Added value? Denaturalizing the “good” of urban greening

Abstract

In recent years, "urban greening" has become a new keyword in urban policy and practice, used to describe a proliferation of urban quality of life and environmental sustainability initiatives including street trees, public parks, greenways, farmers' markets, green roofs, and LEED certification in design. The emerging critical literature on urban greening has highlighted important ways green's social and economic added value affects the political economy of contemporary greening and produces inequalities in access to real or perceived environmental goods. However, such research has only infrequently asked why and under what conditions naturalized understandings of green as "good" make it possible for such initiatives to add value in the first place. As a result, it offers only partial explanations of why green has the effects it has-for instance, increasing property values-and only very rarely questions the fundamental "good" of nature itself. I argue that integrating insights on green's naturalized social and economic value from a growing body of social-theoretical work across geography and the social sciences can complement political economic explanations for greening and provide new vantage points for critique. K E Y W O R D S green gentrification, nature, social theory, urban agriculture, urban greening

The climate change of your desires: Climate migration and imaginaries of urban and rural climate futures

“…16 New Town has been planned for residential use and as a hub of Kolkata’s growing IT sector—now envisioned as a new mode of greening urban development. It has also been the site of a battle between competing visions of urban green growth in India (Das Gupta, 2017). 17 While Prime Minister Narendra Modi envisioned New Town as a key site in his “Smart City” mission for sustainable urban development, Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee has sought to develop New Town as India’s first “Green City.” 18 While these visions reflect substantive differences between India’s major BJP and Congress parties over equity in urban development, water rights, and centralization of the planning process (Ghoshal, 2016), both require the labor of migrants in service of their expansion.…”

“… 17 For similar debates on competing visions of urban green growth outside of India, see Angelo and Vormann (2018), Angelo (2019), and Cohen (2016, 2017).…”

OUT IN SPACE: Difference and Abstraction in Planetary Urbanization

“…Traditional explanations for greening are both Euro-and city-centric, in describing it as a reaction against the density and public health problems of the nineteenth-century industrial metropolis (Nash, 2014). Today, critical scholars document greening's unequal outcomes in affluent Northern cities (Gould and Lewis, 2016) and the global diffusion of urban 'best practices' (Montero, 2017), while positivist, policyoriented approaches take 'nature's' widespread legibility as a good for granted (Angelo, 2019b) and tend to localize and essentialize social difference as 'ethnic preferences' (see Byrne and Wolch, 2009) to be accommodated through design.…”

Editorial: Historical Legacies of Land Use in Cities; Parks, Open Spaces and Potential for Green Infrastructure- Ideas of City Nature in an Urbanizing Planet

“…In this special issue, we have sought contributions that attempt to unpack the contemporary ideologies driving investments in green infrastructure and greenspace in cities across the world, including urban ecosystem science. Our aim was to take a step back and to try to objectively question the idea of "green is good" (Angelo, 2019). We asked ourselves and each other whether there might be a role for other colors within efforts to restore urban ecologies, provide habitat, alleviate environmental inequalities, and combat myriad urban environmental ills.…”