The Green Screen: Urban Greening as Social Improvement and the Normative Power of Nature

• In Event: 358 - Regular Session. Culture and Inequality

Abstract

This essay offers a sociological account of urban greening: the normative practice of using nature to fix problems with urbanism. By comparing greening practices in Germany’s Ruhr Valley over the past 150 years, I argue that urbanization has made nature into a tool for manufacturing Gesellschaft, or ideal urban society, and that a social imaginary of nature as a vehicle for social goods—which I call “urbanized nature”—makes the recurrence of greening practices possible. Through my analysis of the Ruhr, I show how greening interventions made at moments of urban restructuring transform cities, and do so with characteristic social logics. Urbanized nature is defined by a basic paradox: though this imaginary’s operative ideology of universal benefit makes its use as a medium for social improvement possible, protagonists recurrently use nature to spatialize very particular urban ideals, of bourgeois urban publics. Greening practices reproduce this contradiction and middle class bias across dramatic changes in political economy and social relationships. Nature can play this social role because the “green screen” allows protagonists to use nature as well-intentioned investments in the public good, and conditions audiences to respond in kind. The “green screen” also gives nature special utility. It makes greening a form of social engineering that does not look managerial, and tends to foreclose public debate about who benefits from greening. I conclude by arguing that greening is best understood as a form of environmental privilege, that creates uneven geographies of access and participation in spite of its democratic aspirations.

Author

• Hillary Angelo, University of California - Santa Cruz