Concrete and clay : reworking nature in New York City / Matthew Gandy.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Water, Space, and Power
1.1. Water and the Nascent Civic Realm
1.2. Engineering the Technological Sublime
1.3. Urban Decay and the Hidden City
1.4. Paranoid Urbanism
1.5. Hydrological Transformations
2. Symbolic Order and the Urban Pastoral
2.1. Cultural Anxiety, Land Speculation, and Public Space
2.2. Creating the Garden of a Great City
2.3. Olmsted's Urban Vision: A Fragile Synthesis
2.4. Olmsted Rediscovered: An Emerging Preservationist Ethic
2.5. Emerald Dreams
3. Technological Modernism and the Urban Parkway
3.1. The Automobilization of the American Landscape
3.2. Robert Moses and the Radiant City
3.3. The Demise of Technological Modernism
3.4. Fractured Cities
4. Between Borinquen and the Barrio
4.1. Landscapes of Despair
4.2. Space, Identity, and Power
4.3. Disarray in the 1970s
4.4. The Power of Memory
5. Rustbelt Ecology
5.1. Across the Great Divide
5.2. Pollution and the Politics of Resistance.
5.3. Reclaiming the Social Environment
5.4. Trash Can Utopias.

"In this account of the urbanization of nature in New York City, Matthew Gandy explores how the raw materials of nature have been reworked to produce a "metropolitan nature" distinct from the forms of nature experienced by early settlers. The book traces five broad developments: the creation of a modern water supply system, the expansion and redefinition of public space in Central Park, the construction of landscaped highways, the radical environmental politics of the barrio in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the contemporary politics of the environmental justice movement."--BOOK JACKET.