Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata

Ecological Urbanism, Circulation, and the Immunization of Nature

Bibliographic Data

ID7201711
AuthorsRoss Exo Adams (The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, Faculty of the Built Environment, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB, England, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume32
Issue1
Pages12-29
Publication date2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1068/d17012
OpenAlexW2005049369
LanguageEN
Citations received23
References cited17

While ‘ecological urbanism’ promises the introduction of a new generation of apparatuses, exacting control ever more deeply within the social whole, the logic by which such networks of power operate has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This paper will demonstrate the persistence of this logic by placing ecological urbanism within a genealogy of the concept of urbanization. Looking at the work of Spanish civil engineer, Ildfonso Cerdá, I will examine his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the urbe—a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive urbanización. The first part of the paper focuses on Cerdá's concept of vialidad (roughly, ‘circulation’), which formed the basis of his theory of urbanization and provided its origin in ‘nature’ itself. Urbanization was an effort to free mankind from political domination and recover it's ‘natural’ destiny by unifying a latent global society in a single, interconnected global urbe. However, not only did Cerdá's theory introduce a new, far more pervasive technological relationship of power between government and population; it also set free to circulate what was previously fixed in the space and form of the city: the apparatus. In the second part of the paper I reexamine ecological urbanism with regard to the founding relationship between urbanization and nature. Now, because it is nature that has become pathological to humanity, it is nature which must be immunized. Ecological urbanism thus reinvigorates the capacity of the urban to stave off the end of the world, not only by rhetorically reaffirming the natural origins of urbanization but also by inverting this relationship: ecological urbanism proposes to reconstruct nature as urbanization

Archaeology · Ecological urbanism · Environmental ethics · Geography · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Urbanism · Urbanization · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics · Philosophy · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Architecture · Ecology

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