...a fascinating overview of New York City's technological and social infrastructures.
Journal of Architectural Education
Gandy has pieced together a fascinating environmental history of New York.
Publishers Weekly
Concrete and Clay is a towering achievement and a wonderful addition to the literature on the urban environment.
Ari Kelman
American Studies
This remarkable book renders more visible the complex process of socio-environmental transformation that gives form and substance to the city. It is a great read—insightful and well-researched, yet accessible.
Erik Swyngedouw, St. Peter's College and School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University
Gandy deftly and provocatively connects issue of health, politics, economics, and urbanology in a compulsively readable and illuminating cultural analysis.
Publishers Weekly
Gandy does an excellent job of guiding the reader through the thicket of New York's societal relationships with nature. The study defies common conventions of urban historical narrative by allowing the reader to access New York's nature from a variety of perspectives: capital, technology, modernization, landscape, liberation politics, and environmental justice. Concrete and Clay is a major achievement in the field of urban ecology.
Roger Keil, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University
This is a masterful book: sweeping in its coverage of urban environmental issues, provocative in its critique of contemporary environmentalism, and economical in its execution. I can think of no other work that so effectively manages to sustain an analysis of the urban environment across such broad shifts in urban capitalism. By relentlessly bringing us back to the underlying patterns of capital accumulation and political power in cities, Gandy offers a powerful corrective to models of sustainability that invoke an organic ideal of urban nature.
Andrew Hurley, Department of History, University of Missouri, St. Louis
This is a wonderful book—rich in detail and broad in analytic scope. Gandy uncovers the hidden intersections of nature, culture, and power on which the building of cities relies. He offers a dramatic new synthesis of what we know about New York City and the natural environment of water, waste, air, and parkland, framed by the continual struggle for democracy.
Sharon Zukin, author of The Cultures of Cities