The Living City Why Cities Don't Need to Be Green to Be Great by Des Fitzgerald

A sociologist explores why “green cities” won’t fix everything—and urges us to celebrate urban life as it is

Everywhere you look, cities are getting greener. The general assumption is clear: if something is unhealthy or bad about urban life today, then nature holds the cure. However, argues sociologist Des Fitzgerald, green spaces are not the panacea that people think.

In The Living City, Fitzgerald tours the international green city movement that has flourished across the world and discovers the deep, sometimes troubling, roots of our desire to connect cities to nature. Talking to policy makers, planners, scientists, and architects, Fitzgerald suggests that underneath the wish to turn future cities green is another wish: to make the modern city, and perhaps the modern world, disappear altogether. Ultimately, he makes an argument for celebrating the contemporary city as it is—in all its noisy, constructed, artificial glory.  

Des Fitzgerald is professor of medical humanities and social sciences at University College Cork. He has been named a “New Generation Thinker” by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He lives in Cork, Ireland.