� Nerea Calvillo,

“Toxic Nature: Toward

a Queer Theory of
Pollution,” in
Environmental Histories
of Architecture, ed.
Kim Förster (Montréal:
CCA, 2022).
Chapter 2 of
Environmental Histories
of Architecture

Editor:
Kim Förster

Managing Editor:
Claire Lubell

Copyeditor:
Ruth Jones

Published by the
Canadian Centre for
Architecture, 2022
Environmental Histories of Architecture is a series of essays
that, together, rethink the discipline and profession of
architecture by offering different understandings of how
architecture and the environment have been co-produced.
While cross-disciplinary research has focused on the new
realities of the Anthropocene, architecture’s complex
historical relationship to nature—indeed to the very con-
cept of the environment—has yet to be reconsidered in its
political, economic, and cultural dimensions. The prag-
matic, techno-utopian, or even environmentalist stances
that have thus far monopolized this relationship do not
equip architectural practices for the challenges ahead.
The task now falls to anyone producing historical analyses
and theoretical reflections to pursue a more critical, even
operative, engagement with environmental relations be-
yond the themes of energy and climate change. Through
unique methodological and conceptual framings, the
eight chapters of Environmental Histories of Architecture
examine the relationship between society and the environ-
ment, complicate understandings of architecture and
history, and challenge assumptions of modernization and
path dependency. In these ways, as highlighted in the con-
cluding essay, the publication suggests sustainable trajec-
tories for architectural thought and action that can over-
come dominant narratives of inevitability and apocalypse.

Nerea Calvillo — Chapter 2 of Environmental Histories of Architecture

1 Aleksandr Bierig
Building on Ghost Acres:
The London Coal Exchange, circa 1849

2 Nerea Calvillo
Toxic Nature:
Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

3 Daniel Barber
Modes of Concealment:
Architecture, Oil, and Historical Method

4 Kiel Moe
The Equipmental Tradition:
Architecture’s Environmental Pedagogies

5 Jiat-Hwee Chang
The Air-Conditioning Complex:
Histories and Futures of Hybridization in Asia

6 Hannah le Roux
Circulating Asbestos:
The International AC Review, 1956–1985

7 Isabelle Doucet
Interspecies Encounters:
Design (Hi)stories, Practices of Care, and Challenges

8 Paulo Tavares
Architectural Botany:
A Conversation with William Balée on Constructed Forests

9 Kim Förster
Undisciplined Knowing:
Writing Architectural History through the Environment

Nerea Calvillo — Chapter 2 of Environmental Histories of Architecture

Nerea Calvillo
Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

Nerea Calvillo explores what happens when nature itself,

in this case pollen, is deemed a problem, even a pollut-
ant. The essay introduces the pioneering women of Hull-
House, a reformist settlement project founded in Chicago
in 1889, who conducted extensive socioeconomic surveys
that mapped—at least implicitly—the distribution of
ragweed in the city, before pollen-induced hay fever had
been medicalized and commodified in the United States.
Calvillo draws on ecofeminist literature to shape a queer
theory of pollution, one that addresses it beyond the archi-
tectural scale. Rather than simply revealing and repre-
senting pollen as pollution, Calvillo’s focus on the multis-
calar politicization of urban ecologies allows for research
into practices that intervene in society and nature, care
for urban spaces, and are critical of neoliberal greening.

Nerea Calvillo — Chapter 2 of Environmental Histories of Architecture

 Nature, natural, green. Green facades, rooftops, transportation, energy,
bricks, houses. Nature must be protected. Green is the solution to all
urban problems: climate change, heat-island effect, air pollution, hu-
man health, biodiversity loss, shading, real estate, beauty. Critiques are
too few to fight against this greening mania that oversimplifies nature
as good, nature as green, green as good. Rarely asked is, For whom? At
what cost? What counts as green? Who defines what is “nature”?
Western science and culture are at the core of these simplifica-
tions. In their introduction to Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of
Architecture, Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini argue that nature has
been split in two: first, the green that purifies, sanitizes, and cures hu-
man bodies—the solution to ill urban (human) life—and second, other
forms of nature like diseases or so-called disasters—what they call
“the dark side of nature” ① —that are taken to be the causes of these
illnesses and must therefore be sterilized or eliminated. This fictitious
split can be further problematized by considering how anthropogenic
chemicals, gases, and waves have permeated soils, airs, waters, bodies,
buildings, and plants in every corner of the planet, to a point where
what used to be called nature is now polluted and, quite often, toxic.
1 Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini, “Demedicalize Architecture,” in Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, eds.
Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini (Montréal; Zurich: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Lars Müller Publishers, 2012), 19.
Driven by the engineering fantasy that technology is the solu-
tion to any problem, techno-scientific and policy responses to the
polluted environment propose that nature can be cleaned through the
control of bodies and the environment. Geoengineering and techno-
logical projects are designed and built to prevent new emissions or to
clean pollutants from rivers and soils. Buildings, pills, and vaccines are
deployed to protect human bodies. Recently, nature has been put to
work to perform some of these cleaning strategies through the green-
ing of buildings, public spaces, and neighbourhoods. ⒈
But what if the solution is part of the problem? Sustainable solu-
tions—such as the production of renewables or the increasing energy
consumption of sealed buildings—pollute. Medicalization creates
uneven geographies of health-treatment access. Ongoing exposure,
which disproportionally affects the poor, creates, what environmental
humanities scholar Rob Nixon has described as, structural forms of
slow violence. ② Borasi and Zardini argue that architecture “should
seek to challenge—rather than pacify—the newly emerging neo-liberal
agenda [of greening] and question a medicalized vision and approach
to health issues,” ③ which in practice requires accounting for systemic,
planetary, and permanent forms of pollution. How, then, should we
intervene in polluted worlds?
2 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
3 Borasi and Zardini, “Demedicalize Architecture,” 17.

POLLUTION IN ARCHITECTURE: FROM THE CRITICAL-

AESTHETIC TO THE CRITICAL-QUEER

For theorist and architectural historian David Gissen, one of the diffi-
culties in finding alternatives to techno-scientific cleaning responses
in architecture is the discipline’s lack of a critical theory of pollution.
To create one, Gissen suggests a materially and aesthetically oriented
framework, exploring pollution from three perspectives—representa-
tional, material, and historical—to consider how architecture can
represent it, make it experienceable, and establish connections with
forms of pollution from the past. ④ He makes pollution an architec-
tural issue and highlights expertise in architecture practice—material
and aesthetic—to deal with it. Gissen’s aim is to make pollution visible
through architecture, assuming that awareness leads to action. But
ten years have passed since the initial publication of his critical theory

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 of pollution, and despite the enormous amount of information on
environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change now
circulating in the media, change has not followed at the speed and
intensity needed. Could the theory be updated by actually intervening
in pollution, rather than just revealing it?
4 David Gissen, “A Theory of Pollution for Architecture,” in Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, eds. Giovanna Bo-
rasi and Mirko Zardini (Montréal; Zurich: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Zurich; Lars Müller Publishers, 2012), 117–132.
Gissen’s examples, such as coal or cigarette smoke, are undis-
puted pollutants. What counts as pollution and when something is
polluted seems to be, in his formulation at least, clear and fixed. But
ideas of pollution are not static, and what is considered pollution has
shifted in history. For instance, the historian Peter Thorsheim points
out that even though an excessive amount of smoke produced by coal
fires was affecting the health and everyday lives of people in Britain
in the second half of the nineteenth century, it only became an issue
of public concern when the increase of smoke was correlated with
cultural decline. It was the combination of matter and morals that
triggered social and urban action to reduce coal levels in the air. For
Thorsheim, pollution is both the quantity of toxicants and the ideol-
ogies and practices that create those pollutants, which condition how
people face their consequences. ⑤
5 Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006).
Pollution as a concept is also unstable because it gets trans-
ferred—and acted upon—between plants, humans, and environments.
Through her analysis of the agricultural colonization of California’s
Central Valley at the turn of the twentieth century, Linda Nash has
shown how shifting notions of the body, migration, and nature condi-
tioned what was considered as polluting, which informed the actions
that were taken to mitigate mortality. According to what was polluted
through disease—be it the body (usually migrant and racialized) or the
newly colonised landscape—the valley’s colonizers established regula-
tions, medical practices, engineering projects, and everyday routines
to sanitize bodies or landscapes. ⑥ To materially address who is affect-
ed by urban pollution, we must, like Nash, uncover the specificity of its
social and material context.
6 Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
Taking Gissen’s text as an invitation to multiply the perspec-
tives from which to think about pollution in architecture, I update and
expand on his theory by decentring architecture and the human in
favour of environmental issues and phenomena, thereby politicizing
materiality, nature, and pollution. It will also require a radical expan-
sion in the realms and strategies in which architecture intervenes.
Architecture must extend in scale, foregrounding its sociotechnical
connections. A technologically oriented approach to sustainability
has led to the prioritizing of certificates and standards, to monitor-
ing, and to the hermetic sealing of interior spaces, which accompany
certain notions of nature and pollution. But the conditions in and
through which pollution operates are multi-scalar—it does not rec-
ognize boundaries. While Gissen focuses on architecture as buildings,
pollution makes the whole of the built environment a potential site
for intervention, troubling distinctions between architecture, build-
ings, the urban, and urban design. In particular, the actor-network
theory of urban political ecology frames the built environment as an
entanglement of sociotechnical assemblages, freeing us to explore
nature and power relations within the urban. ⑦
7 Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw, In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism
(London: Routledge, 2006); Eric Swyngedouw, “Metabolic Urbanization: The Making of Cyborg Cities,” in In the Nature of Cities:
Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, eds. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Eric Swyngedouw (London; New
York: Routledge, 2006); Wendy Harcourt and Ingrid L. Nelson, Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the “Green
Economy” (London: Zed Books, 2015).

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 To specify and situate pollution in particular situations and
expand Gissen’s theory, I propose a queer framework. The concept of
queerness was first used to fight for the rights of non-normative forms
of gender and sexuality. Its theories and struggles draw from and inter-
sect with feminist theory, lesbian and gay studies, Black and brown
feminisms, decolonial theory, environmental justice and ecocriticism,
and animal studies or posthumanism through combinations of theor-
etical and activist trajectories. ⑧ As an umbrella term, queer allows us
to address changing or unwanted entities and to identify the politics
in the entanglement of nature and gender, race, sexuality, and other
struggles as a form of coalitional politics. It is a theory and an action,
putting social and environmental injustice at the centre of all interven-
tions. Queerness is also useful in its ability to challenge fixed categories,
socialize materiality, and unsettle problematic approaches to sustain-
ability and pollution. As articulated by Luciana Parisi, queer theory
contributes to discussions of nature and naturalization as discursive
and complex biological, technological, and political assemblages. ⑨
8 See William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).
9 Luciana Parisi, “The Nanoengineering of Desire,” in Queering the Non/Human, eds. Myra J. Hird and Noreen Giffney (London;
New York: Routledge, 2016), 283–309.
In unpacking this queer framework, pollen proves to be a pro-
ductive object of study, for several reasons: pollen is a good example
for exploring the limits between nature and culture and what counts
as pollution, as well as the variability of the notion of pollution in time.
Pollen has a dual value: it can be damaging for some human bodies
through allergies, and yet it is one of the core elements of plant repro-
duction and ecological functioning. Compared with smoke or animal
waste, it is easier to trace pollen’s connections with its material, eco-
nomic, social, and political implications and its frequent connections
with processes of colonialism and inequality. Lastly, pollen compli-
cates techno-scientific responses to pollution, making less clear what
needs to be controlled and problematising what deserves to be cleaned.
By identifying pollen’s complexities through what I call pollen-pollution,
it is possible to understand the extent of other forms of intervention in
and through nature.

TOXIC NATURE

Pollen has been worshipped since ancient times for its inherent fer-
tility, as it provides nourishment to multiple species. Yet, it acquired
a toxic identity when doctors and physicians discovered that it was
one of the main causes of hay fever and asthma in the late nineteenth
century. This toxic association had consequences: human bodies
were classified in relation to their sensitivity to certain plant species’
pollen; plants were regulated as either acceptable or unacceptable;
precise scientific research techniques (aerial air sampling, botanical
taxonomic research) were developed; new medical disciplines (asth-
ma experts) were configured; and civic associations lobbied to make
asthma an urgent social and public health issue.
The breakthrough linking hay fever and pollen took place
simultaneously in Britain, Germany, and North America, but it was
in the North American metropolis that it acquired social, regulatory,
urban, and spatial dimensions. Historians of science Gregg Mitman
and Zachary Falck have accounted for this history. In Breathing Space,
Mitman explores how pollen was established as the cause of hay fever
and therefore as a poison—toxic for human health—and how this
correlation generated a whole set of interdisciplinary studies, sparked
activist groups, and most importantly here, led to urban transform-
ations. ⑩ Falck has offered a detailed account of the role of weeds
in the social and spatial development of the urban metropolis in the

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 United States. ⑪ Both articulate how, instead of pollen grains, weeds
became the paradigm of pollen-pollution. These “wild” plants became
the target of technological developments, eradication campaigns, and
urban transformation and a metaphor for eugenic, racist, classist, and
xenophobic ideas. Mitman and Falck show how pollen-pollution is
social and political, and how the war on weeds failed to reduce the
concentrations of pollen in the air, demonstrating the breakdown of
the techno-scientific fantasy of controlling nature. ⒉
10 Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007).
11 Zachary Falck, Weeds: An Environmental History of Metropolitan America (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2011).
Throughout the nineteenth century, hay fever was a common
disease, wrongly associated to the smell of fresh hay. As Oren C. Dur-
ham, a leading pollen researcher of his time, wrote in 1936, “Being
non-fatal and funny, like sickness, (hay fever) has not been a matter
of much concern to anyone except the sufferers themselves and to
the patient-medicine men.” ⑫ Nonetheless, as early as 1819, Charles
Blackley, an English physician and hay fever sufferer, began experi-
menting with his own body. Forty years later, he came to the conclu-
sion that the pollen of any grass was poisonous to him, and in 1875 he
published the first atmospheric pollen studies in North America. In
Chicago, Dr. Karl Koessler began giving injections of ragweed pol-
len extract in 1911, but it was not until 1921 that the Austrian doctor
Clemens von Pirquet coined the term “allergy” to describe blood and
tissues’ reactions to specific pollen grains. ⒊
12 Oren C. Durham, Your Hay Fever (Indianapolis; New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1936), 13.
Through botanical and clinical research conducted in Chicago,
New Orleans, and New York City, three “pollen seasons” were identi-
fied: the tree pollen season in spring, the grass pollen season in summer,
and the weed pollen season in autumn. Although it soon became clear
that each human body had different levels of sensitivity to different
types of plants, at least 60 percent of sufferers were sensitive to weed
pollen. Species of the genus ambrosia, commonly called ragweed—and
in particular ambrosia artemisaefolia (common ragweed) and ambro-
sia frifida (giant ragweed)—were discovered to be the highest pollen
emitters, becoming the main object of scientific research, the symbol of
toxic nature in the media and in the cultural imagination, and a threat
to public health. While developing a medicalized cure for hay fever,
doctors and pharmaceutical researchers argued for a preventive ap-
proach: get rid of weeds in public spaces, parks, and on private property.
Dr. William Scheppegrell organized the first weed eradication cam-
paigns in New Orleans in 1913, and Chicago followed a few years later.
The intense fight against weeds, however, was not exclusively
due to their potential to cause hay fever symptoms. As Falck argues,
weeds unsettled the social norms of the time. They were disliked
because they were considered uncontrollable, invasive, foreign, ugly.
They were seen to share attributes with immigrants, the homeless,
prisoners, the unemployed, or the poor, an outlet for and a confirma-
tion of xenophobic and eugenic attitudes. ⑬ In newspaper articles, im-
migrants and the poor were called “human weeds” to emphasize their
unwanted, dirty, and disposable nature. Weed eradication campaigns
became a social and public health project, where ragweed was re-
moved by hand from sidewalks and empty lots by the so-called human
weeds. ⑭ By enlisting toxic social beings in the removal of toxic na-
ture, both public space and its human inhabitants could be improved.
13 Based on Darwinist understandings of human evolution, eugenicists promoted the protection of the strong and the elimination
of the weak. They became the most vehement enemies of plant weeds and actively campaigned for their eradication.
14 The Times Picayune, 21 September 1915.
These hand eradication campaigns partially transformed streets
and empty lots and interfered in the local ecologies of these spaces.
But, the weeds regrew. After World War II, chemical herbicides and

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 pesticides became new weapons in the anti-weed campaign. Technol-
ogies that had helped defeat foreign enemies would surely lead to vic-
tory in the war against unwanted nature. Fields and cities were sprayed
at large scale. ⑮ The secondary effects of such deployments were
not considered, only later becoming the subject of ecological critique.
During the 1950s, the landscape of the city changed. Some empty lots
were cleared of ragweed and converted to new programs. Many others
deteriorated, damaged by the incessant spraying campaigns.
15 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, 2012).
The failure of hand and chemical eradication campaigns demon-
strates the impossibility of “cleaning” toxic nature. They did not reduce
the levels of pollen in the air, nor did they ameliorate public spaces.
Instead, they illustrate how a limited understanding of pollen-pollution
wasted human, technical, and public resources. Because the urban could
not be medicalized, human bodies and interiors were medicalized
instead. Air conditioning machines became popular in the 1930s, and
by the 1950s the antihistamines market was booming. The changes
that took place in these cities are part of a well-known techno-scientific
model of progress. A scientific collective “discovery” was aimed to be
solved with engineering and technological solutions. ⒋ ⒌

THREE EPISODES: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF

POLLEN POLLUTION

This environmental history reveals pollen-pollution in its making—how

it was addressed and the politics that it required. Although this messy
process took place in several cities, Chicago provides a particularly sali-
ent example. It was the United States’ main port from the late nineteenth
through the early twentieth century and the country’s fastest growing
city, doubling in size every ten years from 1830 to 1900. According to its
inhabitants, Chicago was also the filthiest in the United States. ⑯
16 Chicago Commons, 1894–1911 (Chicago: Chicago Commons Association, 1911).
Within the tapestry of people, technology, particles, laws, and
factories that constituted early attempts to solve the problem of
urban pollen in Chicago were a few proposals that offer alternatives
to techno-scientific ways of thinking. For various reasons, they did
not gain traction at the time, although had they not been ignored, they
could have changed the course of urban development. Rather than
tracing a parallel or new historiography of pollen-pollution to write
a counter-history of pollen and the urban environment, selecting
particular instances might help us think about the present and inspire
alternative futures. This is in keeping with the speculative feminist
tradition, which does not aim to maintain the current world, but to
think about what is possible, a form of thinking with care that “is
about provoking political and ethical imagination in the present.” ⑰
In the words of Donna Haraway, the following case studies aim “to
make cloudy” the past in order to tell a different story of the present
and future. ⑱ These marginal episodes configure what the ecofemin-
ist Maria Puig de la Bellacasa has called an “assemblage of neglected
things.” ⑲ They offer opportunities to re-think how nature, pollution,
bodies, architecture, and the city can be thought of and designed dif-
ferently, expanding, reviewing, and updating Gissen’s critical theory
of pollution for architecture.
17 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2017), 7.
18 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 1.
19 De la Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 7.
None of the following three episodes involved architects or plan-
ners. Their main figures conducted fieldwork in different places and
at different scales but dealt with similar questions, from the epistemic

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 (how to know pollution) to the ontological (what is actually polluting)
and performative (what to do). To conduct their research, they put
their bodies in the city (as opposed to in their university offices or labs),
which allowed them to gain a more detailed picture of the problems
they sought to address and challenge biases related to weeds or their
human companions. Though their outcomes remain incipient ideas
and works in progress, not histories of success, all explored alternative
forms of intervention that acknowledged the entanglement of nature
and culture in different ways.

1892–1894: ACTIVIST WOMEN, “HUMAN-WEEDS,”

PLAYGROUNDS, AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

In 1889, as doctors were correlating pollen with hay fever, Jane Addams
and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull-House, the first reformist settle-
ment house in Chicago. ⑳ Led by middle- and upper-class women with
social justice motivations, the organization was at the forefront of the
settlement movement in the United States. The women of Hull-House
believed in social reform, which in their view could only be achieved by
properly understanding the lives of the disadvantaged. And this know-
ledge could only be gained by living among them.
20 Settlement residents aimed to improve society and the lives of the poor by living with them. The Hull-House took inspiration
from Toynbee Hall in London, the first settlement house.
Hull-House pioneered research methods that combined human
rights activism and urban reform, inaugurating new disciplines like
social work and occupational health. Its members lobbied Chicago’s
city council to repair and improve public services and proposed new
regulations in many fields, from federal labour and social welfare
legislation to consumer rights and ending child labour. ㉑ The nascent
Sociology School of Chicago, while drawing on their research meth-
ods, dismissed them as social workers instead of researchers. ㉒ W. E.
B. DuBois, the author of The Philadelphia Negro, drew from their maps
and field research. Fortunately, their work was acknowledged in other
contexts, including Jane Addams’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
21 Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Florence Kelley: Resources and Achievements,” (paper presentation, Fifth Berkshire Conference on the
History of Women, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, June 1981). Box 1, Folder 20, Florence Kelley Collection, University Li-
brary, University of Illinois Chicago (hereafter UIC).
22 Martin Bulmer, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago and Lon-
don: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).
The Hull-House was located in the nineteenth ward, next to a
“criminal district which ranks as one of the most openly and flagrantly
vicious in the civilized world, and west of the same stream the poor-
est, and probably the most crowded section of Chicago.” ㉓ Florence
Kelley, a Hull-House resident, was appointed Special Agent Expert in
charge of Chicago for the national Department of Labor study “The
Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia,” commis-
sioned in 1892 by an order of congress. ⒍
23 Agnes Sinclair Holbrook, “Map Notes and Comments,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illi-
nois Press, 2007), 53.
To research slums, Kelley set up a team to map wages and na-
tionalities as poverty indicators for the diverse population that con-
figured her neighbourhood. They went door-to-door, filling in ques-
tionnaires and talking to people to get first-hand information. ㉔ They
visited insalubrious tenement houses and sweatshops, highlighting
their “low-ceilinged, ill lighted, unventilated rooms, below the street
level, damp and cold in winter, hot and close in summer.” Included
as well were the observed consequences of these conditions: “Their
dampness entails rheumatism and their darkness injures the sight of
the people who work in them.” ㉕

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

24 Edith Abbott, ed., The Tenements of Chicago, 1908-1935 (New York: Arno Press, 1970).
25 Third Annual Report of the Factory Inspectors of Illinois (for the Year Ending December 15, 1895) (Springfield, IL: State of Illinois, 1896).
Box 1, Folder 4, Florence Kelley Collection, University Library, UIC.
Parallel research conducted by other residents contributed to
Hull-House’s specific methods and approach. Alice Hamilton, known
for her work in occupational health and industrial toxicology in the
1900s, researched women’s working conditions in factories, discov-
ering the health impact of their exposure to concentrated chemicals
and insalubrious spaces. ㉖ Jane Addams observed the poor sanitary
conditions of streets and alleys, full of waste due to deteriorated or
inexistent urban infrastructure. ㉗ Addams and other residents en-
gaged in architecture-related investigations, seeking details on garbage
systems, housing, street paving, plumbing, the air space of rooms, and
many other aspects of the built environment. ㉘ ⒎
26 “Women Workers and Industrial Poisons,” U.S. Department of Labor Bulletin of the Women's Bureau no. 57 (1926). Alice Hamilton
Collection, Box 1, Folder 12, University Library, UIC.
27 Jane Addams, Forty Years at Hull-House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935).
28 Robert Hunter, Tenement Conditions in Chicago: Report by the Investigative Committee of the City Homes Association (Chicago: City
Homes Association, 1901).
Although pollen and weeds are absent from Hull-House’s carto-
graphic project, they are somehow present, implicit in the maps of
wages and nationalities. Not only because the weeds occupied the areas
left blank in the map. Agnes Sinclair Holbrook, another Hull-House
resident and one of the maps’ contributors, commented that “under-
sized and unhealthy” people lived in precarious houses spread “like
rank weeds in fresh soil.” ㉙ As her simile makes plain, the Hull-House
women were aware they were mapping the living conditions of the so-
called human weeds.
29 Holbrook, “Map Notes and Comments,” 54.
Living in and mapping the nineteenth ward gave Hamilton, Hol-
brook, Addams, and their colleagues an understanding of the popula-
tion and the physical state of their neighbourhood from within. Their
research demonstrated that what polluted this urban environment
were the conditions in which the poor lived and worked, not their sup-
posedly polluting, underdeveloped, or faulty human bodies and prac-
tices. Their conclusions, summarized in their book Hull-House Maps
and Papers in 1895, dismantled the eugenics project, demonstrating that
“circumstances and environment, not laziness and drunkenness, were
the major causes of poverty.” ㉚ By ameliorating environments, society,
and in particular the lives of the poor, could be improved. This idea,
later shared by reformists and settlement houses in many cities, was a
fundamental engine for urban transformation. For years Hull-House
persisted with demands to council for street cleaning and better side-
walks. Meanwhile, its members used activities to educate their neigh-
bours, organizing groups of children for garbage collection to prevent
pollution in the ward’s alleys. ㉛
30 Allen F. Davis and Mary L. McCree, eds., Eighty Years at Hull-House (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969).
31 Residents of Hull House, Hull-House Maps and Papers (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
One of Hull-House’s main contributions was its pioneering
work in transforming empty lots into playgrounds. Having lived
in and mapped the crammed conditions of their neighbourhood,
Hull-House residents realized that children needed fresh air spaces
secure from the crime of the streets. At the same time, educational
theorists like Neva Leona Boyd promoted the importance of play
for the development of children and as a means of social adjustment
and cooperation. ㉜ ⒏ To satisfy these two needs, Addams and
the Hull-House women found opportunities in the ruined and aban-
doned lots scattered throughout their neighbourhood.
32 Neva Leona Boyd, “Play as a Means of Social Adjustment,” Cooperative Methods in Recreation (1930). Box 13, Folder 264, Neva
Leona Boyd Papers, University Library, UIC.

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 When negotiating the rent of a dilapidated nearby tenement
building, Jane Addams came up with the idea of demolishing it and
creating a playground, which needed very few resources. ㉝ Inspired
by the sand boxes for small children developed in Germany and built
in Boston, Hull-House’s all-ages playground became the first of its
kind in Chicago. ㉞ From then on, the use of empty lots for play-
grounds became widely established. Hull-House cooperated with the
Chicago Settlement, the Chicago Commons, and the Northwestern
University Settlement to initiate a longstanding social and public pro-
ject to stimulate the development of public playgrounds and recreation
centres in poor areas of the city. ㉟ Hull-House’s first initiative led to
the creation of the Special Park Commission in Chicago. ㊱ ⒐
33 Davis and McCree, Eighty Years at Hull-House.
34 Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood, “Turn of the Century Women’s Organizations, Urban Design, and the Origin of the American Play-
ground Movement,” Landscape Journal 13, no. 2 (21 September 1994): 124–137, https://doi.org/10.3368/lj.13.2.124; Elizabeth Halsey,
The Development of Public Recreation in Metropolitan Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Recreation Commission, 1940).
35 Halsey, The Development of Public Recreation in Metropolitan Chicago.
36 Bureau of Parks and Recreation, 75th Annual Report. Department of Public Works (Chicago: Department of Public Works, 1950). They
built six new playgrounds, three on city property and three on property leased for free by public-spirited owners. In 1955, fifty-
seven supervised playgrounds were managed by the Bureau of Parks and Recreation, an arrangement that lasted until the 1970s.

1926–1936: FLOATING GRAINS, MAPPING WEEDS, AND

MEDICINE IN THE CITY

Pollen researcher Oren C. Durham started his career collecting ragweed

pollen for a doctor in Chicago in the early 1900s. In 1925 he was hired
by Abbott, an important pharmaceutical laboratory at the time, where
he spent the rest of his career. It was there that he finalized, in 1928, the
first national pollen survey of the whole of the United States. In his sem-
inal 1936 book Your Hay Fever, Durham narrates the research process
that led to correlating hay fever with pollen and the definition of asth-
ma as a disease. ㊲ An inventor and an interdisciplinary thinker, he was
interested in the diversity of pollen grains in relation to weather and
other environmental conditions. The pollen collection instruments
and techniques he developed are still used today. ㊳
37 Durham, Your Hay Fever.
38 Gregg Mitman, “Oren C.Durham,” The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 114, no. 5 (2004): 1229–1230,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2004.08.016.
Durham became particularly interested in how the concen-
trations of pollen grains in the air affected asthma symptoms. To
understand this, he needed to undertake a city-wide survey, and so in
collaboration with doctors and botanists, Durham used fieldwork and
aerial pollen counts to map Chicago’s aerial pollen–producing plants.
Working with the physician Karl Koessler, he was able to collect
quantitative, “reliable local botanic data.” Their research, a “System for
an intensive pollen survey, with a report of results in Chicago”—funded
by the Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute and the Department of
Pathology at the University of Chicago, and published in the Journal of
the American Medical Association in 1926—was the first systematic aerob-
iological study of this scale. ㊴
39 Karl K. Koessler and Oren C. Durham, “A System for an Intensive Pollen Survey,” The Journal of the American Medical Association
86, April (1926): 1204–1209.
In order to comprehend the complexity of aerial landscapes,
Koessler and Durham realized that they had to map consistently
throughout the city. To do so they borrowed the quadrant method de-
veloped by the ecologist Frederic Clements. ㊵ Through fieldwork, they
recorded on index cards the percentage of “land given to free vegeta-
tion,” the “character of the area” (or land use), and a list of plants found,
ranking them in order of abundance. Oil-coated microscope slides
spread throughout the city allowed them to determine the differential

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 of daily pollen counts for ten years. Koessler and Durham found an
even distribution of species throughout the city, although ragweed was
the heaviest pollen producer. They identified 38 percent of the city as
what they called “neglected land” or “waste places.” ㊶ ⒑
40 Mitman, “Oren C.Durham.”
41 Koessler and Durham, “A System for an Intensive Pollen Survey,” 1204.
To deepen his therapeutic knowledge on the specifics of differ-
ent types of pollen grains and plants, Durham conducted a follow-up
study, seven years after his work with Koessler, in collaboration with
the allergist Samuel Feinberg. In their view this knowledge was needed
because “before skin tests are employed in the individual diagnosis one
must have a fair conception of the types and abundance of hay fever
plants in the community in which the sufferer lives.” ㊷ The research
was funded by their respective institutions: the Allergy Clinic of the De-
partment of Medicine at the Northwestern University Medical School
and the Biological Laboratories of Abbott Laboratories.
42 Samuel Feinberg and Oren C. Durham, “Hay Fever in Chicago and Suburbs: Clinical, Field and Air Observations,” Illinois Med-
ical Journal (May 1933): 1.
This new version, which drew on Durham’s previous survey
method, relied on field, clinical, and aerial observations. It included
the suburbs, the trees that were sources of hay fever, and the weath-
er. Durham and Feinberg needed to know variations in the types and
abundance of pollen in relation to seasonality, their spatial distribu-
tion, changes in flora through time, and the clinical effects of all these
changes. Through their research, they found that the largest amount
of pollen present in the air did not belong to urban weeds, but to the
crops that surrounded and fed the city of Chicago. They also found
that the neglected land around the city was much weedier than the
average farming district. Gathering standardized pollen data and
mapping where weeds grew showed changes in historical patterns of
land use. ㊸ Durham had been an advocate of weed eradication cam-
paigns, but these mapping exercises made him realize that removing
the weeds was an unproductive endeavour; hay fever–causing pollen
travels kilometres with the wind. ⒒
43 Gregg Mitman, “A History of Pollen Mapping and Surveillance: The Relations between Natural History and Clinical Allergy,”
The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 114, no. 5 (2004): 1230–1235, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2004.08.016.

1939: DUMP SITES, CONSERVATION, AND A BOTANIST’S ANTI-

COLONIAL APPROACH

The ragweed were originally thinly scattered plants, which

served Nature as a sort of rescue squad to “heal scars” in
disturbed soil cover, and were insignificant in hay fever.
Man’s recent land abuses have put a heavy burden on the
rescue squad, and the ragweed have increased enormous-
ly. Their powerful pollen “factories” are now out of all
proportion to the shortened distance between plants to
the increasing misery of hay fever sufferers. ㊹

Taking a different view from Durham on the relationship

between pollen, pollution, ragweed, and hay fever was Roger Wode-
house, a botanist by training who worked for a New York City drug
manufacturer and who became renowned for his work on pollen
taxonomy. ㊺ He outlined his approach in a short text called “Weeds,
Waste and Hay Fever,” written for Natural History, the magazine of
the American Museum of Natural History that was sent to all its mem-
bers as “one of the privileges of membership.” ⒓
44 Roger P. Wodehouse, “Weeds, Waste and Hay Fever,” Natural History, American Museum of Natural History 43–44 (1939): 150.
45 Roger P. Wodehouse, Pollen Grains: Their Structure, Identification, and Significance in Science and Medicine (New York: Hafner
Publishing, 1959).

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 To understand pollen-pollution, Wodehouse went to the dunes
and wasteland of Michigan’s lower peninsula—which was, in the
nineteenth century, a hay fever resort for people living in Chicago and
beyond—to investigate their pollen levels and asthma cases. Walking
through the landscape to make his observations, he used multi-scalar
spatial and temporal frames to ask what ragweed did at different phas-
es of its growth. He followed the question “What does pollution do?”
and realized that ragweed benefitted ecosystems. Wodehouse not only
redefined the role of weeds within their larger ecological contexts, he
also inverted the responsibility of polluting. For Wodehouse, “hay fe-
ver [was] nature’s reply to man’s destructive and wasteful exploitation
of natural resources, as much as [were] soil erosion, wind erosion and
floods.” ㊻ The problem of ragweed was not the plant itself, but how
urbanization had changed the soil conditions so that only ragweed, a
very resistant and adaptable plant, could grow.
46 Roger P. Wodehouse, “Hayfever, A Man-Made Disease,” Natural History, American Museum of Natural History 43–44 (1939): 162.
Wodehouse also demonstrated that artemisa was a genus native
to North America, a plant that had been there for centuries, although
“the Indians had no hay fever” because the land was then covered with
thick vegetation. ㊼ In his account, the increase in weeds was connect-
ed to the history of colonialism, as White Men brought many of these
supposedly noxious plants from the Old World. Yet ragweed was not
an invasive species:

Ragweed are pioneers but not invaders. . . . They per-

form a useful service in holding the soil against wind
and water erosion until it is taken over by other more
permanent plants. . . . Their function is to initiate the
succession by which nature tends to restore the original
balanced vegetation. ㊽

To protect ecosystems and prevent hay fever, Wodehouse—a

conservationist—proposed that weeds be “left to Nature,” dying after
a few years and ceding space to other grasses. ㊾ He also offered an
alternative to this laissez-faire approach, advocating for intensive
cultivation as a different form of soil conservation. Sadly, while
Wodehouse rose to prominence for his analysis of pollen proteins
and pollen grains, his more historical and inclusive perspective,
which supported the man-made and thus cultural nature of hay fever,
drew little notice. ㊿
47 Wodehouse, “Hayfever, A Man-Made Disease,” 158.
48 Wodehouse, 163.
49 Wodehouse, 158.
50 Falck, Weeds: An Environmental History of Metropolitan America.

QUEER CONTRIBUTIONS TO A THEORY OF POLLUTION FOR

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

These episodes illustrate how the understandings of pollution are

fluid and multiple, how they are deeply embedded in other cultural,
social, and political projects. Pollution is not only material, it is also
political and affects bodies. What we call pollution has consequences
in terms of the management of urban space, humans, and the en-
vironment, and these consequences are different for humans and
other than humans. Our conception of pollution matters, as do our
ideas about nature and society. But most importantly, these episodes
reveal how urban space was physically and visibly transformed as a
consequence of pollen-pollution and how any interventions made
in the city are forms of designing the environment. They also enable
us to reflect critically on urban ecologies and greening operations

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 and on why attempts to control nature and cleanse it of pollutants by
technoscientific means might not be the best response.
Queer bodies and queer practices have been historically
labelled as “unnatural”—and persecuted for it. However, in Queering
the Non/Human, the sociologist Myra Hird and psychoanalytic psycho-
therapist Noreen Giffney demonstrate that what might constitute the
un/in/sub natural/human intersects with the monstrous, the abject,
and the unwanted. ➀ From a decolonial perspective, Katherine Yusoff
has used the term in/human to keep present the human bodies that
have extracted, manipulated, or cleaned soils, forests, or mines. ➁
51 Myra J. Hird and Noreen Giffney, Queering the Non/Human (London: Routledge, 2016).
52 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2019).
In Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, migrants, the
poor, and the crippled were subject to multiple forms of exclusion, to
the point where they did not even have human status. They were con-
sidered semi-humans, plant-humans, unwanted-plants, unwanted hu-
mans. The Hull-House women situated pollution within larger frames,
focusing on the most affected. They challenged categories, embraced
the messiness of their context, and collaborated with the unwanted; they
attended to the in/human, moved to live with the so-called human weeds.
Although no explicit connection exists between Hull-House’s
playgrounds and ragweed eradication campaigns, both took place at
the same time. It could be argued that pollen and weeds were, for Jane
Addams and the Hull-House’s other activist women, not an issue in
themselves, but part of a larger form of pollution inequality that went
hand in hand with the consideration of their neighbours as in/humans.
Yet there is a crucial difference between the two campaigns. For the
weed eradicators, the objective was to remove the ragweed, the cause
of pollen-pollution. For the reformists, the objective was educational
and recreational: to eliminate all forms of pollution present in empty
lots (including weeds) to create new conditions for children and adults.
As a result, they intervened in society and nature at once, showing how
environmental and social justice go hand in hand. The Hull-House
women challenged ideas about what pollutes and what counts as pollu-
tion in practice, as well as who bears the consequences. By asking “For
whom?” they proved that a polluted environment was not the cause of
polluting entities, but the result of social and material interventions
that operate at a structural level. What polluted were the living con-
ditions of the poor, their tenement houses and the streets of the nine-
teenth ward.
To create the playgrounds, the reformers did not clean nature.
They transformed it by prioritizing the life of the poor and the vul-
nerable. In collaboration with these groups, the reformers worked
towards making lives worth living, transforming social and infrastruct-
ural conditions to prevent pollution and to improve social and environ-
mental justice. This required working at multiple levels, from legis-
lation, to mapping, to building playgrounds, to organizing activities
with children in the streets. In sum, they saw in the polluted empty
lots an opportunity for a different and more just future. Their work is a
good example of queer practices. ➂
53 David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?,” Social Text 23, no. 3–4
(Fall-Winter 2005): 84–85.
Furthermore, in order to achieve their goals, the Hull-House
women queered their own social class. Women, made responsible for
the reproduction and cleaning tasks of the home, were allowed to par-
ticipate in the public sphere to clean, tidy up, and care for urban spaces
and the poor. ➃ Hull-House’s reformers strategically inhabited this
“female” space and consciously mobilized the rigid patriarchal distri-
butions of labour of the time. They used their upper-class privilege to
access and lobby (male) decision-making places. In choosing to make

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 their collective home in the neighbourhood where they worked, they
queered heteronormative forms of living. The Hull-House provided
an environment where its female residents could dedicate their lives to
research and activism, one of the very few socially acceptable alterna-
tives to nuclear family life. They configured their own support network
and a form of kinship that was, at the time, unique. ➄ Embracing the
in/human allowed the Hull-House women to find opportunities in
the queer, attuned to how Anna Tsing found opportunities within the
ruins of capitalism.
54 Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
22 October 2015, https://doi.org/10.1086/494177.
55 Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s.”
In line with queer approaches, Oren C. Durham focused on
exposure, which immediately connects pollen, human bodies, and
the urban environment. Instead of looking for the physical effects of
human-pollen interaction, he went in search of difference within plant
species, their quantities, and their relation to land use and tried to
understand them from many various perspectives. Beyond the de-
limitation of boundaries, what matters for queer theory is how some
forms of difference become acceptable, and how categories are forms
of power. By spatializing toxic nature, Durham and his collaborators
noticed other aspects of the built environment and its inhabitants
almost as by-products of their fieldwork. For instance, by describing
the spaces where weeds grew, they were also describing land use and
urban development, empty lots, crops, and wasteland, composing
what they themselves called “a map of neglect.” ➅ Spatializing pollen
and its emitting flora connected sources of pollution, the causes that
produce it, and the social and physical conditions that facilitate their
growth. Through Durham’s work, the responsibility for pollution
could be seen to be partially human, originating in the abandoned and
neglected land that hosted the most rife pollen-producing plants.
56 Feinberg and Durham, “Hay Fever in Chicago and Suburbs: Clinical, Field and Air Observations.”
But the maps produced by Durham and his colleagues permit us
to see further. Abandonment coincided with structural social issues—
though not discussed in either of their studies, Durham and company’s
maps reveal the entanglement of social and urban conditions with pol-
len-pollution. Environmental justice scholars have demonstrated how
environmental damage is unevenly distributed, disproportionately af-
fecting the most disadvantaged. If we are to address this inequality, then
a fundamental question is “Who is pollution affecting?” By comparing
these two maps with other maps of the time we can learn how from 4 to
20 percent of the population that lived in the areas with a higher density
of weeds received relief, ➆ and that these areas also coincided with the
non-white and most diverse migrant communities in the city—com-
munities that were also home to Chicago’s gangs. ➇ Koessler, Freiberg,
and Durham’s maps can also read as maps of poverty, immigration, and
violence. Spatializing the relationship between the sources of pollen
and other emissions and their human neighbours creates a detailed
map of environmental justice, revealing who receives toxicity and who
inhabits polluted spaces. These details point toward transformations
beyond random eradication campaigns. Systemic abandonment is the
cause of pollution, which is always spatially and socially situated.
57 Proportion of population receiving relief in Chicago by sub-communities, October 1933, map (Chicago: Cook County Statistical Service,
Illinois Emergency Relief Commission, 1933), https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/collections/maps.moved/chigov/.
58 Frederic Milton Thrasher, Chicago's gangland /prepared by Frederic M. Thrasher, 1923-1926, map,
https://geo.btaa.org/catalog/8ef99545-5fe3-4b3c-93a9-83845c6bf12d.
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson have de-
veloped the concept of “queer ecology” as “a loose, interdisciplinary
constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, . . . to reimagine
evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 politics in light of queer theory.” ➈ If ecosystemic understandings
of nature focus on the interconnectedness of different entities, queer
ecologies are interested in the reconceptualization of human forms of
relating to the non-human natural world. They question what counts
as natural and why and how nature goes hand in hand with what
counts as pollution. ㉍
59 Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington; Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2010).
60 Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 2013).
And yet, eighty years ago Roger Wodehouse had already recon-
ceived of nature and pollution. By dismantling racial and xenophobic
assumptions about ragweed, he framed nature from an ecological and,
what today would be called, an anti-colonial perspective. What be-
comes visible in his work are the entities in movement, at their differ-
ent stages. By looking at the role that weeds play not only for humans
but also for other environmental entities (the soil, other plant species),
what counts as pollution changes. What before was considered a
polluting agent (weeds) becomes something radically ontologically
different, almost the opposite: a pioneer, a necessary step in soil and
landscape restoration. Wodehouse was only able to make this leap by
observing the unwanted weed and challenging its normative assump-
tions. Staying with the queer allowed him find the potential in it.
Wodehouse’s conceptualization of nature and the urban as an
urban political ecology shows how the benefits of some environments
come at the expense of others, both internal and external to the city.
Based on his research, it could be argued that weeds in empty lots were
not simply the product of urbanization, but a fundamental part of it.
They were not objects of exclusion, but of necessity. Considering the
processes involved in and taking place alongside environmental pol-
lution begs the question of what is doing the polluting (pollen, the air,
the weeds, or the too-rapid urbanization process). It also forces us to
address the social and cultural aspects attached to it: instead of invasive
species, the result of recent immigration (mostly from South America),
weeds were a consequence of European colonization of the United
States, undermining the eugenic argument for their eradication. “Of
the seven leading hay fever grasses no one is native to America; all are
immigrants,” wrote one commentator. "We should however have no
resentment towards these intruders, for they are all valuable plants.” ➊
Wodehouse flipped the responsibility of polluting from the unwanted
plant to colonization.
61 Wodehouse, “Weeds, Waste and Hay Fever,” 152.
Instead of attempting to control nature, Wodehouse recognized
the opportunities that emerge when we account for multiple spatial and
temporal scales. His proposed options for intervening into the urban
environment were therefore quite radical: either to adopt a laissez-faire
attitude and let the plants follow their own rhythms, or to plant even
more by using strategies of redundancy and excess to deal with (some
sorts of ) pollution. Most important still is the underlying assumption of
his work: when the land or the environment are prioritized, rather than
human health, humans might also benefit. This is not to say that pollu-
tion’s effects on humans are not relevant, but it puts cleaning in per-
spective and shows the limits of conceiving of the relationship between
pollen grains and human bodies as a solely toxic one.
These episodes might feel far away in time, but the challenges
faced by the women of Hull-House, Durham and his collaborators, and
Wodehouse have only intensified. Today there are an estimated 262
million asthma sufferers worldwide, and the number is only increasing.
Weeds are proliferating because they thrive in atmospheres with more
carbon dioxide and are more adaptive to changing conditions than

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

 many other species. More importantly, debates on the climate and bio-
diversity emergency, invasive species and related migration, ecocide,
and persistent forms of colonial extractivism expose the incapacity of
reductive techno-scientific “solutions” to engage with the complexity
of socio-environmental problems.
Spatial design practices, through the transformation of the
built environment, have the responsibility—and capacity—to engage
with these issues. However, their strategies, materials, tools, methods,
and theories must be updated and repurposed for such an endeavour.
Building on Gissen’s foundational text, we must go further than mak-
ing pollution visible. Doing so has proven to be insufficient to prevent
further pollution, and cleaning is another form of displacement and
colonialism. ➋ Instead, we must find alternative strategies, expanding
architecture in scale and purpose to situate nature and society at its
centre, aligned with the field of urban political ecologies. We must
consider the conceptual and material complexity of what we call pol-
lution. Establishing a queer framework for a theory of pollution in the
built environment enables us to do so.
62 Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
Embracing a queer framework does not mean embracing a rela-
tivistic view; I do not mean to challenge if something (nature, a body, a
soil) is polluted. Industrial chemicals are toxic and produce structural
forms of violence. What is less clear is how to intervene from and
within the built environment. What I am proposing is to look for the
consequences of those classifications, and how they establish par-
ticular power relations that might be productive sites of intervention.
Because, as the above episodes have demonstrated, the material, the
thing, the polluting entity is not the problem, it is an indicator of more
systemic forms of violence and inequality.
This queer framework has implications beyond pollen-pollution.
It is designed to critically engage with other forms of pollution, and
to multiply our points of reference so that we might engage with toxic
forms of nature more broadly. In/Human, systemic, and ecological
strategies shed light onto what pollutes and what counts as pollution
in practice in a particular setting—where pollution comes from, who
is most exposed, and who is responsible for pollution—shifting the
space of intervention from simple binaries like human/weeds to liv-
ing conditions, cultures, and urbanization. They permit us to address
the greening of cities, or the use of remediation and reparation as
magical tools, in more critical ways. In sum, they allow us “to look
much more queerly at the understandings of Nature” and to con-
struct a more just future. ➌
63 Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, 63.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the CCA and the Mellon Foundation for organizing such an amazing fellowship and for
giving me the opportunity to conduct exploratory archival work. Thank you to Kim Förster, Albert Ferré, Natasha Leeman and
the whole team for making it happen through constant conceptual and practical support. This piece is indebted to the conver-
sations I had with my fellow researchers and the multiple seminar guests. I would also like to thank Professor Greg Mittman for
his time and archive guidance, to Kim Förster and Claire Lubell for their generous and invaluable edits to the manuscript, and
to Stéphane Aleixandre for securing the images. Last, this piece is indebted to Professor David Gissen’s work and his piece “A
Theory of Pollution for Architecture,” a thinking companion to me throughout this research.

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Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–1 Ohio Blower Company, The Gospel of Fresh Air: Swartwout (Cleveland: Ohio Blower Company, ca. 1914).
ID:90-B1382, Franklin Institute Trade Catalogue Collection, CCA.

fig. 1

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–4 “Giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida), also known as ‘horseweed,’ is a tall coarse annual, widely distributed in
moist waste and cultivated land in the central and eastern United States. Pollinates mostly in August and
September.” Oren C. Durham, “The Pollen Harvest,” Economic Botany 5, no. 3 (July–Sept 1951): 217. © 1951
New York Botanical Garden Press/Springer

fig. 2

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–4 “Typical field on the slide exposed on July 22, 1937 at Moorhead, Minn. Three Alternaria spores and seven rust
spores are shown.” Published in Oren C. Durham, “Incidence of Air-Borne Fungus Spores,” The Journal of
Allergy St. Louis 10, no. 1 (Nov 1938): 41. © 1938 Published by Elsevier Inc.

fig. 3

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–5 Abbott Allergenic Extract, Mixed Ragweed Pollen, Blosser’s Cigarettes (before 1920), Dr. J. D. Kellogg’s
Asthma Remedy (before 1910), Dr. J. D. Kellogg’s Relief for Spasms or Paroxysms of Asthma (before 1910). Box
442, Series 14, Manuscript Collection 139, American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Records,
1923–2016, University of Wisconsin. Photograph by Nerea Calvillo © Nerea Calvillo

fig. 4

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–5 Dust Recovering & Conveying Co., “Pollenair”: Hay Fever and Pollen Asthma and Other Applications (Cleveland,
OH: Dust Recovering & Conveying Co., ca. 1935). ID:89-B8686, Franklin Institute Trade Catalogue
Collection, CCA.

fig. 5

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–6 Florence Kelley, A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, 1895. Special Collec-
tion, Daley Library, University of Illinois Chicago.

fig.fig.
fig.6a
6a

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–6 Florence Kelley, A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, 1895. Special Collec-
tion, Daley Library, University of Illinois Chicago.

fig.fig.
fig.6b
6b

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–6 Florence Kelley, A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, 1895. Special Collec-
tion, Daley Library, University of Illinois Chicago.

fig.fig.
fig.6c
6c

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–6 Florence Kelley, A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, 1895. Special Collec-
tion, Daley Library, University of Illinois Chicago.

fig.fig.
fig.6d
6d

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–7 Boys playing leap-frog in a garbage-strewn alley near the Hull-House, Chicago, ca. 1900. 20.3 x 25.4 cm.
JAMC_0000_0193_0296, Seven Settlement Houses-Database of Photos, University of Illinois at Chicago
Library, Special Collections and University Archives.

fig.fig.
fig.7
7

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–7 “Play,” Charities and The Commons. A Weekly Journal of Philanthropy and Social Advance XVIII, no. 18 (3 August
1907), cover. Publication Committee of the New York Charity Organization Society, [1905/1906-1909]. Har-
vard University.

fig.fig. 8
fig.8

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–8 Washington School Playground, “The Only Play Space for Hundreds of Children.” Chicago Commons Asso-
ciation, Chicago Commons, 1894–1911 (1911), 44. (OCoLC)ocm05745327, Special Collection, Richard J. Daley
Library, University of Illinois Chicago.

fig.fig.
fig.9
9

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–9 “Map used in a field survey: The numbers on the squares correspond to those on cards in the index; plate sta-
tions are shown by the large dots. Each block is a mile square. Numbers correspond to those on cards in index
where the pollen-producing plants are listed. Percentages indicate amount of land given to free vegetation.”
Karl K. Koessler and Oren C. Durham, “A System for an Intensive Pollen Survey: With a Report of Results in
Chicago,” The Journal of the American Medical Association 86 (17 April 1926): 1204. Medical Library, University of
Illinois Chicago.

fig.fig.
fig.10
10

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–9 “Each numbered block is a square mile, bounded in most instances, by highways. The proportion of weedy
areas in each square is shown by the amount of shading. It will be noticed that the north shore is the most
nearly free from weeds of any part of the City and that the south shore, between 47th and 75th, is almost weed-
free. Detailed records for each square are on file.” Samuel M. Feinberg and Oren C. Durham, “Hay Fever in
Chicago and Suburb. Clinical, Field and Air Observations,” Illinois Medical Journal 63 (May 1933): 467. Chicago:
Illinois State Medical Society, 1889–1962. Medical Library, University of Illinois Chicago.

fig.fig.
fig.11
11

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

2–9 “Russian Thistle growing on waste land near Chicago. This virile recent immigrant will probably punish
man severely for future disregard of proper land economy.” Roger P. Wodehouse and Laurence Blair, “Hay
fever, A Man-Made Disease,” illustrated panel in Roger P. Wodehouse, “Weeds, Waste, and Hay Fever,”
Natural History, The Magazine of the American Museum of Natural History 43, no. 3 (March 1939): 150–163.
NH043, American Museum of Natural History Digital Repository.

fig.fig.
fig.12
12

Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution

Environmental Histories of Architecture is a series of essays
produced as part of Architecture and/for the Environ-
ment, the third research project (2017–2019) of the Multi-
disciplinary Research Program, organized by the CCA
with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foun-
dation. The project—developed by Kim Förster (CCA
Associate Director, Research, 2016–2018) with advisors
Daniel Abramson, David Gissen, and Imre Szeman—
examined unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable, contra-
dictions and ambiguities in architecture’s environmental
history. With Environmental Histories of Architecture, the
CCA launches an open-access publishing model to circu-
late the ideas generated through its research programs.

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Chang, Hannah le Roux, Tessier A
Isabelle Doucet, Paulo Programming:
Tavares, and Kim Förster Rosen Tomov

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