Urbanized Nature and the "Green Screen"

• In Event: 3184 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 02. Material Culture

Abstract

This paper provides a framework for understanding urban “greening,” the normative practice of using nature to fix problems with urbanism, by examining a paradox: while greening projects spatialize protagonists’ specific judgments about ideal forms of urban society and reinscribe inequalities in public space, they are generally carried out and received as investments in the public good. Based on a historical comparison of greening projects at moments of major urban restructuring in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, I identify three ideological and material characteristics of nature that produce this characteristic pattern of misrecognition. (1) Nature’s ideology of lying outside the social reinforces the widespread belief in universal benefit; (2) greening projects bolster this ideology by occupying the sphere of social reproduction, rather than production; and (3) the widespread belief in nature’s universal benefit is not simply an abstraction, but is made concrete and real by phenomenological experiences of green nature as “good.” I highlight the distinct social logics that accompany this imaginary and its correlate practices, and their large-scale impacts on the transformation of urban space.

Author

• Hillary Angelo, University of California-Santa Cruz