The Wrath of Capital by Adrian Parr

Author:Adrian Parr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL010000, Political Science/History and Theory, POL044000, Political Science/Public Policy/Environmental Policy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

7

MODERN FEELING AND THE GREEN CITY

I have visited many cities over the years. Some that left a strong impression include Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Hyderabad, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, New York, Paris, Seattle, and Sofia. I currently live in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since moving to the United States nine years ago, I would have to say that my favorite North American city is Chicago. It is one of the few cities of the world where you can sit on the beach with the skyline immediately behind you or where you can promenade along the waterfront for miles and miles. It is also one of a handful of U.S. cities where bicycling is the norm and public space abounds. The restaurants are hip and alive; its music scene is thriving; its architecture is bold; the art on show is often provocative and cutting edge; and the intellectual scene is stimulating and challenging. In a nutshell, the city has shed its blue-collar rustbelt image, and in its place it has joined the ranks of other global cities the world over.

Chicago is also one of the few cities in the United States that has ranked highly on the various green cities measuring indexes. Over the past decade and under the leadership of Mayor Richard M. Daley (1989–2011),1 it has undergone a green facelift, moving it into fourth position on the 2008 SustainLane U.S. Sustainable City Rankings.2 By making Chicago an “environmentally friendly” city, Mayor Daley expanded on the new and shiny global brand identity that Chicago had forged for itself in a way that reinforced its competitive economic and cultural status within the global arena and in the process generated a greener way of life for Chicagoans. Put differently, as a green city, Chicago epitomizes modern feeling as much as it produces that feeling, and it is this connection that I am interested in exploring further in this chapter. There are obviously many other examples of green urban development that I could have chosen to look at—Abu Dhabi, Tianjin, and Freiburg, to name just a few. Yet in an effort to stave off flattening the theoretical terrain by avoiding the discomfort that can arise from being too close to the issue at hand, I thought it better to focus my analysis on a city that I have a strong attachment to as opposed to one that is by and large present for me as only an abstraction.

I am curious as to how the greening of the built environment is tied to the broader phenomenon of modern feeling on which Fredric Jameson casts a spotlight: “This modern feeling now seems to consist in the conviction that we ourselves are somehow new, that a new age is beginning, that everything is possible and nothing can ever be the same again; nor do we want anything to be the same again, we want to ‘make it new,’ get rid of all those old objects, values, mentalities, and ways of doing things, and to be somehow transfigured.”3

That said, the appetite

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