Maria Kaika is a tenured geography professor at Oxford University. She has written many articles and is very well regarded in the field.

Acknowledgments, Part I, Part II, Epilogue, Endnotes, Index

Typically, cities and nature are perceived as geographic opposites, cities being manufactured social creations, and nature being outside of human construction. Through a historical geography of water in the modern city, Kaika shows that this is not the case. Rather, nature and the modern city are fully intertwined, with cities integrating nature at every level of activity. While her empirical focus is on Athens, she discusses other major cities in the West, including London and New York.