Imagining the Dirty Green City

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban greening
• sustainability
• good city
• more-than-human
• dirt thinking
• care

Acknowledgements

We thank Dave Kendall for his critical and creative contributions to the formative stages of this paper, the editors of this special issue for their encouragement and patience, and in the two anonymous reviewers for their very thoughtful insights and constructive suggestions that helped to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Wendy Steele is an Associate Professor Sustainability and Cities in the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University.

Aidan Davison is an Associate Professor in Human Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania.

Aviva Reed is a Visual Ecologist and Creative Provocateur based in Melbourne.