"...mein Acker ist die Zeit", Aufsätze zur Umweltgeschichte - Oapen

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1 Introduction
The term “city” will be used here in the common dictionary meaning of a town of
significant size and importance, serving as a center of population, commerce, and
culture that is erected and maintained on legal powers, within definite boundaries.
However, I will not strictly follow this definition but will also refer to smaller settlements
for the sake of functional reasoning. Surprisingly enough, cities are not
really much studied in environmental history. Of course, there are many articles
and monographs on various aspects of urban life and the consequences of urbanization.
But the structure itself, which has changed the face of the earth like no other
structure made by man, and which has produced most of the ecological conditions
of the planet, is not really much dealt with. Examples which I am relying on are
mostly from the Western, namely European, hemisphere.
Every town, city, metropolis, is different, as is its societal atmosphere, its
“spirit”, its “vibration”. These differences are among the major reasons why people
like to visit cities or are attracted by different cities in different ways. However,
in terms of structural features all cities share basic properties, since all have to cope
with basically similar demands and expectations of their residents. Residents may
increase in numbers faster, and may be replaced faster for biological reasons, than
the cities can change. Cities do not respond by themselves; they are unable to remodel
in terms of autopoetic systems. Any change has to be initiated and performed
by the residents. This relationship between “city” and “society”, including
the societal frictions resulting from it, is usually addressed by “urban ecology” as
defined by Robert E. Park and his followers, and is a branch of sociology. I will
not go into this realm.
Instead of referring to specific statements by specific authors, I would like to
mention three important and influential books for my topic, although they do not
at all or not really discuss “cities” or related subjects. 200 They mention “urbanisms”
in context of environmental history, but they mostly do not address the fields and
problems in the way I intend to. Instead, I found inspiring Mumford’s contribution
to the pioneering work in environmental history “Man’s Role in Changing the Face
of the Earth”, 201 which offered an excellent systematic view of the problem. Unfortunately,
what later became “environmental history” started by dissecting the
problem and atomized the complexity of the structure. Influenced by Mumford’s
200 The three books are: B.L.Turner, William Clark, Robert Kates, John Richards, Jessica Mathews
and Wiliam Meyer, The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (Cambridge: University Press with Clark
University, 1990);
Andrew Goudie, The human impact on the natural environment 5th ed.( Oxford: Blackwell, 2000);
Shepard Krech, John McNeill and Carolyn Merchant, Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, 3
vols. (New York, London: Routledge, 2004)
201 Lewis Mumford, “The natural history of urbanisation”, in: William Thomas, Carl Sauer, Marston
Bates, and Lewis Mumford (eds.) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1956), pp 382 - 398