As projects like Manhattan's High Line Chicago's 606 and Atlanta's Beltline show major
cities are devoting serious resources to cultivating urban green spaces. These formerly
neglected urban spaces now draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city
governments. But why are these greening projects so widely taken up and what good do they do?
In How Green Became Good Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring
appeal of urban green spaces showing that city planners have long thought that creating green
spaces would lead to social improvements. Turning to Germany's Ruhr valley (a region that
despite its ample open space was greened with the addition of official park and gardens)
Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She turns to three
distinct moments in the twentieth-century Ruhr valley's history that inspired the creation of
new green spaces: industrialization that took hold in the early twentieth century the new
democratic ideals of the 1960s and industrial decline beginning in the early 1990s.Across
these distinct historical moments Angelo shows that the impulse to create green space has
persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes. Ultimately however the
creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it
imparts. Instead the impulse to bring nature into urban life reveals an enduring conviction
that green space will transform us into ideal citizens in an ideal society
