If the second possibility is true, however, then a different response is in order. If the urban development that erodes natural areas is driven by economic factors, for instance, then pointing to an aesthetic feature of the urban environment will not affect it. And insofar as preserving the unique beauty of a natural area is one reason to resist such economic forces, pointing to similarity between urban and natural beauty might, in fact, contribute to such development. This all assumes, however, that the urban development that destroys natural areas is the kind of urban environment that has a similarity in functional order to natural environments. But this is unlikely to be the case. The form of urban development that is most worrisome with respect to the destruction of natural areas is urban sprawl. Yet urban sprawl is a paradigm case of a built environment whose functional order is different from that which we find in nature: highly designed and regulated, lacking in density and a spontaneous interplay of elements, it is not rich in causal role functionality. So in many cases where we must weigh the potential loss of a natural area and its aesthetic qualities against economic (or other) benefits of development, my view would not lend support to development, since the aesthetic quality lost in nature likely would not be replicated in that development.
Finally, one might wonder: Why invoke nature at all? Would it not be better to base an aesthetic for the built environment on the nature of that environment, rather than appeal to analogies with ‘the natural’? Indeed, analogies between nature and city (the ‘concrete jungle’, e.g.) have typically served to highlight the negative features of the urban. Arnold Berleant notes that, although “wilderness” has acquired a positive connotation during the past century, “when the wilderness metaphor is applied to urban experience ... the word reverts to its earlier, forbidding sense of a trackless domain uninhabited by humans” (Berleant, 2005, 42). But the fact that the analogy with nature has not been used to foster a positive attitude towards urban aesthetics does not mean that it cannot be. For, as I have tried to show, the city shares with the natural environment not only negative qualities, but positive ones as well. In fact, using the analogy in this way is appealing given the lack of work on the built environment in contemporary philosophical aesthetics. Given that a completely de novo account of the aesthetics of urban environments does not appear to be in the offing, I think we would be foolish not to use the abundant resources that have been developed for natural environments. We may measure their cut to the built environment and, even if the fit turns out to be poor, at least gain a better conception of our subject’s true dimensions. A final and important consideration is that, for better or worse, our culture continues to hold nature as a paradigm of aesthetic quality. While this remains the case, relating the beauty of the built environment to that of nature is a promising strategy for its articulation.148
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An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2005 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology in Delft, The Netherlands. I would like to thank those present, especially Andrew Light, for helpful comments. Financial support was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Ryerson University.