Human-Nature Relationship in an Urban Context

The spark of the controversies surrounding the definition of the term ‘nature’:

At first thought, every person on this planet might consider the term ‘nature’ as an easy word to describe. When you ask someone, ‘What is nature?’, they might come up with a sneer while responding, ‘You must be kidding… As clear as day… it is…’ and then the halts, stammers, or changing of subjects might start… If you ask your second question, such as ‘Do you think this garden is nature or a designed landscape?’, the hem-and-haw phase might start to surge… and if you go to your third question, which is somehow trickier such as ‘Do you think, we, as human beings are or have ever been a part of nature?’, it will be the coup de grace…  you might face a face with an absolute tendency to dodge any definite yes or no answer… The mission is now complete… The point has been proven: ‘Nature’ is a massively complicated term.. there is no straightforward one-sentence answer to describe it/her.

In the global body of knowledge, the term ‘nature’ has been discussed for decades in various fields of study, including urbanism, landscape design, ecological studies, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and psychology. Spelling out the term ‘nature’ is supposedly an as-easy-as-pie question that reckons its latent complexity as a ‘conceptually transcendent phenomenon’. While some definitions of this term have certain similarities, others entail several paradoxical aspects. Differences in the conceptualisation of nature can be well observed even among various definitions in a single field of study. As Smith (2008) noted, 

“… the concept of nature is extremely complex and often contradictory. Nature is order and it is disorder, sublime and secular, dominated and victorious; it is totality and a series of parts, woman and object, organism and machine. Nature is a gift of God, and it is a product of its own evolution; it is a universal outside history and also the product of history, accidental and designed, wilderness and garden” (p 11).

This blog post aims to present a spectrum of the interpretations of nature and to discuss the human-nature relationships in an urban context.  At one extreme, nature is viewed as the world of non-humans that is distinguishable from all human activities. At the other end of the spectrum, however, nature and human activities such as culture, are considered as non-separable and are believed to have an eternal and continuing integration. So, the main core of the debate is to deliberate on ‘Is there any wrong or right definition of the term nature? And why?’.

End 1 of the Spectrum in definitions of the human-nature relationship: Nature as the non-human world:

In its traditional definition and most common sense, nature refers to any non-human element that can be distinguished from human activities. According to this definition, nature is opposed to history, culture, convention and any other artificial work or product. Hence, nature is recognised as a stranger/foreigner, or more precisely, as an external scope with an ‘otherness’ to humanity. In this exclusion-based definition, the natural environment is composed of elements such as mountains, deserts and shorelines with their existing plants and animals, while the human or man-made environment integrates the world of cities, houses, buildings, factories, transport and commerce. Such binary definition, however, results in an uncertainty of credibility while thinking about indecisive examples such as stretches of cultivated farmlands, pieces of planted forests or partially logged areas, water reservoirs and artificial lakes, or an apartment with a roof garden or with a yard of flowers and an eco-tech high-rise. In other words, even a bilateral all-or-nothing definition ¾that sees the two worlds of human beings and nature as divided¾ can’t precisely depict the exact boundaries between them (Altman and Wohlwill, 1983; Anderson, 2010; Smith, 2008; Soper, 1995).

The practical approaches based on ‘human: non-nature world’ manifesto include but not limited to: a) exploitation of nature, which recognises nature as a place of free resources that can be used without restrictions or considering human’s long-term impact on the Planet; b) taming (controlling) nature, which recognises nature as a wild and hostile world that should be tamed/conquered to prevent or diminish its potential threatening devastations; c) scientific approach, which roots back in the 17^th century literature that states the mastery of nature and discovering the natural rules as a divine responsibility indicated by God; d) protecting nature, which is an eco-centric or bio-centric approach that acknowledges nature as valuable world regardless of its utility for humans and thus has to be kept safe/protected from humankind; e) back to nature (poetic) approach that started to grow from late 19^th century and its concept of the nature idolatry and worship and thus endeavours to insert nature into the city and the landscape, as the context from which the city has developed; and e) Biophilia as a restorative environmental approach which is also referred as green or sustainable design, that entails two complementary scenarios of minimising and mitigate the adverse environmental effects of modern construction and development; and recreating/restoring sufficient and satisfying contact between people and nature (Anderson, 2010; Fuller and Irvine 2010; Gaston, 2010; Goldsmith, 1996; Kellert, 2005;  Ritchie and Thomas, 2009; Smith, 2008; Soper, 1995)     

End 2 of the Spectrum in definitions of the human-nature relationship: Nature and Culture an integrated whole:

On the opposite extreme point in portraying the human-nature relationship, nature and culture are recognised as inseparable. This notion, however, raises many challenges about the reconciling factors and whether this is the issue of re-integration or an ever-since, eternal integration. To answer the question of the age/antiquity of this [re]integration, some seemingly warring, internal and external factors come into the picture, such as the technology and its application in the process of modernisation versus context-based factional and collective practices. In other words, and similar to End 1 in the spectrum, even when we reckon nature and culture as an integrated world, the differences between the denotations and connotations of the term ‘integration’ will emerge as soon as we decide to enter the hands-on phase in this human-nature relationship. This leads to the presence of different and sometimes divergent practical approaches for building human-nature relationships in our cities.

Some of these integration-based definitions of the human-nature world includes a) Marxist philosophy that considers nature as being consistently reshaped, reconstituted and reproduced in the process of commodification (destruction-to-reconstruction of first-nature to second-nature) in a wide range of scales from micro to macro levels; b) nature and culture intertwined as in aboriginal society, where no industrial or technological imprints can be found as the initial source/reason of integration, and nature and culture have never been separated in Indigenous tribes and societies while Homo sapiens has existed; and c) nature-culture consolidation in routines and rituals associated with the ancient civilisations where society has been spontaneously keeping and transferring their nature-dependent practices from one generation to another as an intergenerational heart-to-heart affinity between past, present and future (Anderson, 2010; Castree and Macmillan, 2001; Schmidt, 1971; Smith, 2008).

The Spectrum between the two ends (extremes) defining different levels of integration:

As noted above, even when referring to the literature/database that defines nature as the world of the non-human, specifying the exact boundaries between these two spheres is not possible. So, the next question is, ‘What could be an alternative in elucidation on the scopes of the two worlds of nature and human beings?’. My answer is portraying a ‘spectrum’ with different levels of integration and interaction between these two worlds. The acknowledgement of the existence of such a spectrum in the interaction between human beings and nature will create flexibility and inclusion in implications of the two terms (scopes), i.e. different levels of naturalne artificialness, rather than being totally natural or artificial. While some people believe that the planted forests of the countryside are natural areas, some refer to an inner-city park as an example of a piece of nature. These examples reveal an implicit acknowledgment of the existence of a spectrum in the interaction between human beings and nature. In other words, it is proposed that areas have different levels of naturalness vs. artificialness, rather than being totally natural or artificial. The following images clearly illustrate the concept of omitting the binary extremes (Two Ends) and replacing it with ‘not-totally-man-made’ and ‘not-totally-natural’ but with various weights of natural-ness vs artificiality.