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  • The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920–1960
  • Adam Rome (bio)
The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920–1960. By Jennifer S. Light. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. x+310. $60.

Jennifer Light's book is a fascinating and suggestive account of the influence of ecology and natural-resource management on academic urbanists, city planners, and real-estate professionals. The Nature of Cities ultimately offers new insights into the roots of the urban-renewal campaign of the 1950s and 1960s—a program often known simply as "the federal bulldozer." Though primarily directed at urban and environmental historians, Light's book might also prove useful to historians of technology, especially those interested in efforts to control "natural" processes.

In the 1920s, when scholars first sought to understand the dynamism of the modern city, many sociologists, geographers, and economists found inspiration in ecological science. They eagerly read studies of plants and animals in the hope of establishing "human ecology" as a discipline. One of the [End Page 1043] first textbooks in human ecology—soon nicknamed the "Green Bible"—juxtaposed readings by ecologists and sociologists. By the 1930s, city planners and real-estate professionals also had begun to look to studies of nature for help in understanding the "life cycle" of cities. What caused some neighborhoods to lose value? Could anything be done to prevent the decline of sections of the metropolis? Ecologists at the time argued that forests, ponds, and fields followed predictable patterns of growth, and many planners and real-estate professionals concluded that cities changed in similar successional stages.

Light's discussion of the influence of the conservation movement on urban thinking is especially provocative. The devastating dust storms of the 1930s drew renewed attention to science as a tool of natural-resource management, and many city planners and real-estate professionals soon appropriated the rhetoric of conservation to argue for efforts to protect urban neighborhoods from blight. Like productive farmland, they argued, developed land in cities was too valuable a resource to be wasted.

The advocates of urban renewal appropriated policy ideas as well as rhetoric from conservationists. They urged cities to establish departments of conservation. They also looked to the national network of soil conservation districts as a model for engaging city residents in the renewal effort, and they drew on rural flood-control and drainage projects for legal precedents.

The urban-renewal effort ultimately failed, and Light argues that this failure was partly because cities were more complex organisms than urbanists realized. But Light might have pushed her analysis further. She never explicitly assesses the strengths and weaknesses of using ecology as a guide to understanding social, economic, and political systems. Nor does she compare the effort to manage the process of urban growth and decay with efforts to conserve natural resources. Yet that comparison would be suggestive. Like cities, natural systems often have proven unpredictable, and scientific management of forests, wildlife, and fisheries often has led to disaster.

For historians of technology, The Nature of Cities might be most valuable as a challenge to think about the definition of the field. Is urban renewal a technology? For that matter, is scientific management? Neither is a tool in the traditional sense. Yet urban renewal aimed to control a process that urbanists saw as natural, and technology often has had a similar aim. Though Light does not discuss technology at all, her work is a reminder that the development of new tools is not the only way people have sought to master nature. Management is another. [End Page 1044]

Adam Rome

Dr. Rome, author of The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2001), is associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University.

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