Hillary Angelo
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226738994
- eISBN:
- 9780226739182
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
This book offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a contemporary global phenomenon, and of widespread perceptions of green as a “good” for cities. Urban-environmental scholarship ...
More
This book offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a contemporary global phenomenon, and of widespread perceptions of green as a “good” for cities. Urban-environmental scholarship dominated by well-known cities at notorious moments of urbanism—paradigmatically, New York City’s 19th century Central Park—has understood such efforts as reactions to urban pathologies such as slums and density. Instead, the book examines Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a polycentric industrial region recurrently “greened” despite its ample open space, to explain the common sense of these associations and their persistence across time and place. It argues that greening is a social practice made possible by an imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, called urbanized nature, that is an outcome of urbanization processes rather than a reaction against cities. It traces urbanized nature’s emergence in the Ruhr in the early twentieth century and shows how it has motivated greening, carried out with the goal of creating ideal cities and citizens, across three moments: industrialization in the late 19th century, the postwar crisis of democracy in the 1960s, and postindustrial economic renewal in the 1990s. Across these moments, it also identifies similarities in how this imaginary causes greening to play out, finding that greening is a practice of remaking cities rather than an escape from urban life, and that shared beliefs in nature’s universal benefit condition greening projects to be understood as investments in the public good, even as they reinscribe existing inequalities in public space and distribute their goods unevenly.Less
This book offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a contemporary global phenomenon, and of widespread perceptions of green as a “good” for cities. Urban-environmental scholarship dominated by well-known cities at notorious moments of urbanism—paradigmatically, New York City’s 19th century Central Park—has understood such efforts as reactions to urban pathologies such as slums and density. Instead, the book examines Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a polycentric industrial region recurrently “greened” despite its ample open space, to explain the common sense of these associations and their persistence across time and place. It argues that greening is a social practice made possible by an imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, called urbanized nature, that is an outcome of urbanization processes rather than a reaction against cities. It traces urbanized nature’s emergence in the Ruhr in the early twentieth century and shows how it has motivated greening, carried out with the goal of creating ideal cities and citizens, across three moments: industrialization in the late 19th century, the postwar crisis of democracy in the 1960s, and postindustrial economic renewal in the 1990s. Across these moments, it also identifies similarities in how this imaginary causes greening to play out, finding that greening is a practice of remaking cities rather than an escape from urban life, and that shared beliefs in nature’s universal benefit condition greening projects to be understood as investments in the public good, even as they reinscribe existing inequalities in public space and distribute their goods unevenly.
Hillary Angelo
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226738994
- eISBN:
- 9780226739182
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
Chapter 2 shows how urbanized nature was put to work, materially, through the construction of garden cities in the Ruhr, focusing on Krupp’s Margarethenhöhe in Essen. While the colonies provided ...
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Chapter 2 shows how urbanized nature was put to work, materially, through the construction of garden cities in the Ruhr, focusing on Krupp’s Margarethenhöhe in Essen. While the colonies provided access to nature for subsistence purposes, at Margarethenhöhe animal keeping and subsistence agriculture were forbidden. Instead, the chapter documents gardens and green space being used and understood in the contemporary sense: bearing indirect moral and affective goods, rather than direct, material ones, and fulfilling an urban-aspirational, rather than rural-preservationist, vision of society. The chapter illustrates nature’s new uses at Margarethenhöhe through Krupp’s changing understanding of its company housing from fiefdom to suburb, of its green space from a site of labor to leisure, and of its residents from peasants to urban citizens. It also documents how this emergent view of nature spread throughout the region and to the public sector. Finally, it argues that these new perceptions of nature found affinities with new liberal forms of managerial power and control. While greening was understood in terms of the provision of public goods, it had also become a new managerial technology that imposed new norms of behavior and citizenship as it transformed cities as physical and social spaces.Less
Chapter 2 shows how urbanized nature was put to work, materially, through the construction of garden cities in the Ruhr, focusing on Krupp’s Margarethenhöhe in Essen. While the colonies provided access to nature for subsistence purposes, at Margarethenhöhe animal keeping and subsistence agriculture were forbidden. Instead, the chapter documents gardens and green space being used and understood in the contemporary sense: bearing indirect moral and affective goods, rather than direct, material ones, and fulfilling an urban-aspirational, rather than rural-preservationist, vision of society. The chapter illustrates nature’s new uses at Margarethenhöhe through Krupp’s changing understanding of its company housing from fiefdom to suburb, of its green space from a site of labor to leisure, and of its residents from peasants to urban citizens. It also documents how this emergent view of nature spread throughout the region and to the public sector. Finally, it argues that these new perceptions of nature found affinities with new liberal forms of managerial power and control. While greening was understood in terms of the provision of public goods, it had also become a new managerial technology that imposed new norms of behavior and citizenship as it transformed cities as physical and social spaces.
