Last Tuesday evening, Hillary Angelo (University of California, Santa Cruz), Professor of Sociology, presented her book How Green Became Good (University of Chicago Press). In it, she examined moments in the Ruhr Valley’s urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: from industrialization in the late nineteenth century to economic renewal in the 1990s. Angelo demonstrated that the impulse to bring nature into urban life reveals an enduring conviction that green space can transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. In an engaging discussion with the audience at the KWI Garden Room, we debated how such ideas of nature shape still shape contemporary visions of climate-friendly urbanism.
The event was organised by the Institute for Social Movements (Ruhr-University Bochum) in cooperation with the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI).
