Resumen de Natura Urbana: ecological constellations in urban space
Natura Urbana is a collection of forays into urban nature. It engages with plant and animal life forms in places that are neither designed nor pristine: wastelands and other leftover or marginal spaces in cities where plants, trees and animals build their habitats. To explore these often overlooked or contested spaces, Matthew Gandy draws on a vast range of sources including artworks, novels, political and citizen activism, research, philosophical texts and essays, and he considers a plurality of spaces, forms of growth and contestations. Across the book’s four chapters, he builds a web of connections – or ‘constellations’ – between places, interpretations and theoretical concepts, drawings patterns in the reader’s mind. What meanings can nature take on in cities when it is not simply a means to human ends (such as the human requirement for leisure spaces, fresh air, particular microclimates or rainwater management), and when growth and animal life instead follow other – to many human minds, more diffuse – logics? All too often, the positively laden term ‘biodiversity’ refers simply to the addition of value to cities through forms of diversity that can be counted and measured – and which are therefore ontologically flattened insofar as that counting becomes an end in itself. But this book shows that biodiversity can be much more than that.
As Gandy carefully demonstrates, the spontaneous formation of animal habitats and plant growth is not external to the designed world of the city. Particular human choices or predicaments that often lie outside the city’s capitalist growth logic leave spaces where that spontaneity can flourish. Such spaces afford us the opportunity to understand the city as a place where different life forms can coexist in mutual dependence. Nonetheless, those life forms remain ontologically distinct, and we therefore require aesthetically and epistemologically complex categories through which to unpack their meanings. As we embark on that unpacking through the words that build discursive patterns in this book’s chapters, we discover that these pockets of species diversity and coexistence bring pleasure and even value to the city’s human inhabitants, not only on their own terms but also in ways that we cannot describe through familiar aesthetic and epistemological categories.
A major accomplishment of the book is that it begins to build a language by weaving together a wider field of sources and materials than I am able even to account for in this review. Moreover, it does so in a narrative form that enables openness and raises new questions. Writing-as-thinking and reading-as-reflection become a means to develop a language for the ineffable forms of meaning that arise in these pockets of urban nature, where plants and animals have no less a place than humans in the city’s wider ecosystem.
Gandy also builds the foundation for a relational ethics – a cautiousness in our way of intervening in cities – with reference to the many forms of more-than-human labour involved in the construction and maintenance of urban ecologies. Drawing on decades of work and observation, especially in Berlin and London, and on a vast, almost spiralling, and beautifully connected theoretical framework assembled from a thought landscape that includes neo-Marxism, feminism, posthumanism and postcolonialism, Gandy seeks a ‘critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and a variety of other postpositivist theoretical developments’. Yet this synthesis – naturally, one might say – is never allowed to congeal into prescriptions or guidelines. This may be thanks to the ‘constellations’ of the book’s subtitle, a guiding concept that is difficult to pin down, even though it is scattered throughout the book.
During the 1920s, the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin – a reference point for Gandy in this book – developed a conception of constellations that might help us to understand the kind of knowledge production that Natura Urbana unfolds. For Benjamin, ideas relate to objects in the same way that constellations relate to stars. Constellations/ideas allow us to mark out relationships between stars/objects – relationships that of course only exist by convention, and which can therefore only be discerned through cultural practices and narratives. What is important here is that the epistemological act of bringing objects together into constellations enables us to build meaningful narratives out of objects in the physical world, and that very act can tell us something about how we construe an image and why – giving us access to a rich cultural imaginary.
Something similar happens with the spontaneous growth of plants and animal habitats in the city: their very existence only begins to make sense when we project our various human meanings onto them. We can consider them ugly, a sign of deprivation and desolation, potential development sites. Or we can consider them places of freedom, beauty, surprise, or – in the constellation Gandy traces in his book – places where we can begin to situate ourselves in relation to nature. Reading the book, I came to the conclusion that beyond its value as a rich source of interpretations, theoretical introductions and empirical material, its most fundamental contribution lies in its promotion of a particular form of reflection, and thus a particular ethics concerning human-nature relationships. This is what makes the book such a fertile resource, not only for students and researchers in geography, urban studies, architecture, landscape and planning, but for anyone who wants to think about our relationship to nature in cities. The book reveals how sites of urban nature can become vehicles for pleasure and contemplation, for pleasurable contemplation, for vita contemplativa perhaps, as gardens not designed but given to us by forces other than our own.
In Gandy’s examples, urban culture comprises plant and animal life that thrives in places where human culture gives way to something distinctly other than the city of which those plants and animals are a part – and to which they contribute palpably rich and complex sites of meaning that differ across time and space, but which are held together by the fact that they are there and that things grow in urban places as soon as we humans look the other way. This again recalls Benjamin, who decisively – and unlike most other Parisians – did not look the other way from the arcades, which he described as the ruins of 19th-century urban modernity. Benjamin’s Arcades Project1 built discursive patterns, bringing material together as constellations. In a similar vein, in this book Gandy decisively does not look away from sites of spontaneous nature in cities. He looks right at them, ponders their differences, and builds vocabularies to describe an urban culture where we can begin to recognize forms of multispecies justice and what it might mean to be a citizen – human or otherwise – of the ‘ecological pluriverse’ that cities are.
