Urban Runoff and the City of Relations - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 25

persistent and ever-changing presence in the built environment. In other
words, “cities are built in nature, with nature, through nature.” 35 In this
regard, Spirn writes, “The realization that nature is ubiquitous, a whole
that embraces the city, has powerful implications for how the city is built
and maintained and for the health, safety, and welfare of every resident.” 36
Contemporary urban ecologists share a common perspective of urban
nature as a particular arrangement of humans, nature, and technology
rather than a strict replacement of the natural with the unnatural. From
a geographic perspective, urbanization is not the “end of nature” as many
would argue but rather a transformation into a different spatialization. 37
The principal argument of urban nature centers on the ontological divi-
sion between humans and nature. 38 Geographers Bruce Braun and Joel
Wainwright argue that what counts as nature should never be a closed
question because speaking about nature with some level of certainty en-
tails foreclosing on other possibilities. 39 Braun describes this ontological
perspective as one that is defi ned not by immutable essences but rather
as “precarious achievements, although no less consequential for being
so.” 40 Feminist scholar Donna Haraway describes the activity of question-
ing such seemingly self-evident ontological assumptions as a “queering”
strategy that opens them up to critical scrutiny. 41
Not surprisingly, the queering of seemingly self-evident categories of
humans and nature induces the wrath of those who do not subscribe to
an environmental ethic as well as those who see themselves as custodians
of the wild. 42 The idea that nature no longer transcends the built environ-
ment but is entirely and inextricably implicated within it is antithetical
to contemporary environmental activists who often attempt to reify the
perceived boundaries between the human and nonhuman. Environmental
historian William Cronon provides a helpful summary of contemporary
urban ecology as the problem of nature or wildness: “If wildness can stop
being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as
humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending
task of struggling to live rightly in the world—not just in the garden, not
just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both.” 43
Cronon shares with urban ecologists an understanding that nature is
not “out there” but is inextricably bound up with humans. It is this char-
acteristic of binding or relating that is crucial to the activities of designers
who intervene in the built environment. The goal of urban practitioners—
including landscape architects, ecological planners, and engineers—should
be to elucidate the relations between the natural, social, and technical
and to base their designs on desirable relational confi gurations. The