Urban Narratives about Nature

In an age in which more than half of the Earth population lives in cities, and living conditions worldwide suffer from a steady increase in environmental issues, historical inquiry provides useful reflections about vital concerns and thus new perspectives on the present. Urban Narratives about Nature: Socio-Ecological Imaginaries between Science and Entertainment aims at generating specific historical knowledge concerning processes of production, circulation, and management of natural history narratives and the associated struggles for meaning within the socio-ecological relations involved. These processes take place ultimately in the socio-cultural space of communication, where media outputs, broadly understood, account for the development and interaction of subjectivities, and the eventual creation of agent and non-agent subjects. The city is a powerful storyteller that can only be understood with the countryside through one another. Upon a relational perspective, this book provides a rather diverse while deeply interrelated collection of case studies of urban-based production and circulation of narratives about nature. Altogether, these cases probe the complex relationships among scientific authority, public awareness, policymaking, corporate and political interests, and environmental advocacy, in effect expanding the interdisciplinary linking of urban and environmental history within a global history view.