Mapping urban space

Abstract

In this paper, I engage with the notion of the city as capitalist space, focusing on the specific actors that come together to realign economically heterogeneous spaces into the monolithic, capitalist city. By tracing the role of cartographic practice in enacting the city as a space of industrial economic production in the 19th century, I show how maps helped to bring the capitalist city into view by ‘drawing together’ cartographers, city managers and ordinary citizens, enabling the apprehension of the city as an economic object by emphasizing a specific understanding of what cities looked like, how they worked and what happened in them. In addition, I examine the place of urban nature within this emerging urban imaginary, and its role as a counterweight to the purported totality of the capitalist city. To illustrate these points, historical maps drive a discussion of the specific case of Philadelphia, focusing on two events that coincided with the expansion of the industrial city: the consolidation of the city in 1854 and the establishment of Fairmount Park in 1868. The paper concludes with a discussion of the political possibilities that are opened up by an assemblage-oriented approach for examining the early development of cities.

Keywords:

• urban assemblage
• cartography
• industrialization
• Philadelphia
• urban parks

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Kevin St. Martin, Richard Schroeder, Robert Lake, Eric Sarmiento, Sean Tanner and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The images included here were used with the generous permission of the Fairmount Park Commission, the Philadelphia Water Department Historical Collection, phillyH2O.org and the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Notes

*The field of urban political ecology (UPE) has long been interested in applying Blaikie and Brookfield's (1987) interest in coupling the concerns of ecology with those of political economy to the relationship between capitalist economic practice and urban nature. Over the last decade, UPE has firmly established a position that takes a critical stance on urban environments through a theorization of society in which the urban is a distinct historical expression of capitalism (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006). Yet, even as UPE emphasizes the consequences of ‘metabolic’ capitalist processes on the distribution of and access to urban nature to address the development of urban environments (Heynen 2003; Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006; Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003), it combines this agenda with insights that emerged from post-structural and post-humanist theory, placing questions about the consequences of environmental discourse and socionatural assemblages at the center. Among its key contributions is an investigation of the role that environmental discourses have on the collective imagining and material conditions of urban spaces through the construction of particular types of landscapes, subjects and practices. Cowell and Thomas (2002), for example, describe the power of hegemonic regional discourse formations to silence otherwise progressive political activity. More recently, Kaika and Swyngedouw (2012, 25) have argued that, despite a general consensus among academics regarding the fluidity of the concept of ‘nature’, a growing agreement that nature is ‘radically out-of-sync, singular, under threat and in need of saving’ has emerged among global policymakers, producing a ‘post-political’ moment in which the only rational goal is to maintain the status quo (Swyngedouw 2009). Focusing on earlier stages of urban development, Gandy's (2002) work on the ‘urban pastoral’ in the 19th century offered a detailed historical analysis of the formation of discourses of nature in New York City through the struggle to provide drinking water to expanding urban populations, as well as the establishment of Central Park. Similarly, Kaika (2005) explores the role of the technological networks associated with water as ‘wish images’ that resulted from and drove forward ‘modernity's Promethean project’ in the 19th and 20th centuries. More recently, Gandy (2012) has sought to move toward an analysis of urban space that ‘challenges categories and “mappings” in their broadest sense so that we encounter a challenge to “neatness” in relation to human subjectivities and material landscapes alike’ (742). Together, this work seeks to reveal the multiplicity of forces that collude in producing urban spaces, including the ability of urban environmental imaginaries to make visible or invisible any number of potential modes of interaction between the human and the non-human.

Both Barnes' map and Scott's are available online at the digital Map Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia's website: http://libwww.freelibrary.org/maps

At more than 9000 acres, the Fairmount Park System remains one of the largest.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nate Gabriel

Nate Gabriel is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Geography & Environment at Rowan University.