INTERVIEW
Nature in the City: An interview with Matthew Gandy Interviewed by Edward (Ted) Sonin
Matthew Gandy is a Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at Cambridge, and his work focuses on landscape, infrastructure and biodiversity within the fields of cultural, urban and environmental geography.
For people who don’t know, what’s your research centered around? There are three main areas that I look at in my work. One is landscape, the second is infrastructure, and the third is biodiversity. I am primarily a cultural, urban and environmental geographer. Having grown up in Islington, surrounded by change and gentrification, the place that inspired Ruth Glass to coin the term, did that influence your your career as a geographer now? Certainly, this part of London had many wastelands and spaces of nature that I remember as a child. They were spaces of play and memory within the city. As you gain greater knowledge of the area you grow up in, you become aware of other processes like gentrification. Ruth Glass’s term ‘gentrification’ comes from her own research in Islington in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and this area has played an important role in the wider development of urban theory. 30 | COMPASS
My undergraduate dissertation at Cambridge was on the changing politics of Islington from the late 1950s to the late 1980s and focused on how changes in the borough were reflected in shifting voting patterns and political culture. In your new book about urban nature, you write about being interested in wastelands. In an urban context these types of spaces are often overlooked. What drew you into thinking that this was something special to study? A turning point for me was in the early 2000s when I had a research fellowship at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I became very interested in the marginal spaces of nature in Berlin. By visiting these sites and talking to people I became more aware of urban ecological themes. My recent work is a natural development from that opportunity. I also have a personal interest in ecology and natural history, which I’ve kept going as much as I can. So at a certain level my current research is bringing these different spheres together.