Cities and Nature: Conceptualizations, Normativity and Political Analysis

While the political architecture of ‘sustainable urbanism’ is constantly changing and evolving, some fundamental questions regarding the relationships between cities and the natural environment stand out: How are they conceptualized? To what extent are cities part of nature and what nevertheless differentiates them from nature? What are the normative and political implications of these relationships? Scholars offer varying responses, yet most share an opposition to city-nature dualism, which sees the relationship as oppositional and antithetical: The city is not part of nature and vice versa. While the dualistic standpoint entails inherent contradictions, its philosophical opposition, namely monism, also collapses. Monism and conceptions of the ‘natural city’ regard cities as natural entities and nature as a higher moral order from which urban models ought to be derived. These two positions are analyzed and critiqued in the second section. The subsequent section focuses on two aspects of hybrid, socio-natural conceptions of city-nature relationships that highlight axiological and political challenges posed by urban sustainability. The chapter concludes by suggesting that civic ecologism, i.e., city-based politics of urban sustainability, offers fertile ground for addressing the normative and political implications raised in the analyses.