compartmentalized neighborhoods, beyond which denizens venture with a sense of tentativeness if not positive dread of the unknown. This, too, was the basis of the first major American school of so-called urban ecology, the Chicago School, which peaked between the two world wars (cf. Park). Ecology in this context chiefly meant demographic distribution: the districting of population groups, a mode of conceptualizing activity within cityspace that rested on the orthogenetic assumption that urban growth would follow a nature-like evolution toward to a state of maturity or ‘climax,’ as the first American-generated paradigm of ecological thought had held was the case for natural ecosystems. Where the issue of the nature-city relation entered more specifically into this way of conceiving cities as congeries of neighborhoods was with regard to distribution of green space. American urban park planning initially prioritized large-scale projects like New York’s Central Park; now, at the turn of the twentieth century, came a concerted effort to provide smaller-scale parks at the neighborhood level - for a similar mixture of motives including both salubrity and social control (see Cranz). That was the starting point, in the United States at least, of the view still widespread today that a “high density” of dispersed, accessible parks “with similar and diverse land-use spaces” helps optimize civic responsibility, pride, and well-being all across a city (Forman 21). The other sense of city as fragmentary assemblage, by contrast, would conceive city fragments not as discrete entities but as a series of discontinuous frames. This is the city of postmodern cultural theory - albeit with longstanding roots in the tradition of urban flanerie. As affirmation, this disposition calls us to liberate ourselves from the quest for “archetypal forms, normative values, and overriding goals” and learn to live, however uncomfortably, with “a horizontal juxtaposition of different images” (Boyer 375). As skeptical exposé, it critiques this very persuasion as a mode of consumption, the “society of the spectacle” in Guy Debord’s phrase. This second kind of city-as-fragment mentality stands opposed to the first especially in presup- L AWRENCE B UELL 12 posing a mobile, rootless, and also at least implicitly privileged-class urban experiencer rather than a neighborhood-anchored inhabitant who operates within a delimited comfort zone or home range. This presumably somewhat buffered hypothetical cosmopolitan urbanite might seem by definition more inclined to dismiss nature-city problematics and other anxieties about ecological destabilization as sentimental nostalgia. But in other respects, such a mentality might, at least sometimes, tilt a person toward urban ecological reform. Among creative writers and artists, such figures as Charles Dickens, Jacob Riis, James Joyce, W. C. Williams, John Edgar Wideman, and Frank O’Hara are at least partial cases in point. Such a mentality might, in particular, be more likely to think in transformational terms about needful urban remediation, promoting what British urban historian and planner Peter Hall calls “the new concept of adaptive reuse: the rehabilitation and recycling of […] old physical structures to new uses” (384) that contribute to beautification, prosperity, and also overall public health. Such projects certainly don’t always involve greening the area, but often they do. That’s why present-day Manchester, England, looks a lot leafier than it did in the mid-twentieth century as remembered in Sebald’s novel, whose narrator sees only a single tree in the whole city. An excellent example of postmodern adaptive re-use of the green fragment kind located within walking distance of the Free University of Berlin’s Kennedy-Institut is Südgelände Natur-Park. A sizeable patch of shrubs and trees sprung up there spontaneously in the late twentieth century along an abandoned railway on the border of the two Germanys. It is based on a juxtaposition of old industrial and new natural: showcasing the railroad (for instance) by transforming it into walkway and some of the other old technology into spectacle, and showcasing the new greenery in the dual form of a controlled landscape through which people can stroll and a more genuinely “natural” area for nurturing biodiversity. At its entrance is posted the motto “Art Is Nature’s Nearest Neighbor”; and if the park itself does not bear out this claim categorically it demonstrates its potential truth as a palpable fact. But to conceive the city-nature relation as an assemblage of fragments, even if the fragment is as huge as the lower Thames Valley restoration project, is finally a patchwork affair that takes you only so far. Something on a more comprehensive scale is needed that none of the metaphorical frames I’ve so far dealt with can supply, with the partial exception of the palimpsest. This brings me to metaphor number five, the network. Let me here gratefully acknowledge the work of a colleague who has influenced my own thinking, landscape ecologist Richard Forman, whose recent research focuses on city-nature relations both at the case-study level and on a global-comparative level. His Urban Regions (2008) makes two claims of particular significance for my account. The first is that talk about sustainable cities makes no sense unless the unit of consideration becomes the larger urban region, as determined by such indices as the contours of the drainage basin that contributes major water supplies, geographical perimeters like Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 13 mountain ranges that mark the outer natural limits of urban expansion, and exurban tourist and recreation sites within the farthest commuting distance of urban centers (Forman 116-117). In principle, then, the diameter of an urban region could easily extend to a hundred kilometers or more. Only at this scale can one hope to arrive at planning solutions that optimize coexistence of natural and human-cultural constituencies in a rapidly urbanizing world. And second, as “the fundamental backbone” for such planning, “emerald networks” are crucial. By this is meant, in the first instance, areas of relatively open space within urban regions, existing largely beyond the most densely populated areas, that for planning purposes are considered not as isolated fragments but as interconnected - or interconnectible - through corridors created by a combination of parkland, riverbanks, and the like that allow nonhuman species to breed and circulate through the region more freely than they now can, and also provide accessible green space for a maximum percentage of the human population (249). Emerald “network,” in other words, is the conscientious urban ecological planner’s counter-metaphor to the noplanning default condition of urban “sprawl.” Such at least is the model, which of course rests to some degree on earliergeneration designers from Olmsted to Geddes to McHarg. But unlike their work, Forman’s is global in scope, with a much wider array of environmental variables taken into account, its principles educed from comparative study of thirty-eight urban regions on all six inhabited continents ranging from megacities like Moscow and Beijing to such relatively smaller urban regions as Stockholm, Canberra, and Santiago (Chile). He is no utopian. He is far from presuming that his analysis will solve all the world’s ecological problems. Even while stressing the virtues of largescale planning, he grants that in the one case among the thirty-eight where the whole urban region is already a single jurisdictional unit, the ecological results have been rather disastrous - Beijing, with its immense grid of ring roads and radial roads, which is Forman’s worst-case scenario for urban roadways, ecologically speaking. He also observes that in practice “patch planning” has far more often been prioritized than “connectivity,” and that only about one-quarter of his cities show anything like a “fully-connected emerald network, with no major gaps.” Furthermore, referring back to an earlier project that helped inspire his current study, namely a commission to design an ecologically responsible plan for Barcelona, he grants that neither then nor now could he find any prior model or case study that would promise actually to sustain “the diverse natural resources and nature in the region around a major city” (39, 145, 245). All this forces one to question whether the vision of an ecologically sustainable urban region is nothing more than wishful thinking. Many social theorists would be quick to point out that the predominant application of the network metaphor in urban discourse at least since Manuel Castells’s Rise of the Network Society (1996) has been in relation to techno-economic interlinkages among urban nodes globally - not to the city-nature interdependencies L AWRENCE B UELL 14 within this or that finite urban region. In this view, as British social geographer Peter Taylor puts it (recycling Castells), “there can be no such entity as ‘the city,’ meaning a single city” standing alone. “Cities are networks,” or - more precisely - parts of a single increasingly dense and complexly interlinked global network, within which the world’s cities look like an “archipelago” of nodal points. From this urban triumphalist standpoint, comparatively exurban, nonnetworked places tend to get written off as little more than immiserated periphery - “abandoned regions,” “cleared regions,” “supply regions created by city markets,” “bypassed places,” and so forth - and questions of ecological health or sustainability at whatever scale become epiphenomenal or simply disappear from view (8, 14, 47-48). Even more striking about Taylor’s insistence on urban interlinkage than its almost utter seeming disinterest in ecological concerns is its fatalism: its like-it-or-not assurance that the global future lies in an ever-more reticulated archipelago of urban networking as against the more tentative, thoughtexperiment character of Forman’s assessment of emerald network as urbanecological solution. To put this another way, as one moves from Forman to Castells and Taylor, the network metaphor takes a distinctly apocalyptic turn. This brings me to my final metaphor, apocalypse itself. For millennia, the city has been a preferred metaphor for figuring history’s ultimate consummation, in this world or next - whether it be the image of imperial Rome or Beijing or the socalled white city that Chicago aspired to be at the turn of the twentieth century, or the anagogic prototype of that: the millennium of the Christian book of Revelation. But opposite this, the city figures no less obsessively as metaphor of dystopia: the City of Dis, the Bunyanesque City of Destruction, the late Victorian poet James Thomson’s “city of dreadful night,” Eliot’s “unreal city” in The Waste Land. Likewise, with advancing industrialization, urban metaphor becomes increasingly appropriated in the interest of imaging both the ultimately good and the ultimately horrific ecological order. Which will it be? - the “radiant city” of LeCorbusier, or some necropolis? On the one hand, Lewis Mumford, heartened by recent advances in large scale public hygiene, electrification, and the like, writes hopefully even during the depth of the Depression of the coming of the “biotechnic” city, where “the biological sciences will be freely applied to technology, and in which technology itself will be oriented toward the culture of life” (495). On the other hand, Richard Fleischer’s dystopian film of the 1970s, Soylent Green (1973), imagines a 1984like biotechnic urban order in which the foodstocks required to feed the increasingly hungry and desperate population get replenished by the secret recycling of dead bodies, the supply of which is sustained by state-sponsored encouragement of euthanasia. Like this film, recent fictive work by and large tilts toward a fatalistic interpretation of network metaphor and a dystopian rendition of the apocalypse trope. With this in mind, I have tended in recent years to conclude my Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 15 staple undergraduate “American literature and environment” course with one of two magical realist novels of the 1990s by the Japanese-American writer Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Tropic of Orange (1997). The first centers on the boom-and-bust creation of a metropolis in the Brazilian jungle built upon the vast profits of extracting a mysterious all-purpose plasticoid substance that turns out to be the metamorphosed refuge of the world’s accumulated garbage dumps, which an equally mysterious new bacteria suddenly emerges to destroy. Tropic of Orange is a Los Angeles disaster fiction built around the intertwined fates - which range from guardedly hopeful to completely grim - of a multiethnic collage of mostly displaced or diasporic characters who dramatize the status of L. A. as a nodal point of global demographic, economic, and ecological flow, including traffic in human organs - a mordant encapsulation of all three. This second book in particular dramatizes in a tone that oscillates strangely between pathos and carnivalesque ecocultural confusion, clutter, anxiety, and immiseration of urban underclasses, both economic and environmental. As such, it’s a bottoms-up mirror of the more analytical way the growing phalanx of L. A. spatial studies gurus - Mike Davis, Edward Soja, Dolores Hayden, and others - treat the spectacle of urban fragmentation and disarray. Especially since Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism: or, the Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), but stretching back at least as far as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Los Angeles-watchers have been fond of taking the city as a prophetic indicator of the national urban future, if not also of the world’s future. Yet, Los Angeles, apart from New York, is the only U. S. megacity - that is, the nation’s only city with population above ten million - out of twenty-two such cities worldwide. Of these, two others are in Europe (London and Moscow), two in Japan, and the other sixteen in the developing world, including all the biggest except for Tokyo and New York. Such developing-world megacities as Mumbai and Cairo and Lagos are certain to become an increasingly large percentage of the world’s total (Benton-Short, Short 71). Already they suffer from such mammoth infrastructure problems (of water supply, sanitation, basic human services, etc.) that it might seem quixotic if not frivolous to propose that ecological sustainability ought to become a higher priority for them. Why, after all, has it become possible to think of converting the deindustrialized zones of first-world urban regions into parkland? - Largely because of the combination of industrial outsourcing to and resource extraction from the third world that’s aggrandized the concentration of first-world wealth, at least for the affluent. All this intensifies one’s sense of the eco-apocalyptic and the fatality as against the salubrity of networking metaphors in relation to the city. Yet it is precisely in such contexts that a fatalistic view of the prospects of urban ecological health most needs to be resisted. An exemplary limit case is waste disposal. It would be hard to find a more telling instance of chronic, ubiquitous ineptitude at the level of urban environmental planning. It seems L AWRENCE B UELL 16 to have been a kind of iron law of urban history that supply-line infrastructure should precede waste-disposal infrastructure. Wells get dug before cesspools; attention gets paid to securing upstream water supplies before worrying about processing sewage discharged downstream. Even in the slow-tonegative-growth environment of the developed world this remains a nagging problem; in the U. S., two-thirds of municipal solid waste ends up in landfills (see Arsova et al 22-29). In fast-growth developing-world megacities, the situation is far more dire. In Jakarta, southeast Asia’s biggest city and a typical instance, the “sewage system is still almost nonexistent,” even though plans for one were developed in the late 1970s with World Bank assistance (“The Sewage”; cf. Abhat et al). Here and in other such megacities, infant mortality, life expectancy, environmental squalor in general are commensurately disproportionate, with no end in sight to the mounting gravity of these problems. All this reinforces the imagery of developing-world megacities as environmental disaster zones. But it does not follow from this that either the inhabitants or concerned environmental activists and NGOs have passively resigned themselves. Even in burgeoning happenstance squatter settlements - the worst-case residential situation - inhabitants can develop a multitude of streetwise survival strategies, including waste picker cooperatives of one sort or another that convert waste into asset, developing as one Mexico-based urban ecologist puts it “affordable solutions that work well in a Third World context, that create jobs, that protect the environment, that promote community participation” (Medina). Whereas 90% of World Bank support for thirdworld waste disposal, this same author points out, has gone for purchase of garbage trucks and compactors quite impractical for have-nots to maintain, local low-tech methods can process higher percentages of municipal waste at much lower cost. One well-publicized initiative of the kind that showcases both the benefits and the challenges of such efforts is the NGO-supported effort since the 1980s by Cairo’s Zabbaleen, a large enclave of Coptic Christian slum dwellers, to take charge of processing the city’s trash in the absence of an effective municipal system, using donkey carts for pickup and animals - especially pigs - to consume the garbage, adding profit by recycling other waste to the extent possible, by one account an astonishing 85% of what they collect (Epstein). At peak success, the Zabbaleen were credited with processing two-thirds of the 60% of Cairo’s rubbish that was collected, twice that of the official services (“The Zabbaleen”). Meanwhile, however, the community also met stiff resistance down the line from city officials as a local eyesore, for its stone-age methods, and for offending dominant-culture cleanliness taboos. Perhaps mainly in order to give Cairo a more modern look, the authorities first tried to restrict or ban the donkey carts and outsource motorized garbage collection - a crackdown partially countered by NGO efforts to motorize the Zabbaleen. But the global swine flu epidemic has given pretext for a more drastic measure; in spring 2009, even though not a single Egyptian case had yet been reported, the government ordered extermination of the nation’s entire pig Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 17 population. This edict, obviously directed against the non-Muslim pigkeeping minority, may have left the Zabbaleen without recourse to maintain trash collection with hope of decent economic return, let alone efficiency (see Slackman). Whatever the long-term consequences for Cairo, however, the Mega-Cities Project, one of the Zabbaleen’s sponsoring NGOs, reports that the methods developed there have proven transferable to two other thirdworld megacities, Manila and Mumbai. 20 So at least there seems to have been a positive upshot in the form of a new transcultural ecological strategy working for the benefit of the inhabitants of some of the world’s most stressed and distressed urban regions. In conclusion, to circle back to the title of this essay, “Nature and City,” urbanism and ecological sustainability do indeed point to potentially antagonistic interests and force-fields that threaten now, more than at any former time, to become disjunct, the former threatening to overwhelm the other. But that hardly delegitimates the desire, including and indeed especially on the part of the immiserated, to strive against what admittedly sometimes feels like doomsday so far as the prospect of a viable urban ecological order is concerned. Whether or not this turns out to be a losing battle, clearly it must be fought. What’s more, precisely because the sources of contention to such an extent have to do with qualities as well as quantities, with value commitments even more fundamentally than with strategies of implementation, this is a struggle in which artists and humanists should intervene as thinkers if not also as social activists rather than leave the job only to card-carrying planners, managers, lawyers, and engineers. Surely there are many possible kinds of intervention that do not require freezing critics and creatives into roles they are not equipped to perform. One such path, the one chosen here, is to expose the dependence of urban thought and experience vis-à-vis ecological matters upon embedded, often unacknowledged, tropes that function not only as conduits for verbal expression but also often constitute the conceptual structures in terms of which environmental strategies get thought through, for better and for worse. No environmental initiative today can hope to succeed without understanding the potential uses and abuses of metaphors like ‘ecological footprint,’ ‘sustainable development,’ ‘urban network,’ and for that matter ‘apocalypse,’ with its capacity both to rivet charismatically and to induce a state of paralysis and/ or blindness to what is actually happening on the ground. Although nothing may seem more repellent to artists and cultural critics than to see themselves on a continuum with the likes of advertisers and public relations specialists, the fact is that we too stand or fall according to our adroitness in parsing, practicing, and shaping the discourses of mediation. This is a domain that self-evidently looms ever larger with the exponential growth of the twenty-first century information economy, and the sooner environmental humanists who would also be change agents recognize this 20 See <http: / / www.megacitiesproject.org> (accessed 20 July 2010). L AWRENCE B UELL 18 and place ourselves self-consciously within it the sooner we are likely to be able to play a positive role in contributing to - for example - the urban ecological amelioration upon which our lives and well-being, in the most baldly literal sense of the word, increasingly depend. 21 21 For valuable reflections on earlier versions of this paper, I am grateful to Richard Forman and James Engell; to Frank Mehring and other colleagues of the Kennedy Institute’s Transcultural Spaces conference for their responses on that occasion (October-November 2008); and to Susan Suleiman, Svetlana Boym, Karen Thornber, Thomas Havens, Biodun Jeyifo, and other members of the Harvard Humanities Center’s Seminar on Urbanism, during a spring 2009 next-stage presentation. For valuable research assistance, I also thank Jamie Jones, Margaret Doherty, and Kimberly August. 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