A consistent strand of popular thought has sought to place the city as a human invention in opposition to ‘nature’ or the ‘natural’. Yet no city is independent of nature: each is situated in broader physical processes and entangled in ecosystems; and, at the same time, environmental processes are filtered through social arrangements of political and economic differences. This urban–nature dialectic has been examined by leading scholars such as William Cronon, Martin Melosi, Joel Tarr and Erik Swyngedouw. Urbanizing Nature is part of a larger book series that explores and seeks to understand more fully the role of ‘urban agency’. The purpose of this volume is to examine the urban–nature dynamic in European cities since 1500 – an important objective, since much of the scholarship in political ecology and urban political ecology is focused on the contemporary period.

The book consists of 13 essays divided into four thematic areas, with an introduction and concluding essay. The first thematic area is ‘Nature into urban hinterlands’, which explores how cities used their hinterlands for the provision of water, food, timber and other resources. Christoph Bernhardt's essay, for example, looks at the urbanization of Berlin in the 1800s and identifies several periods of urban agency that were instrumental in the city's growth and transformation. Starting around 1800, the hinterland supplied important materials such as clay for bricks and food to support a growing population. Later, leaders applied new technologies to drain the area surrounding the immediate city, which allowed for new settlements and outward growth. As Bernhardt states, ‘water and landscape were right at the heart of town planning’, which involved redirecting the water courses and remodelling the urban water table (p. 57).

The second theme is ‘Nature as urban resource’, which focuses on the way individual resources were produced and circulated within the city. While there has been much attention paid to the urbanization and modernization of water and water systems in history, less attention has been given to the dynamic between cities and their wood resources. Paulo Charruada and Chloe Deligne examine the role of urban actors in medieval and early modern cities of the Southern Low Countries, which needed wood for firewood and timber for building a range of products including housing. In order to meet these needs, cities and their merchants developed complex sourcing strategies, resulting in the diversification and specialization of different kinds of wooden spaces (p. 115). Agency was a two-way dynamic: urban networks constantly shaped and reshaped wooded areas which in turn shaped urban networking. The result was an evolving transformation in which urban authorities were ‘in constant dialogue with the merchants and mindful of the needs of their population’ (p. 129).

The third theme, ‘Nature as urban challenge’, explores the ways that the urban transformation of nature generates threats (real or perceived). Stephane Frioux's essay examines the costs or threat of air pollution on public health in France. He notes that human agency occurred at several scales in this case: individuals and organizations within the city, city leaders and national policies around air pollution. Frioux says that during the first part of the twentieth century, many cities experienced a regime of ‘partial agency: urban leaders took up the fight against smoke and smells, as long as jobs were not threatened’ (p. 221). Starting in the 1960s, the networks of human agency increased to include pollution and health specialists, concerned citizens and environmental organizations; in addition, technology kept providing new information, such as measurements of SO2 or CO concentrations.

The fourth theme in the volume is ‘Visions of urban nature’, which concentrates on the discourse and practices that reinforced the dissociation of cities from nature. Heike Weber examines the ‘wastescapes’ of Germany. She writes that landfills were ‘supposed to urbanize nature, but also to naturalize the urban’ (p. 263). Before 1970, urban agents such as sanitary engineers assumed that waste would metabolize into compost, thus ‘naturalizing’ urban waste (waste also disappeared from view, allowing cities to dissociate from their waste). Weber notes that the recent history of the landfill Monte Scherbelino illustrates that shaping the city–nature relationship according to human needs can have unintended consequences, such as when material leftovers (what she terms hybrids of city nature) developed their own toxic agency (p. 283). Her essay points out that urban metabolism is not only about the resources brought into the city, but also the quantities of waste generated.

As an edited collection of essays, there are three underlying concepts that unify the volume: a long-term historical perspective, metabolism and agency. In examining 500 years of urbanization in Europe, the book provides new case-studies that demonstrate the value of a historical approach to discover path dependencies, transitions and continuities. Numerous cities are explored, each with a specific, long-term interaction with nature. Thus, the essays provide a great deal of new information about the urban–nature interchange long before the industrial revolution. The second foundational concept is urban metabolism, an idea introduced in the 1990s by Wackernagel and Rees (also called the ‘urban ecological footprint’). The concept of metabolism acknowledges the large volumes of water, energy and food that flow through into and out of the city. Several essays examine ‘hydraulic management’: damns, reservoirs, tunnels, wells, the drainage of swamps and piped water supplies, and remind readers that, even before modern times, cities were interdependently linked to resources. Finally, the essays in this collection reflect on agency in an innovative and more expansive way than previous environmental historical scholarship has done. Agency, as used by many of the contributors, recognizes that the construction, maintenance, upgrading and rebuilding of cities is the work of countless individuals, engineers, urban planners and civic organizations over time. By expanding the concept of ‘agency’ to include a wider range of actors, the book contributes to a better understanding of urban–nature dynamics.

This collection does have some shortcomings: the essays tend to repeat the same literature review, and some are theoretically dense, which may limit the audience to a narrow range of academics, rather than a broader readership of environmental activists and urban actors. In addition, some of the literature that serves as a foundation for the essays is not new, but has been robustly developed and continues to be a theoretical lens used in political ecology and urban political ecology scholarship, and this was not well communicated. Nonetheless, the book makes a significant point that urbanization is not a uniform and linear process but the result of new technological schemes, new actors and new definitions of nature that created and recreated urban–nature dialectic over many centuries. Cities of today are the result of a long and continually changing relationship with the natural environment, one that can and should be documented.