How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens

by Hillary Angelo

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? 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 industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. 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. 

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Climate Change

264 pages, Hardcover

Published March 15, 2021

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taking the admittedly peculiar case of the Ruhr as its focus, Angelo's book demonstrates how the usual discussions of the explanations for the rise of green urbanism - as a late-capitalist consumer response to the negative aspects of the industrial urban form - cannot explain the recurrent recourse to greenery in a place like the Ruhr, which despite being heavily industrialized and proletarianized, does not have a classic urban-center form, having been since medieval times defined by low-density polycentricity and plentiful open space. Despite this, however, the Ruhr as elsewhere has been taken by periodic bouts of "greening." "Scholarly portraits of greening regimes tend to emphasize situatedness within a given context" in which nature and the urban are presented as antinomies, whether that is an elite "civilizing process" in the nineteenth century, as a reaction to large scale Fordism in the twentieth century, or postmodern-neoliberal "greenwashing" in the twenty-first century.

The book encourages us to think of urbanized nature not in terms of place but more in terms of process: "It was not a specific set of physical conditions that produced greening (dense, centralized cities per se). Instead a broader set of underlying transformations, especially the shift from agricultural to wage labor and from subsistence living to a market economy" that drove the shift. The city as conceived here is not merely its physical manifestations of built urban form, but also the various social and political processes that make possible the production of that urban form, such as capital investment, state regulation, collective consumption, social struggle, etc. Greening became a way to reimagine and quite literally relitigate this "constitutive essence" of the city -- which then became a "social imaginary" which could travel from its point of origin to other destinations. Only after this cognitive shift had taken place in which nature become available as a "moral or affective good" did it became "possible to use greening projects as solutions to problems with urbanism in large industrial cities."

The reason greening urbanized nature could work in this form of social imaginary, Angelo presents urbanized nature as (a) a moral good (in a formal sense); (b) a universal good in the sense of being beneficial to all in the same manner; (c) an aspirational good, that is, not merely as a utilitarian tool for reactively fixing urban problems, but rather as a utopian principle based on various idealized futures. In this sense, she concludes, greening is best "understood as a historically specific idiom or grammar of moral action," which is why greening tends to provoke much less backlash than other kinds of technocratic-managerialist forms of urbanism.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

How Green Became Good marks a convincing addition to the critical urban studies literature, acting not only as an empirical force of example for the planetary urbanisation literature, but standing on its own as a critical alternative history of Western greening projects.

Whilst this is primarily an academic text, the central chapters present a detailed history of several phases of greening within the Ruhr valley region over the last 150 years. This alone represents an interesting social history both of urban greening itself and the rise and fall of industrialisation in the region.