Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 169

civic environmentalism as a way to channel the energies of environmental
justice and related activities into new forms of political organization and
effectively go beyond the governmental reform agenda of John's civic en-
vironmentalism. 45 From their perspective, civic environmentalism can do
more than reform existing modes of government and can instead create
entirely new modes of collaborative problem solving at the community
level, the most basic level of political organization. 46 The term “civic en-
vironmentalism” is thus a misnomer because it is not an anthropocentric
form of environmentalism but rather a politics of urban relations that
recognizes the interdependence of social, environmental, and economic
problems. These practices of relation building, what I call “civic politics,”
engage urban residents at the local level and replace the protest activities
of populist politics with deliberation and action aimed at creating and
maintaining more desirable conditions.
Civic politics not only provides an alternative to rational and popu-
list politics, but also serves as a way to enact the relational perspective
as described in chapter 2. In his 2004 topic Politics of Nature , Latour
argues that the process of assembling networks is what should be rightly
called politics. The common work of politics and the sciences is to stir
“the entities of the collective together in order to make them articulable
and to make them speak .” 47 Latour argues that a relational approach
suggests a very different form of public organization, one that considers
the material and nonmaterial simultaneously. Geographer Noel Castree
critiques Latour's notion of politics, arguing that Latour “has yet to fl esh
out precisely what 'politics' might mean in a world of [relations],” adding,
“It is one thing to have a new political vocabulary, but quite another to
have substantive political concepts that ground new forms of practice.” 48
Geographer Jonathan Murdoch makes a similar critique, arguing that
“Latour's work on political ecology is strong on re-conceptualizations of
science and politics in the wake of political ecology but is weak on the
specifi c steps that might be taken to shift scientifi c and political practices
in the desired direction.” 49 There is a signifi cant gap between the relational
theory of Latour (and likeminded human and cultural geographers) and
any form of political structure for collective action. Likewise, landscape
architects, ecological planners, and other designers who practice rela-
tion building frequently do so on a site-by-site basis without scaling up
their approaches to a new political program of urban nature. This is why
Gandy calls for a new kind of environmental politics—a program that can
transform relational thinking and practice into a transformative political
agenda.