This article advances a central contention: urban natures are inseparably technological and political.¹ Far from constituting a timeless, spontaneous, or self-evident presence, nature in the city is the result of deliberate choices, technical systems, institutional arrangements, and power relations. Its introduction, management, and symbolic mobilization rely on infrastructures, imaginaries, and forms of governance that render obsolete any simple opposition between nature and technology. To understand what is at stake in the current enthusiasm for urban nature, it is therefore necessary to analyze both its technological conditions of possibility and its political implications, while situating contemporary debates within a longer historical trajectory.

The political aspect of nature’s presence is more difficult to disentangle. To be sure, the development of green spaces appears as a common refrain in the mayoral speeches, but this political character is neither limited to such public positioning nor to those projects to which the positioning refers. It also finds expression in aspirations and experiments that come to be crystallized by practices invested with a symbolic dimension, such as urban agriculture and community gardens. By proposing to contribute to a restoration of relationships otherwise compromised by social divisions and ideological divergences, the latter undertakings suggest that communal living in the contemporary metropolis is inseparable from the place given to natural elements. A new social contract potentially emerges, which is inclusive simultaneously of humans and non-humans. At the turn of the 2000s, the philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour became the herald of this more expansive conception of the social in such works as Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, first published in 1999.⁴

Making use of this conceptual frame, various histories of the presence of nature in cities become possible. Focusing on the West at the beginning and enlarging gradually the scope, we would like to sketch here one of them, centered on the way nature gradually becomes a central issue in the planning of cities, and how this evolution is inextricably technological and political.

The marginal place of nature in early modern civic initiatives constitutes the first historical episode. Nature is of course present in the cities of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque, but it rarely makes an appearance as an object of attention. The overwhelmingly mineral quality of public space in this period, its inorganic stoniness, attests to the indifference. 

What subsequently emerged during the Enlightenment were the terms setting the stage, at least partially, for our own conceptions: that is to say, the desire for nature in the city that bears a tangible political dimension. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, the creation of public parks and gardens surfaced not only as a hygienic necessity in the urban sphere but, in addition, as a means to contribute to the reinforcement of social connections – social connections that the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau assimilated into the foundations of a social contract transforming people into citizens.⁹

It was in the industrial age that the insertion of large-scale green spaces into the heart of the city became systematic. One of the vital lessons of this period – if we refer to the greening of Paris during the Second Empire or to the creation of Central Park in New York City beginning in 1857 – is linked to the close association negotiating between the status of nature in the city and the technological dimension. Rows of trees and the ordered spaces of gardens and parks not only raised manifold technical challenges, but were often associated, as in the case of Central Park, with major urban infrastructures. In the case of Haussman’s renovation of Paris, these became figurations of infrastructure in their own right. This assimilation of nature into infrastructure announces one of the key traits of a situation that prevails at a time when de-artificialized soil, urban forests, and wetlands seem to be the only measures that have any real capacity to erect an effective barrier against certain major effects of global warming and the flooding caused by rising temperatures. 

A brief evocation of the connections between early twentieth century urban modernity and the question of nature in the city underscores the extent to which we are still, in many ways, the heirs of this controversial moment in the historical evolution of urbanism and architecture. One detects even today, for example, echoes of the modern concept of the Garden City in recent initiatives taken in Singapore, which aims to be a “city in nature.” ¹⁰
Hence the historical study of the relations between city and nature participates in a much broader set of debates concerning what we continue to owe to modernity, this just at the moment when we are caught up in a movement that incites us to break definitively away from its terms.

The smart cityis currently less front facing, even if certain aspects are making an appearance in the press: the creation of so-called “digital twins” for cities or the perspectives garnered from the application of artificial intelligence to the management of urban infrastructures. Should we conclude from this that the smart city was nothing but a passing trend?¹¹ In point of fact, the technologies and practices that it came to inspire have now been diffused and, even, trivialized. Big data, real-time tracking of urban systems, and the intensive use of smartphones by city dwellers have become the norm. In 1991, when he was Chief Technology Officer at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, the computer scientist Mark Weiser asserted that: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear.” ¹² If the smart city has not disappeared, it has nevertheless receded from view. Take the example of certain technologies on which it rests, such as geolocalization – a veritable revolution so pervasive that by now we pay only distracted attention to it – which has become utterly integrated into the everyday life of cities.

However, the smart city has not upheld all of its promises. In the early 2010s, at the zenith of the enthusiasm it broadly inspired, it seemed poised to resolve a great many environmental challenges. Take, by way of example, one of the experiments carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Senseable City Lab in 2009, which demonstrated that smart technologies could potentially contribute enormously to improving trash recycling procedures.¹³ The tracking of pollution levels or the establishment of databases overseeing the health of urban trees likewise fell under an umbrella of possibilities. Requisite adaptation to climate change, which is accelerating far more rapidly than expected, has undermined this optimism. The smart city is not automatically justifiable from an environmental perspective. We must also move toward a more frugal use of information and communication technologies whose growing carbon footprint is huge cause for concern. In France, for instance, if the digital corresponded approximately to 10% of annual electricity consumption in 2022, it is predicted that, without substantial change in its use, its environmental footprint will increase by around 45% within the decade.¹⁴ Hard to resist despite the criticisms to which it is subjected, the rise of artificial intelligence, which we know is massively energy-intensive, exacerbates the problem in even more pressing ways.

What still needs to be addressed here is one of the more confounding paradoxes of the contemporary relationship to natural elements; if the word “nature” is a constant refrain in debates in the press and speeches by politicians, academics and public intellectuals have taken their distance vis-à-vis a notion they perceive as having become ill-suited to the crucial need to reconceptualize the links between humans and non-humans. What to make of this apparent contradiction? 

The current success of the term “non-human” in the humanities and social sciences emerges as inseparable from a set of critical responses to the very idea of nature by philosophers such as Timothy Moreton, sociologists such as Bruno Latour, and anthropologists such Philippe Descola and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. According to Morton and Tsing, the idea of nature contributes to accentuating an arbitrary separation between human and non-human, rendering impossible a truly ecological form of thinking centered precisely on the multiple links that unite them.¹⁵ Latour was of the same mind when he wrote that “political ecology does not speak about nature and has never sought to do so.” ¹⁶ As for Descola, the Western concept of nature is simply not generalizable to the totality of human societies.¹⁷

Simultaneously, media outlets and political platforms have never before made nature so visible in the public sphere, the threats it faces, and that the human race, in turn, faces. Such a chasm between intellectual discourse and common perception is somewhat perplexing. Can we continue to use the term “nature” without precaution or clarification? Its usage in fact encounters pitfalls to which we will return. Yet to substitute for it the expression “non-human” is to run the risk of becoming unintelligible outside of academic circles. 

We will frequently use the term “nature” in this work, along with, however, occasional reference to the “non-human.” Hence, we need to be as precise as possible about the meaning we intend to give to this term, and this entails, at the outset, eliminating interpretations that have had their day. For even though it is useful here not to banish a word still in common use, we share many of the same concerns and criticisms just cited; these continue to be addressed by scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are butting up against conceptions of nature that are now obsolete. 

For instance, if we were to situate under the rubric of “nature” some system of immutable laws that Western science alone has the authority to contemplate – or to cite Bruno Latour again, under a term helping “to recapitulate the hierarchy of beings in a single ordered series” – this clearly would fall into a category of definition that is simply not valid today. To begin with, and without automatically falling into a mode of cultural relativism that runs the risk of removing all validity from scientific approaches, it is vital to recognize that science is still far from offering a working synthesis of the diversity of the non-human as well as of the multiple conceptions, attitudes, and practices developed by humans in contact with this diversity.¹⁸ Then, if we decide to leave aside religious beliefs and metaphysical postulates, it is difficult to separate in any clear way humans from the other beings that populate the planet and on which their survival depends. Even at the heart of Western culture, which is nevertheless ready to set into opposition human and non-human registers, it has never been possible to determine the extent to which humans either belong to nature or are distinct from it. Hypotheses with regards to the superiority of the former over the latter thereby loses a good part of their meaning.

What we understand by nature here is the way in which humans represent to themselves, in a given context, the immense reservoir of spontaneous creativity that constitutes non-human phenomena, objects, and beings. This notion of nature also encompasses the relations that humans maintain with the non-human; hence nature always possesses an imaginary component all the while simultaneously referring to practices that are very real. In other words, the conceptualization of the non-human that is generally called “nature” is inseparable from a complex ensemble of imaginary relations and concrete practices. These relations and practices are interconnected, this despite frequent contradictions between them. For example, at the heart of our industrial societies, an imaginary involving the respect that is due to nature coexists with extractive enterprises that completely abuse natural resources: such contradictions need to be understood as unfolding in particular contexts, for nature should never be envisioned as a timeless entity. To the contrary, nature should be historicized, for its content has changed considerably across the centuries and from one society to the next. As for the separation between the natural and the human, this is a dated conception that has been rejected today not only by humanists and social scientists. Numerous are the defenders of the environment who have joined them on this point. Thus, employing the word “nature” here in no way implies essentializing such a separation. 

In this sense, it is less important that the word does not always find perfect equivalent in certain non-Western societies. Over and against the definition that has long prevailed in the West – a definition put into place since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century under the aegis of a rationalized search for universal rules – it is vital to understand that what we mean by this term more generally are the representations of the non-human along with their relation to the human in any given context. These representations are various, finding different expressions in diverse societies and social groups. They reveal historical trajectories and refer back to continually evolving practices that prevent them from ever being definitively fixed.

Against the use of nature in the singular, it might be better to evoke natures in the plural, thereby foregrounding conceptions and usages of the non-human that are varied, changing, often in conflict with one another, and this even in the context of a single society at a precise juncture in its history. For example, fed by the writings of Isaac Newton, John Locke, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the ideas of nature circulating among European Enlightenment elites differed profoundly from those of rural peasants. In a similar way, the views propounded by contemporary environmentalists, who are preoccupied by the endangerment we have wrought on the non-human, stand in opposition to those toeing the line of a more optimistic credo or to the cynics who want to continue to exploit the resources of the biosphere without consideration under the pretension that it will recover from to all the blows it is dealt. 

The preceding analyses extend quite precisely to the urban nature(s) in question here. Between threatened natures and restorative natures, wild natures and tamed natures, natures belonging to the partisans of urban agriculture and natures to which their detractors refer themselves, the city unveils the plurality of significations that a commonly used term possesses and encompasses. Several of these natures seem to mark their distance from technology, while others bring us inexorably back towards it. Others still claim to be timeless representations of the non-human, whether this be in the name of science or of seeking to defend a balance of ecosystems that human history will only ever continue to disrupt. Yet others recognize an indebtedness to this history. Taken together, their totality stands as an unflagging reminder that it is in the perception of the non-human and in the relationships we establish with it – that it is at the heart of these natures, in the plural sense, which are revealed by the city – that our common future as inseparably technical and political beings will largely play out.