Greening the City

Abstract

Literary and artistic depictions and constructions of the ‘simple life’, a way of living combining individual self-realisation with harmonious social relations, within the context of a personally rewarding but simultaneously ethically grounded and empathetic interaction with animals and the natural environment, have been a central subject for ecocritical consideration. ‘Simple life’ texts participate in a pastoral tradition which extends back over two thousand years in Western culture and are rooted in biblical depictions of paradise on the one hand and Greek celebrations of a temporally distant Golden Age or a geographically remote Arcadia on the other. Pastoral is one of the principal ecocritical ‘tropes’ defined by Greg Garrard in terms of content as “pre-existing ways of imagining the place of humans in nature” and “key structuring metaphors”, and in formal terms as extended rhetorical and narrative strategies gathering together “permutations of creative imagination: metaphor, genre, narrative, image” (2004: 2, 7 and 14).KeywordsGreen SpaceCultural ChangeUrban EcologyGreen Urban SpaceNatural BeautyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.