Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
community as highlighted by urban runoff activities in Austin and Seattle.
From one perspective, this connectedness can be seen as detrimental—the
root of wicked environmental problems that confound technomanagerial
attempts to devise amenable solutions. Conversely, this connectedness can
be leveraged as an opportunity to redefi ne communities by recognizing
that nature is an indelible part of urban life that needs to be acknowledged
and nurtured.
Creating new forms of urban nature may seem like a heroic endeavor,
but civic politics are frequently catalyzed by ordinary citizens who imagine
new hybrid relations, identify humble experts and sympathetic neighbors
to assist them in design activities, and ultimately engage in small but
important experiments to test their ideas. Those interested in enacting a
relational politics can leverage opportunities in local community groups
such as neighborhood associations in which they can initiate projects
in urban waterways, community gardens, pocket parks, abandoned in-
dustrial sites, and other interstitial urban spaces. Activities might begin
with an environmental cleanup and gradually move toward constructive
restoration activities, or they might begin with a public art project or a
community garden that feeds into other civic projects. The emphasis of
these activities is not on the fi nal outcome, as is common in conventional
politics, but rather on the practice of continuous engagement with our hu-
man and nonhuman neighbors. The realization of more sustainable urban
futures requires a new form of politics, one that can engage with both
the human and nonhuman simultaneously. Such a political transition will
not be speedy—indeed, it will likely be measured in generations or even
centuries—but it is through these small, local actions that we will begin
to recognize and rework the relations that bind the city into a whole, and
through these activities, fi nd our place in the world.