California Forever is an American 21st-century utopian vision, a new city to be built on 60,000 acres of dusty farmland 50 miles outside San Francisco. This latest plan for ‘safe, walkable neighbourhoods’, unveiled late last year and yet to be approved, is financed by Flannery Associates, a consortium of tech venture capitalists led by a former Goldman Sachs trader. Despite its ultra-modern backers, California Forever looks nothing like a modern city. Its promotional material is pure English nostalgia, something close to Metroland, with dreamlike vistas, charming streets, rowing boats, bicycles, sunrises and endless trees. If renderings are to be believed, the future is Blytonesque.
This idyll is the latest expression of a seemingly universal hankering for urban life that looks and feels like country life, rooted in nature and magically free from pollution, noise and chaos. California Forever’s artistic renderings came too late for Des Fitzgerald’s The City of Today is a Dying Thing. But they support his premise that this yearning for ‘green cities’ represents ‘a collective anxiety’ about the near future mixed with sentiment and unfocused nostalgia.
The Marble Arch Mound was so pitiful it became
a national laughing stock
Green cities, Fitzgerald suggests, are often contradictory and an impossible fantasy. They are little more than a salve to the horrors of impending ecological disaster: what the Financial Times journalist Alexandra Heal has called ‘fighting climate change with saplings’. Fitzgerald is a professor of social sciences and medical humanities at University College, Cork. His style is spirited and outspoken, poking fun at the absurdity of received opinion, mad initiatives and confused policies with energy and charm. He writes in the style of pro-urbanists such as John Grindrod and Barnabus Calder, both of whom have drawn general readers into debates about architecture and cities which many would prefer to be left to insiders.
The ‘green cities agenda’ Fitzgerald identifies takes many forms, in urban planning, architecture, art, politics, activism, science, philosophy and mysticism. He finds it all over the world, among eco-capitalists, tech billionaires, aristocrats, libertarians and leftist activists alike. Trees are widely imagined as a way to heal modern urban life, in both a scientific and spiritual sense. He calls this ‘treeification’.
At its most benign it begets fads such as forest bathing and rewilding. In physical form it involves vegetation on buildings, such as Milan’s Bosco Verticale, two residential skyscrapers smothered in hundreds of trees designed by the Italian architect Stefano Boeri. (Boeri’s latest plan, revealed last month, involves a ‘Biodiversity Ring Garden’ proposed for the sacred, 6th-century Nepalese burial mound containing the relics of the Buddha. It looks like a tree-lined flying saucer.)
Fitzgerald finds plenty of illogical attempts to blend ‘green cities’ with fuel-heavy travel and space exploration – a kind of verdant futurism. Singapore’s Changi airport’s ‘Jewel’, a four-storey indoor forest complete with waterfall, hotel and early check-in facilities, for example. Or Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin aerospace scheme to abandon Earth for a ‘wooded simulacrum in outer space’.
Similar dissonance can be found in King Charles’s ideas, Fitzgerald suggests. Car-centric Poundbury is one. So was the ‘strikingly feudal’ Queen’s Green Canopy of 2021, which urged people to plant trees to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee, sponsored by McDonald’s and Rentokil among others. Trees are fetishised at endless conferences around the world, for which experts fly in to deliver ‘charming but also oddly evangelical’ talks about greening the modern city – ‘like a weird mix of Silicon Valley and Christian revivalism’.
Fitzgerald’s best passages deal with the most absurd manifestation of the ‘green city’ of all: the Marble Arch Mound – Westminster Council’s panicky, post-pandemic plan to commission the Dutch architects MVRDV to install a temporary hollow hill at Marble Arch to encourage shoppers to return to the West End. The Mound was so pitiful it became a national laughing stock. But Fitzgerald suggests it was a metaphorical success. By revealing the emptiness beneath its structure, it exposed the ‘green city’ as a hollow gesture rather than any serious attempt at ecological change.
Trees are convenient symbols because they are everything to everyone: ‘Nobody’s against trees,’ as Marc Benioff, the Salesforce billionaire behind a plan to plant a trillion of them, has pointed out.
This is an entertaining book. Fitzgerald is refreshingly respectful towards his interviewees, even when he does not share their ardour. It is also sprawling. While he exposes pseudoscience and feeble-minded logic, Fitzgerald never quite nails a central question. Once he has gently mocked his examples, his conclusion – that obsession with greening amounts to suspicion of industrial and urban life and seeks to imply that the 20th century never happened – feels unsatisfactory.
Gestures such as the Mound are self-evidently pointless. But what might policymakers build instead? What would be a serious attempt at ecological urbanism? Are there any? Fitzgerald does not say. In the meantime, California Forever, with its rowing boats, bicycles and soothingly retro illustrations of trees, may be the clearest indication we have.
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