Review of “How Green Became Good. Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens”

Abstract

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. Urban greening is “the normative practice of using everyday signifiers of nature to fix problems with urbanism” (3). Today, it is a popular policy that includes a range of practices: urban farms, sidewalk planters and trees, community gardens, and pocket parks. Why did the idea that greener cities are better cities become naturalized as everyday common sense (4)? To answer this question, Angelo argues, we need to look beyond morphology and towards urbanized nature a key facet of social imagination whereby community members and their leaders read themselves into broader sets of relationships with other municipalities and their perceived strengths. By tracing the case of urban greening in the Ruhr valley in Germany, Angelo shows how greening involves practices and ideas that construct not just physical spaces, but entire social imaginaries. In this account, nature is a public good that is held in tension with consumer goods or, more broadly, economic production needs. But as she points out, these things are not opposites—public “green” on the one hand, private “greed” on the other. On the contrary, they are mutually constitutive. One of Angelo’s crucial analytical moves is to shift away from the idea that urbanized nature is an inherently contentious politics, and toward a socio-cultural reimagining of how a city continually makes itself “modern” by subtly changing its position with respect to a salient public good.