The Dark Green City
The double entendre “dark city” has often conveyed and conceptualized both the blighted landscape and the racial populations of cities, and more specifically inner cities. Although historically represented as impoverished, racialized, high crime urbanities, inner cities are transitioning into green city centers with a vastly different demographic. White and wealthy people populate these urban oases, who now occupy a landscape with far greener pastures. Globally, cities have been implementing environmental policies and practices that have led to the proliferation of green spaces (parks, gardens, and urban agriculture), which gave rise to the concept of the “green city,” an urban area designed to advance sustainability goals, address climate change, improve quality of life, and minimize negative environmental impacts. The dark city and the green city can be understood as two competing realities simultaneously unfolding within the urban landscape as cities negotiate with their pasts and their futures in the present. The “dark green city” marks the fault line where these two tectonic realities, the dark city and the green city, are shifting and creating catastrophic friction and massive societal change while recreating both the urban landscape and its inhabitants. Within the dark green city, one’s economic and racial status determines whether the urban experience is utopian or dystopian. To understand these two divergent and warring urban concepts of race and space we must both deconstruct them and anchor them within their histories.
Excerpt From “The Rise of Green Spaces in Inner Cities.” African American Intellectual History Society, Black Perspectives. http://www.aaihs.org/the-rise-of-green-spaces-in-inner-cities/
Excerpt From “The Rise of Green Spaces in Inner Cities.” African American Intellectual History Society, Black Perspectives. http://www.aaihs.org/the-rise-of-green-spaces-in-inner-cities/