In recent decades, the social sciences have critically addressed the nature/culture dichotomy, which is clearly problematic and inadequate but cannot simply be removed from the field of scientific reflection. It is, in fact, a distinction that is the foundation of social theory itself, as it involves conceptions of humanity, subjectivity, society and modernity. Therefore, a reflection on nature’s cultural, social and political dimensions cannot be separated from a critical engagement with this binary opposition. As early as 1980, Raymond Williams pointed out the extraordinary complexity and ambiguity of the Western concept of nature.Footnote 1 It is no coincidence that he made a similar observation about the concept of culture. Williams notes the multiplicity and contradictions of Western ideas of nature. He particularly criticises their tendency towards abstraction and singularity, and their failure to take account of the phenomenal diversity of concrete natures.
Several disciplines have contributed to a questioning of the distinction between nature and culture and to dismantling its supposed “naturalness” [Descola and Palsson 1996; Macnaghten and Urry 1995].Footnote 2 Scientific language has been enriched with neologisms that attempt to account for the collapse of nature and culture and the blurring of the boundary that would separate them: we refer, for example, to Donna Haraway’s “naturecultures” [2003, 2016],Footnote 3 and to the “socio-nature” [Swyngedouw 1996]Footnote 4 or “social nature” of critical human geography, which recognises nature as “inescapably social” [Castree 200: 3].Footnote 5 The stakes are high. It is a matter of unravelling and overcoming the many costly and problematic implications of this distinction—we refer, among others, to Bruno Latour [2004],Footnote 6 who instead focuses on the associations between humans and non-humans, and Philippe Descola [2005, 2007],Footnote 7 who contextualises Western naturalism within a multiplicity of ontologies of nature.
Consequently, social and cultural research questions should change radically. In the social sciences, there has been a growing focus on ordinary natures and the practices that produce and reproduce them in everyday life [Bartoletti and Cecchelin 2016; Mathieu, 2000; Macnaghten and Urry 1998, 2001; Ruiz-Ballesteros and Cáceres-Feria 2016].Footnote 8 These include the many forms of urban nature that have only recently received adequate attention [Biase et al. 2018; Blanc 2013; Bourdeau-Lepage 2019].Footnote 9
Matthew Gandy’s book offers a critical contribution to this reflection from the interdisciplinary field of urban ecology. Gandy enters the debate from his primary disciplinary anchor point, geography—he is a professor of geography at the University of Cambridge (UK). He argues that urban ecology is still a fluid and pluralistic field, although dominated by the systems-based approach, which he discusses critically. Indeed, a clear merit of the book is its ability to bring a critical tradition of urban ecology into dialogue with emerging perspectives, from multispecies ethnography to postcolonial, feminist and queer theories.
The author’s focus, as the title of the volume immediately reveals, is on urban nature. It is a motivated and fruitful choice. Urban nature has traditionally been underestimated, and the city is the privileged place where nature and civilisation collide [Dubost and Lizet 2003; Franklin 2002].Footnote 10 Cities, undoubtedly locations of conflict between different cultures of nature, are paradoxically also characterised by a high level of biodiversity and creativity. Gandy’s argument throughout the book is that the city today can be a privileged observatory for the production of alternative ecological imaginaries and practices.
In the introduction, Gandy clarifies that urban nature is a “medley of cultural and material elements”, “a domain of nature that coexists with human intentionality, […] an ‘other nature’, flourishing at one remove from the controlled contours of metropolitan nature with its more familiar cultures of function and display” [13], exemplified by roadside weeds, synanthropic organisms and the increasingly audacious incursions of larger predators on the urban fringe such as foxes, wolves and coyotes.
The classical distinction, derived from Marx and Hegel, between a pristine “first nature” and a “second nature” transformed and shaped by human needs, is set aside. Gandy is interested in what urban ecologist Ingo Kovarik [2005],Footnote 11 within his Four Nature Approach, calls “nature of the fourth kind”—where “fourth” has no value connotations. That kind of nature “emerges spontaneously as a novel urban green space on vacant lots or other urban-industrial sites despite severe habitat transformations” [Kovarik 2013: 33].Footnote 12 Scientific interest and cultural sensitivity to the richness and transformative potential of these new, heterogeneous forms of nature developing in urban environments are the hallmarks of this volume.
In the final part of the introduction, Gandy outlines the field of urban ecology, within which he identifies four main vantage points. First, he traces the development of a series of systems-based approaches to the study of urbanisation, rooted in the Chicago School of urban sociology. In his view, these approaches still pay too little attention to the historical and political dimensions of urban change. Such a sensibility is, on the other hand, characteristic of the perspective with which Gandy most identifies, that of urban political ecology, rooted in neo-Marxian insights, which has developed since the 1990s, and which Gandy proposes to combine with alternative perspectives to overcome some of its lacunae. On the one hand, he emphasises the fruitfulness of a field-based observational tradition, attentive to the complexity and heterogeneity of specific urban ecologies and the emergence of new ecological assemblages at the local level. On the other hand, he wants to consider post-human and postcolonial conceptions of urban space that would allow it to be recognised as an “ecological pluriverse”. A critical synthesis of these different strands of urban ecology, as an alternative to systems-based models, is put into practice in the book.
The first two chapters focus on the independent agency of nature. While the first examines animal subjectivities, the second explores spontaneous forms of urban nature. Chapter 1 revisits the term “zoöpolis”, coined by the geographer Jennifer Wolch in the 1990s to include the standpoint of animals in urban theory. Gandy explores “the ambiguous relations between animals and the city, and especially the connections between different conceptions of agency and the articulation of ethical relations towards nonhuman others” [38]. Chapter 2 reframes urban wastelands and brownfields not as empty sites simply waiting to be erased and redeveloped but as spaces of ambivalence, with a tension between unease and freedom, discovery and experimentation. Gandy explores the emergence of the idea of urban biodiversity and analyses some experiences of the “nondesign” of urban landscapes in contemporary cities as an example of the tension between the independent agency of nature and human intentionality.
In Chapter 3, entitled “Ecologies of difference”, the author begins with the work of the French artist Paul-Armand Gette. The street trees that Gette photographed in Berlin are traces of global ecologies consistent with Gandy’s view of urban space as “an ‘ecological pluriverse’ that encompasses myriad cultural, material, and biophysical traces from multiples elsewhere” [150]. He explores the key role of the island city of West Berlin in the emergence of new cultural and scientific approaches to urban nature in the 1970s and ’80s. He then proposes a queering of botanical methods to problematise a series of categorisations, taxonomies and subjectivities, and discusses the lack of attention to racial and ethnic dimensions in urban ecology and landscape design.
Chapter 4 develops the innovative theme of “forensic ecologies”, an idea Gandy proposes by combining forensic entomology and forensic architecture. Such approaches have the merit of introducing historical and political dimensions into the production of space and environmental endangerment. Gandy wonders how knowledge of the complex networks of causality, agency and responsibility can influence policy and nature protection and is interested in the role that emerging forms of knowledge production—such as grassroots data gathering or citizen-science initiatives—can play in the urban arena.
Finally, Chapter 5 introduces the perspective of temporality to analyse the relationship between cities, the ecological dimension and the dynamics of capitalism. The author wonders what role cities can play in ecological challenges through a critical analysis of the dominant rhetoric of the adaptive Anthropocene.
The book is thematically rich and supported by an extensive multidisciplinary bibliographical apparatus. Here, we discuss three issues that we believe will be of particular interest to social scientists engaged in a critical inquiry about cities, social differences and human/non-human relations.
The agency of nature and multispecies interactions
Recognising the independent agency of nature is a starting point in Gandy’s book. Interest in this topic is relatively recent, especially when it comes to urban space: “the agency of nature in the urban arena has been widely feared as a source of disorder—as exemplified by the presence of pests or weeds—or simply downplayed since it unsettles existing modes of analysis that are framed around the bounded human subject” [84].
Agency is a key idea in social theory that is, mainly in Europe, associated with the conceptualisation of the agent as a human subject. Recently, several post-human approaches have extended the notion of agency to non-human living beings and even non-living objects. They reconceptualise agency as relational rather than individual, as a collective product of a given network of actors, human and non-human [Rebughini 2022].Footnote 13 The debate is still controversial, and Gandy distances himself from some of the neomaterialist and neovitalist approaches, wishing “to retain an emphasis on the specificities of human agency in combination with other forms of vitality” [256] and wondering how we should include non-human others in a “more ontologically calibrated analytical framework” [41]. He critically refers, inter alia, to the later work of Latour and recent depoliticised variants of actor-network theory. Regarding the specificities of human agency, Gandy emphasises the question of responsibility linked to causality, which is crucial when analysing the role of constellations of cultural, political and ideological power in the production of space and environmental endangerment.
For our part, we note that even those approaches that are the most attentive to the ontological dimension can be problematic—Descola’s conception of different ontologies of nature, which Gandy explicitly includes among the perspectives supporting the “ecological pluriverse”, also risks concealing a return to Western ethnocentrism [Ingold 2016].Footnote 14 To establish a multispecies reflexive ethnography aware of its inevitably human standpoint, we argue it would be fruitful to further explore a critical anthropocentrism—extending Ernesto De Martino’s [1977]Footnote 15 perspective on ethnocentrism.
After discussing many critical aspects of the ontology of non-human agency, Gandy’s original contribution to the debate on the independent agency of nature is an analysis of the multiple forms of interspecies interaction that occur in urban space. Animal behavioural adaptations to urban environments, or specific epigenetic changes, can be recognised as forms of autonomous agency of non-human life forms, unruly and, to some extent, unpredictable. Plants and soils also show evolutionary responses to urban environments. The return of wild animals to the city, particularly to abandoned areas, introduces the theme of feral urban ecologies, where the boundaries between human and non-human, domestic and wild, become blurred. “The term ‘feral’, in an urban context, signifies a space of disorder or even danger that lies beyond the parameters of biopolitical governmentality” [58]. Urban encounters with the feral—such as wolves or foxes—unsettle humans and can trigger processes of de-domestication in the “human animal”, as is well narrated in two of the films that are among the vast corpus of cultural products discussed in the book. Stray dogs, typically found in poorer urban neighbourhoods, demonstrate a symbiotic form of relationship between humans and non-humans and offer alternative imaginaries of interspecies cohabitation.
We note an apparent resonance with Haraway’s [2003, 2008]Footnote 16 idea of companion species, whose layered relationships in time and space reveal how what has traditionally been called domestication (of animals) is instead an emerging process of cohabitation involving humans and non-humans, with their specific agency—an “anthropo-zoo-genetic practice” [Despret 2004]Footnote 17 that constructs both animals and humans in historically situated interrelationships. Therefore, the autonomous agency of nature emerges when interactions, adaptations, attunements, mutual domestications and feralisations between human and non-human forms of life are taken seriously—as Gandy does. The epistemological stakes are our relationship with the othering and the challenge to human exceptionalism and anthropocentric thinking. Regarding the analysis of ecological and historical-political processes, the interactions between the independent agency of nature and human intentionality produce a variety of complex, dynamic and transitory socioecological constellations, situated in time and space, that demand to be recognised for what they are.
Urban ecologies and multispecies inequalities
Throughout the book, Gandy is attentive to the historical development of the relationship between urban ecologies and the dimension of power, in line with the critical perspective of urban political ecology. Nature is often presented ideologically as an uncontested value [Macnaghen and Urry, 1998; de Biase et al., 2018; Trentanovi et al., 2021],Footnote 18 masking structural inequalities of class, gender and ethnicity. A plurality of cultures of nature, some even conflicting, coexist in the urban arena. Different social groups do not have an equal voice in shaping urban policy, nor do they have equal access to nature in the city, which has consequences for their health and well-being. Gandy discusses various dimensions of inequality that emerge in the study of urban ecologies, focusing primarily on class and ethnic dimensions, including their intersectional entanglements, and offers original insights. He traces many forms of human and non-human interdependence in cities. Nativist botanical notions of landscape “authenticity” and strategies regarding the control and removal of non-native or alien (plant) species are forms of a wider eradication of othering from cities and reveal the interplay between racism, xenophobia and urban nature. Marginalised humans and animals often share a common fate in the urban arena, as the history of slaughterhouses in modern cities and migrant workers in contemporary food production demonstrate.
Urban environmental policies and landscape design can increase social vulnerability and perpetuate inequalities if driven by the interests of class or powerful economic groups. Gandy mentions some environmental improvement campaigns in the Global South that have little to do with ecological concerns, but are interested in producing “cleaner cities” and are driven by the interests of the middle classes, who have previously benefited from lax planning controls. In urban planning, conventional park design and the “excesses of architecture” contrast with the unruly nature of wasteland, which is a fundamental element of public cultures of nature for the poorest urban communities.
Our only note of critique is that Gandy could have exploited a gendered perspective to a greater extent, making more explicit, on the one hand, the resonances between various dualisms and hierarchies in Western thought, such as culture/nature, subject/object and male/female, and, on the other, the epistemological and practical implications of such a perspective in the study of urban ecologies, as it emphasises relationships, collaborations and partnerships between species and situated bodies [Merchant 2013; Haraway 2003, 2016],Footnote 19 in line with the author’s interest in new socioecological imaginaries and cultures of nature.
Urban biodiversity as a critical lens on capitalist urbanism
The spontaneous nature that flourishes in wastelands and urban margins offers crucial insight into the historical and political dimensions of capitalist urbanism and allows for the production of alternative and counter-hegemonic imaginaries of the city.
The relationship between urban ecology and land-use planning places the question of biodiversity at the heart of capitalist urbanisation. Biodiversity is a concept that has become popular, especially since the 1990s, and is a synthetic indicator of the variety of living organisms that is fraught with ambiguity. Gandy argues that it should be understood not as a fixed marker of a series of interchangeable biophysical configurations but as a culturally and historically specific phenomenon.
Contrary to common sense, urban biodiversity is high, and is paradoxically higher than biodiversity in other non-urban contexts. For some species under threat in their native habitats, cities are becoming true ecological refuges. Gandy argues that it is possible to be concerned about the global loss of biodiversity while being fascinated by the richness of cosmopolitan urban nature. However, he also warns against an ideological celebration of urban biodiversity, as cities are elements of a more expansive network of global interdependencies based on historical patterns of exploitation in distant places on which the survival, and sustainability, of cities depends.
Biodiversity loss is a relatively marginal issue in the hegemonic discourse of the adaptive Anthropocene, which Gandy argues is consistent with the systems-based approach currently dominant in urban ecology. The adaptive Anthropocene is associated with strategies of resilience and technocratic management of the environmental crisis, based on a conception of nature in a state of perpetual change that can be steered, at least to some extent, towards human ends (again!), a malleable and reversible nature. On the contrary, the accounts of biodiversity at the heart of the book emphasise the irreplaceability of both species and ecosystems, the specificity of the ecosystems that actually exist and the uniqueness of the various species and ecological formations that emerge from field research. This perspective is consistent with a reactualisation of the right to the city [Lefebvre 1968],Footnote 20 which resists the dissolution of everything solid and situated into mere exchange value. Spontaneous urban nature, concrete and situated in time and space, also resists the generic cultures of nature that accompany the speculative and utilitarian impulse of capitalist urbanisation—represented by various forms of green gentrification in contemporary cities. Spontaneous urban nature, seen as “seemingly useless”, also defies (urban) capitalism on both material and symbolic levels, and is, therefore, often reframed and appropriated as an urban commons [Trentanovi et al. 2021].Footnote 21 Gandy believes that “a closer engagement with the socioecological dynamics of urban space may help to dispel aspects to the ideological opacity of the urban arena itself” [116]—and we could not agree more.
Gandy’s book makes a significant contribution to the study of urban nature, and succeeds in combining a sensitivity to the dimension of power, rooted in the critical tradition of urban political ecology, with emerging post-humanist and postcolonial approaches to overcome anthropocentrism and ethnocentrism. The many questions raised sometimes remain without a definitive answer, challenging the reader and stimulating future research. The possibilities of urban space as an experimental realm of interspecies cohabitation, and of cities as laboratories for the development of new ecological imaginaries and alternative modernities, are among the book’s valuable insights.
