The time seems ripe for the greening of cities: green roofs and walls, planted pavements, shared or therapeutic gardens… Is the city discovering its vegetable nature?
Exploring the place of nature in the French urban environment from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, this volume, translated from the original French by Moya Jones, reveals, rather than a monolithic narrative, a continuous, but fluctuating, interlacing of paving stones and plants. The focus of this liberally-illustrated book is not just gardens and parks, but also all the plants and plant matter that circulate in the space of the city – vegetable waste, market fruits and vegetables, cut flowers, etc. These various forms give a new inflection to the history of cities, taking us on a voyage back to their natural roots.
We trace why the presence of certain aspects of nature in an urban environment has been accepted, sometimes encouraged; what actors have allowed it to take root and flourish; and what challenges have been faced along the way. In examining the vegetal nature of the city at the crossroads of social, economic, cultural and political history, green spaces and plants reveal themselves as instruments of urbanity or disorder; agents of stage setting, schooling and subsistence; objects of commerce, entertainment, scientific study, wellbeing or good living. From the gardens of the aristocracy of the Grand Siècle to the market of the Halles in Paris, from the parks of the Second Empire to botanical gardens, a whole new history is unveiled and throws the light of the past over our own time.
Charles-François Mathis is Senior Lecturer in History at Bordeaux Montaigne University (France). He specialises in the environmental history of Britain and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently preparing a cultural and material history of coal in Britain from the 1830s to 1940. Former chairman of the French network of environmental historians, he is also a member of the board of the ESEH and the editor of a series on environmental history ‘L’environnement a une histoire’, published by Champ Vallon.
Emilie-Anne Pépy is Senior Lecturer in History at Savoie Mont-Blanc University (France). Her doctoral and post-doctoral research led her to explore the history of the relations between societies and nature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, based on two themes: man and the mountain environment; and the construction of knowledge about plant nature. Collaborating on collective research projects, she works on different but complementary subjects such as public health, botanical gardens and landscapes.
Translation by Moya Jones, who is a translator and academic in the humanities.
‘… this handsome volume, authored by two erudite and talented historians, will interest the general reader as well as historians and students of environmental history, landscape history, architectural history and modern European urban history more generally.’
Image Making and the Search for a Commons in the United States, 1682–1865
Mark Luccarelli
CONCEPTUALISING SPACE AND RE-ENGAGING THE COMMON
In The Eclipse of Urbanism and the Greening of Public Space: Image Making and the Search for a Commons in the United States, 1682–1865, Mark Luccarelli pushes past unproductive mind/body debates by rooting the rise of environmental awareness in the political and geographical history of the US. Considering history in terms of the categorical development of space – social, territorial and conceptual – the book examines the forces that drove people to ignore their surroundings by distancing culture from place and by assiduously advancing the dissolution of social bonds. Thus beneath the question of the surround, and the key to its renewal today, is the quest to re-engage the common. The latter is still a part of the approach to space, its arrangement and disposition, and has a necessary environmental dimension.
Concepts of urbanism, place identity, picturesque landscape and nature are part of a larger Western intellectual and cultural context but, by examining the imaging of cities and landscape, Luccarelli links particular American geographic settings – as well as the political ideals and practices of the republic – to the application and aesthetic reading of these ideas. The advocates of these various perspectives shared an aesthetic orientation as a means of redefining or recovering the common. The book looks at various American urban and regional contexts, as well as the work of artists, writers and public figures, including painter and engraver William Birch, Thomas Jefferson, engraver John Hill, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Law Olmsted. Luccarelli embeds his environmental study in the works of these men and in the course of American history between the planting of the city of Philadelphia and the establishment of Olmsted’s major urban parks.
This book is full Open Access (CC BY 4.0) through the support of Iowa State University Library.
Mark Luccarelli was born in Princeton, NJ and attended schools there. He holds a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Iowa and taught at Rutgers University before receiving an appointment as Senior Lecturer in American Civilisation at the University of Oslo. Author of Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region (1995), he is co-editor of Green Oslo (2012) and Spaces In-between (2015) and principal founding member of the NIES, the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies.
‘Mark Luccarelli has written a trenchant analysis of why environmentalism has suffered a political decline in the United States since the 1960s, even as the problems it confronts have become more urgent. By linking his argument to the ethics of place, he moves beyond simplistic explanations and develops a global and historical understanding of this American paradox.’
David E. Nye, author of America as Second Creation and Technology Matters
‘Drawing on primary and secondary sources in several fields, Luccarelli shows that 19th-century poets, painters, landscape planners, geographers, and conservationists conceptually “redirect[ed]” … established spatial patterns.’
A.E. Krulikowski – Choice
‘an important contribution both to environmental and to urban studies.
Introduction. 1. Philadelphia: Green Urbanism and the Atlantic World. 2. Washington: Territory. 3. The Hudson Valley: Landscape. 4. Maine: The Woods. 5. New York: The Emergence of Green Space. 6. Conclusion: The Reinvention of Green Space?
Publication date, 15 December 2016, 256pp. Colour illustrations.
ISBN 978-1-874267-94-2 (HB) £65. eISBN 978-1-912186-01-3 (eBook)
September 15, 2021 8:30 am | by whitehor_pubs | Posted in
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