The Living City

"Everywhere you look, cities are getting greener. From London to New York and beyond, city governments are investing billions in planting trees, installing green roofs, and building micro-parks. The innovations get even bolder, from a "forest city" in China covered entirely by trees to a program in Melbourne that connects citizens, by email, to their local flora. All of these programs, as sociologist Des Fitzgerald points out, are founded on the same general assumption: there is something innately wrong or unhealthy with urban life today, and that nature holds the cure. In The Living City, he argues that this assumption is fundamentally flawed. Talking to the eclectic group of policymakers, urban planners, and dreamers who are building the city of the future, Fitzgerald explores the real roots of our desire to connect cities to nature. The Living City takes us on a tour of the green city movement, from healing forests of South-East Asia to the cognitive architecture of Southern California, through a lab examining the neuroscientific effects of our surroundings to a start-up that's crowd-mapping hidden nature in East London. Along the way, Fitzgerald untangles the often-centuries old ideas undergirding what, exactly, we mean when we think of "nature" - and why we see it as so irrevocably distant from city life. He argues that many urban design programs stem from a Romantic - and misguided -- view of nature. While he isn't opposed to green spaces, Fitzgerald wants to probe the efficacy of attempts to build them into cities. He argues that they aren't the ultimate panacea that many futurists think: after all, how can a line of trees, or an intrusive app designed to show you where those trees are located, truly improve physical and psychological health on a massive scale? At their most useless, green spaces can end up as flowery decorations, "healing" ways of pushing up house prices. Instead of using green space as a band-aid, Fitzgerald proposes that we examine and fix the root issues, like labor rights and work conditions, contributing to urban unease. Ultimately, he makes an argument for celebrating our cities as they are, not as we'd like them to be - in all of their noisy, constructed, artificial glory"--