Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State

Harvard Book Store welcomes the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s GARETH DOHERTY—Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Senior Research Associate and a founding editor of the New Geographies journal—for a discussion of his latest book, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State.

Paradoxes is a 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.