Pergamon

Cities, Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. iii-iv, 1996 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain

0264-2751196 $15.00 + 0.00

Editorial

The natural born city

As Raymond Williams pointed out, the separation between "town" and "country" or "urban" and "rural" is a fundamental one. As one or the other changes, so the dichotomy transforms itself; new suburban forms, or different types of agricultural production, do not manage to blur the basic distinc- tion. There is, moreover , what we might almost call a moral dimension attached to the relationship: despite the economic changes that have been brought to the rural landscape, there is still a roman- tic image superimposed upon it. Williams showed this through European literature but it seems to be a universal trope that can be found in African or Australian literature, in Japanese or Indian movies, and through to the cyberpunk novels of the immi- nent future. At the base of this is an assumption that the city is artificial, a concrete construction that encourages the breakdown of organic social values and thus comes to embody the most artificial aspects of mass society. And, as cities get larger, so the artificiality and alienation supposedly increases.

In recent years, this clich6d image has been con- fronted and undermined. There are those who simp- ly celebrate their cities, and there is even a periodic table of urban elements, that distinguishes the great "organic" cities - New York, Paris, Rio - from the brash, artificial contenders. For half a century, Chi- cago was displayed in all English-language urban textbooks as the model of urban development (albeit only half a city). It still manages to fascinate, as Cronon's recent volume indicates, in a way that "postmodern cities" such as Los Angeles do not. Despite efforts to project LA across the map of the urban future, writers such as Marchand and Soja seem unable to convince; in contrast, studies of LA's moral ambiguity, slave labor camps and police bru- tality, that began with Raymond Chandler and con- tinue in the work of Mike Davis today, seem to resonate more powerfully.

There is also a recognition that the equation of urban=artif ical is simplistic and potentially danger- ous. It implies that humans are themselves not part of nature; it feeds into nihilistic political movements that plan to wait for the apocalypse from the relative comfor t of remote bunkers . The city is, self- evidently, a part of nature. It contains an entire world of plants, insects and animals, and it creates its own micro-climates; and most important, it is sub-

ject to the same natural forces as the archetypal tree in the forest. For every bombing or subway gas attack, there are a dozen other incidents: earth- quakes, tornadoes, floods, all of which remind us that even the megacity is inescapably situated in the basic circulation of the atmosphere, the tides and the continental plates.

As is frequently the case, this reappraisal is getting a good deal of its energy from the grassroots (itself a nicely anachronistic phrase in this context). Political movements are emerging that emphasize the fun- damental relations between people and the environ- ment within which they live; and they also note that access to clean air and uncontaminated water is unequal. This has always been the case: the rich lived upwind of the factory and above the smog. But the distribution of poisons such as TCE is more threatening, and the effects of atmospheric pollution now more widespread.

The four papers in this issue are all addressing the question of nature in cities. They are disparate in terms of the issues that they confront. Melinda Laituri examines the attempt to apply Earth Summit principles to urban management in New Zealand. Gene Desfor and Roger Keil discuss political coali- tions to combat urban development that is obfuscat- ing its impacts in Los Angeles. Gustavo Garza presents a comprehensive review of the problems facing the residents of Mexico City with regard to air pollution. And Gary Pivo examines the possibility of generating sustainable cities in the Pacific North- west. Despite their different concerns, the authors provide some consistent and important insights. In the first place, they emphasize that economic de- velopment - the growth machine - comes at a price. Second, there are always geographic disparities in the distribution of positive and negative externali- ties, and these typically translate into differential impacts by class (which in turn can be usually viewed as environmental racism). And third, it is important to develop political strategies that can generate policy initiatives that will embrace the urban en- vironment as a reality that integrates social, politic- al, economic and natural phenomena, rather than seeing them as competing elements in a cost-benefi t analysis.

There is much within these papers that prompts discussion and analysis. In future issues, we will

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Editorial

present articles that develop some of these themes: a group of papers dealing with natural hazards in large cities, and a collection focusing on sustainable de- velopment, for example. And readers are, as always,

invited to submit articles on other topics dealing with cities and nature.

Andrew Kirby

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