Urban Runoff and the City of Relations - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 24

Now pieces of landscape are shaped by those whose narrowness of knowledge,
experience, values, and concerns leads them to read and tell only fragments of the
story. To an ecologist, landscape is habitat, but not construction or metaphor. To
a lawyer, landscape may be property to regulate, to a developer, a commodity to
exploit, to an architect, a site to build on, to a planner, a zone for recreation or
residence or commerce or transportation, or “nature preservation.”. . . So each
discipline and each interest group reads and tells landscape through its own tunnel
vision of perception, value, tool and action. 29
The disciplinary split is yet another result of the modernist distinc-
tions between nature and culture, science and art, wilderness and city.
The Promethean Project described in the previous chapter centered on
the engineer as the primary actor in defi ning the distinction between city
and nature, but this perspective of humans residing outside of, above, or
separate from nature pervades all members of society. Landscape theorist
Peggy Bartlett notes that urban culture “celebrates a sophisticated distance
from the messy realities of farm and wilderness. As Woody Allen famously
asserts, 'I am two with Nature.'” 30 The public understanding of cities is
predicated upon the opposition between the constructed human world
and the unconstructed natural world. This is the prevalent perspective
today, despite an increasing understanding that cities are highly dependent
on “nature's services” of air, water, nutrient fl ows, and sunlight. 31 Even
environmental actors embrace this dualism of nature/culture when they
advocate for preservation strategies that attempt to reduce the impact
of society on nature by zoning society out of nature via urban growth
boundaries and the preservation of natural areas. 32 The built environment
of cities effectively serves as the social pole and wilderness serves as the
natural pole. 33 Landscape theorist Elizabeth Meyer provides a helpful
critique of this dualist form of thinking: “The continuation of the culture-
nature and man-nature hierarchies by designers when they describe the
theoretical and formal attributes of their work perpetuates a separation
of humans from other forms of life, vegetal and animal. This separation
places people outside the ecosystems of which they are a part and re-
inforces a land ethic of either control or ownership instead of partnership
and interrelationship.” 34
This critique of a segmented understanding of landscape provides a
helpful segue to introduce an alternative interpretation of urban nature.
Unlike engineers of the nineteenth and twentieth century who extended
the Promethean Project to address various urban runoff issues, an infl u-
ential group of theorists and practitioners have continued to embrace the
ambivalence of urban nature. They understand that cities do not represent
a material liberation from biological necessity but rather that nature is a