Urban Narratives about Nature

Carlos Tabernero is associate professor at the Institut d’Història de la Ciència (iHC) of Universtat Autònoma de Barcelona.

“Nature has been narrated as dangerous, backward, salvific, and endangered. Urban Narratives about Nature: Socio-Ecological Imaginaries between Science and Entertainment looks to cities for the mechanisms of production, development, and circulation nodes of some of these narratives. Through carefully chosen and researched cases studies, mostly located in twentieth-century Spain and Great Britain, the chapters in this edited volume compellingly show the transnational networks of media, experts, businesses, and activists that re-imagined non-urban landscapes from cities. From these studies, cities themselves emerge as contested spaces with porous walls traversed, often in unexpected ways, by the very natural entities that urban dwellers sought to tame through their storytelling.”

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Narrating Nature from the CityPart I: Between Academia and ActivismChapter 1: Miquel Crusafont and Sabadell: Narratives about Paleontology (Spain, 1950?1973)Chapter 2: Environmentalism in TransitionPart II: Between Knowledge and EntertainmentChapter 3: Wild at Heart: Zoological Gardens and the Urban SpaceChapter 4: Mass Media and Urban Animals in History: The View from Interwar BritainChapter 5: Teaching and Tinkering with Personal Computers in Catalan Rural Schools and Summer Camps (Spain, 1980s?1990s)Part III: Between Film and LiteratureChapter 6: The Countryside in the Frame: Film Representations of Nature under Franco’s DictatorshipChapter 7: Hunting Narratives in Twentieth-Century Spain: The Case of Miquel DelibesChapter 8: From El Modena to Terminator: Imagining Green Utopian Places for the AnthropocenePart IV: Between Natural History and TelevisionChapter 9: Percy Smith: The Triple Liminality of an Urban Natural History Filmmaker in Interwar BritainChapter 10: The Granada TV and Film Unit at the London Zoo: “Creating Adequate Opportunity for Observing Patterns for Amateur and Professional Zoologists Alike”Chapter 11: Televising Nature as Modernization: El Hombre y la Tierra (Man and the Earth, 1974?1981) in 1970s SpainAfterword: City of Silence, City of Stories: Or of Ghosts, Doors, and SubversionAbout the Contributors