Greening the City
Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century
Publication Year: 2011
Published by: University of Virginia Press
Title Page, Copyright Page
Contents
Download PDF (129.9 KB)
pp. v-vi
Acknowledgments
Download PDF (79.1 KB)
pp. vii-
This book originated at a conference at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, D.C. We would like to thank Christof Mauch, the former GHI director, for co-chairing and providing the opportunity for this conference in the fi rst place. We are grateful to the staff of the GHI, especially ...
Introduction
Download PDF (146.7 KB)
pp. 1-13
“A City! It is the grip of man upon nature. It is a human operation directed against nature, a human organism both for protection and for work. It is a creation.”¹ This quotation poignantly expresses a principal paradigm of modernity— that human creation stands in stark contrast to nature. The city, ...
Part I
Integrating City and Nature: Urban Planning Debates in Sofia, Bulgaria
Download PDF (360.8 KB)
pp. 17-36
Modern city planning emerged as a profession to amend the deplorable conditions of the nineteenth- century Western city, appropriately labeled “the city of dreadful night.”1 Conceived over a relatively short period of time as the unavoidable off spring of the Industrial Revolution, this city offered its ...
Green and Modern: Planning Mexico City, 1900– 1940
Download PDF (410.4 KB)
pp. 37-54
During the early decades of the twentieth century, a group of visionary planners undertook the physical transformation of Mexico City. They reinterpreted the concepts of nature presented in Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities, Jean Claude Forestier’s systèmes de parcs, and Patrick Geddes’s regional planning ...
Part II
Mediterranean Reflections: Reconstructing Nature in Modern Barcelona
Download PDF (478.5 KB)
pp. 57-74
Among the most striking transformations of contemporary Barcelona, in both urban culture and urban nature, is the city’s “return” to the Mediterranean. Barcelona long has been a port city whose commerce, politics, and culture have depended on the Mediterranean. Its early links to Carthage and ...
German Ideologies of City and Nature: The Creation and Reception of Schiller Park in Berlin
Download PDF (1.3 MB)
pp. 75-94
Today public parks are an essential part of every big city, and it is hard to imagine city life without them. Often they are described as a retreat from the urban jungles of today’s postindustrial cities. Many of these public parks were established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A park ...
Race, Recreation, and the Conflict between Public and Private Nature in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
Download PDF (600.1 KB)
pp. 95-111
The growth of modern Los Angeles was inextricably connected to its promotion as a place of outdoor recreation. During the late nineteenth century, L.A. and Southern California utilized tourism as a strategy to foment regional development. Tourist leisure served an important economic function, but as ...
Part III
Nature, Sport, and the European City: London and Helsinki, 1880– 2005
Download PDF (187.0 KB)
pp. 115-132
Across most of Europe, from the harvested forests of Finland to the shepherded uplands of the French Pyrenees, the natural landscape is a social construct, the outcome of man’s ongoing, increasingly pervasive interaction with the ecological world. No more so than in European cities, where ...
From the “Functional City” to the “Heart of the City”: Green Space and Public Space in the CIAM Debates of 1942– 1952
Download PDF (865.8 KB)
pp. 133-156
In 1952, the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) published
a book entitled The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of
Urban Life.
Part IV
Property Rights, Popular Ecology,and Problems with Wild Plantsin Twentieth- Century American Cities
Download PDF (488.4 KB)
pp. 159-180
For more than a decade, cities in the United States have been making new places for their old flora. At Tifft Nature Preserve in Buffalo, New York, botanists mapped “native” plants and protected their habitat.1 The Chicago Park District established neighborhood “nature and wildlife gardens” where ...
Building an “Urban Homestead”: Survival, Self- Suffi ciency, and Nature in Seattle, 1970– 1980
Download PDF (193.6 KB)
pp. 181-203
Amidst the 1970s energy crisis, Jody Aliesan, a seasoned political activist, converted the private realm of her Seattle home to public display. As a participant in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Appropriate Technology Small Grants Program, Aliesan dubbed her home the “Urban Homestead.” Over ...
The Making of an Urban Ecology: Biological Expertise and Wildlife Preservation in West Berlin
Download PDF (370.3 KB)
pp. 204-227
In 1973, a number of institutes and departments of the Technical University in West Berlin merged into a single Institute of Ecology. This was one of various attempts to formally institutionalize the environmental sciences in Germany.1 Focusing on the complex relations of living beings and their natural
Contributors
Download PDF (134.6 KB)
pp. 229-232
Index
Download PDF (165.2 KB)
pp. 233-246
E-ISBN-13: 9780813931388
E-ISBN-10: 081393138X
Print-ISBN-13: 9780813931142
Print-ISBN-10: 0813931142
Page Count: 256
Illustrations: 22 b&w illus.
Publication Year: 2011
