Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750: Technonatures in the Global North

This book explores the historical relationship between ‘technonatures’ and urbantransformations in the Global North. In recent years, various interdisciplinarymovements such as Urban Political Ecology, STS and New Materialism haveaffected urban history and generated new scholarly insights into the formation ofcities and urban life based on notions of hybridity, entanglement and metabolism.While scholars have increasingly attempted to grasp the socio-natural andtechnical complexity of cities, studies dealing with urban transformation withinurban history have, however, mostly concentrated on political actors or broadersocial and economic changes. Seeking to introduce the concept of technonaturesto the field of urban environmental history, this book instead takes its empiricaland analytical starting point in the technonatural fabric of cities. Focusing onurban rivers, dumps, railways, flood walls and housing, the chapters of the bookthus examines how different entanglements of environment, technology andagency have shaped cities and processes of urbanization in the Global Northfrom the seventeenth century onwards. By foregrounding the transformative roleof urban natures, materialities and technologies in shaping the politics of urbanlife and cities more broadly, the book aspires to probe the potentiality oftechnonatures as a conceptual and analytical strategy for urban environmentalhistorians.