Urban Runoff and the City of Relations - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 27

Hybrids, Relational Space, and Topology
Urban ecologists who forward a relational perspective recognize that cities
are composed not of subjects and objects but of impure entities—hybrids
or cyborgs—that are at once human and nonhuman, cultural and natural.
There is a perpetual insistence on the “mongrel nature of the world.” 52
Hybrids are not a social construction of relational theorists but are ever
present in the world; we have simply chosen to ignore them and instead
perceive the world in terms of purifi ed categories. The emphasis on hybrids
is not an attempt to invalidate distinctions between entities but rather to
deconstruct essentialist categories and build a new world composed of
heterogeneous networks, assemblages, or rhizomes. 53
Meyer argues that landscape architecture should be understood as a
hybrid activity that cannot be described using binary pairs as opposing
conditions, and instead, should be understood as a combination of hu-
man and nonhuman processes. She describes Olmsted's Back Bay Fens in
Boston as a “both/and” project, not a recreational facility or a wastewater
treatment facility but a multifunctional, multifaceted facility with mul-
tiple overlapping meanings: a landscape cyborg, a hybrid of human and
nonhuman processes. 54 Hough argues that such landscapes recognize the
“interdependence of people and nature in the ecological, economic, and
social realities of the city.” 55 Appreciating and interpreting such projects
requires a perspective that focuses on the relationships between the ele-
ments of the project rather than on the elements themselves. In this sense,
landscape architecture is not a form of environmental art or a scientifi c
endeavor but a process of relation building, and stormwater management
can be understood as a particular confi guration of relations among wa-
terfl ows, humans, technological networks, vegetation, nonhuman species,
and so on.
A relational perspective also has important implications for the notion
of space. Following on the work of geographer David Harvey, planning
theorist Jonathan Murdoch argues that “spatial properties cannot be
distinguished from objects 'in' space and space itself can only be under-
stood as a 'system of relations.'” 56 This emphasis on space as a product
of relations is in direct opposition to the conventional understanding of
space as preceding everything else. Space is constructed within networks,
and although it is partly physical, space is wholly relational, presenting a
direct challenge to the structuralist geography of well-ordered Euclidean
spaces. 57 Latour describes the problem with a topographical interpretation
of technological networks as follows: “Between the lines of the network