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In his forthcoming book, David Harvey5 insists that there is nothing particularly unnatural about New York City. Yet the virtual images displaying and displayed in Time Square, the Disneyfication of 42nd Street, Bronx kids playing with stand-pipes in the hot New York summers, the multi-million dollar crack scene, Wall Street derivatives, trading in pork bellies and the fight of the homeless for their own nature/space immortalized in Neil Smith's continuing chronicle of New York City's remorseless urban restructuring6—these all seem very remote, if not antithetical, to" nature," to the" green and pleasant land" not tainted by humans and left to its own devices and fundamental laws of life as excavated by biologists, chemists and physicists.

On closer inspection, however, the city and the urban are a network of interwoven processes that are both human and natural, real and fictional, mechanical and organic. There is nothing" …