The Space-Times of Urbanizing Nature

Introduction by David Wachsmuth , Department of Urban Planning and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Two books published in 2021 both offer a major new contribution to geographical and planning scholarship on the relationship between cities and the natural environment: Hillary Angelo’s How Green Became Good and Kian Goh’s Form and Flow. Because urbanization and climate change are arguably the two defining collective social challenges of the current century, their arrival is incredibly timely. This review forum offers ten essays exploring the contested historical geographies of urban nature through Angelo’s and Goh’s books, along with a response from both authors. These essays mostly discuss one of the books on its own. By contrast, as a way of introduction to the Book Review Forum, I want to consider the two books together, and suggest four common points of departure for reading them as major new contributions to urban environmental thought.

The first is that Angelo and Goh offer contrasting yet complementary examinations of the relationship between society and nature under capitalism—in the former case through a historical lens and in the latter case through a spatial one. Angelo’s How Green Became Good is a hundred-year history of urban greening in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, and a bold rehistoricization of the society–nature relationship. The key concept is urbanized nature—the distinctive social imaginary of nature that emerges in the context of urban transformation. Urbanized nature is not simply nature in cities, nor is it a neutral backdrop against which cities develop. Instead, it is a resource for (urban) social action: “an imagined extrasocial nature that is recurrently brought in to improve the social world” (p. 16). Through a careful study of the evolution of urbanized nature in an unlikely context—the polycentric, “city-less” Ruhr Valley—Angelo historicizes the relationship between society and nature under urbanizing capitalism in a way that simultaneously undermines long-standing dogma about the origins of “greening” as a response to the specific built form of the industrial city and recenters the role of imaginaries in contemporary debates over urban environmental policy.

Goh’s Form and Flow is an analysis of the global urban politics of climate change told through a multisite comparative analysis of the “political ecology of design.” This is Goh’s term for the spatial politics of remaking urban spaces in the face of climate change. In a somewhat parallel fashion to how Angelo takes aim at received wisdom about urban greening and ends up telling a very different and more convincing story, Goh goes to work on the (by now well-trodden) academic terrain about the increasing centrality of cities to climate change governance and manages to build new foundations underneath it. Across three apparently very different field work sites—Jakarta, New York City, and Rotterdam—she reveals a networked political ecology of urban climate change policy. Globalized urban climate planners and globalizing social movements struggle over the urban future through plans and counterplans to remake the urban present, and Goh tells this story through the contested spatial politics of marginalization (and resistance to marginalization) at multiple scales.

I should be clear: Neither Angelo nor Goh is limited to a single dimension of space-time in their analyses. On top of being an exemplary work of historical sociology, How Green Became Good offers a deeply insightful take on the spatialization of nature across the urban–rural divide. For Goh, meanwhile, the different possible urban futures whose construction and contestation she documents serve as a temporal organizing principle.

There is a second point of complementarity: Even though these two books are remarkably sui generis contributions to the broadly interdisciplinary field of urban environmental research, they have both taken up one of the core enduring concerns of (urban) political ecology—a conceptualization of nature as a field of struggle. In this respect, Goh and Angelo are attentive to the power-laden dimensions of the production of nature, which finds expression among other places in their emphasis on the interplay between elite and nonelite political projects. The authors are equally attentive, however, to the normative frameworks within which urban nature is situated. In How Green Became Good, this question surfaces as explicit engagement with urban nature as a kind of moral technology. In Form and Flow, we can look to Goh’s juxtaposition of plans and counterplans—the alternate visions of urban socioecological developments that rest on differently articulated claims to legitimacy.

Third, both books offer inspiring methodological models that present research designs adequate to their ambitious theoretical scope. Goh’s comparative methodology traces the political ecology of design across three sites linked by their common vulnerability to water and a common Dutch colonial past. Angelo’s case study choice of the Ruhr Valley—an industrializing and then deindustrializing urban landscape that neither in its growth or its decline manages to resemble the city form that has served as the default launching point for urban theory—allows her to rework the story of urban greening. In both cases, the authors reflexively follow the contours and limits of their research objects, and they do so with a kind of both–and approach to the theoretical–empirical dilemma. Angelo and Goh each offer incredibly ambitious theory—in one case a rethinking of the city–nature relationship and in the other a recentering of design at the core of urban climate change. This ambition does not come at the cost of deep empirical investigation, though—quite the opposite. Form and Flow is a three-city, three-country, three-continent comparative analysis, and How Green Became Good tackles 100 years of history.

There is a final point of complementarity: Both Angelo and Goh conducted the research for their respective books while doctoral students in the collaborative environment of the Urban Theory Lab (UTL), in its earlier iteration at New York University (Angelo) and its subsequent iteration at Harvard University (Goh). The key mission of UTL has been to interrogate urbanization as a planetary process under contemporary capitalism (Wachsmuth 2014; Brenner and Schmid 2015; Arboleda 2020; Angelo and Goh 2021). Both Angelo and Goh have given us, in their distinct ways, major contributions to the analysis of planetary urbanization. Moreover, in recent years UTL’s focus has increasingly consolidated around socioecological questions, and I suspect that Angelo’s and Goh’s analyses helped inform this transition.

This brief introduction to the Book Review Forum on How Green Became Good and Form and Flow has only scratched the surface of these two books. The contributors to the forum will alternatively deepen and expand the discussion. Liz Koslov reflects on Angelo’s analysis of urban greening and points that analysis toward an uncertain future. Nikhil Anand and Malini Ranganathan each explore Goh’s arguments around urban design as a contested field of socioecological struggle, and Kasia Paprocki discusses the interplay of plan and counterplan in Form and Flow. Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago and Matthew Gandy both critically examine Angelo’s concept of urbanized nature as a social imaginary or ideology. Nik Heynen applies Goh’s process-driven account of urbanization to the linked economic and ecological Indigenous struggles on Saputo Island in the United States. AbdouMaliq Simone offers three vignettes of urban nature refracted through How Green Became Good, and Roger Keil uses Angelo’s book as the entry point for a discussion of the aspirational dimensions of urban nature, and their valence in a post-COVID urbanized world. Jennifer L. Rice offers a comparative discussion of the two books that positions them as complementary contributions to urban studies’ engagement with nature. Finally, Angelo and Goh offer their own concluding insights.

Commentary by Liz Koslov , Department of Urban Planning, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

As the book’s title suggests, the premise of Hillary Angelo’s How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens is that the kinds of urban greening interventions so often taken for granted as beneficial, universally legible improvements to the urban environment—parks, street trees, flower boxes, and so on—are not inherently good. Rather, this way of seeing nature, and the very existence of nature in this particular form, has a history.

“Good” greening is a product of urbanization. This is not to say it is a product of the city as conventionally conceived; Angelo challenges the prevailing understanding of urban greening as a reaction to urban problems rooted in density and a built form that crowded out all signs of nature. The classic example cited in the book is New York City’s Central Park, which, when taken as archetypal, depicts greening as an urban reform responsive to a particular, paradigmatic urban form: the dense, concentrated, built-up city. Drawing on an atypical example, Germany’s Ruhr Valley, Angelo shows instead how the imaginary of urbanized nature, and the practice of greening that it entails, results from global processes of urbanization rather than being determined by any given place’s city-like characteristics.

In a tour-de-force analysis of the Ruhr Valley’s sprawling, industrial landscape, Angelo reveals urban greening as central to the repertoire of urban planning even in the absence of an evident cityscape. In the Ruhr, “nature” is plentiful. Green space abounds, yet greening initiatives have recurred nonetheless, paradoxically becoming tools to make the region legible as a city, and to make its inhabitants more urbane, cultured, cosmopolitan, and consumption-oriented citizens.

Urban greening is a recent term, but thanks to Angelo’s book I now understand it as a long-standing practice, a “social practice made possible by a social imaginary” that Angelo terms “urbanized nature, that was itself an outcome of and that has subsequently become a variable in urbanization” (p. 5). In the Ruhr, we see urban greening emerge at the turn of the twentieth century as industrial elites, cognizant of an international network of cities and urban ideals to which they aspired, and for which they wanted to be recognized, constructed a “garden city” not unlike existing workers’ housing. Although the workers’ housing already possessed ample green space, it had very different rules for engaging with nature. No longer, in the garden city, was nature to be treated as a direct good, as the subsistence gardens and “miners’ cows” (goats) of the workers’ housing had been. The nature of the garden city—of urban greening—was an indirect good, a site of leisure not labor, morally beneficial and aspirational, a way of producing and manifesting middle-class citizenship.

The social engineering and paternalistic use of urban greening present in the garden city recurred through subsequent periods of transformation and upheaval. Angelo’s analysis traverses the greening projects of postwar rebuilding and deindustrialization—when parks became part of constructing a supposedly universal, democratic public sphere that might counter, or at least psychologically soothe and render less visible, deindustrialization’s uneven toll—as well as more recent postindustrial neoliberalism, in which greening maintains its position as a practically unassailable public good, however compromised in practice by urban restructuring and private interests.

Yet even as the “green-as-good” logic remains hegemonic, Angelo argues that urban greening projects can be containers for different kinds of politics. “[U]rbanized nature is a social imaginary of form and not content,” Angelo writes, “a way of expressing normative visions rather than any particular one” (p. 108). In other words, it is “a medium, a flexible form rather than a specific (system-affirmative) content” (p. 118). Here, Angelo draws on midcentury theorists of the new mass media, who debated that form’s potential to produce counterhegemonic alternatives, rather than simply spreading and reifying norms of the existing system. Nature, however, is a medium that is meant to, and easily does, appear unmediated. Again and again, we see urban nature valorized to the extent that its social construction, and the politics embedded therein, is erased or kept separate.

How Green Became Good offers glimpses of an alternative history of urban greening in which urbanized nature is enrolled in more leftist and less elite—although still rather paternalistic—visions. The book alludes to a counterhistory, too, in which green is not always so good, and the presumed universal relationship to nature grows more complex, breaks down, or is severed. Theorists of Black environmentalism note the racial violence associated with natural landscapes and, of course, the creation of national parks (Ruffin 2010; Finney 2014). Quotidian signifiers of urban nature such as trees cannot escape their resonance as sites of lynching rather than as “anodyne features, ahistorical objects.”¹

Today it feels as though practically every student who enrolls in my classes on urban planning and environmental justice is skeptical of urban greening projects. They perceive them as bound to contribute to “green gentrification” and displacement. Such critiques, however, do not contest the goodness of green itself. They continue to rest on an understanding of greening as necessarily an urban amenity, access to which is desirable but maldistributed. The ability for everyone to recognize and enjoy the benefits of green-as-good cities, in this view, is thwarted by social systems and modes of urbanization that are still conceived as separate from nature itself.

Recent studies connecting the history of redlining with lower tree canopy and higher heat in urban neighborhoods are being enrolled in municipal planting programs that risk figuring greening solely as repair, purely beneficial work to right past wrongs, rather than as bound up with ongoing practices of racialized, uneven development (Los Angeles Department of Public Works 2021). As I have learned through the important work of two UCLA PhD students, de Guzman (2023) and Lambrou (2023), such programs frequently aspire to enhance community “resilience” by training—although not usually paying—residents of disinvested areas to take responsibility for, and bear the labor of, greening and stewarding their environments, a paternalistic dynamic that How Green Became Good gives us the history and theory to better understand.²

The mutually supportive relationship between urban greening and status-quo urbanism is not inevitable. Angelo’s nuanced analysis reminds us that there is always the possibility of social change, and now the reality of climate change. Reading How Green Became Good, I found myself returning to the question of how green becomes bad, or subversive. In my study of urban “managed retreat” from places exposed to flooding, sea-level rise, and other effects of climate change, I have heard retreat described as a beneficent act of returning land to nature (Koslov 2016). This framing proved effective at rallying support for a controversial policy. The Staten Island property owners I followed who embraced the idea of retreat after Hurricane Sandy envisioned their homes and neighborhoods becoming parkland, green open space. They saw themselves as contributing to the public good. Greening via retreat troubled the edge of the “good” (domesticated) nature versus “bad” (threatening, wild) nature binary, however. Retreat is controversial in part because it can run counter to practices and logics of urban growth, as much as it can buffer and be produced and absorbed by them. What ensued in this case were fights over what counts as nature and what forms of nature are desirable, along with a growing sense that all of it harbored risks becoming ever harder to ward off.³

What happens when the ideal futures that have long oriented and anchored the social imaginary of urbanized nature dissipate, or feel harder and harder to sustain in form as well as content? When does content—the materiality of urban greening—matter, as various signifiers of urban nature become more fraught in the popular imagination: the eucalyptus tree on the corner sparking fear of a devastating wildfire; the green, watered lawn turned symbol of environmental harm, hastening the decimation of nature and city alike? How might we see urbanized nature, and the “green-as-good logic” transforming, in form as well as content, in the context of climate change? This is the question with which Angelo leaves us, and I am eager to follow her continued theorizing of our present moment, perhaps in conjunction with theorists of rural futures, settler colonial urbanism, and the foreclosures, erasures, and ongoing relations of dispossession implicated in fantasies of “green” urban development under climate change (Paprocki 2020; Porter, Hurst, and Grandinetti 2020).

How Green Became Good is a model of a place-based study—deeply grounded and researched in the Ruhr, conveying a vivid sense of the history, life, and experience of that place—and a model of how to transcend the limits of much place-based scholarship. Such work tends to foreground local or national context, with less attention to the role of global trends, flows of ideas, and dynamics in making possible the practices and imaginaries, like urban greening and urbanized nature, that are situated and analyzed in that context. What results from these accounts is rich work, but work that lacks the satisfying breadth and explanatory power of How Green Became Good. The historical sociology of Angelo’s essential book traces the surprising persistence of key elements of “green-as-good logic” across time and space. In so doing, it provides a needed backstory for globally proliferating green urban imaginaries, plans, and projects that promise, but are not primed to produce, a way of engaging nature that can undergird a radically different set of relations and futures.

Commentary by Nikhil Anand , Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Moved by climate crises at different spatial and temporal scales, Form and Flow is a sparkling and energetic book that asks the reader to rethink possible futures in the wake of well-worn critiques of urban planning and in political ecology. Cities are relational formations, Goh shows, and are made with the expertise of planners, developers, and financiers that exceed their borders. At the same time, cities are also steeped in social and material histories that plans and practices make. These are ongoing histories in which inequality and dispossession have long been at work, often intensified by the very plans and processes of urban development projects. The book shows how these diverse and contested processes, at different spatial and temporal scales, are now produced by climate adaptation projects in the entangled geographies of New York, Rotterdam, and Jakarta.

Carefully reading the contestations between experts, firms, and designs across the book’s five chapters, Goh argues that the designers need to better engage the sticky material histories and designs of communities dwelling in cities, and vice versa. This is a bold and rare text, one whose central methods, narrative style, and argument support each other to make a set of original and convincing arguments about why a relational approach to understanding cities is key; why terrains of urban contestation are a generative location in which to organize urban futures; and what a political ecology of design might do, not just to worlds of practice, but also for how futures are made.

Goh’s first key intervention in the book is around understanding cities, and in particular, urban expertise through a relational approach. Climate change, Goh points out, denies urban planning its traditional methods, not least because the causes and effects of climate change transcend and simultaneously manifest across a variety of spatial and temporal scales. This makes them difficult to respond to with the planning tools because these acquire their power by bounding space and time. Planners need to develop new tools to address climate change, not only to address its workings at different spatiotemporal scales, but also to address postcolonial histories of uneven urban development.

Whereas planning might be a bounded practice, Goh shows that the experts of design and planning are not. Colonial and postcolonial cities have long been made with the coloniality of traveling expertise. Goh demonstrates how such disembedded forms of city making continue to matter, perhaps more so now, where the imperatives of climate action have crystallized in the modular forms of international competitions, plans, and networks moved by philanthropies, experts, and design firms whose webs of relation and collaboration frequently stretch between New York, the Netherlands, and postcolonial cities.

This is why Goh astutely advises us to read her work on New York, Rotterdam, and Jakarta, not as an exercise in comparison, but as one of relation. She writes, “each site helps to reveal the others. Tracing the formation of global-urban networks transcends bounded, city-centric emphases in urban climate change research” (p. 113). Chapter 3 makes clear how global networks for urban climate change planning are made through connections between firms, state agencies, and individuals in these three sites. For instance, Rebuild by Design, an experiment that began as a set of interventions in a gallery space following Hurricane Sandy, became a massive and powerful initiative led by its Dutch principal, Henk Ovink, the Rockefeller Foundation, New York University, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. To understand how and why this initiative and other instances of more grassroots planning work, Goh shows that it is necessary to think of the webs of relation in which these initiatives are situated, the kinds of knowledge they authorize, and the different urban agencies they disable and activate into being.

Of course, such forms of relational expertise have their colonial histories, both across and within cities. Jakarta and New York are cities constructed by Dutch colonial officials who made these cities as they relentlessly made social and racial inequality. Urbanization continues to be a process that proliferates inequalities in cities—where development projects expropriate resources from the social and ecological margins (margins that they also make through acts of design)—and also across them—where knowledges and practices are valued through the limited and uneven colonial and postcolonial frameworks of development.

Keenly attuned to these ongoing histories, Goh focuses on what she identifies as “terrains of contestation”—competing plans and projects made by differently positioned urban residents and experts. As residents and activist organizations protest the harms that new climate projects proliferate, they also diagnose the causes of environmental disaster, proposing other interventions and plans. These fields of insurgent planning are not oppositional to those made by the state and its international experts. Goh makes a critical point when she uncovers these recursive and iterative forms, made in conversation with more dominant forms of expertise.

Indeed, as Goh shows, the city of Jakarta has been a critical terrain of contestation since the Dutch colonized and ruled over its populations. Today, as Dutch expertise revisits Indonesia to propose a massive capital-intensive sea wall to engineer the sea away from the city, Goh shows how two local community organizations—the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC) and Ciliwung Merdeka—contest the dispossessions of this plan. They effectively argue that Jakarta’s Dutch experts misrecognize the cause of flooding, and that it largely had an effect of land subsidence, itself an effect of unequal access to water in the city. They produce counterplans to the dominant urban strategy to build sea walls, but they do this by situating it in specific contexts and use it to build coalitions with residents living in different geographies.

The kinds of work that Ciliwung Merdeka and the UPC do are not alien to designers, even if designers seldom spend their time with community organizations. In the final section of the book, Goh proposes a political ecology of design. If, as she points out, “design—urban, landscape, architectural, and infrastructural—is often the platform through which contesting spatial agendas are visualized and prioritized” (p. 17), she urges designers be mindful and integrative of the ways in which “physical place, social meaning, and contested visions” are relentlessly intertwined (p. 119).

As urban administrations seek to adapt to climate change using the unequal processes of urban design and development, Goh shows that neither the modular, transnational field of urban design, nor the political ecological critiques of activists against massive projects will be sufficient to address the urban inequality and ecological catastrophe that these projects proliferate. Goh urges designers not to evade but to methodologically produce a terrain of contestation in their work, so that different political visions can emerge and be made visible through its documents, numbers, and architectural forms. Should they do so, Form and Flow shows, they might yet be enrolled in support of a more democratic and just future.

Commentary by Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago , Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.

How Green Became Good is a double heresy: It challenges the sacred centrality of greening practices in planning discourse and policy, and it does so drawing from a case study from Germany, where landscape schemes and ecological principles have often informed the progress of urbanization concepts. Nature has inspired urban design at least since the 1750s, when Marc-Antoine Laugier’s (1753, 259–60) influential Essai sur l’architecture urged architects to conceive the city as forest and park. About a century later, landscape design pioneers such as Frederick Law Olmsted (1870) took advantage of the growing public acceptance of green spaces to present them as opportunities to pacify society and drive urban development. In the twentieth century, greening became an intrinsic element of urban policy and social action, so much so that, as Hillary Angelo suggests, today it is difficult to imagine ourselves and our practices—as planners or city dwellers—outside the frame defined by it. In many planning cultures, in fact, green space is considered a sine qua non of urban growth and minimum green area ratios are standardized and set by law. Without denying the psychophysical advantages of close access to nature, Angelo asks how this has become possible, and why urban greening is pervasive in very different geographical and historical contexts. The book finds the answer to this question in political and cultural aspirations, rather than in ecological or functional imperatives. The ubiquity of greening approaches stems from the hegemony of “urbanized nature” as social imaginary, a “shared categorical framework” (p. 207) through which we interpret and construct our urban world.

Combining deep theoretical insight with rich archival and empirical evidence, Angelo emphasizes the role of discursive strategies in the production of space, without losing sight of the underlying material processes and class dynamics that shape urban politics. Nature, she suggests, comes to be seen and mobilized as a universal righter of urban wrongs because it is conceived as something distinct from society. This imaginary construction, in turn, results from the loss of direct engagement with rural or agrarian environments through processes of depeasantization, industrialization, and migration to cities intrinsic to capitalism. Thus, urbanized nature is the outcome of changing divisions of labor and a shift in the status of “natural” spaces in the matrix of biological and social reproduction, “from involvement with plants, animals, and green space as ‘direct’ material goods required for subsistence purposes to ‘indirect’ or moral or affective goods” (p. 17). Once established, this imaginary circulates and finds new forms and applications in different contexts. Angelo argues that this discursive and regulatory apparatus is an essential ingredient of capitalist urbanization, a key social management mechanism sustaining its visions of cityness and citizenship; in that regard, the urbanization of nature and the urbanization of social consciousness go hand in hand.

The book traces the trajectories of greening in the urban-industrial region of the Ruhr Valley, an atypical case study where the inconsistencies of nature imaginaries are more easily perceived. The core historical chapters explore three key moments of greening practices in the area, challenging existing accounts of the experiences under scrutiny. Part 1 describes the introduction and implementation of the imaginary of urbanized nature in the Ruhr through the adoption of garden city schemes. The available literature often presents the dissemination of the emerging garden city idea in early twentieth-century Germany as a continuation and aesthetic upgrading of the company town tradition. In contrast, Angelo shows how the Gartenstadt concept became not only a vehicle to reimagine the Ruhr’s loose settlement pattern as an incipient conurbation, but also an opportunity to break with the Arbeiterkolonien legacy, dissociating everyday contact with nature from direct reproduction. Part 2 studies the design of advanced regional park schemes as models of urbanity in the 1960s and 1970s, the concomitant emergence of alternative, working-class understandings of nature, and the links of both experiences to reflections on the production of publicness. Planners familiar with Jürgen Habermas’s work through debates on communicative planning will discover that German practitioners sought to materialize the philosopher’s ideas in actual spaces long before the irruption of this paradigm of planning theory. Some of the criticism the latter has received was also prefigured by the collaboration of locals, activists, and researchers to protect the counterpublics of traditional workers’ colonies and the communal, everyday interaction with nature essential to it. Part 3 focuses on the well-known case of IBA Emscher Park. Angelo departs from conventional analyses centered on processes of brownfield restoration and the interaction between landscape and industrial heritage to look at the cultural and discursive work that sustains planning projects, showing how green spaces are engineered to look unmediated, and how these schemes are actually experienced. At the end of the journey the performative potential of nature seems exhausted: Twisted and distorted to serve diverse and often contradictory purposes, urban greening has become a routine all-purpose feature of global urbanism. In the conclusion, Angelo urges us to green less and green better, reconsidering the adequacy of nature as a universal fix for urban problems.

One of the book’s most interesting and politically relevant aspects is the discussion of social imaginaries as something essentially distinct from ideologies, the interaction between material and immaterial dynamics, and the extent to which urbanized nature—as idea and project—can escape the influence of social hegemonies. Angelo explores past and ongoing attempts by authorities to shape collective consciousness, summarized by a memorable quote from Emscher Park’s director, Karl Ganser: “people do not understand [the park’s concept], but we can change that!” (p. 147). Imaginaries are presented as fundamentally open realms of social creativity, and so the book also shows how green space users reframe and contest these top-down strategies. This left me wondering about the position of grassroots greening vis-à-vis state greening within nature imaginaries, and the role of planning in mediating these relations. Is greening from below an alternative expression of urbanized nature, or rather its negation? Some passages of the book might be linked to a tradition that characterizes nature as a floating signifier or an empty sign that can be mobilized by a range of heterogeneous actors to pursue different, sometimes contradictory goals (see, e.g., Swyngedouw 2010). To me, though, Angelo’s argument is more powerful and politically operative when she describes urbanized nature as a distinct, dematerialized, enchanted environmental formation, engineered to be passively enjoyed—deceptively freed from dirt, toil, and animal manure, so to speak. This is a specifically capitalist, mystified nature regime, conceived by bourgeois urban reform in the nineteenth century and elevated to the status of social norm by state and expert knowledge apparatuses afterward. Grassroots greening usually runs against this distorted perception, aiming at the preservation or reclamation of a direct popular management of nature that state initiatives have often sought to repress or marginalize. The imaginary of urbanized nature is certainly open to contestation but, in my view, the particular manifestation that Angelo sees as pervasive today rests on a fetishized form and therefore works mainly as an ideology inhibiting more immediate, praxis-based forms of access to nature. In the nineteenth century this approach promoted passive, contemplative experiences of green space and informed the proliferation of landscaped parks in advanced industrial cities. Maybe recent experiments at different scales such as the creation of closed nature reserves in the heart of dense urban areas or half-Earth schemes to protect vast swaths of the planet from human agency are an extreme iteration of the same mentality.

These experiences are perhaps the culmination of nearly three centuries of entanglement of elite and state greening practices with faux naturalism—what Tafuri (1968, 100) once described as “nature trained to be natural.” The only way out of this discursive trap is through an attempt to connect lost material practices and possible futures to escape normalized articulations of nature and urbanity. Planning has sometimes been close to this perspective. The green belts, allotments, and cow pastures in Ebenezer Howard’s original garden city concept, for instance, were in part a response to more than two decades of attempts to regain access to land by incipient labor organizations in England. Although still comparatively rare, current radical imaginations of agroecological urban transitions point in a similar direction. These examples suggest that planning is an open site of struggle that, in certain conjunctures, can help to bring forward an alternative, demoralized understanding of nature based on a more direct, material, and hopefully democratic engagement with the “unbuilt” environment. Doing so requires that planners themselves listen to activists and researchers trying to contest and deconstruct the planning imagination. How Green Became Good is a fundamental step in that direction and will remain an essential resource for those interested in charting alternative urbanization paths within and beyond nature imaginaries.

Commentary by Kasia Paprocki , Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, London, UK.

Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice is a magisterial work of urban political ecology (UPE). It is also a pathbreaking example of the kind of methodological work of historically informed relational comparison that is urgently demanded to understand contemporary environmental concerns.

In the book, Kian Goh examines the conflicts that emerge through attempts to address climate change in three diverse (but as she demonstrates, interrelated) sites: New York City, Jakarta, and Rotterdam. She explores how entrenched systems of urban development have created and continue to perpetuate the problems of climate change, even where they intend to address them through adaptation and mitigation. In so doing, she offers important lessons about the politics of addressing climate change within and between communities, at the local and global scale. In its conceptual rigor, empirical nuance, and methodological innovation, the book is an essential contribution to the critical social sciences of climate change.

New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam are three sites that are paradigmatic in narratives about climate vulnerability and urban design. Goh examines them not as isolated cases to be compared to each other, but instead through their interrelations with one another that shape visions of urban futures in each (citing Burawoy’s [1998] extended case method and McMichael’s [2000] incorporated comparison as methodological touchstones). She works to understand these sites in particular through an examination of what she calls “Plans” and “Counterplans”: competing visions of addressing urban water challenges from dominant and counterhegemonic perspectives. The book weaves together an examination of these dominant planning interventions with subaltern urban climate justice struggles in each of the three sites, in the process offering insight into their particularities and interconnections.

In service of discussing these Plans and Counterplans, in what follows I highlight three key points about the book: The first is about the epistemological status of these competing ideas, the second is about the politics of scale, and the third is about the broader political implications of the tensions Goh outlines. Each of these points highlights important insights from the book and its contributions to the human geography of climate change.

Epistemology of the Counterplan

Throughout the book, Goh examines multiple examples of “Counterplans,” which are essentially alternatives to dominant planning visions of climate change adaptation. The question I came back to repeatedly while reading about these Counterplans was whether we should understand them as alternative adaptation or alternatives to adaptation. This is perhaps more a political question than it is an empirical one, and Goh gives us many tools to explore it in the book.

What is clear about Goh’s discussion of Counterplans is that they are not only responses to ecological change, but they are responses more specifically to dominant visions of how to address that change. At one point, Goh refers to this latter aspect (the dominant visions) as the “imperatives of climate change” (p. 49). This attention to the “imperatives of climate change” invokes the unique urgency of the dominant Plans discussed in the book. Form and Flow highlights not only what these Plans look like, but also the need for understanding how they are forged, and the power relations through which they come to be seen as imperative. Specifically, the material realities of climate and environmental change in particular places collide with the existing social and political-economic conditions that shape ideas about what “must” be done about it or often even what is inevitable. Goh further describes how in each site the Counterplans are focused on transformative social change. In this sense, she explains that Counterplans are concerned specifically with these existing social and political-economic conditions. We might understand the Counterplans, then, as efforts to transform the very conditions of this inevitability of crisis.

Politics of Scale

The methodological innovation of Form and Flow also makes possible what Goh refers to as a “political ecology of design.” By this she refers to the interweaving of what we might call local knowledge generated through lived experience with what she refers to as “frameworks for broader and more generalized knowledge production and dissemination” (p. 86). Here Goh works to reconcile the forms of knowledge informing the Plans and Counterplans of her typology. In her discussion of the need to combine these different forms of knowledge, Goh refuses facile conclusions about local knowledge about climate change and their implications to policy, directing our attention to not only the risks but also the powerful opportunities in networked and multiscaled adaptation imaginaries.

Similarly, in examining the interplay between structural and contingent factors at multiple scales, Goh does not assume that dynamics at the global scale are “structures” and those at the local scale are contingent. She leaves space for understanding structures at multiple sites and scales while also seeing fluidity, contingency, and negotiation in both. On both counts (related to knowledge and contingency between these multiple scales), Goh’s theoretical agility opens up new possibilities for understanding alternative climate futures.

Tensions Between Plans and Counterplans

My final reflection on Form and Flow is about the broader political implications of the work, and here the book comes into dialogue with Hillary Angelo’s How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens in particularly interesting ways. In Goh’s discussion of Plans and Counterplans, she beautifully demonstrates that climate change is not just an event to be responded to, but rather a terrain of struggle on which different groups stake demands around their own visions for social and spatial change. This raises important questions about whether there is something unique about climate change as a terrain of struggle that distinguishes it from prior moments of social and spatial transformation. As a terrain, does climate change hinder or facilitate progressive social change?

In contrast to Goh’s discussion of climate change as a terrain of struggle, Angelo describes “greening imaginaries” as “form not content.” That is, How Green Became Good offers a window into urban greening projects that do not contain necessary ideologies but are available for all kinds of diverse political visions. Goh’s Plans and Counterplans, however, do contain ideologies. For the latter, as I already noted, their visions of environmental action always demand transformative social change.

Read alongside one another, Goh’s and Angelo’s books urge scholars of the human geography of climate change to consider the political demands and political potential of any visions (whether dominant or counterhegemonic) of climate change and climate futures. Can Counterplans contain less progressive visions of social change? Some recent work on populist responses to environmental change suggests that this relationship is not always as straightforward as we might expect (Hochschild 2016; Koslov 2019; McCarthy 2019).

These are the big questions with which Form and Flow leaves us: Do Counterplans have a necessary politics? Are they necessarily liberatory? What are the political possibilities contained within these Counterplans, and are they the necessary and exclusive means of pursuing climate justice? Goh’s book does not answer these questions for us, but it does leave them available as an agenda for future research. In so doing, it lays the foundation for addressing our most urgent contemporary questions about how to understand and live with climate change.

As Goh writes in her epilogue, “We need new ways of seeing, and new ways of doing. … No matter what we do now, we will be fighting the mistakes of the past and present for a long time to come” (p. 183). Form and Flow offers us an examination of precisely these old and new ways of seeing and doing. It will be of interest to any scholars interested in thinking about how responses to climate change are forged, experienced, and contested in diverse communities around the world.

Commentary by Matthew Gandy , Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

Hillary Angelo’s new book How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens is a rich and carefully researched addition to the urban environmental literature. The book provides an astute sociological perspective on the emergence of “urban greening” as a global phenomenon emerging from her detailed investigation of the history of urban environmental interventions in Germany’s Ruhr region. Angelo uses the transformation of the Ruhr, with its distinctive patterns of urbanization, as an empirical and conceptual springboard from which to develop a series of wider arguments, including an attempt to apply a neo-Lefebvrian framework to the analysis of regional urban development.

In recent decades the Ruhr has become something of a symbolic terrain for the study of postindustrial socioecological transformations, but Angelo’s study delves deeper into the history of the region to examine a series of critical interventions in the fields of planning, design, and environmental policy. Angelo provides a partial decentering of the Anglo-American intellectual sphere through her close engagement with a range of German sources. Her study traces the influence of Jürgen Habermas, for example, on urban planning as part of a wider concern with the relations between public and private spheres in postwar Germany. In particular, she highlights interest in the use of spatial planning to tackle the perceived “decay” of the public sphere and the need to foster a more democratic society. In this sense, the Habermasian perspective finds resonance with postwar urban theorists such as Hans Paul Bahrdt, who strove to disentangle urban discourse from reactionary forms of antimodernism (see Bahrdt 1961 [1969]). Angelo’s survey of the field also includes Alexander Mitscherlich’s early critique of the alienating aspects of postwar urban design along with Ulfert Herlyn’s contrasting emphasis on the simultaneous rationalization of space and time through the promotion of high-rise urbanism coupled with a shorter working week that is reminiscent of the Weimar-era planner Martin Wagner’s vision for Berlin (see Mitscherlich 1965; Herlyn 1970).

An important strand to Angelo’s argument is how distinctive patterns of urban development in the Ruhr unsettled existing conceptions of urban form. The blurring of existing categories between urban and nonurban, between the bounded city and extended patterns of urbanization, and between familiar and unfamiliar forms of landscape has stimulated the development of novel conceptual vocabularies. Prominent among these new contributions inspired by urbanization patterns in the Ruhr is Sieverts’s (1997) influential Zwischenstadt thesis, which roughly translates as the “in-between-city,” and anticipates aspects of the neo-Lefebvrian critique of urban theory. For Sieverts, a holistic perspective on actually existing urban landscapes in the Ruhr and elsewhere implied a new kind of conceptual synthesis between nature and urbanized landscapes.

Angelo explores the relationship between urbanization and the development of specific ideas about nature. She questions the naturalization of the presence of nature in cities within the broader ideological context of the naturalization of capitalist urbanization. In particular, her emphasis on the historical origins and contemporary normative resonance of “greening as good” links to the significance of “travelling green urban imaginaries” (p. 205) and the current “hegemony of urbanized nature” (p. 217). She notes “the degree to which a nineteenth-century imaginary remains entrenched in contemporary urban-environmental thinking and shapes orientations toward solutions” (p. 217). Angelo’s emphasis on the limitations of inherited conceptual categories within contemporary urban discourse parallels recent critiques of aesthetic theory and the persistence of anachronistic ideas that remain attached to restricted conceptions of the human subject (see Ngai 2012).

Angelo highlights the capacity of the urban arena—broadly defined—to generate new conceptions of nature under modernity. How, though, should we characterize the dynamic relationship between urban space and global environmental discourse? Her book invites reflection on the precise role of specific historical moments or geographical locales within the wider evolution of urban environmental ideas:

But, in placing explanatory weight on the physical conditions and urban form of a specific time period, such explanations miss the extent to which greening is bound up in social processes playing out across broader spatial and temporal scales and, as a result, offer few resources for understanding how and why this idea and these practices have been able to travel so widely and remained so compelling in such a range of environments today. (p. 4)

A key question for Angelo is how the early use of nature within nineteenth-century planning discourse has subsequently evolved into a virtually ubiquitous global emphasis on the merits of urban greening. We might ask, for example, whether the nineteenth-century role of nature, especially in relation to park design, is so radically different from contemporary examples. By comparing the transformation of nineteenth-century Paris with contemporary Dubai, for instance, we encounter not only the inherent heterogeneity of capital but also the ability of capital to transform its material manifestations in the sphere of planning and landscape design.

Another very interesting element to Angelo’s argument is her reflection on the role of nature within a wider suite of strategic governmentalities under modernity:

Nature’s new status as a civic, leisure space and its appearance as presocial, uninterested, and unmediated helped make greening an important part of this suite of managerial technologies. (p. 70)

Here we find an intriguing parallel with the historian Joyce’s reading of urban history as an outcome of indirect forms of control on everyday life. Joyce (2003) adopted a Foucauldian perspective to explore the impact of technological networks such as plumbing for the shaping of the modern self. The role of nature within indirect forms of liberal governmentality such as park design offers an additional vantage point from which to reflect on the relationship between subject formation and urban consciousness.

Angelo grounds her argument in a series of landscape design projects in the Ruhr that have sought to reconfigure spaces of nature for an enlarged conception of the public realm. In relation to the widely acclaimed Emscher Park, for example, she notes:

Experientially, the new Emscher’s aesthetic of naturalness is visually consistent with other urbanized nature projects examined in this book, in that it uses green space and vegetation to create an environment meant to be experienced as pleasant, pastoral, and idyllic. (p. 166)

Similarly, in relation to the Phoenix Lake project, Angelo notes:

People’s responses suggested a tacit belief in the idea of a universal nature, that attraction to nature is a basic human experience, a commonality shared across class, ethnicity, or other forms of social difference. (p. 191)

Yet crucially she also observes how the “natural environment” of Phoenix Lake is almost entirely artificial:

As an artificial lake, Phoenix Lake is also a fragile, heavily managed ecosystem. It is kept separate from the Emscher River in order to prevent sediment from collecting. The water must be filtered once a year to remove phosphates and the growth of plants and seaweed curtailed. (p. 192)

So pervasive has the normative emphasis on urban greening become that to argue against the inclusion of various forms of constructed nature within urban design projects involves taking a position that is radically contrary to prevailing urban environmental discourse. So complete is “the hegemony of urbanized nature,” suggests Angelo, “that, to be against greening projects, you must position yourself against both the ostensible common good and everyday common sense” (p. 200). The question, then, is how the idea of urban nature as a common good became so pervasive. The answer for Angelo lies not in the realm of individual design projects but at a metalevel of analysis in relation to “a global process of sociospatial transformation” (p. 15).

A key strength of Angelo’s argument is to pivot the question of urban design away from questions of morphology or aesthetics toward the ideological resonance of specific spatial formations. Looming over North American conceptions of urban landscape is the specific legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park, which has become an influential leitmotif for nature-based design. Indeed, Angelo’s own work with New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation is revealed in the book’s acknowledgments to be a significant entry point for her own burgeoning interest in urban environmental themes. In terms of the wider historical context for new approaches to park design, Angelo “suggests that asking whether Olmsted’s ambitions could really have been universal because the park he produced was elitist is the wrong way to think about these questions. Instead, both these things are—can be, have to be—true” (p. 209). This observation moves the context for the interpretation of Olmsted’s legacy from a narrow focus on design toward the analysis of capitalist urbanization as a multifaceted set of interventions, including the refashioning of relations between nature and culture in the metropolitan arena. Implicitly, then, Angelo’s careful reading of planning and design discourse in the Ruhr region helps to dispel some of the powerful shibboleths within the North American literature such as a neoromanticist attachment to singular forms of creativity or the misreading of the urban landscape as a mosaic of protected fragments.

In reading Angelo’s book there are a series of further questions that come to mind: What cultural or material artefacts might be considered “everyday signifiers of nature” (p. 2) as part of the global articulation of urban greening? What role do disparate ecological imaginaries play in the articulation of specific kinds of normative discourse in relation to urban planning and design? Does urban greening denote singular or multiple sets of environmental imaginaries? If there are multiple natures emerging in and through the dynamics of urban space then what analytical framework should we deploy to delineate this multiplicity?

The Ruhr region has been the focal point for an extended theorization of various forms of urban “uniqueness” as part of the influential Eigenlogik (literally “self-logic”) debate within German sociology (see, e.g., Kemper and Vogelpohl 2011). Although Angelo does not reference this debate directly, she does use the term “Ruhrbanität” (p. 10) in relation to her wider reflections on the putative distinctiveness of urban development in the region. I wonder, however, whether Angelo might have underplayed the significance of Ruhr cities such as Dortmund, Essen, and Duisberg to locate her study within a neo-Lefebvrian framework that questions city-oriented approaches to urban analysis. If we look at the history of environmental thought in the Ruhr region, we can find examples of studies that have emphasized the particularities of urban and industrial landscapes in Bochum, Dortmund, and other cities. In the field of urban botany alone, for example, these cities were clearly a focus of sustained cultural and scientific curiosity at the same time as new ideas about planning and design were beginning to take shape.

In her introduction, Angelo suggests somewhat provocatively that the Ruhr region has been “failed” by the existing literature yet there is a range of critical German research on the transformation of postindustrial landscapes that suggests a more complex set of intellectual developments (see, e.g., Hauser 2001). It is telling, for instance, that many of these earlier insights were effectively ignored with the rise of “landscape urbanism” in a North American context, which exemplifies some of the asymmetries in global urban discourse that have emerged from the limited intersection between different language spheres of knowledge production (see Müller 2021). In this sense, therefore, Angelo’s study both highlights and re-creates some of the blind spots in North American (or Anglo-American) urban theory. Her framing of the study within a neo-Lefebvrian framework rests uneasily alongside the richness of the case studies that she explores, including the distinctive character of urban environmental discourse in the Ruhr. I would suggest that Angelo’s book works very effectively on its own terms, as a fascinating contribution to both planning history and urban sociology, and does not need to be read as an exemplar for neo-Lefebvrian theory.

Commentary by Nik Heynen, Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.

I used to have real sleep problems. For the most part, I have figured them out and rarely struggle to get enough sleep. That said, prior to the 2022 American Association of Geographers (AAG) session at which I first had the opportunity to discuss this extraordinary book, I woke up at 2:00 a.m. thinking about it; feeling excited about it; and honestly, really selfishly, motivated about how it helped me think about a set of research problems, questions, and “ways of being in the world” I have struggled with. It feels a bit odd to thank somebody who wakes you up at 2:00 a.m., but that’s how I want to start this review; with a big thank you to Kian Goh for writing such an important and well-thought-through book that does so many things for us.

Having never been to Southeast Asia and by extension any Southeast Asian cities, nor having spent much time in Brooklyn, as I waded into the first sentence of this wonderful book’s acknowledgments I realized I was not likely to have much direct experiential knowledge through which to formulate thoughts as I proceeded through the book. As I got deeper into the book, however, I was quickly able to relate more and more to the critical takeaway ideas and sophisticated ways in which some of the world’s most serious problems are written about. I especially started to feel stirred by the time I got to the main question being posed in the book: “In the face of climate change and uneven development and spatial urban development, how are contesting visions in urban futures produced and how do they attain power?” (p. 3). Although the book discusses specific historical-geographical insights through embodied contexts, it has wide-ranging and compressive insights to offer about all places in the ways the very best books do.

There is an especially important early proposition in the book that urbanization needs to be understood as a historically specific and dependent spatial process, and not solely as the conditions of particular places (p. 7). This is a tremendously significant logic to sit with, and sit with amidst the expression of different political projects with different political objectives. As a bit of a footnote hound, I sought out how Goh set up “the urban” and found this: “the urban is a contested process of social, spatial, ecological and economic change often far outside of the city proper” (p. 202). Through this definition, this book works within, and contributes to, an urban studies intellectual tradition that takes processes (I say again processes) of urbanization very seriously. For me, the importance of this intellectual throughline, of thinking about “change often far outside of the city” through processes of urbanization, cannot be overstated. In reading and thinking about this book I have been able to connect these ideas to my own experience over nearly the last decade doing long-term community-based research on a rural barrier island off the coast of Georgia, called Sapelo Island, which maintains the last most intact Gullah/Geechee community in the United States. While it is one of the most isolated places where I have ever spent time, it is simultaneously caught up and shaped by—and shapes—a constellation of “social, spatial, ecological and economic change” intimately tied to Savannah, Brunswick, and Atlanta, as well as other urban and quasi-urban nodes. Related to the ways Goh helps me think through this constellation, she argues, “Research must be attuned to the various spatial scales across which and sociopolitical and institutional interconnections through which these responses are articulated. They need to frame their ways of seeing and understanding around the ways in which historically determined social relationships condition unjust environmental outcomes across spatial scales and temporal period.” (p. 13).

Because the Saltwater Geechee community of Hog Hammock on Sapelo Island is under a constant barrage of interconnected economic and ecological pressures (i.e., wealthy White folks trying to dispossess Geechee residents of land and increasing flooding events related to sea-level rise), another throughline of this book I found inspiring is the emphasis and attention to not just the problems, and the ways to frame problems, but the ways in which solidarity across variously formed spatial constellations is formed and framed. To this end, Goh writes:

We often hear about the resilience of poor people confronting adversity. But these examples suggest a more proactive, positive approach to weaving together social and environmental resilience. It will not do to fetishize poverty or oppression, but it is critical to know how solidarity emerges from a collective understanding of shared histories of marginalization. (p. 85)

Goh goes on to suggest:

The dual condition of visibility and objectification in the face of social and environmental challenges and struggles demands some caution and critical assessment on the part of both activists who are fighting for communities on the ground and researchers who are looking for critical cases of resistance. (p. 87)

Here, Goh offers a steady-handed approach that is determined to offer capacity with measure and in deliberate ways. This balanced and thoughtful approach is neither often discussed in as much nuance and consideration nor put into motion in as liberatory a way.

Related to how the approach Goh offers unfolds, it feels necessary for me to highlight the stirring tone and emancipatory political voice through which Goh delivers these insights to us lest my earlier description make it sound in any way docile or passive. She writes, “the appeal to boldness is important.” In the face of the privileging that she highlights earlier in the book about how “many of the conceptual approaches to urban space and environment delineated here come from those researching and writing from the privilege of vaunted, relatively wealthy Euro-American academic institutions, often from prominent white, male scholars” (p. 19), I want to keep thinking about the call for robust and reaching thought about problems, but from a careful and humble perspective and position. This approach, or rather this aspirational ethos, so important according to Goh, can result from listening to and working closely with folks bearing the brunt of climate change. She says:

Designers should take seriously political education, including theories of social change, critical world histories, and critical pedagogies, learning how to learn from diverse, global sites. Beyond aspects of participation and engagement, more concerted attention to the places of design within broader and longer-term organizing movements for social change would open opportunities for new practices, where the specific iterative and projective process and protocols of design might well be part of emerging political movements. (pp. 180–81)

Beyond the robust spatial theoretical contributions offered in this wonderful book, a main takeaway for me is when Goh offers insights into the power and promise of a dialogical approach to place-based politics by suggesting, “It would help designers to understand better when to step back, listen, and be part of” (p. 180).

I am grateful to Kian Goh for writing this brilliant book and am excited to continue to learn from it and recommend and teach it moving forward.

Commentary by AbdouMaliq Simone, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.

Modularity of Social Imagination

In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo writes:

Greening projects are technologies of experience and impression management. They lay out ways to interact with the environment that cause people to experience places and people in particular ways, and they offer narratives of that environment—including, sometimes, the idea of society as separate from nature and, therefore, of green space as an escape from the social world—in the forms of engagement they lay out. . . . [They] also make it possible for audiences to receive these spaces as public goods rather than as acts of managerialism, in spite of the fact that users are always receiving and responding to guidance about how to view and interpret green spaces, including and perhaps even especially being directed to view them as nature. . . . Urbanized nature makes it possible for people to act in the name of the public good, which in turn primes greening projects to be well received in spite of their inevitable shortcomings and imperfections. As a result of this imaginary, nature’s fundamental good is never questioned, making it possible to sustain a belief in the basic experience of nature as pleasurable and beneficial even in the face of highly compromised projects and materially unequal outcomes.

I identify three characteristics of nature that contribute to these dynamics. First is nature’s long-standing ideology of lying outside the social, which helps offer it up as a universally beneficial medium of social improvement in the first place. Second is the fact that greening projects occupy the space-time of leisure. Whether green spaces are designated as public or private or for individual or collective use, because they are physically and temporally separate from both work and home and their social relationships, it is generally possible to sustain an idea of these spaces as separate from social interests as well—as segregated from economic questions and forms of race, class, and gender inequality. Third is that the widespread belief in nature’s universal benefit is not simply an abstraction; it is reinforced by phenomenological experiences of nature as pleasurable and as “improvement even in the absence of urbanized nature, access to nature was part of a package of tools of managerial control.”

I am in a city of a half-million surrounded by green and green projects—proyek hijau—the rendering sustainable of lives repeatedly broken by a form of colonial rule, a city broken in its own hit-and-run ethos. “Natives” must thus return to the ground up, translating a supposed history of tending gardens to tending to the trappings of citizenship never to be self-determined; small projects that inevitably will last barely a year, for greening framed as greenbacks perhaps goes nowhere but back to green, back to the roots. It is not a city unless it becomes green, unless people behave in such a way as to associate the intrinsic value of urbanization with a capacity to live with nature rather than extruding it as some kind of externality. At the same time, there is a prevailing sense that nature always threatens to engulf the city; that its association with nativity and unruliness, beyond the disciplining apparatuses, will render any infrastructure eventually deficient, and therefore the proper mode of inhabitation is to extract what one can as quickly as possible. One just has to spend a few minutes with John Akomfrah’s triptych film, The Vertigo Sea, to be overwhelmed by the implicit terror of nature. So what is broken, what is refuse, is a reassuring sign of endurance, for even if no longer useful in a concretely instrumental sense, it is a sign that the built still dominates and wards off any threatening incursion.

Nature as racialized—in terms of the proper place for Blackness, permanently ineligible to inhabit the city or to do so only by transporting certain natural products to urban streets to sell—even as certain natives have long clustered in intensely urbanized formats having themselves been composed genealogically as the intersections of multiple flows across water. Even this selling is limited, though. Any fruit and vegetable imaginable is available, even in the plots that are retained within the city limits—but these rarely appear in any market or food stall, as expensive imports underpin the conventional cuisines of the migrants who dominate economic life. Nature as racialized in its seeming obviation of the built, a relationship that requires only a minimal physical detachment, some planks of wood or tin, an inhabitation absorbed by an ecology that does not include the materialization of metabolic systems encased in cement, steel, wires, and plastic tubing, even as these elements are frequently dismantled in the middle of the night and traded in nocturnal markets deep in the bush.

Duri Pulo: Green as a Haunting. Subtraction

Angelo writes:

The Revierparks were understood to play a role in this transformation by helping make structural change “comprehensible” and by providing phenomenal experiences of structural change, an urban future where everyone was included as positive and as something that all could participate in. . . . Urbanized nature is a social imaginary in the definitional sense (shared; agentic; making social action possible), but rather than a specific imaginary of society or social institutions—such as markets, states, or nations—it makes a set of material referents into a mode of collective expression, a way of expressing desires, a social form through which to communicate normative visions of society in general.

The final scene of Tsai Ming-Liang’s 1994 film Vive L’Amour consists of nine minutes of a desolate young woman walking through a park, not yet or not ever green, suspended in the time of removal of a once thriving working-class neighborhood, a place impossible to tell what time has and will make it. There is a sense here of her character’s lack of power, although she is attempting to make money from Taiwan’s speculative property boom of the 1990s, and she is one of many agents in a similar position, unable to sell properties that have been built for investment and are likely to remain empty and eventually abandoned. Set against this temporal ambiguity affected by clear trajectories of erasure, the woman sobs and sobs, and Tsai zooms in on the affective intensity of this moment, and the failure of nature to absorb it, to take it in, to extend itself as an overarching setting that might allow her to feel connected to the world. The viewer can feel the texture of her hair and bodily fluids, made more acute by the foregrounding of the sounds of her crying, sniffing, and blowing her nose. As viewers, our entire senses are engaged in this corporeal convulsion as her image is projected on us. Yet the cathartic potential, the mobilization of this outpouring, goes nowhere, neither in some pastoral reassertion nor existential determination. The only green is the trace of snot on her hand as she lights a cigarette, now prepared to resume the emptiness.

No wonder there is an almost habitual emphasis on greenfields, offered so frequently by the stable of UN Habitat mayors who deem the current dispositions of urban fabric much too complicated and messy for any conceivable programs of rectification to take hold. Better to start anew where things can be made right where nothing now exists, in a reiteration of the imaginary of the frontier, always empty and available. Too often, though, this itself is a hesitant project, replete with projects and infrastructures that either do not work or prematurely fall apart. In many urban regions, extended terrains, no matter how densely populated, remain officially either rural land or other nonurban designations, and there are so many instances of housing and commercial developments operating in a vacuum of jurisdiction, and maintenance soon returning to the bush. Here greening is both a sign of failure and an impetus to try again, as if the landscape demonstrates some inordinate capacity to absorb whatever is done to it, and therefore the possibility to act impulsively and recklessly. Sometimes these redos are less aspirational, less indicative of an imagined future, than simply something that can be done, before someone else does it, a kind of hit-and-run operation, an impatience with leaving things alone. Yet they are also capable of engendering “unnatural” contiguities—relationalities that are difficult to categorize and map, which often seem to mirror the rhizomatic patterns of natural substrates rather than arboreal figurations of urban development.

Eisenheim

In a discussion of the Eisenheim movement, Angelo writes:

Instead, “communal forms of association grow” from digging a plot of land, designing a garden shed, throwing a garden party, or exchanging fruit and flowers. The cultivation of an imagination through the possibilities of play. (p. 125)

In the very heart of the old urban core, right behind the city’s sprawling main market, is a wide expanse of semiforested land, nearly resembling a classic city park, verdant and rambling, which is the traditional home of one of the indigenous groups, now primarily settled by a loose knit network of Rastafarians, hip-hop artists, hustlers, civil servants, layabouts, fisherman, and cultivators. Some come from households with a fair amount of money, whereas others are and have always been dirt poor. The grounds consist of all types of makeshift constructions—shacks, huts, three-story wooden apartment blocks, simple bamboo shelters, and more elaborate edifices constructed from shells and discarded materials. In the last instance the land is inalienable, as this is officially adat land, cemented to the use of whatever lineage can legitimately display connection to the subclan to which this area was formally ceded (Kusumaryati 2020). Although this clan has been dispossessed of most of their customary holdings, this expanse at perhaps one of the most strategic locations in the city has largely been forgotten because, as one migrant taxi driver put it, “they are not interested in developing themselves.” “They have not only forgotten the significant education that the nation has provided them, they have forgotten the industriousness and the ways of life of their ancestors, they simply lay about, scavenging and thieving.”

One of the ironies of the area is that it is both widely accessible and impenetrable at the same time. The “community,” if you want to call it that, has helped build a walkway along the inlets from the sea plied by longboats carrying goods and passengers from outlying islands to the center of the market, and from this walkway much of the interior of the area is visible and open, yet still recessed, not because it is foreboding, but because it is such an anomaly in the larger surroundings. Just a short distance across the northern boundary is a typical rickety and overcrowded neighborhood of the seafaring migrants, whose density of cultivated dilapidation stands in stark contrast to the near pastoral setting of this clan neighborhood. Lambert, an artisan who fashions bamboo beds sold in the nearby market, claims that “we have everything we need, we store rain water, we make compost-based sanitation systems, we have every food we might desire.”

Indeed, residents were always tinkering with things, as well as leaving things alone. Wilson, with an unspecified occupation and who grew up in faraway hill country, talked about the district as being a place of “spontaneous combustion.” Many elders had gone elsewhere to concrete houses on demarcated plots with cars, leaving the young ones to manage, and they did so by rendering all kinds of people extended family whose wheeling and dealing with each other about responsibilities and rights sometime led to prolonged arguments, even violence, that seemed to have always been resolved by rearranging things—space, household compositions, and tasks—as no one was that interested in taking charge of anything except their own singular rhythms and pastimes. Lambert says that any dispute was always easily forgotten, as was the assignation of specific authority and tasks to specific individuals. Things happened, as Wilson claims, in “their own time.” What was particularly important in their ethos was the sense that they could largely live as they wanted because the city has forgotten them. Perhaps this was partially true, for indeed the potential value of this land, given its location and size, was always being concretely depreciated in the frustration of scores of developers more than willing to pull out the big bucks, the political clout, and deep reserves of deviousness to take hold of this property.

First, those to whom the land was ceded and entrusted fell in the gaps between different branches of the clan that had gone their own way. On top of this, countless numbers of bureaucrats always seemed to forget where essential documents had been deposited. In efforts to go around negotiations with Moi customary authorities, surveyors would often inexplicably forget to bring certain equipment, key actors would forget to show up at meetings, incoming municipal administrations would forget what the previous ones had decided, and litigants would forget to file the essential paperwork. This meshwork of forgetting buttressed the reputation of the area as a place of “no good.” Inhabited by residents deemed incapable of making anything useful happen, the area accreted layer upon layer of attributions that any project would likely and quickly face its own demise.

It was not only a matter of being forgotten, though. For the residents were not interested in any kind of recognition of their efforts, rights, or endurance. The claim of being forgotten was always accompanied by the invocation that they themselves had forgotten about being forgotten; that it did not matter to them; that they were, as Lambert put it, “called upon” for other purposes, although who calls and for what objective was also something forgotten. There was simply a call that came through the sudden twisting of leaves in a vegetable garden, or the piercing sounds of cicada in the trees, or in the sudden appearance of a small child having momentarily turned completely white, or in a frail woman sitting in silence on a porch having walked seven straight days from the hill country. One could respond or not, and there was no sense about how adequate the response might be to the objectives intended by the call, for each call could quickly change its mind in terms of what it might want from that to whom it was issued.

Wilson indicated that such calls never came at the “right time,” that even if they were expected, there was something unruly and surprising about when they actually turned up. There was no time that was the right time, and so the area did not so much live according to rights (or wrongs) but exigencies, the sense that something needed to be done right now; whether it was actually done or not did not seem to matter. You could forget about it, as there would be more calls, more inexhaustible opportunities nature would provide.

Commentary by Malini Ranganathan , School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, USA.

Across the social sciences, urban regions have become focal points for the study of climate justice, or the idea that because historically marginalized residents face disproportionate social and ecological threats, their well-being must be centered in any climate response. Scholarship on urban climate justice has typically delved into single case studies, uncovering the underlying racial and economic inequalities facing vulnerable residents and the resulting production of extreme weather disasters. A case in point is Klinenberg’s (2002) landmark study, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. The book denaturalizes the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave, recounting how the city’s deep-rooted racial segregation and selective neglect by politicians caused an astonishingly high death toll in some of the poorest, most disinvested Black neighborhoods. Klinenberg’s book and a wave of postdisaster studies remind us that, like COVID-19, climate events do not occur in a vacuum; they are layered on top of and exacerbate preexisting structural injustices. Similarly, top-down climate policy and planning can advance status quo interests, including those of real estate businesses, consultants, and the elite, unless challenged and held accountable from below.

What the existing literature has not illuminated so far, however, is how the climate fortunes of quite disparate urban areas are linked: how climate disaster and climate proofing in one corner of the world are indelibly connected, politically, ideologically, and materially, to another. Kian Goh, an architect and urban scholar by training, gives us a new story of climate justice. Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice argues that we cannot consider city responses to climate change in isolation. This carefully woven and lucidly written study brings into conversation the lofty design visions and alternative grassroots “counterplans” of two major cities facing climate threats: New York City and Jakarta. It does so through triangulation and reflexive engagement with a third and influential node of climate urbanism: Rotterdam. The fabled “floating” city in the Netherlands, Rotterdam lies below sea level, making it a global showcase of climate resilience and a celebrated paradigm of “living with water.” The Dutch, once a colonial presence in both North America and Indonesia, continue to play a pivotal role in funding, advising, and promoting climate interventions in New York (known at one time as Nieuw Amsterdam) and Jakarta. Goh traces the flow of ideas and “network formations” comprising Dutch, American, and Indonesian designers and government officials; global philanthropy initiatives such as C40’s Connecting Delta Cities program housed in Rotterdam; and the cross-border policy and planning adoptions enabled by these networks. She shows us that climate plans do not develop in single sites; they are evolved through “inter-referencing” (Roy and Ong 2011). They borrow and adapt globally circulating imaginaries, languages, and models. Interreferencing between urban spaces is not apolitical, however: It traverses violent histories of colonial conquest, neoliberal imperatives, and unequal power relationships both between and within cities. Urban interreferencing is never unburdened from these histories but rather is forged from and through them.

Goh focuses on a set of climate events—watershed moments, literally—that changed the face of design in each of these cities, while also thickening the formation of global networks: Hurricane Sandy in 2012 (in the case of New York) and devastating floods of 2007 and 2013 (in the case of Jakarta). In the wake of each event, dominant plans—Rebuild by Design in New York and the Giant Sea Wall in Jakarta—sought to fortify each city against future threats, also spurring economic growth and business opportunities. Counterplans also arose, however, to center social justice concerns and housing coalitions for the poor in each city, while articulating a critique of systemic oppression that would not have otherwise been forwarded by these technocratic plans. Goh does not separate each set of responses as strictly top-down and bottom-up, nor does she offer easy judgments on each. Rather, her central contention is that design offers an avenue for political organizing (“it literally provides space for it” [p. 166], as she puts it succinctly, in reference to a community center that she and her architectural team designed in Red Hook, New York, one of the neighborhoods subsequently most heavily affected by Hurricane Sandy). Climate-related design, in other words, provides a necessary platform, if not a physical space, for the performance of contentious politics. This is what Goh names a “political ecology of design.”

In the aftermath of Sandy, Rebuild by Design was launched as a city-wide competition to elicit proposals for planning a stronger and more resilient New York. Funded in part by the U.S. federal government and in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, Rebuild by Design sought to bridge the knowledge of international architecture and engineering experts, like its principal architect Henk Ovink—who, not coincidentally, is Dutch—with local imperatives and community engagement. Taking qualitative research seriously, Rebuild by Design also recruited Eric Klinenberg as an advisor. Meanwhile, the Indonesian Giant Sea Wall (also known as the Great Garuda for its aerial view resembling the mythical bird and cultural symbol of Indonesia) is also designed by a Dutch architecture firm. Intended to control sea-level rise and coastal flooding, the Giant Sea Wall purports to engage local stakeholders and account for Jakarta’s empirical realities, ultimately seeking to transfer intellectual and symbolic ownership from the Dutch to the Indonesians, as its proponents hope. In other words, both dominant plans intersect with and seek to engage, at least on the surface, with poorer, grassroots stakeholders and their processes that exist outside of formal institutions. In this way, Goh is careful not to dismiss dominant plans for their high modernism or exclusionary nature. She adds nuance and perspective to the qualitative art of “studying up” by providing space for elite designers and architects to voice their views. She also gives space to the many grassroots actors in New York and Jakarta involved in staging alternate visions. In Jakarta, for instance, we meet kampung (informal settlement) activists, such as those in the UPC and Ciliwung Merdeka, who are organizing to confront eviction and flooding threats posed to their informal settlements by the Giant Sea Wall.

For the reader, one of the challenges of Form and Flow is that it is not symmetrical and does not embark on a neat comparative case strategy. The political-economic circumstances and state–market constellations surrounding New York’s Rebuild by Design and Jakarta’s Giant Sea Wall, each complex in themselves, are vastly different; the counterplans undertaken by and stakes involved for the grassroots actors are also vastly different and, in effect, incomparable to one another. For example, whereas it appears that kampung activism is directly affected by the Great Garuda in Jakarta (indeed informal settlements would be submerged or evicted by the building of the sea wall), activists in the Red Hook Initiative and Good Old Lower East Side, two community organizations studied in New York, do not seem to interact in the same manner with Rebuild by Design. It is not always easy, then, to glean specific lessons from the joint study of these cases on the dynamics of plans and counterplans, apart from broad, although nevertheless important, conclusions that history matters and design is political. Because of the multiple cases covered in the book, we also learn little about how particular varieties of U.S. racial real estate capitalism or Indonesian postdictatorial and poststructural adjustment capitalism or European welfare capitalism influence climate planning and grassroots political mobilizations. This is perhaps what the reader is left wanting to hear more of. Yet what we might lose in the book’s asymmetrical approach or in its suturing of disparate sites in sometimes imbalanced ways also serves as the book’s greatest strength. For too long, social scientists have been disciplined into the notion that comparative case design has to follow a perfect formula involving “most like” or “most unlike” cases. This has constrained our imaginative potential to analyze cases relationally and through what McFarlane (2010) referred to as urban “learning,” in which particular insights from one case prompt us to ask new theoretical questions of another, especially across the North–South divide that so rigidly divides urban scholarship. Goh’s book invites scholars to be experimental, transgressive, and bold in multiple-case-study design—indeed, she contends that we cannot study the politics of climate resilience without a transnational and relational approach. This, ultimately, is the book’s greatest contribution and one that will be of immense value to a current and future generation of scholars invested in the transnational politics of design for climate justice.

Commentary by Roger Keil , Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto, Canada.

Hillary Angelo’s How Green Became Good is a superb achievement. The book traces the “unusual urbanism” of the Ruhr area from its initial urbanization in the nineteenth century to its postindustrial regeneration, continuously relating this unusual urbanity to the material environment(s) of the region and the ideas that have been associated with both city and nature. Presenting in great detail more than 100 years of real historical development in Germany’s once most industrialized urban belt and respecting an equally long-standing sociological, historiographical, and geographical discussion in Germany and newer English language work about those developments, Angelo tells a fresh story of the Ruhr. In conversation both with U.S. (and UK) sociology’s leading traditions and the shifting German scholarly and policy debates on the Ruhr, Angelo develops and defends the thesis that the greening of the Ruhr—its “urbanized nature”—is not so much a product of moving deliberately away from urban (industrial) reality but its very essence and distinctive quality. In doing so, Angelo provides an alternative narrative of the historical geographies and sociological imaginaries of Western urbanism to the ones developed from the center of Chicago (the Chicago School) and the expanse of Los Angeles (the LA School) in the twentieth century and rewrites the parameters of urban theory and its treatment of nature accordingly. I am confident that this book will become a standard work in urban, environmental, and sociological studies.

Angelo’s book is, among other things, about an “aspirational” urbanism, in which the urban future appears as a project. In this context, the book reminds us that “contemporary greening is best understood as the global spread of [a] historically Euro-American imaginary” (p. 206). In Angelo’s words, “urbanized nature—a shared understanding of everyday signifiers of nature as indirect, aspirational, and universal goods—actually makes greening possible” (p. 207). As we, on the one hand, expand our view of what is green in urbanized nature and take “[m]any other forms of urban and nonurban nature—climate chaos, weeds, empty lots” into view, we must, on the other hand, restrain our “urge to reach for green as a fix for all manner of social and ecological problems in the first place” (p. 215).

In my comments here, and betraying my own preoccupations, I would like to focus on three points in light of some themes that are raised in the book. In that, I use How Green Became Good as an inspiration to look ahead into the “aspirational” futures of the urbanized nature that await. First, how is this book a contribution to the ongoing debate conversation in UPE? Second, I use Angelo’s discussion of the Ruhr to speak about the proliferation of the types of urban form that the Ruhr area might have been the first to experience, at least at the scale at which it happened over the past 150 years. Third, what do we learn from the COVID-19 crisis in terms of the greening of cities and the urbanization of nature?

First, what does Angelo’s book tell us about the P in UPE? It raises interesting (and largely open) questions about how democracy is linked to spatial and ecological projects. Through Angelo’s critical reading of Habermas, we learn that the public sphere is not always synonymous with public space, and it does not need to be urban in the conventional sense of the word. The imagination of the modern city that underlies Habermas’s understanding of the democratic public sphere places nature somewhere outside of that city. One might say that it is particularly nonnatural to be in that sort of urban place, and to be democratic means to be urban. Angelo’s magnificent “Tour de Ruhr” challenges such certainties and poses new inquiries about urban society and its democratic politics.

Second, then, the book raises questions—critical ones no less—about a form of urbanism that has now become ubiquitous, but for which the Ruhr might have been a prototype: the Zwischenstadt, a term popularized by Sieverts (2003), who called it an “urbanized landscape or the landscaped city” (xi). To Angelo, what is important is that the Zwischenstadt “flips the relationship of city and countryside” (p. 156). My question here would be, given Angelo’s urbanist over cityist predisposition, whether the actual dissolution of the classical city into the nonurban countryside is part of the urbanization of nature as understood in UPE. Moreover, it entices me to ask about whether such an enmeshed rural–urban landscape creates the basis for a new networked politics that escapes the classical polis–politics nexus of the central square and the urban forum. The spatial disbanding that is the Zwischenstadt is further undergirded by a temporal dissolution that comes with the switch from a cityist to an urban perspective. The urban is about history and time. In that sense, like David Harvey and others before her, Angelo redirects our view from the city as place to urbanization as process. In an extension of what I asked about the P in UPE earlier, we might ask what kind of an urban politics the urban process generates. It is particularly important that Angelo treats the “Ruhr also as a case of urban greening in the absence of a city” (p. 9). The relevance of this line of questioning is crucial to asking how we can imagine the metabolisms of an increasingly decentralized urban society in an age of concentrated climate change challenges.

Finally, the greening of cities into more “hygienic” places intersected historically with health reforms (see, e.g., Gandy 2022). Although this connection is not explicitly explored in How Green Became Good, Angelo’s book was dropped into the middle of the world’s biggest public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. This created a particular window of interpretive context that, in my view, deserves a closer look. The pandemic created a reorganization of the spatial grammar of cities, in which the relationship of urban green space as public space played a particular role. Parks became repositories of practices where new forms of regulation and wilding were practiced as locked-down urbanites sought outlets for recreation and mobility. Health and green space became tied into a tapestry of new urban practices in which urbanization’s conventional trajectories were tested: The usual imbrications of densities, compactness, verticality, and urbanity did not serve survival under the pandemic threat well. Parks—together with cycling infrastructure and outdoor dining, for example—became a focus of a particular kind of intervention that pointed beyond the medical strategies of pandemic response such as vaccination. In this sense green once again became good and healthy. It was in this context that I read Angelo’s astute analysis of how the greening of the Ruhr in the latter part of the twentieth century initiated a process of moving a region from a culture of work to a culture of recreation and leisure, bringing social reproduction into the focus of politics. The way in which Angelo analyzes the structural change in a postindustrializing Ruhr, the Strukturwandel, might have been an unintended blueprint for the structural upheavals the pandemic brought to cities when up to half of the workforce and most students were staying home for work and education, turning the classical reproductive sphere into the workplace. Accordingly, the urban outside became an enlarged living room for physical and cultural activities in open space for many. This created the kind of semipublic spaces, the Halböffentlichkeiten of green rooms that were the experience in the proletarian “colonies” of the Ruhr (re)discoved by Habermas’s disciples (and critics) Negt and Kluge in their distinctive critique of the rigid public–private divides usually inscribed in the debate on public space (pp. 122–23).

Angelo’s work is current and aspirational in the sense that she has introduced the term herself. It is current as it situates our current preoccupations with greening in both the historical and genealogical trajectories of the concept in the twentieth century and beyond. Angelo’s discussion prefigures and instigates the types of comparative conversations Vicenzotti (2022) invited between German, Swedish, and Canadian planners in a recent essay. In aspirational terms, Angelo’s book remains a guidepost in discussions we will continue to have in cities about “real” natural parks or fabricated landscapes that operate with a lexicon of nature in their arsenal but deliver techno-scientific utopias. Angelo’s discussion of the artificial Phoenix Lake, centerpiece of the regeneration of the Phoenix steel mill in the north of Dortmund, once a “wildly popular new amenity in the city,” later contested site of green gentrification and a drain on municipal coffers, offers insights into similar types of projects that are now debated everywhere, it seems, as cities once more attempt to create green natures of various kinds. In Toronto, where I live, for example, a project by a European spa company, pushed by the Provincial government, threatens to destroy Ontario Place, a 1970s public waterfront park from the same period as the social democratic greening in the Ruhr, to replace it with what a local journalist calls, with reference to local and global tourist hot spots, “a hybrid of St. Anne’s Spa and Great Wolf Lodge wrapped in a ‘White Lotus’ esthetic” (Keenan 2022). Remarkably, and true to the core of what Angelo tells us in How Green Became Good, those who disparage the impending spa and those who bemoan the demise of the modernist “green” park operate on a very similar rhetorical terrain where the city meets nature, human and otherwise.

How Green Became Good is exactly the kind of book that must be in the core curriculum of the Faculty of Urban Environmental Change where I teach. It touches on most conceptual and empirical complexities with which such a faculty has to grapple without succumbing to the disciplinary constraints of any particular academic tradition like urban geography or environmental sociology. I am grateful to Hillary Angelo to have written such a wonderful book, and I cannot wait until I have the conversations I invoked here and more with my students in the classroom.

Commentary by Jennifer L. Rice , Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.

Hillary Angelo and Kian Goh, together and on their own, have emerged as leaders in critical urban studies scholarship on nature and the environment. In a 2021 coauthored paper, they wrote: “Both of us, in our research, engage with positional, situated knowledge production, and we do so using planetary urbanization frameworks—taking this theory to places critics argue it has not yet gone, or cannot go” (Angelo and Goh 2021, 738). Their 2021 solo authored books provide indisputable proof they are succeeding at this important endeavor.

In How Green Became Good, Angelo’s main concern is how and why the idea and practice of urban greening has become normatively “good” and understood as universally beneficial. For Goh in Form and Flow, the analysis is concerned with the multiscalar, multisited, and contested ways that urban visions of climate policy emerge. Even as their foci are quite different, both books ask questions about complex networks of people and ideas, how they move across time and space, and why marginalization and unevenness persist in most approaches to urban environmental governance. Here, I examine three areas of productive conversation among the books that, together, push our knowledge of urban studies of nature in new directions. I hope to show how the books on their own and together offer new understandings of cities, nature, social justice, and multiscalar politics.

Conceptual Approach

Conceptual rigor and innovation are key to both Angelo’s and Goh’s analyses. Both books draw heavily across critical social sciences, but in Angelo’s case we see the importance of the historical, whereas in Goh’s it is the centrality of the political. These different but complementary lenses draw out the sociopolitical connections across time and space that craft our deeply uneven urban environments.

Angelo uses urban and historical sociology to evaluate questions about the pervasiveness of “green as good sentiments” (p. 12). Anchored in a 150-year longitudinal comparison of greening efforts in Germany’s Ruhr valley, Angelo’s approach is “designed to highlight similarities rather than differences … [making] it possible to identify recurrent patterns in greening’s social logics and consequences” (p. 12). In other words, tracing historical material connections is necessary to understand the present conjuncture of urban greening. Angelo then offers us the idea of urbanized nature as a key feature of why green is good—that is, how greening projects, from garden cities, to parks, to the revitalization of degraded natural amenities, are central to the production of the city and the residents within it (i.e., urbanization itself). Nature is not merely a response to urban problems, but rather, social imaginaries of nature as universal, moral, and aspirational are central to the contestation among different ideas of what the city should be and for whom. As Angelo states about urbanized nature, “multiple social visions [for the city] can be communicated through green space at the same time” (p. 108).

For Goh, it is the political that takes center stage, as her conceptual framework draws across a range of critical approaches to social science, climate governance, and urban planning. Power, and the networks that produce and contest it, are evaluated on every page. Capitalism, neoliberalism, and uneven development are key to the production of marginalization and inequality in the climate-changed city. “Resiliency” to climate change is always a loaded term. Goh’s framework shows us that global–urban networks of expertise and experience can be traced for their role in producing competing visions for climate policy and justice. Goh’s deep and complex engagement of a variety of literatures leads us to one of the primary frames of the book—a political ecology of design—which is how we can “envision new possibilities and futures” (p. 18).

When we consider the books’ conceptual work together, we get a deeper and more complete picture of why the historical and the political are always relevant. Angelo and Goh, using different theoretical tools, provide important analyses of how visions for urban futures are created, who they benefit, and how we might imagine otherwise. We learn that we must look back in time and across a multitude of present-day sociopolitical practices to understand uneven urban natures.

Case Study

Three is the magic number, at least for Angelo’s and Goh’s approaches to their case studies. In How Green Became Good we are offered analysis of three historical eras. Angelo first takes us to the days of industrialization, where she argues that Ruhr’s transition to a garden city happened not because of industrialization’s pollution, slums, and other problems (as is commonly thought), but because elites believed it would bring them in line with more modern and bourgeoisie ideas of the city emerging around the world. We are then guided through the years of deindustrialization, where Angelo evaluates the role that urban parks played in attempts to build a public and democratic sphere amid increased leisure time. Finally, Angelo brings us firmly into the present-day neoliberal era of urban greening. She shows how entrenched ideas of urbanized nature as a universal public good allow urban professionals “to understand themselves as acting benevolently and in the public interest … rather than exercising forms of control by projecting futures and organizing experience in particular ways” (p. 171). This leads us to the provocative argument that urbanized nature is so universally accepted as good that “it became politically dangerous to be against it” (p. 200)—a conclusion carefully constructed through comparing three time periods.

Goh’s book seamlessly moves the reader between three cities: New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam. In each one we meet a variety of people producing and contesting urban futures under climate change. Goh examines the sociopolitical networks that connect the three cities and the place-based knowledge and experiences that distinguish them. This culminates in deeply descriptive illustrations of the everyday activities, power–knowledge networks, and site-specific organizing that constitute climate action. Looking across the three cities also prompts Goh to foreground interrelationships, arguing that “Particular place-based conflicts, although often revealing in and of themselves, may well be conditioned by a broader and longer-term set of relationships” (p. 17). A single analysis of any one of these cities would have shed enormous light on the production of socioecological marginalization in urban climate action, but the tripart analysis identifies a more complex and complete global–urban network with enormous power and influence.

Together, Angelo’s evaluation of three historical periods and Goh’s exploration of three sites show us the importance of comparison in critical urban studies work. The books offer inspiration and guidance for those looking to improve their analytical approaches through comparison, and compelling evidence that it deepens our understandings of urban processes.

Possibilities

For both Angelo and Goh, critique is never the endgame. Rather, they are both deeply concerned about justice, equity, and building better cities for everyone.

In Angelo’s final chapter, we are given something of a toolkit for what can be done to address social and environmental issues without reproducing inequality and exclusivity. We are told to “green better” by striving for inclusivity and access, but provocatively, we are also told to “green less” (p. 215); that is, to resist the urge—the social practice and imaginary—that solutions to social problems can always be found in nature. We need to be louder about the fact that, when greening is put on the table, it shuts down other options for achieving social goods. We are offered a call to action to work together to shatter the idea that urbanized nature always serves as a universal benefit to everyone in the same way and to engage in deeper and more complicated conversations about how our democratic processes can get us to a better future (with or without urbanized nature).

Goh ends her book in a similar fashion, offering several conceptual frameworks and political strategies for climate justice. Goh’s notion of counterplans resonates with the work of Angelo, as it also asks us to consider contestation of established ideas and practices in climate governance. Counterplans “offer ways of conceiving risk and resilience that integrally encompass the agency and voice of their constituents. They continually foreground a different, grounded viewpoint” (p. 165). Never losing site of the actual lives, actions, experiences, and practices of everyday people harmed by climate change and our responses to it, Goh also asks us to do the real work of building relationships and imagining designs that can counter the dominance of neoliberal, elite forms of planning for climate change. The productions of plans and counterplans, and by extension the designs that support these visions, are always political, and always up for negotiation. We leave Goh’s analysis with clear marching orders that “The counterplans are urban movements … they are struggles over urban processes and spaces” (p. 167, italics added).

Together, Angelo’s and Goh’s engagement with alterative possibilities sharpens our conceptual and analytical tool kits to genuinely consider what produces more just outcomes in relation to urban nature. They both ask us to confront our assumptions about how and why we do the work and to look creatively at the possibilities that always exist when we can summon the guts to resist the status quo.

By Way of Conclusion

Returning to their 2021 coauthored paper, we can actually see the connections between these two books quite clearly. They wrote, “we see the ‘planetary’ aspects of planetary urbanization not as foreclosing the possibility of alternative social practices or occluding everyday life, but as inviting scholars to expose and center everyday struggles as an inevitable part of plural, multiscalar processes” (Angelo and Goh 2021, 743). Both books offer deep dives into this project as they move across time and space. Together, they offer a robust and multifaceted critical analysis of nature, cities, power, and inequality from the vantage point of multiscalar politics. On their own, they each offer rigorous theoretic and methodological approaches and rich case studies, and when read together, they offer rich frameworks, analysis, and future visions.

Response by Hillary Angelo , Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, and Kian Goh , Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

What an honor to have this set of comments on these two books, and what a delightful, intoxicating experience to read them together. It is a pleasure to have people we are in conversation with, who we trust, and whose work we read and admire, to engage our work. Many of them participated on the AAG panels where this forum originated and we are excited, several years later, to see these reviews in print.

We wanted to have this joint forum as part of the effort of building comradely, collaborative intellectual community and as an example of the kind of collective work that we think is necessary. Our collaboration has so far included conference panels, a coauthored paper (Angelo and Goh 2021), and more in the works—and doing this forum together, and encouraging the books to be read together, is part of this political and intellectual project.

Substantively, we hoped readers and reviewers would find the pairing generative due to the books’ similarities and their different emphases. The two books broadly share their subject matter—that is, the urban-environmental—and have a shared commitment to relational, political, and multiscalar urban-epistemological inquiry. Drawing out the issues that link both books and encouraging people to read them side by side was the main rationale for doing this joint forum.

As David Wachsmuth says in his introduction, these two books offer “contrasting yet complementary” examinations of the politics of urban nature under capitalism. As reviewers highlight, or as their own work reflects, other shared concerns include negotiations around imaginaries of nature and their links with ideal futures (Koslov, Sevilla-Buitrago) and the examination of how those ideal futures are designed, planned, and made material (Paprocki). Both books are importantly place-based, but both transcend place-bound history per se—there are relational, networked aspects in both (Koslov, Anand). Both books are oriented toward political possibilities and demands (Paprocki, Rice). We appreciate how the two books invited reviewers to think about their own sites and questions (e.g., Koslov [2016] on “managed retreat” on Staten Island; Heynen on the constellation of struggles among the Gullah/Geechee on Sapelo Island [see Hardy and Heynen 2022]).

We also acknowledge that the reviewers noted the distinct and complementary aspects of the books. How Green Became Good offers a more sustained historical analysis of the emergence, travel, and transformation of environmental ideas. Form and Flow offers a more sustained engagement with the geography of global, multiscalar conflicts. We think these are both are important principles, and reflecting on these issues in the course of this dialogue and our ongoing conversations has pushed both of us (and, we hope, readers) to expand our thinking in new ways. For us, both books are also about new ways to see “the city.” As Roger Keil notes in his review, they build on long-standing debates about the nature of the city—Chicago and LA Schools (Keil), methodological cityism (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015) and planetary urbanization (Brenner and Schmid 2015)—and, now, urgent questions about the environmental politics of cities in a time of climate change (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2020; Goh forthcoming).

We now respond to a couple of key points. Matthew Gandy, in his review of How Green Became Good, asks several questions related to the distinctiveness of urban ecologies in particular places versus more general features of these practices and forms. How varied might “everyday signifiers of nature” be? How might we reconcile this book’s argument about the “wider evolution of urban environmental ideas” with the “precise role of specific historical moments or geographical locales” in different places? AbdouMaliq Simone’s review, a lyrical reflection on environmental practices in Indonesia, points toward answers to these questions. He observes dynamics that I (Hillary) document but also highlights other ones. Rather than formally inclusive state projects, Simone describes, essentially, greenwashing: a green veneer of sustainability on “lives repeatedly broken by colonial rule.” He describes the flip side of desirable forms of greening: the terror of nature and violent exclusions and erasures it underwrites, such as greenfields as a frontier imaginary. He points to another form of association, beyond top-down or bottom-up visions of bourgeois or proletarian publics: “forgotten” people, on “forgotten” land, who are not interested in formal rights or recognition at all.

To me, these observations underscore the diversity and robust ideological power of nature, as well as complementarities between ideographic versus nomothetic, or particularizing versus generalizing, impulses in scholarship. Although it is a portrait of a specific place, How Green Became Good is oriented, analytically, toward the general. The book aims to identify commonalities in greening practices across various concrete instantiations, and terms such as “everyday signifiers of nature” are deliberately left broad to leave room for this kind of concrete diversity. As Gandy’s questions gesture toward, and as Simone’s response reflects, environmental practices and concerns always get filtered through, and take place within, the specific relations, histories, and ecologies of particular locations. If the analytic objective is particularizing, place-based, or conjunctural, there is a point where historiography, ethnography, and ecology can and should take over. Simone’s response also underscores how much more there is to be said about the darker sides of greening that How Green Became Good does not address, as well as its intersections with different types of power. New work on carceral and military ecologies, as well as decolonial and abolition ecologies (including by several contributors to this forum), is one site where scholars are extending the foundational insights of UPE with such goals in mind.

Malini Ranganathan, in her review of Form and Flow, comments that the structure of this book might pose a challenge to readers who are looking for more direct and clear comparisons between the sites or more in-depth accounts of their histories. Ranganathan notes, correctly, the incomparability of some of the aspects presented among the sites. Further, she points out the lack of more particular details about each site, how dominant modes of capitalism in the United States, Indonesia, and the Netherlands might inform planning and grassroots actions. Both are important points. For the first, I (Kian) have stressed that the sites and narratives are not to be seen as comparative, but relational. Specific lessons, then, might be less obvious. Here, the lessons emerge out of the whole, or out of particular relations, such as explained in the chapter “Nature of Flows.” For the second, in some ways it is the nature of this kind of research. In searching out particular flows and links among sites and periods, how much is enough, and how much is too much? It is also not always clear that more depth and detail will garner better answers to questions that have to do with relations. Yet the global relational dynamics we observe today do depend on deep histories that are firmly in place. More depth in one place or another could well further reveal different shades or even new relations.

Ranganathan’s noteworthy critiques raise other concerns, too. One of the ongoing challenges I find in my work is how to be accountable to heavy colonial histories in accounts that span global sites and eventful moments. The research for this book entangles a country that still exhibits scars from its long colonial past and recent dictatorial period; another that continues to cast its military and economic power, alongside its very large carbon footprint, with wantonness across the globe; and a third that in some ways enjoys its stature as an urban and environmental exemplar without having fully addressed its present-day racial and social conflicts and its violent colonial history. In conducting the research, I raised for myself a broader, urgent question: How might we think more systematically about the structural-spatial patterns of racial capitalism and colonialism in researching the global and urban politics of climate change? This is very much part of my current focus. Ranganathan ultimately emphasized what we, too, would agree to be the primary strength of the book: its openness to experimental and transgressive scholarship, and its transnational and relational approach.

Overall, we are both especially heartened that the reviewers of How Green Became Good and Form and Flow take temporal and spatial relationality seriously and pay attention to the emancipatory political projects of both books.

The books and parallel thinking over the past several years also have also left us thinking more deeply about relational political questions across urban and agrarian space, and even led to a new collaboration with Kasia Paprocki, whose work has so inspired our thinking on these issues (see Paprocki 2020). Questions on our minds include the following: What real reconfigurations of material interconnections and interdependencies is climate change prompting? What are the political implications of these transformations, and, particularly, possibilities for alliance building and articulation of shared demands across urban and agrarian space? How are these interconnections best understood and described?

We also note the continued imperative to center the historical power relationships that shape contemporary struggles over space. Our reviewers’ and interlocutors’ work highlights the ongoing significance and reconfiguration of historical power relationships—for example, race-based, indigenous struggles, the sustained effects of colonialism—that influence current land conflicts. Although the urgency of climate change is ever more pressing, the rebuilding of infrastructure and reorganizations of land use that adaptation requires prompts us to recognize the degree to which these histories and their legacies have created and continue to create vulnerabilities and injustices in the spaces we are acting in and on.

What this raises for us, too, is the significance of what might be called the political economy of decarbonizing urban form. What political economic and spatial trajectories do current decarbonization efforts have us on now—and what other reconfigurations of space and society might enable us to design and build places that are actually sustainable and more just? Surprisingly, there are far too few good visions of this, and few systematic comparisons or comprehensive analyses of extant models that go beyond straightforward measures such as carbon accounting, especially when considering the myriad conditions of global urbanization and effects of climate change.

Our shared interests—in the politics of design and space, the power of imaginaries and representation, and the political ecology of cities—brought us together. This work has been fun as well as intellectually generative. The experience has affirmed our notion that a kind of collaborative, collective scholarship is necessary, and can be even joyful and exciting. Through the engagement with and responses to our books, including and especially this set of reviews, we have been delighted to learn just how generous, as well as incisive, our friends and colleagues are. There is so much work to do, and we are excited to continue working on it together.

Notes

1 “Today, one of the innumerable minor privileges of American whiteness is the freedom to appreciate trees as just trees: anodyne features, ahistorical objects” (Farmer 2019, 815).

2 Montgomery’s (2016, 2020) work reminds us to attend to (green) minoritization as well as (green) gentrification. Greening projects such as community gardens can become part of “a patronizing plan for uneven development that treats the black urban poor as children who can choose seed packets but cannot decide their future” (Montgomery 2016, 15). This is paternalism that advances racial domination and political disempowerment.

3 For example, as habitat for increasing vector-borne diseases such as West Nile and Lyme—the increase of which can be understood as a product of both neoliberal urbanization and climate change, a kind of urbanized nature though a very different social imaginary (Kaup 2018).