‘No trees around, but we paint some on our walls’: cultivating the ‘green’ image within schoolscapes in India

Abstract

ABSTRACT Compared to various market, state, and civil society sectors, schools’ experiences of urban ‘greening’ in India remain curiously under-researched, despite the fact that schoolscapes are emerging as both awareness-raising agents for and fantastical visions of ‘green’ living. The paper seeks to address this lacuna in schoolscape scholarship by examining the experiences of four government schools in suburban Mumbai. Drawing on oral testimonies of teachers, and field observations, the paper elucidates a contrast between the ‘green’ vision, and the ground realities of school practitioners. While the official logic of ‘greening’ might have been predicated on the need to establish harmony between human well-being and planetary health, the actual performance of ‘greening’ schoolscapes brings into play dynamic and multifarious imaginings of school-nature relation arising from signifiers which do not fully reflect urban realities and school life in particular, but still engender a desire for those imaginings.