Urbanizing Nature: Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature Since 1500

What do we mean when we say that cities have altered humanity’s interaction with nature? The more people are living in cities, the more nature is said to be "urbanizing": turned into a resource, mobilized over long distances, controlled, transformed and then striking back with a vengeance as "natural disaster". Confronting insights derived from Environmental History, Science and Technology Studies or Political Ecology, Urbanizing Nature aims to counter teleological perspectives on the birth of modern "urban nature" as a uniform and linear process, showing how new technological schemes, new actors and new definitions of nature emerged in cities from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Tim Soens is Professor of Medieval and Environmental History at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Dieter Schott is Professor for Modern History at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

Michael Toyka-Seid is research associate at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

Bert De Munck is professor at the History Department of the University of Antwerp, Belgium.