Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State
ISBN: 9780520960626
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter

This innovative multidisciplinary study considers the concept of green from multiple perspectives--aesthetic, architectural, environmental, political, and social--in the Kingdom of Bahrain, where green has a long and deep history of appearing cooling, productive, and prosperous--a radical contrast to the hot and hostile desert. Although green is often celebrated in cities as a counter to gray urban environments, green has not always been good for cities. Similarly, manifestation of the color green in arid urban environments is often in direct conflict with the practice of green from an environmental point of view. This paradox is at the heart of the book. In arid environments such as Bahrain, the contradiction becomes extreme and even unsustainable.



Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Gareth Doherty explores the landscapes of Bahrain, where green represents a plethora of implicit human values and exists in dialectical tension with other culturally and environmentally significant colors and hues. Explicit in his book is the argument that concepts of color and object are mutually defining and thus a discussion about green becomes a discussion about the creation of space and place.

Gareth Doherty is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Doherty's books include Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism . He is co-editor of Is Landscape...? Essays on the Identity of Landscape with Charles Waldheim and, with Mohsen Mostafavi, Ecological Urbanism . Doherty is a founding editor of the New Geographies journal and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color .