Building an Urban Future through Nature
Building an Urban Future through Nature
Chapter 2 shows how urbanized nature was put to work, materially, through the construction of garden cities in the Ruhr, focusing on Krupp’s Margarethenhöhe in Essen. While the colonies provided access to nature for subsistence purposes, at Margarethenhöhe animal keeping and subsistence agriculture were forbidden. Instead, the chapter documents gardens and green space being used and understood in the contemporary sense: bearing indirect moral and affective goods, rather than direct, material ones, and fulfilling an urban-aspirational, rather than rural-preservationist, vision of society. The chapter illustrates nature’s new uses at Margarethenhöhe through Krupp’s changing understanding of its company housing from fiefdom to suburb, of its green space from a site of labor to leisure, and of its residents from peasants to urban citizens. It also documents how this emergent view of nature spread throughout the region and to the public sector. Finally, it argues that these new perceptions of nature found affinities with new liberal forms of managerial power and control. While greening was understood in terms of the provision of public goods, it had also become a new managerial technology that imposed new norms of behavior and citizenship as it transformed cities as physical and social spaces.
Keywords: Margarethenhöhe, Essen, garden cities, municipal governance, embourgeoisment, managerial technologies, urbanized nature
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