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Matthew Gandy: Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002.
This is a book about the social production of nature in New York City over almost two centuries. It suggests a certain maturity to ideas about the production of nature which first emerged in the 1980s in quite theoretical form but which have since then been translated into more and more palpable accounts of the daily environments, urban and rural, in which the vast majority of us live. It chronicles the dramatic ecological transformation and expansion of New York City since the early 19th century through the lenses of urban history, offering a sequence of interlocked environmental episodes as a central thread to the politics of urban change. For those interested in a critical urban environmentalism, this book is a pivotal text.
An accessible theoretical introduction straps the ensuing argument to an eclectic range of contemporary social theory while eschewing a narrowly idealist social constructionism. As its title suggests, Concrete and Clay is about the water and asphalt of urban change, the spaces and skyscrapers of the city, as well as the social struggles and language that make and frame the changing nature of the city. Capitalist urbanization is a massive project in nature: this book attempts "to build a conception of urban nature that is sensitive to the social and historical contexts that produce the built environment and imbue places with cultural meaning."
The story of bringing water to "the most thirsty of all great cities," as Jean Gottmann once called New York, is presented in the substantive first chapter. It tracks water needs and supply from the quickly fetid wells of Lower Manhattan's Collect Pond, built after the 17th century, to the astonishing infrastructure constructed between the 1830s and 1970s that accessed water from the Croton and, later, Catskill reservoir systems. These huge hydraulic construction projects, largely invisible or illegible on the urban surface tunnels and...