Michael H. Carriere and David Schalliol
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226727226
- eISBN:
- 9780226727363
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226727363.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The City Creative: The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America offers the definitive history of “placemaking,” a concept that has become central to the perceived vitality of the ...
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The City Creative: The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America offers the definitive history of “placemaking,” a concept that has become central to the perceived vitality of the twenty-first century city. From William H. Whyte in the 1950s to Richard Florida in the twenty-first century, The City Creative highlights the roles of such prominent individuals and organizations as Jane Jacobs, Robert Putnam, Project for Public Spaces, and the National Endowment for the Arts in the evolution of urban placemaking. What this history ultimately illustrates is that one cannot understand the evolution of the American city throughout the past 60 years without understanding the concept of placemaking. This historical understanding of placemaking has proven successful in influencing both the language and shape of urban redevelopment policy: city officials in a myriad of urban centers have sought to build a “culture economy” through placemaking, as a means to attract and retain the “Creative Class,” a group of educated workers deemed essential for the growth of any post-industrial urban economy. Yet such an approach to both placemaking and urban redevelopment often overlooks an important demographic: the residents who already call these cities homes. By highlighting the histories of such indigenous populations, The City Creative ultimately calls for a new definition of placemaking, one that sees such sites as spaces of production and redistribution. Aided by the stunning photography of David Schalliol, this book ultimately documents and analyzes how Americans are working through economic hardship to re-imagine and re-order the urban landscape.Less
The City Creative: The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America offers the definitive history of “placemaking,” a concept that has become central to the perceived vitality of the twenty-first century city. From William H. Whyte in the 1950s to Richard Florida in the twenty-first century, The City Creative highlights the roles of such prominent individuals and organizations as Jane Jacobs, Robert Putnam, Project for Public Spaces, and the National Endowment for the Arts in the evolution of urban placemaking. What this history ultimately illustrates is that one cannot understand the evolution of the American city throughout the past 60 years without understanding the concept of placemaking. This historical understanding of placemaking has proven successful in influencing both the language and shape of urban redevelopment policy: city officials in a myriad of urban centers have sought to build a “culture economy” through placemaking, as a means to attract and retain the “Creative Class,” a group of educated workers deemed essential for the growth of any post-industrial urban economy. Yet such an approach to both placemaking and urban redevelopment often overlooks an important demographic: the residents who already call these cities homes. By highlighting the histories of such indigenous populations, The City Creative ultimately calls for a new definition of placemaking, one that sees such sites as spaces of production and redistribution. Aided by the stunning photography of David Schalliol, this book ultimately documents and analyzes how Americans are working through economic hardship to re-imagine and re-order the urban landscape.
Elena Aronova
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226761381
- eISBN:
- 9780226761411
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226761411.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The book recovers the intertwined histories of the sciences and the humanities within the Russian/Soviet scientific landscape, from the crises-ridden decades leading to the Bolshevik Revolution in ...
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The book recovers the intertwined histories of the sciences and the humanities within the Russian/Soviet scientific landscape, from the crises-ridden decades leading to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the ruptures of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Using the history of Russia and the Soviet Union as the anchoring point, the book reconnects the disciplinary histories of the sciences and those of the humanities while capturing some of the key moments in the history of socialist political imaginaries over the course of the twentieth century where one would least expect it: in the debates about scientific history. The book contributes to most recent scholarship in the history of science, which began situating programs of today’s “big” and “deep” history within the longer trajectory of similar efforts in the past, by demonstrating that the history of the history of science itself is instructive for today’s repositioning of academic history. The book examines different disciplinary contexts in which historians and natural scientists interacted, the techniques that enacted such interaction, and the political uses to which these programs were put. The submerged histories traced in the book reveal complicated relationships between history and science that were diverse, ambiguous, and, at times, surprisingly productive.Less
The book recovers the intertwined histories of the sciences and the humanities within the Russian/Soviet scientific landscape, from the crises-ridden decades leading to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the ruptures of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Using the history of Russia and the Soviet Union as the anchoring point, the book reconnects the disciplinary histories of the sciences and those of the humanities while capturing some of the key moments in the history of socialist political imaginaries over the course of the twentieth century where one would least expect it: in the debates about scientific history. The book contributes to most recent scholarship in the history of science, which began situating programs of today’s “big” and “deep” history within the longer trajectory of similar efforts in the past, by demonstrating that the history of the history of science itself is instructive for today’s repositioning of academic history. The book examines different disciplinary contexts in which historians and natural scientists interacted, the techniques that enacted such interaction, and the political uses to which these programs were put. The submerged histories traced in the book reveal complicated relationships between history and science that were diverse, ambiguous, and, at times, surprisingly productive.
Thomas Harrison
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226735290
- eISBN:
- 9780226735320
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226735320.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Of Bridges is a sweeping study of bridges as cultural signifiers, extending its analysis from ancient Rome to the contemporary footbridges of major European cities. At stake is the semantic and ...
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Of Bridges is a sweeping study of bridges as cultural signifiers, extending its analysis from ancient Rome to the contemporary footbridges of major European cities. At stake is the semantic and historical resonance of that seemingly simple word bridge, that passage between two points which is unique in its material, metaphoric, and philosophical properties. In a multidisciplinary approach to cultural history, the work presents this symbolic, architectonic form as a simultaneously connective and separating structure carrying dozens of political and ethical objectives. The book’s chapters amount to nine thematic clusters illuminating the meanings and uses of bridges in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (e.g., the Comedy of Dante and Milton’s Paradise Lost), in music (the “bridge passage” in classical and popular music, and an extended study of the blues genre, crossing races and continents), Christian, Native American, and Islamic theology (e.g., the pontifex maximus, or pope, providing spiritual passage to the beyond), the philosophy of Nietzsche (who famously declared that man is a bridge), and poems, legends, stories, and myths throughout Europe and Asia. Special attention is paid to Mediterranean history and to the literary works of Franz Kafka, Ivo Andrić, Hermann Broch, Ismail Kadare, Wallace Stevens, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Eugenio Montale.Less
Of Bridges is a sweeping study of bridges as cultural signifiers, extending its analysis from ancient Rome to the contemporary footbridges of major European cities. At stake is the semantic and historical resonance of that seemingly simple word bridge, that passage between two points which is unique in its material, metaphoric, and philosophical properties. In a multidisciplinary approach to cultural history, the work presents this symbolic, architectonic form as a simultaneously connective and separating structure carrying dozens of political and ethical objectives. The book’s chapters amount to nine thematic clusters illuminating the meanings and uses of bridges in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (e.g., the Comedy of Dante and Milton’s Paradise Lost), in music (the “bridge passage” in classical and popular music, and an extended study of the blues genre, crossing races and continents), Christian, Native American, and Islamic theology (e.g., the pontifex maximus, or pope, providing spiritual passage to the beyond), the philosophy of Nietzsche (who famously declared that man is a bridge), and poems, legends, stories, and myths throughout Europe and Asia. Special attention is paid to Mediterranean history and to the literary works of Franz Kafka, Ivo Andrić, Hermann Broch, Ismail Kadare, Wallace Stevens, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Eugenio Montale.
Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226763514
- eISBN:
- 9780226763798
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226763798.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
In the early 2000s, the government of China encouraged the nation’s 55 registered minority nationalities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” ethnic medical knowledge in an effort to create ...
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In the early 2000s, the government of China encouraged the nation’s 55 registered minority nationalities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” ethnic medical knowledge in an effort to create health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of state-led knowledge development while appreciating local therapeutic practices scattered through rural southern China. The nationalities highlighted are the Achang, Li, Lisu, Qiang, Tujia, Yao, and Zhuang groups. Chapter 1 focuses ethnographically on grass-roots institution-building, and recounts the short but rich history of some relatively successful institutions of nationality medicine. In Chapter 2, medical knowledge sorted into textbooks is shown to result from survey and conceptual work by scholar-activists, and certain openings of formal knowledge to wild expertise and folk authority are noted. Chapter 3 turns to embodiment, reading through textbooks, an explanatory sketch, and the hands-on techniques of local practitioners to discern specific bodies and herbal agents. Herbals are the central topic of Chapter 4, which tracks the love life of humans and plants, and explores other intimacies between human healers and their favored forest products. Chapter 5 dwells on a series of encounters between state agents and nationality healers as well as between official knowledge and earthbound lore, survey researchers and local activists, and anthropologists and their allies and interlocutors. This study draws inspiration from philosophers ranging from Heidegger to Zhuangzi, Deleuze to Mao Zedong, but above all it attends to local knowledge in China’s mountain south.Less
In the early 2000s, the government of China encouraged the nation’s 55 registered minority nationalities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” ethnic medical knowledge in an effort to create health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of state-led knowledge development while appreciating local therapeutic practices scattered through rural southern China. The nationalities highlighted are the Achang, Li, Lisu, Qiang, Tujia, Yao, and Zhuang groups. Chapter 1 focuses ethnographically on grass-roots institution-building, and recounts the short but rich history of some relatively successful institutions of nationality medicine. In Chapter 2, medical knowledge sorted into textbooks is shown to result from survey and conceptual work by scholar-activists, and certain openings of formal knowledge to wild expertise and folk authority are noted. Chapter 3 turns to embodiment, reading through textbooks, an explanatory sketch, and the hands-on techniques of local practitioners to discern specific bodies and herbal agents. Herbals are the central topic of Chapter 4, which tracks the love life of humans and plants, and explores other intimacies between human healers and their favored forest products. Chapter 5 dwells on a series of encounters between state agents and nationality healers as well as between official knowledge and earthbound lore, survey researchers and local activists, and anthropologists and their allies and interlocutors. This study draws inspiration from philosophers ranging from Heidegger to Zhuangzi, Deleuze to Mao Zedong, but above all it attends to local knowledge in China’s mountain south.
Julia Doe
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226743257
- eISBN:
- 9780226743394
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226743394.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. Tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) was invented under the auspices of monarchy, and ...
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Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. Tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) was invented under the auspices of monarchy, and functioned from its start as an embodiment of Bourbon prestige. While historians have long privileged the popular origins of French dialogue opera (opéra comique), this genre, too, had close links to the Crown. In 1762 government authorities incorporated the fairground players that invented the form into a struggling royal troupe, the Comédie-Italienne, thereby consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. The Comedians of the King investigates the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent pre-revolutionary years. Drawing on extensive new musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied lyric genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the Comédie-Italienne. This project also, critically, interrogates the political implications of such organizational and stylistic shifts. The comic theater alternately reinforced and undercut the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. In essence, The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic, institutional, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a collection of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.Less
Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. Tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) was invented under the auspices of monarchy, and functioned from its start as an embodiment of Bourbon prestige. While historians have long privileged the popular origins of French dialogue opera (opéra comique), this genre, too, had close links to the Crown. In 1762 government authorities incorporated the fairground players that invented the form into a struggling royal troupe, the Comédie-Italienne, thereby consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. The Comedians of the King investigates the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent pre-revolutionary years. Drawing on extensive new musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied lyric genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the Comédie-Italienne. This project also, critically, interrogates the political implications of such organizational and stylistic shifts. The comic theater alternately reinforced and undercut the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. In essence, The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic, institutional, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a collection of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.
Laurence Lampert
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226746333
- eISBN:
- 9780226746470
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226746470.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy
This second Plato book of mine treats the three dialogues, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium, in which Plato showed how a young Socrates became the mature philosopher of all the dialogues. Plato ...
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This second Plato book of mine treats the three dialogues, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium, in which Plato showed how a young Socrates became the mature philosopher of all the dialogues. Plato structured these three dialogues to contain events of recovery: each reaches back from a later time to an earlier time in order to recover a stage in Socrates’ becoming, all three stages occurring before what Plato made the chronologically first dialogue, the Protagoras, which he set in 434 when Socrates was 35. Of the three stages that Plato isolated, Socrates himself reports how he began with natural philosophy and then turned to a “second sailing” which led him to transcendent forms (Phaedo), and Socrates reports the final stage which peaks in a comprehensive ontology (Symposium). Understanding the first and third stages depends on the Parmenides, the pivotal dialogue which Socrates does not report. It recovers an event of unlearning that has profound implications for understanding the mature Socrates: old Parmenides showed nineteen year old Socrates that transcendent forms are rationally untenable. The Parmenides contains the implicit challenge to understand how Socrates can still use transcendent forms in his maturity as in the Phaedo and Republic. The Parmenides also contains a “gymnastic” of logical exercises through which alone Socrates can gain the true understanding of forms, the second and indispensable stage: understanding understanding itself. In this installment in the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche, I show how Socrates’ epistemology and ontology are akin to Nietzsche’s.Less
This second Plato book of mine treats the three dialogues, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium, in which Plato showed how a young Socrates became the mature philosopher of all the dialogues. Plato structured these three dialogues to contain events of recovery: each reaches back from a later time to an earlier time in order to recover a stage in Socrates’ becoming, all three stages occurring before what Plato made the chronologically first dialogue, the Protagoras, which he set in 434 when Socrates was 35. Of the three stages that Plato isolated, Socrates himself reports how he began with natural philosophy and then turned to a “second sailing” which led him to transcendent forms (Phaedo), and Socrates reports the final stage which peaks in a comprehensive ontology (Symposium). Understanding the first and third stages depends on the Parmenides, the pivotal dialogue which Socrates does not report. It recovers an event of unlearning that has profound implications for understanding the mature Socrates: old Parmenides showed nineteen year old Socrates that transcendent forms are rationally untenable. The Parmenides contains the implicit challenge to understand how Socrates can still use transcendent forms in his maturity as in the Phaedo and Republic. The Parmenides also contains a “gymnastic” of logical exercises through which alone Socrates can gain the true understanding of forms, the second and indispensable stage: understanding understanding itself. In this installment in the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche, I show how Socrates’ epistemology and ontology are akin to Nietzsche’s.
Pamela J. Prickett
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226747149
- eISBN:
- 9780226747316
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226747316.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
The area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city’s poorest and most violent ...
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The area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods. Amid South Central’s shifting demographics and its struggles with poverty, sociologist Pamela J. Prickett takes a closer look, focusing on the members of an African American Muslim community who call South Central home. Believing in South Central examines how believers help each other combat poverty, job scarcity, violence, and racial injustice, providing new insights into the day-to-day lived religion of African American Muslims. The book shows why the mosque has become believers’ key system of social support in a changing neighborhood and how members deepen their spiritual practice not in spite of, but through, conditions of poverty.Less
The area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods. Amid South Central’s shifting demographics and its struggles with poverty, sociologist Pamela J. Prickett takes a closer look, focusing on the members of an African American Muslim community who call South Central home. Believing in South Central examines how believers help each other combat poverty, job scarcity, violence, and racial injustice, providing new insights into the day-to-day lived religion of African American Muslims. The book shows why the mosque has become believers’ key system of social support in a changing neighborhood and how members deepen their spiritual practice not in spite of, but through, conditions of poverty.
Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226761695
- eISBN:
- 9780226761862
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226761862.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
The Darfur conflict exploded in early 2003 when two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, struck military installations in Darfur. The resulting ...
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The Darfur conflict exploded in early 2003 when two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, struck military installations in Darfur. The resulting conflict devastated the region’s economy, shredded its fragile social fabric, drove millions of people from their homes, and created an environment filled with fear and misery. Darfur Allegory, a result of more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research in locations as diverse as camps for displaced persons, shantytowns, college campuses in the United States, Central Park in New York City, the United States Congress, and the United Nations and the UN Security Council, ties the crisis in Darfur to the overall predicament of the state in the Sudan and the politics of its refugees abroad. Drawing upon life histories and narratives and postings on major Sudanese blogospheres, the work highlights both the sense of urgency and the competing narratives that drive international responses to the devastation of Darfur. While centered on displacement, diaspora, and war in the Sudan, the work argues that the significance of these issues extends beyond Sudanese borders. It addresses some of the most sensitive issues in the social sciences, raising key questions about the categories used to analyze race, color, gender, diaspora politics and drawing attention to how these concepts interact with local political realities. Darfur Allegory is thus an urgent intervention in the anthropology of war, forced migration, and the global circulation of people, ideas, and representations.Less
The Darfur conflict exploded in early 2003 when two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, struck military installations in Darfur. The resulting conflict devastated the region’s economy, shredded its fragile social fabric, drove millions of people from their homes, and created an environment filled with fear and misery. Darfur Allegory, a result of more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research in locations as diverse as camps for displaced persons, shantytowns, college campuses in the United States, Central Park in New York City, the United States Congress, and the United Nations and the UN Security Council, ties the crisis in Darfur to the overall predicament of the state in the Sudan and the politics of its refugees abroad. Drawing upon life histories and narratives and postings on major Sudanese blogospheres, the work highlights both the sense of urgency and the competing narratives that drive international responses to the devastation of Darfur. While centered on displacement, diaspora, and war in the Sudan, the work argues that the significance of these issues extends beyond Sudanese borders. It addresses some of the most sensitive issues in the social sciences, raising key questions about the categories used to analyze race, color, gender, diaspora politics and drawing attention to how these concepts interact with local political realities. Darfur Allegory is thus an urgent intervention in the anthropology of war, forced migration, and the global circulation of people, ideas, and representations.
Fiona Greenland
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226756981
- eISBN:
- 9780226757179
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226757179.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Archaeology: Classical
Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign élites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered millions of Italian artworks and ...
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Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign élites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered millions of Italian artworks and antiquities. Today, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through an activist model and sophisticated art police unit, which dedicates itself to the eradication of tomb robbing. Italy has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics. Ruling Culture traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Drawing on years in Italy studying archival materials, and interviewing key figures, the book presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles over what it means to forge a national community.Less
Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign élites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered millions of Italian artworks and antiquities. Today, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through an activist model and sophisticated art police unit, which dedicates itself to the eradication of tomb robbing. Italy has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics. Ruling Culture traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Drawing on years in Italy studying archival materials, and interviewing key figures, the book presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles over what it means to forge a national community.
Hillary Angelo
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226738994
- eISBN:
- 9780226739182
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226739182.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
This book offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a contemporary global phenomenon, and of widespread perceptions of green as a “good” for cities. Urban-environmental scholarship ...
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This book offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a contemporary global phenomenon, and of widespread perceptions of green as a “good” for cities. Urban-environmental scholarship dominated by well-known cities at notorious moments of urbanism—paradigmatically, New York City’s 19th century Central Park—has understood such efforts as reactions to urban pathologies such as slums and density. Instead, the book examines Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a polycentric industrial region recurrently “greened” despite its ample open space, to explain the common sense of these associations and their persistence across time and place. It argues that greening is a social practice made possible by an imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, called urbanized nature, that is an outcome of urbanization processes rather than a reaction against cities. It traces urbanized nature’s emergence in the Ruhr in the early twentieth century and shows how it has motivated greening, carried out with the goal of creating ideal cities and citizens, across three moments: industrialization in the late 19th century, the postwar crisis of democracy in the 1960s, and postindustrial economic renewal in the 1990s. Across these moments, it also identifies similarities in how this imaginary causes greening to play out, finding that greening is a practice of remaking cities rather than an escape from urban life, and that shared beliefs in nature’s universal benefit condition greening projects to be understood as investments in the public good, even as they reinscribe existing inequalities in public space and distribute their goods unevenly.Less
This book offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a contemporary global phenomenon, and of widespread perceptions of green as a “good” for cities. Urban-environmental scholarship dominated by well-known cities at notorious moments of urbanism—paradigmatically, New York City’s 19th century Central Park—has understood such efforts as reactions to urban pathologies such as slums and density. Instead, the book examines Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a polycentric industrial region recurrently “greened” despite its ample open space, to explain the common sense of these associations and their persistence across time and place. It argues that greening is a social practice made possible by an imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, called urbanized nature, that is an outcome of urbanization processes rather than a reaction against cities. It traces urbanized nature’s emergence in the Ruhr in the early twentieth century and shows how it has motivated greening, carried out with the goal of creating ideal cities and citizens, across three moments: industrialization in the late 19th century, the postwar crisis of democracy in the 1960s, and postindustrial economic renewal in the 1990s. Across these moments, it also identifies similarities in how this imaginary causes greening to play out, finding that greening is a practice of remaking cities rather than an escape from urban life, and that shared beliefs in nature’s universal benefit condition greening projects to be understood as investments in the public good, even as they reinscribe existing inequalities in public space and distribute their goods unevenly.
Daemons Are Forever
The Hinge
Living on the Edge
The Pensive Image
After Redlining
Beethoven
The Calamity Form
Catastrophic Thinking
Congress Overwhelmed
