The Dilemma of Water in the City - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 1

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The Dilemma of Water in the City
[The contemporary city has] a tendency to loosen the bonds that connect its
inhabitants with nature and to transform, eliminate, or replace its earth-bound
aspects, covering the natural site with an artifi cial environment that enhances the
dominance of man and encourages an illusion of complete independence from
nature.
—Lewis Mumford 1
The illusion of independence from nature is the dominant perspective of
cities today not only for the general public but also for the majority of
urban theorists and practitioners. The city is understood as the antithesis
of nature, a refuge from the untamed and uncivilized hinterland, a place
wholly constructed by and for human habitation. The idealized modern
city is human-created, rational, permanent, and ultimately devoid of un-
ruly nature. 2 This idea of the domination of nature by humans was also
central to the nineteenth-century notion of Progress, an idea that can be
reduced to a simple formula: “Progress equals the conquest of nature by
culture.” 3 The allure of Progress and urbanization conspired to create
a cognitive split between premodern and modern, countryside and city,
nature and culture.
Technological development also played a central role in separating the
city from the countryside. As historian David Nye argues, “Nineteenth-
century Americans repeatedly told themselves stories about the mastery
and control of nature through technology in which radical transforma-
tions of the landscape were normal developments.” 4 The shift from the
nineteenth-century organic city to the twentieth-century rational city
has much to do with the introduction of large technical systems for wa-
ter, sewer, transportation, communication, and electricity services. 5 The
large-scale, centralized, and permanent character of these systems was
signifi cant in shaping contemporary forms of municipal governance and