City of Flows

Modernity, Nature, and the City

Maria Kaika

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781136797651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Conservation et Protection de l'Envronnement

Typically, cities and nature are perceived as geographic opposites, cities being manufactured social creations, and nature being outside of human construction. Through a historical geography of water in the modern city, Kaika shows that this is not the case. Rather, nature and the modern city are fully intertwined, with cities integrating nature at

Part I

CHAPTER 1

Preface: Visions of Modernization

Ultimately, the dam had a deep consciousness of its place in the world! It was well aware of the fact that it was a fatal entity, a dividing presence. That’s why it showed itself off the way it did that night in front of the engineer’s eyes.

S. Plaskovitis, The Dam (1961)¹

When I was a child, the factory where my father worked organized an excursion for the employees and their families. I was promised we would go on a trip out of the city, into nature and the countryside. On arrival—and much to my surprise—I found that, instead of the beauties of nature, it was in fact a big dam and reservoir construction that we were taken to see. We spent the whole day by the dam, marvelling at the power of technology and the ability of humankind to control the flow of nature’s water. These trips to the dams were very popular in the 1970s. They were pilgrimages to the revered shrines of technology that displayed humankind’s power to transform nature through progress and technology. By visiting the modern shrines en masse, people became witnesses to the successful outcome of modernity’s Promethean project to tame nature. The remarkable domination of nature and of the landscape to which these technological shrines testified remained inscribed in my memory. In their strange, assertive kind of beauty, they did not seem to belong to either nature or the city. To me, there seemed to be no connection between these proud deities and my everyday life, my home, my city; no connection between the tamed still waters resting at the foot of the dam and water swirling wild at my command through the hose in our back yard. The dam was an elaborate human construction, out there in the wilderness, commanding water to stop flowing, while the flow of water in my home was a natural and simple thing: I simply had to turn a tap or press a switch to satisfy my needs. Similarly, the lights of my city—which gave me a sense of the familiar and homely as soon as I saw them flickering on our way back from the long dam trips—were part of the glamour of the city, and of the coziness of my home, and had nothing to do with nature, which remained dark, silent, and wild.

However, I started reflecting on the connection between the dam and my home when, due to a drought in the early 1990s, our home tap refused to provide its services as expected. We were told that this was the outcome of unprecedented low water levels in the city’s main reservoir, which had dropped to the point of revealing the village that had been inundated by the dam. I was suddenly forced to realize that the flow of water into our kitchen and bathroom was not natural at all; that water reached our home after having traveled for miles, through an intricate set of technological networks that transformed it from a natural element into purified, commodified, drinking water. The specter of the drought made me reconsider what I had been taking for granted: namely, the naturalness of the delivery of goods into the domestic bliss of my home, and the clear-cut conceptual separation between my home, my city, and nature. The drought revealed (by disrupting it) the continuous flow of natural elements (water, electricity, gas, etc.) from the countryside into the city and finally into the modern home. What I used to perceive as a compartmentalized world, consisting of neatly and tightly sealed, autonomous “space envelopes” (the home, the city, and nature) was, in fact, a messy socio-spatial continuum.

This book is an attempt to unfold this continuum.

First, I attempt to decipher the historical geographical process through which modernity discursively constructed the modern city and the modern home as autonomous “space envelopes” independent from natural and social processes. Modernity here is understood as a programmatic vision for social change and progress, linked to industrialization and capitalist expansion, and in effect as an ideology for human emancipation. Although the origin and periodization of Modernity and modernization are a source of great dispute in academic literature,² for the purposes of this book modernization is understood as the ongoing process that originated with the Enlightenment, but which was realized in the economic, political, and everyday spheres only after industrialization and the expansion of the capitalist world market. The analysis in the book unravels the “Promethean Project”³ of modernity, i.e., the historical geographical process that started with industrialization and urbanization and aimed at taming and controlling nature through technology, human labor, and capital investment. The same process aspired to rendering modern cities autonomous and independent from nature’s whims. This project transformed socio-natural landscapes across the world and disrupted the preexisting ontological categories of “nature” and “the city”.

Second, the analysis juxtaposes Modernity, as a meticulous planning and programmatic vision, with Modernization as a transient process of “creative destruction” whereby any planned change is mutated inevitably at the moment of its realization, via its interaction with material, cultural, social, economic, and political processes in place. I use this dialectic between clear programmatic visions and complex historical geographical processes to analyze the materialization of modernity’s Promethean project. I argue that, although the programming vision was to render cities independent from nature’s processes, the materialization of this vision was predicated upon establishing intricate networks and flows of natural elements, social power relations and capital investment cycles, which, in fact, not only did not separate nature from the city, but instead wove them together more closely into a socio-spatial continuum. The modern city and the modern home appear only to function autonomously and independently from natural and social processes, because the flow of natural elements, social relations, and money that support their function remain fetishised (in the case of social relations) or visually severed (in the case of technology networks).

Finally, the book brings to the foreground the fetishised social relations of production and the hidden material networks and flows that urbanize nature. By doing so, it asserts the material, social and historical continuity between nature, the modern city, and the modern home. To this end, it embarks on a historical geographical analysis of the urbanization of water in Western metropolises, drawing mainly on material from London and Athens. Using water as a vehicle, the book follows its flow from nature to the modern city and into the modern home, and explores the margins, outside (dams, reservoirs, etc.) and underneath (networks, pipelines, etc.) the visible and familiar spaces of the modern city and the modern home. The fluid character of water, and its primary importance in the creation of modern cities, permits us to visualize and literally trace the dynamic process of the transformation of nature as it moves to the modern metropolis and into the modern home. Baring the flow of water between the natural, the urban, and the domestic sphere reveals that nature and the city are not separate entities or autonomous “space envelopes,” but hybrids, neither purely human-made nor purely natural; outcomes of the same socio-spatial process of the urbanization of nature. Water itself is also recounted as a hybrid. As it flows from spaces of production to spaces of consumption, it undergoes changes in its physical, socio-political and cultural character. When it reaches our faucet in the form of potable water it is neither purely natural nor purely a human construction.

The periodization of the analysis in the book follows three main phases in modernity’s Promethean project, which go hand in glove with industrial growth, capital expansion, and the production of modern cities:⁴

Modernity’s Nascent Promethean Project (early 19th century): The industrial city experiences deteriorating social and environmental conditions, and becomes “the city of dreadful death”. Urban rivers become a source of disease and death, the Thames becomes the “Great Stink” of London. Nature seems to be uncontrolled and undisciplined, an impediment to further urban development. Yet, this is also the moment when ambitious plans for controlling nature’s water flows are laid and projects for the provision of urban water supply and sewerage networks are in the making.

The Heroic Moment of modernity’s Promethean project (late 19th century to the first three-quarters of the 20th century): This period is typified by large-scale urban sanitation projects (water supply and sewerage) as well as the construction of impressive transport and communication networks. The new technology is admired and fetishised, promoting the myth of progress and modernization as an automatic means of producing a better society. Technology, capital investment, labor power, and institutional changes transform nature’s material and ideological role in the process of urbanization. From awesome and undisciplined, a source of fear and anxiety, an impediment to urban growth, nature becomes tamed and controlled, the prerequisite for urban and industrial development.

Modernity’s Promethean Project Discredited (late 20th century to 21st century): The increasing demand for resources in Western societies, coupled with a crisis in public funding after the 1970s, impedes further improvement of urban infrastructure. A great number of environmental disasters around the world discredit modernity’s Promethean project and question the logic and practice of continuous development. From tamed and controlled (the prerequisite for development), nature is now cast as a potential source of crisis, a potential impediment to further development.

The book is organized in two parts. Part I (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) traces the flow of water from the natural to the urban and to the domestic sphere, in order to establish the material social and cultural continuity between these spaces.

Chapter 2 sets the theoretical agenda.⁵ It first examines how the nature/society dualism emerged historically as part and parcel of modernity’s Promethean project. The analysis imparts the nature/city divide as a spatial expression of the nature/society dualism, and explores how this dualism affected decisions, visions and practices for the production of modern cities. Drawing on examples from architecture and urbanism (Ledoux, Howard, Olmsted, Moses, F. L. Wright, Le Corbusier), art (art nouveau, futurism, surrealism) and literature (Dickens, Huxley), the chapter analyses modernity’s dual scripting of both nature (as inherently good/uncivilized) and of the city (inherently evil/the hotbed of civilization). In order to get away from this dualism and its innate contradictions, the chapter offers a reconceptualization of nature and the city as “hybrids”, neither purely human nor purely natural. The analysis asserts the dialectical relation between the production of cities and the production of nature, as part and parcel of the same process: the “urbanization of nature”.

Chapter 3 follows the flow of water from the places of its production (dams, reservoirs, water towers, pumping stations, purification plants) into the urban domain, focusing in particular on the intricate set of urban technology networks that carry this flow.⁶ Using water networks as an emblematic example, the chapter studies the process whereby an input of nature, technology, capital and human labour gives an output in the form of commodities (clean water in this case, and, by the same token, gas, electricity, etc.) or services (sewerage, metropolitan subways, etc.) which are central to the production and metabolism of urban space. The analysis depicts technology networks as the material expressions of the continuous and interdependent relationship between nature and the city, as the mediators through which the ongoing process of the production of space occurs and through which the flow and consumption of goods and services materializes. The shifts in the significance and symbolism of urban technology networks are chronicled: from urban landmarks of modernization, to banal and derelict monuments of an era and a social project that no longer is.

Chapter 4 continues the journey from the urban into the domestic sphere and examines the historical geographical process through which both nature and society became scripted as “the other” to the modern home.⁷ It argues that the social construction of the Western (bourgeois) home as an autonomous, independent, private space is predicated upon a process of visual and discursive exclusion of undesired social (anomie, homelessness, social conflict, etc.) and natural (cold, dirt, pollution, etc.) elements. It notes that, while the familiarity of the bourgeois home is dependent upon the visual exclusion of social and natural processes, the very creation of the safety and familiarity of the modern private home is nevertheless predicated upon the domestication of natural elements (water, air, gas, etc.) through a socio-economic production process. The exposure of this contradiction allows for a reconceptualization of the domestic sphere not as an autonomous realm, but rather as a sphere carved out of the dialectics between visible and invisible, clean and dirty, just and injust, a space whose existence depends on the continuous flow of goods, people, and capital outside and underneath its premises.

Part II (Chapters 5, 6, and 7) is a detailed historical geographical analysis of the urbanization of water in Athens and London from the 19th century onwards. The efforts to render modern metropolises autonomous and independent from nature’s whims by supplying them with abundant water was predicated upon establishing a complex system of networks that constantly support this flow of water and secure the metabolism of modern cities. The fact that Athens was “a city in ruins” in 1834, when it became the capital of the modern Greek state, makes it an exemplary case for the study of the production of a modern city from scratch through the urbanization of nature.

Chapter 5 depicts early 19th century efforts to sanitize Western cities and render them independent from nature’s processes. Securing a constant flow of water, food, heating, etc. would allow for urbanization, industrialization, and capital investment to expand further. Creating the mechanisms, institutions, culture, and material networks that eventually would permit nature’s water to run abundantly through the city rested at the epicenter of great cultural, political, and social debates. During this period, channeling water into the growing Western cities was far from an easy task. Lack of public funding, warfare, scientific debates and disputes over technological solutions, kept nature untamed and undisciplined. In the case of Athens, most efforts and funds were channeled toward restoring the city’s ancient aqueduct, thus turning modernization into an “archaeological project”. In London, more funding opportunities, stemming from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Part I
• Part II
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Index