Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination by Matthew Gandy
Water in cities is a major topic in current academic and policy circles. The real or perceived increasing water problems in urban areas, the trend of urbanization itself, and the theoretical question as to how the urban differs from the rural—or natural—are topics that link well with Matthew Gandy’s book on six urban water settings. Gandy presents his ideas on cultural and material meanings of water in a variety of cities.
We start in the sewers of nineteenth-century Paris, through photos and reconstructions of urban landscapes, and then move on to Berlin during Weimar for another story of reconstruction, this time regarding lakes and swimming. We discover the water-related diseases in Lagos and the attempts to drain the urban swamps in the 1940s to assure malaria mosquitoes would not find their own swimming pools. The Mumbai chapter builds on Lagos in the sense that Mumbai’s water infrastructure is—and long has been—closely related to social inequality. In the two final chapters, we move to the modern Los Angeles River in all its concrete shapes, and are invited by Gandy to imagine the submergence of London and the latest proposals to prevent just that from happening.
With his six chapters, plus introduction and epilogue, Gandy wants to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on water, to “explore evolving relations between modernity, nature, and the urban imagination,” including how “interdisciplinarity has itself become a contested terrain in relation to the production of knowledge” (p. 2). How such a rather complex story and ambitious agenda unfold is different for each chapter—with different results. Let me explain through a slightly more detailed account of two chapters.
Chapter 3 on postcolonial Lagos probably provides the most historical narrative, with a well-developed chronology, clear presentations of different positions of historical actors—including the agency of mosquitoes—and the consequences of all this on the urban landscape. I have to admit that I was a little surprised to discover that Batavia, the capital of the Netherlands East Indies, was German-controlled around 1900 (p. 89). Gandy probably made this mistake when studying the international network of experts in tropical diseases and mistaking the close cooperation between Dutch scientist Christiaan Eijkman (1929 Nobel Prize winner) [End Page 684] and German scholar Robert Koch (visiting the East Indies in 1899). As the chapter shows, however, such global relations are key to understanding local histories such as that of Lagos.
Given this importance of global relations for local situations, I find it surprising that these are absent from London’s submergence in chapter 6. For sure, the historical relations between urbanizing London, its lifeline the Thames, and the muddy landscapes surrounding the city merit a separate chapter, but I would have liked to read more about the special position of London within the United Kingdom when it comes to flood issues. In what comes close to a political manifesto, Gandy claims that London’s water policy—materialized in the Thames Barrier—is technocratic (p. 188). That is all well, although a clear definition of what “technocratic” means would have helped, but I would argue that UK flood policies differ considerably from the strategy selected for London. For most British cities, the main strategy is defining responses to flood events, not protecting the urban from flooding. As a personal detail, for a Dutch water expert it is quite interesting to see the London approach labeled as technocratic, given that the Netherlands has been shaped by a similar strategy over the last 200 years.
When reading Gandy’s book, I could not help but notice the similarities with Peter Coates’s 2013 book on six rivers—a book not referred to by Gandy, even though the authors share the magical number “six” and one water history, as both discuss the Los Angeles River (or the LA “concrete trench”), an appropriate subject in works on rivers and cities. In both I find the same strengths—complex water...
