Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 170

Civic politics provides relational theorists and practitioners with a po-
litical program to enact a relational perspective by encouraging different
thinking about human/nonhuman relations and, more important, different
doing . It is here where relational perspectives on urban nature take on their
muscle and worth to society rather than merely serving as a theoretical
construct or a one-off intervention. It is through the application of this
knowledge in the reinvention of political life that the relational perspective
of urban nature becomes useful.
Like populist politics, civic politics recognizes that humans are embed-
ded in their material surroundings. The physical world is not simply a
platform for practicing environmental politics; it is co-constitutive in the
practice of understanding and reorienting ecological fl ows. 50 The particu-
lars of place are championed over universal interpretations of an issue
because it is at the local scale, in which those who are most affected can
identify the most important problems. Rubin argues that “people care
passionately about what is close to them,” 51 and John adds that civic
politics involves “a deep, shared commitment to a physical place and to
the community of people who live there.” 52 In short, civic politics takes to
heart the 1970s environmental mantra of “think globally, act locally.” 53
This emphasis on the local is divisive because technomanagerial gov-
ernance frequently champions the importance of the global scale while
situating the local at the bottom of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Political
scientist Timothy Luke writes, “Local knowledges, vernacular technics,
and civic sciences as environmental mediations . . . are dismissed before the
privileging of international knowledge formations, transnational technical
networks, and national scientifi c societies that embrace globality.” 54 Civic
politics challenges the primacy of the global as the fundamental scale of
environmental politics and management; the local is not the only scale of
environmental politics but it is recognized as the most signifi cant. This
emphasis on the local is an attempt to rescue the maligned term “com-
munity” from nostalgic, conservative interpretations; here, community is
understood as the core of democratic politics. 55 Shutkin summarizes this
emphasis on a local politics of place: “In a civic democracy, place and
community are mutually constitutive and reinforcing.” 56 The emphasis
on place and community reverberates with philosopher John Dewey's at-
tempts to defi ne the public through local democratic action. He sums up
this position, stating that “democracy must begin at home, and its home
is the neighborly community.” 57
This grounding in place involves multifaceted relations and requires
a pluralist interpretation of urban nature that recognizes the validity of