GROWING GREEN IN US SUBURBIA : Property Value, Race and Domestic Landscaping Aesthetics in Mid‐Century America

Abstract Much of the current popular and academic literature on the provision of green spaces is dominated by the assumption that ‘nature’ is an unalloyed positive, and that socioeconomic and racial exclusion from access to green spaces is a problem of unequal spatial distribution rather than of the form and content of particular urban designs. This article questions this, calling for a more sophisticated approach to the relationship between property value, ideology and natural aesthetics. I use a historical case study to show how practices of ‘redlining’ that excluded Black homebuyers were underpinned by an aesthetic of green space. Promoted by the government, banks and housing developers to stabilize property values, landscaping acted as a visual signal of racial exclusion. Furthermore, promotion of this aesthetic did not passively reflect underlying racialized economic practice—it actively produced an ideal White subject who would be motivated to support segregation and to maintain a certain ‘look’ in exterior spaces of their home in order to preserve its value. Aesthetics, then, had economic, social and ecological agency, with segregated spaces emerging as a product and as an agent in a series of material practices that shaped racialized exclusion by remaking human–ecological relations.