Toward the Relational City: Imaginaries, Expertise, Experiments - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 187

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Toward the Relational City: Imaginaries,
Expertise, Experiments
Urbanizing nature, though generally portrayed as a technological-engineering
problem is, in fact, as much part of the politics of life as any other social process.
The recognition of this political meaning of nature is essential if sustainability is
to be combined with a just and empowering urban development; an urban devel-
opment that returns the city and the city's environment to its citizens.
—Erik Swyngedouw 1
The pursuit of sustainable cities is often portrayed as a technomanagerial
endeavor to upgrade existing infrastructures to be more energy- and water-
effi cient; to develop regulations to reduce, reuse, and recycle materials;
to foster more local economic activity; and so on. When we go beyond
conventional interpretations of sustainability as a form of ecological mod-
ernization, it is clear that the pursuit of more sustainable urban futures
has deep political implications that involve new modes of governance,
citizenship, and daily life. The hybridity of the contemporary city requires
a politics that can address the myriad economic, ecological, technologi-
cal, and cultural connections between humans and nature, rather than an
emphasis on upgrading and refi ning existing forms of technomanagerial
governance. A civic politics of urban nature provides one route for ac-
knowledging and acting upon the connections between humans and their
material surroundings, and in the process, developing radical political
programs for sustainable urban development.
In this chapter, I conclude by suggesting ways to foster more relational
forms of civic political practice. Rather than propose a framework of
deliberative democratic practice or prescribe best practices for managing
urban runoff, I focus on three attitudes that are integral to realizing the re-
lational city. First, there is a need to develop civic imaginaries that embrace
the indelible connections between humans and nonhumans. Second, there
is a need to reorient conventional modes of expertise so that those with