Nature’s Popular Metropolis: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area

cisco Bay Area, the greenest of cities in the United States. It has earned that title by virtue of over a century of conservation of open space, bay waters, and coastal areas the length and breadth of the metropolitan area. The Bay Area is replete with what might be called “popular urban natures” because the landscape of the region bristles with parks, open spaces, and other protected areas that are the result of widespread mobilization of committed citizens, fierce outbreaks of environmental politics, and thoroughgoing incorporation of green spaces in public life. I have assayed the depth and breadth of this process of popular naturemaking in the city elsewhere; I use this opportunity to elaborate on the key ideas in the making of urban natures and show how they must be grounded geographically and politically. The argument proceeds in three parts. First, the bay metropolis encompasses a huge array of open spaces— loosely called the “greenbelt”— that have become an everyday part of the urban scene, experienced as scenic backdrop, as recreational areas, and as integral to local residents’ sense of place. That greenbelt is widely viewed as preserved wildland, in contrast to the artifice of the city, yet it is anything but nature in the raw. It is an urbanized nature— a socionatural hybrid profoundly transformed by the encounter between city and country and between popular ideas and practices and ecological processes. Second, the greenbelt landscape can be understood as popular urban nature in the crucial sense of being the consequence of strenuous political activity by a mobilized citizenry that has been well organized, well led, and well heeled. Popular spaces of urban nature have been achieved through a sustained struggle in counterflow to the dominant logic of profitmaking, expressed in terms of the public interest and manifested 6 Nature’s Popular Metropolis: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area