Book Review

In a postmodern analysis of New York City's environmental history that uses a variety of disciplinary approaches, Matthew Gandy explores a series of relationships among nature, cities, and social power that are embedded in American metropolises. Beginning with New York City's rapid growth in the mid-nineteenth century, Gandy examines successive efforts that have been made to alter the role of nature in the city, as well the consequences that changing conceptions of nature have had for political and ideological discourses. He views the 1970s as a breaking point in these environmental arrangements, with the earlier period characterized by stability in the relations among nature, capital, and urban space and by the domination of elites that manipulated the democratic and economic systems to achieve their ends, and with recent decades witnessing more dynamism as environmental justice movements have emerged to challenge the status quo of urban ecology.	1
The book consists of a prologue, five chapters that each investigate a different topic, and an epilogue. The subjects of the chapters are water supply, Central Park, urban parkways, a radical Puerto Rican environmental group, and an anti-waste campaign in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg district of Brooklyn. Although Gandy does not explain why he chose these topics or why he omitted others (such as river and ocean trade, agribusiness, and skyscraper and apartment construction) that would have illuminated different aspects of urban ecology, Concrete and Clay does encompass much of New York's remarkably complicated environmental history in a sweeping account that addresses a range of major issues in a sophisticated way and at modest length, allowing it to serve as an excellent introduction for non-specialist scholars.	2
Much of Gandy's coverage of the pre-1970 period will be familiar to environmental and urban historians who know the New York City literature, as he depends heavily on secondary accounts, including works by Blake, Koeppel, Boyer, Moehring, Rosenzweig and Blackmar, and Caro, and contributes no new research findings. To be sure, he concentrates on analysis rather than on research, but it is here, in his conception of power, that his study is most problematic. Gandy views environmental change as a product of "urban capitalism," but he does not tie his discussion of elite actions to nineteenth-century America's social systems or culture, and does not distinguish among mercantile, corporate, and financial capitalism. His conception of power is reflexive and scants the complexity of New York's political culture.	3
This book's strength is its outstanding last two chapters, on the environmental justice movements that have sprung up since the 1970s. Here Gandy has complete command of his material, providing a nuanced and probing analysis of social power that extends and modifies Andrew Hurley's important work. Yet the disparity between the first three chapters and the last two suggests that the author's claims for a 1970s breaking point are an artifact of his own methodology that exaggerate the extent of the changes that occurred in that key decade.	4
Although Gandy's opaque postmodernist prose will exasperate general readers and make undergraduates reach for their add/drop slips, this book would be ideal for a graduate seminar in environmental or urban studies, for it should provoke spirited discussions about how environmental power is exercised in big U.S. cities and how urban environmental history ought to be written. It is a welcome addition to scholarship on the metropolitan environment.	5
Reviewed by Clifton Hood, associate professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and author of 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York City (1993) and, most recently, "Journeying to 'Old New York': Elite New Yorkers and Their Invention of an Idealized City History in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," Journal of Urban History (September 2002). Hood is writing a history of the relationship of New York's economic elites to the city.

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