Imagining the Dirty Green City |
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| Authors: | Wendy Steele Aidan Davison Aviva Reed |
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| Institution: | 1. Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia wendy.steele@rmit.edu.au;3. Geography and Spatial Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia;4. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia |
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| Abstract: | ABSTRACT The green city is being elevated to the status of a self-evident good in the theory and practice of urban sustainability. A large literature documents the linked environmental, economic and well-being benefits associated with vegetating urban systems to maximise the ecosystem function. Contemporary urban greening seeks to challenge attempts to expel nature from the city in a quest for order and control. However, by imagining nature as a new mode of urban purification, much effort in the name of the green city inverts and reproduces dualistic understandings of natural and built space. In response, we disrupt the normative dialectics of purity and dirt that sustain this dualism to expose the untidy but fertile ground of the green city. We draw together Ash Amin’s four registers of the Good City – relatedness, rights, repair and re-enchantment – with the artworks of the Australian visual ecologist Aviva Reed. Our work seeks to enrich the practice of more-than-human urbanism through ‘dirt thinking’ by imagining the transformative possibilities in, of and for the dirty green city. |
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| Keywords: | Urban greening sustainability good city more-than-human dirt thinking care |
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