Editorial Ecozon@ Issue 7.2

Author: Goodbody, Axel Title: Editorial Ecozon@ Issue 7.2 Editorial Ecozon@ Issue 7.2 Axel Goodbody “Urban Ecologies” is the thematic focus of the Special Section and the Creative Writing and Arts Section of this number of Ecozon@. As Catrin Gersdorf notes in her introduction, the city is traditionally associated with processes of replacing rather than harbouring nature, and ecocritics for a long time neglected towns and cities, preferring to focus on texts and genres devoted to the organic and the wild rather than civilisation and the built environment. Throughout most of history, the human population has lived in a rural setting. Although the first cities emerged over five thousand years ago, only a small proportion of people lived in them until relatively recently. This is no longer the case: today, over 50 percent of the world’s population live in urban areas, and the figure is steadily increasing. Building sustainable cities and managing urban areas are among the most important development challenges of the 21st century. The world’s growing cities need to build basic infrastructure in a sustainable way, and even cities with a relatively stable population in high-income nations need to adapt existing infrastructure and patterns of consumption to become sustainable. Cities account for 75 percent of the world’s energy use, and over 70 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. A resource-intensive consumer society currently drives urban lifestyles, contributing significantly to the pressure on the planet’s ecosystems. At the same time, cities have the potential to act as hubs for the development of smart, sustainable solutions that can help Vol 7 meet human needs while minimising the ecological footprint. Providing transport, , No, 2 housing, electricity, water and sanitation for a densely settled urban population is typically cheaper and less environmentally damaging than providing a similar level of services to a dispersed rural population. It falls to town planners and architects in the first instance to create the cities of the future. But fiction, poetry, art, film and popular culture also have a part to play in imagining an alternative urbanity. Gersdorf starts her introduction to the special section by asking whether the High Line in central New York, formerly a stretch of elevated railway, now a 20-block popular recreational area, can be regarded as a model of how to accommodate the presence of non-human life (mainly plants, but also animals) in the modern city. She then traces the emergence of Urban Ecology in the 1970s, and notes how Urban Ecocriticism, which began in the 1990s, has witnessed a spate of recent publications. The four essays presented in this journal use literature and film as a diagnostic tool for understanding the history of the city in the modern imagination, and as a resource from which new ideas and conceptions of urbanity can be gained. Rachel Nisbet writes on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Christopher Schliephake looks at the work of an American visual artist and a South Korean film maker; María Isabel Pérez Ramos examines three dystopian ©Ecozon@ 2016 ISSN 2171-9594 i Author: Goodbody, Axel Title: Editorial Ecozon@ Issue 7.2 images of the urban future set in the arid south west of the US, and Chris Pak views narratives and images of future cities in the writing of H.G. Wells, Frederick Turner and Kim Stanley Robinson from the perspective of the Anthropocene. The General Section contains five essays. In the first, Anastasia Cardone examines the aesthetic concepts underlying Annie Dillard’s classic of contemporary American nature writing, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Nora Vergara Legarra discusses (in Spanish) the geographical and social environment of Barbados as represented in the poems of Kamau Brathwaite, in which place is reconfigured through African-derived orality, approaching them from a perspective of colonial difference. John Ryan considers botanical melancholia in the work of the Australian poet and activist John Kinsella, arguing that his radical pastoralism provides an essential counterforce to prevailing idyllic depictions of the Australian landscape. Writing in Italian, Rossella Di Rosa analyses the ecological thinking in Alonso e i visionari (1996), Anna Maria Ortese’s last novel, and shows how the author shared and even anticipated some of the key tenets of Posthumanism and contemporary Animal Studies. Finally, Katarzyna Olga Beilin reviews the experiments in alternative socio-economic structures which have emerged in Spain in response to economic crisis and climate change, and assesses the role which considerations of individual wellbeing play in the cultures of these forms of alternative biopolitics. The Creative Writing and Arts section presents photos by Laura Sánchez-Vizcaíno (to whom we owe the image on the cover of this issue) and Christian Arpaia, and poems by Kathryn Jo Kirkpatrick and Dean Anthony Brink. In her introduction, Serenella Iovino draws out the part these artists working respectively in Spain, Italy, the United States and Taiwan play in the contributing to the “naturalcultural imagination of and around urban ecologies”. Vol 7 The reviews section presents detailed assessments of Christophe Bonneuil’s important publication, The Shock of the Anthropocene, and works on bullfighting in No, 2 contemporary Spain, reviewed by Michael Boyden and Kathleen Connolly. We hope our readers will find pleasure as well as instruction in this latest number of Ecozon@. ©Ecozon@ 2016 ISSN 2171-9594 ii Author: Gersdorf, Catrin Title: Urban Ecologies: An Introduction Urban Ecologies: An Introduction Catrin Gersdorf University of Würzburg The High Line, New York City, April 3, 2015 © Catrin Gersdorf The image that provides the visual epigraph to this “Introduction” to the special section on urban ecologies is a photo I took when I walked the High Line, “New York City’s park in the sky” (David/Hammond), on cool, drizzly day in early April 2015. Vol 7 Dominated by steel, wood, brick, glass, and concrete, this vista shows no traces of living No, 2 matter, no plants, no animals, not even any human beings engaged in the frenzy of their daily business. It seems the quintessential spatial representation of urbanity, a space defined by architecture and language, not by nature or geography. Traditionally, the city is associated with processes of replacing rather than harboring the natural and the wild. In its idealized form, the city symbolizes what Yi-Fu Tuan has described as the human tendency to seek to “escape” the vagaries of nature. In such an imaginary, urban spaces are conceived as bulwarks against “nature’s undependability and violence” (Tuan 1998: 10). They protect, shield, and separate the human from the non-human, the civilized from the wild. In such a scenario, the city’s liberatory promise rests in its potential “to overthrow the tyranny of nature” (Benton-Short & Short 5). But isn’t this very distinction between the urban and the wild, between environments created and inhabited by humans, and environments created by natural forces and inhabited by non-human animals, plants, and other living creatures, an expression of our anthropocentric myopia? As German biologist and nature writer Bernhard Kegel reminds us in Tiere in der Stadt: Eine Naturgeschichte (2014; Animals in the City: A Natural History), almost every place on earth is inhabited by organisms, and ©Ecozon@ 2016 ISSN 2171-9594 1 Author: Gersdorf, Catrin Title: Urban Ecologies: An Introduction they include the beautiful and the ugly, the obnoxious and the admirable, the charismatic and the disgusting, the wonderful and the dangerous. The High Line is not exempt from such presences. But in order for us to see them, we need to readjust the viewfinder. Just turning 180° may produce a different picture: The High Line, New York City, April 3, 2015 © Catrin Gersdorf Suddenly the trees are there, the bushes and the grass, competing with the architecture and the flagstones, pushing into the foreground and claiming their place in the city. One Vol 7 could actually join Walter Benjamin’s flâneur and, literally, go “botanizing,” if not on the No, 2 asphalt, then in the vestiges of old railroad tracks.1 A shift in perspective may add a distinctly material dimension to urban ecology, a concept that first emerged in the early 20th century when urban sociologists, mostly of the Chicago School of Sociology, used it metaphorically in descriptions of the city as a complex living organism. With the publication of Contemporary Urban Ecology (1977), the outcome of joint research efforts of urban sociologist Brian J.L. Berry and urban geographer John D. Kasarda, the emphasis shifted to adopting the methodological approach of an ecological inquiry. As Berry and Kasarda stated: “The basic premise of the ecological approach is that, as a population develops an effective organization, it improves its chances of survival in its environment” (qtd. in Poston 1006).2 During the same decade, biologists began to study the existence of plants and animals in cities, thus drawing attention to the presence of non-human life in an 1 I have discussed Walter Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur and flânerie as ecocritical practice in more detail elsewhere. See Gersdorf 2013. 2 More recently, Kasarda has envisioned the future city in purely commercial terms, as Aerotropolisthe city that is built to meet commercial rather than ecological needs. ©Ecozon@ 2016 ISSN 2171-9594 2 Author: Gersdorf, Catrin Title: Urban Ecologies: An Introduction environment otherwise perceived as the spatial and organizational epitome of human societies. Kegel’s work cited above stands in that tradition, one that follows a similar path as the research of environmental historians such as William Cronon and Martin Melosi, and urban geographers such as Matthew Gandy as well as Lisa Benton-Short and John Rennie Short. All of these scholars have contributed to our understanding of the city as part of “a society-environment dialectic” (Benton-Short & Short 4), one in which “the city is an integral part of nature and nature is intimately interwoven into the social life of cities” (5).

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