Nature and the city: Boston and the construction of the American metropolis, 1820--1920 (Massachusetts)

Using nineteenth and early twentieth-century Boston as a case study, this work offers a new model for understanding the development of the urban environment by arguing that city building took place through a physical and cultural dialogue with nature. Many of Boston's key physical transformations emerged from the large-scale restructuring of natural environments---country lakes became water supplies, pastures became parks, tidal flats became made land---and the corresponding debates among competing social groups about the meaning of "nature" and the proper human relationship to it. This dialogue shaped the development of urban features that became common not only to Boston but to many American cities, such as independent suburbs, harbor infrastructure, downtown parks, sanitary systems, and nature preserves. The relationship between material and cultural nature was central to the invention of the American city.; I track this relationship through five chapters that explore the evolution of Boston's built environment. The transformation of Boston Common into a park in 1830; debates between advocates of public and private water systems in the 1830s and 44s; suburban battles over annexation to Boston in the subsequent three decades; tensions between landmaking and harbor preservation that stretched from the 1840s to the end of the century; and efforts to build a metropolitan park system between the 1870s and the early years of the twentieth century: Together, these stories demonstrate that arguments about nature pervaded and shaped the city-building process.; This way of re-imagining city building holds important insights for historians who study society, culture, ideas, cities, or the environment. It demonstrates that ideas of nature evolved not just in reaction to urbanization but as part of the city building process itself, and shows that material and cultural nature shaped urban form in unanticipated ways. This work also suggests a new way to integrate the city into the field of environmental history by arguing that city building is a dialogue with nature rather than simply a human endeavor shaped by environmental conditions. Cities, in sum, must stand at or near the center of any discussion about the environment or how we think about nature.