Nature in Edmonton's suburbs is kind of creepy.
It's corralled. It's mastered by human beings and strategically employed to create poor imitations of nature within the domain of culture. Park space is designated; trees are planted along a boulevard, spaced equidistantly; if you don't mow your lawn, your neighbours will hate you. I guess that this way of thinking implies that what we see as "nature" is, in cities, subsumed to the urban ecology.
As Mark Davis says, we are constantly expending energy to master nature and maintain our urban habitats, and "nature is constantly straining against its chains." Think about the millions of dollars the municipal government had to spend this year, post-snowfall(s), plowing the streets so that people could get around the city. David says that "the ability of a city's physical structure to organise and encode a stable social order depends on its capacity to master and manipulate nature," which I think can be translated, in this instance, into no streets = no urban traffic = social disruption = many problems in the everyday lives of people.
But if we collapse the nature/culture binary as Davis suggests and thinks of urban spaces and "nature" as the part of a single integrated system, nature and culture begin to interpenetrate, their interaction shaping the overall ecology. You can equate urban sprawl to weeds, or something like that -- they're both just structures which are attempting to follow the Darwinian rule and proliferate.
I've always been drawn to the idea of desire lines, at least 75% because it's such a poetic phrase. There's poetry in the concept, too. Desire lines are human-worn walking paths that disobey the rules laid down by urban organisational structures (roads, sidewalks) -- because desire paths are shortcuts, or more easily navigated, or maybe even more beautiful to walk. In winter they're particularly apparent because walkers wear down paths in the snow. Desire lines are beautiful to me because they represent two kinds of resistances, complicating the "wild nature"/"controlling culture" binary. Cities resist nature by setting out sidewalks and concrete and roads; then the inhabitants resist the city by carving out desire lines.
I've never heard of desire lines before - so thanks for enlightening me! I checked out the wiki article you linked to, and found the following:
ReplyDelete"Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route."
It seems to me that the reverse could also be true - the idea of physically following a desire could lead in meanders, or could even follow the psychogeographical contours of a place, as Debord suggested. I wonder what he made of / would have made of desire lines.
I totally agree with your point about the artificiality of city nature. Its purpose seems to be only for adornment, and if it gets in the way, rip it out or cut it back. The Sherwood Park transit has started sending a double-decker bus to the University at certain times, but in order to do that, all the trees along White Ave had to be trimmed back. I also have a thing against lawns. They are incredibly wasteful as far as I am concerned with the amount of water poured on them, the fertilizers and weed killing chemicals sprayed on them, and the fact that most of the time we can’t see it because its covered in snow, so what’s the point?
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