Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 185

the basis for constructive relation-building activities, provides an alterna-
tive model for reorienting the links between urban residents and their
human and nonhuman neighbors. It takes the notions of hybridity, situ-
atedness, and topology and transforms them into a political program
of democratic deliberation and action. Civic politics requires us to be
dogmatic not in our convictions to the environment, to society, or to
government, but to the responsibilities we have as beings within a larger
relational web. Although it is fraught with signifi cant challenges, it pro-
vides an opportunity to rework the structural underpinnings of political
life by applying relational thinking to real-world problems (see table 7.1).
If we are indeed awaiting a new form of environmental politics, as
Gandy suggests, civic politics provides a promising—if challenging—
way to reconceptualize what it means to live in the world and to rework
human/nonhuman relations into more desirable forms. Changing con-
temporary modes of citizenship is not an easy task; indeed, this is a revo-
lutionary rather than evolutionary prescription to address the dilemma
of urban nature. However, there are incremental moves we can make to
realize civic politics as the dominant mode of reworking urban nature.
In the next chapter, I conclude by suggesting three modest proposals to
nurture and develop this new politics of nature.