Urban by nature: An environmental history of Seattle, 1880--1970 (Washington)

“Urban by Nature” teases apart the historical relationship between cities and nature in a major American metropolis, Seattle, during the twentieth century. Using concepts from geography, urban design and planning, and science and technology studies, the dissertation illumines how urbanites produced space over time by focusing on the transformation of landscape. In Seattle, these landscapes include the tidelands fronting Elliott Bay, the Lake Washington-Duwamish/Green River basin, the Cedar River watershed, the earthmoving projects (called regrades) in the city's core, and the city's parks.; Beginning the turn of the century, engineers, planners, and landscape architects charted how urbanites could build beautiful and productive cities. By revealing how urbanization produced “urban nature,” a hybrid of the material and the cultural, they suggested that cities and their attendant technologies might not be as destructive as Americans had feared. Seattle's technocratic elites embraced this gospel of improvement, demonstrating how moving mountains, straightening rivers and crafting parks could bring the city and nature into alignment. But while some Seattleites benefited from this attitude and the landscapes it created, urban nature also reproduced and amplified community divisions and material ills. Technocrats had inscribed inequality onto landscape, prompting widespread resistance by the poor and marginal who endured the results.; By the post-World War II period, Seattle's technocrats tried to reenergize citizens' faith to correct nature's deficiencies. Many residents, influenced by a new ecological understanding of nature, now saw their home as a machine that could be manipulated to produce the kind of “nature” they wanted. But newer cycles of “improvements” unleashed another round of unanticipated consequences because technocrats could not escape the legacy of earlier transformations. As a result, some residents began to pine for an unmodified nature free from social discord.; The dissertation thus has two larger goals. First, it attempts to move environmental history beyond a focus on public lands and wilderness and towards a consideration of the city and its social dimensions. Second, it endeavors to show how both cities and their environments are both historical and spatial, and that the production of space and nature are central to understanding the relationship between the two.