The design of Central Park in New York is
usually taken to be paradigmatic of the
nineteenth-century city garden model of the park,
but the point is that Olmstead’s design is part of
a larger aesthetic of nature that was to be incor-
porated into the later movement for national
parks in the United States and elsewhere. Parks
and moral spaces are directly linked here in the
urban geopolitics of policing and controlling
specific areas in a city and in the assumptions
about hygiene that underpin both the rationales
for ‘green spaces’ and police discourses of
security (Herbert, 1997). In both cases the
assumption of nature as effectively devoid of
humans was important. In the garden parks
people visited but did not live; likewise in nature
‘reserves’, game parks and national parks.
Human habitation is precisely what parks do not
have. This argument can be extended to colonial
practices also where native inhabitants were
excluded from traditional lands to set them aside
as game reserves for affluent tourists. Moving
homeless people out of urban parks follows the
same general pattern (Smith, 1997).
In this sense, might we read the ‘problem’ of
dispossessed peoples destroying marginal
environments in the ‘south’ as being analogous
to the problems of homeless peoples in American
cities? In both cases marginal populations violate
the spatial codes of empty parks and orderly
landscapes. But as conservation practitioners
have learned to their cost over many decades, the
strategy of drawing distinct boundaries around
areas slated for preservation in hopes of preserv-
ing ‘nature’ intact is usually doomed to failure
because ecological processes are not limited to
such bounded spaces (Botkin, 1990). But nature
and culture are not so easily separated; their
interconnections are unavoidable, no matter what
conventions cartographers use to render these
landscapes. Environmental matters are about
interaction and connection, not about discrete
places and dividing lines, whether these are pro-
perty lines, park boundaries or state borders.
The aesthetics of planning and urban parks are
ones of order and symmetry, nature controlled
and tamed prior to its reorganization and presen-
tation in a fashion conducive to providing
the benefits of ‘nature’ to urban populations.
Gardens and interpretation centers for parks
provide orderly landscapes in which the wild
chaos of nature is controlled and presented in a
manner that acts to distance the park visitor from
that nature. The ‘experience’ of nature is one of
separation and the production of ‘experience’
rather than an unmediated encounter. In DerekGregory’s (1994) terms, nature is produced as an
exhibition for modern consumers. Ironically of
course such manufactured experiences have
value not only to the customer of the park, but to
the preservation of the environment where igno-
rant urban dwellers are kept off the most easily
disrupted ecological spaces.
The importance of Neil Smith’s (1990) analysis
of capitalism as simultaneously producing nature
and space becomes especially clear in the context
of thinking about environmental matters at the
largest scales. Historically the largest changes
humanity caused in the biosphere were matters
related to agriculture and ‘clearing’ land
(Diamond, 1997). The ecological changes of
habitat were obviously also enhanced by hunting
practices. Capitalism has furthered these
processes of habitat change through the acceler-
ated commodification of numerous facets of
nature and the expansion of the system through
colonialism and subsequently globalization.
State boundaries at the largest scale have
enclosed ‘nature’ and facilitated its transforma-
tion into ‘property’. Property has in turn been
cleared to ‘improve’ the land and make it ready
to produce commodities for the cities. Rural and
urban are profoundly interconnected even as the
powerful rhetoric of such places obscures these
connections.
Henri Lefevre (1991) notes this cartography of
urban and rural at the scale of the French state
which links directly once again to matters of
geopolitics. Writing in the 1970s he noted that
there were two maps of France: ‘From Berre-
l’Étang to Le Havre via the valleys of the Rhône
(the great Delta), the Saône and the Seine, this
stripe represents a narrow over-industrialized
and over-urbanized zone which relegates the rest
of dear old France to the realm of underdevelop-
ment and “touristic” potential’ (1991: 84). But
Lefevre notes that these areas are at once places
where historic authenticity is coded for the
visitors’ edification and also places where the
military has appropriated large territories for its
purposes. This division of landscape is not
unique to France. Whether it is the remote lands
of Labrador where NATO planes disrupt the
caribou herds, the glens of the highlands of
Scotland where RAF Tornados practice low level
flying over hiking trails, or the military destruc-
tion of the supposedly empty desert of ‘Marlboro
country’ in the United States (Davis, 1993), such
hinterlands are at once nature ‘reserves’ and the
training grounds for the sophisticated technolo-
gies of contemporary geopolitical power
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