In the Big Apple, narrowing the divide between nature and the built world

BY MICHAEL AARON ROCKLAND

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Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City
By Matthew Gandy
MIT Press, 344 pages, $34.95

Matthew Gandy, who teaches geography at University College in London, has long been interested in the interface of nature and the built environment. In Concrete and Clay he argues that the city is the place where we most need to think about ecology: “It is paradoxically in the most urban of settings that one becomes powerfully aware of the enduring beauty and utility of nature. It is the reshaping of nature that has made civilized urban life possible.”

Gandy decries the “radical separation between nature and cities … running through Western environmental thought.” This separation is often truer of Americans than of others in the West. In Paris and Budapest and Prague, rivers attract the most important centers of political and cultural life to their banks. Manhattan, on the other hand, turns away from its greatest amenities, the waters that surround it—the Hudson, the East River, the Harlem, and Spuyten Duyvil. Expensive property in Manhattan, for the most part, is located not along its rivers but along its internal avenues. And our newer cities have been shaped more by the automobile than by the natural features of the terrain they were built upon.

Historically, Americans have thought of nature and the city, especially nature and New York City, as antithetical. Most of us long ago took Thomas Jefferson’s side in his debate with Alexander Hamilton: The city was evil, so the thinking went, not only because it represented European autocracy and warfare but also because it endeavored to exploit nature for ungodly purposes. For much of our history, therefore, we have thought it desirable, except for business and certain cultural pursuits, to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the city, whether that meant heading west or to the suburbs. Yet even Manhattan possesses qualities that we do not normally associate with urban environments. It is a living, breathing place, with its own flora and fauna, its own weather created by its canyons, its own geology that has dictated where its skyscrapers must be placed, and its own great tides coursing along its borders. Gandy’s book is about paying attention to these forces, taking them into account in the creation of urban spaces. Only when the tides of the Hudson are accounted for, to give just one example, can docks and bulkheads be successfully built.

The five sections of Concrete and Clay examine aspects of New York City in which a close attention to nature has enhanced urban life: the construction of the city’s vast water system; the design and building of Central Park; the construction of landscaped highways; the intersection of politics and ecology in the city’s Puerto Rican community; and the social justice questions related to the siting of garbage dumps and industries that release toxic pollution.

Though each section of the book is interesting in its own right, the whole seems less than the sum of its parts. No rationale is provided for why these particular topics constitute the book’s focus. It sometimes seems as if Gandy wrote chunks of disparate material and then brought them all together into a book.

Of these parts, the most engaging is the discussion of New York City’s water supply. Gandy demonstrates how essential good water is to a great city’s life and applauds the wise investment in hydrological infrastructure that has made New York City’s water among the purest in the world. That water was not always so pristine. Gandy points out that life in early New York City was rife with water-borne diseases such as cholera, and it took human planning to fix the situation. We may idealize nature that is untouched by humans, but on some level the natural world must be harnessed and controlled.

Our tendency to sentimentalize nature, Gandy believes, has resulted in city being separated from country, a divide that “is at root ideological rather than analytical.” I would have liked to see him add “metaphysical.” Americans, transcendentalists at heart, imagine the deity as an unqualified good, and since nature is the embodiment of the deity, nature must always be good. Adding to the problem is the notion that human beings somehow exist outside of nature because we, unlike all other living things, have souls—a conceit that interferes with rational efforts to harness nature for the good of our species and our planet.

Gandy falls into the very trap he wishes to avoid when he speaks of urban nature as different from what he calls “wild nature.” In doing so, he belies his own title. The phrase “concrete and clay” suggests to me that concrete, something humans create, is as much of the natural world as is clay. Gandy assumes, however, that nature is everything other than that which human beings produce. I respectfully disagree. My home, for example, is as much a part of nature as a bird’s nest and a beaver’s dam.

But if his book helps to break down the city-country dichotomy that plagues us, it will have done some good. It is time we give up our slavish admiration of nature as something apart from man and harness those aspects of it that can contribute to the enlightened development of our centers of civilization.

Michael Aaron Rockland is professor of American studies at Rutgers University.

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