Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City

CONCRETE AND CLAY

Urban and Industrial Environments

Series editor: Robert Gottlieb, Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy, Occidental College

Maureen Smith, The U.S. Paper Industry and Sustainable Production: An Argument for Restructuring

Keith Pezzoli, Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability: The Case of Mexico City

Sarah Hammond Creighton, Greening the Ivory Tower: Improving the Environmental Track Record of Universities, Colleges, and Other Institutions

Jan Mazurek, Making Microchips: Policy, Globalization, and Economic Restructuring in the Semiconductor Industry

William A. Shutkin, The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century

Richard Hofrichter, ed., Reclaiming the Environmental Debate: The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture

Robert Gottlieb, Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change

Ken Geiser, Materials Matter: Toward a Sustainable Materials Policy

Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City

CONCRETE AND CLAY

REWORKING NATURE IN NEW YORK CITY

MATTHEW GANDY

THE MIT PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

LONDON, ENGLAND

© 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Bembo by Achorn Graphic Services, Inc.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gandy, Matthew.

 Concrete and clay : reworking nature in New York City / Matthew Gandy.

   p. cm. — (Urban and industrial environments)

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 0-262-07224-6 (hc. : alk. paper)

   1. Urban ecology—New York (State)—New York. 2. Human ecology—New York (State)— New York. 3. City planning—Environmental aspects—New York (State)—New York. 4. Land use, Urban—New York (State)—New York. I. Title. II. Series.

HT243.U62 N74 2002

304.2′09747′1—dc21

2001054604

d_r0

CONTENTS

PREFACE

In October 2001 I had an opportunity to present material from this book as part of a festival of New York history organized by the recently founded Gotham Center in midtown Manhattan. The festival included a documentary film about the city that concluded with the topping-out ceremony for the World Trade Center in 1971. The packed auditorium sat in disbelief as the camera panned across construction workers waving against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. Though the pall of acrid smoke from the destruction of the World Trade Center had now receded, the city remained in a deep state of shock. I was struck, however, by the sense of common purpose and civic resilience which bodes well for a city that has coped with immense challenges in the past. Since my first encounter with New York City in the spring of 1990 I have become gradually immersed in a project to try to understand better how a modern metropolis is able to function, exploring a series of relationships between nature, cities, and social power. The experience has forced me to rethink the boundaries between different bodies of urban knowledge, ranging from the voices of grassroots activists to the more abstract domain of engineers, planners, and urban theorists. My fascination with New York stems in part from its contradictory character: most notably the juxtaposition of a sophisticated public sphere with the raw energies of a global financial center. Debates since September 2001 about the reconstruction of lower Manhattan perfectly illustrate this tension: Who, for example, has the legitimacy to speak on behalf of the city? How can public and private interests be reconciled in the face of powerful pressures to ensure that land values are protected and enhanced? And what kind of architectural forms might give expression to collective memory in the context of competing demands for the use of urban space? My writing on New York City has coalesced around the theme of urban nature as the organic web that links the abstract and concrete domains of the city. I argue that the very idea of modernity and the modern city is closely tied up with the changing use, meaning, and understanding of nature.

At an early stage in the research I decided to focus my analysis on five specific aspects of New York City: the building of a modern water supply system; the creation and meaning of public space; the design and construction of landscaped roads; the grassroots environmentalism of the urban barrio; and the contemporary politics of pollution. of necessity, some critical themes such as energy, biotic diversity, and regional agricultural change have been left to one side. In writing this book I have been stepping between different worlds using a variety of different data sources. A central element of my research strategy has been the use of oral history in order to capture fragments of institutional memory as a means to better understand the profound changes that have taken place over the last thirty years. My aim is to create a living history of the urban environment as an unfolding and unresolved dynamic. In order to make sense of contemporary developments, it has also been necessary to delve further into the past to reconstruct the context for the creation of new forms of urban nature since the early nineteenth century.

My work could not have been completed without the invaluable contribution of staff at a range of libraries and archives, including the Avery Architecture & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the New York Municipal Archives, the Westchester County Archives, the New-York Historical Society, the Museo del Barrio, the Schomburg Center for Research into Black Culture, the Museum of the City of New York, the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at the City University of New York, the New York Public Library, and the Special Archive of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. Further sources were provided in London by the British Library, the Institution of Civil Engineers, and the Royal Institute of British Architects. A project of this kind invariably owes an intellectual debt to others. I would like to thank Janet Abbate, Nancy Anderson, Karen Bakker, Mark Bassin, Maribel Biasco, Steven Corey, Richard Dennis, David Golub, Michael K. Heiman, Sharon Kinsella, Matthew Lockwood, Hugh Prince, Laura Pulido, and Virginia Sánchez Korrol for their detailed responses to earlier versions of my manuscript. I must make special mention of Simon Gruber’s patience in explaining to me the intricacies of the city's watershed politics, and the unique ambience of the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue for providing such a relaxed environment to mull over ideas. Thanks also to Clay Morgan, Matthew Abbate, and Chryseis Fox at the MIT Press for their patience, diligence, and professionalism at every stage of the project. Cartographic assistance for the illustrations was provided by Elanor McBay, Catherine Dalton, and Susan Rowland. Journal reviewers for Antipode and Transactions have also played a useful role in sharpening my arguments and analysis for earlier material derived from chapters 1 and 4. Financial support for the research was provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the British Academy. Finally, a special thank you to Todd Alden, Reetu Arora, Billie Chan, Maria Gandy, Mike Gandy, Ian Mansfield, Kakoli Ray, and Alex Veness for all their support and encouragement.

Matthew Gandy

London and New York

November 2001

CONCRETE AND CLAY

INTRODUCTION

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

—Lewis Mumford¹

Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.

—John Dos Passos²

In 1524 the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed northward along the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States. Verrazzano described a coastline carpeted with immense forests of trees … too various in colours, and too delightful in appearance to be described. As he entered the mouth of the Hudson River and approached Manhattan Island, he found the land to be much populated, the people clothed with the feathers of birds of various colours.³ Though these original landscapes and cultures have been largely obliterated, the Manhattan skyline has often been described in terms of metaphors drawn from nature, the steel and concrete mass of the modern city simply a luxuriant outgrowth of these earlier forests. The architectural ebullience of the modern city has intensified a perception that the scale and dynamism of New York owes more to the raw power of nature than to the prosaic efforts of human labor.

This book explores the different ways in which the raw materials of nature have been reworked in New York City to produce a metropolitan nature quite distinct from the premodern forms encountered by early settlers. The expression metropolitan nature captures something of the multiple meanings of modern nature, ranging from the preservation of wilderness for the consumption of an idealized natural beauty to the construction of complex networks for the provision of water. New York City has some of the most important examples of urban nature in North America: its verdant parks and gardens; its landscaped parkways like green rivulets cutting free from the city; and its magnificent water technologies, which have harnessed a regional hydrological cycle to serve the needs of nine million people. It is paradoxically in the most urban of settings that one becomes powerfully aware of the enduring beauty and utility of nature. it is the reshaping of nature that has made civilized urban life possible. Nature has a social and cultural history that has enriched countless dimensions of the urban experience. The design, use, and meaning of urban space involves the transformation of nature into a new synthesis.

The production of urban nature is a microcosm of wider tensions in urban society. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the rapidly growing settlement of New York City faced the prospect of social and economic collapse. Only a new kind of mediation between nature and the city could avert this looming catastrophe. The construction of the city’s water supply system instituted new patterns of municipal intervention and innovative mechanisms for the raising of capital. Later developments such as the creation of Central Park and the construction of landscaped roads all flowed from this emerging urban dynamic. These developments involved a realignment between municipal government, capital, and nature, which set in place a remarkably resilient framework for the construction of urban infrastructure lasting well into the twentieth century. Where technical and political opinion concurred, significant changes in the urban environment could ensue. Yet the public health concerns of nineteenth-century progressives evolved in an uneasy symbiosis with wider demands to make urban space more efficient for the purposes of capital accumulation. A cursory glance at mortality and morbidity statistics for nineteenth-century New York shows that squalid and insanitary conditions for the city’s poor persisted long after improvements had been made in urban infrastructure.

In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, the dominance of metropolitan cultural and political power played a decisive role not only in driving the process of urbanization but also in changing perceptions of relations between nature and civil society. The power of nature as an ideological construct not only helped to reinforce perceptions of the city itself but also intensified new forms of social stratification within it.⁴ In nineteenth-century New York, for example, competing cultures of taste in relation to the reconstruction of cities were coded forms of social and political conflict that revealed intense anxieties about the pace and direction of urban change. Cultural differences were from the outset driven not only by social class and gender but by a series of ethnic tensions and racialized stereotypes that infused the discourses of urban planning and design. The creation of Manhattan’s Central Park, for example, presented an Anglophile vision of the English picturesque that was anathema to much Irish political and intellectual opinion at the time. And romantic influences on landscape design fostered suspicions that southern Europeans and other recent immigrants lacked the aesthetic sensibilities to appreciate beauty in nature. Equally, much of the public health discourse of the modern era has drawn on racialized and class-based caricatures of cleanliness and hygiene, stressing behavioral admonitions to the poor in place of any real challenge to the patterns of property ownership and official neglect that underpin the persistence of slum housing. As recently as 1971 an installation by the German artist Hans Haacke that simply chronicled the changing landlords and real estate values for hundreds of dilapidated tenements on Manhattan’s Lower East Side was deemed too controversial to be shown at the Guggenheim Museum.⁵

The transformation of the experience and perception of nature in New York City intersects with a series of social, political, and economic developments. The modern experience of nature in the city ranges from new water technologies within the home to the aesthetic discourses of European landscape design. Its history is intimately related not only to upstate landscapes stretching far beyond the outer boundaries of the city as a physical entity, but also to more distant places bound up with the colonial and imperial legacies of the United States. The ecological and political hinterland of New York City has developed into a global arena of power binding the history of the city to ever-widening flows of people, commodities, and ideas. Our understanding of the production of urban nature involves an engagement with a diverse array of discourses ranging from the technological utopias of twentieth-century modernism to the radical political legacies of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Civil rights-inspired social and political struggles might seem to have little to do with urban environmental history, but these developments are indispensable to any analysis that moves us beyond the technical exigencies of city management to a deeper engagement with the social production of urban space. An exploration of the meaning of urban nature demands that the juxtapositions and contradictions of the urban environment be moved to the center stage of analysis. It is a narrative strategy that seeks to challenge existing conceptions of the relationship between nature and the city and bring together insights and ideas from a range of disciplines and perspectives. To bring questions of environmental justice into the frame of analysis compels us to see urban environmental change not simply as a function of technological change or of the dynamics of economic growth but as an outcome of often sharply different sets of political and economic interests. The shared experience of metropolitan nature reveals many intersecting facets between the public and private dimensions of urban space. The cultural hybridity of urban nature warns us against transcendent views of nature as something beyond historical process or exceptionalist views of nature that search for discrete sets of national or cultural characteristics.

Popular ecological accounts of the urban process have tended to view the productivist dynamic of modern societies as necessarily antithetical to environmental well-being. It is assumed that the abandonment of modernity as both a utopian project and a distinctive set of scientific methodologies and philosophical assumptions holds out the hope for a new kind of interaction with nature. The argument presented here moves in a rather different direction. It is suggested that the production of modern cities has altered the relationship between nature and society in a series of material and symbolic dimensions. It is only by radically reworking the relationship between nature and culture that we can produce more progressive forms of urban society. The modification of nature is itself part of the pretext for a more civilized kind of urbanism through which the benefits of metropolitan nature can be spread more widely. The reworking of modern nature is a collective project that applies the human imagination to the transformation of urban space and affirms the interdependencies that sustain a flourishing civic realm. Few environmentalist accounts of the modern city conceive of the urbanization of nature as a historical and political process and fewer still make any distinction between modernity and capitalist urbanization.

There are, of course, alternative modernities that vie for representation in the urban landscape, as different conceptions of meaning and identity are etched into the fabric of the city. We shall see how the struggle to impose particular interpretations of the urban question has recurred in a myriad of contrasting settings, from public health to urban design. Readers will find a resonance here with materialist perspectives on urban history and landscape iconography through a recurring emphasis on the crucial role of capital in the shaping of urban space. In some instances the role of capital takes the form of municipal bonds or other forms of investment in the urban environment; in other cases nature is itself transformed into new commodities such as urban parks based on the sophisticated interaction between real estate speculation and landscape aesthetics.⁶ To argue that capital is a key dimension to the production of an urbanized and commodified nature in New York City is not to deny the influence of other factors but simply to place political considerations at the center of our analysis. The production of urban nature not only involves the transformation of capital but simultaneously intersects with the changing role of the state, emerging metropolitan cultures of nature, and wider shifts in the social and political complexion of city life. The complex cultural hybridities that characterize the development and experience of urban nature have a material basis not only in the city itself but also in the processes of social and economic transformation that have enabled New York City to gain its ascendancy as a global city.

The terms nature, landscape, and environment are used loosely here so as not to exclude different realms of urban nature. Facile distinctions between landscape and cityscape, for instance, are rejected in order to counter the misleading emphasis on rural-urban distinctions in much existing literature.⁷ A broad and inclusive definition of landscape allows the urban experience to be explored in relation to changing conceptions of nature without separating the technical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of urban space. Much discussion about cities adopts a conception of urban change as little more than the conscious design of a few individuals: the oscillation between architect, engineer, and planner is replicated in an urban troika of buildings, infrastructure, and urban design. The city is conceived as no more than an agglomeration of its parts derived from the fragmentary Cartesian-Lockean world view transposed to the analysis of urban form. Yet two critical dimensions are missing from this formulation: history and nature. History is central to our analysis because the relationships between different facets of urban space change over time: consider, for example, the ebb and flow of different constellations of social power; the fluctuating economic context for capital investment; and the development of distinctive forms of urban consciousness. The transformation of nature provides the other missing element: in the absence of parks or green spaces, the city appears oppressive and dehumanized; the construction of elaborate urban infrastructures has largely dispelled the health-threatening environments of the past; and the cultural resources of nature have been woven into different forms of capital in urban space.

Even the city itself is from an analytical point of view an abstraction: a physical or cultural motif that can easily become divorced from any wider consideration of the dynamics of urban change. The morphological boundaries of the city become a kind of analytical prison that serves to delimit our understanding of the urban process. The city can in other words become fetishized as something natural that has evolved separately from its social and historical context. The naturalization of social power is one of the most powerful ways in which nature and ideology intersect. The word ideology is used here to denote a dominant imprint of ideas on social life that sustains existing power relations in society; it is a constellation of cultural and political power that seeps through the pores of everyday life. Ideology is a hidden language of power that extends from the design of parks to the social stigma attached to dirty neighborhoods.⁸ Yet in invoking this idea of nature as a mask that hides the real mechanisms operating in urban space, the book does not seek to develop a crudely materialist interpretation of the urban process: the focus here is on the mutually constitutive relations between nature as biophysical fabric and the symbolic power of nature as a cultural representation of imaginary landscapes.

The processes of modernization and urbanization in nineteenth-century America developed in a state oftension with different conceptions of nature and landscape in the cultural and political imagination. The growth of cities not only transformed ever greater swaths of the frontier landscape to meet urban needs but also fostered the emergence of new kinds of cultural interactions with nature. In an American context we can trace antiurban sentiment to the very different intellectual lineages of Thomas Jefferson and Henry Thoreau. For Jefferson, the agrarian idyll of small-town America fostered greater human virtue, whereas for Thoreau the beauty of nature was a solitary and transcendental experience rooted in romantic idealism. Jefferson feared that cities were pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man; urbanization was in other words antithetical to what he saw as the essence of American values.⁹ In contrast, Thoreau projected the privileged voice of a metropolitan elite onto an imaginary first nature that would not have been widely recognized by either early settlers or Native Americans.¹⁰ The idea of a radical separation between nature and cities is a powerful current running through Western environmental thought. Yet this city-country divide is at root ideological rather than analytical. We are presented with a series of false comparisons rather than substantive observations on the nature of landscape change and the dynamics of capitalist urbanization.¹¹

Metaphors drawn from nature and the natural sciences have had a longstanding impact on urban thought. In the seventeenth century, for example, new conceptions of economic exchange and medical science emphasizing movement, mobility, and circulation began to shape Enlightenment perspectives on urban form. The developments in medical knowledge advanced by William Harvey, Thomas Willis, and other pioneers of the empirical sciences fed into new sanitary discourses focusing on the free movement of water, air, and citizens through the body of the city.¹² Organic metaphors describing the circulatory health of fast-growing nineteenth-century cities became ideologically explicit when used to characterize the new and frightening forms of social polarization, political instability, and economic uncertainty that these cities experienced. In the twentieth century, a range of technological advances facilitated a new mediation between organic metaphors and the production of urban space. In 1965, for example, the engineer Abel Wolman outlined the complete metabolism of the modern city as the culmination of advances in the technical organization of urban space.¹³ Yet these metabolic metaphors treat the city as a discrete physical entity. The body of the city is considered in isolation from the wider determinants of urban form, and the social production of space is downplayed in relation to the technical mastery of cities. For Wolman, the task of the engineer is to ensure the smooth functioning of the urban system and to apply the latest advances in technical knowledge to the resolution of urban problems. Healthy urban metabolism rests on the interaction between the constituent elements of the urban process derived from water, energy, and other raw materials. The digestive and alimentary dimensions of the modern city are derived from an array of inputs and outputs that must be managed by a team of technical experts. Even where the spatial and conceptual parameters of organic metaphors have been extended, as in the rhizomatic space of flows model developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we find little sense of any distinction between the relative significance of different movements in urban space: the most useful dimensions to their perspective are the exposure of the morphological perimeters of the city as an arbitrary division within a wider system of flows.¹⁴ Above all, however, metabolic conceptions of urban form tend to neglect the flow of capital. It is capital that represents the most powerful circulatory dynamic in the production of modern cities, yet its presence remains obscured in most technical or libidinal accounts of the urban process.

In contrast to the space of flows model, the concept of cyborg urbanization allows us to articulate a dialectically conceived version of urban metabolism relating technical developments to a broader cultural and political terrain. If we take the cyborg to be a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban infrastructures can be conceptualized as a vast life support system.¹⁵ The architectural historian Alberto Abriani, for example, describes how the development of plumbing technologies in the modern era transformed the home into an inseparable part of the urban body: the individual organ (the home network) becomes a member of the social body (the city’s public network).¹⁶ The notion of cyborg urbanization is a useful way of extending existing conceptions of nature in cities by emphasizing the physical vulnerability of the human body as part of a hierarchy of larger-scale social and metabolic systems. The cyborg metaphor reveals the interaction between social and biophysical processes that produce urban space and sustain the possibilities for everyday life in the modern city. Above all, this hybrid perspective illuminates the tension between the city as an abstract arena for capital and as a lived space for human interaction and cultural meaning.

In contrast to the cyborg metaphor, most conceptions of ecological urbanism drawn from the environmental literature rest on a sharp delineation between the natural and the artificial. Over the last twenty years there has been growing interest in the ecological city as an alternative to the environmentally destructive, violent, and socially divisive characteristics of contemporary urbanism. The ecological city draws together a series of interrelated themes: the use of nature as a blueprint or set of rules for the organization of human society; an organic conception of the regional economy as a largely self-contained form of social organization; an aesthetic predilection for the urban pastoral rooted in nineteenth-century romanticism and a belief in the curative and regenerative powers of nature; and an elision between the ecological world view and a wider critique of modernist thought and design. The landscape architect Ian McHarg, for example, longs for a city that emulates an ecosystem in dynamic equilibrium, stable and complex.¹⁷ But how do we reconcile the analogy of ecological stability with the prospect for social change? For McHarg, the rules of urban design are to be found in nature, since ecological science provides not only an explanation, but also a command.¹⁸ The architects Natasha Nicholson and Pamela Charlick extend the ecological analogy even further by presenting the science of complexity as a new urban paradigm that ranges from the biophysical realm to the economic structure of the city. Yet in merging aesthetic and scientific themes, this antimodern manifesto for the ecological city overlooks the continuities in capitalist urbanization that continue to shape the dynamics of urban change. Nicholson and Charlick contrast the perceived linearity of the modernist city with a homeostatic conception of the ecological city as a self-organizing living organism, where the individual and the whole maintain their integrity in a co-operative and non-hierarchical organization.¹⁹ Their Gaian urbanism conceives of the city as a single organism and is predicated on a sharp distinction between the modern and the postmodern. It seems that the terms ecological and natural have become interchanged in a design sense to produce a kind of ideological tautology that rests on the authority of science to elucidate both the mechanisms and appropriate outcomes of landscape change.

Yet the ecological view is critically deficient with respect to the social production of nature. At root, the ecological perspective does not question the role of capital in the production of urban space and is largely silent on questions of social power. Despite the claims of newness, the ecological fusion of nature and society does not represent a radical break with the past but simply reworks the long-standing Enlightenment preoccupation with the unification of Nature and Reason. In 1765, for example, Marc-Antoine Laugier’s treatise on architectural theory likened urban form to a natural phenomenon. The processes of urban transformation unleashed in the protocapitalist city were conceived as part of a natural process conforming to universal laws of growth and change in nature.²⁰ Similarly, Francesco Milizia, writing in 1813, likened the city to a forest derived from a medley of organic forms in which the streets must radiate starlike, there like a goose-foot, on the one side in herringbone pattern, on the other like a fan.²¹ What is of particular interest in an American context, however, is the early emergence of the grid plan pioneered by Pierre L’Enfmt in Washington and William Penn in Philadelphia, which made the pragmatic underpinnings of capitalist urban design far more explicit than in their European counterparts.²² It is this tension between naturalized forms of urban design and the abstract demands of capital in urban space that lends such poignancy to Central Park, for example, as the rectilinear eye of the storm in the Manhattan real estate market.²³ Fragments of nineteenth-century urban nature provide powerful material and symbolic links between the aesthetic discourses of the past and the contemporary promotion of organic templates for ecological stability and social cohesion.

The combination of ecological ideas with urban analysis is fraught with difficulty. If we want to incorporate the independent agency of nature into our analysis, we need to be sensitive to the way in which biophysical processes are mediated through human cultures: explanation in the physical and biological sciences is rooted in metaphors that are social and cultural in origin, even if the phenomena under investigation have an ontological status of their own. To call for an ecologically based urbanism is to replace the historical analysis of social change with an arbitrary alternative. The environmentalist Herbert Girardet, for example, suggests that cities must change from a parasitic to a symbiotic relationship with their host environment in order to prevent widespread social and environmental calamity in the twenty-first century.²⁴ This perspective is not only misplaced in terms of its analysis of the urban process but also suffused with a disciplinarian response to social and spatial disorder. The implication is that an autarchic and inward-looking urbanism will replace the modern metropolis in order to sustain a different set of relations between society and nature. The difficulty with such formulations is that the ecological template for urban change is always assumed to lie outside of society itself. The recent popularization of the ecological footprint as a metaphor for understanding the environmental impact of cities is similarly trapped within a bioregional conception of urban and regional planning that asserts that cities are antithetical to natural material cycles.²⁵ The aggregate ecological impact of conurbations is portrayed as the focal point for any understanding of the global dislocation between social and ecological systems. Yet there is no