.

''City and Nature"

Anne Whiston Spirn

Editors' Introduction

Although landscape architects and park designers have long sought to bring nature into cities, this need was
Often ignored by developers and the nascent city planning profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Engineers and developers filled in or paved over streams, wetlands, and shorelines to make way for urban
'expansion. Highways or railroad lines cut many cities off from their waterfronts. Hills were leveled and native
vegetation removed. Landowners platted lots and built roads without considering the implications for wildlife,
native plant species, or human recreation. With the advent of central heating, electric lighting, air-conditioning,
lcin~-distance food transport, and huge dams and pipelines bringing water from hundreds of miles away, urban
residents became well insulated from nature in all its forms, and even from the limitations of climate and local
geography.
To be sure, historically urban elites have at times created parks for the benefit of city residents. Central
Park in New York City is one of the most famous examples. Often these bits of urban nature have been designed
in a pastoral English landscape tradition or more manicured continental style. In European cities, estates belong-
. ing to royalty or the nobility have sometimes been turned into public green spaces, as well as lands once
occupied by city walls or defensive fortifications, while city squares, cemeteries, the occasional botanical
garden, and the remnant "commons" of former grazing land at the center of many New England towns provided
green oases within American metropolises. On the suburban fringe twentieth-century developers at times sought
to create garden suburbs emulating English country estates. But these amenities did not fundamentally alter
the fact that as cities and suburbs grew, their residents were increasingly living in a manufactured world with
very little connection to natural ecosystems.
· - Only with the environmental revolution of the 1960s did activists and policy-makers come to think more
systematically about integrating urban development with the natural world, as well as protecting human beings
from some of the worst abuses of urban environments. Efforts to restore damaged natural systems within
cities gained speed in the 1980s and 1990s, and new fields such as landscape ecology provided conceptual
tools for thinking about how reconstructed ecosystems might function. Communities experimented with water-
shed planning, citizens groups worked to restore creeks and rivers, and use of native, climate-appropriate
species soared within landscape architecture.
One of the classic pieces first calling attention to systematic relationships between nature and cities was
Anne Whiston Spirn's book The Granite Garden (N~w York: Basic Books, 1984). While McHarg had focused
on the interaction of new suburban or regional deveiopment with natural landscapes, Spirn looked at nature
Within densely built cities themselves. A professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, she
analyzed the role of different natural entities such as soil, water, wind, and light within urban landscapes,
II9 ANNE WHISTON SPIRN

and argued that the city should be seen as part of nature, not as something existing outside of it. If nature is huma1
welcomed into the city, in her view, a delightful urban environment can be created; if nature is ignored, disaster ronmE
may result. Michael Hough, a landscape architect at the University of Toronto, took a very similar approach of yea
in his books City Form and Natural Processes: Toward an Urban Vernacular (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, every
1984) and Cities and Natural Process (New York: Routledge, 1995). As with McHarg's writings, Spirn's Thl
eloquent, passionate style inspired many in environmental planning and landscape architecture professions whole
who have since worked out specific ways to implement her philosophy. tionsl
for thE
Unfor1
nature
the ci~
Nature pervades the city, forging bonds between the share our habitat. Nature in the city is the power- the tic<
city and the air, earth, water, and living organisms ful force that can shake the earth and cause it to city is
within and around it. In themselves, the forces of slide, heave, or crumple. It is a broad flash of built. 1
nature are neither benign nor hostile to humankind. exposed rock strata on a hillside, the overgrown many1
Acknowledged and harnessed, they represent a outcrops in an abandoned quarry, the millions of air anc
powerful resource for shaping a beneficial urban organisms cemented in fossiliferous limestone of more
habitat; ignored or subverted, they magnify prob- a downtown building. It is rain and the rushing crease
lems that have plagued cities for centuries, such sound of underground rivers buried in storm andm
as floods and landslides, poisoned air and water. sewers. It is water from a faucet, delivered by ization
Unfortunately, cities have mostly neglected and pipes from some outlying river or reservoir, then Moder
rarely exploited the natural forces within them. used and washed away into the sewer, returned to essenc
More is known about urban nature today than the waters of river and sea. Nature in the city is an except
ever before; over the past two decades, natural evening breeze, a corkscrew eddy swirling down new c1
scientists have amassed an impressive body of the face of a building, the sun and the sky. Nature that is
knowledge about nature in the city. Yet little of this in the city is dogs and cats, rats in the basement, haveb
information has been applied directly to molding pigeons on the sidewalks, raccoons in culverts, be tree
the form of the city - the shape of its buildings and and falcons crouched on skyscrapers. It is the con-
parks, the course of its roads, and the pattern of sequence of a complex interaction between the
the whole. A small fraction of that knowledge has multiple purposes and activities of human beings
been employed in establishing regulations to and other living creatures and of the natural
improve environmental quality, but these have processes that govern the transfer of energy, the
commonly been perceived as restrictive and punit- movement of air, the erosion of the earth, and
ive, rather than as posing opportunities for new the hydrologic cycle. The city is part of nature.
urban forms. Regulations have also proven vul- Nature is a continuum, with wilderness at one
nerable to shifts in public policy, at the mercy of pole and the city at the other. The same natural
the political concerns of the moment, whereas the processes operate in the wilderness and in the
physical form of the city endures through genera- city. Air, however contaminated, is always a mix-
tion after generation of politicians. ture of gasses and suspended particles. Paving and
[ ... ] building stone are composed of rock, and they
The city is a granite garden, composed of many affect heat gain and water runoff just as exposed
smaller gardens, set in a garden world. Parts of the rock surfaces do anywhere. Plants, whether exotic
granite garden are cultivated intensively, but the or native, invariably seek a combination of light,
greater part is unrecognized and neglected. To water, and air to survive. The city is neither wholly
the idle eye, trees and parks are the sole remnants natural nor wholly contrived. It is not "unnatural"
of nature in the city. But nature in the city is far but, rather, a transformation of "wild" nature by
more than trees and gardens, and weeds in humankind to serve its own neeqs, just as agri-
sidewalk cracks and vacant lots. It is the air we cultural fields are managed for food production
breathe, th!'! earth we stand on, the water we drink and forests for timber. Scarcely a spot on the
and excrete, and the organisms with which we earth, however remote, is free from the impact of
 "CITY AND NATURE" 1nJ
If nature is human activity. The human needs and the envi- related phenomena arising from common human
ed, disaster ronmental issues that arise from them are thousands activities, exacerbated by a disregard for the pro-
tr approach of years old, as old as the oldest city, repeated in cesses of nature. Nature has been seen as a super-
td Reinhold, every generation, in cities on every continent. ficial embellishment, as a luxury, rather than as
tgs, Spirn's The realization that nature is ubiquitous, a an essential force that permeates the city. Even those
professions whole that embraces the city, has poweJful implica- who have sought to introduce nature to the city in
tions for how the city is built and maintained and the form of parks and gardens have frequently
for the health, safety, and welfare of every resident. viewed the city as something foreign to nature, have
Unfortunately, tradition has set the city against seen themselves as bringing a piece of nature to

I
nature, and nature against the city. The belief that the city.
the city is an entity apart from nature and even anti- To seize the opportunities inherent in the city's
the power- thetical to it has dominated the way in which the natural environment, to see beyond short-term
cause it to city is perceived and continues to affect how it is costs and benefits, to perceive the consequences
td flash of built. This attitude has aggravated and even created of the .myriad, seemingly unrelated actions that
overgrown many of the city's environmental problems: poisoned make up daily city life, and to coordinate thousands
millions of air and water; depleted or irretrievable resources; of incremental improvements, a fresh attitude to the
nestone of more frequent and more destructive floods; in- city and the molding of its form is necessary. The
he rushing creased energy demands and higher construction city must be recognized as part of nature and
in storm and maintenance costs than existed prior to urban- designed accordingly. The city, the suburbs, and
!livered by ization; and, in many cities, a pervasive ugliness. the countryside must be viewed as a single, evolv-
!rvoir, then Modem urban problems are no different, in ing system within nature, as must every individual
returned to essence, from those that plagued ancient cities, park and building within that larger whole. The social
e city is an except in degree, in the toxicity and persistence of value of nature must be recognized and its power
rling down new contaminants, and in the extent of the earth harnessed, rather than resisted. Nature in the
;ky. Nature that is now urbanized. As cities grow, these issues city must be cultivated, like a garden, rather than
basement, have becorne more pressing. Yet they continue to ignored or subdued.
n culverts, be treated as isolated phenomena, rather than as
is the con-
~tween the
nan beings
he natural
mergy, the
earth, and
f nature.
tess at one
me natural
md in the
·ays a mix-
Paving and
. and they
is exposed
ther exotic
m of light,
:her wholly
'unnatural"
nature by
1st as agri-
production
10t on the
! impact of