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 ... More

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.