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How Green Became Good: Urban Greening as Social Improvement in Germany's Ruhr Valley.

紀錄類型:	書目-電子資源 : Monograph/item
正題名/作者:	How Green Became Good: Urban Greening as Social Improvement in Germany's Ruhr Valley./
作者:	Angelo, Hillary.
出版者:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2015,
面頁冊數:	452 p.
附註:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 77-07, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International77-07A.
標題:	European history. -
電子資源:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3740755
ISBN:	9781339328690

How Green Became Good: Urban Greening as Social Improvement in Germany's Ruhr Valley.
Angelo, Hillary.

How Green Became Good: Urban Greening as Social Improvement in Germany's Ruhr Valley. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2015 - 452 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 77-07, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2015.

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

This dissertation offers a critical standpoint on the contemporary "green" city by tracing a century of urban greening in the Ruhr. A polycentric industrial region known by historians for its coal and steel production and environmentalists for its recent green renaissance, the Ruhr is one of the North Atlantic's largest urban agglomerations, and one failed by traditional explanations for why cities are "greened". The Ruhr has always lacked the density and slum conditions to which urban historians typically attribute the creation of city parks and green space; its current green makeover reflects not only the latest economic development trends, as critics of greenwashing might expect, but is the most recent in a series of efforts to use nature (in the form of parks, gardens, and animals) to 'fix' its urbanism. In response to these explanatory failures, I provide a historical-sociological explanation of greening as a social practice and show how nature has long been used as a medium to improve urban environments. Methodologically, the dissertation is a longitudinal comparison of greening projects carried out in the Ruhr at three moments of major physical and economic restructuring: industrialization in the late 1900s, the beginning of deindustrialization in the late 1960s, and the "neoliberalization" of the past few decades. I argue that a social imaginary of nature as a vehicle for social goods emerged around 1900 and was mobilized at times of major social and economic transition. As urban restructuring precipitated regional identity crises, elites used nature to realize changing urban ideals. Each time, the goal of their efforts was to turn a working class urban region into a legibly middle class city. My research reveals surprising continuity in nature's use as a medium for improving the social. Across the three moments, I show that greening is best understood as a mode of inhabiting cities: a way people go about arranging forms of better living in changing social and economic contexts. This practice is made possible by a social imaginary of nature, which I call urbanized nature, that is an outcome of and a variable in urbanization. As a result of this imaginary, greening unfolds in strikingly similar ways across changing political economy and very different social relationships. Each time, greening is normatively motivated, aspirational, paternalistic, and defined by a central paradox: it is predicated on nature's ideology of universal benefit and legibility, in spite of its actual interpretive openness and differential effects. This paradox gives greening projects their unique, troubling power: though nature distributes its goods unequally, it is hard to disagree with and very hard to critique. The objective of the dissertation is to understand the "will to green" and its effects on cities in order to better position scholars, practitioners, and citizens to make more reflexive, democratic decisions about greening projects and the values they contain. As urban greening is celebrated as a revolution in urbanism or dismissed as an instrumental policy trend, the project (1) historicizes urban greening as a social practice and describes its contours, (2) excavates the normative dimensions of greening projects carried out in the name of the public good, and (3) demonstrates that this imaginary of nature plays a greater role in the transformation of urban environments than accounts of urban change driven by political economy might initially lead us to expect.

ISBN: 9781339328690Subjects--Topical Terms:

1972904
European history.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Germany

How Green Became Good: Urban Greening as Social Improvement in Germany's Ruhr Valley.
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245 1 0 $a How Green Became Good: Urban Greening as Social Improvement in Germany's Ruhr Valley.
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500 $a Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 77-07, Section: A.
500 $a Publisher info.: Dissertation/Thesis.
500 $a Advisor: Calhoun, Craig.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2015.
506 $a This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
506 $a This item must not be added to any third party search indexes.
506 $a This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.
520 $a This dissertation offers a critical standpoint on the contemporary "green" city by tracing a century of urban greening in the Ruhr. A polycentric industrial region known by historians for its coal and steel production and environmentalists for its recent green renaissance, the Ruhr is one of the North Atlantic's largest urban agglomerations, and one failed by traditional explanations for why cities are "greened". The Ruhr has always lacked the density and slum conditions to which urban historians typically attribute the creation of city parks and green space; its current green makeover reflects not only the latest economic development trends, as critics of greenwashing might expect, but is the most recent in a series of efforts to use nature (in the form of parks, gardens, and animals) to 'fix' its urbanism. In response to these explanatory failures, I provide a historical-sociological explanation of greening as a social practice and show how nature has long been used as a medium to improve urban environments. Methodologically, the dissertation is a longitudinal comparison of greening projects carried out in the Ruhr at three moments of major physical and economic restructuring: industrialization in the late 1900s, the beginning of deindustrialization in the late 1960s, and the "neoliberalization" of the past few decades. I argue that a social imaginary of nature as a vehicle for social goods emerged around 1900 and was mobilized at times of major social and economic transition. As urban restructuring precipitated regional identity crises, elites used nature to realize changing urban ideals. Each time, the goal of their efforts was to turn a working class urban region into a legibly middle class city. My research reveals surprising continuity in nature's use as a medium for improving the social. Across the three moments, I show that greening is best understood as a mode of inhabiting cities: a way people go about arranging forms of better living in changing social and economic contexts. This practice is made possible by a social imaginary of nature, which I call urbanized nature, that is an outcome of and a variable in urbanization. As a result of this imaginary, greening unfolds in strikingly similar ways across changing political economy and very different social relationships. Each time, greening is normatively motivated, aspirational, paternalistic, and defined by a central paradox: it is predicated on nature's ideology of universal benefit and legibility, in spite of its actual interpretive openness and differential effects. This paradox gives greening projects their unique, troubling power: though nature distributes its goods unequally, it is hard to disagree with and very hard to critique. The objective of the dissertation is to understand the "will to green" and its effects on cities in order to better position scholars, practitioners, and citizens to make more reflexive, democratic decisions about greening projects and the values they contain. As urban greening is celebrated as a revolution in urbanism or dismissed as an instrumental policy trend, the project (1) historicizes urban greening as a social practice and describes its contours, (2) excavates the normative dimensions of greening projects carried out in the name of the public good, and (3) demonstrates that this imaginary of nature plays a greater role in the transformation of urban environments than accounts of urban change driven by political economy might initially lead us to expect.
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