REVIEWS
“Angelo risks sacrilege; she takes on nature as a mundane tool of politics, entertainment, and real estate. The ideology of green comes out of its black box, exposed to insightful and historically aware analysis.”
— Harvey Molotch, New York University
“Written with verve and meticulous attention to historical detail, How Green Became Good illuminates the hows and whys of the contemporary phenomenon of ‘urbanized nature.’ Angelo convincingly moves from micro-level investigations of moral judgments and responses surrounding pet rabbits to macro-level examinations of top-down globalized urban greening projects. A tour de force, this book will prompt a rethinking of the green-as-good reflex."
— Robin Wagner-Pacifici, The New School for Social Research
"How Green Became Good takes the conventional western urban imagination out of Chicago’s Loop and past Los Angeles’s Sixty-Mile-Circle to the expanse of the Ruhr and rewrites urban theory from there. This brilliant book on more than a century of “urbanized nature” in Germany’s former industrial heartland will forever change our views of the industrial city as preceding the green city. If you are looking for a concept of the urban beyond the Zwischenstadt, you will find it in Angelo’s magisterial contribution."
— Roger Keil, York University
"How Green Became Good is an exceptionally robust work of historical sociology, shown by the fact that Angelo not only provides the reader with the historical specifics of each greening project analyzed in the book, but also uses those details to skillfully build a general theoretical explanation for how urban greening works as a social process. . . . Angelo’s work serves as a model for other scholars inclined to take a historical approach to answering question sin urban sociology and urban studies."
— Urban Studies
"How Green Became Good is a powerful work of urban sociology, culture, and historical and comparative methods. In it, Hillary Angelo challenges conventional accounts of why urban greening became a public good."
— Social Forces
"Interested in how planning projects, specifically those sold as 'green,' can exacerbate or ignore existing inequalities. . . Angelo’s more specific question is why have all types of cities taken up 'greening' projects
rather than just large, industrial cities? . . . Taken on their own terms, these projects have been remarkable successes, ecologically and economically, but Angelo’s point is clear: the 'greening' at the core of their
conceptions has blunted social criticism. . ."
— Journal of Urban Affairs
"These interventions deserve wide reading by all sociologists, not just urban sociologists or environmental sociologists."
— American Journal of Sociology
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Urban Greening beyond Cities - Hillary Angelo
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.003.0001
[urban greening;social imaginaries;urbanization;urban theory;historical sociology;materialism;culture;city/nature binaries]
The introduction provides a theoretical overview of the book. It presents the main question of the book—how and why a “green-as-good” logic endemic to planning and design of urban green space has become so ubiquitous across the world today—and outlines the book’s main arguments. It defines urban greening as a social practice and outlines why a new, sociological and historical explanation of this phenomenon is needed, arguing that greening has been misunderstood as an ideological reaction to the industrial city by urban scholarship shaped by city/nature and culture/materialism binaries. It introduces the Ruhr as a case of urban greening in the absence of a traditional city, and outlines characteristic logics of the practice that are identified through the historical analysis: that signifiers of nature are consistently constructed as indirect, universal, and aspirational goods; that urbanized nature is an imaginary of form, not content; that greening is a mode of remaking cities, spatially and socially, rather than an escape from urban life; and that greening projects are normative projects carried out and received as public goods. The introduction also outlines the content of each of the chapters that follow. (pages 1 - 26)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. The Imaginative Turn to the City - Hillary Angelo
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.003.0002
[industrialization;Kolonien;garden cities;Krupp;Essen;Robert Schmidt;Karl Ernst Osthaus;agrarian imaginaries;subsistence agriculture]
Chapter 1 documents the emergence of urbanized nature in the Ruhr through local elites’ changing response to a housing crisis precipitated by industrialization, with a focus on Krupp and the city of Essen. The chapter first argues that while the Ruhr had effectively urbanized (materially and socially) by the late nineteenth century, it had not yet urbanized imaginatively. It takes as evidence of this the fact that Krupp and other industrial barons initially responded to the housing crisis by building company housing in the form of colonies (Kolonien) that, in providing access to gardens and animals for subsistence purposes, reflected traditionally agrarian forms of daily life and social relationships in the landscape. The chapter then documents an imaginative turn to the city among local elites, arguing that the proximate cause of these actors’ urban turn was not local physical conditions, but competition and a desire for influence, as they began to see themselves as part of an international urban network. It also demonstrates that once local elites identified the city as a desirable social and spatial form for the Ruhr, they turned to urbanized nature in the form of the garden city as a means to create it. (pages 29 - 53)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. Building an Urban Future through Nature - Hillary Angelo
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.003.0003
[Margarethenhöhe;Essen;garden cities;municipal governance;embourgeoisment;managerial technologies;urbanized nature]
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 indirectmoral 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. (pages 54 - 74)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. The Space-Time of Democracy: Parks as a Bourgeois Public Sphere - Hillary Angelo
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.003.0004
[Habermas;public space;public realm;bourgeois public sphere;Revierparks;urbanity;phenomenology of green space;functionally divided city;leisure]
Part two compares two visions of postwar democratic public life, both expressed through green space: a reformistbourgeois ideal, and a more radicalproletarian one. Chapter 3 presents the bourgeois vision as it was realized in the 1970s through a series of large regional parks (Revierparks), in the Ruhr. The chapter examines social scientific literature, planning documents, and promotional materials to show how the parks’ social functions and benefits were perceived. It argues that, as planners rejected the insularity and homogeneity of community as a social form after National Socialism, they understood the parks to be important tools for rebuilding democratic public life, and specifically saw them as sites for the creation of a Habermasian public sphere as part of a new model of urbanism based on a spatial division of functions and a pluralistic leisure society. The chapter also introduces a new aspect of nature’s perceived universality. Planners’ inclusion of the Ruhr’s blue-collar workforce in postwar society through the parks highlights how the spatiotemporal and phenomenological qualities of green space—physically pleasant, separated from work and home—make it easy to experience such spaces as both desirable and socially neutral, and make them useful settings for democracy. (pages 77 - 106)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. Proletarian Counterpublics: Reimagining the Colonies - Hillary Angelo
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.003.0005
[Eisenheim;colonies;Oskar Negt;proletarian public sphere;Roland Günter;Arbeiterinitiative;reimagining;working class nature;Alexander Kluge]
Chapter 4 examines the movement to save the Eisenheim, one of the oldest workers’ colonies in the Ruhr, as a second green answer to the question of how to rebuild democracy and urban public life in the postwar world. As disillusionment with modernist planning and bourgeois forms of democracy grew, this grassroots effort—connected with ’68 movements—proposed an alternative model of urban publics. Rather than the bourgeois public sphere represented by Revierparks (Chapter 3), the movement drew on the work of two of Habermas’s students, Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge, to advocate for a “proletarian,” counterpublic sphere, which it located in the Ruhr’s traditional workers’ colonies. Through movement-produced materials the chapter shows how the colonies’ gardens and animals were understood to create forms of sociality that could be the foundation for politics based in history, community, class, and experience. The chapter also documents the reinterpretation of existing natures rather than the design of new ones. It argues that deindustrialization and the closure of the mining and steel companies made it possible to reimagine company housing—once a site of repressive control—as an emancipatory space and the locus of a new democratic politics in a new political economy. (pages 107 - 138)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Producing Nature, Projecting Urban Futures - Hillary Angelo
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.003.0006
[IBA Emscher Park;Industrienatur;Industriekultur;Zwischenstadt;postindustrial parks;dynamics of production]
Part 3 takes advantage of data available in the present to examine the dynamics of greening projects’ production and reception in a third moment, that of postindustrial greening in the 1990s and early 2000s. Chapter 5 documents the production of IBA Emscher Park from the perspective of greening protagonists in order to understand how greening projects are actively constructed as universally beneficial nature. The 125-square mile project connects 17 Ruhr cities with bicycle paths, heritage sites, public art, and ecological restoration projectsand recasts the Ruhr as a site of unique Industrienatur (industrial-nature) and Industriekultur (industrial-culture). From interviews with IBA’s directors’ and materials produced about the project, the chapter documents the behind-the-scenes work involved in creating a nature experience. These accounts reveal that greening protagonists are not naive about their efforts, and can describe the significant imaginative work, and work of image production and reception, in which they engage in order to get people to see and inhabit greening projects the way they intend. They also show how greening protagonists’ awareness of the social organization of nature experience coexists with a subsequent discursive and, ideally, experiential, erasure of those efforts in order for green landscapes to be viewed as nature. (pages 141 - 171)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Experiencing Nature as a Public Good - Hillary Angelo
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.003.0007
[Dortmund;Phoenix Lake;dynamics of reception;receiving audiences;win wins;gentrification;public goods]
Chapter 6 shifts perspective from providers of nature to target audiences. In the context of the construction of Phoenix Lake, an artificial lake and park built on a former factory site in the Ruhr city of Dortmund, the chapter examines the dynamics of greening projects’ reception, specifically regarding how urbanized nature makes it possible for greening projects to be received as public goods. It does so by documenting discussion and debate among two sets of receiving audiences: employees of the city, who rejected IBA’s nature aesthetics when constructing the lake, and Dortmund residents’ public critiques of the Phoenix project. It identifies a pattern in both groups’ responses. Like protagonists in chapter 5, all are capable of describing greening projects’ problems and shortcomings, but at the same time can and do go on to advocate for perceived-to-be-universal nature in ways that reproduce greening’s usual blind spots. From these dynamics, the chapter identifies three consequences of hegemonic belief in the “good” of nature. It shapes public debate by foreclosing discussion of the projects as social projects; shapes material outcomes (for instance, by enabling shortened planning processes); and makes greening possible as a form of well-intentioned action. (pages 172 - 200)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion: Global Greening Today - Hillary Angelo
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.003.0008
[green urbanism;smart cities;urban sustainability;traveling imaginaries;contemporary greening;nature as public good]
The conclusion extends the findings to twenty-first-centurygreen urbanism. It reiterates that while the Ruhr is a place at odds with commonsense understandings of greening, it more closely resembles the conditions under which greening usually takes place, and advances several arguments based on this fact: that contemporary interest in green cities should be seen as continuous with greening’s urban history; that global urban processes, rather than local urban form, explain greening’s appearance; and that contemporary greening is best understood as the global spread of a historically Euro-American imaginary. The chapter also observes that while greening projects cannot help but be partial accomplishments, like the provision of any public good, beliefs in the universal “good” of nature contribute to these shortcomings being treated as historical anachronisms or individual failures to be overcome rather than as dynamics intrinsic to greening. The chapter concludes with lessons for practice, arguing for greening better—i.e., with more reflexivity about its limitations—and for greening less—i.e., resisting the urge to turn to green as a solution to all manner of problems. Finally, it argues that these durable imaginaries are one important register in which the myriad transformations required to address climate change must take place. (pages 201 - 218)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
