ARTICLE IN PRESS

doi:10.1016/j.je

Journal of Environmental Psychology 26 (2006) 83–84

www.elsevier.com/locate/yjevp

Book review

PF. Barlett (Ed.), Urban Place: Reconnecting with the

Natural World, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 0-

262-52443-0, 2005 (330pp., $24.00).

Peggy F. Barlett is Professor of Anthropology at EmoryUniversity, where she is actively engaged in promotingenvironmental stewardship. She recently co-edited (withGeoffrey W. Chase) the book Sustainability on campus:

Stories and strategies for change (MIT, 2004). She receivedher Ph.D. from Columbia University.

This book serves the very important function of locatingnature in urban settings, in both a theoretical and apractical sense. It presents a collection of chapters,primarily by anthropologists but also representing severalother disciplines, that examine some aspect of humaninteractions with urban nature. A foreword by RoderickNash and an introduction by Barlett set the stage bydescribing the ways in which nature has been historicallycontrasted with the urban, at least in the United States.Nature has represented the wild, uncontrolled, andprimitive; cities have been modern and under humancontrol. The cliche has been that unsophisticated ruralyouth leave both nature and naivete behind by seeking themetropolis.

Perhaps the greatest danger of a perspective thatseparates the city from the natural is the perception ofnature as something separate from normal human ex-istence. We leave the city to visit wild nature as tourists,rather than inhabiting nature on a daily basis. Thusenvironmentalism is seen as remote and optional ratherthan something that has a direct impact on all of us. On theflip side, insufficient attention is paid to providing urbanresidents with opportunities to experience nature.

This volume provides a counterargument: examples ofways in which city dwellers do interact with nature, as wellas evidence for how important nature is even to urbanites.The first section of the book is devoted to describingprograms that encourage interactions with nature in urbansettings. It is divided into three subsections: discoveringrelationships with the natural world, elaborating newforms of connection, and reclaiming meanings. Thistripartite division is somewhat forced, but it does remindus that there are many ways, both familiar and novel, inwhich humans can interact with nature, and that there arealso different ways in which the relationship betweenhumans and nature can be interpreted.

nvp.2006.01.001

Readers may want to pick and choose among thesechapters according to their own interests. Barlett describesan environmental workshop at Emory that could easily beimplemented at other universities. Faculty responses to theworkshop suggest not only that it was successful inenhancing awareness of the local environment, but alsothat it has possible nonobvious benefits in that it mayfacilitate connections with the university as well as with thenatural surroundings. Stuart’s chapter on gardens atdomestic violence shelters provides a particularly strikingexample of the positive effects of nature for people who arein special need of stress relief and of a source of pride.Notably, one effect of the gardens was to provide a sharedexperience for a diverse group. Von Hassell’s discussion ofcommunity gardens in NYC raised some of the mostinteresting conceptual issues regarding differing views onthe role and function of gardens, and tensions betweenindividual and community. Andreatta’s chapter on the‘‘slow food’’ movement frames it as a contrast to thetypical perception of environmentalism as self-denying,while Barham, Lind, and Jett make the association betweena real food chain and a mental recognition of theconnections from production to consumption. BothAndreatta, and Barham et al., provide data that may beuseful to people trying to promote local agriculture.The next few chapters raise provocative questions. The

report from Ryan and Grese on research with ecologicalrestoration volunteers leads us to ask: How does thiscompare to other types of voluntarism? What is thesignificance of the difference between gardening andecosystem restoration? When ecosystem restoration goesagainst public preferences for what a landscape shouldlook like, what is the impact on the volunteers? Lynch andBrusi consider the status of Latino gardens in New York,and leave us wondering whether gardens that are sanc-tioned by the city to serve environmental functions cancontinue to serve their traditional cultural role. Finally,Rotenberg reminds us that one attribute of nature is that itcan be overwhelming, even terrifying, and asks whether ourfailure to consider this aspect can lead to a misunderstand-ing of the place of nature in the city.The book’s second section includes chapters discussing

research on the importance of nature to human well-being.These chapters acknowledge multiple ways in which well-being can be defined, including physical health as well aseffective behavioral and cognitive functioning. Sullivanreports briefly on some of the striking work that has been

ARTICLE IN PRESSBook review / Journal of Environmental Psychology 26 (2006) 83–8484

done in Chicago, taking advantage of a natural experimentin which low-income residents were more-or-less randomlyassigned to housing with different levels of exposure tonature and finding positive effects of exposure to nature onsocial behavior. Frumkin reviews some practical arenas inwhich the physical environment can affect health, andalerts us to the need for more research in these areas.Kaplan and Kaplan describe their important work on theReasonable Person Model, and use this to integrate someof the research presented here as well as elsewhere on thepositive effects of nature. Both Sullivan, and Kaplan andKaplan, develop theoretical explanations for why naturemight have positive effects, Sulllivan taking a moreevolutionary perspective and Kaplan and Kaplan describ-ing the positive effects of nature in restoring attentionalcapacity.

A final chapter reviews the earlier ones, and offers somemore thoughts about ways to enhance connections withnature. An attempt at integration is doomed to fall short,simply because there are so many important issues toaddress. I would like to have seen more discussion of someof the threads that emerged throughout the book: thedifferent levels of engagement with nature; the long-termeffects of interacting with nature; the significance of naturefor personal and community identity. It would also havebeen useful to include a more explicit discussion ofmethodology. Not all of the authors describe their methodsof data collection in detail, and in some of the cases itseems possible that demand characteristics might influenceparticipants’ responses.

There are a number of reasons why this book is worthreading. Primary among them is the focus on integratingnature into urban existence. Many people, from architectsto policymakers to social scientists, need to be remindedthat nature is a part of human existence and not somethingthat we only engage with on vacation. The variety ofexamples presented also provides useful information

concerning practical ways in which people can try tostrengthen the urban connection with nature, while thechapters on health implications remind us how important itis to do so. Finally, the breadth of the offerings is animportant strength of the volume, addressing both the‘‘how’’ and the ‘‘why’’ of promoting nature in urbansettings in ways that will be meaningful to a variety ofdisciplinary orientations.In addition to its focus on environmental sustainability,

this book speaks to a more general theme in our society. Asthe editor and some of the authors point out, thevalorization of the city in contrast with nature hasrepresented the triumph of the generic over the distinctive.Increasingly, cities are all alike: Restaurant and retailchains are the norm; we are all supposed to be able to makeour home anywhere. This model of the modern belittlesdiversity. What is the value of different plant species, if allour homes are planted with the same turfgrass andperennials? What is the value of different food species, ifall the potatoes are destined for McDonalds? But diversitydoes have value, both aesthetic and ecological. A renewedawareness of the distinctive character of place, whichincludes the cultural differences that characterize our urbansettings as well as the unique geographical features, localclimate, and regional foods, is part of the motive behindmany of the programs discussed. Acceptance and enjoy-ment of cultural diversity is consistent with an emergingscientific consensus about the importance of ecologicaldiversity, and part of a broader societal context thatcelebrates the utility of difference in helping us to surviveand thrive as a species.

Susan Clayton1

Psychology Department,

The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH 44691, USA

E-mail address: sclayton@wooster.edu.

1Susan Clayton is a professor of social psychology and secretary of the

American Psychological Association’s Division 34, Population and

Environmental Psychology. Her research concerns the relevance of nature

to identity, the ways in which people perceive and respond to nature, and

the ways in which people construe justice in regard to environmental

issues.