The Dictionary of Human Geography

Comp. by: LElumalai Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 9781405132879_4_U Date:31/3/09
Time:21:34:50 Filepath://ppdys1108/BlackwellCup/00_Blackwell/00_3B2/Gregory-
9781405132879/appln/3B2/revises/9781405132879_4_U.3d

class;housing studies). Their professional

norms and, in some cases, personal bias con-

dition the access of certain social groups (often

defined by race) to housing through

decision-makingand allocation practices –

withholding or providing erroneous informa-

tion, differential pricing, selective advertising

andredlining. The work of Pahl (1975) and

others spurred much research, while recent

work in the American context (Yinger, 1995)

suggests that despite legal restrictions, non-

whites continue to face discrimination in the

housing market. em

Suggested reading

Pahl (1975).

urban nature A combination of seemingly

contradictory terms: conventionally, where

there is thecity, there cannot benature.In

the past, urban life was decidedly built in con-

tradistinction to rural and agricultural forms of

life. Nature, like ‘uncivilized’ forms of life, was

banned within the walls of cities.urbaniza-

tion, in fact, has often been understood as a

process of human distancing from first nature

(Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]). In cities, nature

became a residual or artificial category limited

to parks,zoosand urban – mostly ornamental

• gardens. Still, twentieth-century urban the-
  ory was strongly influenced by the ways in
  which nature was understood by modern sci-
  ence. Thechicago schoolof urban sociology
  organized thinking on social structures and
  processes around notions taken from evolu-
  tionary biology and ecology (see human
  ecology). Thesemetaphorswere so strongly
  criticized by human geographers and urban
  sociologists (Harvey, 1973; Castells, 1977;
  Gottdiener, 1985) that it became extraordin-
  arily difficult to conceptualize ’urban’ and
  ’nature’ together. The impasse was broken in
  the 1990s, when scholars inpolitical ecol-
  ogybegan to question the non-urban focus of
  their field and its search for ‘nature’ outside of
  cities. Some urban political ecologists began to
  question the non-urban focus of their field,
  which looked for nature outside of cities. The
  new field ofurban ecologystudies the spe-
  cific bio-physical natures found in urban set-
  tings (Breuste, Feldman and Uhlmann, 1998).
  Planners and designers have taken nature into
  consideration when altering urban form
  (Hough, 2004). Urban social geographers at
  the same time began to take a fresh look at
  urban nature. Signature studies of individual
  cities such as Chicago (Cronon, 1991), Los
  Angeles (Davis, 1998) and New York City

(Gandy, 2002) placed nature in a continuum

of societal relationships rather than separate

from it.social justiceconcerns were widened

to include issues of urban environmental

justice (Harvey, 1996; Bullard, 2000). By

the mid-1990s, the notion of ‘zo ̈opolis’ was

added to acknowledge the presence of animals

inside cities (Emel and Wolch, 1998; see

animals). Going even further, urban geog-

raphers have now begun to speak about ‘trans-

human urbanism’ to express the collapsing of

boundaries between human and non-human

nature(s) in cities (Braun, 2005). Originally

used in the context of studies on urbansus-

tainability(Newcombe, Kalma and Aston,

1978), the concept of ‘urban metabolism’

has now become central to critical explor-

ations of urban nature (Heynen, Kaika and

Swyngedouw, 2006). Urban political ecology

in both the globalsouthand the (post-)indus-

trial northhas begun to acknowledge the

importance of thinking urban nature as part

of, rather than different from, social and cul-

tural processes in cities. rk

Suggested reading

Desfor and Keil (2004); Kaika (2005); Keil

(2003, 2006); Swyngedouw (2004).

urban origins Most archaeologists, geog-

raphers and historians recognize five distinct-

ive cultural hearthsin which cities first

emerged:

. Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) (3500bce);
. the Nile Valley (Egypt) (3000bce);
. the Indus Valley (modern India/Pakistan)
(2300bce);
. the Huan He (Yellow River) Valley (China)
(1500bce); and
. Meso-America (600bce).

The sites and locations differ, but so too did

the process. In Mesopotamia urban trajector-

ies were long drawn-out, for example, whereas

in much of the Indus valley the transition to a

distinctively ‘urban phase’ was much more

rapid (Possehl, 1990). Gordon Childe (1946,

1950) claimed that the formation of cities was

so dramatic that it constituted a veritable

urban revolution, whereas Lewis Mumford

(1963) insisted that early cities emerged

through the concentration and condensation

of cultural forms that pre-existed their crystal-

lization and so preferred to speak of anurban

implosion.

There has also been a lively debate over the

importance of religion: Mumford insisted

that it was ‘only for their gods’ that people

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_U Final Proof page 788 31.3.2009 9:34pm

URBAN NATURE