History Lessons: What Urban Environmental Ethics Can Learn from Nineteenth Century Cities

Abstract

In this paper, I outline valuable insights that current theorists working in urban environmental ethics can gain from the analysis of nineteenth century urban contexts. Specifically, I argue that an analysis of urban areas during this time reveals two sets of competing metaphysical commitments that, when accepted, shift both the design of urban environments and our relationship with the natural world in these contexts. While one set of metaphysical commitments could help inform current projects in urban environmental ethics, the second ''de-animalized'' or ''cleansed'' commitments that influenced the structure of post-nineteenth century urban areas could potentially harm projects in urban environmental ethics. Thus we need to be particularly careful when choosing a metaphysical base for our current urban environmental ethics, as, depending on your specific project, implicitly accepting certain commitments could inadvertently work against the overall goals of the project.

Food Sovereignty in the City: Challenging Historical Barriers to Food Justice

“…Land-use policy, zoning regulations, food system choices, and most importantly for this chapter, food initiatives do not happen in a vacuum, but are grounded in specific environmental, historical, and socioeconomic contexts (Mcgirr and Batterbury 2015;Mitchell 2003). These contexts are not value free but are molded by the values of previous generations (Lyson 2004;Thompson 2015) and interwoven with basic commitments and assumptions that often help to guide decision making, such as particular conceptions of disease (Atkins 2012b;Barnes 1995;Howell 2012), what a city is (Noll 2015), and the perceived "right" relationship is between humans and animals (Brantz Forthcoming in "Food (2003) calls "the project of delimiting and determining the governing features of everyday social existence" in the context of the city (p. 462). Specifically, it explores how a) the context of the city and b) actors and stakeholders in this context include or accept key assumptions and commitments that play a role in shaping the current challenges faced by urban agriculture initiatives today.…”

“…For the purposes of this chapter, a "commitment" should be understood as an underlying feature of social existence (Rose 2003) or a basic concept that a person holds concerning what something "is" (Inwagen 2013;Noll 2015). Such commitments are influential in all areas of life, including the development of personal identity (Ricoeur and Blamey 1995), how we treat various groups, such as other those of other cultures, animals, and the environment, and in scientific inquiry (Haraway 1989, Harding 1993.…”

“…The roles of domesticated animals in urban landscapes greatly shifted during the nineteenth century, so much so that, by the dawn of the twentieth century, cityscapes were effectively cleansed of all but pet animals and those predominantly living outside human control (Atkins 2012a;Brantz 2011;Noll 2015). In contrast, inhabitants in pre-modern urban areas included various types of agricultural and work animals-animals who often spent their lives and eventually died in urban environments.…”

“…Concerning the first point, key factors impacting human-animal relationships during the nineteenth century were a) an increasing emphasis and reliance on science and rationality, coupled with a growing faith in progress, and b) the emergence of new concepts of "civilization" and "domestication" built upon the key dualisms of wild/tame and primitive/cultivated (Brantz 2011;Noll 2015). These labels signify different relationships between humans and non-human animals (Palmer 2011), as wildness came to emphasize "the absence of a relation and a disposition that is markedly not 'tame,' while a domesticated animal is one that is both controlled by humans and has been made dependent upon humans in various degrees" (Noll 2015).…”

“…Concerning the first point, key factors impacting human-animal relationships during the nineteenth century were a) an increasing emphasis and reliance on science and rationality, coupled with a growing faith in progress, and b) the emergence of new concepts of "civilization" and "domestication" built upon the key dualisms of wild/tame and primitive/cultivated (Brantz 2011;Noll 2015). These labels signify different relationships between humans and non-human animals (Palmer 2011), as wildness came to emphasize "the absence of a relation and a disposition that is markedly not 'tame,' while a domesticated animal is one that is both controlled by humans and has been made dependent upon humans in various degrees" (Noll 2015). Due to these conceptual developments, "civilized" spaces, such as the home and the city, that were traditionally viewed as a place where various animals (such as agricultural and work animals) were welcomed (Edwards 2011;Pascua 2011), were increasingly conceptualized as a place where only the most "tame" or controlled animals (mostly companion animals) could safely enter (Clutton-Brock 2011).…”