10.

1177/0096144205276991
JOURNAL
Stephenson OF
/ URBAN
URBANENVIRONMENTAL
HISTORY / September
HISTORY
2005 REVIEW
REVIEW ESSAY

URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

The Essence of a Contradiction

MATTHEW GANDY, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York

City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, pp. xi, 344, illustrations, notes, in-
dex, $34.95 cloth.
KARL HAGLUND, Inventing the Charles River. Foreword by Renata von
Tsharner. Published in Cooperation with the Charles River Conservancy.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, pp. xi, 493, illustrations, appendix,
glossary, notes, index, $49.95 cloth.
DAVID NAGUIB PELLOW, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental
Justice in Chicago. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, pp. ix, 234, illustra-
tions, appendix, notes, references, index, $24.95 cloth.

Urban environmental history seemingly examines the study of contradic-

tion, but the contrast between city and nature presents a generative hope, the
ideal of balancing civilization between its elemental forces. Lewis Mumford
confronted this challenge by plumbing the past to fashion a vision of an urban
culture dedicated to Aristotle’s ideal of the “good life.” If his overt morality has
not aged particularly well, with his first book, The Story of Utopias,1 Mumford
cast the beginning of a transcendent arc that still measures those following in
his stead.
“Man is fallen, nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer,”
Emerson wrote, “detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in
man.”2 Mumford, an intellectual scion of the Concord sage, also employed na-
ture but with a more evolved, ecological bent to gauge the aim and aspirations
of his generation’s flight into modernity. The utopianism permeating the
1920s enveloped the young urbanist, but in contrast to the speculative madness
that colored so much of the period, he mined past treasures to present a vision
of equanimity. In The Golden Day, Mumford rhapsodized, like Emerson, over
the “vast designs and expectations” his country stirred. Yet the “laws and insti-
tutions” that translated these hopes into reality must, quoting Emerson, “exist
in some proportions to the majesty of Nature.”3
In the 1920s, Mumford saw little of the divine in the nation’s chaotic urban
expansion. The urbanization phenomenon constituted a “kind of barbarism,”
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DOI: 10.1177/0096144205276991
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he wrote in 1926. It covered the landscape with a “machine-made fabric, in-

creasingly standardized, regimented, characterless, spreading outward from
the metropolis by a process seemingly as automatic as the spread of grassland,
forests, and jungles in nature.” Trading natural processes for urban infrastruc-
ture measured progress, but in return, “Traffic and Commerce are the names of
the presiding deities,” Mumford wrote, “human beings . . . merely units, de-
signed to run or use elaborate mechanical devices.”4
Mumford was hardly a Luddite. Advances in science and technology of-
fered untold possibilities to construct a new urban civilization, but these Pro-
methean forces required a guiding vision that charted limits as well as desires.
To this end, Mumford joined a sterling array of young, public intellectuals in
the Regional Planning Association of America. Mumford crafted the group’s
philosophic template, advocating regionalism as a means to direct modern city
building around the constructs of nature and to secure the good life. As a land-
scape engineered to the dimensions of the “goods life” took shape, his criti-
cism sharpened as he predicted the rise of a robotic race, cut off from nature
and living to consume. Future “cities of parasites peopled by office workers
who perform elaborate tasks with red tape and by a growing well-to-do class,
divorced from practical responsibilities, whose chief economic function is
what Mr. Thorstein Veblen has called the performance of leisure. Social para-
sitism and economic waste in turn lead to a lapse of function, with a growing
amount of vice and crime and physical debilitation, if not disease.”5
This prescient forecast appeared in Mumford’s keynote address to the 1927
National City Planning Conference. He challenged his audience to jettison
their increasingly mechanical conception of the city for a more balanced ap-
proach. Cities constituted more than machines slated for production; they
were organisms capable of evolution and reproduction. Ignoring the basic bi-
ology of existence, he warned, offered a dismal replay of history. Past civiliza-
tions pushing “limitless growth and expansion” collapsed once “parasitic”
megalopolises passed “the limits of functional size and use.” Periods of exces-
sive growth were followed by ecological deterioration, water shortages, crop
failures, and rising indices of disease. Political and economic chaos ensued,
fostering the demise of urban life and societal breakdown. “If the ultimate fate
of such megalopolitan civilizations in the past has always been to turn its lead-
ing cities into Necropolises, or cities of the dead, it would be naive to think,”
Mumford warned, “that the ingenuities of engineering can avert this fate.”6
History, Mumford believed, also held examples to guide development
along more sustaining lines. The garden-city experiments in England, which
adopted the form of the historic English village, offered a prime case. Bounded
by agricultural greenbelts, entwined within the landscape, and centered on
“essential civic functions,” Letchworth and Welwyn were distinct alternatives
to, what we term suburban sprawl, “the speculative subdivisions that have pre-
maturely turned good truck gardens into a confused mass of small individual
ownerships that cannot be rationally planned into any sort of neighborly
 Stephenson / URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 889

unity.” The garden city’s balanced venue offered a model to “master,”

Mumford concluded, “if we are to escape the regimentation and the paralysis
that now threatens us.”7
The garden city’s physical form helped tether Mumford’s soaring prose and
catalyze his genius. In the next decade, he immersed himself in urban history,
exploring the Athenian ideal. In 1938, his seminal work, The Culture of Cities,
garnered national acclaim and procured his first work as a planning consultant.
He garnered choice assignments in Honolulu and the Pacific Northwest, where
his work in Portland proved especially noteworthy. He recommended green-
ing the city’s core and directing new growth into a series of interconnected
greenbelt towns designed around the fertile contours of the Willamette Valley.
Besides protecting one of the nation’s most bountiful and beautiful settings,
investing in “urban rehabilitation” and garden-city design would “obviate the
grandiose engineering experiments to which we are all by sheer inertia and
fashion, too easily committed.”8
Mumford’s plan remained fallow until the early 1970s when the “Oregon
Experiment” turned Portland into a Mecca of growth management.9 Mumford
provided an essential vision and historic validation (along with the Olmsted
brothers) for the nation’s most comprehensive effort to craft a regional city that
reflects the beauty and fertility of the surrounding landscape. “Portland is a
better city,” Neil Goldschmidt, former mayor and governor of Oregon, stated,
“thanks in large part to the wisdom and foresight of Lewis Mumford.”10
Mumford’s mix of historical analysis and cultural criticism produced plau-
sible solutions to a series of increasingly intractable problems, placing the
scope of his work in conflict with today’s theory-laden tomes. For urban histo-
rians, Mumford’s pursuit of the past remains vibrant but, some argue, anti-
quated to the profession’s current schema. In his eloquent opus Cities in Civili-
zation, Peter Hall casts Mumford as a “brilliant polemic journalist, but not a
scholar.” Nor does he “share the Mumfordian view that the great city is
doomed.” Hall claims Mumford failed to understand the great city’s generative
environment because “he lacked a long-term direct everyday knowledge of the
quality of life in them.”11 This reasoning seems more pique than point of schol-
arship, especially since Mumford spent his first forty years in New York City
experiencing, as defined by Hall, a “golden age” of urban life. Mumford’s own
voice is even more telling: “I was a child of the city,” he wrote, “New York ex-
erted a greater and more constant influence on me than did my family.”12
Slights aside, Hall follows Mumford’s lead and constructs theory to explain
the culture of cities. His desire to reveal the essence of the “innovative milieu”
of great cities in their golden ages is noteworthy, but who is to say that devising
an intellectual mold to capture such a mercurial substance is not pure polem-
ics? “It should be evident that the enterprise of theorizing ‘collective creativ-
ity’is as intrinsically dubious,” Ray Porter writes, “as the attempt to explain in-
dividual creativity in terms of birth order or zodiac sign.” Cities in Civilization
is an amalgamation of erudite analysis, a book following in the Mumford tradi-
890 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2005

tion. If this work is burdened with, what Porter calls, “the fashionable aca-
demic preoccupation with theory,” it is the root end of that theory that sepa-
rates Hall the academician from Mumford the public intellectual. 13
Launching theoretical critiques into ever-more-sophisticated flights may
breach new ground, but these otherworldly efforts seldom illuminate solutions
to the issues melding the past and present. “Most of our most serious environ-
mental problems start right here at home, and if we are to solve these problems,
we need an environmental ethic,” William Cronon contends, “that will tell us
as much about using nature as about not using it.”14 This, of course, is Lewis
Mumford’s essential gift; he wrote history for life’s sake not for the sake of
writing history. This dose of reality also infuses Mumford’s interpretation of
history with a certain timeless quality.
Mumford feared the megalopolis because it would bleed the ecological
health from its surrounding region with technological fixes until this unbal-
anced system collapsed under its own weight. It is the hoary appetite of the par-
asitic city that Cronon revealed in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great
West, a work that set a standard for environmental historians.15 Los Angeles’s
endless desire to draw water from the hinterlands has also provided fodder for
historians and Hollywood. A more sordid tale than Roman Polanski’s China-
town is hardly thinkable, but Mike Davis’s account of the increasing frequency
of firestorms on the Malibu coast offers material for a sequel to Day of the Lo-
cust. The government subsidies underwriting the luxury housing located in
one of the earth’s most pyrotechnic environments could almost be passed of as
Southern California extravagance, except that a plan by the Olmsted brothers
offered a sustainable alternative. Davis recounts this episode in The Ecology of
Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster,16 while Greg Hise and Wil-
liam Deveraell devoted a monograph to the Olmsted vision in Eden by Design:
The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angles Region.17
Eden by Design joins a growing literature tallying the Olmsted revival initi-
ated two decades ago. As our understanding of the Olmsteds and Mumford is
enhanced, urban environmental history is clarifying past issues while enlight-
ening present decision making. This is the promise presented in Matthew
Gandy’s Concrete and Clay, but as he warns, combining “ecological ideas
with urban analysis is fraught with difficulty. If we want to incorporate the in-
dependent agency of nature into our analysis, we need to be sensitive to the
way in which biophysical processes are mediated through human cultures: ex-
planation in the physical and biological sciences is rooted in metaphors that
are social and cultural in origin, even if the phenomena under investigation
have an ontological status of their own” (p. 11).
Theorists will enjoy this semiotic extravaganza as Gandy delves into “radi-
cally reworking the relationship between nature and culture” to “produce more
progressive forms of urban society” (p. 5). This endeavor eschews “a crudely
materialist interpretation of urban process: the focus here is on the mutual con-
stitutive relations between nature as biophysical fabric and the symbolic
 Stephenson / URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 891

power of nature as cultural representations of imaginary landscapes” (p. 7).

Neither crude nor materialist, the author incorporates a bevy of postmodern,
poststructuralist interpretations, shifting and collating epistemologies,
ontologies, and visions of the dialectical from Marxian and Lefebrivan per-
spectives. This task is accomplished, however, at the cost of teleology. In the
end, Gandy’s critique of capitalism fails to counter the “brutal logic” (p. 45) of
urban expansion with any tangible, progressive forms.
Concrete and Clay is not without merit. A heterogeneous mix of case stud-
ies traces the nature of New York from its premodern origins to current issues
of environmental justice. The city’s struggle to develop an adequate water sup-
ply is told effectively, from the digging of the first public well in 1658 to har-
nessing “the hydrological cycle of the whole region” (p. 23). The demand for
potable water “necessitated a transformation of the physical landscape over a
vast area” (p. 45). The author mixes a compendium of political machinations,
engineering feats, and cultural criticism to explain this change. Unfortunately,
the accompanying biophysical changes in the environment receive scant no-
tice, leaving important questions unanswered: how was the hydrologic regime
altered, what was the effect on agriculture and lumber, and how did habitats
change over time? Rather than chronicle ecological change, the consequences
of urban growth are revealed in “the disjuncture between the mobility of capi-
tal and the extent of fixed capital represented by past investment in the built en-
vironment” (p. 53). While neo-Marxian critiques may explain the transference
of capital, they do not suffice for an environmental history using original
sources to explain economic and ecological change. Running history through
prescribed theoretical filters may enlighten academic constructs, but it can re-
cast the obvious in such dense permutations that the author obfuscates rather
than enlightens current issues.
For the past decade, upstate development pressures have threatened the
long-term health of New York City’s 2,000-square-mile watershed. Without
growth-control measures, securing future water supplies will require expen-
sive technology to bring drinking water online from such untenable sources as
the Hudson River. New York is pioneering design solutions to its watershed is-
sue by clustering development in “Progressive forms.” If such “smart growth”
is cliché, it still encapsulates a rich historical tradition that can enlighten ongo-
ing experiments. In Concrete and Clay, however, planning is analyzed through
the lens of theory to produce a better process not a better design. “The most
promising solutions to environmental degradation may lie in the development
of a more sophisticated public sphere through which new forms of democrat
decision-making can emerge in preference to any lurch toward the ecological
Hobbesianism of greater control, which may prove in any case to be fiscally
and ideologically untenable” (p. 74). The author’s desire to craft “a more so-
phisticated public sphere” seemingly follows “Olmsted’s conception of the
civic realm,” which Gandy defines as “the Enlightenment preoccupation with
the refinement of taste” (p. 92). Imparting sophistication and refinement to the
892 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2005

benighted public is undoubtedly paternalistic, but perhaps it is a rational re-

sponse to the Hobbesian threat. By contrast, Olmsted realized that only gov-
ernment could restrain the chaotic flow of speculative real estate and procure a
vital public good. Central Park is an amazing accomplishment of American
democracy, given that the opposition “was principally by wealthy property
owners who argued that the cost to taxpayers was too high” (p. 85). Imagine
how such a proposal would fly today, yet Olmsted, and reformers of his ilk,
held to a line of civic virtue that would define Lincoln at his best. “We saw how
Central Park was never an anticapitalist oasis” (p. 233), Gandy writes. Per-
haps, but the more important story is that an urban democracy could craft a
public arcadia in the midst of the world’s most commercial city. Olmsted saw
the urgency to design a “sanitary institution” where harried New Yorkers could
recreate themselves.18 “But I’m not sure if even he could imagine,” Witold
Rybczynski writes, “just how precious its 843 acres would be to a city grown
unimaginably large and dense.”19 Central Park is precious because it memori-
alizes a brief historical moment when the democratic process resolved the
seemingly irreconcilable contradiction between private profit and collective
need to create a masterpiece of living art.
Solving the ecological problems intrinsic to the twenty-first-century city re-
quires a similar infusion of vision and virtue. As Gandy contends imposing
controls to protect vital public resources is fraught with risk in a capitalist soci-
ety, but humans, like all species, operate within a series of natural limits. “The
knowledge of power must coexist with the knowledge of limits,” Daniel Bell
concluded in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, “This is after all, the
most enduring truth about the human condition.”20
A generation later, the contradictions of capitalism abound as our Faustian
nature drives development beyond sustainable limits. In Concrete and Clay,
however, nature is not a limiting factor but an essence to deconstruct and re-
construct. “The factors that determine the long-term viability of cities and re-
gions rest ultimately not with natural limits,” Gandy contends, “which are in
any case largely culturally and technically determined, but with the strategic
significance of places with a wider set of social and economic dynamics” (p.
51). Urban environmental history, in this work, does not place the city within
an ecological context, rather it is a canvas colored by a theoretical palette illus-
trating a transcendent yet “inclusive” political process “based on human diver-
sity, creativity, and interaction” (p. 227). The end product, then, is a means to
procure an undisclosed urban form. The historical record for such an endeavor
is hardly optimistic; Mumford, Bell, and Donald Worster made their mark
chronicling the fate of society’s pursuing utopian dreams that promised to
eclipse the earth’s bonds. Is it hubris or adroit interpretation that cements Con-
crete and Clay? Finding the answer is the lure of this book.
In Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago, Da-
vid Pellow pursues his subject with the eye of an “activist-scholar” (p. 7). A so-
ciologist, Pellow draws on Mumford and Martin Melosi to craft a history out-
 Stephenson / URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 893

lining humanity’s close encounters with urban refuse. His real work, however,
is an ethnographic analysis of the environmental racism underlying garbage
disposal in one of nation’s “trashiest” cities. A surprising and complex inter-
play of subjects foments environmental injustice, revealing the depth of the
problem, even if the history is sparse. The usual suspects (industry and govern-
ment) turn up, but the author also implicates environmentalists and residents
living in the blighted communities.
In its rise to industrial dominance, the “hog butcher for the world” produced
one of its most polluted landscapes. With the most landfills per square mile in
the United States, Chicago is a living testament to an earlier age of environ-
mental disorder. Conflict between labor and management also runs through
the city’s history. Although the scope of conflict has changed since Haymarket
and the Republic Steel strike, the city remains a fulcrum for the nation pound-
ing out solutions to urban problems. Chicago’s Garbage Wars pits poor minor-
ities against entrenched elites, such as Fortune 500 giant Waste Management
Inc., “the most vilified waste hauler in history” (p. 8). A dialectical scheme,
however, cannot explain these battles. In our postmodern world, the elemental
issue of waste disposal is a contentious, complex problem we all create and, at
the same time, seek to avoid.
In 1895, Jane Addams held the position of garbage inspector in Chicago’s
Nineteenth Ward, where recent immigrants lived next to the city’s massive
dumps. Twenty years later, Mary McDowell, an associate of Addams, con-
vinced city leaders that the deplorable conditions spawned from festering gar-
bage could not be shrugged off as a Darwinian fact of urban life. The city
pushed for incinerators as a cleaner alternative initiated, what Pellow labels, a
“movement-policy cycle” (p. 24). The introduction of a polluting waste-man-
agement technology, such as an incinerator, produced a vocal community out-
cry. In response, government and/or industry developed a supposed cleaner
technology, such as a landfill, and the cycle returned. As levels of toxicity and
waste increased over time, the risks poor minority communities encountered
represented a threat not only to their health but to their civil rights.
Borne out of this unique African American legacy, the environmental-
justice movement took wings in the early 1980s to combat environmental rac-
ism, “the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on communities
of color” (p. 64). In Chicago, Southside activist Hazel Johnson initiated this ef-
fort when she founded the People for Community Recovery in 1982. Besides
fighting the deleterious effects of living in a toxic-bound neighborhood, John-
son pushed the city government to provide public services taken for granted
elsewhere in Chicago. In 1994, Johnson, recognized as “the black mother of
the environmental movement” (p. 122), stood with President Clinton when he
signed Executive Order 12898. This new policy required all federal agencies
to work toward environmental justice, and it allowed inner-city residents to sue
polluters as a violation of their civil rights. The Bush administration’s lax en-
894 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2005

forcement of Executive Order 12898 reveals that the policy is more symbolic
than rigorous. Yet it still offers a means to fight battles that can be won.
Pellow effectively delineates the issues and cyclical series of events that
gave rise to the environmental-justice movement. He follows the Mumfordian
view that the parasitic growth of the great city depletes civilization. The fact
that the great city’s refuse is literally dumped on poor, minority neighborhoods
is only one problem. Pellow argues that the “growth mania” (p. 154) driving
government blinds its many stakeholders from their contradictory behavior.
Public funds underwrite private development with massive infrastructure out-
lays, but the external costs of pollution and water-supply depletion barely fig-
ure into the equation. To pay the debt of this “hidden cost,” more progrowth
policies are pursued and the public sector falls further into ecological debt. At
the same time, the drive to privatize and streamline government for efficiency
pushes regulators to the edge of insignificance. In the post-Enron age, when in-
vestors demand government regulation, one cannot read Garbage Wars with-
out hoping regulators also move to protect the nation’s poorest citizens from
environmental destitution.
Pellow has written a new chapter in environmental urban history. Unfortu-
nately, a compelling analysis of recent events is offset by a lack of historical
heft. At a time when Louis Sullivan scraped the sky, Daniel Burnham planned
a monumental city, and the Columbian exposition attracted millions, the au-
thor fails to capture the dynamism and creative discord that created a dominant
industrial city. The productive powers of Chicago were unmatched, but this
came at an environmental cost Pellow barely acknowledges. The failure to
consult Nature’s Metropolis reveals the brevity of his approach. Explaining
the city’s refuse as a byproduct of a consumptive machine engineered to re-
make nature along the most strict lines of capital would better expose the
strains and limitations of the urban life Pellow probes. Also, a more thorough
study of Jane Addams and Chicago’s early reform movement would place the
Progressive origins of the environmental-justice movement in a better light. If
Pellow’s history is slight, he reveals the dilemma stemming from the fallacies
of a throwaway culture. The Garbage Wars are here to stay.
In Inventing the Charles River, Karl Haglund, another activist-scholar, mas-
terfully traces the evolution of Boston’s riverine “Central Park.” Project man-
ager for the Charles River Basin, Haglund helped facilitate the Charles River
Basin Master Plan: The Second Century (2002). Only partially funded, this ef-
fort seeks to renew and, where possible, enhance the historic fabric of the
river’s sinuous system of parklands. Inventing the Charles River places
Boston’s latest river vision in a continuum of plans and schemes dating back to
1844. Haglund’s straightforward prose and stellar display of historical prints
and plans (over 300) reveal how humans have recast nature to create a land-
mark cultural landscape, “against which the visual character of the city is mea-
sured and remembered” (p. xvi). An organic logic permeates this work as the
author traces the origins and outcomes of plans springing from an evolving ur-
 Stephenson / URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 895

ban culture. In the end, uncovering the experiments Boston championed to in-
vent the Charles River not only brings form to a cluttered history but also re-
veals the state of our current standing with nature.
The scope of this book extends beyond the Charles River, investigating the
generative Commonwealth landscape that birthed the professions of land-
scape architecture and city planning. Weaving such seminal plans as Frederick
Law Olmsted Sr.’s “Emerald Necklace” and Charles Elliot Jr.’s Report to the
Metropolitan Park Commission into the history of the Charles River is some-
times tenuous, but Haglund never reaches too far. He is entranced by the dy-
namic culture of late-nineteenth-century Boston, placing the works of
Olmsted and Eliot in tandem with the writing of Henry James and the art of
Winslow Homer. This period marked the high point in a “culture of refine-
ment” (p. 211), when Cambridge and Boston elites united to secure the poten-
tial of urban-industrial life in a healthy civic landscape. Haglund mines this era
not to expose paternalistic pretensions but to gain an understanding of the dy-
namics that transformed the Charles River into a cherished public place. Re-
gaining a history tangled in decades of conflict is crucial to the author’s en-
deavor. Without historical ties to the past, the bevy of competitive interests
plying to shape the river’s future stand to lose a remarkable inheritance. The
author is an advocate, but of the gentlest type, as he plies history with a
pragmatic and telling touch.
The Charles River’s nine-mile course between Boston Harbor and
Watertown is a remnant thread of an estuary that ran with tidal ebbs and flows
until a century ago. By the 1920s, the river was dammed and realigned and the
salt marshes and mudflats were filled to create a pastoral “Water Park.”
Haglund traces the roots of his effort to the transcendental ideals of Emerson
and Thomas Cole, but it took a half century for the concept to coalesce in, a
product of the period and a remarkable talent, Charles Eliot Jr. (1859-1897).
The flurry of work Eliot produced in his short career is this book’s center-
piece. Given that Eliot’s father, Harvard President Charles Elliot Sr., penned
his only biography in 1901, Haglund’s Eliot exposé is an important contribu-
tion. In 1887, after serving as an Olmsted apprentice, Eliot Jr. opened his land-
scape architecture practice at an opportune time. Boston’s explosive growth
had pushed long-standing park discussions to the forefront. The fetid condi-
tion of the Charles River exemplified the failing sanitary conditions the city
had sought to rectify since forming the Boston Park Commission in 1875. In
addition, the need to secure the city’s water supply, the singular belief that
parks were essential to civic life, and the dramatic success of Edward
Bellamy’s Looking Backward provided an emergent clientele for the young
park planner.
In 1892, Eliot and journalist Sylvester Baxter concluded a successful three-
year campaign that produced the nation’s first metropolitan park commission.
Charles Francis Adams headed the august body, and Eliot served as consulting
landscape architect. Haglund’s deft hand and a brilliant series of maps and
896 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2005

prints reveal Eliot’s genius in integrating and extending “earlier, fragmentary

proposals for the Boston region” (p. 126). His 1893 report to the commission is
not just the excellent primer in environmental planning that Ian McHarg ex-
horted for a generation; it is a work of moral persuasion.
Eliot labored to create, what Haglund calls, the “Emerald Metropolis.” De-
spite its degraded state, the Charles River defined the central core of Eliot’s
green hub. He pushed to transfer the river’s margins to the public reserve to re-
make them into a linear park system that would foster a more “congenial out-
door life” (p. 212).
Eliot passed on in 1897, but his legacy continued. The “handsome prome-
nades” (p. 227) he envisioned along the Charles were bounding Cambridge
when, in 1903, Harvard opened the nation’s first graduate program in land-
scape architecture. Charles Elliot Sr. was not just honoring the memory of his
late son; students could pursue their new field in a premier laboratory.
John Nolen, the top student from the 1903 class, analyzed park-system
components in Cambridge and the surrounding region. Under the tutelage of
Olmsted Jr., he also gained a priceless knowledge of Eliot Jr.’s vision of an in-
terconnected, green metropolis. Nolen moved on to private practice and his
path-breaking work laid the foundation for the new field of city planning. Yet
Nolen’s plans always reflected an image of the Emerald Metropolis. Networks
of green not only defined connections to nature but, as he concluded after
working two decades in the segregated South, they offered settings where a di-
verse population might gather in harmony to experience a common love of na-
ture.21 Mumford, speaking of Nolen in 1927, stated, “At least one planner real-
izes where the path of intelligent and humane achievement will lead during the
next generation.”22
Inventing the Charles River opens to full view the birth and first organic
steps of modern city planning. Mumford was one of the few urban critics to
recognize that Eliot’s redesign of the Charles River was “central,” Haglund
writes, “to this new metropolitan framework” (p. 244). Early on, Mumford
also championed Eliot’s plan to link the Boston region with a system of “pub-
lic greens and open spaces,” as “an essential element of urban planning.”23 To-
day, the idea of linking green systems underlies the disciplines of landscape
ecology and conservation biology, while fueling the nation’s greenway move-
ment. If Eliot’s design ideal remains vital, his “vision of regional public stew-
ardship” (p. 367) fell way to a more myopic communal sense.
Ironically, the ideal of the Emerald Metropolis began to fade when Elliot Sr.
established Harvard’s landscape architecture program. “In his subsequent ef-
forts to make the university the ultimate guarantor of expert authority,”
Haglund writes, “President Eliot contributed to what finally became the great
discontinuity in public life” (p. xxi). In the 1890s, ruling elites pursued the ex-
pertise of Olmsted and Eliot, “but they remained fully and finally in control.”
As the planning process fell under the sway of competing experts, Boston’s
unified vision was shredded by a “disciplinary professionalism” (p. xx). A
 Stephenson / URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 897

concomitant shift occurred as the design of Boston’s landscape fell increas-

ingly under the sway of traffic engineers. In 1929, a scheme to interject a four-
lane highway into a new esplanade along the Charles River fomented a contro-
versy tolling the death knell of Boston’s civic unity. Succeeding generations
would provoke highway controversies of their own, culminating in Scheme Z,
the Big Dig’s galactic apparition of eighteen lanes of freeways, ramps, and
bridges crossing the Charles.
Karl Haglund has written an important book that delivers history with a pur-
pose. In trying to chart the course of the Charles River’s second century, he suf-
fered to draw consensus from “the disabled discourse of city building is our
time” (p. 367). The language he encountered is not beyond repair, but it re-
flects a landscape increasingly calibrated to disconnect people from human-
scaled places. In a world of, what Gandy labels, “cyborg urbanization” (p. 9),
the natural, connective tissue of the Charles River Parklands is a panorama of
human life. Inventing the Charles River distills the popularity of the Parklands
to its elemental, Mumfordian essence: humanity’s relationship to nature. It
took the prescient genius of Charles Eliot to graft this essence into a hybrid
seed that could flourish in the extremes of a new urban existence. Eliot’s in-
sight came from the conviction “that reservations of natural scenery had be-
come the cathedrals of modern life” (p. 370). Along the banks of the Charles
River, Bostonians daily celebrate Eliot’s belief. Humans invent natural scen-
ery and create parks because they desire such places not only for their beauty
and community but also to partake in an ancient activity that predates history.
Writing urban environmental history, then, is less about reconciling contradic-
tions than it is about revealing the prehistoric foundations our Faustian culture
cannot escape as it forever seeks to build a new world.

—Bruce Stephenson
Rollins College

1. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York, 1922).

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (Boston, 1883), 171-72.
3. Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day (New York, 1926), 89.
4. Mumford, “The Sacred City,” The New Republic, vol. 28, January 27, 1926, 271.
5. Mumford, “The Next Twenty Years in City Planning,” in Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference
on City Planning (Washington, DC, 1927), 48.
6. Ibid., 48-49.
7. Ibid., 55.
8. Mumford, Regional Planning in the Pacific Northwest: A Memorandum (Portland, OR, 1939), 19.
9. Carl Abbott, Deborah Howe, and Sy Adler, eds., Planning the Oregon Way: A Twenty-year Evalua-
tion (Corvallis, OR, 1994).
10. Goldschmidt quoted in Charles Haar and Jerald Kayden, A Tribute to Lewis Mumford (Cambridge,
MA, 1982), 16.
11. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (London, 1999), 6.
898 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2005

12. Mumford quoted in Donald Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York, 1989), 3.
13. Ray Porter, “Inner Cities,” New Republic, vol. 222, January 10, 2000, 45.
14. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Cronon,
ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1995), 85.
15. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1990).
16. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998).
17. Greg Hise and William Deveraell, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los
Angeles Region (Berkeley, CA, 2000).
18. Charles E. Beveridge and Paul Rocheleau, Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Land-
scape (New York, 1995), 35.
19. New York Times, June 29, 2003.
20. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978; New York, 1996), 282.
21. John Nolen, New Towns for Old (Boston, 1927), 110.
22. Mumford, “Next Twenty Years in City Planning,” 58
23. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938), 220.

Bruce Stephenson is a professor of environmental studies at Rollins College in Winter

Park, Florida. His most recent articles appear in the Journal of Planning History and
Paul Davis and Ray Arsenault eds., Paradise Lost: The Environmental History of
Florida (University of Florida Press, 2005).