Imagining the Dirty Green City

Animals and urban gentrification: Displacement and injustice in the trans-species city

“…One important dimension of this may be to assert the ecological rather than the exchange value of neighbourhoods discoursed as dirty or even toxic, fighting against the capitalist impulse to produce green and clean ‘nature spaces’ where sustainability equates to profitability (see Campkin, 2007, on the ambivalence of dirt in the city, and Lorimer, 2016, on the ecology of ‘rot’). Steele et al (2020) argue that this promotion of ‘dirty green cities’ would require a new language of rights, acknowledging that both human and non-human constitute the matter of cities and that landscapes of dirt and decay are sometimes worth preserving. This is not an easy terrain to navigate, given it would often require the inversion of normative distinctions between those animals that are valued as companion species and those that are not.…”

Placing the more‐than‐human in environmental gentrification

“…Within planning discourse, these conditions are often contained within a duality of 'green' (related to conservation of an idealised kind of nature) pitted against the hues of 'brown' or 'grey' (related to diminished environmental quality, health, and contamination) (Wachsmuth & Angelo, 2018). In environmental gentrification practices, we can understand moves to purity as encompassing a variety of practices: efforts to restore green spaces and ecosystems to an imagined pure or originary state through greening or remediation (Steele et al, 2020); the 'cleaning up' of landscapes through the removal of industrial materials and waste or species that have been identified as weeds or invasives; the policing of non-normative behaviours and bodies in parks (Byrne & Wolch, 2009;March & Lehrer, 2021); or placemaking geared around 'morally superior' individualised consumption practices (Kern, 2012(Kern, , 2015. Toxicity, on the other hand, is something similarly affectively charged, tending to characterise undesirable or 'polluted' bodies or spaces that must be eliminated or removed.…”

Urban re-generations: afterword to special issue on the politics of urban greening in Australian cities

“…In fact, we lost that battle, lost that future, lost that world. (2019,146) The World-saving 'goods' of greening need to be re-composted and re-composed (Steele, Davison, and Reed 2020). Its political and ethical goals, well-intended or otherwise, need to be more thoroughly examined.…”

“…The papers in this issue discuss a diversity of urban greening projects and politics in Melbourne/Naarm, ranging from the social, technological and biological lives of urban forests (Phillips and Atchinson 2018), shifting regimes of governance (Coffey et al 2020), diverse and affective public attachments to green spaces (de Kleyn, Mumaw and Corney 2019); practices of commoning in the more-than-human city (Cooke, Landau-Ward and Rickards); the politics of urban greening on First Nations' Country (Porter, Hurst and Grandinetti 2020) and the untidy propositions of the dirty, green city (Steele, Davison and Reed 2020). An important thread that runs throughout the papers is a move away from seeing urban greening as an instrumental outcome of urban planning and design (Cooke 2020).…”

“…(Ngurra et al 2019, 12) In this afterword, I have suggested that we call the regenerative grammars and practices of cities back from their service to urban growth, white spaces and the geographies of entitlement. But once called back, urban re-generations must sink into the dirt of cities, to compost with the diversity of ecological, cultural, temporal and planetary relations (Houston 2019;Steele, Davison & Reed 2020). But in attempting to articulate new forms of 'earthy companionship' (Despret and Meuret 2016, 32) in ecologically interdependent cities, critical care must be taken not to bring forth the very thing that is sought to be transcended (Lobo 2019).…”