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Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America
Journal of Historical Geography 41 (2013) 95
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review Stephane Castonguay and Matthew Evenden (Eds), Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America. Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, ix þ 302 pages, US$25.95 paperback. In Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America Stephane Castonguay and Matthew Evenden have edited a volume that captures the dynamic relationship between humans and their waterways. Each essay elucidates part of this most complex portion of the natureeculture continuum from the aspect of historical geography and environmental history. Although the collection is limited geographically in its coverage, the essays range widely in the issues that they confront. As a collection Urban Rivers effectively demonstrates a common human interaction with nature that transcends borders of time and space. The editors’ thoughtful approach to the collection is one of the clearest reasons for its success. In their introduction and conclusion Castonguay and Evenden provide a primer on how historical geographers can unlock the meaning and significance of rivers for practitioners of any type of history, but particularly environmental. ‘Rivers shaped cities both internally and externally,’ they write, and they set out to examine ‘both the role of rivers in the process of urbanization and the impact of urbanization on rivers’ (p. 2). Through their insight the noticeably limited, selective collection appears inspired instead of arbitrary. Initially the editors establish that human geographers have forcefully argued that space, like nature, is socially produced; however, in Urban Rivers they ‘pull back from the full extent of this constructivist vision and ask how environmental circumstances changed space and put limits on human geographies’ (p. 2). In their organization the environment ‘embodies a dynamic set of natural processes, partly shaped by human actions, partly independent of them, and in many instances, so intertwined as to be inseparable’ (pp. 2e3). To capture this complexity Urban Rivers steers away from the subject of ecological restoration that has concerned many scholars of riverine landscapes and instead emphasizes stories of river use across time and space. The cast of contributors in Urban Rivers is interesting for its professional and national diversity. Although many are Canadian scholars, others are from France, Norway, the USA, Belgium, Austria, Scotland, and Germany. Museum professionals join with active academics, although scientists and professionals such as engineers and hydrologists seem to be largely unrepresented and their potentially important perspectives are thus lost. Nonetheless Urban Rivers features many historians who have some reputation for joining their field with the science of rivers and water.
0305-7488/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.04.010
The specific essays offer important case studies for historians of Europe and north America. Topics include late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brussels; nineteenth-century London; Norway’s Akerselva in the second half of the nineteenth century; Montreal in the early 1900s; the St Lawrence river from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries; Paris and Vienna in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the firth of Forth in Edinburgh, Scotland. In addition Craig Colten’s essay ‘Fluid geographies’ and Shannon Stunden Bower’s ‘To harmonize human activity with the laws of nature’ consider broader issues that they then apply to riverine sites in the midwestern USA and Manitoba, Canada, respectively. Such a list of topics cannot help but seem arbitrary e indeed, the basic limiting of the volume to north America and Europe might be seen as compromising. However, to dwell on such inherent limits distracts attention from the worth of many of the individual essays and from the editors’ conception of the entire volume. The individual essays are not monumental stories of floods and dam management. Instead the editors have carefully selected subtler e even ordinary e stories that reveal more about the overall trends of river use and management than would exceptional stories, and their selection allows the editors to steer our geographical understanding to find similarities and continuities between river use patterns across borders of nation. Many of these are left to the reader to ascertain; however in their conclusion the editors specify a dialectical relationship between humans and rivers when they write that stories in the volume are not just about rivers being acted upon; instead, the waterways ‘entered into the process of urbanization’ (p. 238). At a structural level rivers became inseparably bound to the development of the urban sphere. Urban Rivers is not an exhaustive encyclopedic collection of stories of river exploitation. Instead it presents a series of case studies that selectively consider what we can learn from periods of intense river management. The most recent installment in the University of Pittsburgh Press’s fine series in the ‘History of the urban environment,’ this carefully constructed collection will be of interest to environmental historians and geographers as well as to professionals and scientists in the area of river management. Each of the stories presents a critical episode in the ongoing discourse of humans managing communities located within the natural flow of rivers. Brian C. Black Penn State Altoona, USA
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review Stephane Castonguay and Matthew Evenden (Eds), Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America. Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, ix þ 302 pages, US$25.95 paperback. In Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America Stephane Castonguay and Matthew Evenden have edited a volume that captures the dynamic relationship between humans and their waterways. Each essay elucidates part of this most complex portion of the natureeculture continuum from the aspect of historical geography and environmental history. Although the collection is limited geographically in its coverage, the essays range widely in the issues that they confront. As a collection Urban Rivers effectively demonstrates a common human interaction with nature that transcends borders of time and space. The editors’ thoughtful approach to the collection is one of the clearest reasons for its success. In their introduction and conclusion Castonguay and Evenden provide a primer on how historical geographers can unlock the meaning and significance of rivers for practitioners of any type of history, but particularly environmental. ‘Rivers shaped cities both internally and externally,’ they write, and they set out to examine ‘both the role of rivers in the process of urbanization and the impact of urbanization on rivers’ (p. 2). Through their insight the noticeably limited, selective collection appears inspired instead of arbitrary. Initially the editors establish that human geographers have forcefully argued that space, like nature, is socially produced; however, in Urban Rivers they ‘pull back from the full extent of this constructivist vision and ask how environmental circumstances changed space and put limits on human geographies’ (p. 2). In their organization the environment ‘embodies a dynamic set of natural processes, partly shaped by human actions, partly independent of them, and in many instances, so intertwined as to be inseparable’ (pp. 2e3). To capture this complexity Urban Rivers steers away from the subject of ecological restoration that has concerned many scholars of riverine landscapes and instead emphasizes stories of river use across time and space. The cast of contributors in Urban Rivers is interesting for its professional and national diversity. Although many are Canadian scholars, others are from France, Norway, the USA, Belgium, Austria, Scotland, and Germany. Museum professionals join with active academics, although scientists and professionals such as engineers and hydrologists seem to be largely unrepresented and their potentially important perspectives are thus lost. Nonetheless Urban Rivers features many historians who have some reputation for joining their field with the science of rivers and water.
0305-7488/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.04.010
The specific essays offer important case studies for historians of Europe and north America. Topics include late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brussels; nineteenth-century London; Norway’s Akerselva in the second half of the nineteenth century; Montreal in the early 1900s; the St Lawrence river from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries; Paris and Vienna in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the firth of Forth in Edinburgh, Scotland. In addition Craig Colten’s essay ‘Fluid geographies’ and Shannon Stunden Bower’s ‘To harmonize human activity with the laws of nature’ consider broader issues that they then apply to riverine sites in the midwestern USA and Manitoba, Canada, respectively. Such a list of topics cannot help but seem arbitrary e indeed, the basic limiting of the volume to north America and Europe might be seen as compromising. However, to dwell on such inherent limits distracts attention from the worth of many of the individual essays and from the editors’ conception of the entire volume. The individual essays are not monumental stories of floods and dam management. Instead the editors have carefully selected subtler e even ordinary e stories that reveal more about the overall trends of river use and management than would exceptional stories, and their selection allows the editors to steer our geographical understanding to find similarities and continuities between river use patterns across borders of nation. Many of these are left to the reader to ascertain; however in their conclusion the editors specify a dialectical relationship between humans and rivers when they write that stories in the volume are not just about rivers being acted upon; instead, the waterways ‘entered into the process of urbanization’ (p. 238). At a structural level rivers became inseparably bound to the development of the urban sphere. Urban Rivers is not an exhaustive encyclopedic collection of stories of river exploitation. Instead it presents a series of case studies that selectively consider what we can learn from periods of intense river management. The most recent installment in the University of Pittsburgh Press’s fine series in the ‘History of the urban environment,’ this carefully constructed collection will be of interest to environmental historians and geographers as well as to professionals and scientists in the area of river management. Each of the stories presents a critical episode in the ongoing discourse of humans managing communities located within the natural flow of rivers. Brian C. Black Penn State Altoona, USA