Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Metronatural
™
: Inventing and Taming
Nature in Seattle
Metronatural™
adj
. 1. Having the characteristics of a world-class metropolis within wild,
beautiful natural surroundings. 2. A blending of clear skies and expansive
water with a fast-paced city life.
n
. 1. One who respects the environment and lives a balanced lifestyle of urban
and natural experiences.
2. Seattle
In October 2006, the Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau unveiled a
new “brand platform” to market the city to tourists and convention go-
ers. Metronatural™ serves as both an adjective to describe the perceived
character of the city as well as a noun to embody the city and its residents.
1
The campaign was immediately panned by locals who thought it sounded
like a contemporary nudist camp or was uncomfortably close to words
such as “menstrual” and “metrosexual,”
2
but the concept refl ects a wide-
spread belief by residents and outsiders alike that Seattle is a city defi ned
by, and in harmony with, nature. Indeed, regional writer Jonathan Raban
argues that Seattle is the “fi rst big city to which people fl ed in order to be
closer to nature.”
3
In this chapter, I examine the evolving interpretation of nature in
Seattle and the Pacifi c Northwest from the nineteenth century to the 1960s,
a period when urban boosters invented an ideology of “metropolitan
nature” to attract new settlement.
4
Meanwhile, Promethean activities by
economic boosters and the fl edgling municipal government would “im-
prove” upon the promised landscape to facilitate economic and cultural
development. The taming of big nature in Seattle produced some of the
advertised benefi ts of social and economic progress but also had unin-
tended consequences of exacerbating social inequality and creating a more
unstable landscape. From this perspective, Metronatural is an apt descrip-
tion for the cognitive and material creation of a hybrid landscape in which
humans and nature exist in an uneasy and continually shifting truce.
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