Book Report Maria Kaika, "City Of Flows, Nature, And the City".

1. City of Flows, Nature, and the City.
PHIL 6650
Fall 2016
Dr. Irene Klaver
Douglas Smith
Heather Williams
Samuel Jackson
Introduction
The process of tracing how water has come to be part of the contemporary household,
invisible, immediately available, only remembered if if fails to appear, is a description of the
formation of contemporary life itself. The book “City of Flows Modernity, Nature, and the City.”
by Maria Kaika traces this metaphor and provides a powerful analysis of the various political,
ethical, and historical factors that show the transition of ideas concerning water, technology, and
human well-being. It traces through the differing philosophical, and subject related parts of
water flowing through a city, and in this way is uniqurely useful for intellectual reflection. This
report is a brief description of this process, done in a similar way as to divine a differing nature
of artistic question asking. Artistic reflections are best based in the real thing and is not so
different from the questions asked by Engineers, what is it? Why does it funciton in the way it
does? And can it potentially function in a way that differs significantly enough to adopt.
The book in question is a historically accurate, and flowing metaphor, that connects not
just the physical substance of water to the city, and thus human beings, but also to the
sociological, and ideological conceptions of it within the cultural imagination. It stretches us as it
progrsses through its difering chapters, and each chapter builds on the nexts. This is common or
artistic works, and in a good book it will be the case. For starting with physical matter, then
working through the ways that human beings have designed cities in particular ways, and the
histories of cities is a history of bringing water.

2. The books progression shows that the story of water, is the story of how cities became
the systems of flow, change, development, and their later redevelopment. The effort here then is
to discuss how this process, over time has become hidden, and to a large extent forgotten due
partly to the paving over of the literal systems that deliver water, and secondly due to changes
within the cultural imagination concerning modernity, and the technological systems that came
to represent its idea of being mechanisms for automatically increasing human well-being. The
essential ideas posed by the book itself, as an effort to maintain and bring forward its own
character will be discussed through three differing themes.
The first of these three themes provides a baseline as we consider what exactly the book
is discussing. Kaika connects the concept of technology as a representation of progress with how
it applies within the concept of the City. The following discussion will remark on the concept
that progress slowly came to be defined not as just the utility of water itself, but as the very act of
connecting with the system of power i.e. to the network providing the utility. The second theme,
while connecting to the first, is Kaika’s unearthing of sedimented social relations and the
physical reifications long hidden by the separation of human labor from its final product in order
to quietly sanitize, remove, and alienate all its facets from our day to day human life. Borrowing
from Marx she criticizes this creation of fetishes that are then sought after with an obsessive
unreflective manner thusly supporting the capitalist aim of a presumed right to human labors.
This fetishization allows the individual human being to consume without being plagued by
thoughts of how their “natural resources” are in fact technologically engineered products. These
seemingly easily provided fetishes eclipse our awareness of long chains of other human being’s
efforts and enshrine as though in a mist the natural origins of our resources on tap. Lastly, we
will discuss how the dam, provides an expansion of the metaphor of the flow of water. The dam

3. as “creative destruction” is a human made barrier that recreates the environment with the use of
social power by the willful application of reason, engineering, design.
Technology for Human Emancipation: A Modern Prometheus
From the outset of the modernist project to bring natural resources into homes, there has
been a constant struggle in an attempt to tame, understand, and ultimately separate Nature from
society:
The taming of nature became a major project within modernity’s broader aims, a project
that scholars came to term “Promethean”. Within this context, the modern scientist, or
engineer would be the new Prometheus, who fights for human emancipation through the
domination of nature. The modern hero would employ creativity, ingenuity, romantic
heroic attitude, and a touch of hubris against the given order of the natural world (Kaika,
11).
This concept of progress is not merely perpetual improvement over time. For Kaika rather,
progress involves an emphasis on scientists and engineers as radically effective beings who can
turn the tide against the natural workings of nature. The human story is the story of distancing,
yet understanding an attempting to control nature. Less than two hundred years ago people had
to spend a great deal of effort on clean water, not having to do this is a modern invention with a
particular history, past, and might dissolve when water resources are damaged by loss and
climate water waste.
As a basic element of this project, nature was to be purified, and through that became
separated from society, specifically so it could be studied and eventually tamed (Kaika, 11).
Though this aim had a kind of humanitarian basis when originally formed, it was soon co-opted
by the productionist/capitalist system interested in creating “space envelopes” which could then
could be used to increase consumptive patterns, leading to a fragmentation of everyday
experience, commodifying everyday life (Kaika 12).

4. In order to look more closely at these “space envelopes” one can consider their opposing
mirror image descriptions. Nature is seen as both, “uncivilized, the untamed wilderness that
requires control” and, “nature is also perceived as inherently ‘good’, as the embodiment of some
innate superior moral code” (Kaika, 13). The city also has this dual scripting, described as the
highest form of human life, and yet also holding some darkness which continually demands a
remaking, and rethinking of what the city is (Kaika 13). This view has existed throughout the
development of city planning. As urbanization ramped up the framing turned towards a stronger
emphasis on “sanitation” as a method of dealing with the supposed corruption of the City, and
with that the wildness/risk inherent within Nature (Kaika, 14).
The second recurring overall theme in Kaika’s “City of Flows” is the manifestation of
what Marx called fetishes as a part of modernity’s Promethean Project of urbanization. As we
saw above modernity for Kaika “is understood as a programmatic vision for social change and
progress, linked to industrialization and capitalist expansion, and in effect as an ideology for
human emancipation (Kaika, 4). This narrative of progress centers on the advancement of
technology, the bringing to bear of human labor, and the ever broadening reach of capitalism to
render nature as not only tame but as one more commodity. Through the process of “creative
destruction” we have urbanized the environment and even brought nature back into our urban
environment in the form of green spaces. The vision of modernity is framed as one of autonomy,
independence, and cleanliness.
The modern Davos man represents this but so does his modern city and even further his
modern home. The modern city is seen as the antithesis to nature. The now fully framed fully
tamed nature exists either outside of the city well behaved for the most part or in well-defined
border patrolled pockets as areas for leisure and tailored reconnections to our envisioned

5. spiritualized past. Kaika argues that, “although the programming vision [of modernity’s
Promethean project] was to render cities independent from nature’s processes, the materialization
of this vision was predicated upon establishing intricate networks and flows of natural elements,
social power relations and capital investment cycles, which, in fact, not only did not separate
nature from city, but instead wove them together more closely into a socio-spatial continuum”
(Kaika, 5).This idealized separation from nature as promulgated by modernity is exaggerated
once more when we focus our lens from the city to the houses which constitute it.
The modern home fulfills the same demands as the modern city as creating a space that is
autonomous, independent, and clean but also provides these commoditized necessities not just
from, or against nature, but from, as opposed to society as well. We exile from the modern home
both the filth as dirt and the social filth of homelessness for example. We enjoy the lighting at
our fingertips and use it to power our devices of inspiration and creativity as we express
ourselves in comfort, safety, and solitude. We are shortsighted though for “the modern city and
modern home appear only to function autonomously and independently from natural and social
processes, because the flow of natural elements, social relations, and money that support their
function remain fetishised (in the case of social relations) or visually severed (in the case of
technology networks)” (Kaika 5). Just as Mary Midgely describes our philosophical plumbing
we only see the proverbial tip of the iceberg and for the most part are happily oblivious to the
various structures that lie underneath, within, and in support of our safe, comfortable solitude.
The interruption of the normal flow of our taken for granted instant access to resources
can “produce a feeling of uneasiness, discomfort, and anxiety, which threatens to tear down the
laboriously built and elaborately maintained security and safety of familiar spaces” (Kaika, 68).
Kaika borrows the term uncanny from Freud to describe this feeling. This existential crisis, this

6. awakening from the dogmatic slumber of blissful ignorance happens when we are confronted by
the underlying social relations normally black boxed and hidden away from us but made present
by the happenings of bursting pipes or piled garbage. The bursting of a pipe reminds of us of the
wildness of nature and exposes how precarious is our control. The sanitation worker’s strike
forces us to witness the messiness of social relations and the putrid nature of decaying matter
when our garbage piles up with no one to remove it and no place else for it to go. Kaika aims to
expose the connections of city/nature, society/nature, and even water itself as hybrids in order to
recontextualize them as “neither purely human-made nor purely natural; outcomes of the same
socio spatial process of the urbanization of nature” (Kaika, 5-6). It is our contention that we are
duty bound to philosophically traverse between the Scylla of blissful ignorance that comes from
fetishization (wrought by capitalism’s making urbanization of nature possible as part of
modernity’s Promethean project) and Charybdis as the existential dread of the uncanny (invoked
unease at the uncovering of sedimented networks of social relations, resource distribution, and
channels of capital).
In Modernity’s Promethean project, the nature/society dialectics has always been at the
center of efforts to create a better society by creating a better urban environment. From
the attempts of the 18th and 19th century to create a “sanitized city”, to the 20th
century’s strive for a “rational city”, to the contemporary quest for a sustainable city,
inspiration is sought for in ideas about the “greening” of the city and reducing pollutants
of all kinds emanating from urban life (Kaika, 14).
Kaika implements the dam metaphor, as our third theme, at the onset with a personal
story in the first chapter, “The dam was an elaborate human construction, out there in the
wilderness, commanding the water to stop flowing, while the flow of the water in my home was
a natural and simple thing…I started reflecting on the connection…due to a drought in the early
1990s” (Kaika, 3). The dam, as a metaphor, extends its sinews into the fibrous matter of

7. Modernity’s phantasmagoric dream and the resulting fetishization by evoking a dialectics of
what remains below the surface of the water. The Marathon Dam in Athens serves as an
exemplar for both the dream and the fetish; the dam, the culmination of the “nationalistic
hallucination” of a Westernized Greece which “imported the idea of associating modernization
with the excavation of its classical past” (Kaika 104). In this reification of a Westernized Greece,
the dam metaphor serves as the imported modernization which stopped the flow of Greek culture
as part of the Orient and the Ottoman Empire, unearthed the classical past, and filtered these
murky waters by distinguishing East from West. The temple at the foot of the Marathon Dam
exists as a concrete symbol of this reification and connection to a pseudo-freedom and
independence; the dam also promotes the fetishes associated with constructing such monuments
and taming nature.
Greece relied on external funding for its independence from Turkish rule, and developing
the ruins of war into a seemingly effective infrastructure; moreover, Ulen & Co’s use of Greek
manual labor under the direction of North American management further develops the dam’s
metaphorical potency concerning importation and reification. For London, the dam metaphor
exhibits its influence via water towers and other works; these monuments served as symbols of
technological innovation – taming nature – and the fetishization of nature and technology.
Modernity’s promise redirected and collected the natural flow of water and the socio-
environmental consciousness, just as the dam suppresses, collects, distinguishes and redirects;
however, water overflows and seeps and nature responds with drought which exposes the
elements hidden beneath. The dam metaphor discloses the relationship between scarcity and
reactionary politics and economics which attempt to resolve via price hikes and consumption
regulations.

8. Developing “the discourse around the scheme ‘scarce = valuable = expensive’”
propagates the dichotomous relationship between water and society; contrariwise, viewing both
abundance and scarcity as outcomes “of long periods of interaction between available resources,
human labor, and the economics, politics, and culture of urbanization and water use” promotes
opportunities for a dialectic of re-imagining the “space envelopes” human beings share with
nature (Kaika, 163). The porosity of the dam metaphor allows the previously suppressed and
redirected elements of past and contemporary society to flow conjunctively and avoid continual
bifurcations.
In Conclusion
In closing there is a great deal of worth in understanding the historical development of
"space-envelopes", and the pattern of 'scarce= valuable = expensive'", as created in the
capitalist, city evolving patterns society has created. These norms did not fall out of the sky, and
did not appear to us unmade, they were made and if not mantained they will be unmade by sheer
lack of care. As brought out by her discussion of the failings of matienence/and the lack of
remembering of the great "accomplishment" bringing water into the home was (Kaika, 165).
Our pipes did not grow out of the ground, they were put there, and in Kaika's book she does an
excellent job of bringing forth the human struggle of controling natural resources, and that our
"assumption" of having them is truly a modern convinence. One which needs to be seen as the
historically relative, and potentially changable, or lost reality that it is.