I am an urban and environmental sociologist, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during the 2022-2023 academic year. I study understandings of the environment and their relationship to large-scale spatial and social transformations, through historical and contemporary research on urban greening, sustainability planning and policy, infrastructure, and climate change. My work bridges political economic and cultural approaches to urban and environmental studies by drawing on historical sociology, social theory, and the sociology of knowledge and morality. My research is also particularly attuned to the politics of the built environment: how natural and human-made environments mediate experience to produce particular understandings of society.
My new book, How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press), traces a century of greening projects in Germany’s Ruhr region in order to provide a sociological explanation for urban greening as a contemporary, global phenomenon. I am currently at work on several projects: on infrastructure and sociology, the rise and politics of urban sustainability planning, climate change action and beliefs, and public lands and the energy transition.
I received my PhD in Sociology from New York University and hold a BA from Vassar College. Before returning to graduate school, I worked for five years with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, primarily on issues of participatory design, immigration, and public space use.
News
My book is out! Order for 20% from Chicago with code UCPSOC. Review quotes:
“Angelo risks sacrilege; she takes on nature as a mundane tool of politics, entertainment, and real estate. The ideology of green comes out of its black box, exposed to insightful and historically aware analysis.” — Harvey Molotch, New York University
“Written with verve and meticulous attention to historical detail, How Green Became Good illuminates the hows and whys of the contemporary phenomenon of ‘urbanized nature.’ Angelo convincingly moves from micro-level investigations of moral judgments and responses surrounding pet rabbits to macro-level examinations of top-down globalized urban greening projects. A tour de force, this book will prompt a rethinking of the green-as-good reflex." — Robin Wagner-Pacifici, The New School for Social Research
"How Green Became Good takes the conventional western urban imagination out of Chicago’s Loop and past Los Angeles’s Sixty-Mile-Circle to the expanse of the Ruhr and rewrites urban theory from there. This brilliant book on more than a century of “urbanized nature” in Germany’s former industrial heartland will forever change our views of the industrial city as preceding the green city. If you are looking for a concept of the urban beyond the Zwischenstadt, you will find it in Angelo’s magisterial contribution." — Roger Keil, York University
Links to related press:
“Who’s the Green City for, Really?” Aaron Mok for Sierra Club Magazine.
Interview with Richard Ocejo for New Books Network.
“Greening Better,” In Common podcast.
Other recent publications (please contact me for PDFs of any published work)
media coverage: UCSC, CapRadio, KQED, Grist/High Country News, The New York Times