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Nate Gabriel Assistant Teaching Professor Department of Geography, Rutgers University Contact Me: nategab [at] geography [dot] rutgers [dot] edu |
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ResearchMy work lies at the intersection of political ecology, urban geography, and environmental justice, and examines questions related to urban environmental governance, specifically governance by the state (local, regional, and national), quasi-governmental institutions, and self-governing individuals.I am interested exploring "the urban" not simply as a site in which to examine the politics of the environment, nor merely the scale at which many environmental conflicts emerge, but as a discourse through which nature and society are understood and produced. My work demonstrates that the way we understand the urban has a profound impact on the ways we interact with the built environment and the non-human. Research Project: The Work That Parks Do I am currently working on a book project, based on my PhD dissertation, that documents the discursive role that Philadelphia's Fairmount Park system played in the formation of the city as an object of knowledge from the nineteenth century to the present. Fairmount Park is one of the oldest and largest urban parks in the United States (established in 1868, now encompassing over 9,000 acres), and had a profound effect on the ways that other cities were imagined and organized at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. My research employs a genealogical method that combines an array of qualitative methods to examine the practices that continue to reproduce the discursive split between nature and society through the technology of the urban park. I demonstrate how various forms of discursive power associated with the management of parks (such as the disciplining of bodies, the arrangement of urban space, and the erasure of non-capitalist economic practices) reproduce the city as capitalist space by nullifying and rendering impotent competing framings that would suggest otherwise. Research Project: Discourses of Urban Sustainability This project examines questions remain regarding the effects of emerging modes of governance of the urban public sphere with regard to the environment. Specifically, it examines the effects of two opposing urban environmental narratives, their associated modes of governance, and their relationship to urban publics. The first of these narratives is that associated with urban "greening" and urban sustainability, in which many US cities have become heavily invested in recent years. The second is that of urban blight, to which the post-industrial city has been subjected for decades. Divergent as they are, these framings are underpinned by the same tension between the neoliberalization of urban governance, whereby private property relations come to play a central organizing role, and an increased focus in sustainability, which tends to frame urban space as an environmental commons. Yet, they are more than the consequence of a shift toward neoliberalization. These narratives have wide-ranging effects in terms of producing new environmentally- oriented constituencies and new spaces of everyday environmental governance and discipline, as cities are increasingly recast in environmental terms. By tracing the specific practices through which urban environmental spaces are produced (for example, through infrastructural reorganization, efforts to increase efficiency of resource use, increased attention on community-led initiatives like urban gardening and cycling, and abandonment of entire sections of cities), this research continues to interrogate the relationship between state governance and "everyday" forms of environmental management and self-discipline. I'm especially interested in the extent to which these new environmental strategies enable or encourage public participation in environmental decision-making, what consequences that participation has on participants, and the potential (or lack thereof) that such projects have for producing more diverse and more inclusive configurations of the interface between urban nature and urban people. | Publications In Print Gabriel, N. and Sarmiento, E. (2020). “Troubling Power: An Introduction to a Special Issue on Power in Community Economies,” Rethinking Marxism. Part of a special issue edited by Sarmiento, E., Gabriel, N., and Shear, B. Sarimento, E. and Gabriel, N. (2020). “Becoming-genealogical: Power and Diverse Economies,” Rethinking Marxism. Part of a special issue edited by Sarmiento, E., Gabriel, N., and Shear, B. Gabriel, N. and Sarmiento, E. (2020). “On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies,” for Dombrowski, K. and Gibson, K. The Handbook of Diverse Economies. Edward Elgar Press. Community Economies Collective, Morrow, O., St. Martin, K., Gabriel, N., Heras Monner Sans, A. (2019). “Community Economies.” In Keywords in Radical Geographic Thought. Gabriel, N. (2018). “Paradox and Possibility: Voluntarism and the Urban Environment in a Post-Political Era,” Social and Cultural Geography. DOI:10.1080/14649365.2018.1474376 Gabriel, N. (2016). “Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park: Discipline, Economic Diversity, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” in Braddock, A. (ed.), A Greene Country Towne: Art, Culture, and Ecology in Philadelphia. Penn State University Press Gabriel, N. (2016). “Mending Fences: Constituting the Urban Through Environmental Stewardship,” in Bezdecny, K. and Archer, K. (eds.) The Handbook of Cities and the Environment. Edward Elgar Press. Gabriel, N. and Campbell, L. (2016). “Editorial: Power in Urban Social-Ecological Systems: Processes and Practices of Governance and Marginalization.” Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 19:253-254. Gabriel, N. (2016). “No Place for Wilderness: Urban Parks and the Assembling of Neoliberal Urban Environmental Governance,” Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 19:278-284. Gabriel, N. (2014) "Urban Political Ecology: Environmental Imaginary, Governance, and the Non-human,” Geography Compass 8(1):38-48. Gabriel, N. (2013) "Territorializing Urban Space: the Production, Division, and Reconfiguration of Natures and Economies." City. 17:3 Mclain, R.J., Gabriel, N., et al. (2012) "Gathering in the city: An annotated bibliography on urban-based non-timber forest products gathering." Pacific Northwest Research Station General Technical Report, PNW-GTR-XXX. 177pp Gabriel, N. (2011) "The Work That Parks Do: Toward an Urban Environmentality." Social and Cultural Geography 12:2 Non-Peer Reviewed Gabriel, N. (2018). “The Brutal Energy of the Capitalist City: a response to Carving Out the Commons,” Environment and Planning C. Gabriel, N. (2015). “Book Review: The Architecture of Pleasure, by Josephine Kane”. Emotion, Space, and Society 16:28-29. Gabriel, N. (2014). “How Have Different Ways of Knowing In uenced the Management of Urban Ecosystems?” Roundtable blog post for The Nature of Cities blog (thenatureofcities.com). In Progress Gabriel, N. “Urban Environmental Governance in the American South: a case study from Birmingham, AL,” under review. |
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