Urban Natures: A Technological and Political History 1600-2030

For over three centuries, people have pondered the role of nature in urban development. From the first gardens opened to the public in the late seventeenth century, such as the Tuileries in Paris or Hyde Park in London, to our contemporary urban forests, the projects provided by architects, engineers, landscape architects, and their clients have remained inseparable from technical challenges as well as from political and social concerns. The technical aspect ranges from preparing the ground and managing water to organizing the cohabitation between natural elements and human beings. These tasks have become increasingly urgent with climate change and the ensuing need to find solutions to prevent deleterious effects, such as urban heat islands rendering any number of urbanized areas unlivable.

Since the Enlightenment, the presence of nature has also been inextricably linked to hygienist concerns as well as to the desire to help people live together in a society threatened by economic inequalities and social divisions. This ambition underlay the landscaping policies that were part of the transformation of Paris during the Second Empire, for example, or that prompted the creation of Central Park in New York. From the eighteenth century to the present day, the history of nature in the city has gone hand in hand with successive visions of the social bond. This history reveals a diversity of aspirations, projects, and practices that would be hard to reduce to one leitmotif: hence, the use of the plural in the exhibition title, Urban Natures.

The importance of urban natures has grown over the past few centuries, reaching a new level of urgency given our current environmental crisis, the solution to which lies in forging new links between humans and all the non-human entities on which our shared survival depends (from soil and water resources to vegetation and animal populations). The spread of community gardens and urban agriculture reflect this growth of awareness.

Urban Natures is an exhibition that measures how far we have come since the first public gardens were created, and it challenges us to envision the future of our cities in new ways.

1. Natural Elements in the Pre-Industrial City
   The discreet presence of nature in public space and its gradual appearance.

2. Nature, Health and Morality in the Age of the Enlightenment
   Urban nature as a widespread hygienic and social concern that is translated by innovative urban projects.
   

3. Nature, Infrastructure, and Politics in the Industrial Era Metropolis
   The first comprehensive policies and realizations of parks at different scales, their technological dimensions, and their social agendas.

4. From Garden City to Modernist City
   The genealogy of the modernist concept of the city in nature.

5. Nature as Threatened and Restorative
   The rise of environmental concerns and the development of remediation practices as well as landscape urbanism,

6. Contemporary Urban Natures and their Challenges
   The new importance given to soils and water. New concepts like sponge cities. Contemporary projects, parks, but also planted buildings, urban farms, ecological corridors, and urban forests. A world-wide evolution and its ambiguities.

7. Towards a New Social Contract
   Practices like urban agriculture that point towards a rethinking of society that expands beyond its traditional, human-centered definition.

Curator

Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Director of Doctoral Programs, Harvard GSD.

Collaboration with Professor Erika Naginski. The Center for Green Buildings and Cities, which sponsored part of the initial research.