NEW YORK FIELD TRIP 2003

‘Nature’ and the city

‘Nature and the city’ is one of the themes that we will be exploring during the field-trip, and on this day-long project you will be asked to investigate how different concepts of nature have been incorporated into the city of New York. This will entail a visit to Central Park, plus small group visits to either the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum, or to a zoo.

 The aims of the introductory lecture were to introduce the concept of nature, to outline how in America nature has often been conceived as ‘wilderness’, to consider the idea of a nature-urban divide, and to examine some examples of how nature has been incorporated into the city of New York, using three case studies.

 I used a number of quotes and OHTs during the lecture, and these are listed below, along with the reading list handout distributed in the lecture, plus details about two of the case studies and some additional references for ‘nature’.

 Introductory lecture

 “The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”          (Mumford, 1961: 571)

“When Laurie Olin recounts the story of the restoration of New York’s Bryant Park, he likes to show his audience an aerial photograph that looks straight down into the canyons of midtown Manhattan, which he calls ‘one of the highest-density places on the planet.’ Amid the imploding forest of skyscrapers in that photograph, Bryant Park is the only visible open space. ‘Thousands of people cooped up in rooms and corridors need places where they can change their depth of focus and be in nature while in the heart of the city’, says Olin. The restored Bryant Park seems to provide just such a well-ordered breathing space for perennially stressed New Yorkers.”       (Thompson, 1997: 7)

Lecture outline

Introducing ‘nature’

‘American nature’ – wilderness and landscape

Nature and the city: the urban – nature divide?

Incorporating ‘nature’ into New York

Central Park

The rebirth of Bryant Park

 Time Landscape™

 1. Introducing ‘nature’

“Nature is a complex word, but broadly there are three main concepts:

 1. The essence of something (as in ‘it’s in her nature’)

2. Areas unaltered by human action, i.e. nature as a realm external to humanity and society

3. The physical world in its entirety, perhaps including humans, i.e. nature as a universal realm of which humans, as a species, are a part.”

                                                            (From the Dictionary of Human Geography, 2000)

Neil Smith in Uneven Development (1984 [1990]: 1-2):

“Nature is material and it is spiritual, it is given and made, pure and undefiled; nature is order and it is disorder, sublime and secular, dominated and victorious; it is a totality and a series of parts, woman and object, organism and machine. Nature is the gift of God and it is a product of its own evolution; it is a universal outside history and also the product of history, accidental and designed, wilderness and garden.”

2. ‘American nature’ –wilderness and landscape

 Attitudes to wilderness:

1. ‘Classical’ – conquest of the wilderness represents civilisation

2. ‘Romanticised’ – revere and preserve wilderness, beauty and restorative value to human spirit – nobility in wild nature

 Metaphor of wilderness in the city:

“Manhattan skyline often described through metaphors drawn from nature, the steel and concrete mass of the modern city simply a luxuriant outgrowth of the earlier forests”

(Gandy, 2002: 1)

3. Nature and the city: the urban-nature divide?

 “Cities have rarely been seen as ‘natural’ in the material or physical sense. Instead urbanization has commonly been viewed as a process which compromises natural environments to a degree that they have become perverted, distorted and destroyed.”

(Keil & Graham, 1998: 102-103)

“Cities are part of nature (they are the site of complex, socially organized relationships between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ processes), but it is precisely its ecologies that are often the most difficult to see (since urbanization [in the past] distances people both spatially and perceptually from the larger bio-physical processes in which cities occur). Thus, people in cities are natural being at the same time as they are social beings. Their reproduction is achieved through a combination of biological and societal processes – through a complex urban metabolism. [According to David Harvey], seen this way, cities are not ‘anti-ecological’: ‘we must recognize that the distinction between environment as commonly understood and the built environment is artificial and that the urban and everything that goes into it is as much a part of the solution as it is a contributing factor to ecological difficulties’ (Harvey, 1996: 60).”                                                                          (Keil & Graham, 1998: 102)

4. Incorporating ‘nature’ into New York

 (i)Central Park

Photographs used in the lecture can be seen in Gandy (2002) and in guide-books to New York.

 (ii)Bryant Park

A small park on Fifth Avenue, next to the New York Public Library. Nine acre park, often referred to as midtown’s ‘Town Square’. Bryant Park has been redeveloped several times since it was first completed in 1871, but despite numerous plans and re-landscaping projects to create a small urban park that would serve as a ‘restful sanctuary from the removed city’ (Thompson, 1997), the park had a history of neglect and a ‘lack of maintenance’ (ibid.). It wasn’t a sanctuary, but had become a space of social problems and danger (crime). 1966 New York Times article labelled Bryant Park a ‘disaster area, attractive to addicts, prostitutes, winos and derelicts’.

 It had become an urban ‘wilderness’ i.e. a space that was ‘morally’ and socially ‘uncultivated’ – one that many thought should be re-conquered by social controls and urban planning – it was the wrong kind of nature in the city…

 1980s, new plans afoot for Bryant Park. Laurie Olin was the landscape architect commissioned to redesign the park. On one of his first survey visits to the park, Olin commented that ‘a sense of neglect pervades the place – pigeon shit and drugs’ (Thompson, 1997). The park had acquired the reputation of being New York’s largest open-air drugs market.

 Olin’s new design for Bryant Park effectively excluded the ‘wild’ (i.e. ‘anti-social’), by re-introducing ‘nature’. Social management was framed through environmental management. Olin’s design got rid of the walled paths, hedges, corners for ‘hiding’, and introduced new open spaces, a nice lawn, thinned out the trees, provided moveable chairs (no park benches to lie upon), with the aim of providing a safe open space in which ordinary people could enjoy ‘connecting with nature’ amongst the concrete of Manhattan office blocks. The new Bryant Park was redefined as a social, natural space amongst working-spaces. It was now a cultivated, i.e. civilised space. ‘Nice nature’ attracting ‘nice people’…

 The new design has been considered successful and is complemented by a new sense of ‘care’ for the park, perhaps its history of neglect has come to an end.

(iii) Time Landscape™

A ‘natural sculpture’ by artist Alan Sonfist, started in 1965 and created on a plot of land on the corner of Houston and La Guardia Place, New York City. Sonfist planted an ‘environmental narrative landscape’, in a space that was once a rubble-strewn urban wasteland. He planted forest plants indigenous to Manhattan, and re-created the soil and rock formations that had existed there before Western settlers arrived in the area. Sonfist stressed the importance of using indigenous plants, because otherwise New York would lose its natural heritage. The forest attracts wildlife and birds. Some local residents decided to become involved and tend this landscape to ensure that it remains ‘indigenous’, e.g. weeding out ‘non-native’ plants that appear (though seeds may have been dropped by the birds who have made their home in the forest ‘naturally’). There was a moment of controversy when a few people started to put up bird-feeders and squirrel-feeders, and Sonfist removed them, because this was not ‘natural’.

 Sonfist has spoken about the role of ‘Natural phenomena as Public Monuments’:

“Civic monuments … should honour and celebrate the life and acts of the total community, the human ecosystem, including natural phenomena. Especially within the city, public monuments should recapture and revitalize the history of the natural environment at that location. As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs and natural outcroppings need to be remembered”

Sonfist A [1968] Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments, in Land and Environmental Art, (1998) edited by J Kastner, London: Phaidon Press.

Reading list

A selection of these readings will provide you with a good introduction to themes surrounding nature, cities and New York. Do some internet searches for additional information on the case studies used in the lecture.

Understanding nature:

Braun, B and Castree, N (eds) (1999) Remaking Reality: nature at the turn of the millennium,              London: Routledge.

Braun B and Castree N (eds) (2001) Social Nature: theory, practice and politics, Oxford: Blackwell.

Cronon W, ed. (1996) Uncommon Ground: rethinking the human place in nature, New York: Norton.

Dobson, A. (1995) Green Political Thought, London: Routledge.

Glacken, C. (1967) Traces on a Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient             Times to the end of the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hartshorne, R. (1939) The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of             the Past, Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers.

Johnson R J et al (2000) Nature, The Dictionary of Human Geography, Oxford: Blackwell.

Johnson R J et al (2000) Wilderness, The Dictionary of Human Geography, Oxford: Blackwell.

Macnaghten P and Urry J (1998) Contested Natures, London: Sage.

Pepper, D. (1996) Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have    Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Simmons, I.G. (1993) Interpreting Nature – Cultural Constructions of the Environment, London:             Routledge.

Smith, N. (1999) ‘Nature at the millennium: production and re-enchantment’, in Braun, B. and             Castree, N, (eds) Remaking Reality: Nature at the Turn of the Millennium, London: Routledge.

Smith, N. (1990) Uneven development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Place, Oxford: Basil             Blackwell.

Wilderness and American Landscape:

Conzen M P (1990) The Making of the American Landscape.

Daniels S (1993) Fields of Vision: landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United             States. Chapters 5 & 6.

Nash R (1982) Wilderness and the American Mind.

Novak B (1980) Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-75.

Mead W R (1974) The American Environment.

Runte A (1997) National Parks: the American Experience.

Short J R (1991) Imagined Country: environment, culture and society. Chapters 1 & 5.

Thompson K (1976) Wilderness and health in the nineteenth century, Journal of Historical             Geography, 2, 145-62.

Cities and nature:

Harvey, D (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference.[Chapter 13].

Keil, R and Graham, J (1999)  ‘Reasserting nature: constructing urban environments after Fordism in             Braun’, B and Castree,N (eds) Remaking Reality: nature at the turn of the millenium  London:             Routledge pp.100-125.

Pile, S, Brook, C and Mooney G (eds) (1999) Understanding cities. Unruly cities? : order/disorder,             London : Routledge, 1999. [Chapters on the ‘Sustainable City’].

Wolch, J (1996) “Zoopolis,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7: pp. 21-49.

The urban nature divide:

Harvey, D (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. [Chapter 13].

Katz, C and Kirby, A (1991) ‘In the nature of things: the environment and everyday life’,             Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16 (3) 259-271.

Keil, R and Graham, J (1999)  ‘Reasserting nature: constructing urban environments after Fordism in             Braun’, B and Castree,N (eds) Remaking Reality: nature at the turn of the millenium  London:             Routledge pp.100-125.

Smith, N. (1990) Uneven development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Place, Oxford: Basil             Blackwell. [Chapter 1].

Williams, R (1993) The country and the city, London : Hogarth Press.

Incorporating nature into the city - New York:

Gandy, M (2002) Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. See Chapter 2: Symbolic             Order and the Urban Pastoral. [Available in National Library of Wales: 2002MB7576].

Gandy, M (1997) The making of a regulatory crisis: restructuring New York City’s water supply.             Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers, 22, 338-358.

Katz, C and Kirby, A (1991) ‘In the nature of things: the environment and everyday life’,             Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16 (3) 259-271.

Luccarelli, M (1995) Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning, London:             Guildford Press. [Chapters 6-10 for details on Central Park, the Sunnyside development and             ecological regional planning in New York State].

Olmsted, F  (1967) Landscape to Cityscape

Pye, M (1991) Maximum City – the Biography of New York, London: Sinclair-Stevenson.

Thompson J W (1997) The Rebirth of New York City’s Bryant Park.

Return to background information index

Return to New York Field Trip index