Towards a post-anthropocene perspective on the welfare city: Public landscapes as green heritage

The welfare city with its humanistic, anthropocentric and progressive design ideals of the good life and egalitarianism usually signifies the post-war welfare state’s tabula rasa suburbs with evergreen public landscapes as common ground for public happiness. Inspired by the recent discourse of the anthropocene, we examine the welfare city’s materialisation in a wider perspective, as a relational assemblage of culturally significant landscapes, organised and administered by various institutions, legislations and vocabularies, to structure and stage a national vision of the good life. We coin this as ‘the green heritage’; an umbrella term bridging the gap between perspectives of the anthropocentric, the anthropocene and a possible post-anthropocene era, both challenged and driven by climate change and urbanisation.