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"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"--

AbstractA common thread has emerged in recent critiques of planetary urbanization. Whether on empirical, epistemological or theoretical grounds, critics tend to posit 'difference against abstraction', arguing that planetary urbanization—as an abstract theory of large‐scale phenomena—occludes 'everyday' embodied, small‐scale and place‐based forms of social difference in its production and/or application. Here we engage with this critique as two queer, feminist scholars sympathetic both to critics' arguments about the politics of knowledge production and to the planetary urbanization framework. While we agree that the theory's most visible adherents have not systematically engaged with questions of difference, especially at smaller scales of social analysis, we reject the suggestion that planetary urbanization is inherently incompatible with such concerns. Rather, we argue that the opposite is true. Using examples from our own research, we show how the planetary urbanization framework—by enforcing a multiscalar and non‐city‐centric view of apparently local phenomena—can be central to theorizing and understanding social difference at the level of everyday life in empirical research.

AbstractUrban political ecology (UPE), an offshoot of political ecology that emerged in the late 1990s, has had two major impacts on critical urban studies: it has introduced critical political ecology to urban settings, and it has provided a framework for retheorizing the city as a product of metabolic processes of socionatural transformation. However, there was another goal in early UPE programmatic statements that has largely fallen by the wayside: to mobilize a Lefebvrian theoretical framework to trouble traditional distinctions between urban/rural and society/nature by exploring urbanization as a global process. Instead of following this potentially fruitful path, UPE has become bogged down in 'methodological cityism'––an overwhelming analytical and empirical focus on the traditional city to the exclusion of other aspects of contemporary urbanization processes. Thus UPE's Lefebvrian promise, of a research program that could work across traditional disciplinary divisions and provide insights into a new era of planetary urbanization, has remained unfulfilled. In this article we trace UPE's history to show how it arrived at its present predicament, and offer some thoughts on a research agenda for a political ecology not of the city but of urbanization.

How we see nature is to a large extent a reflection of ourselves. Sociologists Hillary Angelo and Colin Jerolmack use the example of New Yorkers' fascination with two red-tailed hawks to reveal deep insights about how we represent and understand nature.

Real estate plays an essential part in various sociological theories of political economy, state capacity, racecraft, stratification, and urbanization. However, since foundational insights about the novelty of commodified, emplaced private property from theorists like Du Bois and Polanyi, these disparate threads have not been tied together into a coherent field of study. Here, we review three areas of recent scholarship relevant to understanding real estate—the political economy of place, property rights, and financialization—in order to draw out key insights from each. Overall, the political-economic and socio-legal aspects of real estate have been well-studied, but contemporary research has been limited by its parochialism. We argue that for a sociology of real estate to move forward, it must take a broader, more relational perspective; must become more international; and must confront the climate crisis—and that Polanyi's and Du Bois's contributions can be effectively mobilized toward these ends. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 50 is July 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. They examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption-building a world that is sustainable both economically and ecologically.

What are the limits of design in addressing the political and/or when has design not been enough? A collection of thought pieces written by Theatrum Mundi's Designing Politics Working Group following a workshop at the Villa Vassilieff in Paris on 25th May 2016. This working group is supported by the Global Cities Chair at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris.