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Green City: People, Nature, & Urban Places
Examining 11 cities worldwide and concentrating on the intersection of nature and society in the urban environment, this book offers insight into how people have tried and often failed to connect with nature throughout history while retaining a strong optimism for the future. Giving examples for each city, the author weighs the consequences of introducing nature to urban areas and provides recommendations on creating green space in the city.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Mary Soderstrom
25 books80 followersMary Soderstrom is a Montreal-based writer of fiction and non-fiction whose most recent book--her 19th--Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years was published by Dundurn Press in March 2026. It follows in the footsteps of Against the Seas: Saving Civilizations from Rising Waters (Dundurn, 2023) and Concrete: From Ancient Origins to a Problematic Future {October 2020. University of Regina Press.}
In 2019 the UofRegina Press published her Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States which is an examination of why ten pairs of political entities--ranging from the formerly two Vietnams, through Haiti and the Dominican Republic and Vermont and New Hampshire to the US and Canada--are so similar in some respects, yet so different.
As Katia Grubisic writes about it in the Montreal Review of Books: "Soderstrom is interesting because she is interested... Her frequent asides – musings on language, geology, genetics, twins, what have you – are sharp and illuminating, sparking reflection and lightening the informational load."
Her Road through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move (University of Regina Press) was published in 2017 to laudatory reviews in Quill & Quire, Publishers' Weekly and The Library Journal which called it "a must-read for all interested in society, past and present."
Her most recent work of fiction is River Music, a novel published by Cormorant Book in May 2015. In fall 2013 Oberon Press brought out her collection of short stories, Desire Lines: Stories of Love and Geography. Her last non-fiction book was Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure (Véhicule Press, 2010) . Cormorant published her novel The Violets of Usambara in 2008. About a Canadian politician who is kidnapped in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, it is particularly relevant now in an era of terrorism around the world.
And for nearly a decade she has maintained an eclectic chronicle about politics, nature, cities and life, Recreating Eden (http://marysoderstrom.blogspot.com)
In 2019 the UofRegina Press published her Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States which is an examination of why ten pairs of political entities--ranging from the formerly two Vietnams, through Haiti and the Dominican Republic and Vermont and New Hampshire to the US and Canada--are so similar in some respects, yet so different.
As Katia Grubisic writes about it in the Montreal Review of Books: "Soderstrom is interesting because she is interested... Her frequent asides – musings on language, geology, genetics, twins, what have you – are sharp and illuminating, sparking reflection and lightening the informational load."
Her Road through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move (University of Regina Press) was published in 2017 to laudatory reviews in Quill & Quire, Publishers' Weekly and The Library Journal which called it "a must-read for all interested in society, past and present."
Her most recent work of fiction is River Music, a novel published by Cormorant Book in May 2015. In fall 2013 Oberon Press brought out her collection of short stories, Desire Lines: Stories of Love and Geography. Her last non-fiction book was Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure (Véhicule Press, 2010) . Cormorant published her novel The Violets of Usambara in 2008. About a Canadian politician who is kidnapped in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, it is particularly relevant now in an era of terrorism around the world.
And for nearly a decade she has maintained an eclectic chronicle about politics, nature, cities and life, Recreating Eden (http://marysoderstrom.blogspot.com)
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July 23, 2012
One of the Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of 2007. Reviewer Hadani Ditmar wrote:
In Green City, Mary Soderstrom embarks on an international exploration of what she calls the "green paradox," namely that so many people love gardens and greenery, but when each of us tries to claim a little bit for our own, we end up paving over nature.
From suburban sprawl in California to compromised savannahs at the edge of cities in East Africa to favelas in Sao Paulo, Montrealer Soderstrom offers up a dizzying panorama of urban realities that is part academic study, part green guidebook and part enviro-missionary travelogue.
This important and meticulously researched book could well have been subtitled Days of Poo and Roses, as so much of the history of man and his environment that Soderstrom traces -- from ancient Babylon to medieval France to modern India -- has to do with growth and development and the waste it creates.
Green City examines both the romance and the reality of human settlement. The perennial issue of how to deal with sewage, greenhouse gas or other toxic emissions is counterbalanced by a celebration of the universal joys of greenery and the ubiquitous rose -- a recurring floral theme in the book -- which seems to symbolize the possibilities for sustainable culture.
Indeed, Soderstrom's historically dramatized vision of ancient Babylon (an actual place in present-day Iraq), in the first chapter, seems to suggest that the third millennium BC was able to achieve a balance that eludes us today, with underground aquifers, indoor plumbing and the famous and fragrant hanging gardens.
Soderstrom, whose previous book was Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens, reminds us that the actual Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and that the word edin means "plain" in Sumerian. But this apparent idyll was foiled because of climate change (not to mention regime change).
At the end of the book, she returns to Babylon -- the ruins of which have been destroyed by U.S. marines and (quite literally) Halliburton latrines -- as a cautionary tale about the hubris of man and its rather dire consequences.
From ancient Mesopotamia, where language, architecture, cities and agriculture first evolved, Soderstrom takes the reader to medieval Provins, the walled city she says was the precedent for modern urban centres.
Reminding us that three billion people live in urban centres of more than five million, and that there are 411 cities of more than a million people, Soderstrom makes a case for the village-like appeal of Provins's curvilinear streets, which follow the path of pedestrian traffic rather than the grid-like structures of so many modern megacities. Yet she notes that the city that still encompasses small urban farms and ample green space (full of Provins roses, of course) could soon become a bedroom community of Paris, where residents regularly commute in greenhouse-gas-spewing vehicles.
Soderstrom notes the French phenomenon of the wealthy living in inner-city enclaves while the poor and immigrants are dumped in Le Corbusier-gone-wrong housing estates in the suburbs as the reverse of the North American model. She also points out, aptly, that North Americans have trouble conceiving of high-density living as "green," and the irony that the postwar exodus to the suburbs actually destroyed nature -- one of the essential illustrations of the "green paradox."
London emerges as an example of the best and worst of green cities: It learned its lessons from the overcrowded squalor of the industrial age, and now applies measures such as a congestion tax to cut down on emissions. We also learn that in the early 19th century (here's the poo factor again), barges carried waste from the inner city to fertilize what were then the outlying garden-market areas of Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham. Soderstrom provides an informative description of the Garden City movement, an approach to urban planning founded in England in 1898 by Ebenezer Howard, as well as the development of gardens as private enclaves for the wealthy.
Ultimately, she chooses London because it was the first city to go from a walled town through the excesses of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath to arrive at a precarious green equilibrium. While it may be odd to think of London -- which rivals Athens for the worst air pollution in Europe -- as a green city, Soderstrom makes a strong case, noting the many gardens and parks. It's good to know that a city can be both green and vibrant, bursting the stereotype of the green city as deathly dull.
Unfortunately, I would say that Singapore does not burst this stereotype, although Soderstrom seems to hold it up as the ideal green city. She admires the vision of long-time leader Lee Kuan Yew, who did a remarkable job of creating high-density, mixed-race and mixed-income housing, and making half of this highly populated island green space.
Of course, the fact that this was done with heavy-handed state intervention (and a notable lack of freedom of the press) does not go unnoticed. But Soderstrom sees state intervention as necessary in the fight for green cities, holding up the strongly leftist tradition of Kochi, India, and Shanghai as reasons why these cities are arguably greener than, say, Sao Paulo, which for her represents unbridled free-market capitalism. However, Soderstrom's descriptions of life there -- a crowd happily sambaing in a public park on a Sunday afternoon, for instance -- make it seem like the most fun of the cities. Fun, that is, except for the families in favelas killed by global warming-induced storms and mudslides.
And yet hope, in the form of ethanol-fuelled cars, is on the horizon, and an unforgettable image of a man happily selling African violets in the midst of a smog-covered megacity sums up Soderstrom's philosophy of "one step at a time -- together we shall overcome."
The book is not without its blind spots. While Soderstrom shows both the pros and cons of Irvine, Calif., as a planned city driven more by class than race, the contribution race relations and "white flight" to the suburbs had on urban blight in Chicago, and the issue of largely black migrants from northern Brazil ending up in Sao Paulo favelas, there is no mention of racial divides in Canadian cities.
The lone Canadian city profiled, Hamilton, comes off as rather a nice place with lots of parks and gardens, neatly breaking free of its steeltown stereotype. But what of the racial divide in Vancouver, between east (largely non-white and less wealthy) and west (largely white and affluent)? Or between native and non-native in Winnipeg? Perhaps, as Soderstrom notes of Brazil, race is officially not an issue in Canada.
And while Soderstrom encourages citizens to remain vigilant about green issues, and offers practical suggestions about public transit (it should be subsidized) and green space and a sense of public ownership, she only hints briefly at the darker forces impeding progress.
The global disparity between rich and poor and the power of the petroleum and automobile industries are duly noted. But what about the arms industry? You'd think that a book beginning and ending in Iraq might mention the toxic effects of depleted uranium, white phosphorous and, say, cluster bombs. Surely a bombed city can't be very green.
While Soderstrom's lively prose mostly counters anything too ponderous or academic, there is often a sense of distance in her writing, and one wishes there had been more direct conversations with those living in the "green cities." An interview with a single mum in a favela, for instance, might have made for a more compelling narrative of urban blight in Brazil.
But this is an ambitious book that covers a lot of ground and raises as many questions as it attempts to answer. Soderstrom even manages a certain lyrical mysticism about our universal need for nature, suggesting that the force compelling us to build golf courses in the desert and well-groomed lawns in jungles comes from "a desire to reproduce the close-cropped green grass found after the rains in Africa."
In the end, it is our intrinsic desire for nature -- in spite of the "green paradox" -- that Soderstrom sees as a positive force for change. As long as "people all over the world seek to have contact with green growing things," she suggests, there will be a collective will to protect and create them.
"We must take strength from that," she offers as some solace for our ravaged planet, "when we plan our actions for the future."
Writer Hadani Ditmars has spent time in London, Singapore, Babylon, France and Tanzania, and is currently a regular on Vancouver's #22 bus.
In Green City, Mary Soderstrom embarks on an international exploration of what she calls the "green paradox," namely that so many people love gardens and greenery, but when each of us tries to claim a little bit for our own, we end up paving over nature.
From suburban sprawl in California to compromised savannahs at the edge of cities in East Africa to favelas in Sao Paulo, Montrealer Soderstrom offers up a dizzying panorama of urban realities that is part academic study, part green guidebook and part enviro-missionary travelogue.
This important and meticulously researched book could well have been subtitled Days of Poo and Roses, as so much of the history of man and his environment that Soderstrom traces -- from ancient Babylon to medieval France to modern India -- has to do with growth and development and the waste it creates.
Green City examines both the romance and the reality of human settlement. The perennial issue of how to deal with sewage, greenhouse gas or other toxic emissions is counterbalanced by a celebration of the universal joys of greenery and the ubiquitous rose -- a recurring floral theme in the book -- which seems to symbolize the possibilities for sustainable culture.
Indeed, Soderstrom's historically dramatized vision of ancient Babylon (an actual place in present-day Iraq), in the first chapter, seems to suggest that the third millennium BC was able to achieve a balance that eludes us today, with underground aquifers, indoor plumbing and the famous and fragrant hanging gardens.
Soderstrom, whose previous book was Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens, reminds us that the actual Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and that the word edin means "plain" in Sumerian. But this apparent idyll was foiled because of climate change (not to mention regime change).
At the end of the book, she returns to Babylon -- the ruins of which have been destroyed by U.S. marines and (quite literally) Halliburton latrines -- as a cautionary tale about the hubris of man and its rather dire consequences.
From ancient Mesopotamia, where language, architecture, cities and agriculture first evolved, Soderstrom takes the reader to medieval Provins, the walled city she says was the precedent for modern urban centres.
Reminding us that three billion people live in urban centres of more than five million, and that there are 411 cities of more than a million people, Soderstrom makes a case for the village-like appeal of Provins's curvilinear streets, which follow the path of pedestrian traffic rather than the grid-like structures of so many modern megacities. Yet she notes that the city that still encompasses small urban farms and ample green space (full of Provins roses, of course) could soon become a bedroom community of Paris, where residents regularly commute in greenhouse-gas-spewing vehicles.
Soderstrom notes the French phenomenon of the wealthy living in inner-city enclaves while the poor and immigrants are dumped in Le Corbusier-gone-wrong housing estates in the suburbs as the reverse of the North American model. She also points out, aptly, that North Americans have trouble conceiving of high-density living as "green," and the irony that the postwar exodus to the suburbs actually destroyed nature -- one of the essential illustrations of the "green paradox."
London emerges as an example of the best and worst of green cities: It learned its lessons from the overcrowded squalor of the industrial age, and now applies measures such as a congestion tax to cut down on emissions. We also learn that in the early 19th century (here's the poo factor again), barges carried waste from the inner city to fertilize what were then the outlying garden-market areas of Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham. Soderstrom provides an informative description of the Garden City movement, an approach to urban planning founded in England in 1898 by Ebenezer Howard, as well as the development of gardens as private enclaves for the wealthy.
Ultimately, she chooses London because it was the first city to go from a walled town through the excesses of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath to arrive at a precarious green equilibrium. While it may be odd to think of London -- which rivals Athens for the worst air pollution in Europe -- as a green city, Soderstrom makes a strong case, noting the many gardens and parks. It's good to know that a city can be both green and vibrant, bursting the stereotype of the green city as deathly dull.
Unfortunately, I would say that Singapore does not burst this stereotype, although Soderstrom seems to hold it up as the ideal green city. She admires the vision of long-time leader Lee Kuan Yew, who did a remarkable job of creating high-density, mixed-race and mixed-income housing, and making half of this highly populated island green space.
Of course, the fact that this was done with heavy-handed state intervention (and a notable lack of freedom of the press) does not go unnoticed. But Soderstrom sees state intervention as necessary in the fight for green cities, holding up the strongly leftist tradition of Kochi, India, and Shanghai as reasons why these cities are arguably greener than, say, Sao Paulo, which for her represents unbridled free-market capitalism. However, Soderstrom's descriptions of life there -- a crowd happily sambaing in a public park on a Sunday afternoon, for instance -- make it seem like the most fun of the cities. Fun, that is, except for the families in favelas killed by global warming-induced storms and mudslides.
And yet hope, in the form of ethanol-fuelled cars, is on the horizon, and an unforgettable image of a man happily selling African violets in the midst of a smog-covered megacity sums up Soderstrom's philosophy of "one step at a time -- together we shall overcome."
The book is not without its blind spots. While Soderstrom shows both the pros and cons of Irvine, Calif., as a planned city driven more by class than race, the contribution race relations and "white flight" to the suburbs had on urban blight in Chicago, and the issue of largely black migrants from northern Brazil ending up in Sao Paulo favelas, there is no mention of racial divides in Canadian cities.
The lone Canadian city profiled, Hamilton, comes off as rather a nice place with lots of parks and gardens, neatly breaking free of its steeltown stereotype. But what of the racial divide in Vancouver, between east (largely non-white and less wealthy) and west (largely white and affluent)? Or between native and non-native in Winnipeg? Perhaps, as Soderstrom notes of Brazil, race is officially not an issue in Canada.
And while Soderstrom encourages citizens to remain vigilant about green issues, and offers practical suggestions about public transit (it should be subsidized) and green space and a sense of public ownership, she only hints briefly at the darker forces impeding progress.
The global disparity between rich and poor and the power of the petroleum and automobile industries are duly noted. But what about the arms industry? You'd think that a book beginning and ending in Iraq might mention the toxic effects of depleted uranium, white phosphorous and, say, cluster bombs. Surely a bombed city can't be very green.
While Soderstrom's lively prose mostly counters anything too ponderous or academic, there is often a sense of distance in her writing, and one wishes there had been more direct conversations with those living in the "green cities." An interview with a single mum in a favela, for instance, might have made for a more compelling narrative of urban blight in Brazil.
But this is an ambitious book that covers a lot of ground and raises as many questions as it attempts to answer. Soderstrom even manages a certain lyrical mysticism about our universal need for nature, suggesting that the force compelling us to build golf courses in the desert and well-groomed lawns in jungles comes from "a desire to reproduce the close-cropped green grass found after the rains in Africa."
In the end, it is our intrinsic desire for nature -- in spite of the "green paradox" -- that Soderstrom sees as a positive force for change. As long as "people all over the world seek to have contact with green growing things," she suggests, there will be a collective will to protect and create them.
"We must take strength from that," she offers as some solace for our ravaged planet, "when we plan our actions for the future."
Writer Hadani Ditmars has spent time in London, Singapore, Babylon, France and Tanzania, and is currently a regular on Vancouver's #22 bus.
September 4, 2019
what are the implications for the future of wanting something but trying to get it in ways that endanger the very essence of what we want? p10
This is the 'green paradox' as MS has identified it, and as she documents, it is not a purely modern phenomena. This could be a very gloomy book. Grave mistakes have been made, as noted in the chapter on Provins, a walled city that thrived in the middle ages.
It might be said that what the Europeans did when they crossed the Atlantic was merely to continue what they had been doing in the old countries for previous millennium. p29
Drawing these imaginary lines on the land signalled a great shift between humans and nature. p60
But this is not an essentially gloomy nor polemical work. Rather, it is a delightful, insightful and unique world tour with an eye out for how nature has been integrated (or not) into urban life. As tour guide, MS begins with an enticing glimpse into the ancient city of Babylon and our itinerary includes astute speculations on origins and politics as well as the gardens of course but also the art and architecture, commerce and customs; and most importantly the life of the city.
If I wondered about any of the destinations, not so much after reading each chapter and learning about places I had never considered and even two places I had never heard of.
Published in 2006, the message of this book is more relevant than ever.
I would like to see a new, updated edition, a sequel of sorts. How do these highlighted cities fare today? It would be excellent if the illustrations be given more resolution.
More people need to read this wonderful book.
MS quotes a resident of Sao Paolo, with whom I heartily agree
If we all collaborated, nobody would go without.p191
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews