Nature in the City: An interview with Matthew Gandy

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.

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.

Having studied in Berlin, could you tell us how the urban revolutionized the study of ecology? Though these two things are seemingly separate, how are they intertwined and benefit each other?

Historically, and in a lot of the literature, cities have been seen as the opposite of nature or a threat to nature. There’s a very interesting counter position to thinking about cities as not only important spaces of nature, but also spaces where we can find unusual ecologies or unexpected kinds of landscapes. A city can be a space of creativity and discovery, including scientific discovery.

Part of your documentary film on Berlin discusses the language used to describe different forms of nature. Is there a politics to that? Was there a reason why some plants were considered invasive, whilst others were celebrated and naturalised in the landscape – more than in just a physical sense but also in the minds of people?

Within conservation, biology and ecology, there’s a long standing tension between different conceptions of socio-ecological assemblages. Questioning what is natural or unnatural, what should or should not be allowed, can get caught up in a wider ideological discourse of invasiveness.

The recognition of ‘cosmopolitan ecologies’ in an urban environment always lies in tension with narrowly nativist readings of landscape and nature. Urban nature is always a complex, dynamic mix with traces of nature from all over the world. The vast majority of what are considered non-native plants, for example, are completely harmless. You can read urban landscapes, street by street, to get a feel for a global ecology and a global history that is all around us.

The documentary shows how urban space is ever-changing. Nature and culture come together to form urban ecology. Does the language used in urban ecology such as “invasive” and “noninvasive” hold parallels with aspects of social marginalization?

Absolutely. The documentary highlights the way scientific metaphors can be abused within a social and political context. More neutral language such as “adventive” is preferable because it simply notes that these species have arrived and there isn’t a form of judgment about whether they should or should not be there. It highlights the importance of language when we’re talking about nature and culture. Science, and ecological science in particular, is never neutral, and always reflects a particular cultural or political context.

Has your passion for ecology and more-than-human relationships molded your study of urban concepts?

A lot of the literature talks about ‘more-than-human’ geographies. I tend to use the expression ‘other-than-human’ geographies because it implies a more nuanced conception of historical agency. In trying to conceptualize these questions, we must hold on to what’s distinctive about human subjectivity and consciousness. That’s not to say that we can’t articulate some kind of “ecological pluriverse” which is more open and sensitive to the full range of organisms that inhabit urban space. I’m interested in arguments that seek to identify what is important and how to protect fragments of urban nature. Ecological indices like “red lists”, for example, can be used in an urban context. In some of my research in North London I looked at a very rare fly (Pocota personata) and what happens when we find a rare species in the middle of a city. Does it mean that we should protect this site? Do regulatory agencies have the scientific capacity to understand the significance of this discovery? Are regulatory agencies willing to get involved in the politics of urban land use? All of these questions come to the fore.

That reminds me of the protests that began to protect the bracken. Do you think there is still a culture like that today in urban spaces? Or have we lost that connection to these types of spaces?

Up until, broadly speaking, the 1980s and 1990s, many cities which had gone through a process of deindustrialization and population decline had a lot of empty or deserted spaces that became ecologically important. In recent years, however, because of the recapitalization of urban areas the pressures on land and land values have grown greatly. Recently, it has become much more difficult and complicated to protect marginal spaces which were previously islands cut adrift from capitalist urbanisation. These spaces represent a kind of oases or refugia for biodiversity that lie outside of the dominant urban structures and processes.

It is predicted that around 60% of the global population will soon live in cities or at least highly urbanized regions. If we don’t have a vibrant ecological discourse in relation to cities and metropolitan life I don’t see how you can instill an awareness or consciousness for the protection of nature more generally. Nature can’t just be something abstract that we associate with distant places or passively encounter via media representations. Nature has to be something tactile and multisensory that we can have contact with in our everyday lives.

Do you feel there is a way we can rejuvenate urban ecology without, say, creating a botanical garden, or actively carving out spaces in a city designated to biodiversity?

Yes, there are some very innovative approaches to landscape design which try to combine the spontaneous dynamics of urban nature with designed features. Examples include the French landscape designer Gilles Clément and a number of new parks in Berlin that combine fragments of spontaneous nature with more familiar aspects of public space such as the recently created Park am Gleisdreieck. This prize-winning park has a very sophisticated design that combines science and aesthetics in new ways.

I think there is a tension, though, that any wasteland if simply left alone does not stay the same. It is a dynamic space. Over fifteen to twenty years most of these spaces will begin to transform themselves into wild urban woodland, which is very different from the aesthetic ideal of a flower rich urban meadow alongside a railway track. There are sometimes difficult discussions to be had about the temporalities of urban ecology and how the desire for biodiversity relates to design and public culture.

Do you know where you want your research to lead you in the future?

For me, I think I have too many different ideas and things I want to do! I’m sketching ideas for a new book under the working title “Urban Refugia,” taking some of these arguments forward. I would like to do further research in the global South, and especially in Chennai in southern India. There are interesting debates about the protection of urban wetlands and migratory birds in Chennai and other coastal cities. Emerging themes for me include ‘zoonotic urbanization’ and how we can create healthy spaces of urban biodiversity without creating new habitats for pathogens such as disease-carrying mosquitoes. I am also interested in developing my interest in walking methdodologies, acoustic geographies, and film-making. I would certainly be interested in making another urban documentary film, probably in Chennai, if I got the opportunity. film, probably in Chennai, if I got the opportunity.