urban studies from the city lens toward urban studies...

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Urban Studies1–21� Urban Studies Journal Limited 2016Reprints and permissions:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0042098016629312usj.sagepub.com

From the city lens towardurbanisation as a way of seeing:Country/city binaries on anurbanising planet

Hillary AngeloUniversity of California Santa Cruz, USA

AbstractIn recent years, three superficially distinct urban subfields have made parallel efforts to incorporatethe city’s traditional ‘outsides’ into urban research. Urban political ecology, American urban sociol-ogy and postcolonial urban studies have made, respectively, ‘nature’, the ‘rural’ and the ‘not-yet’city the objects of self-consciously urban analyses. I argue that these interventions are analogousefforts to hybridise city/nature, city/country or society/nature binaries, and that they have a com-mon cause. Each is a response to a persistent ‘city lens’ that remains pervasive in urban practice,and whose assumptions are an increasingly poor fit for contemporary urban environments. Thislens, ground in the context of the 19th century metropolis, interprets the world through a seriesof binary associations hung on the basic assumption that the city can be defined against a non-urban outside. I develop John Berger’s (2008 [1972]) idea of ‘ways of seeing’ as a heuristic forunderstanding this situation and, using the case of nature, show how the city lens encourages prac-titioners and some scholars to romanticise, anachronise or generalise when confronting signs of thenot-city in the urban. I conclude by evaluating the limitations of hybridity as a solution to the prob-lems of the city lens, and by outlining an alternative approach. I advocate for turning this way ofseeing into a research object, and argue for the importance of an historical and process-orientedexamination of the ongoing use of these categories even as critical urban scholars attempt to movebeyond them.

Keywordscity lens, country/city binaries, planetary urbanisation, urban epistemology, ways of seeing

Received September 2014; accepted January 2016

Introduction: New urbangeographies as a problem forurban social analysis

This paper is motivated by a series of recentdebates in urban studies about the interpre-tation of changing urban geographies and

Corresponding author:

Hillary Angelo, University of California Santa Cruz,

Department of Sociology, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz,

CA 95064, USA.

Email: [email protected]

at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on February 18, 2016usj.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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their implications for urban social research.Scholars agree that urban geographiesappear to have transformed dramaticallyover the past few decades, even if there isnot yet a consensus about what the precisenature of these changes is. In the first decadeof the 21st century, the United Nationsdeclared that more than half of the world’spopulation lived in cities (UN-HABITAT,2006; UNFPA, 2007). By the middle of thesecond, the idea that we live in an ‘urbanage’ has become a foundational ideology ofour time (Burdett and Rode, 2006). Andthough the claim that the world is now morethan 50% urban suggests a simple quantita-tive increase in the size and number of citiesacross the planet, increasingly – and conten-tiously – urbanists argue that these are quali-tative changes, and ones that are unsettlingmany of the foundational assumptions ofurban studies (Brenner and Schmid, 2015;Sheppard et al., 2013; see also Scott andStorper, 2015 and Walker, 2015).

I argue that the main axis along whichurban studies’ foundational assumptionshave been challenged in recent years hasbeen that of the relationship of the city to itsperceived opposites, as traditionally ‘non-urban’ research sites and subjects increas-ingly intrude on urban environments. Theexplosive growth of ‘mega-cities’ in theglobal South has challenged the assumptionthat cities are necessarily products of eco-nomic modernisation and are characterisedby forms of citizenship, bureaucraticmanagement, infrastructure and services,and cosmopolitanism familiar to Anglo-Europeans (Roy, 2009). China’s seasonalrural–urban commuting patterns, massiveurban relocation programmes and labourpractices fed by consumption in the NorthAtlantic show lives affected by urban pro-cesses lived at ever-greater distances fromcities, suggesting that lines drawn betweencity and country serve, at best, administra-tive rather than descriptive functions

(Duhigg and Barboza, 2012; Johnson, 2013).And climate catastrophe, green design andurban agriculture have all troubled the com-monsense notion that nature and cities areopposites (Cockrall-King, 2012; Newmanet al., 2009; Owen, 2009).

As these sites and topics have become thesubjects of self-consciously urban analyses,urbanists’ responses to these empirical chal-lenges to city/nature, city/country or society/nature binaries have been in one way strik-ingly congruous. Across the field, scholarshave aimed to stretch, combine or migratethe old binary categories in order to unitethe city with its traditional opposites – amode of intervention I refer to throughoutthis paper as ‘hybridity’.1 Consider threerecent examples from three disparate urbansubfields. American urban sociologists,urban political ecologists and postcolonialurban theorists study, respectively, the rural,nature and the global South in relationshipto urbanisation – each a self-evidently ‘non-urban’ (and ideological) research object onthe basis of traditional urban/rural classifi-cations. And each has resolved this problemin the same way: by stretching, contractingor relocating the old binary categories toaccommodate new research sites and objects.As Herbert Gans (2009) has argued,American urban sociology has responded toincreasingly ‘illogical’ systems of spatial clas-sification based upon notions of urban–sub-urban–town–rural areas by ‘inventingadjectives to deal with at least some of thevariations’ in blurry ‘rurban’ spaces (2009:214). Among researchers working in urbanpolitical ecology, the untenability of city/nature and society/nature dualisms forunderstanding the production or composi-tion of urban environments has led scholarsto rework binary concepts as hybrids: ‘socio-nature’, ‘urban nature’ etc. (e.g. Gandy,2002; Heynen et al., 2006). Postcolonial geo-graphers have argued that the developmen-talist assumptions embedded in North/

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South and city/‘not-yet’ city binaries haveturned Western industrial cities into the ‘pri-vileged sites’ of universal experience and of‘universal’ urban theory (Robinson, 2011:3). They have responded by producing the-ory in the South and migrating conceptsnorthward, ‘provincialising’ urban theory bybringing ‘off the map’ cities and their char-acteristic forms of urbanism into focus(Hentschel, 2015; Robinson, 2006; Roy,2009; Sheppard et al., 2013).

The remainder of this paper is a reflectionon this situation, and a contribution to thegrowing set of efforts devoted to denatura-lising ‘the city’ as the privileged site of urbanresearch and examining the consequences ofthis city-orientation in urban analyses (e.g.Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015; Brenner,2014; Brenner and Schmid, 2014, 2015;Wachsmuth, 2014). Here, I take the field’sanalogous attacks on binarism as an invita-tion to examine what urban studies is react-ing to – which, I argue, is a set of underlyingfolk understandings of the city that havebeen challenged by new urban geographiesand subsequent new research interests, theassumptions of which are an increasinglypoor fit for contemporary urban environ-ments. The central argument is that there isa hegemonic way of seeing urban environ-ments (what I call the ‘city lens’) that wasdeveloped in the context of the 19th centuryindustrial metropolis, and which continuesto strongly influence how we interpret urbanlife. Using John Berger’s idea of ‘ways ofseeing’ as a tool for understanding this situa-tion, I review the historical origins of thelens and the assumptions it enables; examineits uses and effects in contemporary urbanenvironments; and evaluate the limits of‘hybridity’ as a solution to this problem. Iconclude by arguing that we must contendwith the practical uses of these categorieseven as we strive to move beyond them ana-lytically, and by outlining an alternative his-torical and process-oriented approach to

these categories instead. This is not an argu-ment about how to understand the ontologi-cal nature of the contemporary city, but aneffort to bring a naturalised epistemological‘lens’ into focus as an object of analysis forurban studies, and to examine the effects of‘seeing city’ on the interpretation of an urba-nising world.

Ways of seeing

What does it mean to speak of the city as a‘lens’? The phrase ‘ways of seeing’ comesfrom a short book of the same name by artcritic and writer John Berger (2008 [1972]),which demystifies the ‘masterpiece’ of highart and the canonical way of seeing it, offer-ing a more critical and democratic philoso-phy of art production and reception. Thebook’s message is that ways of seeing changeas the world does, and that particular repre-sentations are artefacts: interpretations ofthe world in a given place and time. InBerger’s words, ‘the relationship betweenwhat we see and what we know is never set-tled’ (p. 7); a sociologist might say that waysof seeing are historical. How we see is aproduct of how we have been taught to seeand the qualities of the environment – theproperties of the things we are looking atand the modes through which we experiencethem. Berger’s argument is about technol-ogy: the invention of the camera changedthe way people saw by complicating notionsof perspective and of time. These new per-ceptions were reflected in new forms of art;Impressionism and Cubism reflect newvisual experiences and, as representations,outlast the worlds they represent. Berger’svisual metaphor also helps illustrate howparticular experiences ossify as lenses – theybecome generalised epistemological frame-works through which we view and interpretthe world.

Berger’s argument is given another layer –in a very different context – by Rogers

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Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000), whodistinguish between ‘categories of practice’and ‘categories of analysis’, or ‘folk’ and‘analytical’ understandings of a phenom-enon. In Brubaker and Cooper’s language,the ‘city lens’ is the name I have given to thefolk categories commonly used to makesense of the city, most if not all of whichdefine the city in relationship to an ‘outside’(countryside, rural, etc.), as I will explainbelow. Brubaker and Cooper distinguishbetween practical and analytical categoriesin order to argue that the former should notinfluence the latter. I bring it up here tounderscore how fragile these distinctionsare. As folk understandings become familiar,naturalised lenses for looking at the world,they threaten to influence categories of anal-ysis in subtle ways. The project of this paperis to identify the folk understandings of thecity that have become problematic for con-temporary urban researchers, and to explainwhy this is the case by examining their rela-tionship to current categories of practiceand analysis.

In response to the changes in globalurban geographies introduced above, someurbanists have suggested that urban studiesrequires fundamentally new categories ofanalysis. One set of arguments for this kindof fundamental rethinking has come underthe banner of ‘planetary urbanisation’ (seeBrenner, 2014). Much of this work has beenfocused on changing physical and economicgeographies and the ontological nature ofthe urban, which is not the intention here.Instead, I am taking up the suggestion in thisliterature that contemporary forms of urban-ism are also changing urban experience suchthat new categories for urban social analysisare required as well. Andy Merrifield, forexample (also citing John Berger), hasdescribed the relationship between newobjective environments and new correspond-ing understandings of them as a paradigmshift akin to Cubism in painting: the new

urban condition is one that ‘behooves a dif-ferent way of seeing’, and argued that inorder to grasp it we academics must literally‘reposition our vision and re-describe whatwe see’ (Merrifield, 2013: 911, 912, emphasisin original). Christian Schmid (2013) hasargued that new representations of urbanisa-tion can, or should, correspond to newexperiences of urbanisation, and specifically,that, in an environment of complete, or ‘pla-netary’ urbanisation, the urban can no lon-ger be represented as the familiar ‘grey’ ofthe city in contrast to a presumably ‘green’outside.

Merrifield and Schmid’s arguments are inkeeping with a long history of interventionsin urban studies on the relationship betweenthe city as a ‘space of representation’ and asa ‘representation of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991),as I will explain further below. But it has notalways been clear in the contemporarydebates about urbanism what the implica-tions of changing urban geographies are forurban social analysis. Are new urban geo-graphies provoking new experiences of urba-nisation, or are people still interpreting themin the old ways? If people are interpretingthem anew, how would we know? And howmight we characterise those changes? If theold ways of seeing are not sufficient forurban researchers, what are those old waysand how might we begin to develop newones?

I use the idea of ‘ways of seeing’ as aheuristic to explore this situation in theworld, to evaluate responses in the disci-pline, and to elaborate Merrifield andSchmid’s suggestion that a new way of see-ing is necessary. I argue that hybridity is aresponse to a contradiction, and read theparallel interventions across urban subfieldsas demonstrations in support of Merrifieldand Schmid’s point. Scholars are incorporat-ing traditionally non-urban sites and sub-jects because in spite of changing urbangeographies, the ‘city lens’ remains the

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dominant interpretive mode in everydayurban experience and in urban practice. Thegoal of this essay is to make this naturalised,hegemonic way of seeing urban environ-ments visible, to contextualise it in broaderhistorical transformations, and to under-stand the problems it is causing today. In thefollowing sections of this paper, I explorethe origins of the city lens, describe its char-acteristic ways of seeing, and show how thisinterpretive framework influences urbanpractice and urban analysis.

A brief history of the city lens inurban practice and analysis

Let us begin working towards a new lens asBerger did, by demystifying the old, withsome historical perspective on the origins ofthe city lens and on the history of thesedebates in the discipline. The central conten-tion of this paper is that is that there is a folkunderstanding of the city – the ‘city lens’ –whose assumptions continue to underpincontemporary urban practice, which werepart of the founding assumptions of urbanstudies as a discipline, and which cause ana-lytical problems for urbanists studyingincreasingly diversified urban researchobjects and geographies today. This lenscarves up spatial and social difference in bin-ary terms. It delineates the geographic spaceof the city against a non-urban outside, andassigns a variety of polarised social signifiersto each location. The first thing to realise isthat this lens is, in Berger’s sense, a way ofseeing. It is a historical phenomenon – aresponse to the texture of experience in aparticular place and time. Concretely, thecity lens is an inheritance of a particularsociospatial form: the industrial metropolisat the turn of the last century.

London, Paris, Berlin and New Yorkaround 1900 were the contexts in which thislens was ground and in which practical andeventually analytical categories for studying

urban environments were developed. As wewell know by now, many features of theseenvironments taken to be characteristics ofthe city were actually effects of industrialcapitalism, such as the fact that after half acentury of explosive growth, these cities hadaccumulated incredible wealth, cosmopoli-tanism and culture on the one hand, andpoverty, pollution and immiseration on theother. But whether glorifying the factory orcondemning the slum, people most easilyand most often comprehended these newexperiences in spatial terms. Social reformersdescribed the city as a container for socialproblems, to which the fresh air of the coun-tryside was an antidote. Artists painted thecity as shock, density, energy, social differ-ence, anonymity and alienation in contrastto the quiet, familial ties of rural life (e.g.Kirchner’s Potsdamer Platz (1914) orMondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie(1943)). As these folk understandings of thecity crystallised in popular culture and pub-lic life, social scientists, encouraged by thecontrasts offered up by the physical qualitiesof Berlin, New York, London and Chicagoin the first half of the 20th century, anchoredanalytical categories around these polaritiesas well.

The industrial city appeared to eithercause or correlate with the new kinds ofbehaviour and social organisation that werethe first research objects of the first urba-nists. Nineteenth-century social scientistsfascinated by industrial cities’ human den-sity, diversity, vibrancy, isolation, povertyand anomie described them in city/not-cityterms. In Europe early in the century, bin-aries such as Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft,agrarian/industrial and traditional/modernbecame the frames through which the city’snew social forms were understood, and inwhich the space of the city became synon-ymous with each of these latter characteris-tics (e.g. Simmel, 1964 [1902]; Tonnies, 1963[1887]). In the USA several decades later,

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though Louis Wirth (1938) famously askedafter ‘urbanism as a way of life’ (italics mine)in practice, Chicago School sociologistsreproduced this pairing of geographic loca-tion with social types by taking urban experi-ence to be synonymous with the experienceof the industrial metropolis, a way of lifeindigenous to a particular location, ‘ecology’and morphology. From Berlin to Chicago,scholars treated these contrasts as transhisto-rical attributes of cities as particular kinds ofplaces (large, dense, heterogeneous), ratherthan one of many possible historical prod-ucts of urbanisation processes.

The industrial metropolis was not, ofcourse, where these binary contrasts origi-nated. Ideas about cities (or ‘society’ or ‘cul-ture’) in contrast to country life, to wildnature, to the rural past, and so on, long pre-cede and far exceed the boundaries of urbanstudies. These oppositions have taken differ-ent forms in different contexts, in the nameof modernity, the Enlightenment or indus-trial capitalism (e.g. Fitzsimmons, 1989;Sayer, 1984; Smith, 2008; Williams, 1973).But in the 20th century, in the context ofthese cities, they were given a strongly spa-tial dimension, and canonised as sets of ana-lytical categories for a nascent urban studies,they also had particularly far-reachingeffects. The impressionistic oppositionsexhibited by the 20th century metropolishelped define the first research object ofurban studies as a unique place – the city –that could be distinguished, spatially andsocially, from its non-urban outside.

Urban studies has long since rejectedits founding dualisms in guises as crudeas Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft orSimmel and the Chicago School’s ahistori-city. In fact, just the opposite: the history ofthe field can be told as a story of changinganswers to what Castells (1972) first termed‘the urban question’. Urbanists are alwaysasking what a city is. A place? A collectionof people? A phenomenological outcome of

other processes? And the field’s constantredefinition of its research object has alwaysreflected changes in the urban morphology,cultural and political movements, and eco-nomic processes of each moment (seeBrenner, 2000). It was the rise of capitalismand the eclipse of the mercantile by theindustrial city that provoked Marx, Weber,and Durkheim’s first urban observations inthe 19th century. Growing suburbs and met-ropolitan areas caused urbanists to remarkon the incoherence of the city as a spatial oreconomic unit in the 1960s (Friedmann andMiller, 1965; Gottmann, 1961). Changinggeographies of production and consump-tion, as well as new cultural forms such aspostmodernism, were the focus of theoreticaldebates in the 1970s and 1980s (Harvey,1989; Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]; Saunders, 2003[1981]; Soja, 1989). Today, the set of recentinterventions I mentioned at the beginningare at least in part a response to economicglobalisation, environmental inequality andurbanisation in the global South. And ineach of these instances, scholars have pro-posed new images of the city to more accu-rately reflect changing urban formsincluding – to name just a few – the megalo-polis (Gottmann, 1961), the ecumenopolis(Doxiadis, 1968), the postmetropolis (Soja,2000), the global city (Sassen, 2001), theurbanised planet (Brenner, 2014).

But to historicise today’s epistemologicalinterventions further, urban political ecol-ogy, postcolonial urban theory andAmerican urban sociology are each centrallypreoccupied with some version of hybridity.Each is similar in that their goal is to incor-porate traditionally non-urban research sitesand subjects into self-consciously urbananalyses, and that they accomplish this byuniting the city with one of its outsides –nature, the rural, the not-yet city. They arealso far from the first to notice that city/not-city binaries are a problematic representa-tion of actually existing urban geographies.

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As early as 1961, Jean Gottmann remarkedof the Northeastern Seaboard that ‘in someaspects we may find this urban region much‘‘wilder,’’ and in others much more ‘‘civi-lized’’ than would be expected . urban peo-ple and activities have taken on more ruralaspects and traditionally rural pursuits haveacquired urban characteristics’ (1961: 217),and called for an analysis starting with a‘new symbiosis integrating what used to be‘‘urban’’ and ‘‘rural’’’ (1961: 216; see alsoFriedmann and Miller, 1965; Saunders,1986). Rather, today’s interventions areinteresting because they are evidence of thefact that in spite of this history binary waysof seeing urban environments remain hege-monic in urban practice and are still the folkunderstanding of the city against which con-temporary urban scholars fight.

In other words, even if critically mindedurban scholars agree that the large, dense,heterogeneous, nucleated city distinguish-able from its rural hinterland is at best anideal type of urban environment, and even ifthe discipline has come very far from relyingon city/not-city binaries as explicit analyticalcategories, in the world and in urban prac-tice these binaries remain the dominant‘folk’ way of understanding of what citiesare and what urbanism is. The practicalassociations that became the hegemonicmeans through which to understand city lifein the 20th century are reproduced to theextent that the city remains, more subtly butquite powerfully, the site of shocks andexposure, collective politics, public spaceand culture – against the country, or nature,as the site of community, familiarity or tra-dition. The problem today is that this set ofassumptions is causing problems for urbanstudies not just directly – regarding disciplin-ary debates about ‘the urban question’, orhow we understand ‘the city’ or ‘the urban’as an object of analysis upon which mostrecent publications have focused – but

indirectly, regarding how people, places andthings that could be intuitively mapped ontothose binaries are interpreted in the popularimagination.

How the city lens sees:Romanticism, anachronism,universalism

The city lens is a reification of a historicalexperience of the city turned into an interpre-tive frame, which people use to make senseof a variety of situations in the world today.Here, I outline this lens’ basic operationallogics relatively abstractly – describing whathappens when the city lens gets turned onthe world – before turning to concrete exam-ples of the city lens in action in the followingsections.

Ironically, the city lens’ binary frameworkis not too rigid, but too flexible. The varietyof relational opposites (rural/urban, society/nature, Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, etc.) thatare commonly hung on the city/not-city as aspatial distinction are unstable along twodimensions. First, as mentioned above, thereis slippage between ‘categories of practice’and ‘categories of analysis’ in their use(Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). Second andmore problematic is their transposability.Because, in Andrew Sayer’s (1984: 283)words, as ‘everyday’ concepts country andcity carry such a ‘heavy affective load’, theyallow a great degree of movement betweenassociated meanings and signifiers.

I will return to John Berger for an illustra-tion. Berger’s (2011 [1980]) ‘Why look at ani-mals’ offers the following contrast:

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is gladto salt away its pork. What is significant, andis so difficult for the urban stranger to under-stand, is that the two statements in that sen-tence are connected by an and and not by abut. (p. 7)

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Much like Raymond Williams’ (1973) TheCountry and the City, this sentence is partof a larger argument about the transforma-tions of modern capitalism and changingrelationships to, and perceptions of, natureand animals that have been a product ofthem. Also much like Williams’ explorationof the powerful ideas and feelings, positiveand negative, which have ‘gathered’ on theconcepts country and city, purpose of thecontrast between the ‘peasant’ and the‘urban stranger’ is to shorthand this histori-cal transformation through two subjecttypes. This pair of figures, just like this pairof space-times, is so affectively ‘loaded’ thatthey are both very evocative and have a spe-cial utility. By drawing on these everydayassociations, Berger can describe a historicaltransformation that is multi-dimensional,and in one phrase can conjure a whole set ofchanging social, spatial, economic, politicalforms: spatio-temporal location (country tocity), form of economic organisation (agrar-ian to industrial), form of social organisation(community to anonymity) and normativevalues (good community and bad anomie).This net of associations makes these usefulas literary devices; Berger can use the pea-sant or the urban stranger as characters in afable, highly symbolic, recognisable tropesthat he can assume will be consistentlyinterpreted.

But the density of associated everydaymeanings also makes them vulnerable toeasy misreading. Sayer (1984: 283–284),drawing on Mary Douglas, notes that theseassociations are ‘leaky’, and that there is‘spillage’ in their use: ‘people appeal toequivalences and metaphors’ in their inter-pretations based on these categories, suchthat rural life could signify simplicity orcommunity or leisure or tradition. We canalso add (1) that people are willing to takethe presence of one-half of one of these pairsas an indicator of others, such that a peasantlooks like agrarian production, which looks

like the countryside, which suggests strongcommunity ties, which implies an unalie-nated relation to nature, and so on, and (2)that we associate not just spaces and times,but particular materials and subjects withthese binaries, assuming that from the pres-ence of any one indicator we can inferothers.

The connotative power of these sets ofrelational opposites also makes it very hardto resist the representational significancethat signifiers of urban and rural take on.Through the city lens, particular sets ofmaterial referents (the superficially natural,‘green’ elements of the built environment:trees, grass, plants, animals – or the superfi-cially social ‘grey’ of buildings, roads, indus-try and infrastructure) come to be associatedwith corresponding social characteristics(green means community; grey meansanomie). These associations are assumed totravel in families, such that we can movebetween the second-order assumptionsabout social types and sensibilities that have‘gathered’ on each term to make sense ofthese material signifiers as well as placesthemselves (green means not just commu-nity, but also direct social relationships). Itis with this in the background that we can‘read’ urban greening projects as a socialimprovement projects, and while when wesee a (green) community garden in a city wemay not think explicitly about ‘nature’, or‘the country’, or see gardeners as peasants,analytical questions of social organisation –community, of tight social ties, of dense net-works – are likely to come to mind, and weare likely to associate normative goods withthe space itself and its presence in the city.

Put more schematically, the city lens hasthree characteristic moves. First, it forgetsthat these binaries are shorthands for sets ofcomplex and variable transformations andtreats them as transhistorical categoriesinstead. This is in part enabled by a secondassumption, which is that these relational

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opposites are transposable and that familiesof social characteristics correspond to partic-ular materials and locations such that fromthe presence of one signifier (whether subjecttype, materials, social form, etc.) any num-ber of the signifieds can be inferred. Finally,third, it tends to overlay a set of uninterro-gated normative assumptions onto them.

Applied in social life, these logics producesome familiar patterns. With the aboveexplanation of the work that these categoriesdo in the background, let us take as an exam-ple what happens when people wearing a citylens confront intruding signifiers of the tradi-tional not-city in one material form: practi-cal, everyday signs of ‘nature’ (green space,gardens and animals) in cities. It should benoted that these relational opposites, as wellas being leaky, have changing normativevalences – the not-city can be threateningwild nature or a pastoral idyll – so many pos-sible conclusions that could be drawn fromdifferent configurations of assumptions. Butto maintain our interrogation of the Anglo-European city lens’ favourite biases, anddrawing on the critiques made by the threeinterventions that interest us here, the citylens’ most familiar effects include:

Romanticism. Perhaps the most commonlogical move that can be made by associatingthe not-city’s normative goods with particu-lar materials, romanticism is all-too familiarto urban scholars of ‘nature’ (as a materialresearch object) and ‘community’ (as a socialform) in contemporary American urban cul-ture as well as American urban sociology.While nature of course can be imagined tolie outside the social entirely (one of themain ideologies urban political ecology seeksto critique), in an urban context (usuallymeaning in the city) nature is very often thenpaired with social associations – the norma-tive ideal of community (as the small-scale,homogeneous, small town) and the interac-tive norm of face-to-face relationships.Because the material presence of green space

becomes an indicator of a particular socialform, it can also be seen as the bearer of par-ticular values. We see this in policy, in plan-ning, in community development and in thecommunity garden, as urban food move-ments recover values through food culture,as the green city is imagined to promisealternative social worlds, or as urban ‘green-ing’ and agriculture is used to fix urbansocial problems, as I will describe in detail inthe following section.

Anachronism. With the opposite norma-tive valence, material signs of nature in theurban overlain read through Chicago Schooldevelopmentalism become signals of the ‘notyet’ rather than the bygone (Robinson, 2002:532). This move is all-too familiar to scho-lars of the global South or those working ina comparative urban framework and, as theyhave ably demonstrated, is a long shadow ofChicago School urbanism’s ‘parochialist’origins, characterised by Jennifer Robinsonas a dual uptake of ideas about Westernmodernity and European developmentalismwhich turned into an understanding of urbanexperience as ‘modern’ counterposed againstfolk/culture/tribal ‘tradition’ (Robinson,2011: 4; Escobar, 1995). Thus goat herdersin Dhaka look like pastoral subjects in urba-nising spaces, rural anachronisms in a fieldof city – things that would/should/will disap-pear on the march to city rather than takingon the rustic charm that urban chicken- andbee-keepers do among urbanites in the USA.The seeming inevitability of Romania’srecent ban of horse-drawn carts on mainstreets (Chamberlain, 2008) is analogous tothe (more subtle) way that, these scholarshave argued, certain urban conditions andbehaviours – particularly informality andkinds of ‘making do’ – are assumed to beones that will disappear with increasingurbanisation rather than being modes ofurban living characteristic of particularplaces (Roy, 2009; Roy and AlSayyad,2003).

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Universalism. Assumptions about theahistoricity and transposability of country/city binaries allow movement between vari-ous spaces and materials; they also allowmovement across time. Historical analysesmay project these binaries back in time,reading spaces, times and materials as indi-cators of the same (contemporary) forms ofknowledge or subjectivity or social con-sciousness, seeing them as evidence of famil-iar urban categories rather than queryinghow and where such understandingsemerged. I have observed this, for example,in research on industrial workers’ housing inGermany’s Ruhr region (Angelo, 2013).Through the city lens and its family associa-tions, social historians were able to describea new industrial bourgeoisie as ‘feudal’ (likeBerger’s ‘peasant’, defined by a shorthandthat locates them in space and time andsocial relationships) based on a series ofbehaviours and decisions about the materialenvironment, namely factory dwellings thatappeared to reproduce rural ideals – smallscale, culturally homogeneous, with privategreen spaces. Historians have interpretedmine and factory owners’ decisions to man-age their employees through these forms ofhousing as anti-modern, rather than contem-porary responses to a modern social forma-tion, and the presence of green space waspresented as evidence in support of thepoint. The mistake here is universalism – theassumption that these categories exist stati-cally in time rather than emerge historically,and that the burden of proof is evidentiaryrather than explanatory.

The city lens in practice:Romanticising ‘nature’

To elaborate one example, let us now exam-ine one of the most familiar and contempo-rary examples of the city lens in action moreclosely: the romanticisation of signs of‘nature’ in the urban. Among practitioners

and the public, a pervasive discourse of‘improvement’ accompanies efforts to‘green’ cities, including urban agriculture,community gardens, and the creation ofrecreational parks and waterfronts. Thisinterpretation of the addition of everydayforms of nature to cities is a normative jud-gement based upon and made possible by acity/nature binary. If cities are withoutnature, green space can be added. If citiesare imagined to be crowded, grey, dense,dirty places (in implicit contrast to the coun-tryside outside), the addition of green spacecan be, and usually is, evaluated as good.Detroit, for example, is one of the USA’smost troubled urban areas, and one in whichits tens of thousands of abandoned anddilapidated buildings have become the pri-mary symbol of the city’s decline. The solu-tion that has emerged to cope with thissituation is to demolish the crumbling build-ings and replace the empty parcels withgreen space – in spite of the great expenseand public health risks of exposure to leadand other toxins (Thompson, 2015). What isso striking about the plan, and whataccounts for its popularity, is that the new,‘green’ landscape allows Detroit’s economicdevastation to be recast and reimagined aspastoralisation and renewal. A recent NewYork Times photographic essay on Detroitfeatured aerial photographs depicting vacantlots dotted with trees, seeded as lawns orused for community gardens or agriculture(MacLean, 2014). The photographer’saccompanying description is as clear anexample as any of the city lens in actionwhen he explains how he interprets Detroit’sgreening as a symbol of hope for the future:

From the air today, the decline appears to beslowing. The spaces once covered in rubble arecleared and mowed. Open green spaces, alongwith new community gardens and orchards,look almost bucolic against the downtownskyline. From my plane, I sense the potentialfor resurgence in these areas. I can see how

10 Urban Studies



neighborhoods could become more walkableand support mixed-use development, with newshops, public transit and nearby parks andschools.

While there are real physical, social and eco-

logical reasons to want more parks and

green spaces in cities, the use of nature to

‘improve’ cities is an example of how these

folk associations (1) drive particular inter-

ventions in the built environment and (2)

shape justifications for and interpretations

of them in urban practice. The associations

of the city lens enable this photographer to

interpret Detroit’s post-demolition geogra-

phy as bucolic and full of potential in spite

of greening’s risks and the city’s continued

economic devastation. I would go so far as

to argue that the popularity of greening as

an urban development strategy is itself aproduct of this implicit contrast to the city.

But at the very least, ‘greening’s’ almost uni-

versally broad appeal also shows the ubiqui-

tousness of this interpretive lens: making a

‘farm’ out of an industrial city is an urban

development narrative that, across ideologi-

cal differences, corporations, communities,

foundations and government can all get

behind (Morgan, 2015: 1386). The same lens

also made parks and green spaces a power-

ful element of former Mayor Michael

Bloomberg’s ‘luxury city’ agenda in New

York City (Loughran, 2014), as the promise

to improve access to nature effectively stifled

opposition that might have been inflamed

by more transparently ‘social’ interventions

– such as the construction of luxury housingor the controversial (and eventually failed)

West Side Stadium proposal. Detroit’s ‘ruin

porn’ is an example of a romantic interpreta-

tion of nature in the city with the opposite

normative valence (Millington, 2013): the

pathos of industrial landscapes repopulated

with animals, plants, and ‘feral’ people and

buildings is an instance of nature ‘reclaim-

ing’ the social.

Moving from urban practice into urbananalysis, we see the same romantic view ofnature in the interpretation of everydayforms of green space, parks and gardens incities. Very often, these are treated not justas materially opposed to conventionalunderstandings of the quotidian textures ofthe city, but also as socially and politicallyoutside of it. Such blatantly unreflexiveromanticism is rare among critical urbanists(especially those with nature as theirresearch object), but one recent example insocial science is James Gibson’s (2009) AReenchanted World: the Quest for a NewKinship with Nature, which argues that wecan repair the social by adding nature(Angelo and Jerolmack, 2012). The senti-ment is also alive and well in work by scho-lar-practitioners. To return to the exampleof urban agriculture, Adams and Hardman(2014, quoting Hou, 2010: 15) have noted inthis journal that guerrilla gardening is veryoften celebrated as a ‘resistant’ activity thatcan ‘effect change in hegemonic landscapes’,and that the gardens themselves are moregenerally assumed to be ‘free spaces’ in cit-ies, that remain outside of social relation-ships and politics. Morgan (2015: 1385,quoting McClintock, 2010: 202) has alsoobserved that urban agriculture is often ima-gined to help ‘redress social and ecologicalalienation in capitalist societies by helping to‘‘re-establish a conscious metabolic relation-ship between humans and our biophysicalenvironment by reintegrating intellectualand manual labour’’’. And Draus et al.(2014) note that organisations advocatingfor urban agriculture often do so based onthe premise that ‘it will promote social cohe-sion, individual responsibility, social justice’and other intangible social outcomes (2014:2524). Such views of urban gardening – whicheach of these scholars critique – are examplesof just the problematic inferences that the citylens makes it possible to make: that insertingnature into cities can be understood to create

Angelo 11



spaces free of traditionally ‘urban’ – rationa-lised, profit-maximising, anonymous –social relationships (romanticism); that gar-dening and urban agriculture can reproduceunalienated forms of work characteristic ofrural or pre-industrial societies, by provid-ing a phenomenal experience of reinte-grated intellectual and manual labour(anachronism); and that nature spaces canbe celebrated because they build commu-nity – in spite of, or especially, across socialand economic differences – because thebenefits gained through interaction withnature are the same for everyone every-where (universalism). These assumptionsare not just general instances of a naıveview of nature, but a specific conception ofnature’s role in the city, in contrast to thecity, and in relationship to the politics andsocial relationships of a city.

Each of these examples illustrates howthe city lens’ folk categories underpin urbanpractice and social analysis not specificallyconcerned with disciplinary questions aboutwhat counts as urban and how it should bestudied. And though there is nothing neces-sarily wrong with such ad hoc use of thesedistinctions, the examples do show howromanticising nature in cities affects the dis-tribution of resources and political out-comes. Among practitioners, the assumptionthat the materials commonly called ‘nature’(grass, trees, flowers) bring or encourage tra-ditionally non-urban values and social attri-butes (health, hope, community renewal)means that efforts to ‘green’ Detroit havebeen able to secure large amounts of publicand private funding without considerationof other solutions, and have contributed tothe sense that ‘decline is slowing’ even in theabsence of substantive economic investment.In New York and elsewhere, it has meantthat the differential social benefits and out-comes of efforts to create ‘green’ and sus-tainable cities have been less readilyapparent and less quickly interrogated.

Hybridity and its limits

Moving from categories of practice to cate-gories of analysis – or from those workingfrom behind the city lens to those self-consciously trying to move beyond it – whatwe see more often in critical geography andurban studies is a healthy and robust critiqueof these impulses, repeatedly resolved withan epistemological intervention that I havecharacterised as ‘hybridity’. As I began thispaper by arguing, urban political ecology,American urban sociology and postcolonialurban studies have each made analogous cri-tiques of binarism – objecting to urban/rural, society/nature, city/not-yet city bin-aries that designate ‘urban’ and ‘non-urban’research sites and subjects. Returning tothese three interventions now, we can seethat it is just this family of associations towhich the three interventions are objecting.They are resisting a universalising assump-tion that tight social ties or patterns of con-spicuous consumption belong to country orcity, respectively; anachronistic readings ofSouthern cities’ informal economies or inad-equate public services as not-yet city; andromantic notions such as the idea that‘returning’ nature to the city will help savethe city.

Beyond these three subfields, a strikinglylarge amount of contemporary urbanresearch is similarly organised around thequestion of how people and places meet orviolate binary expectations for cities or not-city spaces. The critics of romantic views ofurban agriculture cited in the previous sec-tion, for example, also explain that city/nature is false dichotomy, and advocate forsome kind of union. Morgan (2015) arguesthat food has been a ‘stranger’ to urbanplanning because it is understood to lie ‘out-side’ the city, and sees urban agricultureundoing these binaries by falsifying thisassumption. Like urban political ecology’s‘socionature’, a recent special issue of Urban

12 Urban Studies



Studies calling for a ‘social-ecological resili-ence framing’ in urban governance notesthat ‘tropes’ of the urban ‘apply all acrossthe landscape’ (Beilin and Wilkinson, 2015:1214). The field of ‘peasant studies’ hasbegun to self-consciously deploy phrasessuch as ‘peasants in the city’ and the ‘urbanpeasant’; making ironic use of these distinc-tions the entry point to discussing how themigration and labour patterns of their tradi-tionally non-urban research objects becomepart of urbanisation and change it (e.g.Overton, 2001).

But if there is broad agreement amongurbanists that these binaries are problematic,the most common way of addressing them isby continuing to play off these recognisableassociations. In this way scholarship contin-ues to use these binaries as foundationalcontrasts even as it explicitly rejects them.Let us take one article in Beilin andWilkinson’s special issue as an example,which concerns ‘amenity migrants’ (alsoknown as ‘rural gentrifiers’), and examineswhat happens after urbanites, seduced bythe romance of rural life, migrate to thecountryside (Beilin et al., 2015). The casestudy shows inhabitants of these spacesmaking sense of the new migrants in city/not-city terms. One long-time resident isquoted as saying that ‘it’s funny though asthey come out here and don’t want to beinvolved . [they want] all these urbanthings [like street lighting, guttering, etc.] aswell as seclusion’ (2015: 1313). Or in otherwords, urban–rural migrants continue tohave ‘urban’ expectations for comfort andamenities, while not living up to the spirit ofcommunity that ‘should’ accompany thecountryside. The researchers draw on thesame folk understandings of the city as theirsubjects when they evaluate migrants’ beha-viour in terms of whether or to what extentthey conform to activities and social beha-viours expected in each kind of space.Though the authors note that the peri-urban

‘is neither clearly ‘‘rural’’ nor definitively‘‘urban’’’ (2015: 1306), they also remark thatamenity migrants are strangers in the coun-tryside because they consume the landscaperather than contributing to its production(2015: 1314).

The effect of continually playing off thesebinaries is that contemporary urban geogra-phies are not described (or, we can thusimagine, perceived) as qualitatively differentkinds of urban environments – requiring ananalytical paradigm shift – but as signifiersof country or city in the wrong places, or asapparently paradoxical mashups of thesebinary pairs: ‘green city’, the ‘urban pea-sant’, the ‘rural gentrifier’. And because suchterms rely on the city lens for their interpre-tive efficacy, its binary folk categories stillgovern the patterns of expected social differ-ence laid out. As a result, hybridity has twomajor limitations.

(1) It is too targeted given the ubiquity ofthe city lens and the scope of its effects.Though each of these interventions correctsone specific misinterpretation that is a prod-uct of the city lens (e.g. urban political ecol-ogy’s argument that cities are not withoutnature, but constitutively ‘socionatural’environments), these categorical divisionsremain deeply embedded in urban studies’epistemology more generally. This is indi-cated by a number of biases and blind spotscharacteristic of the field. For example,urban studies’ latent developmentalism,anthropocentrism and arbitrary geographi-cal circumspection that the critiques intro-duced in the first section of this essay targetare not only products of naıve Euro-cen-trism – each also correlates with, and drawsupon, one city/not-city binary pair.Developmentalism: the city/not-yet city.Anthropocentrism: city/nature. Arbitrarygeographical circumspection: urban/ruralbinaries. Another tell is urbanists’ preoccu-pation with the city. David Wachsmuth(2014) has written about the ‘tenacity’ of the

Angelo 13



idea of the city as a bounded form; togetherwe have described ‘methodological cityism’:the fetish for studying the city as the privi-leged site of urban processes that may extendfar beyond it (Angelo and Wachsmuth,2014). An underlying city/not-city epistemol-ogy contributes to reproducing urban stud-ies’ default research object as ‘the city’ as asite in contrast to a putatively non-urbanoutside (Brenner, 2013: 97) – and may alsohelp explain the field’s fierce resistance tothe suggestion that ‘urbanisation’ might be amore appropriate one. But urbanists’ metho-dological preference for a particular spatiallocation is not surprising; it correspondswith, and reinforces, an epistemologicalframe that carves up the social world in bin-ary terms. This binary epistemology is alsoreproduced outside of urban studies, mani-festing as disciplinary gaps between ‘urban’and ‘rural’ studies (Smith, 2011), urban stud-ies and ‘development’ studies (Robinson,2002), and sociology and ecology (Dunlapand Catton, 1994).

(2) Hybridity is a solution poorlyequipped to handle the ongoing physicaltransformations of urban space. Today’sinterventions are motivated by urbanists’shared interest in the dramatic expansion ofurban environments and a real desire tostudy these extended geographies as urban,even as debates rage about what the natureand implications of these changes are. Butthrough the city lens, the breakdown of theexpected correspondence between spatiallocation and each of these binary pairs isexperienced as ‘matter out of place’(Douglas, 2002 [1966]): the most readilyavailable interpretation of traditionally non-urban sites and subjects is still as signs of thenot-city in the wrong places, such as the‘urban peasant’. It seems fair to assume thatmore and more cities will look less and lesslike the traditional Euro-American metropo-lis in the coming decades – and, therefore,that the city lens will provide a less and less

adequate representation of these spaces andpeople. In North American and Europeancities, new geographies will continue to beexperienced as the increasing intrusion ofthe city’s perceived opposites on ‘urban’analyses; outside of them, the normativeoverlay of these second-order assumptionswill still make it very hard for researchersnot to read spaces and subjects as more orless urban, political, communitarian or cos-mopolitan, and so on, based on the presenceor absence of various city or non-citysignifiers.

Evidence of these limitations is alreadyvisible today. For example, Monika Krause(2013) has argued, to good effect, for thestudy of the ‘ruralisation’ rather than the‘urbanisation’ of the world, both to counterthe ‘imperialism’ of the urban and to analysecontemporary sociospatial transformations‘from the perspective of that which is suppo-sedly acted upon or being transformed’(2013: 233). It is true that non-urban oftenfades problematically from view in thedebates about urbanisation. But doesencouraging a view of subsistence agricul-ture among squatters in Maputo, Africa, as‘the rural in the urban’, just as we alreadycharacterise suburbanites in the countrysideas the urban in the rural, get us to the‘broader understanding of variation in socio-spatial arrangements’ for which Krauserightly calls (2013: 235)? Instead of movingus away from the problematic urban/ruralframing, it seems more likely to have theopposite effect: putting scholars of the non-urban in the position of contesting the pro-blematic associations that so often accom-pany a ‘rural’ understanding of theirresearch objects. This is exactly the form ofanachronism I described above – the ideathat by being characterised as ‘rural’,Maputo’s squatters are not only somehowless urban, but also less modern, less devel-oped and less rational. Postcolonial urbanstudies’ need to demonstrate that informality

14 Urban Studies



is a mode of urbanism characteristic of theglobal South rather than an earlier devel-opmental ‘stage’ is an example of just thiskind of perpetual battle. Having establishedthe basic grounds for research on Southerncities outside of a developmentalist or excep-tionalist framework, they must still fight theassumption that poor people’s infrastruc-ture, education, sanitation and food provi-sioning in Mumbai or Johannesburg areproducts of contemporary inequalities ratherthan leftovers from rural life or conse-quences of migration from countryside.Flipping from one side of the binary to theother is important to bring the ‘non-urban’into focus, but little to break us out of thebinary way of seeing that was the impetusfor these interventions in the first place.

From the city lens towardurbanisation as a way of seeing

So what does an alternative look like? AsColin McFarlane (2010: 728) has put it,‘despite the fact that many urbanists do notthemselves subscribe to these categories, anddespite efforts to blur notions of First/Third,Developed/Developing, or North/South,these categories have an ongoing performa-tive effect – they are stubborn, and are noteasily written away’. The bulk of this paperhas been devoted to illustrating this fact inurban practice and in urban research. Thestubbornness of city/not-city binaries sug-gests that while striving to move beyondthem analytically, we must also contend withtheir ongoing use. I conclude by proposinganother response to these frustrations thanhybridity, which is to turn these binaries intoa research object, and study their social util-ity, legibility and consequences.

Detroit, for example, is a clear demon-stration of the ‘performative effect’ of city/nature binaries. A romantic view of naturemakes it possible to fix Detroit through‘greening’, as much or more than economic

reinvestment, and puts greening and agricul-ture projects front and centre in narrativesabout the city’s renaissance. The challenge isto account for the power of this idea assomething other than a product of ‘moder-nity’ or Detroit policymakers’ naıvete and tounderstand the consequences of its deploy-ment on Detroit’s post-industry redevelop-ment programme.

From the perspective developed in thisessay (and as I have elaborated at morelength elsewhere (Angelo, 2015)), the expla-nation looks something like this. The bundleof transformations we describe as ‘urbanisa-tion’ – the shift from an agrarian to industrialeconomy, increasingly socially heterogeneousmilieus, a norm of market-based, rather thansubsistence-based livelihoods – have pro-duced a variety of environments with newand different experiential selectivities. In the19th century, one of these was the industrialcity, characterised by the size, density andheterogeneity so well documented by theChicago School, and the social consequencesof which were so carefully teased out bySimmel, Durkheim and others. This city wasa place where people suffered increased expo-sure to environmental ‘bads’, decreasedaccess to environmental ‘goods’, and experi-enced nature as a place for leisure rather thanlabour. As urbanised environments and mar-ket economies expanded throughout the 20thcentury, more and more people had thesetypes of experiences of nature – not only inlarge metropolises. These experiences hadepistemological consequences. First, theycontributed to the production of a hegemonicunderstanding of urban environments asopposed to nature, as outside nature. Theyalso contributed to the emergence of an ideaof nature as an ‘indirect’ good – somethingbeneficial not for subsistence purposes, butfor the social, moral and psychological bene-fits it delivered. Once available in the publicimagination, this way of seeing nature tra-velled. It became ‘modular’ (Anderson,

Angelo 15



2006): widely replicated, legible far beyondthe boundaries of industrial cities, and fre-quently called upon when making decisionsabout the built environment. This way of see-ing constitutes a shared social imaginary thatI have called ‘urbanised nature’ (Angelo,2015).2 Most importantly in this context, thisimaginary has enabled a set of practices: itmakes it possible to ‘improve’ cities by‘greening’ them. Urbanised nature allowspeople to act with the naturalised belief thateveryone benefits from the addition ofnature, and conditions audiences to receivegreening interventions as such.

The methodological point to take beyondthe case of nature is that ways of seeing areoutcomes of processes, rather than reactionsto places. In arguing that urban studies stilllacks an ‘urban epistemology’, proponentsof planetary urbanisation have advocatedfor a shift from the city as a site to urban pro-cesses as the proper research object of urbanstudies (Brenner, 2014; Brenner and Schmid,2015). This reorientation has been modelledconcretely cartographically (Brenner andKatsikis, 2013; Diener et al., 2005), thoughincreasingly, scholars are describing urbani-sation in terms of extra-city economic andgeopolitical transformations (Gustafsonet al., 2014; Whitehead, 2013). The type ofexplanation I have outlined in brief aboveextends this type of argument into the realmof social knowledge and social experience,and is a way of elaborating Merrifield andSchmid’s assertions that contemporaryurban geographies have changed such thatfundamentally new ways of seeing are neces-sary. Rather beginning with the city-as-social-experience, I am arguing that we canactually trace the forms of social knowledgethat changing environments produce, andmap their movement and use over time.

Pursuing this type of analysis involvesdeparting from current approaches in twomain ways.

First, it requires studying urban imagin-aries in addition to imaginaries of the urban.Examining the urban as a lens, as a way ofseeing lots of things, means looking not justat how city is perceived, but how things otherthan the city are understood through it. Justas debates in the field remain inordinatelyfocused on the question of the ‘city’ or ‘urba-nisation’ rather than on the spaces that it isaffecting or acting upon, such phenomenolo-gical or perception-oriented approaches havefocused primarily on conceptions of the cityitself (Goonewardena, 2005; Lynch, 1960;Wachsmuth, 2014). But looking at the cityto see the effect of urbanisation on socialcategories is a bit like looking at the sun. Wemight also look away from the city andtowards other categories that are also con-structed by urban processes. This meansabandoning the city not just as a containeror naturalised research object, but even con-ceptions of it as the primary thing we urba-nists want to know about.

The researchers who most often confrontthe forms of social knowledge created byurbanisation are those whose researchobjects are traditionally constructed inopposition to the city – exactly those scho-lars of nature, the rural and the global Southwhose efforts have provoked this examina-tion. Among scholars of nature, urban ima-ginaries – imaginaries shaped in and throughurban processes – have received some directattention. Huber and Currie (2007) haveattempted to construct a specifically ‘urban’imaginary of nature; Brewster and Bell’s(2010) discussion of a dominant public ‘outin nature’ frame, though they do not expli-citly query its origins, is clearly a product ofthese oppositions. In both cases, the ‘nature’in question is not understood to be ‘urban’because of its location in a city, or because ithas been physically transformed by capital.Rather, as in the case of the photographer’saccount of Detroit, each is taken as an

16 Urban Studies



instance of nature as interpreted by subjectswhose entire epistemological orientation hasbeen shaped by urbanisation.

Second, it requires adopting a historical per-spective on the emergence and transformationof categories of understanding. Rather thantaking the city lens as a ‘categorical commonal-ity’ belonging to those who inhabit particularspaces or subject positions, we can approach itas something more like ‘historically variablerelational embeddedness’, much as has beensuggested for the study of categorical markersof identity, such as class, nation, ethnicity orsexuality (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000: 11).Just as we study the production of objectiveforms of nature through capitalist urbanisation(Smith, 2008), we can study the production ofsubjective ways of seeing nature – e.g. as out-side the city, and something that can be used to‘improve’ the city. Understood in these terms,the questions become: What produced this wayof seeing? What have been its effects?

The city lens is a historical condition.Being able to decipher the world in terms ofcity/not-city binaries, is, like class-conscious-ness, ‘something which in fact happens (andcan be shown to have happened)’(Thompson, 1966: 8). It is a form of socialknowledge and social consciousness that isan outcome of a process, rather than a stateentered on the day territory X reached popu-lation Y. Much as Thompson (1966) didwith class, as Brubaker and Cooper (2000)have recommended with nationalism and asScott (1991) has shown with identity, we canlook for the emergence of these self-understandings and understandings of theworld in different places and times. Just asreflecting on the experience of Berlin in 1900or Chicago in 1960 helps us understand fairlywell where the city/not city epistemologycame from, a study of Johannesburg orMumbai reveals that what is producedthrough global uneven development is notjust different kinds of cities, but entirely dif-ferent logics and modes of subjectivity.

Beyond cataloguing the diversity of ways ofseeing the city, we could study how differentways of seeing emerge from different places,among people with different power,resources and knowledge.

Conclusion

Today’s disciplinary debates about how tounderstand the nature of contemporaryurban transformations are motivated by abasic common problem: the boundaries ofthe discipline are moving ever-farther fromthe 19th century European city as urbangeographies, research interests and politicalcommitments continue to expand and diver-sify. This paper has offered a historical per-spective on this situation, arguing thatthough that metropolis is no longer the char-acteristic form of urbanism, an understand-ing of the city and its associated oppositionsderived from it remain a dominant interpre-tive frame – and that it is against these folkunderstandings of the city that urbanists’interventions are directed. Its goal has beento highlight the limitations of the city as a‘way of seeing’ in contemporary urbanenvironments, and to explicate the socialand representational dimensions of whatsometimes appears to be simply a debateabout interpreting geography.

I concluded by arguing that in additionto attempting to move beyond these binariesthrough hybridity, we might also study howurbanisation produces environments andexperiences that create categories of under-standing that are durable across subsequentchanges. As the set of critiques from urbanpolitical ecology, postcolonial urban studiesand American urban sociology suggest, andas the case of Detroit reaffirms, the city lensstill has considerable affective power andutility. This paper has not been a study ofthe effects of changing urban geographies onideas about nature, or the global South, orthe rural in relationship to the city – I have

Angelo 17



not attempted to gauge their future durabil-ity. But my conjecture, as a scholar ofnature, is that they have so far remainedundisturbed. An urbanising planet has notproduced a situation in which people can nolonger use nature to fix the social. If any-thing, the opposite appears to be true. Theubiquitousness of green urban solutions toglobal environmental problems suggests thatthese tacit beliefs have intensified ratherthan dissolved. Which is why, I argue, it isimportant to study these ways of seeing evenas we strive to move beyond them.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Neil Brenner, Daniel AldanaCohen, Stuart Elden, David Madden, AndrewPerrin, Saskia Sassen, Stuart Schrader and DavidWachsmuth for their thoughtful comments onearlier versions of this paper, as well as toCatherine Fennell and Lyke Thompson for theirinsights on redevelopment in Detroit. This paperalso benefited from presentation at several confer-ences between 2013 and 2015; from the commentsof Gemma Mangione, David Reinecke, StacyWilliams and the participants in the NYLONworkshop in New York; and from the insights ofthree anonymous Urban Studies reviewers.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from anyfunding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. I use the term ‘hybridity’ quite literally in thispaper: to describe parallel efforts to combinetwo traditionally opposed terms. I do notmean to suggest that urban political ecology,postcolonial urban studies or American urbansociology share specific ontological claims ormethodological approaches beyond this ana-

lytical manoeuvre. While efforts to hybridisecity/not-city binaries bear some similaritiesto other recent efforts to rethink the city asrelational, hybrid and networked rather

than a static, bounded, human-dominatedplace – Actor-Network-Theory and ‘assem-blage’ urbanism in particular (Farıas andBender, 2012; McFarlane, 2011; see alsoBrenner et al., 2011) – an exploration of thesesimilarities is beyond the scope of this paperand is not its primary intention.

2. I use this phrase to distinguish this imaginaryfrom ‘urban nature’, commonly understoodto mean ‘nature in cities’ (Angelo andWachsmuth, 2015).

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