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Book Review
| The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space. Edited by Andrew C. Isenberg. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, notes on contributors, index. $75.00.
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| In this volume of essays, nine historians employ "syncretic" (p. xiv) methods and emphasize the concepts of power and the body to examine culture, landscape, and urban space. These analyses of past struggles to control cities and their environs explain some of the origins of environmental values held, landscapes inhabited, and resource management dilemmas faced today. Scholars concerned that environmental historians too often obscure power relations will be most interested in the collection. |
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The Nature of Cities is the result of a conference held at Princeton in 2003. It includes findings published in recent monographs, segments of forthcoming work, and pieces from projects in progress. A brief introduction highlights some of the important—but not all of the interesting—similarities and connections among essays, which are organized into three parts: Urban Spaces, Death, and the Body; The Geography of Power and Consumption; and, Cities Deconstructed. These readable essays could be matched in a variety of ways to create assignments that sharpen students' skills in comparative analysis. |
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The book reinforces the necessity of studying cities and nature together, as both are "constructed and changeable" (p. xvii). Five authors investigate American cities: yellow fever in antebellum New Orleans, land speculation and levee building in gold rush Sacramento, plague outbreaks in San Francisco, recreation in Seattle during the early twentieth century, and cremation in Harlem at the close of the twentieth century. The chapters about European environments address water management in early modern Venice, open space in late-nineteenth century London, and French regional planning after World War II. The sole study outside of these regions takes up colonial management of Angola and Namibia. In each case, nature complicated urban development rather than insured long-term growth. |
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Across these times and places, the authors focus on diverse populations' access to and control of nature. Editor and contributor Andrew Isenberg recommends that urban environmental historians should eschew incorporating scientific and technical literatures into historical explanation without carefully scrutinizing how these perspectives have advanced particular interests. The contributors all detail how environmental context and ecological relationships influenced urban life, but they also make clear that managing urban environments provided opportunities for some agents to wield power over others. For example, Peter Thorsheim discusses middle- and upper-class Londoners' debates regarding poor and working-class people's use of and benefit from urban open space. |
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Isenberg introduces the collection as a "new direction" (p. xiv) for urban environmental history, but he is also commenting on "what's next" in environmental history. Isenberg asserts that urban specialists in particular and environmental historians in general can learn from advances made in other subfields without the profession at large forgetting what environmental historians have discovered about the past. The Nature of Cities demonstrates how environmental historians can better communicate their ideas to historians in other fields, suggests how social and cultural historians can interpret the past if they strive to integrate the insights of environmental historians, and indicates what environmental historians can produce by synthesizing a wide variety of scholarly literature. |
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Zachary Falck, has taught environmental history at Carnegie Mellon University and Washington University in St. Louis. |
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