Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 12 – 29 doi:10.1068/d17012 Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata: ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature Ross Exo Adams The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, Faculty of the Built Environment, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB, England; e-mail:
[email protected] Received 20 September 2012, in revised form 9 July 2013 Abstract. While ‘ecological urbanism’ promises the introduction of a new generation of apparatuses, exacting control ever more deeply within the social whole, the logic by which such networks of power operate has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This paper will demonstrate the persistence of this logic by placing ecological urbanism within a genealogy of the concept of urbanization. Looking at the work of Spanish civil engineer, Ildfonso Cerdá, I will examine his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the urbe—a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive urbanización. The first part of the paper focuses on Cerdá’s concept of vialidad (roughly, ‘circulation’), which formed the basis of his theory of urbanization and provided its origin in ‘nature’ itself. Urbanization was an effort to free mankind from political domination and recover it’s ‘natural’ destiny by unifying a latent global society in a single, interconnected global urbe. However, not only did Cerdá’s theory introduce a new, far more pervasive technological relationship of power between government and population; it also set free to circulate what was previously fixed in the space and form of the city: the apparatus.