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"Gandy, Matthew"
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The Fabric of Space
Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood. Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.
eBook
Natura urbana : ecological constellations in urban space
\"A study of urban nature that draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought. Postindustrial transitions and changing cultures of nature have produced an unprecedented degree of fascination with urban biodiversity. The \"other nature\" that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours of metropolitan nature, is not the poor relation of rural flora and fauna. Indeed, these islands of biodiversity underline the porosity of the distinction between urban and rural. In Natura Urbana, Matthew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity, through the lens of urban ecology and the parallel study of diverse cultures of nature at a global scale. Gandy examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Gandy's fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether \"urban political ecology,\" broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences, and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.\"--Publisher's website.
BOOK
Urban atmospheres
What is an urban atmosphere? How can we differentiate an ‘atmosphere’ from other facets of urban consciousness and experience? This essay explores some of the wider cultural, political, and philosophical connotations of atmospheres as a focal point for critical reflections on space and subjectivity. The idea of an ‘affective atmosphere’ as a distinctive kind of mood or shared corporeal phenomenon is considered in relation to recent developments in phenomenology, extended conceptions of agency, and new understandings of materialism. The essay draws in particular on the changing characteristics of air and light to reflect on different forms of sensory experience and their wider cultural and political connotations. The argument highlights some of the tensions and anomalies that permeate contemporary understandings of urban atmospheres.
Journal Article
The fly that tried to save the world: Saproxylic geographies and other-than-human ecologies
The discovery of a rare fly in a North London cemetery marks my entry point into a wider reflection on the value and significance of urban biodiversity. Using different indices of ecological endangerment, along with a critical reading of new materialist insights, this paper explores the cultural, political, and scientific significance of saproxylic (rotten wood) invertebrate communities in an urban context. The paper brings the fields of urban ecology and post-humanism into closer dialogue to illuminate aspects to urban nature that have not been systematically explored within existing analytical frameworks. We consider a series of intersecting worlds, both human and non-human, as part of a glimpse into saproxylic dimensions to urban nature under a putative transition to a new geo-environmental epoch.
Journal Article
Marginalia: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Urban Wastelands
Wastelands are a characteristic feature of many urban and industrial landscapes. Although the term wasteland has become widely subsumed within various utilitarian discourses concerning the redevelopment of ostensibly empty or unproductive spaces, the idea encompasses a multiplicity of meanings, material origins, and ecological characteristics. This article considers these anomalous spaces of urban nature as an interdisciplinary terrain that extends from renewed interest in urban biodiversity to alternative conceptions of landscape authenticity. It is suggested that a more theoretically nuanced and historically grounded conception of the intersections between critical cultural discourses and recent advances in urban ecology might provide a useful counterpoint to narrowly utilitarian approaches to urban nature.
Journal Article
Negative Luminescence
The increasingly pervasive phenomenon of light pollution spans several different fields of concern, including the loss of the night sky, energy wastage, and the effects of artificial light on circadian rhythms and nocturnal ecology. Although the scale of the problem has grown significantly in recent decades, the underlying dynamics remain only partially understood beyond the identification of specific technological pathways such as the rise of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or the capitalist transformation of the nocturnal realm. It is suggested that current approaches to the study of light, including the identification of \"urban atmospheres,\" the elaboration of existing approaches to urban ecology, or the extension of \"smart city\" type discourses, do not capture the full complexity of the politics of light under late modernity.
Journal Article
From urban ecology to ecological urbanism: an ambiguous trajectory
The term 'ecology', which first emerged in relation to the biological sciences in the 19th century, has subsequently undergone a series of conceptual permutations in an urban context. Existing tensions around the definition of 'the city' as an object of analysis have become further complicated by the increasing deployment of ecological metaphors in urban design and related fields. It is suggested that the limitations of urban ecology, as a coherent approach for urban analysis or intervention, stem from the dynamic, interdependent and historically contested characteristics of urban nature and the ambiguous dimensions to ecology as a leitmotif for urban politics.
Journal Article
Planning, Anti-planning and the Infrastructure Crisis Facing Metropolitan Lagos
Many of the 'mega cities' of the global South face an escalating crisis in the adequate provision of basic services such as water, housing and mass transit systems. Lagos—the largest city in sub-Saharan Africa—exemplifies many of these challenges but has tended to be viewed within a narrow analytical frame. In this essay, 'exceptionalist' perspectives on the African city are eschewed in favour of an analysis which frames the experience of Lagos within a wider geopolitical arena of economic instability, petro-capitalist development and regional internecine strife. An historical perspective is developed in order to reveal how structural factors operating through both the colonial and post-colonial periods have militated against any effective resolution to the city's worsening infrastructure crisis. It is concluded that a workable conception of the public realm must form an integral element in any tentative steps towards more progressive approaches to urban policy-making in the post-Abacha era and the return to civilian rule.
Journal Article