The Living City: Why Cities Don’t Need to Be Green to Be Great

“We’re overinvesting in nature as a panacea for what are actually fairly mundane urban problems,” according to this garbled if intermittently intriguing debut from Fitzgerald, a sociologist at University College Cork. He inveighs against the greening of urban areas (which can consist of planting trees, constructing roof gardens, or opening new parks) but largely sidesteps arguments about the climate benefits and instead takes aim at the moralistic claims of urban planners and architects throughout history. Primary among them is landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whom Fitzgerald portrays as a figurehead of the 19th-century movement to build urban parks out of a paternalistic impulse to keep working-class urbanites “physically fit and morally good.” He contends that denigrations of city life as “unnatural” belie the racist and classist underpinnings of anti-urban sentiment, suggesting it instead stems from decades of “telling young and mostly White college students and their parents that the city is, somehow, a dangerous place, a dying place, and, sotto voce, perhaps, increasingly, a too racially diverse place.” Though Fitzgerald makes a provocative point about how class and racial anxieties have fueled disdain of urban areas, it’s unclear whether he’s “against green cities” or rather against their moralizing advocates. There are stimulating ideas here, but the execution feels muddled. (Nov.)