Unravelling Urban Technonatures

In this introductory chapter, we examine the historiographical development of ‘technonatures’ as an analytical lens to study the dynamic and mutable relations between nature, technology, and agency in the city. Encouraging us to foreground the transformative role of urban natures, materialities, and technologies in shaping the politics of urban life and cities more broadly, the concept of technonatures, we argue, offers a fruitful analytical entry point from where to write urban environmental history. Thus, we survey how the relationship between nature, technology, and the urban have been theorized and investigated in urban research and point to the broader ontological shifts in social theory underpinning this development. Moreover, the chapter addresses the implications of technonatures for historical analysis, reflecting specifically upon the consequences that historicizing technonatures have had for this book’s approach to key analytical categories including temporality, agency, and power as well as to the city as a historical and technonatural phenomenon.