CityReads | How Green Became Good?

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How Green Became Good？

Greening is a mode of remaking cities, socially and spatially.

Hillary Angelo, 2021. How green became good: urbanized nature and the making of cities and citizens, The University of Chicago Press.

Source: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo61910401.html

In an era of climate change and ecological crisis, urban greening is understood to be a worldwide policy trend. As projects like Manhattan's High Line, Chicago's 606, China's eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do?

Chicago's 606

Greening projects transform cities: shaping living, working, and leisure environments, the organization of public and private space, and, thereby, social organization and civic life. How might we explain why greener cities are better cities has been naturalized as everyday common sense.

In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany's Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was "greened" with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley's urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: the nineteenth-century garden city in the first decade of the twentieth century, the postwar city beautiful in the 1970s, and the entrepreneurial green city in the early twenty-first century. The book documents the changing ideals of urban society and the ways in which greening projects were used to remake the Ruhr's cities and citizens in each moment in the service of a sociological project. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.

How to understand urban greening?

Angelo defines urban greening as the normative practice of using everyday signifiers of nature to fix problems with urbanism. In urban practice, the catchall term generally includes superficially "green" forms of streetscaping—urban farms, community gardens, street trees, pocket parks—as well as "gray" high-tech ecological interventions such as green building and coastal adaptation. If, in the form of urban sustainability and climate adaptation, greening appears quintessentially contemporary, in another sense urban sustainability is but the most recent iteration of green urbanism.

Raymond Williams famously quipped that nature is one of the most complex words in the English language, connoting urban parks and apparent wildernesses, plague and famine, providence and destruction, force and resource. In this sense, as long as there have been cities, there have been efforts to improve them with desirable symbolic forms of nature, such as parks and green space, alongside as many efforts to tame, protect them from, and ameliorate the effects of extreme weather, wild animals, and ecological threats of various kinds. The objects, practices, and associations of interest here are those commonly understood to have originated in nineteenth-century urban-industrial environments: the widespread recognition of plants, trees, small animals, and especially green open space as beneficial investments in the public good, understood to be important ways to show care for a city and its people.

Central Park in nineteenth-century New York City, a large industrial metropolis, is a typical example of urban greening. As a result, the greening impulse has classically been understood as a reaction to the pathologies of large industrial cities—their slums, density, and rampant public health problems. This explanation is inadequate. it is an explanation that is produced by and that reproduces two long-standing polarities in urban studies—between the study of the city and of nature, and between culture and political economy.

The goal of this book is to provide an explanation for urban greening that overcomes these polarities and reflects recent theoretical advances. The objective is to move beyond the two persistent binaries—between city/nature and culture/political economy—reflected in commonsense understandings of greening as an (ideological) reaction to the (industrial) city by developing an explanation for greening that foregrounds the relationship of urbanization as a social process to greening as a social practice, that highlights the centrality of green space to the organization of modern urban life, and that foregrounds the causal role of cultural or imaginative work in relationship to structural and material factors, all in order better to understand the dynamics and consequences of urban greening today.

Why Ruhr Valley?

This book develops an explanation for contemporary greening through a historical study of greening projects in Germany's Ruhr Valley, a classic urban-industrial region well-known for its coal mining and steel production, but a place that is failed by traditional explanations of why cities are greened. As a result of its industrial economy, the Ruhr is often invoked as a region without nature—its natural resources extracted, its air and landscape polluted. But, in fact, it has recurrently greened throughout its urban history in the absence of the classic urban form, urban problems, or urban bourgeoisie typically understood to motivate greening.

Because the polycentric Ruhr remained low density throughout its industrialization and preserved ample open space—first in the form of farmland, then greenbelts, and most recently recreational greenways and blueways—it never lacked the signifiers of nature—grass, trees, and open space—that are often added to large metropolises. What is interesting about this case is that, even though the Ruhr was and is superficially green looking, it could still be "greened".

At the beginning of the twentieth century, industrial barons provided garden cities for workers already living in faux-agricultural environments; postwar planners designed large regional parks to rebuild urban public life; in the past few decades, this deindustrialized region has been made into a giant regional park showcasing industrial nature (Industrienatur) and industrial culture (Industriekultur). Because, over 150 years, changing groups of protagonists recurrently used signifiers of nature to "improve" the region even in this low-density landscape, the Ruhr’s long urban history and unusual morphology make it a place well suited for developing a different explanation.

From the history of greening in the Ruhr, urban process, not urban form, turned signifiers of nature into "goods" for society and that urbanization as a social process is the condition of possibility for acting to improve urban environments through green space. Specifically, I find that urban greening is a social practice made possible by a social imaginary or urbanized nature, that was itself an outcome of and that has subsequently become a variable in urbanization.

Greening is a mode of remaking cities, socially and spatially. It is also a particularly powerful way of intervening in the urban built environment because, although specific projects are embedded in the political economy of each moment and reflect its biases, in each era they are constructed as universally beneficial investments in the public good by  both greening protagonists and their target audiences. The purpose of this book is to bring this view of greening—as a "grammar" of moral action, as a favorite fix for problems with urbanism—into focus by treating the built environment as an archive of these decisions.

Greening's Logics

1. Signifiers of nature are consistently constructed as indirect, universal, and aspirational goods. urbanized nature is valued, not primarily for the nutrition, shade, or windbreak it provides, but as a container for moral sentiments and as a vehicle for morally charged action. Second, urbanized nature is understood to be universal: beneficial to all and to all in the same way. Third, urbanized nature is aspirational.

2. Urbanized nature is an imaginary of form, not content. This social imaginary makes greening into a way of expressing social desires, but its content and politics are highly variable

3. Greening is a mode of remaking cities spatially and socially. Greening is a mode of remaking cities rather than an escape from urban life, signifiers of nature are, more specifically, used to recurrently reconstruct the city as a social world by spatializing changing ideals  of publicness in each era.

4. Greening projects are normative projects carried out and received as public goods.

Conclusions

This book has offered a new explanation of the origin, spread, and politics of modern greening—as a social practice that is a product of a social imaginary—in order to provide a new perspective on an activity we think we know well and denaturalize urban greening as a global, contemporary phenomenon. It has established a view of greening as a mode of moral action, rather than reactionary antimodernism, or the simple provision of public goods.

Contemporary greening is best understood as the global spread of this historically Euro-American imaginary: as urbanized nature traveled to the Ruhr at the end of the nineteenth century, it has traveled to Asia and the Middle East today. We should see the contemporary interest in green cities as continuous with greening's urban history. Today, greening—carried out in the name of sustainability, ecomodernization, climate adaptation, and quality of life—remains central to both development-oriented and grassroots projects in classic industrial cities such as New York and London as well as to community revitalization and economic and social renewal initiatives in suburbs  and "shrinking" cities in Europe and North America. The green-as-good logic is at work in "world class" citymaking, in new, "smart" ecocities, and in everyday adaptation efforts in Asia and the Middle East.

If greening projects have universal ambitions but cannot help but be partial (social) accomplishments, it should be no surprise that they will reflect existing inequalities in the landscape and the social dynamics of the world in which they were produced, in terms of how and by whom they are carried out as well as the biases the spaces themselves ultimately reflect. Greening projects will, like any kind of social project, always reflect the world in which they are produced, often in spite of the explicit intentions of their creators, and should be treated accordingly.

For instance, Central Park remains in many ways an elite project: managed by a nonprofit conservancy funded in part by wealthy neighbors, still speaking on behalf of an imagined public, better resourced and better maintained than its Harlem counterparts, and still reflecting distinctly Euro-American conventions for uses of public space in its design even as it is simultaneously "used to illustrate an abstract, normative ideal of an inclusive public sphere that is held to have existed in the past".

Greening is not only the imposition of paternalistic desires; it is also a good desired by publics, even if never perfectly executed and never actually universally beneficial. For example, The High Line was attractive because it capitalized on another powerful social imaginary, that of (high) culture, in promising galleries and public design as well as access to nature. But, it was not until long after it was designed and built that project leaders began to fully reckon with its limited public uses and the changes it catalyzed in the neighborhood.

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