Urban-natures and ‘Limiting Machines’: Evaluating Hybrid and De-limiting Production in Urban Spaces and Infrastructures

Travis K. Bost

tbost@gsd.harvard.edu Harvard Graduate School of Design

Cambridge, MA 22 April 2012

Submitted to: Writing Cities: Graduate Student Conference

A dualist conceptualization of the urban-nature relationship has proven increasingly irrelevant and counterproductive as has been noted in many ways by authors including Swyngedouw (1996), Haraway (2004), and Latour (1993, 2004). While early Kantian Enlightenment conceptions justified a conquest of nature for industrialization and Modernist-era urban infrastructures embedded this dualist relationship in city form and process, these limitations have proven mere ideological constructions rather than veritable historical conditions. In response several authors have posited a more hybrid conceptualization of urban-nature to explain and advocate a more synethic socio-natural production. The consequences of a hybrid nature thesis involve the dissolving of socially-produced urban-natural limits, as each omnipresently shapes the other. While there has been considerable theoretical and critical repositioning of infrastructure along this line of thought within design of urban landscapes and infrastructures—despite the ample enthusiasm to ‘bring nature into the city’, ‘heal post-industrial scars’, and ‘give back waterfronts’—the critical question remains: are we succeeding in revealing the social-production process of synthetic urban-natures, or are we in fact producing new urban-natural limitations and alienation with nature merely on display in the city? This paper therefore takes up these questions, making use of recent descriptive analyses, design polemics and aesthetics of urban interventions—each indicative of or claiming a re-orientation in perspective for producing urban-natures. Travis Bost is an architectural designer and a student of urbanism, landscape, and ecology. He received M.Arch. and B.Arch. degrees from Tulane University in New Orleans and will complete the Master of Design Studies program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2012.

“though you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she [sic] will still find her way back”

– Horace, Epistles, (cited in Castree 1995: 12)

“We must anticipate a time when we will have to recreate nature. To produce particular objects will no longer be sufficient; we will have to reproduce what was the basic condition for production, namely, nature. With space.”

– Henri Lefebvre (2009 [1970]: 173)

A dualist understanding of the urban-nature relationship has proven increasingly irrelevant and counterproductive

for both describing urban environments and conceptualizing their socio-material production. While early

Enlightenment oppositional conceptualizations produced a nature that justified its conquest for industrialization,

Modernist urban infrastructures embedded this dualist relationship in urban-natural forms and processes. Under

industrialization, urban design strategies, infrastructures and urban amenities such as park spaces mediated nature

through opaque and mystifying processes where nature was located at the end of a tube, beyond a dike, or enclosed

by a fence. These then produced social constructions of a ‘primal nature’ and ‘hinterland’, forming hard-lined limits

between the spaces of nature and the urban. However these delimited encapsulations have proven mere ideological

constructions rather than veritable historical conditions. Castree and Braun’s (1998) ‘social natures’, Gandy’s (2005)

‘cyborg urbanization’, and Swyngedouw’s (2006) ‘hybrids’ have sought to explain and expose the synthetic qualities

and implications of a socio-material production of urban-natures.

The consequences of a hybrid nature thesis involve the dissolving of socially-produced urban-natural limits, as each

omnipresently shapes the other. While there has been considerable theoretical and critical repositioning along this

line of thinking in the analysis of urban spaces and their infrastructures, within the material design of urban

landscapes and infrastructures—despite the ample enthusiasm to ‘bring nature into the city’, ‘heal post-industrial

scars’, and ‘give back waterfronts’—the critical question remains: is there a coordinate revealing of the social

production process of synthetic urban-natures, or are there in fact new forms of urban-natural limitation and

alienation being produced with nature merely on display in the city? This paper therefore takes up these questions,

making use of recent descriptive spatial analyses, design polemics and urban interventions.

Producing the urban, producing nature

Despite, or as a result of, the long-established and perpetuated nature-culture and nature-urban dualism, it is in fact

a human construction. In order to conceptualize the world, the human and each in the other, a constructed world

view is necessarily forged. Thus nature as a subject, object, place and relationship is produced by socially conceived

ideologies in the human world. But further, it is not only that nature is socially produced but indeed its materiality is

equally produced, both facets of which are governed by the logics of the given mode of the historical-geographically

specific mode of production—that is the mode of human interfacing with the world for the satisfaction of collective

needs and desires. Any spatial transformation, executed under certain urban-natural relations then “requires the

reproduction of those relations in order to sustain it” (Harvey 1996: 94). The manifestations of this ideology are,

therefore, found in both cultural and formal terms in the socio-physical construction of urbanization. As a process

of “social and bio-physical change,” the production of nature under capitalism requires that “new kinds of spaces are

created and destroyed,” both as exteriorized conditions to the urban and as material embedded into the urban

landscape (Gandy 2006: 63-64), resulting in “the continuous production of new ‘natures,’ of new urban social and

physical environmental conditions” (Swyngedouw 2004: 10), as well as the limits defining each. This ‘uneven

development’ (Smith 1984: xiv), the concrete transformation of space, is facilitated or justified by socio-cultural

conceptions of nature manifest in the aesthetics and iconography of spatial production. In short, “[t]he production

of urban nature,” is therefore, “a microcosm of wider tensions in urban society” (Gandy 2002: x). In order to

comprehend the processes and intentionality of urban spatial transformations, it is necessary to unearth the

prevailing conceptualization of nature manifested in cultural and formal ideologies being leveraged in the urban and

natural environment. As part of the ‘Promethean’ project of modernization, three key moments of social and

material production of nature are particularly discernable, variously casting nature as: ‘outside’, ‘spectacle’, and

‘hidden’.

On the Outside and ‘the Other’

“As complex and as sodden with metaphor as the concept of nature is, probably no metaphor is as prevalent or as

deep-seated as the femininity of nature,” Neil Smith (1984: 13) describes the key tool for the production of nature as

‘other’; beyond the limits of the city or mankind, women and nature become “objects which mankind attempts to

dominate and oppress, ravage and romanticize; they are objects of conquest and penetration as well as idolatry and

worship” (14, emphasis added). The strategy of ‘the other’ is therefore not only externalizing but diminutive as well,

stripping the complexity and identity of a feminized nature, leaving only objecthood. Such a social framing

legitimates a thesis of material domination and exploitation of nature. Following from this, the environment, under

capitalist urbanization, is transformed by human labor as commodity, and in advanced forms as in Modernism,

commodification is coupled with fetishization, “through which the commodity form become the form of existence,

severed, from its historical and geographical (hence social) process of production” (Kaïka and Swyngedouw 2000:

121), widening the urban-nature limit from line to chasm.

Spectacle

In the cleaving of produced nature from the source and means of production by fetishization, a new quality is given

to the ‘second nature’ that Kaïka and Swyngedouw call ‘phantasmagoria’, which “subverts the possibility of actually

experiencing and living the desires promised by the commodity” (2000: 123). As a commodity, denuded of its

‘primal’ character, it is reified in the urban landscape. In describing the delivery of water for the first time to the

heart of Manhattan from the Croton Springs reservoir, Matthew Gandy (2002) shows how Union Square and its

fountain became a ritualized site of spectacularization of the newly minted natural product, clean delivered water.

Where before, water was sourced locally through crude technologies, it was thereafter produced with greater

mystification in the process, further abstracting nature conceptually. Union Square then was transformed as a

landscape for celebrating not only the spectacularization of nature but also of the machine for its production. The

square in a sense then became a ‘limiting machine’, continuously severing water from its source conceptually while

still producing it as a public good; material infrastructure, then, lends urban space its cultural meaning (Gandy 2005:

39). Not limited to urban utilities, early modern parks, such as Central Park, served as infrastructures for the social

reproduction and sanitization of the public by producing a spectacular ‘virgin nature’ that, in an organicist model,

were dubbed the ‘urban lungs’ of the city (Gandy 2002, Spirn 1996). The nature of produced nature in urban

amenities under early modernism therefore was one of reification for an abstracted idea of nature rather than a

concrete element of the existing, industrializing environment.

The Banal and the Hidden

While early modern phantasmagoric infrastructures—dams, fountains, parks—were celebrated and designed with

intense ornamentation and prominent locations, their products and networks were eventually routinized, and “vast

infrastructural networks gradually disappeared from view as part of the ‘taken-for-granted’ world of everyday life”

(Gandy 2005: 35). In the urban fabric and collective consciousness, this results in what Gandy (2002) calls ‘urban

symmetry’ where two halves of the urban, despite being self-reproducing, are separated but parallel whether in pipes

hidden in walls, drains buried beneath streets, or reservoirs nestled in peripheral secrecy. “It is exactly this hidden

form that renders the tense relationship between nature ad the city blurred,” and thus that limit is obscured, rather

than dissolved or overturned, further contributing “to severing the process of social transformation of nature from

the process of urbanization” (Kaïka and Swyngedouw 2000: 121). While fountains and dams abstracted that nature

from its environment as a resource, the “nature/city connection [was] still present in the old forms and flows,

demonstrating, ‘man’s’ control over nature,” but the banalization and hiding of newer infrastructure networks totally

severed that connection, further alienating the urban from the natural (Kaïka and Swyngedouw 2000: 134). Under

the project of modernization, as the networks grew in extent, density, and complexity through the urban

environment, modernism approached “the final goal of emancipation and freedom from the ‘tyranny of nature’”

(Kaïka and Swyngedouw 2000: 125), the complete solidification of an urban-nature limit. But Kaïka has noted the

goal “to do away with fear and anxiety” by segregation “actually served to deepen the very same problem it tried to

eradicate” (2005: 72). And using a concept she borrows from Freud, ‘the uncanny’, whereby “the unexpected

surfacing of typically hidden elements,” as in a water main break, “rather than being a source of fear and anxiety, [it]

has the potential to be a source of knowledge and emancipation” (72). So while modernization complexified and

intensified the urban-nature limit, it also allowed for radical, if momentary, reorientation in conceptualization.

Co-Modification Defining urban-natural space, as in the ‘environment’, is a tool for producing nature. Timothy Luke breaks this

down linguistically to show that ‘to environ’, “as a verb means to encircle, encompass, envelope, or enclose,” and as

such it is an active, projective process (1997: 1377). But a process of abstracting nature, that is commodification,

leads “to an endless ‘co-modification’ of human and nonhuman beings in both nature and culture,” defining a

process of coevolution (Luke, cited in Swyngedouw 2004: 25). Therefore, as producers of encapsulated, abstract

forms of nature, urban infrastructures and landscapes are socio-physical transformations of the urban fabric

manifesting that production and co-modification process. In short, the production of urban nature “is a microcosm

of wider tensions in urban society” (Gandy 2002: x), that is self-reinforcing once embedded into socio-material

conceptualization by transformation of the urban-natural landscape.

Dissolving the Urban-Nature Dichotomy

These conditions under modernism are elements of proof that “Nature and the world never come to us unmediated”

(Castree 1995: 38), but Castree argues that in this type of critique, too much emphasis is put on the congruent

shaping of nature by capital and that critics “have frequently not theorized the role and importance of those

produced natural environments themselves” (21). This does not remove those environments from the means of

their production, but simply adds another, more tangible, layer of analysis. Castree refers to this layer as the

‘materiality of nature’ meaning specifically, “the ontological reality of those entities we term ‘natural,’ and the active

role those entities play in making history and geography” (13). In this way, this section explores the importance not

only of the effects of the ‘urbanization of nature’ but also those of the ‘naturalization of the urban’ to posit the

necessity of a socio-material reconceptualization of a truly synthetic urban-nature that dissolves limitations imposed

by modernist ideologies. The notions of the ‘cyborg’ and the ‘hybrid’ are theorizations that reframe the social,

critical conceptions of urban-nature with the aim of engendering a subsequent material one.

Cyborgs

Donna Haraway’s ‘cyborg’, “a hybrid creature, composed of organism and nature” (1991: 1), is a key beginning for a

more nuanced understanding of nature, technology, and urbanism; but there are two particular facets to her

manifesto that are unpacked by many authors of political ecology that will be of most use. First, Haraway’s

conceptualization of the cyborg is essentially concerned with the body, its scale and interface with machinic

environments. Her concern though is a superficial one, in the literal sense. The two forms of cyborg, one of humans

and other organisms, and the other of machines, are both distinguished by the ‘guise’ they take as information

systems. Second, as Luke points out, Haraway sites the cyborg “at key breaches in the categorical containments

demarcating the boundaries between humans and animals, organisms and machines,” that were so rigorously drawn

in pre-war Modernism (1997: 1369). The cyborg can be understood then as a subtle crumbling of those binaries.

Gandy picks up on this first facet and expands its application to urban space:

“The emphasis of the cyborg on the material interface between the body and the city is perhaps most strikingly manifested in the physical infrastructure that links the human body to vast technological networks. If we understand the cyborg to be a cybernetic creation, a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban infrastructures can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems.” (2005: 28)

For Gandy, then, in addition to the cultural implications of Haraway, “[t]he figure of the cyborg is at root a spatial

metaphor” (2005: 28). Indeed infrastructures have determinant power on humans and urban space-making, hence

the budding anxiety over machines as they infiltrate and shift the nature of space around us. In this model, urban

infrastructures can be seen to operate “as a prosthetic extension to the human body” (2005: 29). With the infiltration

of the machine into the human and human space, as in the networks of nature’s production discussed above, it is not

only the material, technical, or political manifestations of a machinic environment that redefine the urbanization

process and our relationships to it, but that urban infrastructures “are also systems of representation that lend urban

space its cultural meaning” (2005: 39). Given technology or infrastructure’s mediating role, a transformed cultural

meaning for urban spaces entails, under cyborganization, the co-production of nature and the urban.

Gandy contrasts two historical conceptualizations to make this point. The first he calls the ‘organicist city’, recalling

early modernist models of the city as a closed organism undergoing linear metabolism of natural resources, while the

second, the contemporary condition, is the ‘neo-organicist city’. Whereas the material metabolism of the organicist

city produced a single, immediate, and delimited ‘hinterland’, there is now instead a ‘neurological’ construction of

networks (rather than independent organs) that produces a highly complex form of urbanization where metabolism

is fundamentally reworked as a far more complex relationship. This has significant implications for physical urban-

natural form where, “the distinction between ‘city’ and ‘non-city’ becomes extensively blurred under cyborg

urbanization to produce a tendential landscape exhibiting different forms of integration between the body,

technology and social practices” (2005: 41).

Hybrids

Exploring further the urban spatialization of the cyborg, for Erik Swyngedouw (1996; 2006), rather than cyborg

infrastructures acting as a prosthetic, they permit the city itself to be produced as a cyborg. Implicating the social to a

greater degree and downplaying the agency of the machine, he instead describes these human-infrastructure-nature

relationships as ‘hybrids’. Hybrids are not an ‘ontological strategy’ or a lens as the cyborg is for Gandy, but instead

they are actively produced. And extending from a localized bodily prosthetic, the hybrid, through its ‘neurological’

structure, “opens up a new arena for thinking and acting on the city, an arena that is neither local nor global,” where

‘ordinary’ spaces become a deeply connected weave of the two simultaneously (1996: 80).

Most significant in Swyngedouw’s method is the presumption—though underdeveloped—that the hybrid is, in

essence, a similar tool to Marx’s commodity. Both are tools for understanding the encapsulation of seemingly

disparate properties, labor and capital, and humans and machines. They each are subject to intense politicization

and contribute profoundly to the shaping of urban-nature, local and global. The success of this deepening of the

cyborg is achieved by the appropriation of truly Marxian dialectics. Whereas Haraway’s perspective of the body

posed the machine as an external thing being crudely fused onto it and Gandy saw infrastructures imposed on the

city to reconceive it as a cyborg, Swyngedouw sees the urban-nature dialectic internalized as a process within urban

space itself such that the hybrid is there from the beginning, within urbanization as a hybridized production process

(1996: 69-70). A hybrid holds both the urban and nature in tension to produce itself.

Again using a ‘neurological’ conceptualization of metabolism, the myriad conflated flows of natural resources,

capital, wastes, and labor that flow through the bundled networks, for Swyngedouw, “produce the urban as a

continuously changing socio-ecological landscape” (2006: 21), ensuring there is no delimited ‘outside’ of a

bifurcated urban-nature. “This metabolic circulation process,” one wholly different than that of the industrial

(organicist) city, “is deeply entrenched in the political-ecology of the local and national state, the international

divisions of labour and power, and in the local, regional, and global socio-natural networks and processes” (2006:

36), meaning the greater the extent and density of flows through a now ubiquitous urban-nature landscape, the

greater the influence of a given spatial configuration of urban-nature through which circuits must inevitably pass.

The hybrid then, as a co-production model, allows agency in the ‘ordinary’ spaces that connected globally as local

politico-material construction of an internalized socio-natural dialectic of infrastructure has rippling effects.

Luke then frames what remains the task at hand, “[t]he acceptance of Haraway’s world-changing cyborg fiction

signals the searching for some facts of this world change” (1997: 1369). Where the above theoretical reframing aims

at a socio-ontological reconceptualization, “[t]he recognition of the social production of nature and the city is

essential if issues of sustainability are to be combined with just and empowering urban development” (Swyngedouw

2004: 115). Thus we must go search not only for extant material evidences of hybridity and synthetic urban-natures,

hidden by modernist ideology, but also pathways toward the dissolving of urban-natural limits in the design,

construction, and production of urban-natures.

Evaluating Evidences of De-limitation of Urban-natures

Given the necessity of breaking down those hard limits in the cognitive and formal conceptualized spaces of nature

and the urban under the modernizing project, it is important to develop original alternative non-delimiting

conceptualizations. Beyond perspectives of socio-geographical criticism, there are evolving models of

conceptualization being actively deployed in the production of the urban environment. It is therefore important to

evaluate those formulae in action, assessing where some break down those modernist limits in practice and where

others, in fact, produce them in yet greater quantity, variety, or severity. From these it may be able to tease out those

methods to embrace as being resistive to the limiting project in practice to complement a critical-social perspective

that might jointly produce a reconfigured socio-material conceptualization of urban-natures. To this end, it will be

useful to examine recent practice in three facets: descriptive advocacy, urban design polemics and ideology, and the

aesthetics of constructed projects. Examined below, are an example of each facet that either are a particularly

relevant example of an evolving reconceptualization, or proclaim outright a recalibrated or resistive project for

producing urban spaces and natures.

Description: Freakologies of the LA River

The Los Angeles River has long been one of the frustrating confrontations of urbanization and nature for

modernists, and consequently also one of the most fantastical experiments for the dividing, siphoning and

evacuating, of nature from the urban. David Fletcher (2009) takes on the re-examination and re-positioning of the

river’s natures and spaces produced by modernization to advocate new approaches for dealing with the unforeseen

elements and pressures of this environment. Fletcher begins by establishing the long-held popular sentiment that

the river is “unnatural or non-existent” which has been exploited by Hollywood as a “symbol of dystopia” (36). But

foundational is the repositioning of the concept ‘river’ that he develops from concrete properties of the river itself.

“Once a meshwork of meandering river, streams, arroyos, and washes,” the river, as a concept, becomes a

superimposition of “freeways, streets, bridges, railways, power lines, cell towers, … sewage infrastructures,” as well as

water flows (36). This concretized repositioning is then spiraled back up as an abstract lens for the re-

conceptualization of urban ecology. But his urban-natural conflation is not only a visual metaphor for flow, but a re-

framing of a very necessary ecology for the survival of both. The aqueous flow managed by the storm infrastructure

and vital to the river’s plant growth, he shows, is dictated by the effluent of three sewage treatment plants (41). This

nutrient-enriched water allows for the growth of ‘the Sludge Mat’, a vast area algal growth in the lower part of the

river that, combined with other advantageous human influences such as plastic bags that accumulate as a substrate

for other organic growth (42), creates “the most biologically productive stopover for migrating shorebirds in

Southern California” (44). He therefore develops an expanded notion of ecology, “one that lives off human excess,”

(50) and celebrates its potential, the only obstacle being, as he presents it, the misunderstanding of the public.

Though ‘freakish,’ he assumes a definition of ecology that is equalizing for its expanded membership. Fletcher tips

his hat to the popular desire for ‘virgin’, bucolic nature by terming those expanded members as ‘freaks’, but insists

that the need if but a mental reconceptualization, “embracing freakology rather than bucology … to [understand]

the contemporary river, its watershed, and our place within it” (46).

Despite his seemingly radical revisioning, Fletcher relies on common tropes of modernist ‘urban symmetry’ in order

to promote a more fluid urban-nature. Similar to the loaded term ‘freak,’ he refers to “non-natural factors” that

must be included into the expanded, dynamic repositioned ecology, which include “urbanization, global warming,

and the heat-island effect” (46). Though an argument could be made for them as facilitating communicability in

order to make a greater claim, the delimiting of an outside of nature or the urban has clear effects on his

repositioning. So despite a claim for the redefinition of the concept ‘river’ by “expanding our idea of ‘nature’ to

include the parrot, the shopping cart, the weed, the sludge mat, and the stormdrain apartment” (50), Fletcher in fact

maintains enough urban-natural division that there is not an erasure of the limits of each but a replacement of one

by the other. Fletcher recalls that in an ‘unurbanized past’ the river ran intermittently with the seasons, “but now

effluent and urban runoff allow it to flow more consistently, year round,” and as a result “it is by many definitions

more of a ‘river’ today that it ever was” (40-41). Re-orienting our mentality of a river is not, therefore, toward a

greater project for the symbiosis of urban-nature, but toward the goal of relieving our collective anxieties over its

gratuitous cleaving apart in the space of the viaduct.

Polemics: Landscape Urbanism

“Airstrips, information centers, public performance spaces, internet and worldwide web access all point to a redefinition of received ideas about parks, nature, and recreation, in a 21st century setting where everything is ‘urban,’ even in the middle of the wilderness.’” – Bernard Tschumi, Downsview Park project statement (cited in Waldheim 2006: 51)

The desire to create urban landscapes that equally describe the conditions of contemporary nature and urbanization

is a key purported goal of the polemical project of ‘landscape urbanism’. To this end, Charles Waldheim and James

Corner reject the binary opposition of nature and ‘the city’ (citing Ian McHarg), pastoralism (Olmsted), and “a

supposedly autonomous ‘nature’ conceived to exist a priori, outside of human agency or cultural construction,”

making the case that such conceptualization are “naïve or irrelevant in the face of global urbanization” (Waldheim

2006: 38). Instead they advocate a “landscape conflated with a pervasive ubiquitous urbanism” (51). However,

despite Tschumi’s listing of technical innovations as a representation of the remaking of nature by way of the urban,

their logic is not dialectical; nature for them is crafted to fit pervasive urbanism. It is not pervasive itself, forcing a

naturalizing of the urban. This reformulation for nature is akin to a re-molding or stretching of an antiquated

nature to interface only formally to the shapes of the ‘networked’ or ‘post-industrial’ city. This becomes clear as

Waldheim, falling back on tropes of nature, boasts of the “efficacy of landscape as a remediating practice—a salve for

the wounds of the industrial age” (44, emphasis added). But, there is a reformulation of nature here, one that is two-

fold: nature as a cultural descriptor and as a tool for urbanization. Both are consciously acknowledged in landscape

urbanism. In the former, nature is used—only metaphorically—to describe the contemporary city which “absent

intervention by designers and without the benefit of planning, [has] been found to emulate natural systems” (43),

but without defining that nature, leaving only a superficial assumption. As a tool, nature, mobilized as a landscape,

is “the medium through which to conceive the renovation of the post-industrial city” (48). Landscape is deployed as

needed as a “matrix of connective tissue that organizes not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic processes

and events that move through them” (Wall 1999: 233). Similar to its use as the ‘urban lungs’ of the city for Olmsted,

nature is a tool for working on the city, rather than a reworking of ‘the urban’ as a subject.

As a descriptor and a tool, the urban-nature limits are redrawn. Once the limit of the urban was drawn in the field

of nature and reinforced by the dichotomous exceptionalism of Central Park, the limit of nature is now drawn in the

field of pervasive urbanism. There is however a coordinate shift in the political economy of nature in landscape

urbanism. Where once nature was abstracted for social reproduction, as in the water of Union Square’s fountain or

the constructed nature of leisure in Central Park, it is mobilized here as landscape to facilitate accumulation by

“articulating relations between urban infrastructure, public events, and indeterminate urban futures for large post-

industrial sites” (Waldheim 2006: 40). Indeed, there is a “conflation, integration, and fluid exchange between

(natural) environmental and (engineered) infrastructural systems” (43), that jointly produces “the organization of

urban settlement and its inevitably indeterminate economic, political, and social futures” (39). Though Waldheim

“reject[s] the camouflaging of ecological systems within pastoral images of ‘nature’,” there is an inevitable reification

of urban infrastructures, the ‘limiting machines’, and their divisive process. The reorganization of urbanization to

facilitate production using those conflated natural systems correlates with the first of Nina-Marie Lister’s (2007) dual

strategies of ‘ecological design’ and ‘designer ecology’. In the second, nature is appropriated only as an imitation for

its consumable comforting aesthetic. Mobilizing both, Waldheim extols the human-designed display of nature in

the curating of mussels and birds by West 8’s ‘Shell Project’ that “organizes an ecology of natural selection and

renders it for public perception via the automobile” (45-46), lamenting that modernist scenic parkways only

spectacularized nature without intervening. Again, in spite of the dissolving of the modernist urban-nature limit in

nature’s ‘conflation’ with urban systems, that limit is reproduced in multiple, complex ways of abstracting nature as

organization and product.

Aesthetics: The High Line Much of the very original design intentions and aesthetics of the High Line park project are well known, and its

popularity is widely cited as evidence of success. Despite the celebration of its post-industrial past in the project’s

preserved, constructed, and botanic ‘second nature’ aesthetics, the conceptualization of the nature currently

deployed on the site has not been made clear. As a site, the elevated train right-of-way is seen as both the means of

production of that ‘second nature’ as well as the platform for its public exhibition; thus the separation of those very

urban means from that nature are broken down and even celebrated. In this way, there is an obvious parallel with

the phantasmagoria of modernist-era heroic infrastructures which produce a commodified (second) nature. While

the High Line does in fact expose the means of production of the unique weed and wild flower ecologies in the

découpage of preserved train rails, this is a reification of a historical process that is presently being deployed for a

new production of ‘second nature’ for popular consumption. The ecologies on display are in fact a result of a long

process of selective disinvestment in urban infrastructures throughout the post-war period, which was reversed

when investment became no longer possible elsewhere and thus the space was reappropriated for expanded

accumulation through dispossession to facilitate gentrification and speculative luxury real estate investment. This is

the means of production for the ‘second nature’ on display today. Again the once severe urban-nature limit is

subverted, only to be re-organized in more complex ways.

That nature, though not claiming a primal origin, is therefore fetishized in its severance from this obscured

production process; fetishization takes various physical forms in the project as well. Most notable are the various

ways in which that nature and humans are separated in the design. The display platform perches in the sky, above

the everyday space of the street; only tree tops and dangling vines give hints of the landscape above. Elevator access

permits a particular removed relationship to the space. Although the park’s pavement fades into the planting areas,

inviting connection, long swaths of the path are lined simply with chain link fence, giving the impression more of a

zoo for ‘second nature’. As the railed path narrows to an amusement park queue, it rises above the landscape and

periodically separates into viewing platforms for its contemplation, abstracting yet further that human relationship

to one of consumptive spectatorship. With consumption, the inevitable questions arise: of what? by whom? to what

end? The corridor treatment of the space mimics that of a museum space; there is little to do and but few spaces for

activities, other than linear flâneurie and passive enjoyment of curated ecologies. The conspicuous consumption is

evident both in visitors, locals and tourists, and in the residents of the luxury hotels and condominiums hovering

above. The project, through its abstracted, spectacularized nature becomes again an infrastructure, now for

speculative accumulation, a green spine onto which real estate attaches. The separation of the natures from visitors

legitimates their consumption, which, still further legitimates the conspicuous consumption of luxury space.

However, there are points of resistance in the conspicuousness and spectatorship, particularly in what Kaïka calls the

urban uncanny. While the gallery layout projects nature as spectacle there are also periodic perversions of this

framing where the city is looked back upon, but in its most mundane streetscape scenes rather than its heroic

skylines. The uncanny is also found in the verbose ramblings and scoldings of the park’s water fountains that create

unease simply in their verbal communication but also their criticality of wasteful water consumption. Both new

urban-nature limits and criticisms are therefore produced in the easily obscured infrastructures under a still limited

and limiting urban-nature conceptualization.

Conclusion

While there is indeed a re-formulation of the social and material production of the urban-nature limit, both the

conceptualizations being advanced by theoretical repositioning and practical claims and aesthetics fall short of an

elimination of the deleterious modernist limit, often simply displacing or complexifying it. However each also

advances incremental tools for realizing a more hybrid conceptualization, but independently. The combination of

methods may together provide for a more balanced model of urban-natural production, allowing a more complete

addressing of sustainability for urban-nature landscapes.

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