Urban Natures: Living the More-than-Human City 9781805390831

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations, Figures and Tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction. Mapping the More-than-Human City in Theory, Methods and Practice
Part I. Making Visible Diverse Urban Natures
Chapter 1. Life After Dark: Multispecies Encounters in the Nocturnal City
Chapter 2. Making Urban Natures Visible (with a Focus on Insects)
Chapter 3. Let the City Walls Go Wild: Finding Safety in Urban Edgelands
Chapter 4. A Bear and Those Things Beneath My Knees: Nature in Settler-Colonial Los Angeles
Chapter 5. East End Jam: A Multisensory Urban Foraging Artwork
Chapter 6. Illuminating the Worlds We Produce: A Refl exive Approach to Urban Natures Research
Part II. (Re)Connecting Urban Natures
Illustration
Chapter 7. Layering Identity, Place and Belonging between Nature and Urbanity
Chapter 8. A ‘Democracy of Compost’: Neo-materialist Encounters in Urban Spaces
Chapter 9. Caring for Foxes at a London Allotment: Tales from a Contested Interspecies Playground
Chapter 10. Relational Growing: Reimagining Contemporary Aboriginal Agriculture in Colonialized Cityscapes
Chapter 11. ‘War on Weeds’: On Fighting and Caring for Native Nature in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand
Chapter 12. Designing with Bees: Integrating More-than-Human Knowledges in Brussels’ Cityscapes
Part III. Politicizing Urban Natures
Chapter 13. Reducing Vulnerability through Gardening? The Mobilization of Urban Natures during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Chapter 14. ‘I Don’t Care about Tomatoes’: Building Situated Urban Commons in Girona
Chapter 15. Urban Fog Oasis Conservation: Endangerment, Invasiones and Informal Urbanization in Lima
Chapter 16. Haunting Natures: The Politics of Green Reparations in Baltimore, MD
Chapter 17. Urban Trees as ‘Furniture’? The More-than-Human Politics of Moving Gothenburg’s Mature Trees
Chapter 18. ‘There’s a Strong, Green Wind Blowing’: Drawing the Politics of Street Trees in Practice
Conclusion. Reflections and Future Directions for Researching Urban Natures
Glossary of Key Terms
Index

Citation preview

Urban Natures

Urban Anthropology Unbound General Editor: Aylin Tschoepe, University of Basel Urban spaces are centres for human and nonhuman activity, as well as agents entangled in networks both material and immaterial, real and imagined. Urban Anthropology Unbound unpacks the usual assumptions of an anthropology of urban life and what this means for understanding past, present and possible urban futures. It promotes urban ethnography as a grounded, interdisciplinary methodology to study spatial phenomena as they interface with social and cultural ones, and offers ways to understand, interpret, make and practise urban lifeworlds. Volume 1 Urban Natures Living the More-than-Human City Edited by Ferne Edwards, Lucia Alexandra Popartan and Ida Nilstad Pettersen

Urban Natures Living the More-than-Human City

deú Edited by Ferne Edwards Lucia Alexandra Popartan Ida Nilstad Pettersen

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Ferne Edwards, Lucia Alexandra Popartan and Ida Nilstad Pettersen

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Edwards, Ferne, editor. | Popartan, Lucia Alexandra, editor. | Pettersen, Ida Nilstad, editor. Title: Urban natures : living the more-than-human city / edited by Ferne Edwards, Lucia Alexandra Popartan and Ida Nilstad Pettersen. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Urban anthropology unbound ; volume 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023007869 (print) | LCCN 2023007870 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390824 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390831 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: City planning—Environmental aspects. Classification: LCC HT166 .U7375 2023 (print) | LCC HT166 (ebook) | DDC 307.1/216—dc23/eng/20230608 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007869 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007870

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-082-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-359-7 epub ISBN 978-1-80539-083-1 web pdf

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390824

Ferne Edwards to Marmie (Phyllis Nellie Edwards)

Lucia Alexandra Popartan to Camil Ungureanu

Contents List of Illustrations, Figures and Tables

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Preface Ferne Edwards

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Acknowledgements

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List of Abbreviations

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Introduction. Mapping the More-than-Human City in Theory, Methods and Practice Ferne Edwards, Lucia Alexandra Popartan and Ida Nilstad Pettersen

1

Part I. Making Visible Diverse Urban Natures Chapter 1. Life After Dark: Multispecies Encounters in the Nocturnal City Nick Dunn

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Chapter 2. Making Urban Natures Visible (with a Focus on Insects) Ferne Edwards

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Chapter 3. Let the City Walls Go Wild: Finding Safety in Urban Edgelands Hannah Cowan and Sam Knight

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Chapter 4. A Bear and Those Things Beneath My Knees: Nature in Settler-Colonial Los Angeles Chima Michael Anyadike-Danes

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Chapter 5. East End Jam: A Multisensory Urban Foraging Artwork Clare Qualmann and Amy Vogel

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Chapter 6. Illuminating the Worlds We Produce: A Reflexive Approach to Urban Natures Research Lisa de Kleyn, Brian Coffey and Judy Bush

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Contents

Part II. (Re)Connecting Urban Natures Chapter 7. Layering Identity, Place and Belonging between Nature and Urbanity Tracey M. Benson

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Chapter 8. A ‘Democracy of Compost’: Neo-materialist Encounters in Urban Spaces Monique Wing and Emma L. Sharp

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Chapter 9. Caring for Foxes at a London Allotment: Tales from a Contested Interspecies Playground Jan van Duppen

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Chapter 10. Relational Growing: Reimagining Contemporary Aboriginal Agriculture in Colonialized Cityscapes Dominique Chen

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Chapter 11. ‘War on Weeds’: On Fighting and Caring for Native Nature in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer

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Chapter 12. Designing with Bees: Integrating More-than-Human Knowledges in Brussels’ Cityscapes Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria

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Part III. Politicizing Urban Natures Chapter 13. Reducing Vulnerability through Gardening? The Mobilization of Urban Natures during the COVID-19 Pandemic Andrew MacKenzie and Ginny Stein Chapter 14. ‘I Don’t Care about Tomatoes’: Building Situated Urban Commons in Girona Lucia Alexandra Popartan, Josep Pueyo-Ros, Enric Cassú, Richard Pointelin, Joana Castellar and Joaquim Comas

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Chapter 15. Urban Fog Oasis Conservation: Endangerment, Invasiones and Informal Urbanization in Lima Chakad Ojani

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Chapter 16. Haunting Natures: The Politics of Green Reparations in Baltimore, MD Mariya Shcheglovitova and JH Pitas

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Contents

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Chapter 17. Urban Trees as ‘Furniture’? The More-than-Human Politics of Moving Gothenburg’s Mature Trees Mathilda Rosengren

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Chapter 18. ‘There’s a Strong, Green Wind Blowing’: Drawing the Politics of Street Trees in Practice Hanne Cecilie Geirbo and Ida Nilstad Pettersen

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Conclusion. Reflections and Future Directions for Researching Urban Natures Ferne Edwards

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Glossary of Key Terms

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Index

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Illustrations, Figures and Tables

Illustrations 1.1. River Irk, looking towards Collyhurst, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn. 1.2. Post-industrial coexistences, Collyhurst Road, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn. 1.3. New perimeter fence blocking access to St Catherine’s Wood, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn. 1.4. Illegal waste dumping, Smedley Road, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn. 1.5. On the bank of the River Irk near bridge at Smedley Road, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn. 3.1. Escape route one: The Elm Grove to Whitehawk tunnel. © Sam Knight. 3.2. Drove Road – fenced in. © Sam Knight. 3.3. Hangleton over the A27 city wall. © Sam Knight. 3.4. From Balsdean Bottom. © Sam Knight. 3.5. Submerged farm machinery in the lost village of Balsdean. © Sam Knight. 3.6. Devil’s Dyke facing north-east to Saddlescombe. © Sam Knight. 3.7. Brighton from the bridleway facing east. © Sam Knight. 3.8. Race Hill allotments and Whitehawk. © Sam Knight. 5.1. Foraging with families in Hackney E8, August 2018. © Clare Qualmann. 5.2. Preparing foraged fruit, Gainsborough Community Centre, September 2017. © Clare Qualmann. 5.3. Jamboree in the Olympic Park, September 2016. © Clare Qualmann. 5.4. Picking mulberries with Gayhurst School, July 2017. © Clare Qualmann.

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Illustrations, Figures and Tables

6.1. Ways of knowing Merri Creek, Melbourne, Australia, 2021. © Judy Bush. 6.2. Whose voice is heard, Northcote, Australia, 2021. © Brian Coffey. 6.3. Sensing Wattle Park, Burwood, Australia, 2021. © Lisa de Kleyn. 7.1. Talking to trees, the Australian National Botanic Gardens, 2021. © Tracey M. Benson. 7.2. Author at Nightcliff Beach, 2017. © Martin Drury. 7.3. Street View, 2021. © Tracey M. Benson. 7.4. Ginninderry Corridor, 2021. © Tracey M. Benson. 7.5. Scalpland, ‘Volt: the new performance’, Institute of Modern Art, 1995. 7.6. Author at Hurum Gamle Kirke, 2017. © Tracey M. Benson. 9.1. Allotment gardener fox encounter. © Jan van Duppen. 9.2. Fox passing by. © Jan van Duppen. 9.3. Allotment gardener self-portrait with fox. Photograph by research participant. 11.1. ‘Join the War on Weeds’. War on Weeds brochure, 2017. © Department of Conservation New Zealand. Photograph by Jesse Bythell. 12.1. Friche Josaphat. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria. 12.2. Citizen movements calling on planners and policymakers to reconsider their development plans through the slogan ‘Let the Friche Bee’. © Jossart. 12.3. Schematic representation of the three research tracks. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria. 12.4. A frame of the visual narrative integrating findings from the walk-along interview. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria. 12.5. Narrated section integrating data collected during the walk-along interviews, as well as technical information from expert studies. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria. 12.6. Experiment with a way of drawing that combines the concept of the timeline with drawings of interventions at

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Illustrations, Figures and Tables

specific moments. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria. 12.7. Plan indicating habitat types linked to the phases of ecological succession, and the landscape and architecture typologies to be included as ‘places of encounter’. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria. 13.1. Island cabbage (Aelan kabis, Abelmoschus manihot) was extensively planted on vacant land around Port Vila in the weeks following the closure of the borders. © Ginny Stein. 13.2. Manples Market, Port Vila. Seasonal produce supplied by local growers on sale at one of the daily markets in Vanuatu’s capital. © Ginny Stein. 13.3. In March 2020, Eluk plateau was a patchwork of vacant lots and newly planted gardens. © Ginny Stein. 13.4. Newly planted gardens appeared on vacant lots at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. © Ginny Stein. 13.5. Eluk Plateau, on the urban fringe of Port Vila, saw a significant increase in gardening activity following the closure of the borders in response to the pandemic. © Ginny Stein. 13.6. Eluk Plateau overlooks the seaside village of Pango, one of the oldest villages on the island of Efate. © Ginny Stein. 13.7. Despite the pandemic, new housing development is sprouting among the gardens on Eluk Plateau. © Ginny Stein. 13.8. The fencing of the northern end of Eluk Plateau with razor wire, highlighting the tenuous access to the gardens. © Andrew Mackenzie. 14.1. Scarecrow in front of Menja’t Sant Narcís vegetable garden. © Joaquim Comas. 15.1. A recently formalized neighbourhood in the lomas in Villa María del Triunfo, Lima © Chakad Ojani. 15.2. Alonso’s illustration of the two realities, Lima, 2019. © Chakad Ojani. 15.3. The amancaes flower in the lomas in Villa María del Triunfo, Lima, 2019. © Chakad Ojani. 18.1. Trees within urban flows. Photograph by the authors, used with permission from interviewee. 18.2. Trees as ecosystem service providers. Photograph by the authors, used with permission from interviewee.

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Illustrations, Figures and Tables

18.3. Trees as aesthetic elements. Photograph by the authors, used with permission from interviewee. 18.4. Trees from a historical perspective. Photograph by the authors, used with permission from interviewee. 18.5. Drawing from group discussion. © Hug the Streets.

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Figures 2.1. 6.1. 6.2. 6.3.

Reflections from the students on the sensory nature walks. Vignette by Judy Bush. Vignette by Brian Coffey. Vignette by Lisa de Kleyn.

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Tables 6.1. Research questions 8.1. Approaches of connection and disconnection (drawn from interviews with seven community compost facilitators and educators) of differing systems of composting.

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Preface Ferne Edwards

A string of international events has contributed to this edited volume. These events illustrate creative, disruptive and multi- and cross- disciplinary perspectives that contribute to reimagining the city as a convivial, just, sustainable and more-than-human place. The volume synthesizes and extends on selected topical strands to build on this field. In this preface, I seek to acknowledge the highlights and research emphases from these events, which underpin this collaborative work. Please note that they are not indicative of all research on this theme but represent a personal trajectory of those I had the privilege of participating in.  A key argument within urban sustainability – which extends to a focus on urban nature – is the need to ‘untame the city’. This sentiment was first raised in the 2016 book Untamed Urbanisms: Practices and Narratives on Socio-environmental Change for Urban Sustainability, edited by Adriana Allen, Andrea Lampis and Mark Swilling. An outcome of the International Social Science Council’s ‘World Social Science Fellow’ program, I was fortunate to join eighteen scholars in Ecuador, where this book was born. From this journey, it was argued: Cities can be understood as the product of multiple taming practices and strategies, ranging from the techno-infrastructural domestication of nature to secure key resources, to the sociopolitical disciplining of the relational and organizational structures and behaviours that shape everyday life in cities. But cities are also profoundly untameable because they are a complex and often unintelligible web of institutional and everyday practices that produce them in fundamentally political ways, whether intentionally or unintentionally. (Allen, Lampis and Swilling 2016: 1)

The book’s contributors sought to recognize diverse urban narratives from cities in the Global South and North that could productively disrupt dominant perspectives that potentially mainstay cities on a highly consumptive, pollutive and unjust path. While this book sought ‘to develop an integrated social-ecological perspective on the challenge of sustainable urban development’ (Allen, Lampis and Swilling 2016: i) – and, indeed, did so with respect to water, food and other urban elements – much focus remained cushioned within anthropocentric concerns. My attendance at the ‘Untaming the Urban’ symposium in Canberra, Aus-

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tralia, carried on this desire to ‘untame the urban’, yet shifted this viewpoint in more of a multispecies direction. ‘Untaming the Urban: From post anthropocentric design to urban ecologies’ was a multidisciplinary symposium held at the Australian National University (7–9 December 2016) that sought to explore urban possibilities for convivial, cross-species cohabitation (Untaming the Urban 2016). This symposium acknowledged the city as a ‘constructed ecology’, defined by Margaret J. Grose as being either unintentional – ‘accidental or haphazard by-products of human exigency’ – or purposeful – ‘deliberately planted and designed landscapes, perhaps with nominated species’ (Grose 2014: 70). ‘Untaming the Urban’ sought to seek out human/nonhuman convivial relationships, that is ‘the kind of conviviality gathering force in the name of “posthumanism” that is taking place in “living cities”’ (Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2006: 125). Hosted by the Fenner School, this event brought together artists, designers, social scientists, biologists and more to examine the intricacies and politics of actual and potential human/nonhuman relationships within the city. The symposium’s themes centred on notions of umwelt (environment) such as the diverse worlds that nonhuman natures inhabit in the city, the untaming of the vernacular that frames nature, a rethinking of the city as either natural or artificial landscapes, questions of how to communicate with nonhuman species, and discussions of the complex compromises that arise from sharing multispecies spaces. Notions of cohabitation ranged from the actual, such as urban beekeeping practices (Edwards) and the incorporation of natures within the built form (Garrard et al.), through to more speculative accounts of ‘the internet of possums’ (Barrass) and a barn house that considered cohabitation with horses (Muminovic) (Untaming the Urban 2016). Following a very stimulating and successful event, a second ‘Untaming the Urban’ event was held in 2018 (Australian National University, Canberra). This brought in two new dimensions – an edited book project and an elaboration on case studies and artistic contributions resulting in an art exhibition. I am pleased that Andrew McKenzie, conference organizer with Viveka Hocking for Untaming the Urban in 2016 and a participant in 2018, and Tracey Benson, a curator of the 2018 symposium exhibition, are also chapter contributors for this book. Additional sessions explored cities as complex ecologies, creature structures, multispecies perspectives, approaches and methods, and reconceptualizing and practising more-than-human worlds – all rich territories in which to further develop understandings of more-than-human worlds (Untaming the Urban 2018). 

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‘The Nature of Cities Festival’ (Paris, 2019) provided an international opportunity from which to explore this ground further. Emerging as the first in-person event from the highly popular ‘The Nature of Cities’ (TNOC) blogsite, this festival is self-described as ‘an annual experiment in transdisciplinary collaboration to radically imagine cities that are better for nature and all people’ (TNOC, n.d.). Similar to ‘Untaming the Urban’, TNOC drew together contributors from different disciplines, sectors and backgrounds – albeit on a much wider and international scale – to explore multispecies relations using a range of formats, including essays, prose, poetry, performance and pictures.  Inviting biologist Amy Hahs from ‘Untaming the Urban’ with colleague landscape architect Yun Hye Hwang as convenors, we co-hosted the TNOC panel, ‘Wild, Stray, Care: Exploring multiple ways people co-exist with urban nature’ (Edwards, Hahs and Hwang 2019). This session further developed themes from ‘Untaming the Urban’ to explore possibilities of urban nature through three frames – wild, stray and care – initially proposed by Wendy Steele, Ilan Wiesel and Cecily Maller (later published as Steele, Wiesel and Maller 2019). Outcomes from the session included: • Cities must be considered holistically, including biologically, to satisfy aesthetic-sensory experiences, and for people to sense nature as part of ourselves.  • The frames of ‘wild, stray and care’ are highly site-specific where geographic, climatic, sociocultural conditions all have influence.  • Local expert knowledge in these regions should be acknowledged and integrated.  • Systemic and strategic integration is needed among ‘wild, stray, care’ by each party.   • The nested scale and timescale of urban species and situations should be considered.  • It is imperative that a transdisciplinary approach that acknowledges disciplinary assumptions and boundaries to transcend them is supported. (Paraphrased from Edwards, Hahs and Hwang 2019) These perspectives are, to varying extents, considered and advanced within the chapters of this volume.     Reflecting a change in employment that resulted in applying theory and principles of urban greening and nature to grounded edible nature-based solutions projects in twelve international cities, the next event explored the politics of urban nature reproduction and the ties, constraints and

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possibilities that emerged in practice. Working with co-editor Lucia Alexandra Popartan, and sustainable urbanism expert Susan Parham, we hosted the panel, ‘Who’s Eating the City? Looking behind the scenes at urban greening, natures, and edible cities’ at the Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) ‘Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration’ (Brighton, UK, 24–26 September 2020). This panel consisted of ten contributors from three international, applied urban greening projects.  The session applied a critical lens to how urban greening, biodiversity and urban agriculture are often accompanied by frameworks such as nature-based solutions, natural capital and ecosystem services, which are typically supported by practices such as co-creation and co-design. We applied an urban political ecological framework to draw out assumptions bound within processes that effectively regulate the ‘wild’ – taking a return to ‘untamed urbanisms’ here – that, in turn, raise questions of ‘co-option, seduction, capture, subordination, cooperation, parasitism, symbiosis, conflict, coexistence, [and] complementarity’ (Gibson-Graham 2006: 71). The session engaged in issues common to political ecology scholarship, including a critique to hegemonic ways of knowing and living with natures in the city, in the context of neoliberal accumulation and control over resources. This session proved pivotal for Part III in this book: ‘Politicizing Urban Natures’.  In February 2020, the many concepts, questions and possibilities within urban nature research emerged during the ‘Global Symposium of (Re)Connecting Urban Natures’ held at RMIT Europe in Barcelona. This event was supported by a grant from the Centre of Urban Research (RMIT, Melbourne) uniting work from three RMIT research programmes, ‘EdiCitNet’, ‘People, Nature, Place’ and ‘Critical Urban Governance’. I worked with scholars Cecily Maller and Brian Coffey to convene the conference, where their research into healthy urban environments and the urban governmentality of nature proved highly valuable (Coffey 2016; Maller 2018). Coffey, alongside RMIT colleagues Lisa de Kleyn and Judy Bush, are chapter contributors for this book.  ‘(Re)Connecting Urban Natures’ sought to move beyond assumed or extant binaries maintained by Westernized ontologies, thinking, writing and practice. It aimed to make visible human/nonhuman urban relations, which can include sensing, governing, caring, learning, and producing, to acknowledge the flows, networks, influences and atmospheres in urban environments. To interrogate these aspects and to disrupt assumptions, the event was structured around four themes: place and place-making, care and caring, governance and governing, and imagining possible fu-

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tures. Twenty scholars from Europe (the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Belgium, Germany), Australia (Melbourne, Wollongong, Sydney), Aotearoa New Zealand and North America (Canada and the United States) attended the event, providing diverse theoretical and methodological knowledge and perspectives into cultural understandings, politics, and practices of urban natures. Co-editor Ida Nilstad Pettersen and chapter contributors Jolein Bergers, Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer and Mathilda Rosengren were attendees of this event.   A vibrant, urban, nonhuman nature populated the discussions: street dogs, trees, weeds, microbes, sharks and wild boars – dwellers of a myriad of ‘scapes’, including the city/ocean fringe and even cemeteries. In addition to qualitative and quantitative approaches, visual methodologies were discussed, including photographic walk-alongs and sketch maps to reveal relational understandings of place and nature. It was at this juncture where the structure of ‘Urban Natures’ fell into place, recognizing the three key aims, or sections: to make visible, to (re)connect and to (re) politicize. Further complemented by a writing retreat, this symposium not only explored urban nature themes but united urban nature academics online to bear witness and discuss the return of nonhuman nature in the city during the first few months of the pandemic.    Wild nature made a mighty comeback to cities during the lockdowns that followed the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. As if in a post-apocalyptic movie set, wild boars appeared on the deserted streets in Spain, condors swooped in city skies in Chile, monkeys marauded parks in Thailand, and deer ran freely down roads in Japan (Bekkesy et al. 2020). Birdwatching surged: locked in their homes, with little connection to nature outside other than the trees in front of their windows, many people started appreciating the feathered beings on the nearby branches (Fortin 2020). Domesticated nonhuman natures also came to the fore: dog sales soared, with dog-walking offering a passport to exercise and the great outdoors, while cats and birds became almost the solo source of socialization for people who were stuck at home alone (Applebaum et al. 2021). Plant life too provided a sense of grounding and purpose for many. Gardening became more popular, often providing nutritional benefits as certain foodstuffs were increasingly difficult to source because of distant trade route disturbances, and long queues delayed shop and supermarket access (Cerda et al. 2022). This brief pause from human-dominated cities was accompanied by a change in how the city felt – residents could hear and see more of the nonhuman life around them, prompting remembrance of a human’s place within a wider – and wilder – natural world. So too did COVID-19

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unleash unexpected human emotions of fear and loss, disrupting assumptions of safety and kinship, while weighing the values of where and how to spend one’s time and effort. COVID-19 reminded many city dwellers of the values, roles and needs of nonhuman others, with nature soothing the human condition on sensorial, social, mental, physical and spiritual fronts – solidifying many themes that are explored in this book. However, nonhuman species’ ‘reappearance’ – marked here in quotation marks because in reality many had never left – was accompanied by the dark realities of current times. For example, many of them are entering cities due to large-scale habitat losses, thus becoming marginalized and at risk in their traditional homes. Narayanan (2017: 476) argues that they ‘face steady eviction from spaces that are increasingly privatised, ghettoised, developed, or otherwise removed from nonhuman access’. Haraway (2015: 160) makes a similar claim: ‘the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge’. The global pandemic highlighted the dangers of ignoring these human/nonhuman nature relations, which create ‘imbalanced or unjust situations such as habitat destruction, intensive livestock production, wildlife trade, and microbial resistance, which potentially lead to increased zoonotic disease transmission’ (Hovorka et al. 2021: 4). The final event that united these topics was a return to a (now) online TNOC Festival in 2022. Occurring in the final days of the book manuscript, this session brought together twelve of this book’s contributors to discuss their chapters and – offering an excellent opportunity in which to cross-fertilize themes across chapters – to explore future directions for each book section. These events have all contributed in some way to the culmination of this book. The resulting product learns from the passions, approaches and experiences of the researchers who attended and shaped these ideas and events. While we admit that this book is not comprehensive in topic, it plays to the strengths of its editors and authors to dart in more depth into previously unexplored corners of urban nature research. In so doing, this book’s core frame and focus is an urban anthropological one, reflecting my own background and experience, and is the first book in Berghahn’s new ‘Urban Anthropology Unbound’ series. It takes onboard the ‘unbound’ implications, and opens up its anthropological angle to sensorial, methodological and theoretical contributions from many other disciplines. This book is based on the multiple events mentioned here that has been further developed through the writing and editorial process of all the co-editors contributing expertise from anthropology, design for sustainability transitions, political science and applied nature-based solution projects. I led the editorial overall and

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Part I specifically, Nilstad Pettersen was the lead editor of Part II, and Popartan lead the editorial efforts for Part III. Together, this work advances a critical urban political ecology perspective that further interrogates the limitations, barriers and potential interstices for socio-political change for moving towards living the more than human city. Work by the chapter contributors complement and extend the editors’ backgrounds, further illustrating how urban nature requires cross-disciplinary perspectives, stretching into fields of art, architecture, urban planning, agriculture engineering, philosophy, international urbanism, environmental history, geography and environmental science. We hope that through these diverse approaches, which combine the theory and practice that have developed over time, that this book will provide yet another window into the lived and possible worlds of urban nature.  Ferne Edwards has conducted research on sustainable cities across Australia, Venezuela, Ireland, Spain, Norway and the UK. Her books include the edited volumes Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices and Food, Senses and the City (both Routledge, 2021), and the monograph Food Resistance Movements: A Journey into Alternative Food Networks (Palgrave, 2023). She is based at the University of Surrey, UK. References  Allen, Adriana, Andreas Lampis, and Mark Swilling (eds). 2016. Untamed Urbanisms: Practices and Narratives on Socio-Environmental Change for Urban Sustainability. London: Routledge.  Applebaum, Jennifer W., et al. 2021. ‘The Impact of Pets on Everyday Life for Older Adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic’, Frontiers in Public Health 9.  Bekkesy, Sarah, et al. 2020: ‘Where the Wild Things Are: How Nature Might Respond as Coronavirus Keeps Humans Indoors’, The Conversation, 8 April. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https://theconversation.com/where-the-wild-thingsare-how-nature-might-respond-as-coronavirus-keeps-humans-indoors-134543. Cerda, Constanza, et al. 2022. ‘Home Food Gardening: Benefits and Barriers during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Santiago, Chile’, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 6: 841386. Coffey, Brian. 2016. ‘Unpacking the Politics of Natural Capital and Economic Metaphors in Environmental Policy Discourse’, Environmental Politics 25(2): 203–22. Edwards, Ferne, Amy Hahs and Yun Hye Hwang. 2019. ‘Wild, Stray, Care: Exploring ultiple Ways People Co-exist with Urban Nature’, The Nature of Cities Summit, Paris, 11 October. Retrieved 14 June 2022 from https://www .thenatureofcities.com/2019/10/11/wild-stray-care-exploring-multiple-wayspeople-co-exist-with-urban-nature/. Fortin, Jacey. 2020. ‘The Birds Are Not on Lockdown, and More People Are Watching Them’. The New York Times, 29 November 2020. Retrieved 30 December

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2022 from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/science/bird-watching-coronavirus.html. Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.   Grose, Margaret J. 2014. ‘Gaps and Futures in Working between Ecology and Design for Constructed Ecologies’, Landscape and Urban Planning 132: 69–78. Haraway, Donna. 2015. ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities 6: 159–65. Hinchliffe, Steve, and Sarah Whatmore. 2006. ‘Living Cities: Towards a Politics of Conviviality’, Science as Culture 15(2): 123–38.   Hovorka, Alice, Sandra McCubbin and Lauren Van Patter. 2021. ‘Introduction’, in Hovorka, McCubbin and Van Patter (eds), A Research Agenda for Animal Geographies: Visioning amidst Socio-ecological Crises. Cheltenham, UK: Edgar Elgar, pp. 1–20. Maller, Cecily. 2018. Healthy Urban Environments: More-than-Human Theories. Abingdon: Routledge.  Narayanan, Yamini. 2017. ‘Street Dogs at the Intersection of Colonialism and Informality: ‘Subaltern Animism’ as a Posthuman Critique of Indian Cities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35(3): 475–94. Steele, Wendy, Ilan Wiesel and Cecily Maller. 2019. ‘More-than-Human Cities: Where the Wild Things Are’, Geoforum 106 (November): 411–15. TNOC. n.d. ‘The Nature of Cities Festival’. Retrieved 14 June from https://tnoc-fes tival.com/wp/. Untaming the Urban. 2016. Symposium. Retrieved 14 June from https://untam ing-the-urban.tumblr.com/Symposium.  ———. 2018. Untaming the Urban. Retrieved 14 June from https://untamingurban .wordpress.com/symposium-2018/.

Acknowledgements Ferne Edwards, Lucia Alexandra Popartan and Ida Nilstad Pettersen would like to thank all contributors to the book, as well as the individuals who did additional reviews of some of the chapters and the three anonymous peer reviewers of the full manuscript, for their constructive comments and suggestions, which improved the book. Nick Dunn is grateful for the funding provided by Research England under the Beyond Imagination project, 2019 to 2022, which enabled the experimental research that underpins Chapter 1 to be conducted. He would also like to thank his colleagues in the City & Urban Beyond Imagination Cluster (CUBIC) for their energy, encouragement and support. Finally, Nick would like to thank the bats, rats and wayward cats of the Irk Valley for their openness and tolerance while a human became entangled in their nocturnal lives during this research. Lisa de Kleyn, Brian Coffey and Judy Bush would like to acknowledge that Chapter 6 is written on Wurundjeri Country. They acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation, on whose unceded land they live, learn and work. They respectfully acknowledge Ancestors and Elders – past, present and emerging. They acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of lands across Australia, their Elders and Ancestors, and their cultures, knowledge, heritage, and ongoing relationship with the land. Tracey Benson would like to thank the reviewers for their very helpful feedback in bringing Chapter 7 together. She is also most grateful to Wally Bell, Tamera Beath, Karen Maloney, Louise Curham, Urambi Parkcare Group, Ange Calliess, Rachel Eland, Tyson Powell, the Ginninderry Conservation Group, and all who have walked before. Monique Wing and Emma L. Sharp would like to thank the School of Environment and Faculty of Science at the University of Auckland, and GNS Science for their funding contributions to the Soilsafe Aotearoa community science programme, https://soilsafe.auckland.ac.nz/. They also acknowledge funding from the Food, Food Production and Nutrition Research Network in the Faculty of Science, University of Auckland, New Zealand. They thank their research participants, human and more-than-human. Jan van Duppen would like to thank the allotment gardeners and foxes for sharing their stories with him. Chapter 9 has benefited from

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the lively discussion at the Geographisches Kolloquium seminar series at the Department of Geography, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, and thanks Sandra Jasper for the invitation. He is further grateful for the conversations he had with Tijana Stevanović, George Revill, Gillian Rose, Melissa Butcher, David Crouch, Petr Jehlička, Sigrid Merx and Lynn Turner, and for all their suggestions. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (United Kingdom) is gratefully acknowledged. Lastly, Jan is indebted to the editors of this book – Ferne Edwards, Ida Nilstad Pettersen and Lucia Alexandra Popartan – for their critical engagement and support. Dominique Chen would like to acknowledge that Chapter 10 was written on Jinibara, Yugarra and Turrbal Countries, with respect and gratitude. She says thank you to Dr Carol McGregor and Northey Street City Farm for holding space for these conversations; and says ‘gaba nginda’ to her Elders, family, friends, colleagues and Countrymen, with whom life is one big collaboration. Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer would like to express her gratitude to all the residents of Auckland who agreed to participate in this research for Chapter 11. She also thanks her former supervisor Eveline Dürr, who has accompanied this research project with great commitment. Further, she thanks the Social Sciences Department at Auckland University of Technology for supporting her research, in particular Professor Charles Crothers. Jeannine-Madeleine also thanks her colleagues from Urban Ethics: Conflicts over the ‘Good’ and ‘Proper’ Life in Cities, an interdisciplinary research group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, for their discussions and colloquia. Her thanks also go to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for the financial support for this research. Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria would like to thank Steyn Van Assche and Maya Maes of BRAL, Amandine Thiberghien and Eric De Plaen of Natagora, Ernesto Diez and Raphael Magin, Bernard Pasau, Pierre Ryckmans, and the other volunteers of Sauvons la Friche Josaphat, Jeroen Beerten and Karel Bruyland of I love Josaphat, and Stéphane De Greef of the Brussels Bee Atlas (Université Libre de Bruxelles) for their cooperation and feedback during the research process for Chapter 12. They also thank Koenraad Danneels and Björn Bracke for their valuable feedback during the writing process. Lucia Alexandra Popartan, Josep Pueyo, Enric Cassú, Richard Pointelin, Joana Castellar and Joaquim Comas would like to thank the community of Menja’t Sant Narcís in Girona who taught them so much about commoning, concrete utopias, and what it means to ‘fer barri’ [Catalan for ‘building neighbourhood/community’]. They acknowledge the

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support and inspiration from the projects EdiCitNet (European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 776665) and RITA (AGAUR – Ref. 2020PANDE00176). Chakad Ojani would like to thank Alonso and all the other conservationists for kindly allowing him to participate in their activities, as described in Chapter 15. He is also grateful to the editors for their constructive comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the University of Manchester. Mathilda Rosengren would like to acknowledge that her research was funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant Rethinking Urban Nature project at the University of Cambridge. She presented an earlier draft at the ‘(Re)Connecting Urban Natures’ workshop, RMIT Barcelona, February 2020. Mathilda would like to thank all the participants for their insightful comments, which in many ways helped to shape this final version. Mariya Shcheglovitova and JH Pitas want to extend their gratitude to the community members and professionals who contributed their time and experiences to this research. They would also like to thank Ferne Edwards, Alexandra Popartan and Ida Pettersen for their work in organizing this collection, and for their comments and careful editing, which significantly improved their chapter. Hanne Cecilie Geirbo and Ida Nilstad Pettersen would like to acknowledge that Chapter 18 is based on the research project ‘Hug the Streets’, funded by the Research Council of Norway (project number 259923/O70). They would like to thank the participants in the interviews and the workshop for sharing their experiences, insights and drawings. They are especially indebted to Hanne Johnsrud, who was part of the research team and conducted the data gathering with them.

Abbreviations ABS CCET CS DOC GCT LLDC MSI MSN NBS NSCF NZ PCO PoNF RSDP SLU SNCB STS UN USDA

Australian Bureau of Statistics Chinese Conservation Education Trust Citizen science Department of Conservation, New Zealand Ginninderry Conservation Trust London Legacy Development Corporation Maatschappij voor Stedelijke Inrichting (a regional urban development corporation) Menja’t Sant Narcís Nature-based Solutions Northey Street City Farm New Zealand Pest Control Operative Park and Nature Department Regional Sustainable Development Plan Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Belges (the Belgian national railway company) Science and Technology Studies United Nations United States Department of Agriculture

deú INTRODUCTION

Mapping the More-than-Human City in Theory, Methods and Practice Ferne Edwards, Lucia Alexandra Popartan and Ida Nilstad Pettersen

In the Anthropocene, our lifeworlds have become largely based around cities – places where now more than half of humanity live, work, play and eat (Gottlieb 2009). Cities both catalyse and suffer from escalating contemporary crises. The capacity of cities to respond to societal needs and disasters is encumbered in part by their relationship to a wider morethan-human world, encompassing multiple species (of animals, plants, microbes, viruses, and more) and ‘non’ or ‘other-than’ human elements, matters and processes (such as water, minerals, soil, sun and weather). The rights, needs and desires of other-than-humans within the city are often trivialized by human inhabitants, and subsequently devalued, ignored or even vilified as they compete for space and resources. However, cities are not only home to multiple species but they are also cocomposed by them, where increased proximity heightens both the frequency and intensity of encounters between human and nonhuman lifeforms, matter and phenomena. This interspecies interdependence extends to the human body that exists in exchange with micro-organisms (McFall-Ngai 2017). Hence, a shift to a more-than-human city considers how ‘a range of forces and agents shape urban rhythms, spatial form, materiality, and consumption, not just for and in relation to humans, but for and in relation to themselves and each other’ (Sharma 2021: n.p.). This concept stresses relationalities across humans and nonhumans, asking how one species, matter or phenomena impacts or influences another. Furthermore, by realigning humans as part of nature within the city, questions arise: Who and what are cities for? How can diverse natures

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coexist in urban environments? How are nonhuman natures politicized, and how does this impact their governance? In this book we argue that cities are highly relevant sites for exploring more-than-human relationships, resistance and struggles. Often located in species-rich areas (Luck 2007) but often also set apart from all things ‘natural’, cities are centres of transformative change where human and nonhuman clusters reveal new edges of tension, possibility and promise. Some argue that cities even represent ‘evolutionary hotspots’, unifying diverse spaces and species to catalyse new species and assemblages (Schilthuizen 2018). The definitions of nonhuman natures in the city are also being redrafted as the city becomes known as a ‘novel ecosystem’, challenging staid categorizations of misplaced natures like ‘feral’ and ‘invasive’, and instead recognizing their potential to coexist and flourish in cities (Davis 2019). Furthermore, we contend that this posthuman turn emerges at a pivotal time in human history, when the need for urban nature is greater than ever whilst entering global discourse in the call for ‘green’, ‘resilient’, ‘nature-based’ futures. We also advocate that a morethan-human transformation requires creative, innovative, democratic and interdisciplinary approaches. While some scholars advance radical acknowledgement for convivial new states of human/nonhuman relations, others retain a historical, human-centric and utilitarian perspective, which envisions humans in cities as changing nature rather than embracing the agency of nature to change cities (and humans). Others again fail to recognize the unique, compressed and complex conditions of diverse urban environments. In contrast, our volume joins work by Bram Buscher and Robert Fletcher (2020) and Matthew Gandy and Sandra Jasper (2020) to take a fresh perspective to urban nature, questioning and disrupting assumptions in their many different forms and flows in and across the city. As we move towards more-than-human understandings, it becomes apparent that ‘to dissolve the boundary between nature and culture is to radically remix the arts, humanities, and the social and natural sciences’ (Gan 2019, n.p.). This changing ground welcomes a broad range of disciplines that offer alternative perspectives, approaches and methods. Here, we have chosen the intertwining perspectives of anthropology, geography, design and urban political ecology to explore how humans can ‘make visible’, (re)connect to and politicize urban natures. Anthropology provides a thick description of holistic contexts from which to analyse the more-than-human world, while geography considers relationships between space, place and identity in the city. Political ecology guides our inquiry into how power, reflected in institutional, moral and emotional dynamics, constantly shapes the limits of the (urban) community for

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both humans and nonhumans. Finally, design translates these findings and concepts into concrete strategies of intervention, facilitating collective exploration and imagination, experimentation and implementation. From this base, this chapter introduces core more-than-human perspectives and approaches in theory, method and practice.

Mapping the Theory An Anthropology of the More-than-Human Traditionally, anthropology has engaged with ‘nature’ in numerous ways. Whilst the more-than-human turn was headlined by the coining of ‘multispecies ethnography’ by Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich (2010), this approach has been influenced by a long succession of authors. In the early sixties, Henri Lévi-Strauss (1963) suggested that ‘thinking with’ animals could question human exceptionalism to expand human social and political worlds to include nonhuman beings (Feinberg, Nason and Sridharan 2013: 1). The need for greater consideration of a wider environment was emphasized by Tim Ingold, who sought to bring the ‘backdrop’ of the environment forward (Ingold 1988: 1). However, a distinct pure anthropology trajectory is difficult to distil for this topic. From geography and political ecology, significant contributions include Noel Castree and Bruce Braun (2001), Sarah Whatmore (2002) and Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (2006), whose work contested the notion of an apolitical ‘wild’ nature to instead acknowledge ‘nature’ as ‘hybrid entities, or socionatural assemblages’ (Ogden, Hall and Tanita 2013: 12). Moreover, as noted, urban political ecology insists on the need to link the distribution of power with productive activity and ecological analysis (Robbins 2012). However, Anna Tsing (2013) suggested a ‘more-than-human sociality’ approach that would extend the study of the nonhuman to consider ‘animate and inanimate, beings and things, but also entities that are less tangible, such as spirits’ (Lien and Pálsson 2021: 4). Fields of ecology and biology remind us that humans are one part of a larger urban ecosystem, and that urban rifts and anthropocentric views often guide and drive them (McClintock 2010; Pickett et al. 2016). Ecology introduces new paradigms such as ‘recombinant ecology’ (Barker 2000) that represents relational and connected communities ‘assembled through the dense comings and goings of urban life’ (Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2006: 123). Contributions from biology include Gregory Bateson (1972), who challenged human exceptionalism to later develop the concept of biosemiotics, and Jakob von Uexküll (2010), who intro-

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duced the term ‘umwelt’ to acknowledge the existence of specific nonhuman worlds. This intellectual progression coincides with a changing understanding of what animals are (and are capable of), in turn, informing how we define being human. For example, are we human in our difference to ‘nature’ because we, as humans, possess culture – or because we work, think, speak, and/or have symbolic thoughts? All these presumptions were raised in earlier years to distinguish humans from ‘nature’, yet they have now been trumped by science (Lien and Pálsson 2021). Some argue that a shift in anthropology to a ‘posthumanist approach helps us to better understand the human condition’ (Smart and Smart 2017: 6). While anthropology has historically noted ‘nature’ in its thick description of cultural studies, until recently humans remained firmly fixed at its core, persisting the assumption that ‘humans alone . . . made and had “culture” (cf. Tylor 1994 [1871])’ (Lien and Pálsson 2021: 4). Marianne Elisabeth Lien and Gisli Pálsson examine this rupture before and after the ‘more-than-human’ turn by revisiting the role of nature in its various forms in traditional ethnographic accounts. Here the affective dimension of fieldwork – a sensing of sorts – becomes apparent, where once recorded in notes, ‘nature’ does not often feature in subsequent theoretical developments. The work of Roland Barthes provides one such example, where Lien and Pálsson ask, ‘But what became of the animals? What became of his affective relations with the material world? And what became of the poetry?’ (2021: 3). In such classic accounts, they acknowledge how ‘A singular focus on meaning, symbolism or utility (Willis 1990; Douglas 1966; Rappaport 1984) has often sidelined other relational practices’ (ibid.). The inclusion of this book within the new Urban Anthropology Unbound series will join others in ushering in a renewed perception of nature within anthropology. A more-than-human anthropology typically stresses the relational ties between people and a wider world, revealing new edges and terrains for ethics, power, conflict and identity. These vital relationships are rejuvenated by an ‘attentiveness to nonhuman agency – stones, plants, birds, and bees have the power to transform the world in this work’ (Ogden, Hall and Tanita 2013: 16). Political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett (2010) acknowledges the ‘vital materiality’ and political agency of nonhuman entities. Such human/nonhuman entanglements are often perceived as being in a state of ‘becoming’, where Donna Haraway acknowledges ‘that becoming is always becoming with – in a contact zone where the outcome, where

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who is in the world, is at stake’ (Haraway 2008: 244). She recognizes ‘how humans have coevolved with their “companion species” and coconstitute each other’ (cited in Locke and Muenster 2015: n.p.). The liveliness of nonhuman others both raises new ethics and gives rise to new political becomings. Ethically, it calls to ‘make visible’ nonhuman others in theory and practice (Buller 2016), whilst recognizing the need to establish an ethics of ‘living with’ the natural world (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) – or, as expressed by Ogden, Hall and Tanita (2013), an anti-essentialist ethics that goes beyond merely extending moral consideration to nonhumans to instead reconsidering human-based classifications placed on other beings (Hache and Latour 2010). Such a perspective that both decentres the human and recognizes the coproduction and hybridity of others and ourselves serves to outline nuanced modes of being, involvement and responsibility, where different human– animal relationships can appear, such as those of mutuality, companionship and care (Lien and Pálsson 2021). Politically, this interrogates the creation of subjectivities, which are ‘decisive to the operation of institutions as they are integrally bound up in social relations of power and the ways in which people understand their relationship to others, whether that be human or nonhuman others’ (Nightingale 2011: 121). Ultimately, this book recognizes that a more-than-human politics must account for the ‘performance of things and not just the actions of humans (Braun and Whatmore 2010: xx)’ (cited in Ogden, Hall and Tanita 2013: 16), raising further questions of belonging, alienation, value creation, conflict and dominance (Feinberg, Nason and Sridharan 2013). Anthropology is well geared to contribute to the development of morethan-human perspectives. Anthropologists seek to open up understandings that typically go beyond modernist European or Western conceptual frameworks, where anthropologists often act as ‘translators’ across cultures. Seeking a holistic perspective through the practice of ethnography – defined as a ‘comprehensive approach to the human condition’ (Otto and Bubandt 2010: 3) – anthropology is also well positioned to work with other disciplines to explore in rich detail ‘the interconnectivity of animals–humans–environments, as well as highlighting the experiences of marginalized human and nonhuman groups’ (Hovorka, McCubbin and Van Patter 2021: 3). The posthuman turn can deepen this holistic goal to ‘meaningfully integrate the affective and the ecological, the individual and the relational, moving beyond anthropocentrism, speciesism, symbolism and utilitarian thinking’ (Lien and Pálsson 2021: 16). The next section acknowledges another prominent discipline in the making of the more-than-human: geography.

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Bringing Nature Back In There has been a strong movement in human and animal geographies over the last three decades to ‘bring nature back in’ to the conceptualization of the human world. Henry Buller (2014) presents an excellent overview of this trajectory, detailing how a special issue – ‘Bringing the Animals Back In’, led by Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emmel (1995: 633) – argued ‘for a new animal geography to go beyond taking animals as merely “signifiers” of human endeavour and meaning’. Others followed suit (Philo and Wolch 1998; Wolch and Emel 1998; Philo and Wilbert 2000; Urbanik 2012), emphasizing the need to not only acknowledge the agency of animals and nonhuman others but to show how agency is interpreted in time and place, focusing on the physical and conceptual places and spaces of human–nonhuman interactions. Engaging interest from and engaging with diverse disciplines, such as the environmental humanities, politics and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this subfield has since emerged to become a porous, shifting and eclectic heterogeneity of ideas, practices, methodologies and associations within a more-than-human life/world: an ‘emergent scholarly community’ . . . , one in which animals matter individually and collectively, materially and semiotically, metaphorically and politically, rationally and affectively. (Buller 2014: 310)

These ‘vital connections’ (Whatmore 2006: 601) or ‘lively biogeographies’ (Lorimer 2010: 491) offer new ways and points of reflections for understanding our place, connection and responsibility to a wider world. With cities becoming the dominant sites for the human population, we next consider the ‘urban turn’ in more-than-human studies. However, before we can explore the ‘urban turn’ to bring nature back into the city, a brief explanation is needed to understand why nonhuman nature – physically and symbolically – ‘left’ cities. Here we acknowledge a focus on Western cities and the colonialization of cities as a process, whereas such a human–nonhuman separation did not occur within Indigenous communities. Up until the mid-1800s, European and American cities were full of working animals: horses were used for transport, machinery, and their manure for fuel; cows for milk, cheese and meat; pigs for meat and as eaters of urban trash, manure and dead animals; and chickens for eggs and meat (Blecha 2007; McShane and Tarr 2007; Brinkley and Vitiello 2014). Urban industries included fresh food markets, stables, piggeries, slaughterhouses and breweries – the remnants of which can still be seen today in building and street names.

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The arrival of the City Beautiful movement in the late 1800s introduced a new urban ideal, desiring to remove distasteful and immoral behaviour, smells, noise and liquids (Donofrio 2007). Modernist separationist discourse from the Enlightenment period also underpinned this perspective, asserting a moral order that placed humans ‘above’ and ‘outside’ nature. Urban natures became designated in broad terms as being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. ‘Good’ natures remained in the city, where a rise in aesthetics and romanticism in mid-eighteenth-century Europe embraced ‘wild primeval’ nature in stylized forms. Symbolizing controlled beauty, subdued natures entered homes as paintings of model gardens and as picture cases of pressed dead butterflies, beetles and spiders. ‘Wildness’ also became a source of nostalgia, affection, contemplation and inspiration, with prestigious creatures presented alive in zoos, aquariums and at circuses (Barber 1984; Cronon 1991). Conversely, the designation of ‘bad’ natures prompted a ‘discursive erasure of animals from mainstream imaginaries of the modern city’ (Blecha 2007: 15). Selected species were recategorized according to their use or enjoyment value for humans, or instead declared to be a ‘transgressed species’, such as rats, cockroaches and pigeons (Atkins 2012). Urban zoning and policy reinforced these anthropocentric assertions (Brinkley and Vitiello 2014). Thus, through processes of purification and polarization, many ‘undesirable’ animal species were marginalized as ‘problem’ species, justifying their relocation (whenever possible) to rural regions (Wolch 2002; Braun 2005). Hence, ‘place’ perpetuates particular framings that guide assumptions and politics for the nonhuman ‘other’. From the mid- to late 1990s, calls to acknowledge the presence of nonhuman nature’s presence in cities have arisen predominantly in critical animal studies and geography, revealing a series of ‘nature turns’. This surge in popularity was fostered by earlier research in urban wildlife studies from the late 1960s and early 1970s (Adams 2005; Gehrt 2010; Magle et al. 2012) and Human–Animal Studies from the 1990s (Anderson 1997; Shapiro and DeMello 2010). Critical Animal Studies emerged in the 1990s, transforming into Critical Animal Geographies soon after, with one outcome being a focus on urban human–animal relationships (Wolch and Emel 1995; Philo and Wolch 1998; Philo and Wilbert 2000; Buller 2016). This subsequent urban animal turn (prominent in animal geographies, and extending to include nonhuman natures more generally in recent years) has called for the modernist boundaries between city/country, culture/nature and wild/civilized to be overcome, allowing new perspectives to raise questions about who and what the city is for,

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and how it should be defined. As such, cities are becoming reconceptualized as more-than-human places that necessitate recognition of species’ agency, innate values and ethics – outside of the human-dominated frame. A range of concepts are growing that seek to disrupt traditional perceptions of the city and who it is for. Concepts of dwelling and umwelt are both on point for placing nature in the city. ‘Dwelling’ refers to ‘an immediate, enduring and relational process of being-in the world’ (Ingold 2000; Jones 2009). These degrees of approaching closeness across species, which are further accelerated in the urban environment, are expressed by Deborah Bird Rose (2009: 87) as the ‘situated connectivities that bind us into multispecies communities’. The act of ‘untaming’ is another popular approach. Adriana Allen, Andrea Lampis and Mark Swilling argue for ‘the act of untaming as forms of producing the urban that are rarely acknowledged or recognized as productive pathways to rethink what makes and could make cities conduits of social and environmental justice’ (Allen, Lampis and Swilling 2016: 2; also see Preface). Cyborg urbanization also emerges as a useful concept to explore human–nature–city relations (White, Rudy and Gareau 2016: 153). The authors Erik Swyngedouw (1996) and Matthew Gandy (2005) were among the first to underline the interconnections among apparently separate domains. As Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (2006: 11) point out, ‘[t]he urban world is a cyborg world, part natural/part social, part technical/part cultural, but with no clear boundaries, centres or margins’. This means that urban metabolisms and flows are discursively constructed, and cannot be separated from the choreographies of power and political projects (Kaika 2005). Decolonialization too provides a useful frame for analysis. Decolonizing nature within the settler-city seeks to recognize the uneven power flows that underpin the distribution, framing and management of nature – a prominent theme in this book (see chapters 4, 6, 7, 10, 16). While settler-colonial relations may not appear immediately obvious, Sarah de Leeuw and Sarah Hunt recognized that ‘the complex and interdigitated nature of globalization and neoliberalism mean that profits and accumulations drawn from settler-colonial geographies implicate people and places beyond specific state borders’ (de Leeuw and Hunt 2018: 2). Nathan McClintock provides the example of urban agriculture – a popular pastime that often proclaims good intentions yet can either extend domination or symbolize resistance. He notes how urban gardens have ‘played an important role in delimiting race and space’ (McClintock 2018: 5), requiring an openness to deconstruct their history and claim to place.

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Finally, the question of who the city is for has long concerned urban geographers, political ecologists and planners. They draw out the processes of exclusion and marginalization generated by the urbanization of nature, also known as green gentrification: intentionally or not, bringing more nature into the city can create ‘enclaves of environmental privilege when low-income and minority residents are excluded from the neighbourhoods where new green space is created’ (Anguelovski, Connolly and Brand 2018: 10). Sensing and Living the More-than-Human City Once relegated to the realm of the private or demonized as expressions of the ‘unreasonable’ or ‘irrational’ (Velicu 2015), senses and emotions have gradually become a vital part of the conversation on human–nature relations. So much so that, for instance, Farhana Sultana (2015) talked about an ‘emotional turn’ in political ecology (see also González-Hidalgo and Zografos 2020), and a growing number of theorists are now acknowledging the emotional toll of the Anthropocene: the study of emotions such as distress, anxiety and grief in relation to forecasts of environmental doom has gained increased scholarly salience. Present and expected extinctions of both human and nonhuman life (van Dooren 2016), caused by climate change, unhinged extractivism, pandemics and ubiquitous injustice, have an impact on the way we live and sense the city. Indeed, as we hear climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us may feel a sense of déjà vu regarding the sad outcome to this story (Head 2016; Richardson 2018). This sickening feeling resonates with what Ann Kaplan (2016) calls ‘pre-trauma’ – the traumatic imagining of catastrophe to come – which functions like a sort of ‘memory of the future’ (Kaplan 2016, cited by Richardson 2018: 2). Several chapters in this book document experiences of trauma and loss produced by socio-natural urban malaises. This sense of dread is sometimes made visible in the shape of rituals of grief and memorialization (Chapter 16), emotional bursts and tensions with regards to how nature is ‘managed’ in the city (Chapter 18), and as acts of frustration and resistance (Chapter 17). How do cities matter in this context? The concept of ‘solastalgia’ anchors the diffuse sense of end of the world in concrete sites: scholars have identified elements of grief in the loss or change of loved places, and the disruption of life patterns, with climate change transforming the geographical, human and more-than-human components of urban sites (Farbotko and McGregor 2010; Cunsolo 2012; Galway et al. 2019). Cities become such places of grief as the urban denizens are directly af-

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fected by the rise of the sea in coastal towns, by raging fires and by water scarcities. They are also at the receiving end of indirect effects of the environmental crisis, as planning fixes may create unwanted consequences: gentrification, displacement, homelessness, conflicts, and the erasure of local identities (Robbins 2012; Anguelovski, Connolly and Brand 2018). The effects are dire on both the individual and the community: Collective trauma is a blow to the basic tissues of social life; [it] damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality. . . . [I]t is a form of shock . . . a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support, and that an important part of the self has disappeared. ‘I’ continues to exist though damaged, and maybe even permanently changed. (Erikson 1976, 153–54; quoted in Velicu 2022)

Yet, ‘end-of-the world’ discourses are not without criticism. For instance, Erik Swyngedouw denounced that apocalyptic imaginaries about the environment are depoliticizing. As an integral part of the cultural politics of capitalism, these narratives manage to ‘create a consensual setting where environmental problems are generally staged as universally threatening to the survival of humankind, announcing the premature termination of civilization as we know it’ (Swyngedouw 2010: 217). ‘It’s a catastrophe, relax!’ says the physicist ironically, in Ian McEwan’s novel Solar (quoted in Velicu 2022). However, this post-political argument may be obscuring innumerable instances where nature is mobilized politically in collective actions for instituting disruptive ways of being together in the city. According to Lesley Head, hope can be traced back to practices rather than particular emotions. The depoliticizing effect of apocalyptic dread on the one side, and the blind faith of technocratic optimism on the other (see Habermas 2015), can be compensated if hope is kindled in ‘localised, vernacular understandings and practices . . . indigenous engagements, gardens, suburbs, farms, domestic homes’ (Head 2016: 24). In this sense, hope ‘savours the life and world we have, not the world as we wish it to be’ (ibid.: 21). Importantly, in the face of depoliticized imaginaries, hope is interpretable as a fundamentally political stance. To use Jacques Rancière and his followers (see Velicu 2015), the ‘return of the political’ means the disruption of the established ‘partitioning of sensible’ (the dominant, what is acceptable to our senses) and the enunciation of the principle of equality by ‘those who have no part’, those marginalized (Rancière 1999). This book documents several such occurrences of hope. Fragile and incomplete as they are, the alternative practices of being with nature in the city hold the potential to interrupt the dominant apoca-

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lyptic imaginary (see, for instance, the chapters by McKenzie and Stein; Ojani; Popartan et al.), while ‘unveiling the contradictory/ambiguity of selves/identities as sites of social transformation’ (Velicu 2015: 847). One such frame that disrupts conventional tropes and is particularly pertinent for human/nonhuman relations is that of ‘care’. Emphasis on care and kinship in the context of relationality, interdependence and co-constitution that entangles human and nonhuman worlds is core to Indigenous scholarship and ontologies (Bawaka Country et al. 2019; Tynan 2021). Bawaka Country et al. explain that when humans care for Country and Country cares for them, it is in both cases not about caring for something separate. Rather, it is a process of co-constitution, co-becoming and caring as Country. For ‘Western’ practices and technocultures, such understandings clearly represent a break. In the words of Donna Haraway: ‘Technocultural people must study how to live in actual places, cultivate practices of care, and risk ongoing face-to-face encounters with unexpected partners’ (Haraway 2011: 9). Presence in Country is needed for it to flourish; not perfection but ongoing, effective care. Care, often devalued in capitalist, neoliberal societies (Fisher and Tronto 1990) is considered important for thinking and living in interdependent, more-than-human worlds (see Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 2017). In recent years, care has been explored in many different contexts, including the urban. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa points out that care per se is a relational concept, and it contributes to the subsistence of living beings in more-than-human entanglements. She underlines this by pointing to Joan Fisher and Berenice Tronto’s much-cited definition of care: ‘[A] species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Fisher and Tronto 1990: 40, in Tronto 1995). As Puig de la Bellacasa (2012, 2017) shows, however, when exploring the implications of thinking with care, these are ambivalent terrains, impure and fraught with tensions. The emphasis on ongoing processes of care can also be seen in examples of conceptions of care in the context of cities. Ash Amin, for example, outlines the elements of an urban ethic for the good city, formulating an ethics of care based on the four registers of urban solidarity: ‘repair’, ‘relatedness’, ‘rights’ and ‘re-enchantment’ (Amin 2006). Wendy Steele builds on these by decentring humans to address the urban greening agenda and how it tends to reproduce dualistic understandings of natural and built space by framing nature as a mode of urban purification. In turn, envisioning cities as modes of human belonging in more-thanhuman worlds can be transformative, as we see them not by placing the

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focus on ‘the profitable sanitising of technology by nature, but as spaces of dirty more-than-human care and solidarity’ (Steele 2020: 245). Hence returning nonhuman natures to cities – both physically and symbolically – requires a complex (re)thinking, (re)sensing and (re)living of who and what cities are for. Rather than assume that one or a few approaches should dominate, abundant narratives are required to decolonialize current perceptions of how to express ways of knowing the world (de Leeuw and Hunt 2018). The next section explores methods towards knowing the more-than-human.

Mapping More-than-Human Methods More-than-human approaches must go beyond the limits of human assumptions, needs and desires as far as possible to comprehend the many worlds of nonhuman others. To study these relationships, new tools and strategies with which to better understand nonhuman worlds in an ethical way must be developed. Returning to anthropology, multispecies ethnography offers one such approach. Coined by Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich in 2010, multispecies ethnography seeks to acknowledge the ‘interconnectedness and inseparability of humans and other life forms’ (Locke and Muenster 2015: n.p.). Multispecies ethnography departs from the epistemologies of biological anthropology to consider emergent relationships between human and nonhuman encounters, producing diverse entanglements at times described as mutual ecologies, coproduced niches, new genetic technologies and symbiopolitics. Furthermore, as Eduardo Kohn asserts, multispecies ethnography ‘should not just be to give voice, agency or subjectivity to the nonhuman – to recognize them as others, visible in their difference – but to force us to radically rethink these categories of our analysis as they pertain to all beings’ (cited in Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 562–63). Hence, by making them visible, scholars are also repoliticizing urban natures, welcoming them back as equal players in the shared city. In addition to applying ethnographic techniques to understand nonhuman others, anthropologists are mimicking human-centric multi-sited approaches to instead follow ‘genes, cells, and organisms across landscapes and seascapes’ (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 556). These approaches often also embrace affective and sensorial elements in their attempts to bridge human/nonhuman worlds – both in correspondence to the affective states of the nonhuman other and through the anthropologist’s self-reflection on their affective experiences (Latimer and Miele

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2013). For example, Ferne Edwards (2021) describes how the senses can inspire, engage and educate beekeepers in a reciprocal process as they tend to their hives, while beekeepers are able to convey beekeeping knowledge to others through embodied learning, such as through mentorship. However, problems of translation and representation persist in interspecies research, prompting questions: How can anthropologists learn from other disciplines to understand and speak for nonhuman others? What new insights and understandings of diverse nonhuman natures can be revealed through inter- and transdisciplinary approaches? Other disciplines are also thinking urban nature differently. In landscape architecture, ‘environmental stewardship’ seeks to foster mutually beneficial interactions. Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives such as actor-network theory have stimulated new ways of approaching relations to nonhumans, from landscapes to technologies (Whatmore 2006; Forlano 2017). Others, such as Heather Paxson and Stefan Helmreich (2013), have taken a ‘microbial turn’ to explore morethan-human health relations. Efforts to decentre humans, bridge worlds and broaden participation can be seen across design-related fields, under different headings. Weisser and Hauck (2017) propose Animal Aided Design (AAD) as an approach to the design of open urban spaces, as it integrates conservation into planning and makes planning inclusive of animals. Within animal-computer interaction, scholars place animals at the centre of iterative development processes, as users and design contributors (Mancini 2013). Researchers working on design and evaluation are, for example, encouraged to go beyond ethnomethodology to explore sense-making mechanisms, or to support multispecies ecologies by ‘designing with’ other species (Mancini et al. 2012; Mancini 2013). Focusing on other species’ needs and rights does not necessarily address ecosystem interdependencies but can help to move beyond human-centredness (Clarke et al. 2019). Emerging design research further disrupts binaries and decentres humans. Scholars engage with posthumanist or more-thanhuman approaches to tackle environmental issues and socio-technical systems transformation, or with decolonial theory to address issues of equality and justice (Forlano 2017). Focusing on relations to dynamic technologies, Giaccardi and Redström (2019) argue, for example, that more-than-human design implies a shift from human-centredness, distinctions between design and use and a focus on ensuring the best outcomes possible, to continuous negotiation and cultivation of multiple relations, perspectives and responses in dynamic interplays between humans and nonhumans; a shift from a concern with what should be to what might become. In the context of participatory design and neigh-

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bouring fields, emerging research explores topics ranging from how nonhumans participate to co-creation with ecosystems, interspecies design and multispecies place-making based on artistic methods (Rice 2017; Pettersen, Geirbo and Johnsrud 2018; Clarke et al. 2019; Roudavski 2021; Olsen 2022). STS provides innovative and experimental enactments of technological natureculture hybrids, whereas more-than-human participatory research seeks ‘to support the inclusion of marginalised actors and to make research accountable to those it affects’ (Bastian et al. 2017: 5). Cross-/interdisciplinary approaches – such as those that combine anthropology, environmental humanities and bioartists – provide illuminating, species-shifting food for thought. For example, the multispecies salon, an exhibition held for several years at the American Anthropology Association, juxtapositioned the agency, beauty, danger and complexities that lie between human and nonhuman entanglements (Kirksey 2014). Recognizing the power of visuality and other senses to convey emotional connection and alternative ways of thinking, one chapter in each book part (chapters 3, 7 and 13) explores urban nature by taking a visual and/or narrative form. Similarly, contributors span from anthropology to disciplines of art, architecture, urban planning, design, engineering, philosophy and geography. These inter-/transdisciplinary approaches are evermore needed when putting human/nonhuman learnings into policy and practice. We hope by showcasing, describing and reminding others about such possible actions that greater care and conservation practices can be galvanized to overcome the extinction of experience (Schuttler et al. 2018; Soga and Gaston 2016). Urban centres – where we can learn to see nature once more all around us – are ideal places to (re)connect, care and act with such other worlds.

From Theory to Practice In recent years, the enrolment of ‘Nature’ in urban sustainability policies has reached unprecedented levels, driven by the doxa of green, resilient and smart cities (Connolly 2019). The ecomodernist discourse on ‘win–win solutions’, bridging environmentalism and economic growth, is the orthodoxy of our days (Anguelovski and Martinez Alier 2014). Therefore, the map of practices in urban sustainability would be mostly occupied by ‘system-affirming tools’ fuelled by the neoliberal growth imperative (Kotsila et al. 2020). The concept of Nature-based Solutions (NBS) is a case in point, as it currently dominates environmental

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discourse in cities, especially in the Global North. This shift in European Union policy vocabulary from terms such as ‘green infrastructure’ and ‘ecosystem-based assessments’ to NBS reflects interest in achieving ‘co-benefits’ for both people and nature in cities (Raymond et al. 2017). This shift aligns with the conceptual framework adopted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which has a considerable focus on ‘nature’s contributions to people’ (Castellar et al. 2021). The notion has gained extraordinary popularity amongst environmental scholars and practitioners, incentivized by extraordinary European funding: in 2021 the European Commission calculated that its Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme had invested 292 million euros in NBS projects. The concept of NBS was first used as a policy instrument by scientifically oriented non-governmental and finance organizations such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the World Bank (Cohen-Shacham, Walters and Janzen 2016; Faivre et al. 2017). It is an all-encompassing term that frames debates and proposals on climate change adaptation and mitigation, sustainable resource use, biodiversity conservation, and circular economy in cities (Frantzeskaki 2019; Stefanakis, Calheiros and Nikolaou 2021; Castellar et al. 2021). From small-scale interventions such as green walls, to large-scale interventions such as the creation of artificial urban ecosystems, NBS are the latest environmental ‘silver bullet’ that can ‘simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits’ (European Commission 2022). From a more-than-human perspective, this current fetishization of NBS is problematic for its unapologetic anthropocentrism. The concept is mainly focused on outcomes and benefits for humans, dismissing the nonhuman species and ecosystems that might be affected, ‘no matter how minimal or invisible they may be perceived to be’ (Maller 2021: 2). The accent falls on nature’s traits and services, obscuring the value of non-replicable human–nature interactions: trees and greenery are treated solely as ‘physical’ elements that can be managed and moved around, and that offer ‘advantages’ such as carbon dioxide capture, flood regulation and heat relief. In turn, ‘situated socio-natural systems – such as the irreplaceable memories and associations with a specific tree in a specific space – are often erased or deemed irrelevant’ (Kotsila 2020: n.p.). Moreover, even as NBS discourse is littered with references to ‘co-creation’ and ‘co-design’, the participatory enthusiasm does not extend to nonhuman ‘stakeholders’, thus ignoring increasing knowledge about interconnection and dependencies between humans and other life forms (Atkins 2012; Narayanan 2017; Maller 2021).

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From a political ecology perspective, NBS are also a target of critique, as ‘selling nature to save it’ (McAfee 1999) remains the leitmotif of mainstream nature-based practices in our cities, furthering the neoliberal agenda, while suppressing conflicts and dissent (Swyngedouw 2014). In this sense, NBS offer yet another idealized vision of ‘nature’ to replace genuinely emancipatory political issues, thereby evacuating the political from the public arena. Instead of addressing the inequalities and injustices produced by global (neo)liberal capitalism, political energies are channelled into technomanagerial solutions to environmental problems (Swyngedouw 2014; Woroniecki et al. 2020). The overwhelming positive discourse around the benefits and co-benefits of NBS as a costeffective instrument sidelines unintended consequences such as green gentrification followed by an amplification of inequality, displacement and loss of habitat (Anguelovski, Connolly and Brand 2018; Sekulova and Anguelovski 2017). The only way out of this impasse lies in the power of the imagination to construct ‘radical . . . spatio-temporal utopias’ and ‘demanding the impossible’ (Swyngedouw 2011: 273). For instance, Rachel Clarke et al. ‘demand the impossible’ by advocating for a more-than-human participatory approach in design that challenges the ‘technologically driven, human-centred, and solution-optimizing’ smart cities approach to solving environmental problems (Clarke et al. 2019: 60). They propose an exploration of more-than-human temporalities and alternative wisdoms, including Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, and development of pedagogics and curricula that nurture skills in alliance and partnership-building with more-than-human worlds. Elsewhere, the Barcelona Lab for Environmental Justice documents urban projects that follow environmental justice principles, and help planners to implement new green spaces in ways that ‘benefit rather than displace local residents’ (BCNUEJ 2021). This book itself offers a glimpse of concrete utopias and variegated alternative practices that challenge established discourses and manage to politicize nature. They capture human/nonhuman entanglements, tensions and conflicts, while acknowledging their dilemmas, contradictions and complex assemblages. Below we offer an overview of this vision.

An Overview of the Book Sections Part I: Making Visible Diverse Urban Natures Abundant diverse natures often go largely unnoticed in the city or are managed, contained, restrained and even vilified through regulatory,

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conceptual and infrastructural devices (Philo 1995; Philo and Wilbert 2000; Brinkley and Vitiello 2014). There is increasing demand for recognition that many types of nature – including the ‘untamed’ – exist, can add value, and have a right to the city. Furthermore, as cities are continually changing due to increasing pressures, such as climate change, consumption and densification, where the arrival of new species, in turn, catalyses new human/nonhuman relationships, needs, benefits and conflicts (Schilthuizen 2018). Part I recognizes the presence of diverse nonhumans and more-thanhumans that pervade, influence and integrate within human-centric cities, ‘making visible’ calls for the need to look beyond dualisms and stagnant categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ natures in order to recognize the existence of diverse natures. By calling for urban more-than-human worlds to be ‘made visible’, this part acknowledges their presence and exposes the reasons why such natures may remain ignored, demonized and misunderstood. The chapters in Part I ‘make visible’ urban natures in a variety of ways. Nick Dunn (Chapter 1) engages with temporality to explore multispecies life in the nocturnal city. He applies nightwalking to comprehend the multisensory qualities of urban nature, seeking to contribute to urban design by better encompassing the realities of nocturnal urban natures. Noting that ‘to make visible’ is a popular call across urban nature scholars, Ferne Edwards (Chapter 2) questions how ‘making visible’ can or should be done. From interviews with map makers and organizers of eco festivals and citizen science events through to examining the outcomes from her self-organized nature walks with students, Edwards takes as her muse the insect to draw out key reflections on how best to reveal, remind and reconnect people to nature in cities. Hannah Cowan and Sam Knight (Chapter 3) explore boundaries, borders, edgelands and in-between spaces as they journey out of the city during the pandemic. In their travels, they sense nature differently through shifting proximities to, within and from urban space. Their experience raises questions of safety and security, distribution and access. For them, ‘nature’ both remains in and surrounds the city, represented by rolling hills and landmarks that have been shaped by a long cultural history left to go wild, whereas pastoral plains are continually manicured by both human and nonhuman forces, such as sheep and cows. By trespassing hemmed spaces, Cowan and Knight recognize how ‘cities are so often focused inwards’; instead, they seek ‘towards reorientating cities to look out to the peripheries, to make safer spaces for humans/ nonhumans alike’.

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Chima Anyadike-Danes (Chapter 4) explores how members of the Mongolian community assert their right in Los Angeles by forming unlikely relationships with nonhuman beings; the bed bug and the California grizzly. By making visible human/nonhuman relations, other hidden human conditions are revealed and bestowed, namely citizens’ rights and territory in the settler-colonial city. Clare Qualmann and Amy Vogel (Chapter 5) discuss how through urban foraging tours (called ‘East End Jam’) as a social practice artwork they make visible the edible abundance of London’s urban environment. Through East End Jam, participants can learn how to use local resources differently whilst ‘tasting’ their neighbourhood, producing outcomes for nature interaction, communal knowledge production and sustenance. Furthermore, such embodied and guided practice connects to political strategies to (re)claim public and other urban spaces. Lisa de Kleyn, Brian Coffey and Judy Bush (Chapter 6) take a collaborative autoethnographic approach to question how the positionality of researchers influences research outcomes, and ask how a reflexive approach could contribute to urban natures research practice. To achieve this aim, they make visible the frames of enquiry by presenting a narrative based in a specific place to reveal influences of their understanding of nature. Their analysis demonstrates diverse ways of knowing, and how each approach can reveal or challenge assumptions. Hence urban natures can be made visible in a variety of ways: by expanding the day to engage with nature at different times, as unique and shared experiences, through embodiment and the senses, and through reflection to question what perspectives of nature may emerge. Part II: (Re)Connecting Urban Natures This part explores the need to (re)connect and (re)centre ‘human–nature’ relations in cities; to move beyond binaries dominant in much thinking, writing and practice, and in turn to guide different ways of living in and governing cities. The need to (re)connect with ‘nature’ is becoming increasingly important in times of climate change and biodiversity loss. Relational perspectives recognize the interconnections between human and nonhuman actors and the specific contexts they inhabit and create. Connection, coexistence and care are themes that run through the chapters in Part II. In these contributions, the authors re-centre human– nature relations to ‘think with’, ‘become with’ and ‘design with’ nonhuman others. Doing so allows them to explore the potential in more-thanhuman or multispecies coexistence, but also to address troublesome sides of such encounters.

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In a layered account of her own personal and artistic development, Tracey Benson (Chapter 7) explores relations to place through stories of connection, engaging with topics such as personal identity, Australian colonial history and belonging. Benson shows how active, lived experience – walking, listening deeply, and noticing the connections that are there – can make it possible to break with dominant narratives and binary understandings, and thus to reconnect, live and act with care and respect. Monique Wing and Emma Sharp (Chapter 8) take soil and composting as their topic. They draw on neo-materialist theory that decentres and reframes humans as co-producers. Composting then becomes an entry point to explore more-than-human entanglements and interdependencies, and the co-flourishing that reimagining composting can open up. They do this guided by questions about the values associated with compost and doing composting. Examples from individuals involved in community composting in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, demonstrate that it can contribute to the understandings and embodiment of circularity and interconnectedness. In Chapter 9, Jan van Duppen turns to community gardens in London, exploring the ambivalence of care but also the possibilities for reconnecting through play. Here, van Duppen presents an ethnographic study of relations between urban gardeners and urban foxes, involving medication, feeding and play. Through these stories, the author shows the ambivalent and contested nature of interspecies encounters and interactions of ‘becoming with’ foxes. The chapter illustrates how these interactions are negotiated and can disrupt binary understandings as contradictions and tensions may arise – for instance, between gardening work, care and play. Drawing on personal experiences and creative practices as a way of reconnecting to place, Dominique Chen (Chapter 10) addresses the underresearched topic of Indigenous peoples’ relations to place in urban environments. This chapter is thus not so much about ‘reconnecting’ as about ‘re-emplacing’ already relational practices. Chen explores how Aboriginal agricultural practices can be reimagined and revitalized in Australian cities and allow practitioners to reconnect with Country, away from their ancestors’ homelands. This is done by drawing on two practice-led case studies with examples of creative relational practices and their potential, focusing on the topics of bushfood and bushfood knowledges. Here, relationality is important in different ways: it highlights the embodied, generative, dynamic and multi-modal aspects of culture, learning, sharing, and reconnecting to Country, and how that can be possible even in urban spaces dominated by colonial history.

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Care, belonging and related paradoxes are also themes in JeannineMadeleine Fischer’s chapter (Chapter 11), which clearly illustrates how ethics and politics are always interwoven in care, and in judgements of what constitutes good care (see Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Through ethnographic field research on unwanted urban nature – weeds and weeding in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand – she looks at how people can ‘care’ for nature in problematic or damaging ways, and how weeding practices relate to both colonial history and contemporary discussions about human migration and belonging to the city. In the final chapter of Part II, Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria (Chapter 12) take more-than-human understandings and approaches out of research settings and into real-life urban planning and design. They do that by focusing on the urban transformation area Friche Josaphat in Brussels, Belgium, where plans are criticized by citizen movements for destruction of nonhuman habitats. Here, the authors seek to bridge the gap between citizen collectives’ situated knowledges about wild bees, and the expert knowledges of public administrations. They experiment with innovative more-than-human urban design approaches that allow for tracing, articulating and mobilizing wild bee knowledges in urban planning and design. Part III: Politicizing Urban Natures This part takes its cue from political ecology to recognize that human– nature (re)integrations may catalyse human–nonhuman and human– human conflicts; while some may lead to new beginnings, others may reveal the impossibility of founding or healing political communities on the remains of injustice. The section interrogates where power lies, and how relations of power and domination affect outcomes for creating convivial and just multispecies cities. Where is the political in the more-than-human city? How is it construed, imagined and supressed? The chapters navigate across different imagined natures – disciplined, emancipatory, utopian, pure, invasive – seeking to ground theoretical perspectives in the reality of the concrete attempts to bring nature back within urban centres. The ambition of this part is to consolidate the engagement between political ecology and more-than-human literatures. Part III opens with an image-based chapter by Andrew MacKenzie and Ginny Stein (Chapter 13), who take us to the wreckages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vanuatu. As the pandemic crippled the tourism-dependent economy, many Ni Vanuatu (the vernacular name for indigenous citizens) living in the capital, Port Vila, were left unemployed. For those who could not return to the rural areas, gardening became a necessary survival

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strategy. This chapter combines aerial images of disciplined natures with close-up shots of local vegetable markets to convey the dynamic interactions and tensions between those who organize urban natures through legal tenure and those ordinary practitioners who, through their own spatial tactics, opportunistically shape urban nature, particularly during disaster. Urban gardening is also the subject matter of the next chapter (Chapter 14) by Lucia Alexandra Popartan et al., narrating the creation of an ‘edible neighbourhood’, Menja’t Sant Narcís, in Girona, Spain. It is a very different story, where gardening is recuperated for a white, middleclass neighbourhood, split between neoliberal utopias of the municipal state and the desire of local activists to create new urban commons. The authors discern the tensions between groups and actors, and how (current and historical) ‘imagined communities’ shape the evolution of the project. The chapter documents the difficult task of creating and taking care of the commons, trapped between idealistic pursuits and inherent exclusionary dynamics, and between commoning and un-commoning. Chakad Ojani’s chapter (Chapter 15) illuminates another facet of the entanglement between imagined natures and imagined communities. He shows how in Lima the fog oasis conservation movement paints the city’s poor occupying the outskirts of the city as ‘invasive’ and ecological threats. This way, they reproduce deep-seated imaginaries about informal urbanization. The chapter constitutes a call for the ‘return of the political’ in urban nature preservation by considering social asymmetries in these analyses. The policies and representations of nature-based urban development is the focus of Mariya Shcheglovitova and JH Pitas and their case study in Baltimore, Maryland (Chapter 16). There, sustainability agencies claim that greening is a step towards righting the effects of past racist housing measures such as ‘mortgage redlining’, which was the practice of denying home loans to applicants based on their race. This attempt to employ nature to heal past trauma is not welcomed by black residents, who remain ‘haunted’ by legacies of injustice. Greening as a resolution to racial injustice pursues a vision of an ‘equitable and just city’, but in fact cannot escape a white spatial imaginary. The authors propose the concept of ‘haunted urban natures’, which reveals how past entanglements between public space, urban nature and white supremacy still loom as spectres in places where these struggles unfold. The last two chapters of Part III also look at how urban nature, specifically urban trees, can represent a source of conflict between different views and practices involved in urban design and planning. Are trees

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a mere furniture, or do they have the right to exist, move and expand within cityscapes? Who decides – and according to which imaginaries and hierarchies of (human) concerns – if and how trees are to be planted, moved or uprooted? In Mathilda Rosengren’s chapter (Chapter 17), the transplanting of Gothenburg’s mature urban trees presents a situated example of how to begin to interrogate such philosophical and conceptual propositions of multispecies cohabitation. She reveals how an urban nature intervention can become an event of political subjectification for those involved, whereby a more-than-human urban politics can emerge, predicated upon continuous multispecies negotiations. In turn, Hanne Cecilie Geirbo and Ida Nilstad Pettersen (Chapter 18) employ drawing as methodology to explore the politics of street trees within and across social practices, inviting practitioners to represent their profession through sketches. Drawing thus becomes a way of capturing the very different imaginaries of the urban held by planners, engineers and architects, but also a way of engaging stakeholders, negotiating conflicts and reimagining urban spaces.

Our Aims This book applies three distinct yet overlapping lenses – making visible, (re)connecting and politicizing – to investigate how existing nonhuman natures can be ‘seen’ and ‘sensed’, to determine what strategies of (re)connection can be established and maintained to care for them, and to reveal the political frames governing urban natures that may hinder their expression. While based in anthropology, this volume welcomes perspectives and approaches from other disciplines to open up, experiment and ground such inquiry. Importantly, the book takes a step towards closing the gap between political ecology and more-than-human geographies, following the call for ‘a more-than-human urban political ecology’ (Tzaninis et al. 2021: 232), to explore the intersection between urbanization and nonhuman nature (see also Connolly 2019: 2; Gandy 2021). We, the editors, see the more-than-human city as relational, political, diverse and shared. Moreover, it has potential to be convivial, and ‘not just to exist in the same time and space but actively and conceptually [to] cohabit, interact and engage with other species as part of the practice of everyday life’ (Untaming the Urban 2016: n.p.; Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2006). The direction that cities, human and nonhuman natures will take – towards or away from conflict or peace, homogeneity or diversity, greater human dominance or decolonization – remains unclear.

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We argue that a critical approach needs to be applied to examine urban greening histories, politics, discourses and ecologies to sharpen their approach, and to specify where improvements can be made.

Conclusion This Introduction has outlined the story of both the disappearance and potential reappearance of nonhuman natures in cities. The city, in its many forms, represents a key site in which human/nonhuman relations are increasingly compressed, producing tensions and disruptions. However, cities also offer excellent sites in which to lead and demonstrate alternatives for human/nonhuman coexistence. In this book, we argue that nonhuman natures must first be ‘seen’ and ‘sensed’ to next consider diverse strategies for (re)engagement. Importantly, we argue that this process of bringing nature(s) in and out the realm of the senses, while constantly opening and suturing its meanings, is an essentially political process. This Introduction has mapped the landscapes of more-thanhuman theory to unpack the understandings of ‘living with’ other natures, to also consider the affective impacts from grief and loss, where humans are grieving the potential lost opportunity to connect with a wider world. An overview of diverse, innovative and experimental methods has been presented in response to the need for numerous narratives to displace dominant discourses. We have then interrogated the application of theoretical knowledge to the real world, to go beyond assumptions to question who benefits, how and why; and we have ended by providing an overview of the book sections, depicting diverse approaches, cityscapes and, of course, natures. We hope this array of case studies adds to an increasing body of literature to provide inspiring insights for how we can live better with nonhuman nature in cities.

Ferne Edwards has conducted research on sustainable cities across Australia, Venezuela, Ireland, Spain, Norway and the UK. Her books include the edited volumes Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices and Food, Senses and the City (both Routledge, 2021), and the monograph Food Resistance Movements: A Journey into Alternative Food Networks (Palgrave, 2023). She is based at the University of Surrey, UK. Lucia Alexandra Popartan is an environmental social scientist and Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher at the University of Girona, LEQUIA research group. In her work, she has explored the contested politics of wa-

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ter and environmental technologies, taking a critical lens to nature-based solutions, circular economy and digitalization. Her research interests include environmental justice, degrowth, anti-privatisation movements, and the water-food-energy nexus in cities. Ida Nilstad Pettersen is a professor at the Department of Design, Faculty of Architecture and Design, NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has a PhD in design for sustainability (2013), and her research addresses sustainability transitions, practice transformation, participation, consumption, and urban natures. References Adams, Lowell W. 2005. ‘Urban Wildlife Ecology and Conservation: A Brief History of the Discipline’, Urban Ecosystems 8: 139–56. Allen, Adriana, Andrea Lampis and Mark Swilling. 2016. ‘Introduction. Why Untamed Urbanisms’, in Allen, Lampis and Swilling (eds), Untamed Urbanisms: Practices and Narratives on Socio-Environmental Change for Urban Sustainability. London: Routledge, pp. 1–15. Amin, Ash. 2006. ‘The Good City’, Urban Studies 43(5/6) (May): 1009–23. Anderson, Kay. 1997. ‘A Walk on the Wild Side: A Critical Geography of Domestication’, Progress in Human Geography 21(4): 463–85. Anguelovski, Isabelle, and Joan Martinez Alier. 2014. ‘The “Environmentalism of the Poor” Revisited: Territory and Place in Disconnected Glocal Struggles’, Ecological Economics (102): 167–76. Anguelovski, Isabelle, James Connolly and Anna Livia Brand. 2018. ‘From Landscapes of Utopia to the Margins of the Green Urban Life: For Whom is the New Green City?’, City 22(3): 417–36. Atkins, Peter. 2012. ‘Introduction’, in Peter Atkins (ed.), Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories. Farnham UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 1–18. Barber, Lynn. 1984. The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–1870. London: Jonathan Cape. Barker, G. (ed.). 2000. Ecological Recombination in Urban Areas. Peterborough: The Urban Forum/English Nature. Bastian, Michelle, et al. 2017. ‘Introduction: More-than-Human Participatory Research: Contexts, Challenges, Possibilities’, in Michelle Bastian et al. (eds), Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds. London: Routledge. Bateson, Gregory 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bawaka Country et al. 2019. ‘Goŋ Gurtha: Enacting Response-abilities as Situated Co-becoming’, EPD: Society and Space 37(4): 682–702. BCNUEJ. 2021. ‘Policy and Planning Toolkit for Urban Green Justice’. Retrieved 2 January 2023 from https://www.bcnuej.org/2021/04/08/policy-and-planningtoolkit-for-urban-green-justice/. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.



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Blecha, Jennifer. 2007. ‘Urban Life with Livestock: Performing Alternative Imaginaries through Small-Scale Urban Livestock Agriculture in the United States’. PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, USA. Braun, Bruce. 2005. ‘Environmental Issues: Writing a More-than-Human Urban Geography’, Progress in Human Geography 29(5): 635–50. Brinkley, Catherine, and Domenic Vitiello. 2014. ‘From Farm to Nuisance: Animal Agriculture and the Rise of Planning Regulation’, Journal of Planning History 13(2): 113–35. Buller, Henry. 2014. ‘Animal Geographies I’, Progress in Human Geography 38(2): 308–18. ———. 2016. ‘Animal Geographies III: Ethics’, Progress in Human Geography 40(3): 422–30. Buscher, Bram, and Robert Fletcher. 2020. Convivial Conservation: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature beyond the Anthropocene. London and New York: Verso. Castellar, Joana, et al. 2021. ‘Nature-Based Solutions in the Urban Context: Terminology, Classification and Scoring for Urban Challenges and Ecosystem Services’, Science of the Total Environment 779: 146337, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.scitotenv.2021.146237. Castree, Noel, and Bruce Braun (eds). 2001. Social Nature. Oxford: Blackwell. Clarke, Rachel, et al. 2019. ‘More-than-Human Participation: Design for Sustainable Smart City Futures’, Interactions (May–June): 60–63. Cohen-Shacham, Emanuelle, Gretchen Walters and Christine Janzen. 2016. Naturebased Solutions to Address Global Societal Challenges. IUCN: Gland, Switzerland. Connolly, James. 2019. ‘From Jacobs to the Just City: A Foundation for Challenging the Green Planning Orthodoxy’, Cities 91: 64–70. Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton. Cunsolo, Willox. 2012. ‘Climate Change as the Work of Mourning’, Ethics and the Environment 17(2): 137–64. Davis, Mark. 2019. ‘Defining Nature. Competing Perspectives: Between Nativism and Ecological Novelty’, Mètode Science Studies Journal 9: 101–7. de Leeuw, Sarah, and Sarah Hunt. 2018. ‘Unsettling Decolonizing Geographies’, Geography Compass 12: e12376, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12376. Donofrio, Gregory Alexander. 2007. ‘Feeding the City’, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 7(4) (Fall): 30–41. Edwards, Ferne. 2021. ‘Humming Along: Heightening the Senses between Urban Honeybees and Humans’, in Ferne Edwards, Roos Gerrtisen and Grit Wesser (eds), Food, Senses and the City. New York: Routledge, pp. 54–66. Erikson K.T. 1976. Everything in its Path. New York: Simon and Schuster. European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. 2022. The Vital Role of Nature-based Solutions in a Nature Positive Economy. Retrieved 17 June 2022 from https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/307761. Faivre, Nicholas, et al. 2017. ‘Nature-Based Solutions in the EU: Innovating with Nature to Address Social, Economic and Environmental Challenges’, Environmental Research 159: 509–18. Farbotko, Carol, and Helen McGregor. 2010. ‘Copenhagen, Climate Science and the Emotional Geographies of Climate Change’, Australian Geographer 41(2): 159–66. Feinberg, Rebecca, Patrick Nason and Hamsini Sridharan. 2013. ‘Human–Animal Relations’, Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4: 1–4.

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Ingold, Tim. 1988. ‘Introduction’, in Tim Ingold (ed.), What is an Animal? London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 1–16. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. New York: Routledge. Jones, Owain. 2009. ‘Dwelling’, in Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (eds), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography: 266–72. Kaika, Maria. 2005. City of Flows. London: Routledge. Kirksey, Eben (ed.). 2014. The Multispecies Salon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kirksey, Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545–76. Kotsila, Panagiota. 2020. ‘Are “Nature-Based Solutions” an Answer to Unsustainable Cities or a Tool for Furthering Nature’s Neoliberalisation?’, Undisciplined Environments Blog. Retrieved 18 May 2022 from https://undisciplinedenvir onments.org/2020/06/02/are-nature-based-solutions-an-answer-to-unsustainab le-cities-or-a-tool-for-furthering-natures-neoliberalisation/. Kotsila, Panagiota, et al. 2020. ‘Nature-Based Solutions as Discursive Tools and Contested Practices in Urban Nature’s Neoliberalisation Processes’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4(2): 1–2. Latimer, Joanna, and Mara Miele. 2013. ‘Naturecultures? Science, Affect and the Nonhuman’, Theory, Culture & Society 30(7): 5–31. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Totemism. Trans. R. Needham. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lien, Marianne Elisabeth, and Gisli Pálsson. 2021. ‘Ethnography Beyond the Human: The “Other-than-Human” in Ethnographic Work’, Ethnos 86(1): 1–20. Locke, Piers, and Ursula Muenster. 2015. ‘Multispecies Ethnography’, Oxford Bibliographies. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/ view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0130.xml. Lorimer, Jamie. 2010. ‘Elephants as Companion Species: The Lively Biogeographies of Asian Elephant Conservation in Sri Lanka’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35(4): 491–506. Luck, Gary W. 2007. ‘A Review of the Relationships between Human Population Density and Biodiversity’, Biological Reviews 82: 607–45. Magle, Seth B., et al. 2012. ‘Urban Wildlife Research: Past, Present, and Future’, Biological Conservation 155: 23–32. Maller, Cecily. 2021. ‘Re-orienting Nature-Based Solutions with More-than-Human Thinking’, Cities 113: 103155, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103155. Mancini, Clara. 2013. ‘Animal–Computer Interaction (ACI): Changing Perspective on HCI, Participation and Sustainability’, CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts (27 April – 2 May): 2227–36. Mancini, Clara, et al. 2012. ‘Exploring Interspecies Sensemaking: Dog-Tracking Semiotics and Multispecies Ethnography’, Proceedings of Ubicomp 2012 Conference, ACM Press, pp. 143–52. McAfee, Kathleen. 1999. ‘Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17(2): 133–54. McClintock, Nathan. 2010. ‘Why Farm the City? Theorizing Urban Agriculture through a Lens of Metabolic Rift’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3: 191–207. ———. 2018. ‘Urban Agriculture, Racial Capitalism, and Resistance’, Geography Compass 12(6): e12373.

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PART I

deú Making Visible Diverse Urban Natures

deú CHAPTER 1

Life After Dark Multispecies Encounters in the Nocturnal City Nick Dunn

Introduction The manifold diverse natures that occur through and with the city are often barely detectable, either through their adaptation to human-centred places or the management and control of habitats. New urban agendas promoting health and well-being meanwhile are accompanied by images of clean, green and daylit environments. If we follow Bruce Braun’s (2005) assertion that urbanization is a particular spatialization of nature, then what is made visible through these representations is a highly sanitized version of urban nature. This is because through the development of urban landscapes, different places with distinctive characteristics become entwined within a single, integrated socio-ecological system, and are profoundly changed in the process. Certain features of nature, therefore, are deemed compatible with urbanization and are included in the design of urban places, while others are considered problematic and may simply be omitted. Of specific interest in this chapter is the invisibility of urban natures at night. Some more-than-human places may be legible in the daytime city but I argue are far less so after dark. The chapter, therefore, examines multispecies life encounters in the nocturnal city, and the multisensory experiences produced when visual perception is less reliable or dominant in sensing and making sense of nature. This chapter is consequently organized into five sections. The first introduces the concept of the multispecies city, and presents the rationale for the selection of the fieldwork site, which is located along a section of the Irk Valley in Manchester, UK. The background history of the Irk Valley is provided in the second section, to give an overview of the major

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transformations that have led to the current landscape conditions of the site, and its forms of urban nature. The third section presents a ‘nocturnal praxis’ methodology, and explains its relevance to comprehending the multisensory qualities of experiencing urban nature. To illustrate how nocturnal praxis can be applied in this way, the fourth section gives an abridged account of a three-hour nightwalk undertaken on 25 March 2021; it is accompanied by images of specific places encountered during the walk to assist the reader’s understanding of the experience. Finally, the chapter concludes by reflecting on how such multispecies encounters might enable us to rethink built environment design practices and policymaking to better support urban nature at night.

The Multispecies City As many of us return home of an evening and start preparing meals, engaging with other forms of labour and care, we often draw away from the daytime, its routines and rhythms. Behind glass, we are less attuned to the environment outside, its flora and fauna now limited simply to what we can see through the portals of our homes. At twilight, we have in most cases already put lights on to continue whatever we are doing, and even draw the curtains or blinds as night falls. Yet outside, the natural world does not stop. We may close ourselves off from the outdoor environment, but on it lives – above, around, underneath and away from our homes. Of course, it also lives within our homes – on its surfaces, in the cracks, out of view or undetectable by human eyes. Life after dark is a multi-scalar phenomenon, from the microscopic to global networks of migration by many different species. Multispecies urbanism, Avi Sharma explains, ‘is useful because it shifts our vision to include other modes of urban creation and fields of political contestation, and can alert us to the ways that urban nature itself helps us to locate and site the city’ (Sharma 2021: 2). With this in mind, I wish to now consider a significant site for multispecies encounters close to the city centre of Manchester, the Irk Valley. A large green corridor comprising 600 hectares, the Irk Valley spans from St Michael’s and Angel Meadow near Manchester Victoria Station, to the M60 motorway boundary at Heaton Park to the north, and to the Moston Brook tributary to the east. To give a sense of the diversity and richness of the Irk Valley, it is worth briefly discussing two sites located further away from the city centre: Blackley Forest and Boggart Hole Clough. The woodland of Blackley Forest is a nature reserve comprising a mixture of habitats, including mixed deciduous forest through which

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the River Irk runs, and heathland unique to the city, which supports a number of species. Three species of bat can be found here as well as thirty species of breeding birds, including green woodpeckers, kingfishers and sparrowhawks. Hedgehogs, shrews, voles and wood mice sift about in the undergrowth, while foxes assert their presence at dusk. There is a wide diversity of flora with over 240 species of plant. The strangely named Boggart Hole Clough is another woodland with its origins in ancient woodland and regional folklore. Its lake provides habitat for nineteen water bird species, including coots, tufted ducks and grey heron. In addition to a range of birds and small mammals, there have also been occasional sightings of roe deer, while after dark, the normally elusive badgers can be seen going about their nocturnal ways. By contrast, the section of the Irk Valley where I conducted my fieldwork initially appears to offer very little nonhuman activity compared to sites such as Blackley Forest and Boggart Hole Clough. However, while the latter two are established and protected, it is the very quality of this influx and soon to be redeveloped site that makes it most relevant. The section runs from where St Catherine’s Wood joins the bank of the River Irk at Dantzic Street, along Collyhurst Road, then down following the bank of the river until it meets Queen’s Park. Encountering this one-mile section of the Irk Valley at any time of day, it is difficult not to be put off by features that render it a place to pass through quickly rather than spend any time: overgrown, strewn with litter, unmanaged coppices, burnt-out vehicles and many things in between. The rationale for selecting this hitherto neglected and inauspicious section of the Irk Valley is that it is about to undergo a process of major transformation as part of the Northern Gateway masterplan (2017). Billed as one of the UK’s largest residential-led regeneration schemes, a key feature of the development will be a ‘world-class City River Park’ (Farrells 2017).

From Pleasure Gardens to Polluted Landscape During the last two centuries, the Irk Valley has witnessed huge transformations, not least due to the rapid industrialization of Manchester. In 1830, the Irk had, according to The New Gazetteer of Lancashire, ‘more mills seats upon it that any other stream of its length in the Kingdom’ and ‘the eels in this river were formerly remarkable for their fatness, which was attributed to the grease and oils expressed by the mills from the woollen cloths mixed with the waters’ (Clarke 1830: 72). Yet, by the beginning of the twentieth century the Irk Valley had become seriously polluted and neglected. Such was the impact upon the waterway and

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banks of the Irk at the height of the city’s industrial excess that Friedrich Engels was moved to describe the view from Ducie Bridge thus: ‘At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank’ (Engels 1892: 50). Along the initial stretch of this section, adjacent to the River Irk, is St Catherine’s Wood. The wood is named after the church that had previously stood at the edge of Collyhurst Road. Established in 1859, the church had to close due to dry rot and a declining population, and was eventually demolished in 1966. Very little is known about this area, despite it containing many acres of brownfield sites, including disused railway sidings, an unclaimed nature reserve, and a forest just half a mile from Victoria Station. It is a manufactured landscape, with some steep inclines that are the product of a large amount of tipping from the top during the nineteenth century. This has meant that any woodland management is challenging, and it has become a place where giant hogweed, Japanese knotweed and rats flourish. The ground itself still contains many chemicals and heavy metals, while the landscape presents a series of difficult-to-navigate green spaces, full of hazards, twists and turns, which can make it feel very isolated and out of public view. On the other side of the River Irk is the dubious hill, unusual in its geometry for this landscape. It has a bizarre and unnatural appearance, because it is actually a spoil hill formed from the waste of a century and a half of industrialization. Part wooded and part covered by turf, it rises quickly from street level in the valley and has a striking silhouette. In the 1700s this area was considered wild and neglected until a local man named Robert Tinker decided to clear and convert the land into what was known locally as ‘Tinker’s Gardens’, a type of pleasure garden that was very popular around the country at the time. Established in the 1790s and continuing until the 1850s, the pleasure gardens were originally named Elysian Gardens, after the paradise in Greek mythology where heroes on whom the gods conferred immortality were sent, and later Vauxhall Gardens so that it benefited from association with London’s renowned place of recreation. Although largely forgotten in the collective memory of the city, Sarah-Jane Downing (2009: 22) notes its significance in the early 1800s as a place for people to enjoy during both day and night. The gardens were adorned with three thousand coloured lights, so those who entered were able to experience a night that was ‘at once intelligent, rural and delightful’. Eventually the site became surrounded and then engulfed by industrialization, and adjacent land was excavated. An outcrop of reddish rock is all that remains of Collyhurst Quarry, from which the stones that built Manchester were hewn (Hart-

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well 2001). The stone is notoriously susceptible to the impacts of weathering and erosion, with a tendency to disintegrate relatively quickly. The city was soon going to understand the consequences of this when Robert Angus Smith, whilst in Manchester in 1852, first discovered acid rain and its relationship to carbon burning and industrialization (Reed 2014). This is pertinent given that a large proportion of the acid rain he was studying was being produced in this particular section of the Irk Valley. Joined by a colliery, tanneries, textile dye works and other chemical factories, this part of the valley quickly changed in character from a place welcoming people to genteel lantern evenings to one that was highly polluted and inhospitable. This history powerfully shaped the present conditions of this section of the Irk Valley.

Nocturnal Praxis I have enjoyed nightwalking in cities for many years as a means to provide much-needed respite from the confines and pressures of the daytime. I have been particularly interested in how my physical and psychological relationships with the built environment change amongst different coexistences of darkness and light. However, over time it became apparent to me that nightwalking also offered a useful spatial practice through which I could gain knowledge about places through direct experience, and so better understand how the identity of places changes by night in relation to the day. The increased impact of late capitalism, including the privatization of public space and attempts to manage the urban night, led me to write a monograph, Dark Matters, as an exploration of walking as cultural practice, the politics of space, and the right to the city (Dunn 2016). In early 2014, the city council of Manchester, my home city, announced its intention to rollout a replacement of 56,000 streetlamps with LED ones. Since then, I have been using nightwalking as part of a ‘nocturnal praxis’ – defined here as a mixed methods approach, combining nightwalking, reflexive writing and photography – to help to document the city and wider borough through an ongoing series of surveys. Over the last seven years, this activity has led to several thousands of hours walking through urban landscapes at night, and the production of an archive of photographs, maps and autoethnographic notes. I have compiled this archive as a means of capturing some of the different ambiances of light and dark in urban places, and how they are changing (Dunn 2019). I am not the first person to undertake such research. For example, in 1869 the journalist Blanchard Jerrold, together with the French artist Gus-

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tave Doré, produced an illustrated record of the shadows and sunlight of London (Doré and Jerrold 1872). They spent many days and nights exploring the capital, its night refuges, cheap lodging houses, and other locations of human nocturnal activity. I continued my nocturnal praxis throughout the national lockdowns imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic. During that time, I was struck by two things. Firstly, the degree to which the city was largely devoid of human activity apart from a small number of designated key workers, which meant the urban atmospheres usually found at night were profoundly different. Secondly, while an increasing body of evidence had been signalling the importance of access to green spaces and sites of nature for positive health and well-being, especially during the pandemic (Slater, Christiane and Gustat 2020; Pouso et al. 2021), none of this considered urban nature at night. With this latter point very much in mind, I set out to document one of the most significant places for urban nature in Manchester, the Irk Valley, after dark. Although there is an emerging strand of research on walking as a methodology through which to investigate the more-than-human world, to date this has only related to the daytime (Springgay and Truman 2018). By applying this approach at night, it is the intention of this chapter to contribute nocturnal praxis to such methods. It should also be acknowledged that my nocturnal praxis is inseparable from the fact that I am a white adult male moving through urban space after dark. As such, I recognize that my encounters are personal and far from universal, as gender and race, for example, may influence how other people experience walking through urban places at night, both physically and psychologically. Through this inquiry I hope to stimulate further research by an array of other researchers to better understand a wider spectrum of encounters that nocturnal praxis as a methodology can reveal in relation to diverse entanglements between human and more-than-human, bodies and landscape, and place and time. Why investigate more-than-human places after dark? Night, as Robert Shaw suggests, ‘offers an interesting lens because of the ways in which it straddles the social and the natural. . . . The natural and social elements cannot be untangled; they work in unison . . . not always in harmony’ (Shaw 2018: 2). In addition, the diversity and plurality of dark places, their differences and reinterpretations, recalls Doreen Massey’s (1994) discussion regarding the identity of a place as being ‘open and provisional’. Nightscapes are, as Robert Williams reminds us, ‘neither uniform nor homogenous. Rather they are constituted by social struggles about what should and should not happen in certain places during the dark of night’ (Williams 2008: 514).

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When seeking to consider how multispecies patterns, rhythms and confrontations coproduce the nocturnal urban environment, what methods are available to explore these coexistences? Art and design can contribute a valuable role in their ability to capture and communicate the excess of the world, providing creative, embodied and critical methods that can represent entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions (Tsing et al. 2017). Walking has long been established as a methodology for creative practice (Careri 2002), bringing together the body and landscape, their rhythms and multisensory interplay. If we seek to account for how the night is moved through and how it moves through us and our nonhuman companions, then the perambulatory qualities of nocturnal praxis can be useful. Nocturnal praxis here is positioned as a mobile method than can reveal empirical sensitivities and new avenues for critique (Büscher and Urry 2009) pertaining to urban nature at night: how and why it is constituted and, crucially, by whom. To date, the written accounts of nightwalking take two primary forms. On the one hand, they are deeply rooted in the urban experience, its sensations of pleasure-seeking, rumination on illicit encounters, and the potential liberation of escaping the confines of daytime routines and rituals (Dickens 1869; Beaumont 2015; Foessel 2017). On the other hand, in the second form, they provide embodied accounts of predominantly non-urban landscapes at night, where nocturnal nature is foregrounded (Yates 2012; Francis 2019; Gaw 2020). Thus, to date, nightwalking has largely been used to experience the spectacle of the urban night or connect to nocturnal wildlife in non-urban contexts. These accounts have, unintentionally or otherwise, served to reinforce the distinctions between urban and nature rather than specifically examine their entanglements. I employ it here as a method to directly engage with urban nature at night. By taking this approach, I am deliberately trying to include and make sense of the multispecies ‘everynight’ in an oft-overlooked part of the nocturnal city. To do this, I draw on David Gissen’s (2009: 22) notion of ‘subnatures’, which are ‘those forms of nature deemed primitive (mud and dankness), filthy (smoke, dust, and exhaust), fearsome (gas or debris), or uncontrollable (weeds, insects, and pigeons)’. I suggest that nocturnal praxis affords a means through which urban subnatures can be recognized as an ecological formation (Barua and Sinha 2020), a multispecies city inhabited by numerous and often unseen inhabitants. I conducted a series of eight walks at night between 3 February and 31 March 2021. This cumulative experience helped me to comprehend some of the nuances of this section of the Irk Valley at night, and to find ways to navigate some of the difficult terrain. I deliberately revisited a

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number of places during each walk as a means of improving my ability to engage multisensory experiences with, and develop appropriate sensitivities to, my specific surroundings and its other inhabitants. The following section provides an abridged account of a nightwalk taken on 25 March 2021, starting from Dantzic Street at 7.30 pm, about an hour after sunset, and lasting approximately three hours. It also includes photographs of specific sites to assist the reader’s understanding of the experience and context (illustrations 1.1–1.5).

A Journey of Multispecies Encounters The isolation one feels in these places, especially during lockdown, is particularly pronounced. Even though there is not a curfew, activity after dark is only evident near to homes and in local streets rather than at larger sites of urban nature. The spectacle of urban regeneration, especially in the city centre, has resulted in a collective amnesia of the less populated and less striking parts of the urban landscape. This has rendered parts of the Irk Valley overlooked, almost invisible, to many people in the city. Unkempt and unremarkable to the casual eye, this area is the preserve of joggers, workers from the light industrial units, occasional stragglers on their way home, and bored children and teenagers out of the parental gaze. These wildlands are a potent mix of the urban and seemingly otherworldly. This makes them perfect places for creativity and imagination, as they outwardly appear to be in a state of becoming rather than finished sites of manicured nature. They are terrain vague and it is this quality that also makes them ideal as spaces in which we can think about the future. Of course, such a perspective is human-oriented. There are already many different species crawling, scurrying, swimming and flying within and through the Irk Valley. The significant amount of detritus has a twofold impact. First, it discourages human activity by limiting access to sites or making them hazardous. Second, it provides additional places of refuge for other species. In this way, these artificial buffer zones offer a useful if unaesthetic feature of these places. Heading along Dantzic Street, I am silhouetted against a brick wall that suddenly ends at a bridge over the River Irk towards the unknown lands of St Catherine’s Wood. Here, above the river, there are common pipistrelle bats swooping in their flourishes against the navy sky. Down by the waterside, a rat makes its unhurried way along a series of displaced bricks. Stop, sniff, it dissolves into the shadowy fingers of overhanging flora. Turning around 180 degrees, I see Canada geese paddling quietly along the arc of the river as it bends out of view. A small flutter of

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moths busy themselves, rendered by a streetlamp. Slowly flowing along Collyhurst Road, the land rises quickly on either side, and the city beyond almost disappears. At Vauxhall Street, the quickstep of a young fox slinks up the angular incline of the former spoil heap. Back down near the river, a new perimeter fence attempts to block access to the other end of St Catherine’s Wood. It may present an obstacle for the nightwalker to squeeze around but there is plenty of toing and froing by nocturnal kin, whose journeys are not in the least bit hindered by its regimented metal strips as they pass above, between and under it. Peeling away from the industrial units and the main road, my feet are drawn down by the slope of Smedley Road. Household and trade debris bursts forth from swollen hoardings, fences and brick walls, spewing itself onto the pavement. Rodent feet scritch-scratch their way amongst cardboard before a passing car sets the whole scene ablaze in its headlights, and leaves silence in its wake. Smudging down the bank towards the river itself, the splosh and gurgle of water echoes from underneath the nearby brick bridge. It is dark down here. Trees, bushes and grasses conspire together, ensuring that progress through and around them is slow and careful. A slight buzz briefly orbits around me followed by the sensation of tiny insects about my face; but my proprioception is off-kilter in this dark and unfamiliar place, and so all focus is put into staying still, the better to detect the more-than-human utterances of the night.

Illustration 1.1. River Irk, looking towards Collyhurst, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn.

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Illustration 1.2. Post-industrial coexistences, Collyhurst Road, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn.

Illustration 1.3. New perimeter fence blocking access to St Catherine’s Wood, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn.

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Illustration 1.4. Illegal waste dumping, Smedley Road, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn.

Illustration 1.5. On the bank of the River Irk near bridge at Smedley Road, Irk Valley, 25 March 2021. © Nick Dunn.

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Rethinking Policy and Design Practices for the Nocturnal City Through this chapter, I have sought to illustrate how nocturnal praxis is able to support what Tim Edensor describes more broadly as ‘previously unanticipated ways of apprehension, soliciting perceptions that expand the capacities for imagining and sensing place otherwise, such approaches extend the compendium of ways of seeing’ (Edensor 2017: 125). By focusing on a neglected area of urban nature, I have intentionally explored a section of the Irk Valley in Manchester that is considered by many as wasteland that is effectively empty and unproductive (Gandy 2013). Although there is growing demand for recognition that such untamed natures exist, can add value and have a right to the city, their characteristics can provoke dismissive, derogatory or even hostile responses from humans (Mattoug 2021). Current practice by built environment professions and policymakers tends to ignore such places until it becomes profitable for them to undergo regeneration, a process that will have a number of ecological consequences, good or ill, depending on the species of flora and fauna. I therefore argue that it is useful to turn our attention and open up sensitivities to those elements that are often underrepresented or excluded from design. Viewed in this manner, it is possible to consider how we might account for our ‘unexpected neighbours’ (Stoetzer 2018) and, by doing so, establish a framework through which the multispecies city can be supported through a dynamic and ongoing process that adopts a more temporally sensitive approach to urban planning and design (Gwiazdzinski 2015). Using the nocturnal praxis described in this chapter, I have attempted to provide some initial forays into ways through which we might document and communicate the underrepresented and marginalized places of nocturnal urban nature. This practice-based methodology seeks to align with emerging theory concerning more-than-human approaches for rethinking nature in cities (Maller 2021). By making visible such urban natures, accounts of these multispecies encounters enhance our understanding of how urban environments and atmospheres are coproduced. They are intended to help overcome the prevalent misunderstandings that are associated with these places, both during the daytime and especially at night. I propose that such knowledge can enrich built environment design practices and policymaking by enabling them to be more attentive to the various ways in which coexistences of humans and nonhumans shape our cities. To conclude, adopting these methods to inform how design can have greater sensitivity towards the coproduction of urban environments would enable the life after dark in and through cities to help all of us move towards an ethical and convivial multispecies city.

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Nick Dunn is executive director of Imagination, the design-led research lab at Lancaster University, where is also professor of Urban Design. He is the founding director of the Dark Design Lab, exploring the impacts of nocturnal activity on humans and nonhumans, with the aim of reducing the environmental impact of urban places at night. He is the author of Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City (Zero, 2016), and co-editor of Rethinking Darkness: Cultures, Histories, Practices (Routledge, 2021).

References Barua, Maan, and Anindya Sinha. 2020. ‘Cultivated, Feral, Wild: The Urban as an Ecological Formation’, in ERC Horizon 2020 Urban Ecologies Research Project, pp. 1–17. Beaumont, Matthew. 2015. Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. London: Verso. Braun, Bruce. 2005. ‘Environmental Issues: Writing a More-than-Human Urban Geography’, Progress in Human Geography 29(5): 635–50. Büscher, Monica, and John Urry. 2009. ‘Mobile Methods and the Empirical’, European Journal of Social Theory 12(1): 99–116. Careri, Francesco. 2002. Walkscapes: El Andar como Práctica Estética/Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili. Clarke, S.R. 1830. The New Lancashire Gazetteer. Holborn: Henry Teesdale and Co. Dickens, Charles. 1869. The Uncommercial Traveller and Additional Christmas Stories. Boston: Fields, Osgood. Doré, Gustave, and Blanchard Jerrold. 1872. London: A Pilgrimage. London: Grant & Co. Downing, Sarah-Jane. 2009. The English Pleasure Garden 1660–1860. Oxford: Shire Publications Ltd. Dunn, Nick. 2016. Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City. New York: Zero Books. ———. 2019. ‘Dark Futures: The Loss of Night in the Contemporary City?’, Journal of Energy History / Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie, Special Issue: Light(s) and Darkness(es) / Lumière(s) et Obscurité(s) 1(2): 1–27. Retrieved 5 November 2021 from http://energyhistory.eu/en/node/108. Edensor, Tim. 2017. From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination, and Gloom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Engels, Frederick. 1892. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, trans. F.K. Wischnewetsky. London: Swan Sonnenschien & Co. Farrells. 2017. Manchester Northern Gateway. Retrieved 5 November 2021 from https://farrells.com/project/manchester-northern-gateway. Foessel, Michaël. 2017. La Nuit: Vivre Sans Témoin [At night: Living without a witness]. Paris: Editions Autrement. Francis, Tiffany. 2019. Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night. London: Bloomsbury. Gandy, Matthew. 2013. ‘Marginalia: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Urban Wastelands’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(6): 1301–16.

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Gaw, Matt. 2020. Under the Stars: A Journey into Light. London: Elliott & Thompson. Gissen, David. 2009. Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Gwiazdzinski, Luc. 2015. ‘The Urban Night: A Space Time for Innovation and Sustainable Development’, Articulo – Journal of Urban Research (November). Hartwell, Clare. 2001. Manchester. London: Penguin. Maller, Cecily. 2021. ‘Re-orienting Nature-based Solutions with More-than-Human Thinking’, Cities 113: 103155. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mattoug, Cécile. 2021. ‘Dwelling in an Urban Wasteland: Struggles for Resources’, in Francesca Di Pietro and Amélie Robert (eds), Urban Wastelands: A Form of Urban Nature? Cham: Springer, pp. 115–34. Northern Gateway. 2017. Northern Gateway. Retrieved 5 November 2021 from http://northerngatewaymanchester.co.uk. Pouso, Sarai, et al. 2021. ‘Contact with Blue–Green Spaces during COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown Beneficial for Mental Health’, Science of the Total Environment 756: 143984. Reed, Peter. 2014. Acid Rain and the Rise of the Environmental Chemist in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life and Work of Robert Angus Smith. Oxon, UK: Ashgate. Sharma, Avi. 2021. ‘The City under Stress: Waking to a Multispecies Urban’. Position paper, Urban Environments Initiative, 11 January. Retrieved 5 November 2021 from https://urbanenv.org/the-city-under-stress/. Shaw, Robert. 2018. The Nocturnal City. London: Routledge. Slater, Sandy J., Richard W. Christiane and Jeanette Gustat. 2020. ‘Recommendations for Keeping Parks and Green Space Accessible for Mental and Physical Health during COVID-19 and Other Pandemics’, Preventing Chronic Disease 17(E59). Springgay, Stephanie, and Sarah. E. Truman. 2018. Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World: WalkingLab. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Stoetzer, Bettina. 2018. ‘Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin’, Cultural Anthropology 33(2): 295–323. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, et al. (eds). 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Williams, Robert. 2008. ‘Nightspaces: Darkness, Deterritorialisation and Social Control’, Space and Culture 11(4): 514–32. Yates, Chris. 2012. Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature. London: Collins.

deú CHAPTER 2

Making Urban Natures Visible (with a Focus on Insects) Ferne Edwards

Introduction In recent years there have been calls to ‘make visible’ urban nature for many reasons, including biodiversity conservation and the extinction of the human–nature experience (Maddox et al. 2016). Typically unseen, hidden and marginalized, much urban nature remains overlooked as cities grow busier and noisier, as surfaces are covered with asphalt, and as people spend increasing amounts of time indoors. In this chapter I focus on insects to explore the causes, contradictions and concerns for learning to see – and hence engage and act for – nature in cities. Human existence is indebted to insects. Defined as small arthropod animals with six legs, they include bees, ants, grasshoppers, flies and moths (Debczak 2019). Insects provide resources, such as silk, honey, wax, dye, resin and jewellery; they serve therapeutic purposes; they are edible and are valuable sources of protein, vitamins and minerals; and they can even aid in forensic investigation. They are also of high ecological importance, acting as potential predators against pests, as bio-indicators to assess pollutants, and as pollinators (Lokeshwari and Shantibala 2010). Concerns for insect invisibility escalated after reports of an insect Armageddon (McKie 2018), when they ran the risk of departing from more than merely the public imagination. Recognizing the massive contribution that insects make to human life, the Alliance of World Scientists released the manifesto ‘World Scientists Warning to Humanity’ to ‘appeal for urgent action to close key knowledge gaps and curb insect extinctions’ (Cardoso et al. 2020: 1). One such strategy is to expand urban conservation practices to the general public (Samways et al. 2020), who must first learn to ‘see’ nature.

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While insects are highly suitable for human–nonhuman encounters in the city, they remain largely ignored by the public. Engagement efforts must overcome common human reactions of fear and disgust, as insects are so often associated with bites, stings and spreading disease (Azil et al. 2021). Often portrayed as monsters in movies, media and myths (Wills 2021), a significant gap remains between human and insect understandings of relationalities. Advocates for urban nature include biologists, ecologists, planners, environmentalists and bio-artists – professions that typically recognize the co-benefits that nonhuman natures can bring. Yet all these backgrounds relate to nature in different ways, where the call to make nature visible can deliver divergent and even contradictory interpretations. In this chapter I seek to delve into what ‘making visible’ could mean, from diverse perspectives to supporting human–nonhuman (re)engagement in cities, which, in turn, can complement conservation efforts.

Let’s Begin with Bees My preoccupation with the phrase ‘to make visible’ began with bees. From 2011 until 2022 I conducted research with beekeepers in (primarily) Australian, Mexican and Norwegian cities. Noting the growing popularity of beekeeping in cities around the world, my interest was how the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) – as both a loved and a feared insect – ‘fits’ within city limits. During this research I found that visibility for the bee was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, visibility for what I term the ‘global’ bee equated to an awareness to ‘Save the bee’. This need to be saved arose from intersecting crises such as industrial agriculture, climate change, pests, disease, and colony collapse disorder – all contributing to a potential disaster, with consequences for humans and the planet alike. One of two poster insect species – the other being the Monarch butterfly – bees evoked a human fear of loss, a grieving for a potential world without (Head 2016). In this context, visibility was vital – people joined campaigns and clubs, celebrated World Bee Day, and advocated banning the pesticide neonicotinoid in order to ‘save the bee’. On the other hand, visibility of beekeeping at a local level created some tensions. Compounded by the Local Food Movement that had emerged in the 1990s, which encouraged people to reconnect with their food supply, urban beekeeping became an active way to show support by driving up local bee stocks (Cockrall-King 2012). Occurring in cities, where more than half the world’s population now lives, heightened num-

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bers of honey bees became rather proximate to other species: pressed up against fences, sitting atop neighbours’ and shops’ roofs, and flying wherever they pleased. Sporting a sting and darkening the skies with swarms, not all residents were tolerant of their increased visible presence. Tensions broke out between both humans and nonhumans in cities. The two most pertinent were a public fear of being stung by bees, and a concern that native bee populations (primarily in the Australian context) were being deprived of their foraging resources (Edwards and Dixon 2016). One beekeeper described one such incident: My neighbour complained about my inner-city hive. The hive was there for two years before she noticed it was there. Then, another neighbour who lives quite far away was walking his dog in the park and he got stung by a bee. And of course, that was my bee! Because the hive was visible.

Another example included a young mum beekeeper in an inner-city suburb who was chided by her friends for exposing her child to lifethreatening insects. Other negative associations from being visible included claims from the vegan population that beekeeping was unethical, based on an assumption that it supported monoculture and harmed bees during the honey extraction process. These perspectives reveal that common misunderstandings persist between people and the wider natural world – even after a global campaign to support bee stocks. While bee stings can and do cause deaths, research participants explained that the numbers are very low; and bees are unable to sting during swarming. Also, the claim of competition between honey and native bees remains inconclusive due to the complexity of the research, while hobby beekeepers (who are often urban) use a variety of methods to care for – rather than repress – their bees’ well-being (Packer 2010; Prendergast, Dixon and Bateman 2021). Due to these negative outcomes of visibility, many beekeepers choose to hide their hives, even curbing their enthusiasm to share with bee-tolerant others. Urban beekeeping thus reveals a disconnect between global and local perspectives. This discordance can be expressed as a form of environmental ‘NIMBY-ism’, which refers to the protectionist attitudes of and oppositional tactics adopted by community groups facing an unwelcome development in their neighbourhood . . . residents usually concede that these ‘noxious’ facilities are necessary, but not near their homes, hence the term ‘not in my back yard’. (Dear 1992: 288)

This begs the question: how can beekeepers share their love of honey bees with a wider public? Recognizing that bees – and many other urban

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natures – live in cities and are here to stay, how can the benefits, value and possibilities of coexistence with urban nature be ‘made visible’ while adapting to the intricate complexities of proximate more-than-human entanglements? I next explore these questions through four examples that make nature visible to diverse publics, using approaches of insect festivals, citizen science, more-than-human mapping and nature walks. These four examples were chosen because they apply a range of engagement approaches to capture the interests of varying demographics: from the public in general, through to interested individuals and beekeeping aficionados. For this research, I conducted six interviews with representatives from Pestival, BugLife, the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, Honey Bee Watch and the Pollinator Observatory project. I also draw on reflections from students from three nature walks that I held in Trondheim, Norway. Rather than represent a comprehensive project, this chapter serves as an entry point for exploring what ‘making visible’ could mean for greater human–nonhuman connections and actions in the city.

Pestival: Showcasing Awe-Inspiring Feats of Insects to the Public at Large Pestival is a public festival held in the heart of London that seeks ‘to highlight the vital symbiotic relationship between human and insect by placing the “little guys” at the heart of our lives and culture’ (Pestival n.d.). Arts and culture are key mediums through which to inspire a new generation ‘to a new way of thinking – and acting – in the greater interest of our shared environment’, which centres around ‘the ingenuity of insects’ (ibid.). Pestival has invited eminent local and international guests, and displayed diverse interactive sites, venues and formats ‘from film to fashion to music in every discipline, architecture, medicine’ (interview with the festival director), ‘to collaborate on cutting-edge interdisciplinary art projects . . . to challenge . . . stereotypes about insects good and bad . . . and [to] understand the role of these animals within the biosphere’ (Hvenegaard et al. 2013: 208). Held over two events so far, Pestival grew from ten thousand people in 2006 to become a three-day event in 2009 attracting more than two hundred thousand attendees, while reaching another ten million people worldwide through their press campaign. A survey of 10 per cent of their visitors reported that 98 per cent had positively changed their perspective of insects (ibid.).

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To engage people with ‘pests’ in a meaningful way ‘when most people don’t even like insects’, the Pestival director has applied several devices that include fun, cultural trends, and tapping into the next generation with relatable content. From these foci, she has chosen to always start from the point of human interest. Art has provided an important way ‘to get across a very salient message’ to a wide audience. The director recognized that the arts need ‘to be protected because they’re the one place where you go to have a meaningful, at their best, spiritual kind of dialogue with your inner being. I mean, what are we? What are we surviving for and protecting if we can’t protect things of beauty?’ Examples of exhibits have included the Bee Cab, a popular taxi ride where passengers could enjoy a conversation with a beekeeper driver. This attraction has aligned symbolic references such as ‘bees are always busy like taxis, and they both have the knowledge’ (the Pestival director). Alternatively, the Termite Pavilion represented a scaled-up, visually arresting solid timber reconstruction of Namibian termite mounds built on London’s South Bank (Pestival Termite Pavilion n.d.). The director commented: ‘It was just like giant Jenga piece that was built over a week. . . . lots of men and women running around building it like ants’. In addition to being a collaborative scientific work featuring sound recordings and a lighting system to simulate breathing, the Termite Pavilion was about ‘creating an installation piece that can then inspire people to learn more, but also get a feeling of being connected. And I think that’s the thing that we lack the most is the connection to what it means to be part of something bigger’ (the Pestival director). The director explained how the exhibition is essentially about telling good stories whilst creating a visceral, immersive and lasting experience. She explained how one needs ‘to create an ambience for people coming in that off kilter [the everyday]’, where one can create a feeling like ‘those shared memories [that] are the ones you carry with you to your deathbed’.

Citizen Science: Counting and Contributing to a World of Science Citizen science (CS) presents a very different human–nature experience that is situated much closer to science, on a smaller scale, and physically closer to insects. An increasingly popular tool, CS typically applies open source, collaborative technology to collecting data for scientific research. Local actions are connected to global issues, and scientists benefit from gaining access to massive, dispersed data sets, while the public can contribute to solving real world problems (Dickinson et al. 2012).

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CS projects differ greatly in their focus and approach. The three projects I researched ranged from ‘understanding how different habitats across Ireland could provide resources for bees’ (All-Ireland Pollinator Plan), to monitoring the health of wild honey bee colonies (Honey Bee Watch), to surveying pollinator species that exist within a local area (Pollinator Observatory). While some projects were in their initial stages, others, such as the All-Ireland Pollinator Project, had proved extensive, collecting a data set of approximately five thousand photographs. A project coordinator explained: ‘We uploaded all those photographs onto a citizen science platform and [the bees on] each photograph has now been counted [and] identified by thousands of volunteer citizen scientists’. While CS can benefit science by enabling innovative leaps of logic and invention to occur from their mix of participants, and can stir community action, learning and citizenship to increase conservation (Dickinson et al. 2012), the degrees of engagement vary, affecting uptake and output. For example, scientists may experience issues of quality control, while the public may encounter a psychological barrier to participating in science, with short-term interest and a loss of confidence in their ability to contribute (van der Wal et al. 2016). CS also tends to attract already highly engaged people, raising the need for wider inclusivity (Phillips et al. 2019). However, being in the field, up close and personal with your subjects, can elicit greater engagement. For example, the organizer of the Pollinator Observatory project noticed a positive effect when participants slowed down to focus on their field observations. He remarked: I can tell that where they’re more engaged is when we’re in silence. I [say to] them, “you have 7 minutes. You have to be quiet, no phone, not texting. You’re just observing the flower” . . . And of course, when they do get to see the pollinators, the excitement is quite palpable. Oh, it’s “ah” . . . it has so much meaning.

He likened this ‘ah’ moment to art, explaining: ‘Think that if you connect that then with some meaning of being creative . . . Like transmit it into art, put it into words, sing about it. And then there’s a really true connection that makes us closer to these things’. The project coordinator explained how this shift had evolved from ‘I’m doing citizen science’, typically focused on intense observation and counting of a species, through art – as something that was sensorial, visceral, emotional and personal – as approaching something akin to more-than-human thinking, suggesting a transformational shift was taking place with respect to the participants’ relationship with nature. Here ‘more-than-human’ – as

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in the Pestival example – confers an emotional ‘oneness’ with nature, where humans sense and share emotions and/or understandings with a non-human ‘other’ (see Edwards 2021). The next example also supports this shift towards a more-than-thinking perspective by reasserting nonhuman nature’s place on the city map. B-Lines: Drawing Lines of More-than-Human Connections on the City Map With evolving technologies that enable more diverse and experimental participation, maps are exciting tools with which to draw out the previously unseen. In shifting to a more-than-human city perspective, maps seek to turn the gaze on nonhuman natures to recognize their relationships to humans and to each other, and in doing so, to correct polarizations between human and nonhuman knowledges, agencies and power relations. An example of a ‘more-than-human map’ is BugLife’s B-Lines. This project sought to identify and map priority ‘B-Lines’ – pollinatorfriendly transects – to form a coherent insect pollinator dispersal network across the United Kingdom. In other words, their work creates pollinator corridors within and between cities on a national scale. While B-Lines include the European honey bee on the map, they also show the pathways of more than fifteen hundred native insect pollinators that live in the UK. An eleven-year project that was completed in 2021, B-Lines provides continuous public visibility of pollinators in regard to place and identity. People can place their locations for foraging or hives – be it a rooftop, private or community garden – upon the map. The way the map was created – section-by-section moving across the UK – also proved desirable for both the public and councils. This process involved first locally mapping where the pollinator pathways could be placed, to link these paths on a national scale, to then return to the local to ‘thicken’ the map by promoting local activities. As a result, individuals or groups could ask why they were not on the map, if they could be, and if not, if it would be possible to contribute to pollination efforts elsewhere. Hence B-Lines, through identifying pollinators and connecting previously unlinked zones on a national and comprehensive scale, provided an example of how visibility, continuity, more-than-human inclusivity and a connection to place can all foster favourable outcomes for engagement in promoting urban biodiversity. B-Lines represents one of several morethan-human maps that are experimenting with how to make visible – and to convey the importance of – nonhuman nature in the city (see Edwards in progress).

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Sensory Nature Walks: Walking a Path of Human–Nonhuman Nature Reconnection This final example describes nature walks I hosted for students in Trondheim, Norway. While not specifically about insects, these events sought to acknowledge what natures exist in cities. The class brought together Master-level students from across disciplines to consider the significance of urban nature. Recognizing that students were either new to the topic and/or to the place, two stages of nature walks were organized. The first was an exploratory walk that I led to illustrate the diversity of human– nature issues that existed, and to highlight possible ideas, concepts and examples (from Trondheim and elsewhere) that could be implemented to overcome human–nonhuman nature conflicts. These walks stressed relational elements, where I connected the relationships, influences and impacts on people, place and nonhuman natures at specific sites as we moved through the city. Three walks from this first stage were held with mixed student groups in different locations. The second walk was led by each student group to demonstrate how their projects responded to a specific, more-than-human design intervention strategy at a selected site. Walking proved to be an excellent way to engage participants in the local environment, as has been noted by many others. By slowing down, the walker could relax into their surroundings, encountering local ‘gazes, rhythms, sounds, smells’ (Pink 2008: 193). Wishing to provide the students with a toolkit of approaches, they were asked to dedicate time during the first walk to listen to and smell different types of nature. These approaches enabled the students to sense nature in the city by ‘weav[ing] places together’ (de Certeau 1984: 97) through the feet, nose, eyes, ears and head (Lee and Ingold 2006). Selected student reflections from the first stage of the walks are described below. Reflections from the Students ◾

Figure 2.1. Reflections from the students on the sensory nature walks 

[from] the rooftop where we could see the different parts of the city more easily . . . industrial areas and taller buildings being kept out of the city centre. . . . Trondheim is a city with many elements, and for me it looked like nature was prominent in all of them. . . . wildlife presence was low, but a few species seemed to show themselves again and again. The magpies were maybe the one we both saw the most and heard the most.

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I haven’t visited many graveyards in the past, and those that I have I’ve never considered ‘green spaces’, or a space where nature can be enjoyed. The one we visited was quite beautiful . . . I really appreciate these areas that hold both a natural and cultural/social significance. It makes me think that nature is so closely tied to our social and cultural experiences as humans. [Nature] could not be heard at all due to vehicular movement on the roads . . . The only clear signs of nature . . . were the trees, bushes, and grass around the old rail tracks; a small group of ducks in the area connected to the ocean; a thin strip of grass separating a bike path from the road; and the odd tree and patch of neat grass sprinkled in random places . . . One particularly notable sign of nature was the sunflower row . . . which apparently looks great in the summer, but looked very underwhelming at the time of the walk.

◾

Here the students commented on the lack of nature – including insects – as the walks were held at the start of the year when Norway was experiencing extreme weather conditions; as such, ‘cold, wet and white’ were key descriptors. This absence persisted in the built-up parts of the city. However, we also found urban ‘hotspots’, such as cemeteries, where nature appeared ‘wild’ and untamed, providing a contrast to the more managed street verges, community gardens and parks. On the second nature walk, the students took me to sites where they were envisioning more-than-human solutions. For example, student projects emerging from this process included designing green sensory barriers for construction sites, creating ‘rain rooms’ to appreciate the aesthetics of water, and retrofitting a busy local bridge and surroundings to ease human–nonhuman nature relations. For this reason, many of these walks appeared ‘nature-less’, representing land-in-waiting for potential design interventions. The nature walks proved popular: the students commented that they opened up their understanding of the current state, and possibilities for the future, of nature in cities. The walking element further ‘grounded’ such relationships in specific places, providing a strong link to the local context with their accompanying conditions, restrictions and realities. These sensory walks offered a way to step aside from a human- and sight-centric focus, as through listening, smelling and chatting we overcame the banality of the everyday cityscape, and questioned the human– nature relations around us.

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Discussion These case studies embrace the desire ‘to make visible’ and highlight additional aspects that extend the poignancy of this phrase. I next draw out the key take-home messages from this research. Bees as a Flagship Species to Consider Diverse Other Insects, Pollinators, Natures Bees – and the European honey bee in particular – were a reoccurring species in this research, reflecting how the bee represents a charismatic ‘flagship species’ that is used ‘as a symbol to arouse public interest in the animal and its habitat, and promote broader ecological and economic values of conservation’ (Smith and Sutton 2008: 127). However, what was more surprising was that many case studies chose to go beyond the bee where relational ties to other species, states, places and/or pollinators were highlighted. For example, the director of Honey Bee Watch commented: the closer you get to bees, the deeper you get connected to nature. . . . if you get to know the European honey bee, you get to know more about bees in general and solitary bees . . . I start noticing the patterns of the seasons and I start noticing what plants are melliferous, and you know have good nectar sources . . . I’m getting closer to nature because of the bee. Thank you.

This tendency marks an important shift in nature awareness by extending the popularity of one species to many – imparting an essential move towards more-than-human (and more-than-bee) conservation efforts. Actions Often Went beyond the Visible Many examples also went beyond the visible in conveying closer, lingering, immersive experiences with urban nature. Such experiences were often social, performed in groups where personal reflections could be reinforced by group discussions. Here, multisensory experiences spoke to ‘affect’, defined as ‘the capacity or potential to affect and be affected by the world, largely through emotions and feelings’ (Maller 2018: 9; also see Massumi 2015). While Pestival sought to provide spectacular one-off but lifelong memories, practices such as CS and the nature walks provided the possibility to reinforce considerations of urban nature more frequently. Sharma et al. (2019) suggest that the everyday practice of

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recording biological data, and hence regular reinforcement of walking, noticing and feeling nature, could be the next possible next step for CS (Gray and Colucci-Gray 2018). Diverse Approaches that Span across and beyond Academia, from Knowing to Doing As the case studies show, the medium is essential in attracting, holding and conveying the gravity of the message. These narratives – be they conveyed through themes of art, science, urban conflict or possibility – are engaging diverse publics in more-than-human worlds. While not always overtly apparent, their message is political, where these protagonists are questioning the role of human dominance in the city. This politicizing of awareness evokes Rancière’s ‘partition of the sensible’, where ‘[i]t makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise’ (Rancière 1999: 30). This action ‘to make visible’ also falls within academic responsibility, whereby making animals – their presence, agency and materiality as well as their ordering, use and treatment by humans – visible and accountable, then this surely has been an intentional challenge to animals’ longstanding (spatial, moral and relational, as well as social and scientific) invisibility wrought through the practices and ontologies of modernism and humanism. . . . (Buller 2016: 423)

However, the voices of not-for-profits, business and academia in this article revealed a subtle difference in the desired direction and extent for urban nature outcomes. For example, stakeholders did not necessarily share the same understandings of sustainable urban change, or the degree, desire or capacity to achieve it. Instead, other foci were prioritized where stakeholders perceived themselves as contributing to one part, rather than the whole, along the spectrum of urban sustainable change. This outcome prompts the need to look beyond the borders of academic disciplines to also include multi-sectoral perspectives. I argue that it is important for academics to remember the real world that our research lives in – alongside its limitations, priorities and frameworks within and beyond academia – so that achievable strategies for addressing complex issues of urban conservation and sustainability can be identified and mobilized.

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Making Visible Urban Insects Impacts How We See Ourselves, Nature and the City Returning to bees, I argue that a more-than-human perspective is necessary to overcome ‘NIMBY-ism’ to secure interdisciplinary and multisectoral strategies to create a multispecies city. The case studies here provide many salient features to contribute to this transition by instilling an emotive and persistent (re-)emplacement within a wider natural world. Such a transition needs to go beyond the individual to consider more-thanhuman relationships across the city. In the interview with the organizer of the Pollinator Observer project, my suggestion of creating a ‘community of beekeepers’ was adapted to future visions of his project. He mused: ‘Everyone is a beekeeper’. But not in the traditional sense of ‘let’s keep the bees because they give us honey’ . . . It’s about recognizing the agency of these bees and their right to be as part of, a wild thing in the city. . . . at the core there’s a Citizen Science Pollinator Observatory ‘Pollinator in Action’ idea. But I think there’s something there that’s more than just that. I think for this programme to become really meaningful, I’m finding that it’s more likely we’ll need to be associated with either the more-than-human thinking, or at least following up with that kind of approach . . . Something that makes the people flow into a space where they can really connect.

This transition needs to shift from merely ‘seeing’ to caring, from being detached observers to active participants – where bees (often but not always) can provide a first step. Cities are a crucial location for this shift to occur. Nonhuman natures in cities must be seen to exist and persist, where – due to the destruction of rural resources and climate change – cities are becoming refuges for nature (Schilthuizen 2018). Coupled with increasing urbanization, humans and nonhumans are required to share increasingly proximate space. Making visible these more-than-human possibilities can all help to bring to the forefront the co-benefits that more-than-human coexistence can bring.

Conclusion Noting how the phrase ‘to make visible’ is loosely applied across several fields and contexts, this chapter has explored how ‘making visible’ is employed to urban nature with a focus on urban insects. The term was initially problematized in the context of urban beekeeping, revealing a disconnect between global desires and local actions to increase urban bee stocks. Multi-sectoral approaches were then examined to show how this

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phrase was applied in practice, with case studies including an insect festival, citizen science, nature maps and nature walks. These alternate perspectives revealed that, while the European honey bee often represents a flagship species, there is a shift to consider its relationship to, and hence the value of, other diverse insects, pollinators and natures; and the case studies thus often went beyond being visible to prefer multisensorial experiences. Furthermore, such approaches engaged diverse organizers across and beyond academia to move from knowing to doing; and by ‘making visible’ urban insects, there are implications for how we see ourselves, our relationship with other natures and the city. All the case studies indicated a shift towards a more-than-human perspective, to decentre the human in the city, and to consider the rights, agencies, needs and desires of nonhuman others by using techniques of immersion, affect and relationality. Furthermore, these approaches were complementary, where some – such as Pestival – could inspire large numbers of people about insects using art, while CS approaches worked with smaller groups more intensively over longer periods of time. Hence, ‘making visible’ means much more than simply seeing a specific nature. It also acknowledges the role of other senses, species, places and perspectives in making sense of nature in new ways towards creating more-than-human cities.

Ferne Edwards has conducted research on sustainable cities across Australia, Venezuela, Ireland, Spain, Norway and the UK. Her books include the edited volumes Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices and Food, Senses and the City (both Routledge, 2021), and the monograph Food Resistance Movements: A Journey into Alternative Food Networks (Palgrave, 2023). She is based at the University of Surrey, UK.

References Azil, Aishah H., et al. 2021. ‘Fear Towards Insects and Other Arthropods: A Cross Sectional Study in a Malaysian University’, Geografia. Malaysian Journal of Society and Space 17(1): 69–80. Buller, Henry. 2016. ‘Animal Geographies III: Ethics’, Progress in Human Geography 40(3): 422–30. Cardoso, Pedro, et al. 2020. ‘Scientists’ Warning to Humanity on Insect Extinctions’, Biological Conservation 242: 108426. Cockrall-King, Jennifer. 2012. Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution. New York: Prometheus Books. Dear, M. 1992. ‘Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome’, Journal of the American Planning Association 58(3): 288–300.

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Debczak, Michele. 2019. ‘What’s the Difference between Bugs and Insects?’ 10 April, Mental Floss. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https://www.mentalfloss.com/ article/579236/whats-difference-between-bugs-and-insects. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dickinson, Janis L., et al. 2012. ‘The Current State of Citizen Science as a Tool for Ecological Research and Public Engagement’, Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 10(6) (August): 291–97. Edwards, Ferne. 2021. ‘Humming Along: Heightening the Senses between Urban Honeybees and Humans’, in Ferne Edwards, Roos Gerrtisen and Grit Wesser (eds), Food, Senses and the City. London: Routledge. ———. In progress. ‘Putting Bees on the Urban Map: Exploring Dimensions of More-than-Human Mappings’, TBC. Edwards, Ferne, and Jane Dixon. 2016. ‘The Hum of the Hive: Negotiating Conflict between Humans and Honeybee towards an Ecological City’, Society & Animals 24(6) (December): 535–55. Gray, Donald Stuart, and Laura Colucci-Gray. 2018. ‘Laying Down a Path in Walking: Student Teachers’ Emerging Ecological Identities’, Environmental Education Research 25(3): 1–24. Head, Lesley. 2016. Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-conceptualising Human–Nature. London: Routledge. Hvenegaard, Glen T., et al. 2013. ‘Insect Festivals: Celebrating and Fostering Human–Insect Encounters’, in Raynald Harvey Lemelin (ed.), The Management of Insects in Recreation and Tourism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Jo, and Tim Ingold. 2006. ‘Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing’, in Simon Coleman and Peter Collins (eds), Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, pp. 67–86. Lokeshwari, R.K., and T. Shantibala. 2010. ‘A Review on the Fascinating World of Insect Resources: Reason for Thoughts’, Psyche 207570. Maddox, David, et al. 2016. ‘How Can We Make Urban Nature and its Value More Apparent, More “Visible” to People?’, The Nature of Cities. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2016/09/25/how-can-we-makeurban-nature-and-its-value-more-apparent-more-visible-to-people/. Massumi, Brian. 2015. Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. McKie, Robin. 2018. ‘Where Have All Our Insects Gone?’, The Guardian, 17 July. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/ jun/17/where-have-insects-gone-climate-change-population-decline. Packer, Laurence. 2010. Keeping the Bees: Why All Bees Are at Risk and What We Can Do to Save Them. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers. Pestival. n.d. ‘Pestival. More Insects Now. Creators of Insect Eco-Entertainment’. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from pestival.org. ———. n. d. ‘Termite Pavilion: Beautiful Biomimicry’. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https://www.pestival.org/project/termitepavilion/. Phillips, Tina B., et al. 2019. ‘Engagement in Science through Citizen Science: Moving beyond Data Collection’, Science Education 103: 665–90. Pink, Sarah. 2008. ‘An Urban Tour: The Sensory Sociality of Ethnographic PlaceMaking’, Ethnography 9(2): 175–96. Prendergast, Kit S., Kingsley W. Dixon and Philip W. Bateman. 2021. ‘Interactions between the Introduced European Honey Bee and Native Bees in Urban Areas

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Varies by Year, Habitat Type and Native Bee Guild’, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 133: 725–43. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Samways, Michael J., et al. 2020. ‘Solutions for Humanity on How to Conserve Insects’, Biological Conservation 242: 108427. Schilthuizen, Menno. 2018. Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution. London: Quercus. Sharma, N., et al. 2019. ‘From Citizen Science to Citizen Action: Analysing the Potential for a Digital Platform to Cultivate Attachments to Nature’, Journal of Science Communication 18(1): A07. Smith, A.M., and S.G. Sutton. 2008. ‘The Role of a Flagship Species in the Formation of Conservation Intentions’, Human Dimensions of Wildlife 13(2): 127–40. van der Wal, R., et al. 2016. ‘The Role of Automated Feedback in Training and Retaining Biological Recorders for Citizen Science’, Conservation Biology 30(3): 550–61. Wills, Mathew. 2021. ‘Fear of an Insect Planet’. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https:// daily.jstor.org/fear-of-an-insect-planet/.

deú CHAPTER 3

Let the City Walls Go Wild Finding Safety in Urban Edgelands Hannah Cowan and Sam Knight

I wake up, still in the dead of night, getting sandwiches and coffee together for our journey. It feels like we are going on holiday. In reality, it is lockdown and we are not able to venture very far, but we can, at least, escape the city. I meet Sam by Brighton railway station. He is joining me on one of my many coping-mechanism walks to the hills, from my flat in central Brighton during the COVID-19 pandemic, to capture pictures of things I can only describe with words. We walk down a row of shops where just the bakery is awake, across a park and up one of the city’s many hills. At the top, there is a tunnel that takes us under a racecourse and out onto our first bit of grassland. The path through the tunnel is a little eerie; multicoloured lights flicker, and the colourful walls tell us fringe stories – of police violence, the ‘plandemic’ conspiracy, and whose tags lay sovereign over the walls. In the half light on the other side, we can just make out the tower blocks emerging from the slopes below, and beyond them a wash of houses down towards the sea. A man in a highvis jacket walks up the tarmac path from a block of flats, gives a nod and a greeting, and traces our steps back through the tunnel and down to the city below. This is just one of many escape routes from the city. Others meander through rural alleys, wedged between the backs of houses and railway tracks, or along the coast accompanied by seagulls, turnstones and cormorants. The veins of countryside reaching into the city are not only passageways for Sam and me, but urban greenways, wildlife corridors, and pollinator patchworks for bees, plants and water voles (Hinchliffe et al. 2005).

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Illustration 3.1. Escape route one: The Elm Grove to Whitehawk tunnel. © Sam Knight.

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Illustration 3.2. Drove Road – fenced in. © Sam Knight.

As the sun rises, we continue walking through the city’s edgelands, where the strange mix of skylarks, seagulls, sheep, and the start of rush hour traffic can be heard. Why did we feel the need to escape the city? There is a fable, over two thousand years’ old, initially credited to an Ancient Greek named Aesop, but reiterated and retold through the ages, including to me as a child. The story is of a town mouse and a country mouse – distant cousins. The town mouse visits the country mouse, but scoffs at their basic way of living: the stale bread, the plain food. The town mouse invites the country mouse back to the city, and the country mouse is astounded by the rich and elegant treats, the ornate and elaborate decor. But their feast is abruptly ended by an intruding cat and they must run for their lives. The country mouse rushes back home, with the moral of the story: that we should reject opulence in place of safety and security. And indeed, as we left the troubled city behind, we rejoiced in our escape to a simpler, more peaceful environment. But in this photo essay we suggest that this is also a story of the unequal distribution of resources, and the real difficulties in finding safety and security in place, where place and precarity are made up of things and beings (Brenman 2020). If only finding a safe niche was so easy as a dichotomized urban–rural decision. Whilst we were seeking solace in the hills during the pandemic, we were also aware that the countryside in England has long been a dangerous place, where in the past people have

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been hung, drawn and quartered for trying to reclaim and live off the common land that has been enclosed by dukes and gentry (Hayes 2020). But even today, the proliferation of barbed wire to keep us out (and livestock in) reminds us that safety in place is hard to come by.

Illustration 3.3. Hangleton over the A27 city wall. © Sam Knight.

We need space, and the things in it. Crossing the motorway always feels like a moment of escape, knowing that on the other side you can breathe freely. I have spent lockdown in a studio flat, not even a right to land through my monthly rent, but a temporary box in the sky. So when we walk over that motorway it feels like walking over the city walls, the bold felt tip line that says ‘this is your city’, ‘this is your place’. But, as Bruno Latour (1993) suggests, drawing walls and lines between things only emphasizes and encourages their leakiness. We are reminded of this as the motorway follows us on our trek to the hills, and at times the soft but steady swish of cars provides the same mesmerizing roll as the howling wind or the sea waves heaving in and out of shore. Indeed, the motorways that border the city are not just leaky boundaries but are simultaneously the arteries that supply the city with food, goods and workers. We are drawn to the city not simply as Aesop suggests for its opulence, but because this is where we can hope to find the resources we need to live. Where we used to find our sustenance on

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the land, where wood and water were free, and we could gather, hunt and build settlements as we wished (Hayes 2020), the cities call us for we must now engage in wage labour to exchange money for our needs (Graeber 2011). In the city there is food, fuel, housing and clothing everywhere, but as we have seen more than ever during the pandemic, this does not mean that it is easy for everyone to claim them as their own.

Illustration 3.4. From Balsdean Bottom. © Sam Knight.

Most people do not cross the footbridges over motorways. Rather, they drive from the city to one of the National Trust car parks on the tops of the hills. On a sunny afternoon, they are rammed full, heat intensified by the sun bouncing between the cars. That feeling when you get out the car, jaw dropped at the panoramic views stretched out under your feet – it sure does make you feel lighter, removes you from everyday worries, gives you a glimpse of the freedom you need to process. But since I have started walking to these places, I have realized the view is always grander from the bottom, or halfway up. As the landscape emerges, that feeling of freedom washes through your body with every breath, every step. The connections matter. Driving dichotomizes home and destination, encourages the mistake that you can dominate nature by standing on top of it. But walking connects up home in the city with this new home in the hills, forcing you to collaborate with the living world, with no particular aim or end point, acknowledging its power as you clamber up and down its slopes (Shepherd [1977] 2014). A lit-

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tle being called SARS-CoV-2 has prevented us from travelling to far-off destinations, but instead it has forced us to rediscover the wealth of life and relations that open up like a magic box when we focus on the local minutiae. As we walk through this living landscape, we quickly realize it is an illusion that all the resources can be found in the city. The countryside powers the city – the food, the chalk pits, the wood. Whilst we must pay attention to the living wilds in our cities, we are also concerned that we have been alienated from so much of this surrounding land.

Illustration 3.5. Submerged farm machinery in the lost village of Balsdean. © Sam Knight.

For a long time, walking down into this valley felt simply like immersing myself in the countryside, secluded from civilization. Like going underwater in a sea of green, where I have grown gills to breathe more easily. It was the outer-most point of our walk today. But it took time and exploration with Sam to realize that I was in fact walking down into urban past, through civilizations buried in the ground under our feet. Whilst these are not the big citadels found after being taken over by the Amazon forest (Monbiot 2013: 196–97), they are the places where people have previously found it safe to settle, or seek sanctuary. This valley used to house a whole village, now lost to the elements. The machinery sunken into the earth was marked 1899, and a grassy mound nearby, the remains of a Norman church, almost a thousand years old.

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Walking into the countryside round here is not about walking into nature, an untouched wilderness. Rather it is about finding other civilizations, long gone but yet still here, imprinted on the earth. Climb to the hillcrest and find the Iron Age hill fort, with ditches built for safety all around. Look out and feel the strategic sense of place – safe, or at least well aware of danger when it comes. Go down into the valley and find the sheltered medieval village, one still standing, and another with a sunken wall and remnants packed into the bumpy ground (Brandon 1998). Whilst the pandemic has brought a renewed nostalgia for rural escapes, finding these human remnants reminds us that nature is and always has been cultured; we have always lived in the Anthropocene (Proctor 2013). Rather, this venture out of the city is about glimpsing another way of living, another version of our relations with the world. We fantasize that parts of our cities will one day see the same fate, with the office blocks of Canary Wharf, built to house what David Graeber (2018) called ‘bullshit jobs’, covered in ivy, subsiding into the ground below.

Illustration 3.6. Devil’s Dyke facing north-east to Saddlescombe. © Sam Knight.

Now the ruins, wheat fields and the sheep-grazed grasslands are all part of the South Downs National Park. Although this does not stop most of the land being privately owned, it does ensure there are paths and small patches designated for leisure – such as here at the Devil’s Dyke. With the growing industrialization of our cities in Victorian times, stories proliferated that confirmed Aesop’s fear of city life, and the countryside continued to be reinforced as a pastoral utopia well into the twen-

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tieth century (Brandon 1998). This version of the countryside made it seem a safe place – the wildness alive in older stories of dragons, witches and ghouls had been harnessed, the wolves killed off years before (Monbiot 2013). In their place is the remnants of a Victorian theme park, where there once stood a cable car across this magnificent ditch. This was, however, a place for high society (National Trust n.d.), and notably this idealization of the countryside further forces work and leisure into separate chunks of time, even separate bodies, slotted into an urban– rural dichotomy. More telling of rural dangers is perhaps the story of this dyke, said to have been dug by the devil himself. He was angered that the villages around had finally been converted to Christianity, so he began digging a channel to the sea to drown the residents. The devil was stopped halfway by St Cuthman, who tricked the Devil into thinking it was dawn (National Trust n.d.). This is a constant reminder to the people of Sussex, the last territory to convert to Christianity in the seventh century, of the consequences if they did not obey the new ruling elite. Our safety, it seems, depends not just on where we are, but on who we are and what we are doing. In the shooting season, it becomes clear, Aesop, that sometimes it is the city that is safer, as the occasional pheasant is chased out of the vast swathes of countryside enclosed as hunting grounds for the rich, to find shelter in urban gardens and on city balconies.

Illustration 3.7. Brighton from the bridleway facing east. © Sam Knight.

It is time to think homeward. It is not the end, heading home is half the walk, but our eyes turn back towards the city. The coastline helps to

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pull us back in. The real beacon home though is a slightly bitter one – another leisure attraction, a vertical cable car called the British Airways i360. The company has faulted on its loans, despite its managers earning six-figure salaries, leaving the council to foot the bill (BBC 2021). A beacon to lead us home but also a beacon of misused and poorly distributed resources, just as we saw on the paths behind us. We are not the only ones coming back home, into the city, as the day draws to a close. From late summer to early spring, flocks of starlings soar overhead, the sound of thousands of flapping wings more intense than a jumbo jet, going to join their night comrades for a goodnight battle dance between the piers. The West Pier is now only a wreck, but is loved and protected by the city’s residents for its provision of marine and bird life, as well as its dramatic staging for sunsets. The Palace Pier is usually busy with theme park rides whizzing by, and people crowded around candy floss stalls. But this year, the only crowds were the starlings finding more pertinent uses for our tourist attractions, and the humans back on shore watching the birds perform as if they were at a fireworks display. When commercial places closed, lockdown allowed us to see more clearly the multitude of possible assemblages, which defy nature–culture, urban–rural, work–leisure and even human–nonhuman dichotomies (Proctor 2013).

Illustration 3.8. Race Hill allotments and Whitehawk. © Sam Knight.

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We are nearing home now, but we are in limbo. The town mouse and the country mouse were both right in their own ways. Humans get claustrophobic in the city, scrapping around for resources, working sedentary for hours; but yet, we are told that the countryside and its resources are not ours. They have been privatized into relatively barren hunting grounds, country estates, and highly subsidized sheep farms – not great places for nonhumans either (Monbiot 2013; Hayes 2020). So we see seagulls, foxes, pheasants and water voles making similar journeys in and out of the city. The countryside seems to be safe for the same beings that cities are. The rest of us find ourselves unsatisfied, boomeranging back and forth between the city and the hills, trying to find a place to be. For too long we have been fortifying our cities, drawing boundaries between urban and rural. Although a lot of this has been done to protect the countryside (Brandon 1998; Proctor 2013), it has also acted to segregate humans and nonhumans, and stopped us being able to reimagine what a city, or indeed the countryside, could look like. Whilst we have seen that these lines are leaky, and are excited about the work going on in urban wilds and edgelands to create a new ecological politics – a ‘cosmopolitics’ – based on consensus between humans and nonhumans (Hinchliffe et al. 2005), we also want to make visible other possible relations by reorientating our cities not to look in towards the town centre, but out to the peripheries, the edgelands and beyond. In 2020, a virus undermined human decisions on where the boundaries should get drawn. It closed our shops and offices, and many white-collar workers who can feel safe anywhere, fled away from virus-filled cities to more rural spaces (Marsh 2020). But perhaps all the othered, disenfranchised humans and nonhumans together could also use this moment to stretch out of this uncomfortable liminal space to reclaim the land and resources across the urban–rural divide. We could let those office blocks full of ‘bullshit jobs’ go wild, and create a consensual cosmopolitics for the commons, for wolves, humans and starlings alike, focusing not just on which places are safe, but for whom, and doing what. Our labour could not only be more leisurable, but focused on creating more caring relationships and forms of exchange with other beings and things that have been exploited for far too long.

Hannah Cowan is a social and medical anthropologist currently employed as a research associate at King’s College London. She completed her PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2020, and has also held teaching and research assistant positions at Queen Mary University, London, and UCL. Her work spans a num-

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ber of topics that intersect to address issues of inequality, activism, and methods of social change. Sam Knight has been a photographer for over fifteen years, and specializes in landscape, wildlife and outdoors photography. He is fascinated by conservation and, with over a decade in the creative industry, he now helps to promote interest in travel, nature and the environment.

References BBC. 2021. ‘Brighton’s i360 Tower Misses Latest Loan Repayment’. BBC News, 2 July. Retrieved 6 September 2021 from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-eng land-sussex-57693473. Brandon, Peter. 1998. The South Downs. Chichester: Phillimore. Brenman, Natassia F. 2020. ‘Placing Precarity: Access and Belonging in the Shifting Landscape of UK Mental Health Care’, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 45: 22–41. Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. London: Melville House. ———. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It. London: Penguin. Hayes, Nick. 2020. The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us. London: Bloomsbury. Hinchliffe, Steve, et al. 2005. ‘Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitan Experiment’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 643–58. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marsh, Sarah. 2020. ‘Escape to the Country: How Covid is Driving an Exodus from Britain’s Cities’. The Guardian, 26 September. Retrieved 20 April 2021 from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/26/escape-country-covid-ex odus-britain-cities-pandemic-urban-green-space. Monbiot, George. 2013. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. London: Penguin. National Trust. n.d. ‘History at Devil’s Dyke’. Retrieved 6 September 2021 from https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/devils-dyke/history. Proctor, James. 2013. ‘Saving Nature in the Anthropocene’, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 3(1): 83–92. Shepherd, Nan. (1977) 2014. The Living Mountain. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

deú CHAPTER 4

A Bear and Those Things Beneath My Knees Nature in Settler-Colonial Los Angeles Chima Michael Anyadike-Danes

Introduction ‘I want my children and other younger members of community to know that we were here’. This was how one of my interlocutors explained their rationale for trying to create a Mongolian space in the city of Los Angeles. But for members of the Mongolian community, asserting their right as inhabitants to create a space in settler-colonial Los Angeles that the community could call their own was an ongoing challenge. My particular focus is on how the dominant settler ideology’s position on nature led to Mongolians forming specific relationships with nonhuman beings – relationships that would previously have been outside of their ken. In this instance my focus is on the impact of two species of nonhuman life – Cimex lectularius (the bed bug) and Ursus arctos californicus (the California grizzly) – on Mongolian spatial production in Los Angeles, and thus on their right to the city. Henri Lefebvre coined the term ‘right to the city’ in his 1968 book Le droit à la ville (Schmid 2012: 42). The idea was informed by his studies of modern life in his natal province of Aquitaine, his commutes from the centre of Paris to the suburban Paris West University Nanterre La Défense, and conversations with Guy Debord and other situationists (Elden 2004; Merrifield 2006). Lefebvre’s argument, which he further developed in his 1973 book Espace et politique, was that capitalism’s rise had not just created alienable labour but alienable space (Harvey 2012). In mid-twentieth-century France, an unimaginative French state organized this space with minimal input from the majority of inhabi-

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tants. This ensured ‘relations of class privilege and domination’ were engraved in the city’s landscape (ibid.: xiv). Lefebvre responded by calling for the urban classes to eschew the mediating role of the state and to actively involve themselves in the production of space (Lefebvre 2000: 154). He envisaged that both the socio-economically dispossessed and those who were alienated would be empowered and gain rights through this process (Marcuse 2012). The culmination of Lefebvre’s work on the right to the city is to be found in the foreword to the 1990 edited volume Du contrat de citoyenneté (Stanek 2011). There he wrote that the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen had been a watershed moment, but that due to globalization, migration and immigration the world had now changed, and consequently: Belonging can no longer simply be defined by family and name (birth) or by place (residence). It has multiplied, and we all ‘belong’ to our family, to a village or a town, a region, a trade or occupation, a country (homeland, nation and nationality), a State, a continent (in our case, Europe), and one or more cultures, etc. (Lefebvre 2003: 249–50)

Lefebvre drew specifically on Jean-Jacques Rosseau’s notion of the social contract when he argued that this new citizenship and its attendant rights should be the subject of a contract between the citizenry and the state. This contract would serve as a means to reincorporate the dispossessed and alienated, and dismantle the established social order (Marcuse 2012). The period in which Rosseau lived was dominated by an ‘anthropocentric humanism’, a doctrine that placed nature at the service of man (Marks 2002; Fernandes 2007). Sadly, this theoretical position was by no means unusual in twentieth and twenty-first centuries for, as Jennifer Wolch noted, contemporary urban theory is remarkably anthropocentric (Wolch 2017). Lefebvre’s work on the production of space offered a complex and contradictory portrait of nature’s role (Janzen 2002). On the one hand he argued that nature can create space, but on the other he saw urban environs as ones in which nature is controlled. He observed that, with the rise of leisure, ‘Nature’ – or what passes for it, and survives of it – becomes the ghetto of leisure pursuits, the separate place of pleasure and the retreat of ‘creativity’ (Lefebvre 2000: 158). However, nowhere in Lefebvre’s work on the right to the city is there a discussion of the role that nature might play in either the apportioning of rights or the creation of urban space. Such a lacunae is a profound problem in a city like Los Angeles, not just because it is part of a region ‘unique in the Northern Hemisphere for the intensity of interaction between humans,

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their pets, and wild fauna’, but because nature plays a particular role in the spatial production of settler-colonial cities (Davis 2000). Indeed, the central focus of this chapter is to explore how nature, in the form of nonhuman beings, in settler-colonial Los Angeles was consequential for Mongolian immigrants’ rights to create space in the city. When I identify Los Angeles as a settler-colonial city I refer to more than a historical act of genocide. Los Angeles is an urban environ in which settler violence is ongoing and structural. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang observed, the very existence of a settler-colonial polity is premised on continual violence so as to eradicate native presence in all its forms (Tuck and Yang 2012). Furthermore, this involves not just physical genocide but acts of ecocide (Short 2016). These occur because settlers’ ‘strategies of territorialization involve . . . the distribution of nonhuman agents . . . to reorder spaces and places according to their own allied imperatives’ (Neale 2016: n.p.). Settlers justify this behaviour through an ideology that positions nature, in the form of land, as a resource to be exploited. In Los Angeles, settler ideology, dating back to eighteenth-century Spanish occupation, is that they exploit land far more effectively than the Tongva – a name that some of the Indigenous inhabitants of Los Angeles identify themselves by. This effective exploitation of the land legitimates settler claims to sovereignty. In this construction the city is thus a place of cultured nature, and is separate from the wilderness or unmanaged nature that is associated with the native, who is presented as the antonym of ‘civilized’ urbanism. Indeed, in such a formulation, despite historical evidence to the contrary, natives are presented as incapable of urbanism (Forbes 1998). It is because in a settler-colonial city claims to the right to produce space rest upon a mastery of nature that both native humans and nonhumans represent potential threats that have to be eliminated. Elimination in this context refers not just to genocide, although it often takes that form, but also to the ongoing cultural destruction of indigenous lifeworlds and cosmologies through practices like domestication, imprisonment and religious conversion (Wolfe 2006; Hernández 2017). At various points in history settlers have classified both the bed bug and the California grizzly as pests. Pest, like weed, is a designation for nonhuman beings categorized as being out of place, and thus disruptive to human attempts at spatial production (Nagy and Johnson 2013). In exploring how these two species affected Mongolian immigrants attempts at claiming a right to the city in Los Angeles, my goal is to stress the importance of including nature(s) as an actor in any discussion of new citizenship rights and spatial production in settler-colonial cities. In doing so, I am arguing that settler-colonial urbanism takes a particular

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form. My exploration of this phenomenon firstly involves a discussion of bed bugs and their role in dispossessing the economically vulnerable of their right to spatial production. I then discuss how engaging with the grizzly as a symbol became the key to the Mongolian community as a whole being permitted to create space. I believe that my accounts of these animals’ engagement with Mongolians exemplifies the fragmentary and unequal access to the creation of urban space that Lefebvre opposed, and that are a key feature of existence in settler-colonial Los Angeles.

Research Context My exploration of the role that nonhuman beings, like bed bugs and bears, played in the right that Mongolians have to produce space in settlercolonial Los Angeles draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork. During the mid-2010s I conducted research with this community of a few thousand people. It had its origins in a Mongolian migration to Los Angeles that had begun in the late 1990s but swelled significantly in the early 2000s as the Mongolian economy boomed due to developments in the mining sector. Some of the older migrants had held significant positions in the Mongolian People’s Republic, while some of the newer migrants were scions of families that had enriched themselves in the early days of zerleg kapitalizm (wild capitalism) following the end of the communist state (Munkherdene 2018). Among the Mongolians were many students seeking to improve their employment prospects back in Mongolia through getting an English-language university education. Others of them were supporters of the opposition political party who thought they would have better economic opportunities in the United States. Finally, there were a number of Mongolians who had no intention of returning to Mongolia, and wished to remain in the United States. While groups of Mongolians lived throughout Los Angeles County’s ninety-odd cities, the largest concentration resided in Koreatown. When compared to other American metropolises, Los Angeles is often described as sprawling and with a low population density, but Koreatown was slightly less than seven concentrated square kilometres of hustle and bustle. It lay just to the west of downtown Los Angeles, and was the city’s most densely populated neighbourhood. Indeed, with more than seventeen thousand people per square kilometre, it was one of the most densely populated places in the United States. Most residents of the neighbourhood lived in apartment buildings, and many of Koreatown’s Mongolians lived in circumstances that I regard as crowded.

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Despite Koreatown’s toponym and the overwhelming presence of hangul signs (the writing system of the Korean language), the majority of inhabitants were not Korean American, but from other ethnic groups. In the 2010s, the neighbourhood has been the site of not inconsiderable strife due to various conflicting attempts at spatial production. There were protests over perceived gerrymandering of the city council electoral districts, anger at the transfer of redevelopment funds into surrounding neighbourhoods as opposed to it being spent on developing services in Koreatown, and conflict between the competing claims of Bangladeshi American and Korean American communities, both of whom have sought to create specific kinds of ethnic spaces in the neighbourhood. Questions of who had the right to create space in the city were thus a matter of repeated and explicit concern in Koreatown.

Cimex L.’s Effect on a Place of One’s Own In late 2014 I met up with Nancy and Anya at one of Koreatown’s many coffee shops. As I was slightly delayed, I was unsurprised to discover them already in conversation, but I was surprised by their topic – Nancy’s recent experiences with bed bugs. She explained that it was the welts on her son John’s pre-teen body that made her aware of a vampiric presence in her apartment. At first she thought it was fleas, but later, after she too was bitten, she realized that it was bed bugs. Nancy was a time-poor, working, single mother yet she diligently washed and cleaned everything in the apartment. However, there was no respite and eventually she concluded that they would have to move to escape the voracious parasites. Nancy explained that she had reached this expensive conclusion after her apartment superintendent had been unable to resolve the matter. Moving meant a lost deposit but she felt it was a small price to pay for peace of mind, as bugs had endlessly intruded on her mind. As my previous apartment building was infested with bed bugs, I expressed my sympathy and described my own experiences. Anya was surprised by our stories, as despite living in Los Angeles for more than a decade she had never encountered a bed bug. In the rest of this section, I discuss bed bug biology and what Nancy’s and my encounters with bed bugs and Anya’s reaction might tell us about who, or what, has what rights in settler-colonial Los Angeles to create space. Cimex lectularius is a member of the Hemiptera order of insects. Hemipterans are classified as true bugs because they feed using a probiscis. There are tens of thousands of hemipteran species, yet only three of them – two species of bed bug and the kissing bug – habitually use

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their probiscis to feed on human blood. Bed bugs are stealthy, nocturnal hunters relying on their thermoreceptors and chemoreceptors to locate their human prey (Schutt 2009). These senses allow them to detect both the temperature increases and carbon dioxide concentration that mark the presence of a resting human. Having reached their prey, the bugs use their mouths to pump forty-six different proteins into their host’s body in order to keep blood flowing (Borel 2015: 2–3). After feeding for several minutes, they digest the blood and excrete, leaving telltale black marks. The bugs then return to a nearby harbourage, often a wall (Jones 2015). Bed bugs’ consumption of blood fuels their growth and is crucial to them breaking their exoskeletons and moving to the next stage in their life cycle (Schutt 2009). I vividly recall witnessing several stages in this life cycle when I disassembled a wooden futon. There amongst its joints I found not only bed bugs and their faeces, but also eggs and several instars; the largest of these was several millimetres long and dark brown in colouration. The number of eggs seemed to indicate a relative boom in the population, which is unsurprising as an adult female bed bug lays several hundred eggs over the course of her lifespan. When Nancy became aware of the presence of bed bugs in her apartment, she carried out a deep clean. Killing bed bugs that are present in clothes or other fabrics requires that they be boiled. Treating the fabric of one’s home, such as its furnishings, is more complex and requires either the hiring of a licensed pest control operative (PCO) or the use of home remedies with potentially deadly side effects (Borel 2015). At the time, Los Angeles municipal county guidelines defined the responsibility of parties as follows: the tenant had to inform the landlord of the infestation, and the landlord would have to hire a PCO. However, this was not the case throughout the United States, and in a 2019 paper Daniel Schneider reported that after analysing thousands of jurisdictions in the United States he could only conclude that very few of the nation’s cities have comprehensive legislation on bed bugs (Schneider 2019: 98). With respect to bed bugs, I would argue that the nation is best understood as a multilayered, jurisdictional patchwork, with the presence of legislation and its demands varying at a number of levels (Varsanyi et al. 2012). In Los Angeles County the mere existence of legislation did not help tenants like Nancy because, as American legal realists have long argued, there is a profound difference between what a statute says and how it is enforced or implemented (Pound 1910). For example, in my building, which was constructed in the 1920s, calling a PCO was ineffective. The PCO only sprayed apartments that had reported bed bugs, not neighbouring apartments – meaning bugs could migrate, survive and return. Tenants like Nancy were thus burdened with vigilance. As the anthro-

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pologist Mary Douglas once observed, a home is a place defined by routines, patterns, and imposed orders (Douglas 1991). However, the bugs’ presence imposed a new and unwanted order. As Nancy and her building supervisor were unable to remove the bugs, Nancy and John moved rather than continue to accept the demands of blood and time that the bugs imposed on them. The Englishman John Southall’s ‘A Treatise on Buggs’ is often regarded as the ‘the first scientific examination of the bed bug’ (Sarasohn 2013: 515). Southall wrote at a time when early modern England was becoming increasingly concerned about the bug’s presence. Incorrectly, yet perhaps reassuringly for his audience, he held that the bug originated in the United States, having come to England after the Great Fire of London (Southall 1730). However, ‘[y]ears later, documents would reveal that the bloodsucking pests had actually been recorded in England since 1583’ (Schutt 2009). Moreover, according to Peter Kalm, an eighteenthcentury Swedish naturalist who visited the United States in 1748, he could find no evidence of bed bugs amongst the Indigenous population – only amongst the colonists. Bed bugs should thus be regarded as co-colonizers, with their presence creating what Matthew Candelaria has referred to as ‘a parallel world unseen by most’ (Candelaria 2009: 301). Until the late 1940s this world flourished in the United States’ urban environs, particularly in apartment buildings, where the walls were rarely solid and central heating sped up the bugs reproductive cycle (Biehler 2013: 57). Bed bugs ceased to flourish as a result of the application of DDT, a chemical that had been successfully deployed in the Second World War to deal with lice and other insects plaguing troops (McWilliams 2008). However, by the late 1990s, Euro-America’s surviving bed bug populations had developed an immunity to DDT, and the globalization of travel enabled them to spread and multiply throughout the world’s cities with exceptional speed (Borel 2015). Despite living in Los Angeles for more than a decade, Anya was both surprised and uncertain as to how to respond to our stories about bed bugs. Her confusion stemmed, as she explained, from the fact that neither in Mongolia nor in Los Angeles had she ever encountered a bed bug. This is not unusual. Brooke Borel describes in Infested her reaction to her dermo-pathologist father suggesting that her bites were from bed bugs: ‘Bed bugs? Are you crazy? That’s not even a real thing’ (Borel 2015: xii). Anya did not live in a crowded apartment building in Koreatown, with no control over what fixtures and furniture were brought into the building by her neighbours, and nor was she subjected to an endless rotation of new tenants, but instead had a bungalow in South Los Angeles. The chances of a bed bug colonializing her home and creating a space

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of its own were thus diminished. Dawn Biehler observes that contemporary discourse positions bed bugs as equally plaguing rich and poor (Biehler 2013). However, money provides options. This was evident in Nancy and Anya’s different housing choices. That Nancy had to enter into these inter-species relations while Anya did not is revealing of how the Mongolian community in Los Angeles was changing with respect to its engagement with other beings and space. Specifically, both wealthier Mongolians who had recently arrived, and older Mongolians like Anya who had attained a degree of socio-economic stability, were choosing to reside outside of Koreatown, in the suburbs. For them Koreatown was a place of communal gathering not of residency, and the sorts of encounters and complex relations with bed bugs that Nancy and the more impoverished Mongolians residing in Koreatown had been subject to were not part of their experiences. Nancy’s encounter with bed bugs and her discovery of the difficulty of renting affordable accommodation is illustrative of both the phenomenological and the processual qualities that I ascribe to the term ‘becomings’. Becomings, in one sense, refers to the ongoing nature of life as experienced in contact between a variety of species (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 546). In such a situation all beings possess agency and enact consequential relations with one another, like the bed bugs did by feeding on Nancy. To lack those consequential relations as Anya did was to experience a place very differently. All of this is to say we ‘become’ in very particular places and, to paraphrase Jean Lave’s work on British expatriates in Portugal, a Mongolian who wiles away some time in a Koreatown apartment building being fed on by bed bugs is never entirely the same as a Mongolian who has not had to experience being consumed by parasites and who dwells in a bungalow elsewhere in the city (Lave 2003). This increasing divide in experience as a result of becomings is an example of superdiversity. Thus, while both social scientific and public discourse might continue to reductively equate a population’s becomings with their ethnicity, now a variety of variables including their engagement with nonhuman beings ‘condition people’s lives’ (Vertovec 2007: 1026). My purpose in discussing the very different experiences of urban life that my Mongolian interlocutors had has been to highlight how in settler-colonial cities the right to the city can be removed by nonhuman beings, and how those who are impoverished are particularly likely to be dispossessed in such a fashion. Indeed, amongst my Mongolian interlocutors the lesson that experiences like this taught them was that, in contemporary settler-colonial Los Angeles, money is what allows for the regulation of some forms of nature and the proper enjoyment of a place.

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A lack of money leaves one at the mercy of pests. In effect they assert their own agency, their right to control space and to make a visible place for their own enjoyment. Their parallel world, which was once unseen, becomes visible as the human settler’s ability to control space diminishes, and in the process it reveals the impossibility of claiming rights to a city without accounting for nature as an actor.

Creating Space through Grizzly Rituals I first met Wilshire in the autumn of 2015 at the library on Koreatown’s western border, with which he shared a name. I was there with some Mongolian colleagues negotiating a library shelf for Mongolian-language books that the Ulaanbaatar Public Library system would send to Los Angeles. In return, my colleagues were going to purchase some of the library’s stock to send to Ulaanbaatar. Wilshire, of modest stature, sat near a pile of books intended for Ulaanbaatar. He was wearing a short red jacket with intricate embroidery over a turquoise T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Los Angeles City of Angels’. He said nothing, but then why would he? He was, after all, a stuffed bear. However, he was also more – for he was a California grizzly. This subspecies has a long and ambivalent relationship with California. On the one hand it has had the state’s totem since the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt, but on the other hand, actual grizzly bears were regarded as pests who threatened settlers’ lives and livelihoods. Wilshire was not a pest. He would journey to Ulaanbaatar by boat and rail to serve as the library’s mascot. He symbolized the friendship that his creator, and others associated with the library, hoped to build through the exchange. If the bed bug has always been regarded by settlers as a pest and its existence threatens to dispossess the socio-economically disadvantaged of the ability to create space, then the grizzly offers a different set of insights into the relationship between nature and a right to the city in settler-colonial Los Angeles. My particular goal as I provide further details on the book exchange and attend to the differences in Indigenous, Spanish and American understandings of this nonhuman being is to demonstrate how nonhuman beings who are not classified as pests, but instead are positioned as subservient, can serve as a means of legitimating the production of space and preventing alienation. Koreatown’s Mongolian community organizers initiated the book exchange programme because they wanted to ensure the community could read relatively recent Mongolian-language publications. Prior to the programme’s establishment, the community had limited access to

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Mongolian-language books. The Ulaanbaatar Library System had agreed to this as long as a reciprocal relationship could be created with a local library in Los Angeles. This library would house the books and send English-language books to Ulaanbaatar. Wilshire Library made sense, both because of the Mongolian population in its catchment and because one of its librarians had already reach out to the community. However, the librarian insisted that the Mongolians demonstrate that they were committed Angelinos not merely sojourning. They would only have the right to shape library space under such circumstances. This commitment was to be demonstrated by purchasing and shipping library stock to Ulaanbaatar, and also ensuring that the library in Mongolia would regularly send shipments of new Mongolian-language books to Wilshire Library. That a bear would be central to a ritual founded on exchange should come as no surprise. Throughout the northern hemisphere, bears have played an important role in human rituals (Hallowell 1926). Indeed, David Rockwell observes that, with respect to Native Americans, ‘[b]ears were often central to the most basic rites of many tribes: the initiation of youths into adulthood, the sacred practices of shamanism, the healing of the sick and injured, the rites surrounding the hunt’ (Rockwell 2003). For certain Native Californian populations, it was not just that bears, particularly grizzlies, were central to their ritual life but that beings known as ‘bear doctors’ were able to shift between human and grizzly form (Willard 1995). The Tongva, Los Angeles’ first people, included among their number such bear doctors. According to C. Hart Merriam, an ethnographer who had interviewed some Tongva, they referred to the California grizzly as hoó-nahr. This was a favoured form of the Tongva’s most powerful class of spiritual leaders (McCawley 1996: 94). Alfred Kroeber said of bear doctors that they possessed the ability to heal and regenerate themselves if wounded, and that they often received their powers as a result of having lived with hoó-nahr (Kroeber 1907). Adopting an atheistic perspective, if only for methodological reasons and not others, Rockwell argues that hoó-nahr, and others like them in other Native American and non-Native cosmologies, often played such a role in various human belief systems because of their propensity for hibernating, and the fact that they share some characteristics with human beings (Rockwell 2003). When the Portola expedition arrived in Alta California in 1769, they saw not the hoó-nahr, but oso. In this form he was not a spiritual leader, but sustenance. Oso’s meat was an early delicacy for Spanish explorers – a fact commemorated by the toponym Los Osos, which signals an area once rich in the animal. The Spanish occupation of Alta California was the beginning of the native population’s elimination, but oso flour-

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ished, growing in such numbers that they began to outnumber humans in the state (Grinnell 1938; Storer and Tevis Jr. 1996; Alagona 2013). Southern California’s early nineteenth-century ranching economy had transformed oso into what Deborah Bird Rose has referred to as a feral feedback – that is, an indigenous species that benefits from the environmental changes wrought by settler colonialism (Rose 2012). During the period from Mexican independence to California statehood, oso played an important ritual role in the life of the state’s Californios (Hispanic people living in California). For example, on certain saints’ days oso was trapped by vaqueros (horse-mounted livestock handlers) and placed in an enclosure to do battle with a bull as part of the festivities. On other occasions, the vaquero would kill the oso upon capturing it. A crucial aspect of the role of oso in Californio life was the lack of ill will they bore it. Unlike later settlers, Californios did not seem to regard oso preying on their livestock as a challenge to their supremacy or livelihood. Osos flourished during the era of the Californios, but by the close of the nineteenth century they had become what is now known as the California grizzly. The last grizzlies were sighted in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century (Grinnell 1938). Classified as pests, grizzlies quickly met their demise at the hands of numerous anglophone settlers: some took umbrage at their killing livestock, others killed them for food, and a few for sport (Rivers 2020). For all parties, killing the bear cemented their claim to have rights over the land. It is perhaps this swift annihilation that explains why Wilshire, with his black hide and lack of claws, bore little resemblance to an actual California grizzly. Ironically at the same moment as the grizzly was being wiped out in California, Western scientists began to produce accounts of its life, which led to it being reclassified as no longer a pest. Foremost amongst these was C. Hart Merriam, who in addition to having studied the Tongva was also a zoologist who had once headed the Bureau of Biological Survey and had spent considerable time studying the remains of grizzly bears from various parts of the United States. In a 1918 paper, Merriam drew on his study of numerous grizzlies shot and preserved throughout the United States to argue that, contrary to previous scientific understanding, there were really eighty-five distinct species (Storer and Tevis Jr. 1996: 8–12). However, as an early professional, Merriam felt that further understanding would require that ‘[m]any bears now roaming the wilds will have to be killed . . . to construct accurate maps of their ranges’ (Merriam 1918: 8). This killing would have to be done in a particular manner by ‘absolutely trustworthy persons’, who would immediately note the locality and the bear’s sex. The identification of a species existence, and its preservation, was therefore, in his estimation, thor-

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oughly entangled with death. Death performed in an exacting manner made the grizzly knowable to settler-colonial science and thus precisely the opposite of a pest, like the bed bug, whose ability as a co-colonizer to produce space is a product of its ability to exceed settler-colonial science’s attempts at understanding it. For some, like Charles Shinn, the death of the grizzly was inevitable, because for Californians to master the landscape it needed to die (Shinn 1890). Much like Native Californians, the bear was a threat to settler control of the landscape (Rivers 2020). Its demise signalled that the settlers were the true owners of the region. However, the relationship between life and death in settler-colonial societies is never uncomplicated (Rose 2012). One reason for this was that in settler California the grizzly was immortalized as ‘a new myth of the American continent’ (Shinn 1890: 130). Evidence of the myth’s power is to be found in the fact that, as Peter Alagona observed, ‘Californians are surrounded by bears’ in symbolic form – that is, they appear on flags, as mascots and statues, and in various other forms of artistic activity (Alagona 2013: 12). As the grizzly is biologically dead but socially alive, and more visible than ever, it is something of liminal being. It was in this role as a symbol that Wilshire was intended to foster the creation of new networks and relations. These were relations indisputably informed by settler ideals, but relations, nonetheless, that would allow Mongolians a right to the city – specifically, the right to produce cultural spaces of their own that would bring their community together at the same moment as radically different experiences of nature had dispossessed some Mongolians while leaving others untouched. This is not the only sense in which the bears represent something of a contrast to bed bugs. Unlike bears, bed bugs have stubbornly persisted in Los Angeles and thus they continually challenge the settler colonists’ assertion of rights. This is because settlers’ claims to rights are legitimated through a mastery of nature. By contrast, the grizzly’s liminality sees them move from the status of ‘pest’ to the means for attaining a right to the city.

Conclusion My argument throughout this chapter has been that any account of rights to the city needs to deal with the relations that humans and nonhumans establish in urban environs. These, as my two Mongolian case studies demonstrate, have implications for how urban space is both created and experienced. Nancy, for example, was forced by dint of personal circumstances and pests to relinquish her apartment, and her right to the city that it represented, and to seek it elsewhere. Her experiences were at

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odds with those of her friend Anya, who because of her location was unlikely to encounter such pests. Their stories, and that of the Mongolian community’s engagement with Wilshire the grizzly, demonstrate the necessity of reckoning with nature and nonhuman beings when discussing the right to create spaces in urban environs, and this is of particular significance in settler-colonial cities. This is because the justification for settlers’ control of the right to spatial production rests upon their claim to control nature. Nowhere is this justification of greater importance than in urban environs that are constructed in settler ideology as at odds with nature, and display very visible indexes of the superiority of settler ways of life and civilization. And nowhere is the faultiness of such reasoning likely to be revealed more than in Los Angeles, which ‘has the longest wild edge, abruptly juxtaposing tract houses and wildlife habitat, of any major non-tropical city’ (Davis 2000: 202). Grizzlies and bed bugs, the two species that the Mongolians in my case studies encountered, are to my mind excellent companions to think through the complexities of settler-colonial attitudes to nature, because they are so different. Both have at times been classified by settlers as pests, but the grizzly was a native challenger, while the bed bug was a co-colonizer, and consequently their engagements with the urban were profoundly different. Furthermore, unlike the grizzly, insects like the bed bug and the cockroach represent an ongoing challenge to any notion of human superiority, for not only do they flourish in the city, but they have very real consequences for how space is experienced. An account of urban life and spatial production that does not take seriously the presence of such creatures is an impoverished one indeed.

Chima Michael Anyadike-Danes is a researcher at Durham University’s Department of Anthropology, where he is currently investigating the relationship between decarbonization and social inclusion in local government policymaking. He has previously held positions at Sheffield University and Warwick Business School. Amongst his research interests are the lived experiences of Mongolians residing in settler-colonial Los Angeles.

References Alagona, Peter S. 2013. After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Biehler, Dawn. 2013. Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Borel, Brooke. 2015. Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Candelaria, Matthew. 2009. ‘The Microgeography of Infestation in Relationship Spaces’, in Sarah McFarland and Ryan Heidiger (eds), Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Boston: Brill, pp. 301–20. Davis, Mike. 2000. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Douglas, Mary. 1991. ‘The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space’, Social Research 58(1): 287–307. Elden, Stuart. 2004. Understanding Henri Lefebvre. London: Continuum. Fernandes, Edésio. 2007. ‘Constructing the “Right to the City” in Brazil’, Social & Legal Studies 16(2): 201–19. Forbes, Jack D. 1998. ‘The Urban Tradition among Native Americans’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22(4): 15–27. Grinnell, Joseph. 1938. ‘California’s Grizzly Bears’, Sierra Club Bulletin 23(2): 70–81. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1926. ‘Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere’, American Anthropologist 28(1): 1–175. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Hernández, Kelly Lytle. 2017. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Janzen, Russell. 2002. ‘Reconsidering the Politics of Nature: Henri Lefebvre and The Production of Space’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 13(2): 96–116. Jones, Richard. 2015. House Guests, House Pests: A Natural History of Animals in the Home. New York: Bloomsbury. Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545–76. Kroeber, Alfred Luis. 1907. ‘The Religion of the California Indians’, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 4(6): 319–56. Lave, Jean. 2003. ‘Producing the Future: Getting to be British’, Antipode 35(3): 492–511. Lefebvre, Henri. 2000. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ———. 2003. ‘From Social Pact to the Contract of Citizenship’, in Stuart Elden and Eleonore Kofman (eds), Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings. London: Continuum, pp. 238–54. Marcuse, Peter. 2012. ‘Whose Right(s) to What City?’, in Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer (eds), Cities for People, not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. London: Routledge, pp. 24–41. Marks, Jonathan. 2002. ‘Who Lost Nature? Rousseau and Rousseauism’, Polity 34(4): 479–502. McCawley, William. 1996. The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles. Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press. McWilliams, James E. 2008. American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT. New York: Columbia University Press. Merriam, Clinton Hart. 1918. ‘Review of the Grizzly and Big Brown Bears of North America (Genus ursus): with Description of a New Genus, Vetularctos’, North American Fauna 41: 1–137. Merrifield, Andy. 2006. Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Munkherdene, Gantulga. 2018. ‘The Formation and Distribution of Procapitalist Perspectives in Mongolia’, Central Asian Survey 37(3): 372–85.

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Nagy, Kelsi, and Phillip David Johnson, eds. 2013. Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Neale, Timothy. 2016. ‘Settler Colonialism and Weed Ecology’, Engagement, 2 November. Retrieved 16 May 2021 from https://aesengagement.wordpress .com/2016/11/02/settler-colonialism-and-weed-ecology/. Pound, Roscoe. 1910. ‘Law in Books and Law in Action’, American Legal Review 44(1): 12–36. Rivers, Daniel Lanza. 2020. ‘Grizzly Country: Settler Worlding and the Politics of Species on the California Frontier’, American Quarterly 72(2): 351–76. Rockwell, David L. 2003. Giving Voice to Bear: North American Indian Myths, Rituals, and Images of the Bear. Lanham, MD: Roberts Rinehart Publishers. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2012. ‘Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time’, Environmental Philosophy 9(1): 127–40. Sarasohn, Lisa T. 2013. ‘“That Nauseous Venomous Insect”: Bedbugs in Early Modern England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 46(4): 513–30. Schmid, Christian. 2012. ‘Henri Lefebvre, the Right to the City, and the New Metropolitan Mainstream’, in Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer (eds), Cities For People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, trans. Christopher Findlay. London: Routledge, pp. 42–62. Schneider, Daniel. 2019. ‘They’re Back: Municipal Responses to the Resurgence of Bed Bug Infestations’. Journal of the American Planning Association 85 (2): 96– 113. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2019.1591294. Schutt, Bill. 2009. Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures. New York: Harmony Books. Shinn, Charles Howard. 1890. ‘Californiana: Grizzly and Pioneer’, Century Magazine 41(1): 130–31. Short, Damien. 2016. Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide. London: Zed Books. Southall, John. 1730. A Treatise of Buggs. Near the Oxford-Arms in Warwick-Lane: J. Roberts. Stanek, Lukasz. 2011. Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Storer, Tracey I., and Lloyd P. Tevis Jr. 1996. California Grizzly. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1): 1–40. Varsanyi, Monica W, Paul G. Lewis, Doris Marie Provine, and Scott Decker. 2012. ‘A Multilayered Jurisdictional Patchwork: Immigration Federalism in the United States’. Law & Policy 34 (2): 138–58. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. ‘Super-diversity and its Implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6): 1024–54. Willard, William. 1995. ‘Bear Doctors’, American Anthropologist 10(1): 116–24. Wolch, Jennifer. 2017. Zoöpolis. Retrieved 16 April 2021 from https://www.verso books.com/blogs/3487-zoopolis. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8(4): 387–409.

deú CHAPTER 5

East End Jam A Multisensory Urban Foraging Artwork Clare Qualmann and Amy Vogel

Introduction East End Jam is a social practice artwork that uses urban foraging to explore the unexpected fruitfulness of the urban environment. Social practice is an artistic medium that uses real world systems and activities to make things happen (rather than to make traditional art, like paintings and sculptures). East End Jam claims free food and propagates the knowledge to use it. In doing so, it connects with political strategies to (re)claim public and other urban spaces, and it contributes to health and well-being by (re)connecting participants with their environment. This chapter explores how East End Jam connects people and nature in the city through multisensory urban foraging activities. Urban foraging has seen a swell of interest since the early 2000s in the Global North, with individual practices, group activities and taught courses facilitating its growth (McLain et al. 2012; Shackleton et al. 2017; Nyman 2019). Although urban foraging is an underresearched phenomenon (Fischer and Kowarik 2020), existing studies highlight benefits including ‘development and transmission of ecological knowledge, recreational opportunities, mental and physical well-being . . . and strengthening of social ties’ (McLain et al. 2012: 1). Urban foraging activities can raise awareness of and improve access to nature and green spaces in cities, providing opportunities for nature connection (Palliwoda, Kowarik and von der Lippe 2017). Despite clear benefits, there are also barriers, including intersections with the social stigma of free food (Purdam, Garratt and Esmail 2016; Edwards 2021) and the pressures of normative behaviour in public space (Sheik 2009; Child 2010).

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The city and nature are often considered as binary opposites (Mabey 1973 [2014]; Wilson 1995; Mayer and Frantz 2004). Projects like London’s National Park City seek to challenge this by raising awareness of green space within the city, disrupting the idea that contact with nature requires an excursion to the countryside. As understandings of the benefits of biodiversity in cities grow (Threlfall et al. 2017), local authorities and green campaigners turn attention to the rewilding of existing green space, and maximization of green interventions, such as removing hard paving, planting street trees, and creating wildflower meadows (Friends of the Earth n.d., 2020; Moxon 2018). Human–nature interaction is strongly linked to better human health and mental well-being (Conradson 2005; Ernst and Theimer 2011; Pensini, Horn and Caltabiano 2016), but alienation from nature through a ‘decreased self-nature overlap’ (Mayer and Frantz 2004: 505) is a fact of modern life for many residents in the United Kingdom (Cox et al. 2017), particularly the 83 per cent who live in cities (World Bank 2020). Stephan Mayer and Cynthia Frantz’s 2004 ‘Connectedness to Nature Scale’ confirms assumptions around a deficit of nature in urban locations, with rural nature experiences predominantly recalled by participants (Cleary et al. 2018). Literature on nature connection tends to focus on leisure activities like walking, hiking and sailing, in which movement through landscapes is the focus (Wolsko and Lindberg 2013), with little attention to slower or more static activities, such as urban foraging. This chapter draws from a constellation of practices and discourses in contemporary art, nature connection, landscape and food studies in a novel conjunction, with the objective of generating new insights into the potential of participatory art to support rich, multisensory urban nature experiences.

Research Design and Background East End Jam began in 2014, inspired by a surprisingly fruitful walk around residential and light industrial streets in Stratford, East London. It has grown through collaborations with artists, food activists, chefs, gardeners, scholars of herbal medicine, anthropologists, and film-makers. In 2015, walks and workshops were funded by the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) through their programme to encourage people to use the newly opened Olympic Park. East End Jam walks traced the boundary of the park’s byelaw zone, critically reflecting on the fact that foraging was forbidden within it. Preserves sourced from this walk were served at a ‘Jamboree’, part of the 2015 Harvest Stomp

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community festival. This event made space for conversations around the table about the fruit, its sourcing, jam-making, and why we could not forage in the park. Most participants in these walks had prior interests in sustainability, food and art, and had actively sought an urban foraging course. We reflected that our recruitment was not attracting a diverse range of people, risking ‘cultivation of shared resources among white, bourgeois, urban-dwelling individuals with a hankering for the rural’ (Abse Gogarty 2017: 128). This led us to organize targeted workshops with community groups in 2016 and 2017. We engaged with adults living in assisted accommodation, primary school children, and cookery class attendees at an adult education centre. These sessions made visible exclusions and restrictions in participants’ connections to urban nature. For example, although the assisted accommodation was located next to the Olympic Park, more than 50 per cent of workshop participants had never been there. The desire to work with diverse participants (for whom the potential benefits might be greater) is in tension with resistance to instrumentalization of the artwork. The political context of the ‘Big Society’ (Conservative and Liberal Democrat Party Coalition 2010) in which civic structures, services and social supports are replaced with voluntarism and ‘libertarian paternalism’ (Corbett and Walker 2013) risks making social practice artists the tools of a reduced state; their work commissioned as impossibly insufficient salve for the wounds left by reduced funding (ibid.). The challenges of working aesthetically, ethically (Bishop 2006), and without being complicit in ‘artwashing’ (Pritchard 2019) are great. Our goal, to structure moments of artistic conviviality (Rovisco 2020), will always be open to critique in this political context, especially in our decision to accept funding from the LLDC. However, we argue that our aims are not to contribute to creative place-making but to work with activist intent to facilitate and enable deeper and more meaningful engagement with places as they already are, aligning with Pritchard’s concept of ‘Place Guarding’ (2019). Consideration of these tensions of practice and politics led us to focus from 2018 until 2021 on conducting workshops in Hackney, E8. Hackney has experienced rapid gentrification and economic change over the last decade, moving from being the second most deprived borough in England in 2010 (out of a total of 333), to the twenty-second most deprived in 2019 (Hackney Council 2020). Despite this improvement, poverty levels are still very high, with 36 per cent of the general population and 48 per cent of children living in poverty (Trust for London 2020). The statistical improvement is largely accounted for by an influx

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Illustration 5.1. Foraging with families in Hackney E8, August 2018. © Clare Qualmann.

of wealthier residents, rather than improvements for poorer ones, resulting in high levels of disparity across indicators from food to health, well-being and education. Working iteratively in a defined location sought to create deeper connection to the place and its communities. It resists what Miwon Kwon (2002) has described as the peripatetic nature of site-based art practice, in which artists ‘land’ in new locations and execute projects in ‘one place after another’. However, this closeness can raise challenges around identities and positionalities, as well as ethics, as Clare reflects: The roles that I am taking on simultaneously can be confusing . . . Am I a neighbour talking to a neighbour, or an artist recruiting participants? . . . I’m pointing out a fruit tree to my children’s friends in the park, but I’m also making a mental note of the way that they describe the location of other fruit trees in the neighbourhood.

Acknowledging an ethical obligation to place (Smith and Persighetti 2011: 19), as well as to human participants, is vital in an artwork that connects with environment and ecosystem. Practice-based research (Lyle Skains 2018) acknowledges our positionality and implication in the

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work. As artists and researchers, we are fully entangled: changing the work (world) just as the work (world) changes us (Braidotti 2013). We pay attention to bodies and their experiences beyond the verbal and visual, following Sarah Pink’s (2009) argument for sensory ethnography. To support inclusive participation, we advertised workshops on printed posters, local Facebook and WhatsApp message boards, and to pre-existing local groups, such as a social housing kids club and a gardening club. We formalized our research process of evaluation and reflection, incorporating voices and interpretations of co-researchers and participants. In 2019 we developed our methods further to include video and photographic recording, posing the question: ‘What does the artwork do?’ In 2020 we adapted to COVID-19 restrictions by using identification guides and location tips to enable participants to forage alone. Emerging themes included: assumptions of the city as opposite to nature; nature connection and (dis)alienation; the pressures of normative behaviour in public space; foraging as multisensory connection with place; collaborative foraging as a process of changing relationships with place; and the challenges and potentials of social practice as an artistic medium.

What Does East End Jam as Social Practice Artwork Do? Walking East End Jam begins with walking. ‘It helps us learn to see, imagine, and understand . . . from the particular perspectives and social positions of those we journey with’ (Moretti 2017: 76). We walk to research the routes we will take, and then we walk to find and pick the fruit together. We find ourselves turning around and walking backwards . . . We cover a very short distance, no more than one mile, but it takes us over an hour. Our walking is characterized more by our stationary moments than by movement.

Walking and foraging are ways of being in a place that can change perceptions. You move differently, more slowly, and less set on a straight path. Your attention zigzags back and forth – looking up to scan trees for fruit, or for blossoms that tell of fruit-to-come. Movement is drawn by all the senses: the smell of the fig tree, the sound of an apple falling into water, the soft squelch and slip of plums underfoot before the hard pip engages between the sole of your shoe and the surface of the path.

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Using Space Differently Refocusing on the edible directs attention to plants, trees and bushes. Our foraging-walking is different, unusual, and so are the other performances that the work instigates in urban space. We gather in the front garden of a house . . . The children take turns climbing up on the wall and using the picking stick to reach up high into the loquat tree to grab the fruit . . . The others gather around, calling to one another to direct the picker and give advice on using the stick: ‘Jiggle it, there, just left a bit’.

The local park is London Fields; a small park with grassy areas, a cricket pitch, playgrounds, a lido and exercise areas. It presents three areas for foraging: fruit trees along the northern boundary; a ‘woodland’ area with elder and garlic mustard; and four mature cherry trees in the southeast corner. The cherry trees are near the entrance to Broadway Market, a popular location for food and drink. People use this part of the park to eat takeaways, to work out, and to sit and socialize. Our actions diverge from these uses: Gathering around the cherry trees we circle, looking up . . .We are a group of around fifteen. The fruit is high up, almost totally out of reach, apart from in one place where a hump of ground rises towards the branches. Adults stand on the slope and gently pull branches towards them so the kids can reach up and pick.

Lottie Child notes the far-reaching impacts of acceptable behavioural codes in flattening and restricting our lives. Her work highlights the potential of site-based performative art practices to reclaim space for joyful action. ‘It is only when we step out of the accepted codes to follow a desire not concurrent with the hyper-consumption agenda that we realize the array and kinds of people and behaviours we are missing out on as these smoothed-out spaces become increasingly the norm’ (Child 2010: 86). Citing Beunderman, Hannon and Bradwell (2007), they point out that given a chance, children and young people are experts in playful and experimental behaviours, with less deeply internalized inhibitions, chiming with our findings: People sitting on the grass nearby look over, and point at what we are doing, but it is the children who come and ask. They lead their adults into joining in. We gradually gather quite a big crew of children . . . they have trouble controlling the long poles, and an adult stands alongside them ready to catch any unpredictable swinging.

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These social interactions with the landscape are positive experiences, contributing both to a wider vocabulary of potential activities and to ‘an ecological conception of place’ (Conradson 2005: 346), by which we mean an understanding of our human selves as a connected component of this location, interacting with its plant and material elements. Talking, Listening, Inviting and Showing Acts in turn provoke conversation, making space for interaction: As we pick the fruit, a woman and child stop by the gate; Clare smiles at them and asks if they would like to try a loquat. The woman exclaims that she did not know what these were called in English . . . She says they are a taste of her childhood.

Our visibility as a group makes us approachable – we stand out through our differences and make ourselves open to conversation. This is not an unfriendly neighbourhood; it is normal to smile and say ‘hi’ to people in the street, but stopping and talking is out of the ordinary. We are picking mulberries on Eleanor Road . . . A car pulls up next to us . . . The driver unrolls the window and leans across the passenger side, and there is a definite tension in the group that he is going to tell us off for what we are doing. But he is just excited . . . He tells us about a fig tree ‘covered in figs’ not far away.

This knowledge sharing, invitation, and response is made possible through our physical presence in public, visibly performing the actions of the work and bringing into being new connections with those beyond the temporary community of the foraging workshop group. Similar interconnections take place through the shared space and time experienced by participants across an afternoon, a season, or over a number of years. Sharing Knowledge, Changing Perceptions Spending time together in shared activities makes a space for conversations. We talk about the fruit that we are finding, how to identify it, whether we have seen it before; we talk about the jam that people have made before – or seen other people making – or that they like to eat. We talk about the seasons and the weather, and if things are early or late this year, or if there is a good or bad crop. Taking part in the project year on year, participants build their knowledge and share it onwards:

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The children on the estate show Amy where the nasturtium is growing . . . They show her the pale green pea-sized seed pods, their surfaces ridged like miniature brains. ‘Eat one they say, go on try it, it’s delicious’. ‘What does it taste like?’ she asks, and they repeat, ‘Just try it, go on, try’. She puts it in her mouth and the seed explodes with an unexpected spiciness, an overwhelming flavour . . . They laugh and laugh at the face she is pulling; they think this trick is hilarious.

These playful acts are multisensory; the children draw on their own surprise at encountering the new tastes of the nasturtium, and share it onwards by enticing others to try. Many of these interactions bring to light perceptions of edibility, either due to correct identification, or through differing opinions on when food is ‘bad’: We are preparing apples . . . peeling and coring and cutting away bruises, insect damage and squishy bits . . . We have three large bowls in front of us, one for the ‘bad’ bits that cannot be eaten (including creatures like maggots and earwigs that we have disturbed from their fruity homes), one for peel and cores (that can be used for making jelly or adding pectin to other jams), and one for the ‘good’ bits – chunks of peeled, chopped apple ready to go into jam or chutney . . . People check in with each other on whether

Illustration 5.2. Preparing foraged fruit, Gainsborough Community Centre, September 2017. © Clare Qualmann.

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a bit of fruit is good or bad: ‘Can this go in?’ There are some differences of opinion, and some participants want to throw away the whole apple if there is something wrong with it – especially if there is something alive in it.

Gianmarco Savio (2016) notes the positive potential of collective activity to (re)shape perspectives of dirt, disgust and inedibility. Although he focuses on dumpster diving, conceptions around food found through foraging bear comparison: both are removed from the sanitization and perceived hygiene of supermarket shelves (Steel 2013). This connects with our earlier consideration of behavioural norms that might prevent people from foraging alone. Marcus Nyman (2019: 173) points out that ‘individuals themselves may oscillate in their understanding of food, depending on the temporal, spatial and social context’. Reflecting on moments when our activities have not had wholly positive outcomes confirms this further: Clare was picking garlic mustard leaves when a young teenager came over and asked what she was doing . . . He tried one and whooped ‘I like it!’. . . He started to enthusiastically pick the leaves, gathering them in his bag. His mum came over . . . and she looked really concerned . . . She spoke to him using sign language . . . telling him to stop. Clare tried to explain that the leaves are edible and showed her that she had gathered some as well. The boy was upset and defensive, saying ‘Don’t worry, I’ll explain; my mum uses sign language, I can tell her what you’re saying’. But he could not explain in a satisfactory way, and attempts to help were futile.

This interaction took place when Clare was researching a foraging walk alone. Although we cannot know how this scenario might have worked differently had we been in a group, in the moment it felt clear that she had nothing with her to ‘prove’ herself as a reliable source of information; no business card or flier for a walk, no shared language to communicate with. In contrast to this lone state, a group of people acting together can structure a sense of confident disregard for the norm (Savio 2016), as well as a theatricality in their publicness (ibid.), communicating authority to make permissible the usually frowned upon, or as Nyman (2019: 178) argues, allay the understandable fear and discomfort of the ontological uncertainty of foraged food. Cooking and Eating Transforming the foraged ingredients into jam evaporates their uncertain identity to become recognizable ‘food’. This shift occurs through the collaborative process of picking, preparation, cooking, jarring and labelling. Some participants remark on the ‘alchemy’ of jam making. There is

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Illustration 5.3. Jamboree in the Olympic Park, September 2016. © Clare Qualmann.

a kind of magic when the fruit and sugar reach the temperature needed to set, and you ‘feel’ the change in the pan. The vivid jewel-like colours bubbling and spluttering fill the space with sweet smells. At ‘Jamborees’ where we offer preserves to eat, expressions of concern around edibility, or the origin of the fruit, are replaced by surprise and sometimes incredulity. Participants who have taken part in the full project cycle contribute their stories of foraging locations, recipes, and methods of making to the collective jam-eating table. The key constituents of the work – the group actions, the iterative workshops, the publicness of the performances, and the connection to the neighbourhood – work together to structure the artwork. Walking, talking, picking, cooking, and eating together (re)constitute social bonds within the community through shared practice and knowledge production (Firth 2014).

Analysis and Discussion As a social practice artwork, East End Jam largely meets its aim of connecting participants with urban foraging, jam making (and eating) with

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aesthetic and ethical care. However, there are key critiques of social practice and related artforms that can be applied to the project’s goals and activist intent, alongside consideration of the multisensory urban nature connections instigated through the artwork. Social practice artworks are criticized for their creation of exclusive experiences for audiences with cultural capital, for their avoidance of antagonism, as outposts of the new experience economy, and as social work instrumentalized by state and corporate funders. Amy Spiers (2013: 132) points out that ‘projects present cosy, feel-good images of people gathering together, but they do so with a rhetoric of inclusion that is rarely questioned or problematized’. This echoes Claire Bishop’s (2012) critique that documentation (often in the form of beautiful photographs) of participatory artwork tells nothing of the quality, depth or meaning of the relations instigated therein. These points chime with our reflections on the early workshops that we instigated, when groups of art and food enthusiasts looking for a pleasurable activity took part. Although we note the positive experience that those groups had, and do not doubt the beneficial impact, we sought to proactively shift from this ‘comfort zone’ through a geographically specific and community-based focus. We have found that by operating outside of the circles of the art ‘world’ we avoid bringing together ‘like-minded art lovers’ in an unreal ‘microtopia’ (Bishop 2004: 67). In their writing on participatory art, Miwon Kwon (2002) and Bishop (2004) both draw on Chantal Mouffe and Ernest Laclau’s (2001) work on antagonism, arguing that disruption, tension and discomfort are key factors for productive democratic spaces. They argue that more difficult feelings and affects should not be avoided in artworks and practices that seek to produce social/community relations. This in turn connects with tensions around public funding and the desire for ‘feel good’ artworks reproducing myths that ‘social harmony and unity are fundamentally possible, and that participatory, socially engaged artworks can provide models for how they can be achieved’ (Spiers 2013: 138). Frictions between people rarely emerge in our workshops, but we are aware of the antagonisms created between participants and social norms, comfort levels, and the environment that we are working in (rather than with one another). By this we mean that the unusual behaviours and transgressions that we are inviting people to take part in can feel uncomfortable or embarrassing. The mahonia bushes are along the edge of the park . . . We run a quick check for urban park ‘nasties’ (shit, broken glass, needles). Once established that it is safe enough, the kids start climbing behind the bushes to

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reach the fruit. The berries ‘zip’ off the trailing fronds in a super-satisfying way, staining fingers with bright maroon juice. As we clamber, one of the parents comments, ‘I would never do this on my own!’

Our discussions (and actions) around byelaws and whether to abide by them similarly raise feelings of uncertainty. Furthermore, participants’ relationships with and understandings of dirt, decay and edibility are challenged, breaking social and cultural norms in a process that includes feelings of discomfort. The emotional responses that these scenarios provoke, and the impact that they have on participants’ future actions and behaviours, is an area for further exploration in relation to urban foraging, social norms and stigma. The nature connections that East End Jam instigates encompass multiple senses and operate at closer proximities than more usual urban activities of walking in the park, picnicking, or playing games. Daniel Cox et al. (2017) summarize research demonstrating that even indirect experiences of nature (such as looking at a view through a window) are beneficial, though interaction is better (Fischer and Kowarik 2020). Benefits of multisensory engagement with nature through foraging (for example, touching and tasting in addition to looking) are suggested to be on a par with the positive impacts of gardening for mental health and well-being, as well as awareness of ecosystems and biodiversity (ibid.). A study by Julia Palliwoda, Ingo Kowarik and Moritz von der Lippe (2017) in Berlin highlights the benefits of foraging to ‘support human–plant interaction’ (ibid.: 403), where they note the positive impact of free foraging tours in building knowledge, suggesting that ‘gathering activities may maintain traditions, help strengthen social ties, and are an important way for many people to get in contact with nature’ (ibid.: 402). Foraging begins with the visual and continues through other senses. Touch is a key sensory engagement: pulling, plucking or grabbing fruit and berries, or gently pressing or squeezing to test for ripeness. This can also include unpleasant sensations such as stings and scratches. We feel the textures of leaves, berries, fruit and other parts of plants or trees, pulling branches to reach fruit or leaning on the rough bark of a trunk. Taste and smell are both central – testing and trying things as they are picked, as they are prepared, while they are cooking, and once they are made. Although we do not have space here to consider in depth the concept of somaesthetics (Shusterman 2008), an element of the corporeal turn that forefronts ‘visceral connections with the world and human capacity to attribute meaning to experiences’ (Iared and Torres de Oliveira 2017), it presents valuable future theoretical frameworks for us

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to consider in relation to the bodily engagements (and knowledge) and that we both observe in participants and experience ourselves through this work. Masashi Soga and Kevin J. Gaston (2016) explain the ‘loop’ of interconnections between spending time in nature and feeling connected to nature. That is to say that people who spend less time connecting with nature feel less interested in it, and vice versa. We hypothesize that having a new reason to take part in nature connection activities can provide access to the well-researched benefits that this brings, breaking the negative loop of disconnection. The conviviality that is structured through the social art practice works together with the foraging activity impacting on participants awareness of their environment, resulting in a shift in perception. One participant described how she started seeing fruit everywhere after a workshop: ‘I noticed rosehips along the wall, and then crab apples in the park and apples on a street tree and figs too, and it seemed wherever I turned there was more’. This presents an area of further research for us; exploring the impact of the artwork on participants’ mental maps of their neighbourhood to build our understanding

Illustration 5.4. Picking mulberries with Gayhurst School, July 2017. © Clare Qualmann.

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of the impact of the awareness of nature, as well as new behaviour patterns and feelings associated with it. Our observations and findings suggest that the nature in urban settings may be less immediately noticeable or recognizable than in rural settings (see Wyles et al. 2017, cited by Cleary et al. 2018), requiring a shift in attention through the instigation of nature connection activities. We argue that urban spaces offer huge potential for immersive and meaningful nature experiences, supported through the permission to transgress perceived urban behavioural norms and overcome fears of negative outcomes that the group practice allows. Although there is considerable focus on the legal frameworks of urban foraging (Shackleton et al. 2017), we suggest that further research exploring behavioural norms and stigma would be useful for understanding how to break barriers to urban foraging. Art is one such practice that can support this process; Spiers (2013: 132) notes that ‘the title of “artist” grants permission to challenge social norms, interfere and unsettle the familiar’.

Conclusion This chapter has discussed how foraging practices, such as those performed through East End Jam, enable intimate, informed and positive connections with nature. This intervention provides vital tools to counter alienation from the natural world, challenging mainstream ideas of ‘acceptable’ foods, reclaiming the ability to source free foods effectively and responsibly, and altering perceptions of urban space. East End Jam facilitates its participants to re-encounter their city in a multisensory format. They can ‘taste’ their neighbourhood and use local resources differently: for nature interaction, communal knowledge production, and sustenance. East End Jam operates within what Nyman has described as the ‘blurry edges and ontological uncertainty of what food is, what is food and how matter becomes food’ (2019: 170). By facilitating new foraging practices, the activities of East End Jam transform matter that has previously not been considered as food, into food, acting as an ontological ‘shifter’ (Calderaro 2018). The performative potential of this process builds through each iteration to rewrite the neighbourhood through creating new understandings, recognitions and practices. This work continues on an annual cycle, adapting and shifting in response to conditions and resources. We hope that this will continue to disrupt perceptions of what urban nature is, further developing understandings of human–nonhuman connection, and forging long-lasting relationships between people and their places.

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Clare Qualmann is an artist/researcher whose work focuses on socially engaged, site specific, and experimental modes of contemporary creative practice, often using walking. She is an associate professor at the University of East London, where her teaching and research explore the interconnections between art, activism and the radical potentials of participation. Amy Vogel completed an MRes in anthropology at UCL in 2020, and a BSc in anthropology at UEL in 2019, where she was awarded the vice-chancellor’s scholarship. Her Master’s thesis analysed East London’s utilization of foraging as a tool for understanding and interacting with the ‘natural’. References Abse Gogarty, Larne. 2017. ‘Usefulness in Contemporary Art and Politics’, Third Text 31(1): 117–32. Beunderman, Joost, Celia Hannon and Peter Bradwell. 2007. Seen and Heard: Reclaiming the Public Realm with Children and Young People. London: Demos. Bishop, Claire. 2004. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110(Fall): 51–79. ———. 2006. ‘The Social Turn, Collaboration and its Discontents’, Artforum. Retrieved 12 December 2021 from https://www.artforum.com/print/200602/ the-social-turn-collaboration-and-its-discontents-10274. ———. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Calderaro, Bibi. 2018. ‘Walking as Ontological Shifter’, Walking Art/Walking Aesthetics, Interartive. Retrieved 28 April 2021 from https://walkingart.interartive .org/2018/12/ontological-shifter-Calderaro. Child, Lottie. 2010. ‘Street Training in Loughborough: On Climbing, Testing, Penetrating, Playing with, Nurturing, Building and/or Pissing on Boundaries – Physical, Mental and Social – in the Perpetual Making of Public Space’, Visual Studies 25(1): 85–86. Cleary, Anne, et al. 2018. ‘Predictors of Nature Connection among Urban Residents: Assessing the Role of Childhood and Adult Nature Experiences’, Environment and Behavior 52(6): 579–610. Conradson, David. 2005. ‘Landscape, Care and the Relational Self: Therapeutic Encounters in Rural England’, Health & Place 11(4): 337–48. Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition. 2010. ‘Building the Big Society’. Retrieved 10 December 2021 from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/gov ernment/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/78979/building-big-socie ty_0.pdf. Corbett, Steve, and Alan Walker. 2013. ‘The Big Society: Rediscovery of “the Social” or Rhetorical Fig Leaf for Neoliberalism?’ Critical Social Policy 33(3). Cox, Daniel, et al. 2017. ‘The Rarity of Direct Experiences of Nature in an Urban Population’, Landscape and Urban Planning 160: 79–84.

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Edwards, Ferne. 2021. ‘Overcoming the Social Stigma of Consuming Food Waste by Dining at the Open Table’, Agriculture and Human Values 38: 397–409. Ernst, Julie, and Stephan Theimer. 2011. ‘Evaluating the Effects of Environmental Education Programming on Connectedness to Nature’, Environmental Education Research 17(5): 577–98. Firth, Rhiannon. 2014. ‘Critical Cartography as Anarchist Pedagogy? Ideas for Praxis Inspired by the 56a Infoshop Map Archive’, Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 16(1): 156–84. Fischer, Leonie, and Ingo Kowarik. 2020. ‘Connecting People to Biodiversity in Cities of Tomorrow: Is Urban Foraging a Powerful Tool?’ Ecological Indicators 112: 106087. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106087. Friends of the Earth. 2020. ‘How to Double Tree Cover in Your Area: Briefing for Councillors’. Retrieved 8 December 2021 from https://takeclimateaction.uk/ print/pdf/node/1167. ———. n.d. ‘Making Our Towns and Cities 10xGreener’. Retrieved 4 September 2021 from https://friendsoftheearth.uk/nature/10x-greener-towns-and-cities. Hackney Council. 2020. ‘A Profile of Hackney, its People and Place’. Retrieved 27 August 2021 from https://hackney.gov.uk/statistics-evidence-plans-and-stra tegies. Iared, Valéria, and Haydée Torres de Oliveira. 2017. ‘Walking Ethnography for the Comprehension of Corporeal and Multisensory Interactions in Environmental Education’, Ambient Sociology 20(3) (July–September). Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyle Skains, Rebecca. 2018. ‘Creative Practice as Research: Discourse on Methodology’, Media Practice and Education 19(1): 82–97. Mabey, Richard. (1973) 2014. The Unofficial Countryside. Beaminster: Little Toller Books. Mayer, Stephan, and Cynthia Frantz. 2004. ‘The Connectedness to Nature Scale: A Measure of Individuals’ Feeling in Community with Nature’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 24: 503–15. McLain, Rebecca J., et al. 2012. ‘Gathering in the City: An Annotated Bibliography and Review of the Literature about Human–Plant Interactions in Urban Ecosystems’, Environmental Studies Faculty Publications 10. Retrieved 1 December 2021 from https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/environment_fac/10. Moretti, Cristina. 2017. ‘Walking’, in Danielle Elliott and Dara Culhane (eds), A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mouffe, Chantal, and Ernest Laclau. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Moxon, Sian. 2018. ‘Rewild My Street: A Design-Practice Model for Biodiverse, Community-Led Urban Redevelopment’. Conference presentation, Generosity, 27–29 June, Cardiff, UK. Retrieved 12 January 2022 from http://repository.lon donmet.ac.uk/2799/. Nyman, Marcus. 2019. ‘Food, Meaning-Making and Ontological Uncertainty: Exploring “Urban Foraging” and Productive Landscapes in London’, Geoforum 99: 170–80. Palliwoda, Julia, Ingo Kowarik and Moritz von der Lippe. 2017. ‘Human–Biodiversity Interactions in Urban Parks: The Species Level Matters’, Landscape and Urban Planning 157: 394–406.

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Pensini, Pamela, Eva Horn and Nerina Caltabiano. 2016. ‘An Exploration of the Relationships between Adults’ Childhood and Current Nature Exposure and Their Mental Well-Being’, Children, Youth and Environments 26(1): 125–47. Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Pritchard, Stephen. 2019. ‘Place Guarding: Activist Art against Gentrification’, in Cara Courage and Anita McKeown (eds), Creative Placemaking: Research, Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, pp. 140–55. Purdam, Kingsley, Elizabeth Garratt and Aneez Esmail. 2016 ‘Hungry? Food Insecurity, Social Stigma and Embarrassment in the UK’, Sociology 50(6): 1072–88. Rovisco, Maria. 2020. ‘Artistic Conviviality’, in Jo Tacchi and Thomas Tufte (eds), Communicating for Change. Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan. Savio, Gianmarco. 2016. ‘Organization and Stigma Management: A Comparative Study of Dumpster Divers in New York’, Sociological Perspectives 60(2): 416–30. Shackleton, Charlie, et al. 2017. ‘Urban Foraging: A Ubiquitous Human Practice but Overlooked by Urban Planners, Policy and Research’, Sustainability 9(10): 1884. Sheik, Simon. 2009. ‘In the Place of the Public Sphere? Or, the World in Fragments’, in Claire Doherty (ed.), Situation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shusterman, Richard. 2008. Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Phil, and Simon Persighetti. 2011. A Sardine Street Box of Tricks. Exeter: Triarchy Press. Soga, Masashi, and Kevin J. Gaston. 2016. ‘Extinction of Experience: The Loss of Human–Nature Interactions’, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14(2): 94–101. Spiers, Amy. 2013. ‘Too Comfortable? Some Misgivings about the Social Turn in Contemporary Art’, Journal of Arts & Communities 5(2–3): 131–45. Steel, Carolyn. 2013. Hungry City: How Food Shapes our Lives. London: Random House. Threlfall, Caragh G., et al. 2017. ‘Increasing Biodiversity in Urban Green Spaces through Simple Vegetation Interventions’, Journal of Applied Ecology 54: 1874–83. Trust for London. 2020. ‘London’s Poverty Profile: Hackney’. Retrieved 20 August 2021 from https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/data/boroughs/hackney-pov erty-and-inequality-indicators/. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1995. ‘The Rhetoric of Urban Space’, The New Left Review 1(209) (Jan–Feb): 146–60. Wolsko, Christopher, and Kreg Lindberg. 2013. ‘Experiencing Connection with Nature: The Matrix of Psychological Well-being, Mindfulness, and Outdoor Recreation’, Ecopsychology 5(2): 80–91. World Bank. 2020. ‘Urban Population, United Kingdom: 2018 Revision’. Retrieved 7 December 2021 from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB .TOTL?locations=GB&view=chart.

deú CHAPTER 6

Illuminating the Worlds We Produce A Reflexive Approach to Urban Natures Research Lisa de Kleyn, Brian Coffey and Judy Bush

Introduction Concepts of ‘urban natures’ and ‘urban greening’ are receiving considerable attention as human populations concentrate in cities, and social and environmental pressures pervade city life. In Australia, there is substantial research that applies scientific and technical methods to understanding urban natures in terms of ecology, urban heat, canopy cover, human health and liveability, and individual preferences for aspects of the urban environment (for example, Kendal et al. 2016; Parris et al. 2020). Scientific and technical approaches to urban greening research often intersect with and inform managerial framings of governance. However, such approaches can obscure questions of power and reflect assumptions embedded in institutions such as those that construct ‘the environment’ as separate from humans, and as quantifiable and manageable, and valued instrumentally, in terms of their anthropocentric benefits. In response, strands of research in Australia: explore the ‘more-thanhuman’ (Steele, Alizadeh and Eslami-Andargoli 2013; Phillips and Atchison 2018); contest power relations by applying a critical lens through environmental justice and decolonizing approaches (Byrne 2018; Porter, Hurst and Grandinetti 2020); and use grounded approaches to reveal diverse representations, ways of knowing, and connections in urban greening (Phillips and Atchison 2018; de Kleyn, Mumaw and Corney 2019). Australia’s settler-colonial context is recognized, with Libby Porter, Julia Hurst and Tina Grandinetti (2020: 221) writing that ‘urban greening

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is always being practiced on unceded Indigenous lands’. The purpose of such research is to expand conceptions of human–nature relations, realize equitable relations, reframe policy problems, and find new approaches to urban natures research that engender critical, equitable and ecologically centred visions and responses (Cooke 2020). In some respects, researchers are intentional in their research practices, including the theories they engage, the questions they ask, the methods they use, their representations, and what they advocate (Davies 2008; Adams and Herrmann 2020). However, researchers are not independent observers, rather being part of the societies, cultures and situations being researched (Roy and Uekusa 2020). Institutions, defined as ‘persistent, predictable arrangements, laws, processes or customs serving to structure political, social, cultural or economic transactions and relationships in a society’ (Dovers and Hussey 2013: 14), exert a powerful influence through inherited assumptions, judgements, and actions. It is often difficult to make institutional assumptions visible, let alone change them. This recognition compels reflexivity as fundamental to an ethical, critical, and intentionally evolving approach to research (Davies 2008; Agee 2009; Phillips et al. 2013; Machen 2020). Coming together as a research team in 2020 we decided to be intentional and reflexive in the way we work together and in what we make visible through our research. In this chapter we hope to demonstrate the importance of taking a reflexive approach to urban natures research, which we explore using a collaborative autoethnographic inquiry. Our overarching questions are: how do our positions, practices, and context influence our research into urban natures, and what does a reflexive approach contribute to urban natures research practice? This chapter presents our responses. Firstly, we explain our approach to collective autoethnography, including the questions used to guide our discussions, which are based on qualitative, autoethnographic and reflexive research methodologies (Agee 2009). Then we acknowledge our positionalities, and present individual narratives about a place or space – providing ‘visibility’ of us, the researchers (Anderson 2006). Our findings show that we bring distinct perspectives to our collective research. Our understanding of these perspectives was extended through discussions, covering: diverse ways of knowing as a matter of recognition justice, and challenging the dominance of universalist approaches; the importance of critiquing institutional representations; and how a grounded, affective, and relational approach to understanding nature connections can assist in the development of an appreciation of, and responsibility for, nature. Listening to each other’s narratives, and how these informed and underpinned our respective research framings, highlighted the conditional nature of individual perspectives and helped us

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each to be more aware of each other’s choices that inform what, how and why we research. As a process, collective autoethnography should demonstrate a progression of understanding and change through critiquing, reframing and reshaping perspectives and approaches. Specifically, the common thread in our discussion was challenging the dominance of knowledge systems that serve to minimize, marginalize and erase perspectives, which raises the questions of: what opportunities are available to us to extend our view of urban nature and shape our research; and how do we progress our research in conversation with our positions and privileges? In addition to improving our own (individual and collective) research practice, we hope our account may provide guidance for others engaged in research into urban natures and urban greening.

Methodology Reflexivity is part of a tradition in qualitative research that understands knowledge as socially constructed and coproduced through interactions between the researcher and a range of subjects (Phillips et al. 2013). Commencing a new research collaboration, we were conscious that although we were coming together to research urban greening, an area on which we had already published together (Coffey et al. 2020), the three of us have different backgrounds, priorities, and theoretical framings that we bring to research. We wanted to draw these out, make them visible and explicit: we wanted to be intentional in our work together. We sought to understand this composite context in relation to urban natures research, including its ‘broader sociohistorical context’ and ‘disciplinary culture’ (Davies 2008: 9). Particularly, we felt a shared sense of discomfort about: narrow representations of urban natures reflected in our key research areas of critiquing neoliberalism (Coffey and Marston 2013; Coffey 2016); analysing the nexus of nature-based solutions, climate change and justice (Bush and Doyon 2019, 2021; Bush 2020; Bush, Coffey and Fastenrath 2020); and exploring grounded, affective and responsible relationships within nature (de Kleyn, Mumaw and Corney 2019). As a result, we embarked on a collaborative autoethnographic process. Autoethnography recognizes subjectivity in the research process, and is concerned with the interaction between a researcher’s understandings, actions and experiences in their social and cultural context with reference to their research. Scholarship involves systematic methods of collecting and analysing autoethnographic information that may include different types of expression, such as stories, photographs, poems, drawings, video and music (Chang, Ngunjiri and Hernandez 2013; Roy and

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Uekusa 2020). Approaches to autoethnography have been distinguished between being evocative – focusing on the particular to share and inform readers through an empathetic response to the work (Bochner and Ellis 2016); and being analytic – committed to analytic reflexivity and contributing to ‘theoretical understanding of broader social phenomena’ (Anderson 2006: 375). Autoethnography can also be critical, understood as interrogating assumptions, the production of identities, power, and knowledge production (Machen 2020), and has been used to interrogate individual researcher’s positionality, research and engagements with academic institutions (see Marston 2015; Howitt 2020; Porter 2020). Collaborative autoethnography brings a research team to the method, and the interpretation of self, the group, cultural context and the research project becomes collective (Chang, Ngunjiri and Hernandez 2013). Our primary interest was to explore how taking a collaborative autoethnographic approach can contribute to a more reflexive approach to urban natures research practice. To do this we undertook a writing task that was open, individual and uninterrupted to encourage our own perspectives, understandings and interests to emerge. We each chose a location or element of urban nature, and wrote a reflection of around 350 words, based on a single encounter or key idea that we wanted to convey. The purpose was to assist in making us ‘visible’ and animate the subsequent inquiry (Anderson 2006: 384). These narratives have been edited over time in line with our evolving discussions, and revised for inclusion in this chapter. We then met for two hours every two weeks, over two months, to explore the narratives through a series of guiding questions as an initial foundation for analysis (Table 6.1). The project commenced during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (a time when Roy and Uekusa [2020] were advocating collective autoethnography as a productive and useful method to research the effects of the pandemic). We met in person when we could, and online during an extended lockdown in Melbourne – and on some other occasions. Our meetings started with an informal conversation, which we considered important, particularly during the pandemic, taking the time to listen, reflect, and develop trust. We sought to embrace ‘slow’ scholarship in our project (Berg and Seeber 2016). We held the meetings as conversations that centred each person’s thoughts, experiences, and key arguments, and approached the meetings with respect for each other and an intent to explore and learn. Notes were recorded during the meetings. We then collaboratively and iteratively discussed the insights and arguments through drafting and revising this chapter. This process has been described as a ‘built-in process of internal peer-reviewing’ that both deepens intellectual engagement and brings tensions about individual and collective contributions (Roy and Uekusa 2020: 388).

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Table 6.1. Research questions Type of question

Questions

Exploratory

What are our individual social and cultural positions, and educational, professional, and recreational interests and experiences? What are our research methodologies and the ontologies and epistemologies that underpin them – the nature of things and how we can know? (Moon and Blackman 2014)

Contextual

We acknowledge that we are working in a ‘settler-colonial’ country (Porter, Hurst and Grandinetti 2020) that presents ‘administratively rational’ and neoliberal environmental discourses (Dryzek 2013), and within academic institutions. How do these cultural and institutional settings influence our research?

Normative

What are we trying to achieve in urban natures research, and how does this reflect our social, contextual and philosophical positions?

Making Ourselves ‘Visible’: Positionality and Our Personal Narratives Our Positionality We acknowledge the social structures that create privilege and disadvantage, and our places within these structures and hierarchies. We are white, tertiary-educated academics, holding paid employment, working in Australia, though our backgrounds and the paths that brought us together are varied and distinct. With this privileged positionality comes responsibility to use our voices and influence to challenge inequitable or oppressive institutions. We acknowledge that our scholarship is being undertaken on unceded Wurundjeri Country, and we recognize First Nations People’s knowledge, culture and practices, and their enduring relationships with Country. We recognize the ongoing violence, oppression and exploitation of people and nature embedded in colonial and capitalist systems. While the similarity between us as a research team facilitates understanding between us, it can also be a barrier to seeing such oppression and developing new ways of being, and we recognize that this requires ongoing commitment and work. We also recognize that our research takes place within an academic setting, which, in Australia, has been subjected to significant neoliberal reform in recent decades, including requirements to demonstrate entrepreneurialism, research productivity and impact (Berg and Seeber 2016; Watts 2017; Machen 2020; Rogers et al. 2020).

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Figure 6.1. Vignette by Judy Bush

Judy Bush I’m riding beside Merri Creek, on my way to meet Lisa and Brian. Two birds ahead of me are squawking at something. They’re yelling at a snake crossing the path in front of me. Arrgghh! I’m going too fast. I manage to navigate around the snake and stop on the flat section of path beyond, heart beating faster. I watch the snake disappear into the long grass. I like watching snakes move – away from me, and from a safe distance! I used to work on Merri Creek – planting, weeding, ecological burns, community engagement, advocacy and strategic planning. I got to know the creek so well: the plants, animals, rocks, soils; the water, where it flows fast and where it pools; the smellier drains that flow into the creek; the surrounding communities and their connections with the creek. When I visit the creek now, I remember those experiences and connections. This is different to nature spaces I don’t know so well. I look at unfamiliar spaces with an ‘ecology’ eye – species, composition, effects of slope, aspect. I name the plants in my head. In thinking about these different ways of engaging with nature and place, I reflect on how familiarity shifts how I see and relate to a place, from an ‘objective’ scientific eye to a storied, personal relationship. I reflect on the depth of connection of First Nations Peoples, with thousands of years of cultural heritage stories and custodianship, compared with the connections I’ve been accumulating across just my lifetime.

Illustration 6.1. Ways of knowing Merri Creek, Melbourne, Australia, 2021. © Judy Bush.

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Figure 6.2. Vignette by Brian Coffey

Brian Coffey Nature strips are frequently taken for granted ‘places’ we encounter day to day. In Australia, nature strips (the piece of land between a property boundary and the kerb) tend to be owned by local councils, yet the expectation is that the occupant of the adjoining land will care for it, in accordance with council policy. For example, my local council has a policy and guidelines that express their approach. They define ‘your nature strip’ as ‘the area of Council land between your property boundary and the kerb’, and state that ‘residents are not permitted to plant their own street trees, as this is a Council function’. The guidelines indicate that the function of nature strips is to ‘house underground services such as gas, water and power’, although they are also recognized as important for ‘traffic and pedestrian safety’ and as a place to put bins on collection day. Visually, the council considers nature strips as spaces that will ‘normally’ be covered by grass, but suggests that ‘there are lots of things you can do to beautify your street’. However, even a short walk around the neighbourhood reveals diverse and divergent visions about what a nature strip is or should be, as they are used for amenity, biodiversity, food production, and social connection. Nature strips may also be markers of social status. In this context, and building on my policy- and governance-oriented research, I’m interested in ‘who speaks for nature in the city’: whose voices count and whose do not, and how are these politics played out.

Illustration 6.2. Whose voice is heard, Northcote, Australia, 2021. © Brian Coffey.

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Figure 6.3. Vignette by Lisa de Kleyn

Lisa de Kleyn My first memory of Wattle Park is doing a cross-country run as a teenager. I remember the topography, a runner’s awareness of hills and moments of shade. I still love the topography – the feeling of walking up and down hills, the adjustment of my ankles to rough ground, and the sounds of strands of bark and dry leaves under foot. The smell of eucalyptus invigorates me and makes me want to breathe deeper. Wattle Park is familiar to me, and I recognize that it is easy for me to be here. I admire native flowers and grasses, and listen to birds and observe their movements. I watch magpies, seemingly still, standing, perceiving. I wonder about this social construction of stillness within an active landscape. I have much to learn from the park. Wattle Park is unceded Wurundjeri land, shaped in an ongoing relationship over tens of thousands of years. Colonial use transformed parts of the park into a heritage site, golf course, walking track and playground. A descendent of the Lone Pine tree lives here; it was grown from the seeds of a tree that lived in Gallipoli at the site of Lone Pine during the First World War. The park is now bounded as an urban park. Reflecting on these relationships, the park extends beyond its boundaries and present moment, connecting nature and cultures across place and time. We are all still here, in the fabric of the park, and may seek a deeper understanding of this place to guide our next steps.

Illustration 6.3. Sensing Wattle Park, Burwood, Australia, 2021. © Lisa de Kleyn.

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Exploring the Narratives The nature of the narrative task draws out each person’s character, positionality, interests, and research areas – as we wanted to represent them for ourselves and to each other as part of this process. In essence, the narratives can be characterized as active, analytical and affective. Judy presents an active, ecological and experiential engagement with Merri Creek that draws on her work and education, and contemplates the depth of connection that can be developed over time. Brian takes an analytical approach, and draws attention to institutional representations of nature and its governance (specifically nature strips), and contrasts this with what he perceives in his local area. Lisa presents an affective and contemplative experience with Wattle Park that acknowledges a range of entities and relationships with the park and emplacement as directing a response. At this level, the narratives demonstrate diverse accounts, which together provide a more multilayered representation of urban nature. Drawing on these narratives and subsequent discussions, the following sections present opportunities for urban natures research through incorporating diverse ways of knowing, critiquing institutional representations, and taking a grounded approach to understanding nature connections and associated responsibility, including an appreciation of nature itself. Knowing Involves Different Forms and Expressions, and Builds Over Time The narratives provide insight into the authors’ different and preferred ways of knowing, and an opportunity to critique knowledge production, including ‘the philosophical contingency of knowledge, of social structures, and relations’ (Machen 2020: 331). The authors present a multidisciplinary approach. Judy reflects on her past work and her ‘ecology eye’, where knowing is represented through an ordered, ecological, and environmental management lens. For her, ecology informs a scientific approach that underpins a relational way of understanding environments: the ecosystem relationships of plants, soil, climate and water, as well as people’s relationships with each other and with place. Brian’s narrative directs attention to ‘official’ documents, such as council policy and guidelines. All three authors draw on experience, and the narratives include personal, social and cultural connections and their stories, and aesthetic

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appreciation. Specifically, Judy acknowledges First Nations Peoples and knowledge developed over thousands of years through cultural heritage stories and custodianship. Lisa presents an immersive and sensory experience, which opens the potential for memory, aesthetic appreciation, learning, and ethical consideration. Recognition of different ways of knowing, and valuing different forms of knowledge, is a matter of justice, particularly for marginalized communities in repressive contexts (Tuhiwai Smith 2012). Joan MartinezAlier (Martinez-Alier et al. 2014: 22–23) asserts that ‘the apparent neutrality and objectivity of normal science is criticized because in many situations it makes hard facts explicit whilst concealing both the values and the uncertainties in question, often neglecting local-situated knowledge and hiding hegemonic interests’. Challenging urban natures researchers to incorporate diverse ways of knowing, such as experience, has the potential to: unseat the institutional dominance of particular ontologies; explicitly acknowledge urban nature as produced; develop richer and more expansive understandings of relationships within urban nature; and facilitate more democratic deliberation about places. Institutional Framing Enables and Constrains Opportunities Brian’s exploration of nature strips foregrounds an institutional view – the perspective of a local council, which has management authority over the space. Local councils prescribe how nature strips are owned, occupied, defined (including their appearance and function) and managed by different social actors. Nature strips are both property and ‘spacesin-between’, representing spaces that are owned, have clear boundaries, and yet are ‘delegitimized’ – rendered subordinate to other spaces by definition. Nature strips are formally managed for particular functions, and yet ‘occupants’ of adjacent land and residents are invited to ‘care’ for ‘their’ nature strip and beautify the street – care is relegated to the private sphere, and as an option. Brian highlights the ‘politics’ of nature strips by observing their potential uses: service provision, amenity, biodiversity, food production, and social connection. Narrow conceptions of ‘urban infrastructure’ represent neocolonial and rational logics, including nature strips as static entities rather than a dynamic part of human– nature relations, thereby demonstrating the importance of unpacking the assumptions informing taken-for-granted institutional norms.

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While Brian’s narrative names and analyses institutional forces as a way to critique meanings and their effects, it also foregrounds a local government institutional frame. As researchers, it is important to be conscious of the frames we invoke. Our research choices advertently or inadvertently centre and decentre perspectives. When considering meaning-making as a dynamic process, imbued with power, researchers have an opportunity to foreground multiple perspectives to reveal hegemonic assumptions, and lead critique as a way of promoting change (Harrison 2017). Emplaced Forms of Appreciation and Ethical Consideration Entwined emotional, physical and contemplative engagement with Wattle Park are fundamental to Lisa’s experience. While her feelings might be reduced to an instrumental representation, such as facilitating ‘wellbeing’, the term obscures the relationship between the feelings and the park itself. A relational approach acknowledges the park as an entity, and the relationship and park cannot be quantified, traded or transferred equally to another place – central tenets associated with the commoditization of nature (Nadeau 2006). Lisa brings a range of entities into the foreground, including birds, bark and the smell of eucalyptus – presenting a ‘radically contextual’ approach (Houston 2020). Such an approach emphasizes the particular as important in itself, as part of human–nature relations, and therefore, significant in urban natures research (Phillips and Atchison 2018). Grounded approaches invite a broad range of research methods, including stories, recounting walks, and art (see ibid.; de Kleyn, Mumaw and Corney 2019; Alexander and Gleeson 2020; Steele, Davison and Reed 2020). Lisa acknowledges multiple influences on the park, highlighting the coproduction of urban nature (Phillips and Atchison 2018). The narrative reflects ideas of ‘enchantment’ and ‘connection-to-nature’ as contributing to understanding and providing ethical direction (Restall and Conrad 2015; Phillips and Atchison 2018; Alexander and Gleeson 2020). However, people’s relationships with nature differ, mediated by context, social experiences, personal reactions, and nature itself (de Kleyn, Mumaw and Corney 2019). While affective relationships can bring a sense of responsibility, the questions of responsibility to what and whom are relevant, and how to negotiate incommensurable values in process.

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All three narratives have a common thread that critiques knowledge systems and meaning-making such that we are not claiming a universal knowledge but instead offering diverse ways of knowing and expressions to contest the dominance of scientific, managerial and technical ways of knowing, and the structures they reinforce, such as the local government framing of nature strips. Particularly, we offer grounded and immersive experiences as inviting understanding with place. However, a critical next step is to consider how we, as researchers, work through such issues so as not to obscure or overlook power relations. Specifically, Jason Byrne (2018) argues that a critical approach is required in urban greening research to articulate power relations, including whose perspectives are foregrounded, how those perspectives have developed, and who and what they serve.

Opportunities to Expand Our View in Urban Natures Research Leon Anderson (2006: 384) argues that autoethnographers ‘should openly discuss changes in their beliefs and relationships over the course of fieldwork, thus vividly revealing themselves as people grappling with issues relevant to membership and participation in fluid rather than static social worlds’. In this light, we discuss our evolving awareness of our subjectivities and positionalities, and the ways we have presented them, and how this awareness helps us to reframe and reshape our research practice. The narratives provide insight into our positionality. For example, while we are aware of and concerned about access, tenure, congestion, ability, safety, crime, service provision, pollution, social norms, ability to interpret information, inclusion, discrimination, displacement and dispossession (see Byrne 2018), these issues were not foregrounded. We all have a normative agenda, which requires further articulation as normative ends can be taken for granted as being positive, and without critical reflection can uphold and unwittingly reinforce particular agendas. While Brian’s narrative asks ‘whose voices count’, and we are moving beyond inclusion to understand diverse perspectives as a means of critique and to promote change, it is imperative for urban natures researchers to acknowledge the politics of space, and to articulate the who, what and how of progressing justice. Dominant sociocultural representations and practices shape urban nature; therefore, researchers should pay critical attention to the historical and contemporary processes that

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they support and centre. For example, there are assumptions that could be further examined in our narratives in relation to property and its foundation of dispossession, researching diverse perspectives, and deliberative processes and justice, particularly through decolonizing methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith 2012; Coddington 2017; Kotef 2020; Porter, Hurst and Grandinetti 2020). There are opportunities to work through such issues. Firstly, being guided by questions informed by decolonizing approaches (Tuhiwai Smith 2012) or concerned with critical research impact (Machen 2020) can challenge and bring new dimensions to research. Secondly, giving greater consideration to the diversity of research teams, particularly as ‘nonrepresentativeness’ is a critique of collective autoethnographic work (Roy and Uekusa 2020: 388). Collaborative research supports such diversity as a means for transformation through collaborative development of knowledge and actions that empower individuals and communities (Phillips et al. 2013). However, researchers must attend to unequal power relations so as ‘not to consume or compare ontologies of difference’ but to collaborate as ‘truth telling’ and responsibility (Porter, Hurst and Grandinetti 2020: 222). As Porter (2020: 145) reinforces: ‘Of course, recognizing privilege, acknowledging that you have imperial eyes, doesn’t remove your eyes, or shift racialized relations of power’. There are no easy answers, no prescriptions or frameworks to ‘solve’ such issues. Perhaps a sense of discomfort and unease, paired with reflexivity, at least underpins researchers’ ethical strivings towards ‘unsettling the taken-for-granted privilege of settler dominance in Indigenous domains’ (Howitt 2020).

Conclusion We used collaborative autoethnographic inquiry to explore how urban natures research can be more reflexive and critically aware. Our endeavour reinforces a potential strength of collaborative research: providing insight into diverse ways of knowing, and how together these different approaches can reveal or challenge assumptions or blind spots. More specifically, the analysis of our narratives highlights the following: diverse ways of knowing involve different sources and forms of expression, and evolve over time; institutions constrain and enable opportunities for entities through their representations; and emplaced forms of appreciation can enhance consideration of ethical issues. Yet while we endeav-

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oured to undertake this work in an ethically responsible manner, we also recognize our potential to substantially strengthen these considerations by continuing to critique our positions, reframe our approaches, and reshape our practices. In particular, we think that this can be achieved through being guided by questions informed by decolonizing approaches and being concerned with critical research impact (Machen 2020), by giving greater consideration to the diversity of research teams, and by working on the institutional norms and processes that govern research. Beyond improving our own (individual and collective) research practice, our experience may offer insight for others who are seeking to navigate the contours of urban natures and urban greening in ways that are critically aware and ethical.

Lisa de Kleyn is a research fellow at the Climate Change Adaptation Lab, La Trobe University. Her research encompasses environmental ethics, governance, representations and nature connections. Brian Coffey is a lecturer in sustainability and urban planning at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. His research centres on how issues are conceptualized in policy processes, and the implications this has for how they are governed. Prior to completing his PhD he worked in the public service in a variety of environmental policy and planning roles. Judy Bush is a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Melbourne. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on urban nature-based solutions, climate change and urban environmental policy. She has previously worked in environmental non-profit alliances focused on climate change and on urban waterway restoration.

References Adams, Tony E., and Andrew F. Herrmann. 2020. ‘Expanding Our Autoethnographic Future’, Journal of Autoethnography 1(1): 1–8. Agee, Jane. 2009. ‘Developing Qualitative Research Questions: A Reflective Process’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22(4): 431–47. Alexander, Samuel, and Brendan Gleeson. 2020. An Urban Politics of Enchantment, Urban Awakenings: Disturbance and Enchantment in the Industrial City. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, Leon. 2006. ‘Analytic Autoethnography’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35(4): 373–95.

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Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. 2016. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bochner, Arthur P., and Carolyn Ellis. 2016. Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories. New York: Routledge. Bush, Judy. 2020. ‘The Role of Local Government Greening Policies in the Transition towards Nature-based Cities’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 35: 35–44. Bush, Judy, Brian Coffey and Sebastian Fastenrath. 2020. ‘Governing Urban Greening at a Metropolitan Scale: An Analysis of the Living Melbourne Strategy’, Australian Planner 56(2): 95–102. Bush, Judy, and Andréanne Doyon. 2019. ‘Building Urban Resilience with Naturebased Solutions: How Can Urban Planning Contribute?’ Cities 95: 102483. doi:10.1016/j.cities.2019.102483. ———. 2021. ‘Tackling Intersecting Climate Change and Biodiversity Emergencies: Opportunities for Sustainability Transitions Research’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 41(September): 57–59. Byrne, Jason. 2018. ‘Urban Parks, Gardens and Green Space’, in Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty and Gordon Walker (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 437–48. Chang, Heewon, Faith Ngunjiri and Kathy-Anne C. Hernandez (eds). 2013. Collaborative Autoethnography. New York: Taylor & Francis. Coddington, Kate. 2017. ‘Voice Under Scrutiny: Feminist Methods, Anticolonial Responses, and New Methodological Tools’, Professional Geographer 69(2): 314–20. Coffey, Brian. 2016. ‘Unpacking the Politics of Natural Capital and Economic Metaphors in Environmental Policy Discourse’, Environmental Politics 25(2): 203–22. Coffey, Brian, and Greg Marston. 2013. ‘How Neoliberalism and Ecological Modernization Shaped Environmental Policy in Australia’, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 15(2): 179–99. Coffey, Brian, et al. 2020. ‘Towards Good Governance of Urban Greening: Insights from Four Initiatives in Melbourne, Australia’, Australian Geographer 51(2): 189–204. Cooke, Benjamin. 2020. ‘The Politics of Urban Greening: An Introduction’, Australian Geographer 51(2): 137–53. Davies, Charlotte Aull. 2008. Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. de Kleyn, Lisa, Laura Mumaw and Helen Corney. 2019. ‘From Green Spaces to Vital Places: Connection and Expression in Urban Greening’, Australian Geographer 51(2): 1–15. Dovers, Stephen, and Karen Hussey. 2013. Environment and Sustainability: A Policy Handbook. 2nd edn. Annandale, NSW: The Federation Press. Dryzek, John S. 2013. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Summer. 2017. ‘Environmental Justice Storytelling: Sentiment, Knowledge, and the Body in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats’, ISLE. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24(3): 457–76.

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Houston, Donna. 2020. ‘Urban Regenerations: Afterword to Special Issue on the Politics of Urban Greening in Australian Cities’, Australian Geographer 51(2): 257–63. Howitt, Richard. 2020. ‘Unsettling the Taken (for Granted)’, Progress in Human Geography 44(2): 193–215. Kendal, Dave, et al. 2016. ‘Benefits of Urban Green Space in the Australian Context: A Synthesis Review for the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub of the National Environmental Science Program’. Melbourne. Retrieved 14 June 2022 from https://nespurban.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/CAULHub_BenefitsUrbanGreeningReport_20160912.pdf. Kotef, Hagar. 2020. The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/ Palestine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Machen, Ruth. 2020. ‘Critical Research Impact: On Making Space for Alternatives’, Area 52(2): 329–41. Marston, Greg. 2015. ‘From Being a Fish Out of Water to Swimming with the School: Notes from a Class Traveller in Australian Higher Education’, in Dee Mitchell, Jacqueline Z. Wilson and Verity Archer (eds), Bread and Roses. Rotterdam: SensePublishers, pp. 171–79. Martinez-Alier, Joan, et al. 2014. ‘Between Activism and Science: Grassroots Concepts for Sustainability Coined by Environmental Justice Organizations’, Journal of Political Ecology 21: 19–60. Moon, Katie, and Deborah Blackman. 2014. ‘A Guide to Understanding Social Science Research for Natural Scientists’, Conservation Biology 28(5): 1167–77. Nadeau, Robert L. 2006. The Environmental Endgame: Mainstream Economics, Ecological Disaster, and Human Survival. London: Rutgers University Press. Parris, Kirsten M., et al. 2020. ‘Cities for People and Nature. Melbourne: Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub’. Retrieved 14 June 2022 from https://nespurban .edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Cities-for-People-and-Nature.pdf. Phillips, Catherine, and Jennifer Atchison. 2018. ‘Seeing the Trees for the (Urban) Forest: More-than-Human Geographies and Urban Greening’, Australian Geographer 51(2): 1–14. Phillips, Louise, et al. 2013. Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research: A Reflexive Approach. New York: Routledge. Porter, Libby. 2020. ‘Learning to Live Lawfully on Country’, in Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata (eds), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World, vol 1. Singapore: Springer, pp. 137–46. Porter, Libby, Julia Hurst, and Tina Grandinetti. 2020. ‘The Politics of Greening Unceded Lands in the Settler City’, Australian Geographer 51(2): 221–38. Restall, Brian, and Elizabeth Conrad. 2015. ‘A Literature Review of Connectedness to Nature and its Potential for Environmental Management’, Journal of Environmental Management 159: 264–78. Rogers, Marg, et al. 2020. ‘Organisational Narratives vs the Lived Neoliberal Reality: Tales from a Regional University’, Australian Universities Review 62(1): 26–40. Roy, Rituparna, and Shinya Uekusa. 2020. ‘Collaborative Autoethnography: “Selfreflection” as a Timely Alternative Research Approach during the Global Pandemic’, Qualitative Research Journal 20(4): 383–92. Steele, Wendy, Tooran Alizadeh and Leila Eslami-Andargoli. 2013. ‘Planning across Borders: Why a Focus on Borders? Why Now?’, Australian Planner 50(2): 93–95.

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Steele, Wendy, Aidan Davison and Aviva Reed. 2020. ‘Imagining the Dirty Green City’, Australian Geographer 51(2): 239–56. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd edn. London: Zed Books. Watts, Rob. 2017. Public Universities, Managerialism and the Value of Higher Education. London: Palgrave Critical University Studies.

PART II

deú (Re)Connecting Urban Natures

Illustration 7.1. Talking to trees, the Australian National Botanic Gardens, 2021. © Tracey M. Benson.

deú CHAPTER 7

Layering Identity, Place and Belonging between Nature and Urbanity Tracey M. Benson

For some reason, the writing of this chapter has not come easily. Behind the text you read on this page are layers of process, like mulch on the soil. Earlier layers explored writing in the third person so as to make these accounts more rigorous and theoretical. The middle layers experimented with poetry, personal story and the use of language to invoke a meditative state. Where the writing landed is a combination of these features, in essence a turning of the soil. I begin with an acknowledgement of Country, and thank the Elders past and present for their loving care of the lands in which I live and walk. I also thank the First Nation artists, activists and mentors who have guided my understanding of place and ‘being’ in this embodied existence. This Connection to Country is not something that speaks of a separation between past and present, here and there, mine and yours. It is an acknowledgement of the importance of relationship and of care, how we connect between things. This way of being ‘in the world’ demonstrates the limitation of the Western binary system, where the past is severed from the present, art is disconnected from science, and my experience is in isolation from yours. Experience is ever emerging through the NOW and the impulse to refer back to a perception of binaries that reinforces a colonizing way of understanding our place in the world. Nora Bateson talks about pre-emergence (Bateson 2021), the ‘what’ that comes before and lays the ground. This is a useful concept for exploring stories of the suburbs on the Australian continent. Before the sprawl of the city and its network of

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highways, there were trade routes, meeting places by the river, songlines and ceremonies across these lands. My understanding of these layers of knowledge is expressed through experiences – as an artist, a specialist in pro-environmental behaviour change communications, a nature lover and a walker. In the places I walk and observe, it is not only the bird call, the creek, the river, the ocean and the trees that embed an awareness and connection to place; it is the sense of walking on land that is unceded territory and its need for acknowledgement. Country calls us to listen, and by using the language of the land as shared by the traditional custodians, I hope to pay my respects and acknowledge this long-standing relationship between land and human and more-than human inhabitants. By sharing stories from a personal perspective, the goal is to speak from a position of respect, and with an appreciation of how cultural experiences operate in relation to sharing knowledge across disciplines and cultures (Benson 2021). These lived and told stories and the talk about the stories are one of the ways that we fill our world with meaning, and enlist one another’s assistance in building lives and communities (Freeman 2020). This chapter speaks to those stories of connection through my learning as an artist and my love of nature and wandering. As part of my creative practice I facilitate ‘walkshops’, whereby people are invited to walk with me and local knowledge holders to bring awareness to local places through mindfulness practice, creative play and sharing stories. Although I have lived in many places on the Australian continent, I have spent the most amount of time in the place I now live, in Ngunnawal Country in the foothills to the Australian Alps. This still seems strange to me, as my formative years were spent in the subtropics of Gubbi Gubbi Country in south-east Queensland, and the tropics of Larrakia Country at the top end of Australia.

Background My chapter explores art projects through the context of walking and themes related to place. This is an attempt to consider a holistic response to how humans engage with local environments. For example, the highly respected Aboriginal Elder Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr’s (1998) sharing of the concept of Dadirri evokes the need for deep listening, close observation and presence in the places we see as familiar. The concept of deep listening opens the pathway to walking with respect, a way for all of us to connect to the lands and waters. As mentioned above, deep listening is also called Dadirri, a word from the

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Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri languages of the Aboriginal people of the Daly River region, 220 kilometres south of Darwin in the Northern Territory (Korff 2019). ‘[Dadirri] is in everyone. It is not just an Aboriginal thing’ (Eureka Street TV 2012). As an artist I am also drawn to expressions of the Sacred (Basarab 2002), which gives context to the importance of reverence and the impact that nature has on our sense of well-being and health. At the same time, I am curious to understand how the more-than-human actors see and care about these relationships. Does the tree love me as I love the tree? At a conscious level I am aware that with each breath the trees interact with us, exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide and by doing so we are mutually alive. My writing is also deliberately non-theoretical as I wish to focus on the story itself and its relationship to the land, my identity and my place within an experiential understanding of belonging. Also, the concept of layering is one that is envisaged as complex, uneven and at times even contradictory.

Thinking about the Edges Most of my life I lived on the edge of urbanity. As a young child I lived on the outskirts of Brisbane’s suburbs, spending hours playing and daydreaming in the bush not far from my home. When I was eleven years old my family moved to the most northern Australian city, Darwin, where we lived across the road from the beach. When I think of the concept of ‘urban natures’ I find myself thinking in Western binaries – that urbanity is the antithesis of nature – but this contrasting dichotomy has not been my lived experience. Of course there are many examples where these two concepts sit together in relationship with each other. The trees, creeks and oceans of my childhood wanderings connect to the streets and houses of the suburbs, leaving an indelible mark on my understanding of the concept of urbanity. These childhood experiences have long informed my creative practice, which has explored place and identity. My work as an artist has been a lifelong process of trying to make sense of the world and the land on which I live. The lands I speak of have ancient stories, tied to people who have cared for the lands and waters for thousands of generations. You can discover remnants of these long-forged connections everywhere – if you take the time to look. But it is not just about ‘looking’ or taking time; these threads of connection between time and place also inform how we live in the city and act with care and respect. One such example is the

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Illustration 7.2. Author at Nightcliff Beach, 2017. © Martin Drury.

development of local ‘micro-forests’ in the Canberra suburbs, which are community-led projects aimed at creating climate resilience and restoring ecological balance to communities. This layer of the story starts locally, with my street and its trees. The long afternoon shadows from the winter sun on the road from the broad branches of the maple tree look like veins. The tree’s roots are slowly breaking through the pavement, lifting the bitumen on the edge of the road. Under the tree is a path, worn by human and animal steps and bicycle wheels; not a concrete path, but one created as a result of erosion caused by human and animal traffic. It is a ‘desire line’, representing the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and a destination. Does this tree call to the humans in our community? I often wonder how I, as a human, can be sensitive to the messages of the beings we share our urban environments with? How can we act in ways that are mutually beneficial? These trees help us in so many ways: their shade cools our suburb in the heat of summer, and they provide homes for our nonhuman residents. Here, I have found myself on the edge of suburbia yet again. For over a decade I have lived in this pocket of Ngunnawal Country, surrounded by farmland that edges the Murrumbidgee River, with the Brindabella mountain range framing the view of the horizon. But things are changing quickly. More suburbs are being built in all directions around us, and the land has predominantly been stripped bare and then covered with new

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Illustration 7.3. Street view, 2021. © Tracey M. Benson.

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roads, streetlights and parklands. Only the oldest of trees have been left in situ. As this expansion of the suburbs has evolved, we have noticed new bird species in our garden, Crimson and Eastern Rosellas, more Galahs and Sulphur Crested Cockatoos. And while I love these new visitors to my garden, the sense of loss for the grasslands is at times overwhelming. At the same time, there have been efforts to conserve some of the remnant woodland and its stories. Ginninderry Conservation Corridor is a positive example of responsible development. As the Ginninderry estate has been developed, care has also been taken to make sure that there is habitat for local species through the establishment of the Ginninderry Conservation Trust (GCT). The area is also rich in terms of Aboriginal artefacts, as it was an important place for local and visiting people for thousands of years. The word Ginninderry is derived from an Aboriginal word meaning ‘sparkling’ or ‘throwing out little rays of light’. It symbolizes the creek that flows through the district, and acknowledges both the Indigenous and the European heritage of the area. In partnership with the GCT, and under the banner of Treecreate, I have facilitated a series of ‘walkshops’, which focus on raising awareness of the significance of this special place. Since Europeans arrived in Australia, there has been an enormous impact on the land as well as the people. Many plants and animals have become extinct, and many more are under threat. This is why efforts such as the GCT are critical to keeping the vibrant ecosystems and culture of the region thriving and evolving to tell new stories of place.

Illustration 7.4. Ginninderry Corridor, 2021. © Tracey M. Benson.

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Connections to Place Relationship to place and identity have long figured as themes in my work as an artist. This exploration has been informed by the contexts of colonialism, belonging/unbelonging/longing and genealogy, echoing a personal journey of learning about history, ancestry and culture. A 1995 performance, Scalpland (Benson 1995), was a response to these themes, inspired by the writing of Paul Carter. His work The Road to Botany Bay (1988) provides a doorway to explore the complex and multilayered story of the land known as Australia. My performance reflected on the colonization of the land, as well as the female body. In this piece, I clipped off my hair, connecting the clearing of the land and it being a ‘tabula rasa’, reflecting on the long-held official narrative of terra nullius – an empty land. The poetic piece that accompanied this performance also addressed the male gaze, and how women’s bodies were colonized and ‘read’. The history of shaving a woman’s hair to denounce her as subversive – criminal, hysteric, heretic – was also explored. This work and its critical concerns continue to resonate through my practice, but perhaps now in more subtle ways. The land has many strata. We know this from the earth sciences and from how we record history. For many cultures, the land is inscribed through song, story and dance, and is painted onto the body. For other cultures, those stories are fragmented, lost or actively hidden or obscured. Scalpland explored the correlations between body and memory, history and identity. It was a response to witnessing the loss of bush around my suburban home in Brisbane. The work also explored colonization as it related to the body – how bodies are mapped, colonized and inscribed as acceptable and normal in society. In the performance I defer the gaze, clipping my hair with my back to the audience, using images of phrenology to illustrate the mapping of the body and of land in the European context (Benson 2019). Phrenology is a pseudoscience from the Victorian era that used the measurement of the skull to identify character traits and mental ability. It was unfortunately used by some people to reinforce notions of racial supremacy. In the case of Scalpland, phrenology is seen as a form of colonial cartography, of mapping the body. In essence, this piece was a response to urban development. A return to a childhood place after many years to find the creek buried under a four-lane highway, and the bush now a new estate. My reaction at the time was visceral, a deep sense of grief for what was lost. As a child I would escape to the bushland to study insects and to imagine myself living there, in a gunya, like I had learnt about the First peoples of the land. This work and its relationship to memory, mapping and place continues

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Illustration 7.5. Scalpland, ‘Volt: the new performance’, Institute of Modern Art, 1995.

to resonate for me as an artist living in unceded sovereign lands as an uninvited visitor. Many years later, the themes of Scalpland still echo in my creative practice. Perhaps now with a different tenor, one that – instead of expressing hurt, loss and anger – now seeks to honour and revere what is. The intention of recent Treecreate walkshops is that I can communicate this sense of love and respect for the land with people who experience my work. Also, I no longer walk alone, as part of the design of the Treecreate walkshops focuses on bringing together diverse knowledges from historians, environmental specialists and First Nations custodians. Participants also have the opportunity to share their knowledge, through the process of walking together, making time to listen closely to the land and to each other.

Ancestral Ties My journey towards walking with reverence and deep listening begins with a lesson. Like many people of settler heritage living in unceded lands, I walked with unease. With the discomfort of knowing that, despite my love of the country where I was born, my relationship to this land and my own place within it is fraught. A dearly loved Māori Elder told me that to connect with Indigenous knowledge you need to look to your ancestors. But what if the links to the ancestors are also lost – what then? Perhaps the answer is held by the trees.

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Illustration 7.6. Author at Hurum Gamle Kirke, 2017. © Tracey M. Benson.

In the Ngunnawal language there is a beautiful expression – Mura Gadi – which translates to ‘Searching for pathways’. Perhaps by simply walking the land, holding the concept of Dadirri, deep listening and observation, that path would reveal itself to me. In 2017, I found myself on a three-month residency in Norway, where my project ‘Waters of the Past’ focused on ancestral journeys. I was researching my Norwegian ancestor Anton Berntsen, who left Norway in the late 1880s from Drammen. My residency was actually in Drammen, so I could access family records at the local council office. I learnt that Anton had been baptized in a village around thirty minutes from where I was based, and that the local church in Klokkarstua had records of his family.

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My first journey to Klokkarstua was full of emotion. As I travelled in the bus, I was overcome by the beauty of the fjord and the countryside, and felt such deep sadness that my ancestor had to leave such a beautiful place. When I arrived at the small village, I went into the churchyard and spent a long time looking closely at all the graves, looking for a connection to my family. There was nothing. Despondent, I sat under a large oak tree, leaning against its strong trunk. Then I had a realization. This tree was a witness. It was hundreds of years old. This tree had met my ancestors. Like a silent ancestor, this tree Elder was connecting me to my ancestral past in a way I had not anticipated.

Walking with Intention As a person from a migrant background living on unceded First Nation land, I have had an unsettled relationship to the lands where I have lived. Although I love the lands and waters, there has been a deep sense of unbelonging, evolving from my early exposure to First Nation peoples and cultures during my formative years living in Darwin. The history books and the stories of European history obscured the occupation of the land. Australia was called the ‘new’ country, when in fact it was ancient, its stories held for thousands of generations. In 2013, I participated in a residency in Aotearoa New Zealand, SCANZ 3rd Nature. Many workshops were led by Māori Elders and artists, as well as artists working with environmental themes. It was at this time that Scalpland called me back, a reminder of the journey of my own work. I asked the Elders how I could walk on the land in the ‘right way’ – in a way that respected the First peoples and with sure footedness. Two responses have stayed with me: the first was about the intention ‘If you walk with respect, you can walk anywhere’; the other one, as mentioned before, was ‘You need to connect with your own ancestors and your own lands’. Again, I am reminded of the many layers of knowledge embedded in the land, knowledge that guides my need to tread lightly and with respect and acknowledgement. I find myself having walked full circle, but the track is never static. With each breath and step, it changes – as do I.

Tracey M. Benson is an Australian-based interdisciplinary artist and researcher working with ubiquitous technologies, Human-Centred Design and active audience participation, focusing on themes related to ecologi-

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cal balance, environmental awareness and well-being. She often collaborates with Indigenous communities, historians and scientists to co-create works exploring place, time and memory.

References Basarab, Nicolescu. 2002. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Bateson, Nora. 2021. ‘What is Submergence?’ Medium. Retrieved 20 March 2023 from https://norabateson.medium.com/what-is-submerging-ad12df016cde. Benson, Tracey. 1995. Scalpland. Retrieved 20 March 2023 from https://traceybe nson.com/2017/11/10/from-the-archive-scalpland-1995-1996/. ———. 2019. ‘Borderlands: Disruptions between Remote Map-Making and Local Readings of Place’. Published in Walking Art, Walking Practices, Walking Bodies, Walking Arts Encounters Conference proceedings, Prespes 2019. ———. 2021. ‘Walking Together: Artistic Collaboration across Cultures in Australia and New Zealand’, Canadian Journal of Action Research 21(3): 32–51. Carter, Paul. 1988. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. New York: Knopf. Eureka Street TV. 2012. ‘Interview with Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Bauman’. Retrieved 14 April 2023 from www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2YMnmrmBg8. Freeman, John. 2020. ‘Projects with People, Participant-Coercion and the Autoethnographical Invite’. Canadian Journal of Action Research 20(2): 85–103. Korff, Jens. 2019. ‘Deep Listening (dadirri)’. Retrieved 26 March 2023 from https:// www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/education/deep-listening-dadirri. Ungunmerr, Miriam-Rose. 1998. About Dadirri. Miriam Rose Foundation. Retrieved 14 April 2023 from https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/dadirri/.

deú CHAPTER 8

A ‘Democracy of Compost’ Neo-materialist Encounters in Urban Spaces Monique Wing and Emma L. Sharp

Introduction Our soil ‘environment’ – the foundational material of our global existence – is in crisis. Beyond effects from anthropogenic climate change such as desertification and salination, humans have variously shifted soils from one place to another, mined them, sealed over them, drained them, contaminated them, and, in some cases, rendered them extinct (Rhodes 2015: 78). The cumulative impacts of these activities have been observed in the majority of the soils on Earth, with implications for the Earth’s ‘Critical Zone’ (Richter et al. 2015: 1). The soils that are used to feed urban populations face particular threats: those outside of cities are subjected to fertility extraction and displacement, while those inside cities must compete with urban development, private property ownership or neglect for their very existence. This chapter proposes a radical reimagining and democratizing of the centuries-old practice of composting as a means to: foster (re)connections between humans, as well as with more-than-human others; repair existing urban soils; and to coax new areas of fertility into being. By utilizing a theoretical framework of neo-materialism, we offer that deeper considerations for the diverse materiality of compost have the potential to lead humanity beyond instrumentalist ethics of exploitation or mere sustainability towards a new paradigm of regeneration and inter-species co-flourishing. We argue that composting in urban spaces must be integrated into systems of food production and consumption. We envisage a system of overlapping ‘tight circles’ of fertility linking urban farmers, food eaters, compost and urban soils. Discourses of compost should ex-

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tend beyond notions of ‘waste management’ to embrace deeper understandings of the interdependence and entanglements of all matter. When we re-evaluate what is precious, and find ways to work within nature, we advance eco-ethical human/more-than-human interactions and city– soil relations to potentially re-stitch together what Nathan McClintock (2010) has referred to as ‘the metabolic rift’. Neo-materialist theory offers a potential antidote. It repositions the human among the nonhuman as opposed to a separate, individuated subject with capacity to act independently of the natural world (Sanzo 2018). By decentring the human being within earthly relations, humans and nonhumans are understood as coproducing agents of an everevolving world. Neo-materialist theory holds that much of what humans understand as uniquely human achievement has only been possible because of the material world that has shaped and enabled human thinking, practice and technologies. In this view, human beings ‘do not control and dominate the material world, so much as emerge from and with it’ (LeCain 2017: 429). Eminent scholar Jane Bennett (2004: 348) conceptualizes the world’s materiality through ‘thing-power’ materialism, which gives the ‘stuff’ of the world potential and potency, and ontologies of their own that sit outside of the meanings or purposes that humans ascribe to them. She envisions that when we ‘depict the non-humanity that flows around [and] also through humans’ (Bennett 2004: 349) we will strengthen ecological relations. Her contention is that ‘the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’ (ibid.: 364), whereas an ontological shift towards recognition of the inherent vibrancy of ‘things’ could lead to more respectful, less dangerous human engagement with the earth, and the more-than-humans that make it. Soil can be seen as agential all on its own. It is the living skin of the Earth – the interface between geology and biology (Rhodes 2015: 75). Half of all the world’s biodiversity lives within the soil, and a single teaspoon of healthy soil is said to contain a billion organisms (ibid.: 76). It is ‘vital’ material – a life support system for all terrestrial lifeforms on the planet (Krzywoszynska 2019: 2). Human activities throughout the Holocene period and into the Anthropocene have led to fundamental biological, chemical and physical transformations of the Earth’s soils (Richter et al. 2015). Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2019: 393) argues that acknowledging our intimate entanglements with soil – it does, after all, provide us with corporeal nourishment – will help to shift instrumentalist conceptualizations of soil as ‘resource’ towards a more relational understanding of soils as coproducers of our bodies and our world, as well as living entities with their own intrinsic worth (ibid.).

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Daniel Richter et al. (2015: 13) assert that human beings are not just ‘agents of soil disturbance’, depletion or degradation, but also agents of soil production. Rather than approaching this as another example of humans dominating nature, we widen our gaze to view this provocation through the lens of neo-materialist theory, such that ‘Earth’s surface systems [are being transformed from “only”] natural bodies to those that are human-natural’ (ibid.: 1). We offer that these interdependencies might be seen in the vital materiality of compost, and in reimagined (re-democratized) systems of urban composting. Further, Bradley Jones (2019: 3) describes compost as ‘the (de)compositional processes and collaborative assemblages nourishing all life on earth’ (italics authors’ own). The application of compost is reported to: enhance soil fertility, tilth, nutrient uptake in plants and the water retention capacity of soil; reduce dependence on chemical fertilizers; reduce heavy metal bioavailability (Cooperband 2000: 287); mitigate and ameliorate urban and industrial soil pollution (Cogger 2005: 243; Kästner and Miltner 2016); and improve carbon sequestering properties in soils (Favoino and Hogg 2008: 61). While Jones’s assertion may overstate humans’ power to affect nature, we recognize that, unlike humic material broken down without human intervention, compost is a substance produced from human and more-than-human interactions, and its use is human determined. We note that while composting along with soil beings can be generative, these systems can also fail or overflow (see, for example, Abrahamsson and Bertoni 2014), prompting more direct approaches for productive collaborations between humans and more-than-humans. Composting in urban environments commonly takes place at three levels – households, communities and municipalities – each of which encompasses different human-to-human and inter-species relational configurations, with implications for engagement, participation and outcomes. Here, through the lens of neo-materialist theory and the accounts of seven committed proponents of compost in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ask what values we might associate with compost, and the ‘doing’ of composting, in urban spaces. We also explore new imaginaries of urban composting to understand how this may serve as an important step forward for our cities, ourselves, and for nature.

Method As composting is an embodied practice that generally takes place in the garden, the planned approach for this study was to conduct interviews

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and ethnographic observations within these spaces, ‘following’ gardeners and composters ‘in the field’ (Lassiter 2005: 83–106). Due to COVID-19 restrictions over this 2020 field study period, close contact was not possible, and interviews were instead conducted via Zoom (Reñosa et al. 2021: 2). Participants were purposively recruited for their prominent involvement in composting practices. Variously, they are involved in community compost education (three participants), city council composting initiatives (two), local food waste recovery schemes (one), community composting hubs (four), urban farming (three) and environmental activism (one). Each semi-structured interview was guided by participant experiences and interests, and one included a ‘Zoom tour’ of a composting space. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed, with inductive and deductive approaches employed (Braun and Clarke 2013: 201–22).

Results and Discussion Our analysis articulates concepts of neo-materialist theory, human relations to urban compost, and notions of the health of soils that are used to feed cities. Through their observations of and engagement with the material of compost, and practical interactions in diverse ways with urban communities, the participants were united in a belief that urban composting practices should be decentralized, dispersed and democratized. Themes of circularity, connection, participation, access and community permeated these discussions, and the participants pointed to the relational aspects of the material of compost itself to signpost the way to support community-scale composting. Cycles of Life and Death Viewed through a lens of materiality, compost itself may contribute to improved understandings of, and (re)connections to, the vital circularity that sustains natural systems. It appears to embody the interconnected concepts of cycles of life, death, decay and rebirth, the idea of ‘no waste in nature’, and reciprocity. Modern humans have constructed a mode of existence that rejects the rules of assembly that apply elsewhere in nature – eating, breathing, defecating, and dying in-situ – and that perpetuate ongoing cycles of life, death and re-emergence. Considering modern urbanites’ typical disconnection from death, and their visceral aversion to decaying matter (for example, DeSilvey 2006, and McGinn 2011: 173), Matt, a facilitator of community and restaurant ‘waste’ compost-

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ing in inner-city Auckland, commented that urban citizens, in their ‘clean and sanitized lives’, are more inclined to embrace and celebrate the ‘above-the-ground, living aspects of nature’, while failing to appreciate the significance of the other side of that same coin – which is dormancy, death and decay. Matt proposed that compost is a vehicle for revealing the beauty of these critical components of nature’s cycles. This view was complemented by Maeve, the founder of an Auckland-based environmental-action organization focused on soil and pollinator health, who accepted that death and decay are integral to compost, but conceptualized it fundamentally as material of rebirth: What I love about compost is that living systems go through a flow, between a death impulse and a life impulse – including us, so we ourselves are dying and re-coming into being constantly. Compost is one of those places where we can understand that system by working with it . . . you have a whole lot of things that have come to the end of a process, in terms of living impulse . . . and you put them together in a system . . . completing that part of the flow and returning [them] to a life impulse again.

When new life is brought to the multispecies ‘life form’ of soil, the life-giving capacity of soil itself is enhanced. On a ‘Zoom tour’ of her garden, Maeve pointed out the parts of the land that, through the application of compost from ‘hard core’ [dead] soils, she had transformed into areas with the ‘most amazing fertility’. There Is No ‘Waste’ in Nature Maeve’s thinking was that ‘there is no waste in nature – just circularity within the system’. With life-giving ‘materials of rebirth’, and as we have understood through the cycling effects in and of composting, there is material ‘re-use’ taking place. Western societies continue to seek increasingly out-of-sight-out-of-mind ‘solutions’ to what has been framed as a ‘problem’ of waste organic materials. But ontologies of waste (Sharp et al. 2021: 2), and urban concerns for what should be done with it, are concepts that are not so cut and dried when viewed through a neomaterialistic lens. Hana, a community farmer and compost educator, stressed the importance of providing city dwellers with opportunities to meaningfully connect with the waste that their modern lives are producing. Matt commented that, by repositioning food ‘waste’ as a precious resource, people might notice the two, equally important life-giving ‘parts’ to our food: the part we eat and the part we throw out. With care and consideration for everything that is removed from the earth, our ‘waste’ can be turned into other things of immense value – healthy soil

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and diverse lively worlds – both for ourselves and the more-than-human others with whom we are intimately entangled. Reparation and Reciprocity in and with Nature Soils worldwide have been subjected to increasingly intensive agricultural practices to keep pace with human demands (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015: 692). Maeve made the claim that using compost is ‘the only way to repair ecosystems’. Other participants have spoken of the power of these human–nonhuman collaborations to bring (back) life and assuage human-wrought environmental damages by attributing magical qualities to them. Sam, a community compost educator, claimed ‘it [composting] is like alchemy’. Like Maeve, Ngaire referred to compost as a ‘material of rebirth’, elaborating: ‘You can go around the city and you can dump this stuff on some dirt, and then a little while later, it’s soil, and it’s living and you can put plants in it. . . . it’s like a brush, that you can brush over a city, and it goes from dead to alive’. Sam called compost ‘a healing balm’ that we can apply to the damaged earth, as if attempting to atone for damages caused to soils and ecosystems as a result of these extractions. Further, Maeve claimed that people feel a deep grief that our species has caused so much devastation, contending that the work of composting ‘is not just about healing ecosystems, it’s [also] about healing as individuals and as communities’. The possibility of reparation through compost might therefore be conceived of as building resilience in urban soils – and in urban humans – for their mutual benefit. Generating new soil and nourishing new life helps us to see compost and composting performing as ‘interconnected bodies and lifeworlds of humans and non-humans’ (Turner 2014: 5). Given our regular extractions from ‘nature’ in urban environments, composting might be seen as a moral activity that should be undertaken in order to ‘give back’ to nature. Our participants, such as Matt, framed composting as something relatively simple that people can do to ‘give back to the soil that has generated everything, really, for us’, adding: ‘It is one of the most important things we can do, because while we live, we all need to be eating . . . the parts of the plants that we don’t eat can be used to generate soil for the next plants’. It could be argued that composting practices that emerge from human sentiments of gratitude towards soils do not constitute an ethos of ‘giving back to the soil’ for the soil’s sake, so much as an instrumentalist concern about the productive capacities of soils solely for the benefit of humans. While the act of ‘composting’ may be considered to make a pos-

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itive contribution to the environment, if thought of as something we do in response to removing nutrients from the ecosystem, solely to ensure the future ability of that same ecosystem to provide for us again in the future, we again overemphasize the place of humans within the wider materiality of the Earth. We are not suggesting here that a focus on reciprocity or ‘the circular economy’ (fashionable in the Global North) nullifies the generative potential of ‘care-full’ utilitarian relationships (see Meulemans  2020). But by framing our participation as takers and givers in the system, we might reinsert ourselves into those cycles as partner-collaborators – mutual labourers. Further, scale is important, where the ‘distance between production and consumption’ has a material effect on social and ecological benefits and harms – for example, the transportation costs and fossil fuel used to move ‘waste’ materials around cities (McClintock 2010: 192). We might think instead of framing this circularity as a proliferation of ‘tight circles’ of hyper-localized fertility use and re-use within urban spaces. Noticing, Learning and Enacting Circularity is read through neo-materialist encounters with compost, and so too is enactment and interconnectedness. We have outlined the theoretical underpinnings of neo-materialism as manifest in experiences of urban composters, but how do these soil actors actually come to know compost and bring it into existence as ‘vibrant matter’? How do they become aware and take action to re-stitch the city–soil metabolic rift (McClintock 2010)? There is an acknowledgement of humanity’s interdependence with the natural world, and a sense that the practice of composting enacts a particular environmental ethics. Compost itself may function ‘as a kind of learning instrument . . . connecting [human] communities with the biology and the livingness of the soil that is under them and around them’ (Matt). Soils are ecosystems animated by diverse interconnected beings, providing heuristic relationships and connectivity that serve to inform and inspire compost advocates, and the newly inquisitive, to make and use compost. Maeve says: When I discovered that mycorrhizal fungi was one of the most critical materials to sequester carbon, I just wanted to make compost. I became really committed to compost – and I think that’s what happens to people – they become committed to compost. [She showed us her cow pat pit:] The pit is in between my limes and lemons and it’s just a hole in the ground, and I’ve just turned it over – so that’s cow manure and you can see it’s not quite

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powdery yet, but it’s well on its way to [having] the most amazing fertility, and it’s just teeming with microbes.

With these examples Maeve showed how, as the occupant of a large plot of land on the outskirts of the city, she has come to notice, learn and enact compost (Sharp 2018), and be a part of it becoming through attentiveness and action. She revealed herself to be a compost practitioner who assumed the role of overseer or facilitator of natural processes, yet sees herself as just one part of the environment that she lives within. Beyond the confines of her own garden Maeve is a compost educator and environmental activist committed to providing pathways for everyone to participate in composting. She emphasized to us that it is critical to help city-dwellers – including those who live in apartments or high-density urban environments – to understand that ‘we are all part of an ecosystem’. By attempting to replicate and extend the networks, connections and interdependencies evident within soil communities into the human sphere, compost educators and practitioners promote an emergent feeling of responsibility for the flourishing of the soils that we depend upon. Connecting Urban Farmers, Food Eaters, Compost and Urban Soils How might we negotiate this neo-material understanding of soil in urban management practices? How might we reconcile this repositioning of humans and nonhumans as interdependent actors in soil production, and how might we operationalize these learnings of interconnectedness for mutual benefit? Compost by its nature is uniquely capable of answering the imperative to care for environment(s). Where human actors can actively keep organic waste out of landfills, and redirect compost’s cycles to productive spaces instead, humans and nonhuman soil actors can work together to cycle, nurture or gift fertility (back) into soils through compost, at rates that are sustainable. Opportunities for noticing these relationships can take place where composting is visible, embodied and enabled. However, the current paradigm of food production and distribution in Aotearoa New Zealand – where food is grown outside of cities and consumed inside cities – challenges this ideal. As a consequence, soil fertility is displaced, resulting in fertility deficits in rural food producing areas, but fertility surpluses in cities. Ngaire was involved in an urban farm project enacting food rescue through the reclamation of food ‘surplus’ from households: We are getting to a point where we don’t need as much [urban compost] anymore . . . compost can’t exist without the food system . . . being fixed . . . vegetable production needs to be smaller scale, and much more spread

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out . . . communities [need to] interact with . . . grower[s] and get their ‘waste’ back to them so that the grower can put the nutrients back.

In other words, compost and composting need to occur where food is grown. And food growing needs to occur where food eating happens. By re-scaling food systems into tighter cycles of fertility use and re-use, networks of urban farms could enable urbanites to reconnect with their food and the soils that produce them. Locally produced food combined with local composting initiatives could facilitate productive cycling of fertility through each stage of the food production and consumption process, as well as reducing transportation costs and emissions. Composting in cities currently occurs predominantly as a decentralized practice (home composting), or in centralized, large-scale facilities run by municipalities. A reimagined ‘soil system’ might connect a decentralized network of composting hubs that would in many ways mimic the rhizomatic relations modelled by compost, and contribute to new forms of ‘ethical ecological thinking and practice’ (Turner 2019: 770). We drew from our participants – all strong advocates of community composting – to assemble a range of ideas (Table 8.1) for how different urban composting systems either foster or inhibit productive connections. Further observations (italicized in the table) as drawn from national industrial biogas advocacy reporting (Bioenergy Association 2020) were added for further context. Home composting is identified as the preferred option for homeowners who have the space, the inclination and the skills to produce quality compost in their own gardens. However, in rapidly intensifying urban environments this is an option that is increasingly out of reach or undesirable for many people. Ngaire also cautioned against potential home composting ‘failures and inefficiencies’, as it facilitates the proliferation of ‘x-number more rat homes’. At the opposite end of the spectrum, numerous environmental and social disconnects associated with centralized municipal composting solutions were identified (see Table 8.1). Large-scale, technocratic and transport-heavy systems are seen to solve the ‘problem of waste’ by encouraging a throwaway ethos of non-responsibility and disconnection from natural life-sustaining processes: What’s deeply distressing is how councils and governments are investing in these huge food waste solution scenarios that don’t fund, support, or nurture an individual’s connection to their ability to restore the ecosystem through using our waste as a way to repair . . . Having a collection at the side of the road where it just goes to the ‘never never’ will not enable people to learn. (Maeve)

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Table 8.1. Approaches of connection and disconnection (drawn from interviews with seven community compost facilitators and educators) of differing systems of composting. Qualitative entries in italics are drawn from a report (Bioenergy Association 2020) that advocates centralized composting. Home Composting

Community Compost Hubs

Centralized Composting

Connections • Hyper-local (no transport) • Fertility remains on site • Quality, lively ‘good’ compost • Closed-loop system

Connections • Reduces transport costs and emissions • Fertility available for communities, local soils • Quality, lively, ‘good compost • Everyone can participate • Ideally link to urban farms or parks • Facilitates engagement with waste • Helps to grow communities • Provides jobs • Opportunities for education/awareness • Connects communities to biology/soil life

Connections • Potential to divert large volumes of food and green waste from landfills • Potential for methane (biogas) burn-off as alternative to fossil fuels • Provides stable employment • Biofertilizer produced • Funding guaranteed through taxpayer • Simple, low input, low ‘disgust’ in handling for households

Disconnections • Lack of interest • Feelings of disgust • Not everyone can participate • Limited skills, money, space, time • Attracts vermin • Inefficient – not enough biomass to make quality compost

Disconnections • Funding and management required for success • Attracts vermin • Risk of illegal dumping

Disconnections • Expensive – requires large capital investment • Technological ‘fix’ separates humans from nature • Curbside collections disengage humans from their waste • Fossil fuel reliance in transport to/from site – big carbon footprint • Produces excess nitrogen/ leachates contaminate local soils and waterways • Requires major engineering to manage correctly • Fertility removed from rural areas • Inferior ‘bad’ compost – no worms, dead matter, mineral substrate

Matt was equally critical of centralized systems in which waste gets picked up and taken ‘away to awayland’, a paradigm he claimed denies individuals and households the capacity to appreciate the value of their waste and the opportunity for connection to their ‘local place’.

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Instead, there is advocacy in this space for a diffuse network of community composting hubs, which are envisioned to foster access, connections and participation. Hana claimed that cities could be composting at scale in a decentralized fashion if they had networks of compost hubs servicing households and communities. This correlates with a study conducted in the city of Chicago, which determined that decentralized composting systems encourage community engagement and facilitate the diversion of substantial volumes of food waste from landfills, thereby delivering ecological, economic and social benefits (Pai, Ai and Zheng 2019: 1). Maeve was adamant that everyone should have the opportunity to participate in the composting stream. At the time of research she was working alongside local government bodies throughout Aotearoa New Zealand to bring to fruition future cityscapes that would include a decentralized network of rates-funded or economically self-sustaining community composting hubs. In her utopian vision, there will be one such hub located every 500 square metres in every city: [People live in cities . . . they need to have places where they can participate . . . urban farms and composting hubs are integral to that . . . places where they can go and drop stuff off . . . and see their waste becoming fertility. I want to see our urban farms and our compost hubs becoming as commonplace as cafes . . . or your local dairy or butcher . . . [where] nobody is talking about waste, [and] everyone is talking about resource, and we are creating systems [that] are much more decentralized, resilient and hyper-local. Everyone should have access to that.

As radical as the vision of a compost hub on every corner seemed, Maeve was confident that ‘people can change their behaviour very, very quickly when they understand why, and they’re given the tools to do it’. Jess expressed a desire that composting would become ‘totally mainstream, absolutely normal, . . . just what people do’, facilitated by resourced education and training for individuals and champions of the initiative. Where large modern cities have effectively ‘declared their independence from nature’, such a model of decentralized composting offers regenerative urbanization (Girardet 2014). When humans participate and cooperate with each other and with nonhuman materiality, the analogy of a ‘democracy of compost’ gains relevance. If composting becomes accepted as a natural part of daily life, our cities may be configured around overlapping, self-sustaining ‘tight circles of fertility’, driving individuals within smaller communities to cycle nutrients (grow-eat-compost) hyper-locally, through new imaginaries of urban farms and community composting hubs.

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Conclusion Traditional hierarchical human-centred thinking has produced and perpetuated ecologically destructive practices. The ontological fracturing of social and material worlds has led us (humanity and more-than-humanity alike) beyond the relatively amenable environmental conditions afforded by the Holocene, into the uncertainty and existentially threatening realm of the Anthropocene. The participants in this research exhibit understandings of the ‘vital’ importance of more reciprocal human and more-than-human relations through their personal composting values and compost-mimicking eco-political actions. Composting is often construed as a largely instrumental practice that home gardeners ‘do’ in order to enhance the productive potential of their own space, or that municipalities ‘do’ primarily to deal with ‘waste’, but this study’s participants advocate wider (and deeper) considerations of compost as a material substance representative of convivial, truly ecological communities. Compost, ‘a multispecies cycling of nutrients and energy’ (Jones 2019: 7) offers human communities the opportunity to place themselves ‘within’ rather than ‘above’ the natural world that they are just one part of. Engagement with the lively networks of interconnected species and materialities inherent in compost appears to motivate these composting practitioners to radically reimagine current waste management policy and practice within urban settings. They advocate the emulation of compost’s network characteristics through the establishment of decentralized networks of composting hubs (ideally linked to hyper-localized urban farms) to serve the human and more-than-human communities that coexist within our modern cities. Under this new paradigm, compost is not just for home gardeners and waste-managing municipalities: it is a conduit for all of us to participate in nature’s cycles and become soil coproducers rather than simply soil consumers (givers as well as takers). If human communities can begin to see themselves as ‘part and product of the material world’ (LeCain 2015: 3) then some form of ‘democracy of compost’ may contribute to the co-flourishing of humans and morethan-humans alike in a more eco-ethical, generative Anthropocene.

Monique Wing is a student of geography, and she came to gardening and composting in a personal capacity in response to her concern for human-wrought environmental harms. Her research is informed by feminist critical theory, which she uses to explore the potential for better, more just and sustainable human interactions and relations with the natural world.

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Emma L. Sharp is an environmental geographer and senior lecturer in Te Kura Mātai Taiao at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She co-leads Soilsafe Aotearoa, a New Zealand-wide citizen science research programme, coproducing knowledge on diverse soil values with communities (www.soilsafe.auckland.ac.nz). She has research interests in food and soil politics, science and technology studies (STS), theory of care, diverse economies, and community engagement.

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McClintock, Nathan. 2010. ‘Why Farm the City? Theorizing Urban Agriculture through a Lens of Metabolic Rift’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3(2): 191–207. McGinn, Colin. 2011. The Meaning of Disgust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meulemans, Germain. 2020. ‘Wormy Collaborations in Practices of Soil Construction’, Theory, Culture & Society 37(1): 93–112. Pai, Shantanu, Ning Ai and Junjun Zheng. 2019. ‘Decentralized Community Composting Feasibility Analysis for Residential Food Waste: A Chicago Case Study’, Sustainable Cities and Society 50: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2019.101683. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2015. ‘Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care’, Social Studies of Science 45(5): 691–716. ———. 2019. ‘Re-animating Soils: Transforming Human–Soil Affections through Science, Culture and Community’, The Sociological Review 67(2): 391–407. Reñosa, Mark Donald C. et al. 2021. ‘Selfie Consents, Remote Rapport, and Zoom Debriefings: Collecting Qualitative Data Amid a Pandemic in Four ResourceConstrained Settings’, BMJ Global Health 6: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ bmjgh-2020-004193. Rhodes, Christopher J. 2015. ‘Fossil Fuel Use is Limited by Climate, if Not by Resources, and “Peak Soil”’, Science Progress 98(1): 73–82. Richter, Daniel, et al. 2015. ‘Soil in the Anthropocene’, IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science 25(1): https://doi:10.1088/1755-1315/25/1/012010. Sanzo, Kameron. 2018. ‘New Materialism(s): Genealogy of the Posthuman’. Retrieved 14 June 2022 from www.criticalposthumanism.net/new-materialisms. Sharp, Emma L. 2018. ‘Enacting Other Foodworlds: Affective Food Initiatives Performing a Care-full Politics of Difference’. PhD thesis, University of Auckland/Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand. Sharp, Emma L., et al. 2021. ‘Less Food Wasted? Changes to New Zealanders’ Household Food Waste and Related Behaviours due to the 2020 Covid-19 Lockdown’, Sustainability 13(18): https://doi.org/10.3390/su131810006. Turner, Bethaney. 2014. ‘Food Waste, Intimacy and Compost: The Stirrings of a New Ecology’, Scan (Sydney) 11(1): 1–11. ———. 2019. ‘Playing with Food Waste: Experimenting with Ethical Entanglements in the Anthropocene’, Policy Futures in Education 17(7): 770–84.

deú CHAPTER 9

Caring for Foxes at a London Allotment Tales from a Contested Interspecies Playground Jan van Duppen

Allotment gardener Jasna depicts long-term engagements between her fellow allotment gardeners and foxes, which to her were unexpected: [Y]ears ago, when I first started seeing foxes here, I thought that the blokes here would shoot them, or kill them, or something like that. And I found that completely the opposite was true. And . . . at one stage, when the fox had mange, Paul brought some antibiotics up and crushed them into some dog food and fed the fox antibiotics until the mange went away! All of them, especially the Greeks up here, the ones that I know, they feed it. They like it. They really like it. And they take care of it, which I think is nice.

Using Donna Haraway’s vocabulary, I recognize in these patterns of relations between humans and more-than-humans a ‘becoming with’ (Haraway 2008: 25) in the situated naturecultures of the allotment site. In recurring encounters with foxes, these allotment gardeners bring unexpected relationships between species into being in this urban space. In this chapter, I tell a few tales of human–animal encounters at an allotment garden in North London that help to challenge binary conceptions of nature and culture, wild and domesticated, play and work. I discuss current debates on the posthuman and multispecies entanglements, and bring these into conversation with the idea of care and care giving. Rather than resolving or smoothening out contradictions and tensions, this discussion will try to embrace the ‘ambivalent grounds’ of care, as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 12) puts it.

Caring for Foxes at a London Allotment

Illustration 9.1. Allotment gardener fox encounter. © Jan van Duppen.

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The material presented in this chapter is the result of an ethnography (from 2012 to 2017) of an allotment site situated in London’s public transport Zone 3, which is an ethnically diverse working-class neighbourhood that also has pockets of middle-class property owners. I conducted participant observation of and go-along interviews with allotment gardeners, and I also incorporated photography into my fieldwork (van Duppen 2020). I am telling the tales of foxes and allotment gardeners encountering each other through a series of vignettes, quotations from conversations with gardeners and images made during the fieldwork. I understand these materials as ‘fragments’ that allow me to piece together a partial account of multispecies entanglements at an allotment garden.

Questioning Definite Human–Animal Boundaries in Gardens Within this section of reconnecting to urban natures, this chapter looks in particular at human–animal relations, and aims to denaturalize dominant ways of seeing and scaling foxes. In the introduction of the Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, the editors critique the Western cultural imaginary of human–animal relations, which ‘has primarily been one of definite borders, distancing and denial’. They, instead, plea to reframe and denaturalize dominant ways of seeing and scaling animals, and to bring ‘into focus kinships, stories, affects and dependencies that may otherwise be elided’ (Turner, Sellbach and Broglio 2019: 2). Telling the tales of allotment gardeners’ encounters with foxes contribute to this wider scholarly project of questioning human–animal definite borders, distancing and denial. This relational thinking is woven into Donna Haraway’s (2008) When Species Meet, which evokes her complex, affective interactions with her dog. She proposes that these encounters be understood as taking place in situated naturecultures, ‘in which all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages, both before and lateral to this encounter’ (Haraway 2008: 25). This understanding of naturecultures, in which all actors become who they are in the dance of relating, presents the challenge of doing geography differently – conducting research that works with these more-thanhuman agencies, that performs a sensitivity towards these other forces at play (Dowling, Lloyd and Suchet-Pearson 2016: 2). Recent studies on animals’ atmospheres (Lorimer, Hodgetts and Barua 2017), multispecies childhoods (Hohti and Tammi 2019), feral cats (Van Patter and Hovorka 2017), flourishing with awkward creatures (Ginn, Beisel and

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Barua 2014), interspecies park life and cows (Knudsen, Stage and Zandersen 2022) and etho-ethnographic fables on human–animal kinship (Vannini and Vannini 2020) demonstrate an attentiveness towards the complexity of human–animal relations, and a creative thinking with multispecies that informs this chapter. Following on, to better understand practices of care in more-thanhuman entanglements, I turn to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s book Matters of Care, which works with Joan Tronto’s conception of care as ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex life-sustaining web’ (Tronto 1993: 103). Puig de la Bellacasa develops Tronto’s understanding of care by bringing it into conversations with Haraway’s work on naturecultures and situated knowledges. Puig asks the question: ‘What does caring mean when we go about thinking and living interdependently with beings other than human, in “more-than-human” worlds?’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 13). She discusses ‘three dimensions of care – labour/work, affect/affections, ethics/ politics’, and argues that these do not ‘sit together without tensions [or] contradictions’ (ibid.: 5). This notion of the ambivalent grounds of care informs my discussion on fox–human encounters; which in turn engages in ongoing debates on therapeutic landscapes and animal farms (Gorman 2017), and the questioning of care in more-than-human communities (Pitt 2017). Additionally, Mark Bhatti et al.’s (2009) research on private gardens suggested that cultivating the garden can be transformed into cultivating the self and cultivating relationships with friends, family and nonhumans. In my work, I extend this notion to public gardens.

The Elusive Figure of the Urban Fox The urban fox appears to be an elusive figure in the public imagination; a wild animal that roams around freely in the city. In cultural depictions of the fox, it is often portrayed as a ‘trickster’, a social disrupter (Wallen 2006). In their detailed study of the media coverage of a ‘fox attack’ on twin babies in North London in 2010, Angela Cassidy and Brett Mills analyse the intense tone of shock, surprise and fear emanating from the newspaper reports, television documentaries and commentary pieces. They analyse the public outrage around the ‘fox attack’ as a series of breaches of the ‘societal boundaries’ in between ‘humans, animals and “nature”’ (Cassidy and Mills 2012: 499). These authors also discuss the figure of the urban fox as sitting in-between wolves and dogs on a

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continuum of wildness, ownership and controllability. What is more, the foxes have a particular contested role in British society, as the rural foxes are bound up with historical hunting practices. A counterpoint to the urban fox as social disrupter and potentially dangerous city species is depicted in the novel Happiness by Aminatta Forna (2018), in which the main character ‘Jean’, an American scientist, moves to London. Commissioned by a local authority, she studies the behaviour of a neighbourhood’s fox population. Finding her way in this new city, and building new relationships out of chance encounters, she forges an informal collective of fox spotters. West African immigrants working as security guards, hotel doormen and traffic wardens help her to map the movements of foxes through the day and night. Instead of ‘distancing from’, the story that unfolds is one of nurturing an attentiveness towards the more-than-human city. Moreover, the fox spotting brings a disparate group of strangers together, forming a new collective. In other words, human and fox lives become interwoven in a complex web of coexistence in the London suburbs, and the novel thereby offers an alternative cultural interpretation of human–fox relationships. The following ethnographic accounts cannot easily be mapped onto these two diverging cultural interpretations of the urban fox. Instead, they further complicate the picture and open up new ways of thinking and living with foxes in cities, whilst embracing their elusiveness.

Illustration 9.2. Fox passing by. © Jan van Duppen.

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A Playful ‘Becoming with’ The sense of cultivating the garden and at the same time cultivating relationships with the self and foxes is evoked in the following vignette about allotment gardener Pete: It is February, a winter morning at the allotment site. Whilst Pete and I chat about the poor weather of the last few weeks, a fox approaches us. Pete is excited. He plays with the fox and uses his black textile bag to interact with it, waving it from left to right, trying to encourage the fox to come closer. The fox looks and comes a bit closer, but stays some distance away. I am moved by this scene of familiarity between the fox and Pete. At 95, Pete is the oldest allotment holder on site, and he has cultivated his two plots ever since he retired at the age of 64. It’s an occupation for him: ‘You can’t do nothing; you’ve got to do something’. He is a widower, and he used to have five brothers. Each morning he comes to the allotment site on the W4 bus, and as soon as he gets close to his plot the fox approaches him. Pete usually feeds the fox leftovers from the meat he ate the day before: maybe chicken, beef, liver, sausages or pork pies. According to Pete, the fox only eats part of the meat straightaway, burying the rest in small holes spread over the allotment site. In times of hunger, the fox will dig these pieces up and eat them. When he brought in four pork pies, Pete told me: ‘And he knows I’ve got four for him. The fox can only take two pies in his mouth. So, when I put the two pies on the ground, he picks them up and then returns, because he knows there’s more coming’. This illustrates that the fox and Pete have become attuned to each other, that they’re sustaining some sort of relationship. Pete cares for the fox, and the fox can often be found close to Pete, sitting next to him when he’s working the plot – as allotment gardener Ben told me. The sense of care-taking maybe comes across most strongly in Pete’s act of feeding liver to the fox, to which he had added antibiotics, ‘to keep him fit’. By giving the fox medicine, Pete expresses concern for the fox’s health, but he actually disturbs the fox’s well-being because the animal is not used to receiving such drugs. Sometimes though, the fox does not turn up, and Pete is left with the food in his bag. He wonders where the fox is, and whether he’s fighting with some other foxes somewhere. One day when I met Pete he had a bag full of sausages, but no fox appeared – I sensed a sadness in his voice.

My fieldwork suggests that for older men like Pete the regular rhythm of cultivating their allotment plots is tied up with taking care of a particular fox, which brings them a purpose in life, a certain kind of joy, but sometimes also sadness. Feeding foxes contradicts their interest in producing vegetables and fruit because the ongoing presence of foxes on

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site can actually affect the growth of the plants, as fox excrement can stunt plant growth. Moreover, foxes burying the abundant meat that is being fed to them might be detrimental to the soil that the vegetables and fruit grow in, and furthermore decrease the foxes’ appetite for hunting rodents, which would be beneficial for the garden. Hence, these care-taking encounters with foxes are irrational in terms of going against the gardeners’ own allotment practices – demonstrating a playful mode that defies instrumental thinking and action (Huizinga 1971). These unexpected social relations developed between the supposedly wild fox and humans can thus be qualified as playful, as they are irrational in terms of producing fruit and vegetables, and also undermine the boundaries between the ‘wild’ animal and humans. Foxes do not ‘need’ to be fed as if they are pets, but these allotment gardeners challenge these conventions. For all these reasons, I understand these encounters of care-taking as a site of play, and see this pattern of ‘becoming with’ foxes at the allotment site as a form of play. At the same time though, these practices of feeding foxes and interacting with them can be understood as rational and instrumental, as they cultivate a social relationship between the gardeners and the foxes that is enjoyed by the older allotment holders, and probably helps them to deal with loneliness. These paradoxical relations between play and work are further exemplified by the care-work enacted in these interactions between humans and more-than-humans: it requires effort and determination to cook and bring food to the allotment site every day. The vignette on Pete also indicates that playful encounters can be tinged with sadness if the care-work invested in cultivating the relationship is not reciprocated by the wild animal. This brings to the fore that the allotment gardener’s play is not necessarily also the fox’s play, and it is these conflicting interpretations of play that I explore further in the next tales of human–animal entanglements.

Cohabiting, ‘Distancing from’ and Contesting Gardeners continuously negotiate the density and diversity of urban space, and while this condition of ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey 2005) offers possibilities for surprise and play, it also involves risk. This builds upon Sara Ahmed’s (2000) conception of encounters as involving conflict, and it argues that interpretations of play can differ, meaning that encountering someone else’s play can be irritating, upsetting and conflictual. Some allotment gardeners cultivate socialities with foxes on site. While for these older men these care-taking encounters are a playful dance of re-

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lating with more-than-humans, other allotment gardeners can get mildly irritated or even very upset with this particular kind of play with foxes. Many foxes co-inhabit this rather large allotment site with other species, and their inhabitation leaves traces such as trampled seedlings as they sleep inside the warm net tunnels, dig holes, or look for mice under the canvas. Another trace that foxes leave is excrement, and many plot holders mention finding it on their beds. Robert comments that he occasionally finds himself cursing due to ‘having to clear up a pile of droppings or cover up a newly planted patch Illustration 9.3. Allotment gardener of something because it was dug self-portrait with fox. Photograph by over or sat on’. Unsurprisingly, research participant. gardeners do not experience having to clear fox excrement from their patches as the most pleasant part of allotment gardening, nor do they much welcome finding small seedlings squashed because a fox has used a plot to sleep in. Although most allotment gardeners are not disturbed by the presence of foxes on site, this certainly does not ring true for allotment gardeners Maria and Sue. The latter recalled an encounter with a fox that really scared her. It had looked at her with a slightly twisted mouth, and when she threw it a chocolate cookie, it took it from the ground and walked away. She could hear the fox chewing it among the trees, and she felt uncomfortable because there was no one else around at the site. Maria is uncomfortable with the foxes for other reasons, being very upset about them trampling on her plants, digging up her potatoes, and leaving their excrement on the raised beds. She goes on to say that she disapproves of people feeding the foxes because they become ‘too tame’ and ‘lazy’, and so ‘do not go after rats’. She cries out: ‘The most horrible thing in your life . . . foxes!’ To her, gardening with foxes is ‘a battle – it’s a battle. They cost me over a hundred pounds a year, just to put stuff down to keep them away’. The stuff she uses is not a chemical, she explains: ‘I would not hurt the animals. I would not. I’m organic really’. Maria thus con-

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tests the other allotment gardeners’ play with foxes, and her disapproval of fox feeding is shared by other allotment holders. Darren and Jim, for example, are also convinced that feeding them lessens their appetite for hunting rodents. In their view, foxes could help to keep the population of mice and rats down. In short, encounters with foxes and the traces they leave are not appreciated by all allotment holders. On the contrary, some gardeners are scared of them, while others make a lot of effort to prevent them from getting close to their plants. Like humans, more-than-humans can also play (Huizinga 1971; Haraway 2008), and it is this fox play that occasionally disturbs the growth of plants at the allotment – as illustrated by the following vignette: Luca, an old allotment holder with an Italian background, showed me his plot one day in May. In between the dense bed of artichoke plants, some greasy plastic packaging from a fried chicken shop, some big pieces of paper and a plastic bag have been dropped randomly in between the crops. Moreover, several of the plants have been trampled on and left bowed, cracked and with broken leaves. Luca says that this is the result of young foxes playing, saying, ‘you can’t do [anything] about the animals’. He is unhappy with the damage, but he accepts that he shares the space with the foxes. Luca sees the foxes regularly, and he points out that their nest is just next to the fence, outside the allotment site. He claims that there are two fox families living underground, with many young foxes. Luca has cultivated his artichokes with much care, yet their growth has been disturbed by the young foxes playing on and around his plants.

Although he is upset about the damage to his plants, Luca expresses that it is beyond his control to do anything about it, and so he is not too disturbed. However, this vignette does show that the play of one species is not necessarily that of another.

Troubling Play and Care The encounters taking place between allotment gardeners and foxes do not take place in a societal vacuum, and so should be understood within the wider social and cultural context. As Sara Ahmed notes in Strange Encounters (2000: 9), the particular encounter ‘always carries traces’ of broader relationships of power and antagonism, yet this does not predetermine the encounter, as the meeting between subjects contains the possibility for a reframing of identities. Returning to the observations of allotment gardener Jasna at the beginning of this chapter, she mentioned that she initially expected the foxes on site to be shot by male

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allotment gardeners, yet to her surprise these men approached foxes and took care of them. Her account contains an implicit reference to fox hunting in the British countryside, which influenced her initial expectations of what kind of human–animal relationships would be unfolding around her. Cassidy and Mills, in this respect, argue that the figure of the urban fox troubles the ‘natural-ness’ of human–nonhuman boundaries ‘in blithely wandering from the countryside to the city, from the city to the street, and from the street to the home, it highlights the constructed nature of the boundaries we draw to assert human identity’ (Cassidy and Mills 2012: 505). Yet, the human–animal encounters that I analyse in this chapter should be seen in contrast to the moral panic of the boundary-breaching foxes that Cassidy and Mills discuss. In this ethnographic material, I detect a different quality of boundary-breaching in which there is a degree of a mutuality in the boundary crossing. Although only a small aside in their paper, Cassidy and Mills seem to have a narrow reading of Haraway’s 2008 work as they limit her study to dog–human relationships, whereas Haraway’s writings on companion species aims to open up binary conceptions, and think through multispecies relations, not just those developed with dogs. I do however recognize that a ‘becoming with’ foxes is not without its risks, as this is still an animal that cannot be fully domesticated. Here then we explore the edges of what can be a possible companion species in the city. The fox–human tales told in this chapter have described encounters of contestation between the playfulness enacted between some allotment holders and foxes on the one hand, and the gardening practices of other allotment holders on the other. Feeding foxes makes them return to the allotment site more frequently, and consequently they take naps on recently planted seedlings, leave excrement on growing salad and bury meat in the soil where tomato plants are growing. Furthermore, when foxes are being fed, they are presumably less inclined to hunt for rodents at the allotment site, and some allotment gardeners regret the foxes’ decreased appetite. Encounters between humans and more-than-humans can thus involve contestation. The ways in which gardeners respond to the ‘throwntogetherness’ of urban spaces differ, with some using multiple strategies to deter foxes from inhabiting their allotment plot, enacting a mode of distancing. Another mode of multispecies entanglements is that of cohabitation. Allotment gardeners speak of an acceptance that the foxes are part of this space. There is an understanding of coexistence – not always in harmony, but not acrimonious either. This negotiating of proximity is also apparent in the conflict between foxes’ play and the ‘play’ space of the allotment gardener. The young foxes run amok in a field of artichoke plants, which intersects and conflicts

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with the space where the gardener grows vegetables for pleasure. Observing the young foxes play troubles ‘the assumption that creative play is unique to human life and distinct from the realms of instinct and nature’ (Turner, Sellbach and Broglio 2019: 5). Furthermore, these findings demonstrate that both humans and more-than-humans can have different interpretations of play, and that these can conflict. These men caring for foxes are resisting ‘practices of policing human/ animal and human/nature boundaries’, and the vignettes discussed here break down the ‘dichotomous representations’ of foxes as dangerous and wild (Cassidy and Mills 2012: 504). In these encounters I identify playfulness as a disposition. Foxes cannot be fully domesticated, they remain wild, yet they are in the city. There is a risk involved in the encounters with foxes at the allotment site. These elderly men are testing the boundaries: Can I invite the fox to eat a biscuit from my hand? Will the fox turn up every day if I bring cooked meat for it? These allotment gardeners cannot be entirely sure how the fox will react, how it will respond, yet despite being aware of this uncertainty they continue to engage with the foxes. It resonates with Haraway’s understanding that play is key to ‘new kinds of communities and worldlings that refuse the species boundary’ (Vint 2019: 494). I identify in these human–animal encounters a playful mode of engaging, an openness towards its contingencies. Rather than trying to resist or avoid the unexpected, the gardeners open up and engage with more-than human others, a playful ‘becoming with’. At the same time, however, these social relations require care-work, and these gestures of reaching out are sometimes tainted with sadness, as they are not always reciprocated. In this respect, Puig de la Bellacasa suggests that care is ‘rarely bilateral; the living web of care is not maintained by individuals giving and receiving back again but by a collective disseminated force’. She goes on that in sustaining more-than-human worlds ‘care is a force distributed across a multiplicity of agencies and materials, and supports our worlds as [a] thick mesh of relational obligation’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 20). This raises the question of who is considered to be part of the ‘community’, and whether its edges are opened up or contained. For instance, there is a contrast between Paul the site secretary and the older male allotment holders like Pete in their practices of feeding and medicating foxes. The former understands ecology as something that can be controlled and managed, whereas some of the older allotment holders approach it more as a limited one-to-one relationship and seem less concerned with the wider community. The feeding of cooked meat to foxes, and medicating them with antibiotics, then seems to lack a ‘commitment to the larger ecology of diverse animal–

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environment, nature–culture entanglements’ (Turner et al. 2019: 7). It speaks of an ‘anthropocentric focus’, only the scale perceptible to the human eye seems to be catered for, the domination of the ‘visible’. The application of antibiotics kills as much as it might nurture, attacking the microbes in the body of the fox, but these antibiotics might also leak into the soil. In the process of containing contamination by medicating mange, in effect the wider web of more-than-human entanglements gets contaminated. Moreover, it might actually be detrimental to the fox itself. Yet, the intention of this allotment holder is to keep his fox companion strong and healthy. This is an example that further troubles the notion of care at the allotment site. To trouble the notions of care and play further, human–animal relationships developed at the allotment site are predominantly between elderly male allotment gardeners and foxes. In other words, ‘taking care of foxes’ is a gendered practice here, as the older male allotment holders, being retired, are able to spend by far the most time at the allotment garden site. These men come to the allotment every day, and spend a considerable amount of time there. In this particular case study, the group was not only elderly but predominantly male. The gender picture is more mixed when looking at younger age groups. But as older male allotment gardeners can spend more time at the site they have more chance to encounter foxes, especially as the foxes tend to move about more freely when it is quieter at the allotment site, which is normally during the working week and during the day. There seems to be another layer to this gendered practice of seeking contact with the foxes, as it appears to be informed by a desire for companionship. However, whilst finding solace in taking care of foxes, these human–animal interactions could be qualified as rather careless in respect to the wider natureculture of the allotment site. The feeding of the foxes for the ‘selfish’ pleasure of interacting with them goes at the expense of the wider interrelations between humans, animals and plants at the site, as it affects the fox’s capacity and role within the local ecosystem of keeping the rodent population in check; and, as noted above, the act of medicating foxes might be detrimental to the complex web of interdependencies between humans and more-than-humans.

Conclusion To conclude, this chapter’s analysis of newspaper reports of a fox attack, the novel’s depiction of fox spotting that brings a disparate group of strangers together, and the discussed ethnographic material, brings

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into focus a contradictory picture of human–animal entanglements in London. Allotment gardeners’ practices of care challenge binary conceptions of human/animal, nature/culture, and play/work. Telling these tales opens up new ways of thinking about the multispecies city as a space that allows for a playful ‘becoming with’ that reimagines the allotment garden as a contested interspecies playground. Rather than seeing allotments as spaces of rational recreation for humans or as productive food landscapes, this ethnography provokes us to think of allotments as sites of human and more-than-human play. This study of encounters between foxes and gardeners, then, goes against the grain of relations of rationality and productivity, and demonstrates the importance of play in reconnecting to ‘nature’.

Jan van Duppen is a Humboldt Foundation research fellow at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. He is interested in gardening and its more-than-human geographies, play and work, and visual methods. He published ‘Seeing Patterns on the Ground’ (2020, Open Arts Journal). He holds a PhD from the Open University.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Routledge. Bhatti, Mark, et al. 2009. ‘“I Love Being in the Garden”: Enchanting Encounters in Everyday Life’, Social & Cultural Geography 10(1): 61–76. Cassidy, Angela, and Brett Mills. 2012. ‘“Fox Tots Attack Shock”: Urban Foxes, Mass Media and Boundary-Breaching’, Environmental Communication 6(4): 494–511. Dowling, Robyn, Kate Lloyd and Sandra Suchet-Pearson. 2016. ‘Qualitative Methods II: More-than-Human Methodologies and/in Praxis’, Progress in Human Geography 41(6): 823–31. Forna, Aminatta. 2018. Happiness. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Ginn, Franklin, Uli Beisel and Maan Barua. 2014. ‘Flourishing with Awkward Creatures: Togetherness, Vulnerability, Killing’, Environmental Humanities 4(April): 113–23. Gorman, Richard. 2017. ‘Therapeutic Landscapes and Non-human Animals: The Roles and Contested Positions of Animals within Care Farming Assemblages’, Social & Cultural Geography 18(3): 315–35. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hohti, Riikka, and Tuure Tammi. 2019. ‘The Greenhouse Effect: Multispecies Childhood and Non-innocent Relations of Care’, Childhood 26(2): 169–85.

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Huizinga, Johan. 1971. Homo ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in our Culture. Reprint from 1955 paperback edition. Originally published in 1938 in Dutch. Boston: Beacon Press. Knudsen, Britta Timm, Carsten Stage and Marianne Zandersen. 2022. ‘Interspecies Park Life: Participatory Experiments and Micro-Utopian Landscaping to Increase Urban Biodiverse Entanglement’, Space and Culture 25(4): 720–42. Lorimer, Jamie, Timothy Hodgetts and Maan Barua. 2017. ‘Animals’ Atmospheres’, Progress in Human Geography 43(1): 26–45. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage Publications. Pitt, Hannah. 2017. ‘Questioning Care Cultivated through Connecting with Morethan-Human Communities’, Social & Cultural Geography 19(2): 253–74. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More-thanHuman Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Turner, Lynn, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio. 2019. ‘Introducing The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies’, in Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach, and Ron Broglio (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–12. van Duppen, Jan. 2020. ‘Seeing Patterns on the Ground: Reflections on Field-based Photography’, Open Arts Journal 9(Winter): 71–90. Vannini, Philip, and April Vannini. 2020. ‘What Could Wild Life Be? Etho-ethnographic Fables on Human–Animal Kinship’, GeoHumanities 6(1): 122–38. Van Patter, Lauren E., and Alice J. Hovorka. 2017. ‘“Of Place” or “of People”: Exploring the Animal Spaces and Beastly Places of Feral Cats in Southern Ontario’, Social & Cultural Geography 19(2): 275–95. Vint, Sheryl. 2019. ‘Science Fiction’, in Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 488–503. Wallen, Martin. 2006. Fox. London: Reaktion Books.

deú CHAPTER 10

Relational Growing Reimagining Contemporary Aboriginal Agriculture in Colonialized Cityscapes Dominique Chen

Introduction Contemporary Aboriginal food growing and procuring systems and practices are a continuation of over 120,000 years of Aboriginal occupation and cultural practice within the Australian continent (Bowler et al. 2018). Stories within many of our communities place us here since time immemorial. When British colonists arrived on Aboriginal lands, from as long ago as 230 years to as recently as 38 years ago (Mahony 2014), they brought with them many things: feral animals and plants, diseases, ideas of law and ownership, violence and a disregard for the original inhabitants – both human and more-than-human. Along with the destruction of fertile and balanced ecologies and the denuding of the landscape, this process of translocation also saw the overwriting and silencing of Aboriginal peoples’ existence, including the vast, sophisticated and interconnected food growing systems that spanned the entire continent (Gerritsen 2008; Gammage 2011; Pascoe 2014). Aboriginal authors, such as Yuin and Bunurong man Bruce Pascoe (2014), have only very recently promoted the idea of Aboriginal peoples’ advanced and regenerative agricultural practices, which is in contrast to many popular and academic discourses that have continued to debase, deny or misunderstand these systems and practices. Goenpul academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015), Christopher Mayes (2018) and others explain this silencing as a continued means of justifying illegal colonial occupation and control of land based on terra nullius – a Latin term meaning ‘land belonging to no one’. Despite this critical analysis,

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little focus has been given to the continued application of cultural food systems and practices in the urban environment, by and for Aboriginal people. This chapter looks to bring further focus and understanding to an underresearched area, and one with a particular absence of Indigenous perspectives that are underpinned by relational practices and positionalities. It draws on relevant research across the disciplines of Indigenous studies, art theory, and urban studies. In addition, it will be backgrounded by my own understanding and experiences as a Gamilaroi First Nations woman – the first generation of my Aboriginal family to be raised almost entirely away from our ancestral homelands, on Yugarra and Turrbal Country, in an inner-city suburb of Meanjin/Brisbane, on Australia’s east coast. The chapter will explore some of the relevant social, political and cultural realities for Indigenous peoples living within urban environments. It will contextualize customary Aboriginal food systems in general, and highlight the value of creative relational practices in responding to the urban context by providing an agentive methodology through which food-related cultural knowledges and systems can be re-emplaced. I use the term ‘relational’ here as a kind of culturally relevant, interconnected thinking and collaboration that reinforces kinship and relatedness (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003), facilitates material connection and embodiment (Martin 2013), assists knowledge transference (Reser et al. 2021) and reasserts connections to place (Cumpston and Beer 2019). After providing background context, the chapter will identify and explore the potential of creative relationality within two practice-led case studies: a bushfoods workshop on an inner-city permaculture farm; and a visual art project centred around bushfood knowledges in the greater Brisbane region.

The Urban Context In 2016, as many as 81 per cent of the Indigenous population of Australia (around 3.3 per cent of the total Australian population) were recorded as living in cities and non-remote areas, with a continuing upward trend of migration towards urban locales (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] 2016). Population surveys also highlight that a majority of Indigenous people within these areas are not living on their ancestral homelands, which is consistent with figures that show only around 27 per cent of Indigenous peoples across all regions live on Country1 (ABS 2019). This settler colonialism-induced diaspora is significant in regard to connection and cultural continuity, as within Aboriginal cultural contexts a relational connection and belonging to one’s Country underpins

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all aspects of cultural life, epistemology, ontology and identity. Indigenous authors such as Bronwyn L. Fredericks (2013) and Larissa Behrendt (2005) argue for the normalization of Indigenous belonging within the milieu of the urban, despite the diasporic nature of connection. Both highlight the urban as a site of new-found connection at both a community and an individual level. As Berendt states, ‘wherever we have lived there is a newer imprint and history, one that is meaningful and creates a sense of belonging within Aboriginal communities that have formed in urban areas’ (2005: 2). Authors such as Kay J. Anderson (1993) and Sylvia Kleinert and Grace Koch (2012) add to this argument with examples of nationally significant social and political movements that have solidified Aboriginal emplacement in urban environments, and shaped urban identities and discourses. Despite these social and political efforts and positionings of connectedness, the broader reality for Aboriginal peoples within the urban is that there remains limited opportunity for stakeholdership, autonomous control or determination of urban spaces. For example, the 1993 Native Title Act, a piece of Australian Government legislation that looked to overturn the perceived non-existence of Aboriginal peoples’ connection to the land prior to colonization and to establish some level of land access and management provision for Traditional Owners, is almost impossible to apply to greater metropolitan areas. The 1993 Native Title Act cannot be applied to private freehold land, leasehold land, land for public works or other types of land tenures that make up a majority of the urban built environment. This is in stark contrast to the application of Native Title, Land Rights and other Indigenous Land Use agreements in the less developed and so-called ‘unused’ spaces of national parks and nature reserves, which have more recently incorporated a degree of Indigenous consultation within their management by government departments. A critical researcher in the field of urban environments, Libby Porter, attests that the recent shift towards Indigenous participation in Australian land tenure and management has ‘barely touched urban Australia’, and that ‘public and policy discussion about the future of urban Australia is framed as if Indigenous people were not present, and as if cities were not built on Aboriginal land’ (Porter 2016, para. 2; see also Wensing and Porter 2015). Through the one-sided application of colonial ideals embedded in urban planning, property rights and land division and use, for example, Indigenous perspectives and ways of being – including the application of urban food growing – are continually overshadowed, limited and/or replaced by colonial political and economic order (Wolfe 2006; Cavanagh and Veracini 2013).

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This lack of policy recognition reflects commonly held, mainstream preconceptions that ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ Aboriginal people live in remote areas, not the urban spaces of cities and large towns (Fredericks 2008; Fredericks, Leitch and Barty 2008). Indigenous ‘invisibility’ within the urban not only limits the available government and public funding or support for urban food growing initiatives, but also coincides with what Emily Brand, Chelsea Bond and Cindy Shannon (2016) refer to as a ‘mainstreaming’ of urban Indigenous issues and services. While this argument was made in relation to Indigenous health, it contextualizes the way in which many current applications of urban Aboriginal food systems and practices have been mainstreamed into Western models of agriculture, such as the introduction of native food and medicine plants in Western-styled and operated ‘community gardens’, or larger systems of monocultural growing and commodification. Revealingly, while the bushfoods industry in Australia is estimated to be worth around $20 million, Indigenous peoples’ participation is estimated to be only 1 per cent (Higgins 2019). As such, the urban provides a challenging ideological space from which urban Aboriginal food growing needs to emerge – and be viewed in its own right – as an extension of ancient, relational systems and practices in the physically changed, transcultural spaces of the urban environment.

Relational Growing Aboriginal food systems prior to colonization were a functional part of a holistic understanding of, and caring for Country, through the management of larger interconnected ecosystems spanning the entire continent. These management practices included the sharing of resources, and the strategic and responsive application of fire, as well as the use of native grasses, seasonal hunting, collecting and other practices to manage animal and plant populations on a broader scale (Gammage 2011; Pascoe 2014; Steffensen 2020). Importantly, land management and food growing happened in collaboration between nations and tribal groups through foodways and trade routes that criss-crossed the entire country. All these aspects were inseparable from, and supported by, Aboriginal peoples’ relational kinship systems and obligations between humans and more-than-humans, dreaming tracks, songlines, and performative, creative practices such as dance, story, song and mark-making. Despite the violence of settler colonialism enacted upon both Aboriginal people and the landscape, and the disruption or displacement of these systems and practices, many still exist today. However, the question remains,

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how can urban spaces, which have altered the physical, cultural and ecological landscape, and which provide little autonomy or visibility for Aboriginal peoples, be the locus for continued, cultural food growing systems and practices? In correspondence with a friend and fellow urban-based, Gamilaroi yinarr/woman living away from Country about two medicinal uraah/ eremophila saplings in her backyard that have withstood various mowing accidents and the poor-quality soils of her small rental property, she expressed their presence as her daily connection to Country and healing. For me, this reflected how our relationships to our plants, to our Country and to our community – and our obligations to care for them – is untouched and eternal, even within the changed spaces of the urban. It also highlighted the fundamental aspects of all Aboriginal peoples’ ‘relational existence’ – that is, an ontological positioning of ‘living relatedness’, or an existence made possible only through our active and participatory relationships with people, place and Country (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003). Many authors have spoken to relationality within an Australian Indigenous context (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003; Martin 2013; Williams et al. 2018; Brigg, Graham and Weber 2021), although very few have applied and or researched its methodological potential specifically within an urban food growing and procuring context. This contrasts with recent scholarship speaking to Indigenous, relational food practices in North America and Aotearoa, for example (Poe et al. 2014; Manson 2015; Reid and Rout 2016). The term ‘relational’ can and has been used in a variety of contexts and disciplines. While I apply it here to food-related practices, I borrow some of its meaning from within a participatory, creative practice akin to established notions of socially engaged art (Springgay 2011), relational aesthetics (Downey 2007; Ali 2020) and methexical praxis (Martin 2013). While these constructs are predominantly written from Western academic paradigms, I use them consciously to more easily capture and translate – but not reduce or misrepresent – the foundational aspects of Indigenous customary culture and cultural practices as being inseparable from relational, creative and artistic ontologies (Clothilde Bullen in Baum 2017). I also use these creative contexts to generalize the experience of relationality across various Aboriginal cultural groups and individuals, acknowledging the diversity of experiences and cultural connections, particularly within the milieu of the urban. A creative, relational practice will be explored in the following two case studies. Many aspects will be explicit, however it is important first to outline some general aspects of relational practice and its function.

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Firstly, as mentioned, relationality underpins Aboriginal cultural ontologies – or ways of knowing, being and doing. So, in the ‘doing’ of relational practice, such as the making and strengthening of connections between people, place and the more-than-human, we are methodologically asserting and reinstating culture, regardless of the physical expression or outcome. Cultural relationality operates beyond superficial or visual expression, such as one’s appearance, and the adoption of Western material culture. Relationality is also an acknowledgement of interconnected thinking and collaboration (Graham 1999; Martin 2013), reinforcing Aboriginal food systems based on kinship and relatedness – a framework that can help to mend the gaps of colonial fragmentation, loss and/or disruption of cultural knowledge. As an extension of this idea, Muruwari, Bundjalung and Kamilaroi academic Brian Martin articulates that the relational engagement with materials and objects can be a means through which the doer can embody or ‘become’ the materials themselves (Martin 2013). Aboriginal people can reinstate spiritual and totemic connections to plants, foods and medicines as embodiments of Country, where those deep empathetic links have been severed or forgotten. Lastly, a creative, relational practice is significant as a means through which to learn and share knowledge. This kind of multidimensional and multidisciplinary pedagogy, used by Aboriginal people and communities to carry and relate knowledge over millennia, is proven to be extremely effective to retain information and apply in dynamic contexts (Reser et al. 2021). Art theorist Jacques Rancière also highlights the potential of the relational in knowledge transference, in that such happenings involve a ‘community of narrators and translators’ who are active in engaging with a dialogue from which they can access and internalize critical and experiential wealth (Rancière 2009: 22). Thus, relational practice not only transfers information, but can make information personal and meaningful.

Case Studies Foodways, Our Ways, Always: First Nations Urban Food Growing and Food Usage Workshop In early autumn 2021, I helped to facilitate a First Nations bushfoods workshop in conjunction with Northey Street City Farm (NSCF), as part of my PhD research into contemporary, urban-based cultural food growing. NSCF is Brisbane city’s first community garden, created in 1994, and comprises approximately 2.4 hectares of council-owned land that has over time been revegetated with various edible and non-edible plants,

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including native foods and medicines. Most plants are rainforest species, or those found within subtropical climates similar to the Brisbane region, such as Aniseed and Lemon Myrtles, Lemon Aspen, Kangaroo Grass, Finger Limes, Sandpaper Figs and Davidson Plums. The original site for the farm was unvegetated, degraded land that had been vacant since major flooding in the area, and many native plants were planted within the last decade. The farm is leased and managed by a non-Indigenous, not-for-profit organization that opens the garden to staff, volunteers, allotment holders and participants in workshops and events (E. Brindal 2021, pers. comm., 16 April). The bushfoods workshop comprised three relational parts: a walking tour of the farm’s native food and medicine plants, in which participants could smell, touch and taste the plants as well as learn information about their cultivation and use; preparation of various bushfoods in modern cuisine with an opportunity to eat them during a shared lunch; and a seed-ball-making activity using gararr/Kangaroo Grass through which participants were able to reflect and distribute native grass seeds within their local communities after conclusion of the workshop. The ten participants were diverse in age and gender, and represented several different Aboriginal nations, including Yuggara, on whose Country the workshop took place. As the group moved through the farm on the walking tour, various individuals were able to share their own local information around particular plants. For example, the site contained a mature Bonye/Bunya tree, which is sacred to various groups such as the Jinibara and Kabi Kabi peoples. The Bonye was and is at the centre of a large cultural gathering that, for millennia, has coincided with the tree’s fruiting, and that sees groups from far-reaching parts of the country, including Gamilaroi people, coming together for feasting, marriage, trade and other cultural business. The opportunity to be in the presence of and to feel, smell and taste the nuts of the Bonye allowed individuals to have the space and provocation to share their personal and community connections to the gathering and to the tree. Discussions around the Bonye also included the way the presence of precolonial Bonye trees, and other tree species, can serve as markers for traditional walking paths, trade routes and foodways. This activity led to conversations around knowledges of precolonial, local food trees that were still existing on verges, near car parks or at the intersection of major roadways. Despite the landscape being so severely changed since colonization, relational connections such as these allowed the opportunity to piece back together and coalesce customary connections to ancestral Country with our new urban ‘homes’ on others’ Country. This type of knowledge mapping also redresses the invisibility of Aboriginal occupation and continued

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presence in the landscape, and the invisibility of food growing and sharing systems more generally. The sensory participation with various plants on the site also conjured personal memories – such as salt bush, which reminded one participant of her childhood garden and the way she and her family would use the salt bush to make medicinal balms. For me, many of the plants that I smelt and tasted for the first time also stirred a kind of bodily remembering – as if reconnecting with something genetically or culturally akin. Work around the connections between food, sensory experiences and memory have been undertaken by various scholars (Lupton 1994; Springgay 2011; Allen 2012). Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) in particular highlights the value of sensory or affective pedagogy, articulating that this type of relational engagement or ‘knowing’ – which, she argues, precedes intellectualized thought – provides an ‘anomalous place of learning’ in which both knowledge and knowing can be activated and transferred within a specific time and place-based context. The multimodal learning that unfolded during the walking tour was significant in reflecting the participatory learning pedagogies of Indigenous cultural contexts, where stories and events are attached to, in this case, particular plant species to build a fabric of relational and accessible information. For example, when I think about salt bush now, not only do I think about the plant and its uses, but I also think about the individual who shared that story, and her connection to her place and ancestors. In this sense, knowledge is embodied and has dynamic ‘aliveness’ through its relational contexts. The final two parts of the workshop included the preparation of native greens and herbs into meals, which were shared over lunch, and a seed-ball-making workshop, where native Kangaroo Grass seeds were made into clay and compost balls that could be dried, stored and used to propagate the seeds into the future. Kangaroo Grass was chosen as it is a ubiquitous native grain that was commonly used by Aboriginal peoples across Australia to make flour for bread. It is also a highly significant habitat species for butterflies and other key species required for ecosystem health. Both these activities provided the space for participants to be together, talk, and build relationships while making, sharing and interacting with materials from Country. The seed-ball-making process included potent conversations around their ability to be deployed to grow the Kangaroo Grass where access is restricted, such as public parks and vacant lots, and private sites that are overrun by introduced plants species. It also provoked a remembering and oral mapping of personal sites and spaces, prompting an awareness of participants’ more-than-human surrounds, as well the restrictions placed upon their access. In response,

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one participant threw a handful of seed balls around the edges of a car park near the NSCF site, which was dominated by invasive grasses and bushes. Others planned to deploy them onto public parks and street verges after the workshop. Through holding the workshop, relationships were also built between Aboriginal participants and the NSFC. This event brought cross-cultural dialogue and an awareness of Aboriginal connection to the site, as well as to the specific food plants it contained. This opened discussion around the intellectual cultural property and cultural protocols associated with the plants and their use – aspects that are often neglected through the silencing of Aboriginal peoples’ connection and custodianship of place. After the workshop, NSCF expressed a desire to open the space further and more meaningfully to Indigenous engagement, participation and use. For example, they have extended the opportunity for Aboriginal people to take cuttings of some native plants for personal use, as well as holding monthly events to swap and exchange native plants. Thus, the grassroots, relational aspects of the workshop have softened some of the previously hard boundaries of non-Indigenous land ownership towards what will hopefully be a more mutual and shared connection to space and place. Bush Tucker, Skin Country and Black Seeds Cloak Projects I was privileged to participate in the relational, practice-led arts research undertaken by Wathurang artist and academic Dr Carol McGregor, along with other members of the Brisbane Aboriginal community. McGregor’s practice allows for insightful discussion around the value of relational arts practices in urban spaces within the contexts of urban Aboriginal food and plant knowledges. Here I refer to the Bush Tucker Community Cloak, Black Seeds and Skin Country cloak projects – just three examples of McGregor’s extensive, possum skin cloak making across the greater Brisbane region. As part of her doctoral research entitled ‘Art of the Skins’, McGregor facilitated numerous workshops that engaged hundreds of individuals from various Aboriginal nations across the region to connect and share knowledges towards the revitalization of customary possum skin cloak making – a practice that had been lying dormant in the region since early colonial settlement (McGregor 2019). As per its customary context, each cloak functioned as a kind of canvas to record or visually represent individual and collective stories, knowledges and customary connections. While the various cloak projects produced beautiful, cultural objects, the less tangible outcomes of the projects lay in the process of the making: the coming together of var-

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ious peoples to talk, connect, remember and share knowledges (ibid.). These projects also held space for what Martin (2013) understands as a methexical process of performative ‘connection’ and ‘embodiment’ with people and place, facilitated by the handling of and collaboration with materials – in this case, the skins of animals and ochres (earth pigments that hold cultural significance to various Aboriginal groups) from Country. The Bush Tucker Community Cloak, made in 2017, incorporated individual panels from twenty Indigenous people connected through the Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art at Griffith University. All participants were residing in greater Brisbane at the time, however the composition of the group included individuals whose customary lands were located across Australia. The cloak was made during a one-day workshop that required participants, including myself, to create individual panels that would then be sewn together to make a cloak, with the specific theme of bushfoods or ‘bush tucker’ – a colloquial term meaning native food plants and animals. The process of making the Bush Tucker Community Cloak facilitated discussion around the stories and knowledges relating to each panel. For example, my panel included abundant bushfoods from Gamilaroi Country such as bumbal/ native orange and ngaybaan/native passionfruit, as well as introduced species such as nasturtiums, which my grandmother would eat during times of hardship while living in inner-city Warrang/Sydney. Others included stories of goanna, witchetty grubs, emu and turtle from across Australia. The sharing of these stories through the cloak-making process not only helped with reinvigorating specific food knowledges, but it also provided opportunities to find the kinship, geographic, ecological and other cultural intersections and connections between various nations that plants and animals traditionally facilitated. Like the Bush Tucker Community Cloak, the Black Seeds (2016) and Skin Country (2018) cloak projects speak to the breadth and diversity of connected plant-based food and medicine knowledges from Indigenous peoples belonging to or bordering the greater Brisbane area, such as the Turrbal, Yuggara, Quandamooka, Yugambeh, Jinibara, and Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi nations. Different to the Bush Tucker Cloak, these cloaks were created solely by Carol McGregor after lengthy discussions, bush walks and yarns2 with Elders and community members, and the handling, smelling and tasting of relevant plants. The Black Seeds and Skin Country cloaks depict a large number of culturally significant plant species endemic to the region, placed onto the cloaks using forms of customary pokerwork and ochre colouring. The cloaks depict Maiwar – a Yuggara/Turrbal word for the Brisbane River, which intersects the city,

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and which McGregor uses as a reference point to position the plants as accurately as possible in their precolonial locations. Interestingly, many names of suburbs in and around Brisbane still reflect their connection to these plants. For example, the suburb of Geebung was named after the persoonia tree – a highly prized edible fruit that was in abundance in the area, similar to the areas of Doomben (fern tree), Dakabin (grass tree), Boondal (from bundal or cunjevoi) and Wynnum (from winnam or pandanus) (McGregor 2019). Despite the overlay of colonial infrastructure and built environment, the destruction of so many pre-existing plants, trees and ecologies, and the limitations of communities being able to access and care for sites due to government control, the relational creation of these cloaks asserted continued connections, custodial knowledges and sovereignties of Aboriginal peoples to these areas. While the mapping of the plants is a visual representation of precolonial ecologies, it is also a mapping of people’s ongoing social-political connections and responsibilities, and of kinship between nations and between the human and more-than-human. For example, Carol McGregor highlights how various plant species grew across diverse tribal regions, and how associated groups could ‘relate and remember similar stories and uses of plants’ (McGregor 2019: 99). This interconnectivity of ecologies, reinforced by story, song and language, binds various groups’ relational connection. As McGregor states, ‘I am drawn to how native plants anchor these systems. All were and are intertwined, touching one another, and I am in awe of the enormity of this multifaceted connected picture’ (ibid.: 102). The making of these cloaks holds space for individuals and communities to remember and reassert these connections and knowledges, and to provide a valuable reference for food systems and practices into the future. Or as McGregor states, ‘privileging Indigenous intellectual sovereignty in Black Seeds signifies the Aboriginal plant knowledge held by Ancestors and the strong continuum of this knowledge in our contemporary communities’ (ibid.: 27).

Conclusion Since colonization, the environments of cities and towns have remained places of belonging for Traditional Owners, and have become places of belonging for many dispersed Aboriginal peoples and communities. Despite being overlayed by the dominance of the colonial-built environment, colonial ideologies, and government control and determination over land use and management, they are still Country, representing fer-

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tile sites for the continuation of Aboriginal food systems and practices. As demonstrated by the two case studies, a relational creative practice has the capacity to reconnect stories and re-emplace knowledges, regardless of how physical environments may have changed, or where the migration of Aboriginal peoples away from customary homelands may have occurred. Importantly, a relational creative practice facilitates a dynamic and multi-modal kind of knowledge exchange, which can extend beyond the intellectual acquisition of information, to the embodied understanding of our empathetic connection to Country, and to the more-than-human entities therein. This can be effective with only minimal, or decontextualized materials from Country, through, for example, the touching, smelling, tasting and using of leaves, furs, seeds, ochres and foods. A relational creative practice can also discern and strengthen relationships between people – a functional way to remember and reinstate the socio-political kinships that supported large-scale, holistic food systems prior to colonisation, as well as helping to build practical, contemporary networks for resource and material sharing. This is significant in regard to the economic disadvantages experienced by Aboriginal peoples as a legacy of colonial land theft and unpaid labour, and responds to the ideological landscape where urban-based Indigenous peoples are rendered invisible or ‘mainstreamed’, and where cultural and autonomous food practices are not supported. Despite the apparent incongruence between customary Aboriginal food systems, knowledges and practice, and contemporary colonized, urban Australia, a relational creative practice can bring adaptability and relevance-making. Within the relational place and moment of coming together, interacting, sharing, making and responding, knowledge is ‘alive’ and responsive, and can therefore be applied to, and hold meaning within, various changing contexts. In ‘doing’ relational creative practice, we are practising a foundational aspect of culture, and by applying relational creative practice to contemporary food systems and practices, we are resisting ongoing colonization from an autonomous position – literally and metaphorically in our own ‘backyards’.

Dominique Chen is a Gamilaroi, First Nations woman and interdisciplinary arts-based researcher. She lectures in contemporary Indigenous art, culture, and sociopolitical histories at Griffith University, Queensland, and is undertaking PhD research at the University of Technology Sydney in relational creative practice and urban-based Aboriginal food and medicine growing.

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Notes 1. In an Aboriginal context the term ‘Country’ is an animate and sentient concept that encompasses all aspects such the ground, sea and sky – and the ancestors, beings, stories and knowledges contained therein. It speaks to ‘an interdependent relationship between an individual and their ancestral lands and seas . . . sustained by the environment and cultural knowledge’ (Common Ground n.d.). 2. A culturally ascribed and cooperative, conversational process specific within Indigenous contexts that involves the telling and sharing of stories and information (Walker et al. 2014).

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Pascoe, Bruce. 2014. Dark Emu Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome, WA: Magabala Books. Poe, Melissa R., et al. 2014. ‘Urban Foraging and the Relational Ecologies of Belonging’, Social & Cultural Geography 15(8): 901–19. Porter, Libby. 2016. ‘How Can We Meaningfully Recognise Cities as Indigenous Places?’, The Conversation. Retrieved 20 November 2020 from https://thecon versation.com/how-can-we-meaningfully-recognise-cities-asindigenous-places65561. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. Reid, John, and Matthew Rout. 2016. ‘Getting to Know Your Food: The Insights of Indigenous Thinking in Food Provenance’, Agriculture and Human Values 33: 427–38. Reser, David, et al. 2021. ‘Australian Aboriginal Techniques for Memorization: Translation into a Medical and Allied Health Education Setting’, Plos One 16: 1–17. Springgay, Stephanie. 2011. ‘“The Chinatown Foray” as Sensational Pedagogy’. Curriculum Inquiry 41: 636–56. Steffensen, Victor. 2020. Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia. Clayton, VIC, Australia: CSIRO Publishing. Walker, Melissa, et al. 2014. ‘“Yarning” as a Method for Community-Based Health Research With Indigenous Women: The Indigenous Women’s Wellness Research Program’, Health Care for Women International 35: 1216–26. Wensing, Ed, and Libby Porter. 2016. ‘Unsettling Planning’s Paradigms: Towards a Just Accommodation of Indigenous Rights and Interests in Australian Urban Planning?’, Australian Planner 53(2): 91–102. Williams, Lewis, et al. 2018. ‘A Global De-colonial Praxis of Sustainability: Undoing Epistemic Violences between Indigenous Peoples and Those No Longer Indigenous to Place’, The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 47(1): 41–53. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8: 387–409.

deú CHAPTER 11

‘War on Weeds’ On Fighting and Caring for Native Nature in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer

Introduction: Declare or Dispose Having just arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand for my first time, I notice the remarkable number of signs, announcements and information sheets that indicate the ban of any imported ‘risk goods’. On the way to the passport control, I pass unmissable signs that read ‘BIOSECURITY NEW ZEALAND. NEW ZEALAND, IT’S OUR PLACE TO PROTECT’. Right in front of the customs luggage inspection I arrive at the final call, printed in big black letters on a vivid yellow sign: ‘LAST CHANCE TO DECLARE OR DISPOSE’. After confirming that I do not even have a forgotten apple in my backpack – for which one can be fined up to four hundred New Zealand dollars – I am presented to a sniffer dog that investigates my clothes. These security regulations – based on the Biosecurity Act from 1993, but later reformed by the Biosecurity Law Reform Act in 2012 (New Zealand Legislation 2021) – regulate the ‘exclusion, eradication, and effective management of pests and unwanted organisms’. Biosecurity, however, is more than controlling imported goods at international borders; it is a common part of daily practice that is enacted all over the country and is intimately tied to the global representation of Aotearoa New Zealand as ‘clean and green’. This striking omnipresence becomes particularly evident in the context of urban weeding. Weed control by hand seems to be one of the main concerns of environmentalists in the city – and, in particular, a popular kind of voluntary work in green areas in and around Auckland. In the local discourse on environmental care, many of my interlocutors emphasize the caring aspect of more-than-human relations in nature conserva-

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tion (Dürr and Fischer 2018). Caring practices, however, are subjected to critical analyses regarding, for example, veiled power hierarchies (see Cox 2010) and a problematic conflation with neoliberal subjectivation; the ‘ideal’ neoliberal subject is self-responsible, ready to provide for him-/herself, and thus welcoming a shift of state responsibilities to the individual level (see Hyatt 2001; Muehlebach 2012). The claims of ‘caring’ and ‘neoliberal’ subjects tend to be compatible, especially in the environmental context (see Brand 2007; Perkins 2009; Crossan et al. 2016). In this chapter I argue that weeding takes shape as an ambiguous practice linked to sociocultural dynamics that reach beyond ideals of urban nature. Caring for native nature is tied to local ways of dealing with colonial history and more recent immigration discussions since the early 1990s. Weeding, with a focus on protection, reveals violent aspects of care. The attentive practice of preservation is connected to defining and fighting threats and enemies. In what follows, I first contextualize my field site historically and locally. Building on my empirical material I then discuss urban weeding practices and their entanglements with concepts of caring and fighting that feed into negotiations on urban inclusion and exclusion. Weeding practices interrelate with social processes of consolidation and demarcation that co-constitute ways of belonging to the city. This chapter is based on my ethnographic field research in Auckland between 2012 and 2016, and refers to findings that I elaborated in my doctoral thesis (published as Fischer 2020). My dissertation project was part of an interdisciplinary research group on ‘Urban Ethics’ at the Ludwig-Maxmilians-University of Munich, which sought to challenge ideals and practices of good and righteous life conduct in different cities around the globe (Dürr et al. 2020). Methodologically I relied on participant observation, qualitative interviews and group discussions with city dwellers in socio-economically and socioculturally diverse neighbourhoods, as well as with environmentalists and council staff.

Situating Auckland The biggest city of Aotearoa New Zealand is Auckland, located in the northern part of North Island. It is home to around 1.6 million people, which is one-third of the country’s total population, and is expected to exceed 2 million within ten years (Stats NZ 2021). The increasing share of urban residents with an East or South Asian migration background is continuously problematized within a racist, anti-Asian discourse (Yee 2005; Li 2006; Lowe 2016; Lee and Cain 2019). Some citizens com-

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plain that Auckland has become less ‘New Zealandish’, and this asserted transformation also reflects changed attitudes towards urban nature (Ip 2005). Auckland is a city particularly close to nature, with its manifold landscapes, islands, beaches, harbours, bush, and volcanic cones. This unique combination of urban and natural features makes it one of the most popular places of residence worldwide. At the same time, citizens tend to complain about population density, industry and pollution, whilst comparing Auckland to the rest of the country, which is marked by smaller towns and vast rural areas. These idyllic and bucolic scenes fit better with the country’s global image. For its low population density and unique biodiversity, Aotearoa New Zealand is commonly referred to and touristically advertised as ‘100% pure’ (New Zealand Tourism n.d.). A growing awareness for an environmentally friendly and healthy urban lifestyle feeds into increasing criticism of national and urban self-displays of being in close touch with nature while obviously struggling with serious pollution issues. The local newspaper The New Zealand Herald repeatedly points out these issues in alarming headlines such as ‘New Zealand’s shame: “We’re not clean and green” . . .’ (Gibbs 2018), and ‘Clean, green NZ? Litterbugs and loads of rubbish tarnish image’ (Morton 2019). For national and local identity, nature has always been a strong point of reference (see Bell 1996; Clark 2004; Coyle and Fairweather 2005). The landmass of today’s Aotearoa New Zealand split from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana 85 million years ago. The distance between Aotearoa New Zealand and the nearest large landmass Australia was about 2,000 kilometres. Plants and animals that arrived during this period had to travel across this huge body of water. Until the first seafarers arrived from Polynesia in the late thirteenth century, local nature was flourishing abundantly, and without any human impact a unique biodiversity emerged. The late human settlement is one main reason why 89 per cent of the native flora is endemic, and is thus conceived of as unique across the globe and worth protecting (Crosby 2015: 220). European colonization restructured the landscape according to a romantic version of rural England. These reorganizations were mainly based on agricultural and industrial-technological ideals in order to transform the new world into a clean, productive and ‘civilized’ one. Native plants were seen as ‘uncultivated native[s]’ that had to be reshaped (Mastnak, Elyachar and Boellstorff 2014: 367), in contrast to the British flora and fauna at home that was worth introducing as an economic, aesthetic and cultural enrichment for the recently settled country (Dunlap 1999). The brutality of colonialism, occupation and land grabbing are deeply

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inscribed into contemporary landscapes of the islands. Thus, colonization interwove with patterns of cultivation that have shaped the country to this day. As introduced species are active agents, they keep moulding local landscapes beyond colonial time frames. As Franklin Ginn puts it, ‘colonialism was never something simply done to, it was also done with oak, gorse and other imported species’ (Ginn 2008: 344, emphasis in original). In this way, weeds continue transformation processes that were initiated in the colonial era. Land (whenua) is particularly significant in the Māori world, and closely associated with ancestors (tūpuna), spiritual identity and belonging (Mead 2003: 269f.). The land is fundamentally interlinked with mana, an inheritable spiritual power that can increase and decrease depending on individual deeds in the course of life (Metge 1976: 8). Land dispossession deprives this meaningful process and keeps Māori from fulfilling their duty as ‘kaitiaki’ or guardians of the natural world (Rixecker and Tipene-Matua 2003: 256). Environmental organizations and official council plans often refer to Māori concepts, which seem to harmonize well with eco-minded principles (see Forest & Bird 2020; Auckland Council 2021). However, eco-friendly ideas can run counter to Māori ideals and kaitiakitanga (protective rule), which can vary among different Māori in different contexts (see Haami 2008). The distribution of environmental care is clearly unequal, and is drawn along ethnic lines in the heterogeneous city: polluting infrastructures are located in neighbourhoods populated mainly by Polynesians and Māori, while the residential areas declared clean and cared for are predominantly home to Pākehā – that is, New Zealanders with a European background. The enormous transformations of the country, and of the city in particular, have to be taken into account when considering nostalgic romanticizations of local nature. Auckland is considered to challenge ideals of pristine and ‘wild’ nature through its mere ‘cityness’, with its built-up environment and dense urbanization. In the following section I consider how the call for preservation of native nature translates into urban discourses on weeding.

The Dirty Dozen More than six hundred years after the first settlement, Auckland competes with Honolulu for the weediest city in the world (Cumming 2009). With the establishment of the Department of Conservation (DOC) in 1987, the first official lists of weeds appeared. Weeds were evaluated

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according to the scale of their potential threat, with the ‘worst weeds’ being the most invasive. The register from 2012 enumerates 254 different weeds in Aotearoa New Zealand. The differentiation between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ plants, however, is questionable. The silvereyes, for example, arrived from Australia in 1856 and are nowadays considered to be native (Ginn 2008: 341). Even species that used to live in the country before human arrival are partly from an Australian origin. It is not clear how long a species must thrive in Aotearoa New Zealand or what conditions must be fulfilled before being able to be called ‘native’. In 2017, the DOC published a brochure on the most dangerous species – ‘the dirty dozen’ (DOC 2017). To label these non-native species ‘dirty’ adds another descriptive category to the existing ‘invasive’, ‘powerful’ and ‘dangerous’. Dirt is frequently linked to cultural concepts of poverty and moral inferiority. As Mary Douglas put it, dirt mirrors social ways of dealing with alterity (Douglas 1980; for a more critical analysis, see Duschinsky 2016). The DOC encourages citizens to notify ‘the dirty dozen’ and put a bounty on these ‘culprits’ (Sullivan 2017). This naming clearly contradicts with local values. As touristic and global representations of Aotearoa New Zealand illustrate, purity is an iconic ideal. Designations that invoke metaphors of pollution or impurity are diametrically opposed to the country’s self-image.

Caring for the Poor Little Ones Four weeks after my arrival in Auckland I joined an environmental organization that ran different ecological projects, including weed control. We were a group of ten volunteers who met one Tuesday morning in Mount Eden, a middle-class suburb in central Auckland. As in most of the weeding sessions I participated in, the volunteers were a rather homogeneous group of Pākehā. Doreen,1 the secretary of the organization, got windbreaker jackets from the stock, and packed safety vests, gloves and gumboots into a white Volkswagen bus. We were supposed to be back at 4 pm, after working eight hours. Many of the volunteers were in regular employment and routinely spent a midweek day off to come to the weeding sessions. We all climbed into the bus and made our way past car repair shops and factories towards the park of the week. Most of the terrains I visited for weeding during these months were located in remote industrial areas. These were no spots of urban recreation according to Yvonne, but rather ‘forgotten places’, which were not even considered to be ‘urban’ by many citizens. It is probably only the weeders who go there on a regular basis.

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Having arrived at a somewhat savaged parking area, we put on our gear and took devices like hoes, scissors and shovels from the car boot. The key point was to differentiate between native and non-native species, which was more than just visual perception as it required a haptic sensibility as well as a truly bodily involvement. This aspect is highlighted by some environmental organizations as a physical and affective access to urban nature. Depicted as a corporeal interrelating with local nature, the experience is advertised to be a concrete, intimate and meaningful one (Volunteerworld n.d.; Volunteering Solutions n.d.; Natucate 2018). Working with Rita, a 24-year-old Pākehā, I noticed how she repeatedly referred to the ‘poor little ones’ that get no light, and the ‘stronger ones’ that need to be removed. When I asked her if the thriving weeds in these abandoned areas could be considered as a natural process, she replied: ‘Hm, it is nature, but it also isn’t. I mean these plants did not get here on their own, they were imported. Originally New Zealand was full of these lovely plants before the stronger ones came in . . . It’s only fair that we bring the order back in here’. Her striking distinction suggests a certain order that guides action. The simplistic division of local nature into desirable and undesirable species assumes a binary order and thus an underlying, static structure of nature (see Dürr 2007: 5). The ‘poor’ plants require support in order to be protected from the ‘stronger’ ones. These vocabularies invoke an affectively charged vulnerability metaphor, associated with the need and entitlement for care and protection, and thus entailing power relations. Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher have coined a much-cited definition of care as: ‘[A] species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web’ (Tronto and Fisher, in Tronto 1993: 103). The emphasis on interdependency in caring practices has been described as ‘acting for self-and-other-together’ (Held 2006: 12) and ‘an “integrated” act of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 4). In this reading, the concept of care goes beyond a dichotomous categorization, and rather emphasizes multidirectionality and complexity. This should not obscure the fact that a concern for well-being is always formed by ideals, and is thus only inclusive to a certain extent. The boundaries of this ‘self-and-other-together’ mark a clear outside. Care as a ‘thick, impure, involvement in a world’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 6) is ‘never innocent’ (Benson et al. 2016: 7); and, in this context, it means to permanently kill non-native species. The violent potential of care becomes tangible in

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urban weeding practices. How care articulates as a consolidating fight for protection will be discussed in the following section.

Weed Warriors in an Underground Army The DOC has launched different campaigns to call citizens and communities for action against the problematized weeds. Citizens are asked to become ‘weed busters’ and ‘weed warriors’, while children are encouraged to identify weeds in their neighbourhoods to merit a ‘Kiwi2 Guardians Medal’ (Weedbusters n.d.). In addition to this rather playful approach, the DOC highlights the urgency of the problem: ‘Controlling weeds is an important part of conservation work, and unless everyone plays their part in stopping the spread of weeds we will be fighting a losing battle’ (DOC n.d.). In 2017 the DOC published a brochure headed ‘Join the War on Weeds’. The cover shows a young woman in a victory pose: with her left hand she holds up a cut branch of Pinus Contorta – labelled as ‘Enemy Number One’ by the DOC – as if it was the head of her defeated enemy (DOC 2017). Aggressive vocabulary is also used in the context of ‘invasive’ fauna, as the widespread hatred of possums exemplifies (Fischer 2017). In this context, the struggle against pests and weeds is not only seen as a local practice but one correlating with the protection of the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand. This meaning becomes obvious in an article published in The New Zealand Herald: ‘Tell yourself you’re not labouring just to spare your blushes when you host your first barbie – you are saving the countryside. Gain strength from the thought that you are part of an underground army, digging for victory’ (Cumming 2009). Accompanied by wartime vocabulary and formulas of belonging, this way of ordering sounds threatening. Banu Subramaniam argues that the problematization of invasive species is based on the differentiation into ‘nature in place’ and ‘nature out of place’. Introduced species are conceived of as ‘species that do not belong’ (Subramaniam 2014: 97). The weeders team up against the nonhuman agents that threaten their ‘ingroup’. But it is not only the invasive plants that differ from the idealized and harmonized ‘we’. It is also those who do not care, or who even actively plant invasive species and thus contribute to the threat. The geographer Franklin Ginn considers the close linkage between biodiversity and national identity as a postcolonial and apolitical harmonization of Māori, Pākehā and Polynesian. Following Benedict Anderson, he takes the identification with native nature as an ‘imagined community’, existentially threatened by weeds and other pests (Ginn

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Illustration 11.1. ‘Join the War on Weeds’. War on Weeds brochure, 2017. © Department of Conservation New Zealand. Photograph by Jesse Bythell.

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2008: 336). The project of nativizing urban nature can serve as an attempt to reorganize the history of Aotearoa New Zealand. The harmonization of an imagined past takes shape as a ‘clearance’ of colonial land confiscations and transformations, a pretended ‘undoing’ of oppressive intrusions. The common nature worth protecting works as a benchmark going back to precolonial times. By defining a common history in terms of native flora and fauna, colonial violence fades into the background. In this way, the protection of native nature is taking shape as a shared goal of Māori, Pākehā and Kiwis in general, and facilitates consolidating effects that hide conflicting contestations (ibid.: 335). In this reading, the removal of invasive species can be interpreted as a symbolical way of decolonization (Mastnak, Elyachar and Boellstorff 2014: 374). As Friederike Gesing suggests, Pākehā can make use of weeding practices in order to express their care for native nature, and thus perform their appreciation for material and spiritual aspects of local land (Gesing 2016: 270). These socio-ecological cross-links between desired past, present and future interact with more recent urban immigration processes, as the following section will show.

Taking Care to Belong In parallel to seemingly consolidating effects, the idealization of native nature can also work as a demarcation towards newer immigrants. Especially in the light of demographic changes since the early 1990s, anti-Asian ressentiments remain prominent in urban discourse. The ‘new’ immigrants are perceived as more ‘threatening’ as they differ socioeconomically from poor immigrant workers who arrived in the 1960s (Li 2006: 9). The recent global trend of abuse against Chinese in the pandemic era, however, works as a ‘painful reminder of past wounds’, and points to the ongoing racism in Aotearoa New Zealand (Chen 2021). ‘Asians’ tend to be defined according to physiological characteristics, even though they are long-time residents and third-generation migrants who self-identify as Kiwis. Aucklanders of Asian background are often publicly considered as incompetent in relating to nature (Dürr 2010), not ‘binded’ to the place and local ideals (Ip 2005: XI) – and thus as ‘inassimilable, brash, too wealthy and unworthy to be real New Zealanders’ (Lowe 2016: 240). In 2002, the Chinese Conservation Education Trust (CCET) was founded, with an explicitly ethnical and pedagogic focus. Ming, one of the initiators, had moved from Hong Kong to Auckland in the 1990s,

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and referred directly to her own immigration experience. She explained to me that immigrants from Eastern Asia have had to learn ‘how to behave in Auckland’ as they had predominantly been raised in skyscrapers. Ming aims to ‘help’ them to better orient and integrate (Ming, Skype, 5 May 2016). The CCET responds to the problematic insinuations in the city. Their volunteers enact the role of those to be taught and to adopt local practices for being accepted as part of the nature-oriented city. At the same time, their endeavour can be read as a counterproject, because the participating immigrants emphatically do not behave according to racist clichés but are actively engaging with urban nature, and challenge the ‘white privilege’ within environmental care (see Pulido 2000). Commitment to the urban environment becomes a measure of belonging, and serves to distinguish oneself from the ‘non-caring other’. Obviously, environmental practices are represented as ethnically connoted and learnable. In the same vein, weeding is applied to articulate one’s attitudes, positions and identities (Gesing 2016: 286). When raising this topic among my local acquaintances and at the weeding groups, they find it strange to transfer this ecologically motivated ideal to a social dimension. In their view, weeding is about the protection of a globally unique biodiversity, and not about immigration. This could mean that the lines of connection between environmental and social practice cannot be drawn as straightforwardly as discussed above. It could also mean that the shift in discourse is powerful enough to make underlying patterns of meaning intangible and hardly re-translatable. According to Banu Subramaniam who considers the dramatization of non-native species in North America, social anxieties are being rearticulated in ecological terms to conceal social problems behind the ‘panic about foreign plants’ (Subramaniam 2014: 11). Deflecting immigration debates symbolically onto weeds covertly inserts nationalist attitudes into the urban discourse, and veils racist statements behind seemingly more legitimate opinions. The positively framed practice of care is thus fraught with ethnic prejudices and inequalities, and keeps reproducing lived hierarchies in the city. With the urban demography, these processes are particularly noticeable in the city. The exclusionary potential of care (MacGregor 2006: 77) clashes with the pervasive idea of locating care in ‘a somehow wholesome or unpolluted pleasant ethical realm’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 8). Care should be seen through ‘less-than-rosy glasses’ for its ‘paradoxical set of practices, feelings, and moral orientations that are embedded in particular relations and contexts, and that are socially constructed as both feminine and private’ (MacGregor 2006: 58, emphasis

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in the original) – and, in this context, as ethnicized and emphatically ‘New Zealandish’.

Conclusion Idealized characteristics of the country such as isolation, biodiversity and nativity are incorporated within an urban context. Weeding is conceived of as caring for the country and, explicitly, for the city itself: through the bodily involvement of weeding on Auckland’s meadows, agents reshape their city according to dominant ideals of native nature. This ideal, however, is not free from contradictions or frictions. A century-old native tree, for example, that casts too much shadow in one’s front yard may well be treated like a weed (see Fischer 2016). At the same time, the popular kiwi fruit, even named after the iconic bird that gave its name to New Zealanders, was imported in 1904 from China (Ginn 2008: 348). Obviously, different systems of order intertwine here, and nativity is not an unambiguous, nor the only, benchmark by which plants are judged. Despite these inconsistencies, the care for native nature is dividing Aucklanders into those who ‘really’ care and who belong, and ‘outsiders’ who do not care or who just do not know how to care. Weeding as an embodied form of caring is linked to being and becoming an ‘insider’ in the city and, thus, to processes of domination and exclusion. This dimension is inherent in all caring relationships (see Lawson 2007: 6). Michelle Murphy emphasizes the semantic level of care in terms of feeling ‘troubled’, and argues that this is the angle from which care should be considered analytically to disrupt ‘non-innocent narratives of belonging’ (Murphy 2015: 721f.). Unruly mobilities of weeds are interlinked with urban dwellers who actively counteract imaginaries of a desired aesthetic of, and engagement with, urban nature. Having made, or in the process of still making, their place in Auckland, weeds urge us to rethink urban human–nature relations. Being based on a romanticized past and focused on an imaginary future, the practice of weeding reorders transgressions of nature as ‘out of place’ from colonial history to current immigration. Urban discourses of caring and fighting merge into the local project of preserving native nature. And that is what the airport taught me when I first arrived: ‘NEW ZEALAND, IT’S OUR PLACE TO PROTECT’.

Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. In her thesis she exam-

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ined environmental projects as practice-oriented fields of ethical negotiation in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a postdoc researcher at the University of Konstanz, and part of the interdisciplinary research group ‘Traveling Forms’. In her current project she is exploring aesthetic forms of activism in South Africa. Notes 1. All names are pseudonyms. 2. ‘Kiwi’ is the common term for all New Zealanders, independent from their ethnic affiliation.

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Perkins, Harold A. 2009. ‘Out From the (Green) Shadow? Neoliberal Hegemony through the Market Logic of Shared Urban Environmental Governance’, Political Geography 28: 395–405. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pulido, Laura. 2000. ‘Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(1): 12–40. Rixecker, Stefanie S., and Bevan Tipene-Matua. 2003. ‘Māori Kaupapa and the Inseparability of Social and Environmental Justice: An Analysis of Bioprospecting and a People’s Resistance to (Bio)Cultural Assimilation’, in Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard and Bob Evans (eds), Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 252–68. Stats NZ. 2021. ‘Auckland Population May Hit 2 Million in Early 2030s’. Retrieved 18 August 2021 from https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/auckland-popula tion-may-hit-2-million-in-early-2030s. Subramaniam, Banu. 2014. Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Sullivan, Wendy. 2017. ‘Wanted – Dirty Dozen Bounty Closing Soon’. Retrieved 5 April 2023 from https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/96001532/column-wan ted---dirty-dozen-weed-bounty-closing-soon#:~:text=The%20Dirty%20 Dozen%20competition%20is%20part%20of%20the,more%20people%20 to%20get%20involved%20with%20their%20control. Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Volunteering Solutions. n.d. ‘Conservation Volunteering Program in New Zealand’. Retrieved 5 April 2023 from https://www.volunteeringsolutions.com/ new-zealand/conservation-volunteering#. Volunteerworld. n.d. ‘Volunteer in New Zealand’. Retrieved 5 April 2023 from https://www.volunteerworld.com/en/volunteer-abroad/new-zealand. Weedbusters. n.d. ‘Weed Information’. Retrieved 5 April 2023 from www.weed busters.co.nz/weed-information/. Yee, Beven. 2005. ‘Coping with Insecurity: Everyday Experiences of Chinese New Zealanders’, in Manying Ip (ed.), Unfolding History, Evolving Identity: The Chinese in New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press, pp. 215–35.

deú CHAPTER 12

Designing with Bees Integrating More-than-Human Knowledges in Brussels’ Cityscapes Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria

Introduction In the winter of 2020, the authors of this chapter developed a ‘wild bee narrative’ for the design manifesto ‘Plan B Josaphat’ (BRAL and Natagora 2021). With this design manifesto, citizen collective and nature association BRAL and Natagora – representing several citizen and naturalist collectives in the Brussels Capital Region – aimed to call regional authorities and planning administrations to pause their redevelopment plans for Friche Josaphat (Illustration 12.1), a brownfield site on the northern outskirts of the city. The site, a former railroad station, was purchased by the regional urban development corporation Maatschappij voor Stedelijke Inrichting (MSI) with the intention of transforming it into a new urban district to meet the region’s growing demand for affordable housing, schools, sports facilities and green spaces. In 2018, when regional planning administrations made the master plan for the redevelopment of the site public, the plan immediately caused a wave of protest. At first, citizen collectives critiqued the lack of citizen participation as well as the partial privatization of the site (Commons Josaphat 2015), but as time went by, naturalists and nature associations stepped in and further fuelled these protests. They feared the development plans would erase an ‘urban Eden for wild bee populations’ (Vereecken et al. 2021) that had emerged on site during its approximately twenty years of vacancy. With the design manifesto, Plan B Josaphat, both groups of actors – citizen collectives and nature associations – aimed to bundle their critiques and call for a more participatory planning process, integrating the needs of humans as well as nonhumans.

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Illustration 12.1. Friche Josaphat. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria.

In the past century, Brussels has been a breeding ground for ideas and practices in which constellations of scientists, politicians and urban planners have sought to achieve new integrations of city, nature and ecology (Smets 1977; Danneels 2021). Furthermore, the city is known for its urban struggles (Doucet 2015) and is home to a ‘hundred citizen collectives’ (Demey 1992) that have, after multiple waves of protest, succeeded in formally confirming and structurally embedding several participatory practices in regional planning instruments (Kuhk et al. 2019). As a result, more structurally embedded citizen collectives such as BRAL have acquired a know-how and capacity to produce alternative knowledge products through which they aim to renegotiate planning processes at different political levels. An interesting evolution at Friche Josaphat, however, is how naturalists and nature associations are pushing to broaden the focus of these knowledge products to include human as well as nonhuman concerns. In this chapter, we will describe how we used this unique context to investigate an integration of morethan-human perspectives in urban planning and design. By organizing a research trajectory running in parallel to, as well as in interaction with, the writing process of Plan B Josaphat, we want to help to bridge the gap between the situated knowledges of citizen collectives about wild bee species and the expert knowledges of public administrations to come

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to a more productive discussion between conflicting visions on urban nature and urban development.

More-than-Human Approaches in Urban Planning and Design The different attitudes of experts and collectives towards wild bees in the redevelopment of the Friche Josaphat links to a larger debate on the integration of city, nature and the nonhuman. In recent decades, the city is increasingly being recognized as an important site for nature and habitat restoration (Ives et al. 2016; Lepczyk et al. 2017). In the Western context, publications such as Design with Nature (McHarg 1969), City Form and Natural Process (Hough 1989) and Ecological Urbanism (Waldheim 2010) have introduced methods and discourses aiming to reconcile design with ecology. Recently, these publications have been enriched with research focusing on biodiversity, botanical and animal dimensions of the city – such as ‘Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design’ (Garrard et al. 2018), ‘Designing Wildlife-Inclusive Cities’ (Apfelbeck et al. 2020), ‘animal-aided design’ (Vink et al. 2017) and ‘Nature Inclusive Design’ (van Stiphout 2019). In these publications, environmental data tends to be described through top-down approaches and the lens of expert knowledges – disconnected from daily urban practices, politics and struggles – often resulting in approaches that aim to ‘solve’ environmental problems rather than renegotiating underlying distorted human–nature relationships. As a result, nonhumans are too often regarded as passive resources rather than as active participants of urban spaces (Bastian et al. 2017). Discourses stemming from the environmental humanities argue for more ‘complex’ (Stengers 2000) or ‘entangled’ (Houston et al. 2018) understandings of urban nature, in which the agency of nonhumans is being acknowledged. According to these authors, methods are needed that can ‘heighten our sensibilities through which different modes of living can be registered’ (Ernstson and Sörlin 2019). Compelling design experiments that draw inspiration from these theories include the design research ‘Regenerative Empathy’ at Harvard University’s faculty of landscape architecture (Gali-Izard 2019) and ‘Cohabiter dans la vallée de l’Eure’ at the École de paysage de Versailles (Bracke et al. 2021), as well as concrete design experiments at the seventeenth Venice Architecture Biennale, entitled ‘How will we live together?’ (de Vecchi et al. 2021). However, as most of these design experiments have so far been situated outside everyday planning and design practice, it remains an important question how these approaches will land in complex interactions between different constellations of

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urban actors, as well as their different ‘ways of knowing and being in relation to urban nature’ (Ernstson and Sörlin 2019: 365). By drafting from situated knowledges about wild bee species from citizen collectives at Friche Josaphat, we not only want to develop an approach that sustains the multiplicity of urban nature (Escobar 2008; Ernstson and Sörlin 2019), but that can also advocate a ‘more-than-human right to the city’ (Shingne 2020).

Friche Josaphat: A Hotspot of Situated Knowledges about Wild Bee Species During the past decade, the Friche Josaphat has evolved into a hotspot of situated knowledges about wild bee species. Nevertheless, also before citizen protests emerged as a result of regional development plans, the site was known for its biological diversity (Saintenoy-Simon 2018). For almost a century, the site was a railway station for freight transport, the Gare de Schaerbeek-Josaphat (Perspective.Brussels 2021). Freight trains from abroad arrived at this station, delivering goods to and from the industrial city of Brussels, such as coal that was stored, sorted and distributed on the site (Saintenoy-Simon 2018). The coming and going of these trains distributed plant seeds and pollen from distant regions, resulting in a rich composition of native and exotic plant species (ibid.; Vereecken et al. 2021). This diversity was noticed by naturalists, with several nature associations finding their way to the site to draw up floral inventories (Saintenoy-Simon 2018). In 1994, when the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Belges (SNCB) (translated as ‘Belgian National Railway Company’) abandoned its activities on the Friche Josaphat, the plants started to colonize the area. Soon, ‘the tracks were overgrown with weeds, and the railway wagons were surrounded by bushes’ (Saintenoy-Simon 2018: 2). The open and sandy soils of Friche Josaphat not only accommodated a great diversity of native and exotic plant species, they also became known for hosting a diversity of wild bee species (Hendrickx 2020). To this date, 129 wild bee species have been observed on the site, among which are some very rare or almost extinct species, such as the ground-breeding Andrena bimaculata (a large, dark mining bee) and the Bombus hortorum (a large bumblebee with a very long tongue) (Vereecken et al. 2021). In 2013, when a tentative approval to draft the master plan was given by regional authorities, the interest of naturalists in visiting and observing the site took a more political turn. Nature observations turned into nature walks, through which growing numbers of people were engaged in observing the species diversity on site. New

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observations were made by citizens on a weekly or even daily basis, and shared on the open-source web platform ‘waarnemingen.be’ (translated as ‘observations’), which collects animal and plant observations on a national scale. By registering the perimeter of the Friche Josaphat as a separate zone, citizens have made it possible to group all new observations on a separate webpage. Currently, this webpage mentions 139 members constructing a collective database of more than 39,000 observations, most of them since 2014. This ‘urban activism’ has led to observations of approximately eleven hundred different animal and plant species, a knowledge base challenging environmental data produced by consultancy firms. For example, the environmental impact report (Aries Consultants 2019) commissioned by regional administrations to ‘measure’ the impact of the development plan, fails to acknowledge this rich wild bee biotope, as it describes urban nature through abstract categories, such as ‘soil’, ‘hydrology’ and ‘fauna and flora’. Thus, it may come as no surprise that citizen collectives call for a more sensitive approach to nonhuman life on the site, by using the wild bee Anthidium septemspinosum as a mascot (Illustration 12.2).

Illustration 12.2. Citizen movements calling on planners and policymakers to reconsider their development plans through the slogan ‘Let the Friche Bee’. © Jossart.

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Tracing, Articulating and Mobilizing Wild Bee Knowledges To test the integration of more-than-human approaches in urban design, as well as their reception among different constellations of urban actors, we organized a research trajectory running in parallel to the writing process of Plan B Josaphat. This trajectory was organized along three research tracks (Illustration 12.3). In a first track, we traced situated knowledges of citizen collectives (that we will refer to as ‘wild bee knowledges’) using walk-along interviews. We included findings from these interviews in narrated collages. In a second track, we articulated wild bee knowledges by materializing them in a design scenario through which the regional development plan could be critically questioned (Plan Bee Josaphat). And finally, in the last track, we mobilized Plan Bee Josaphat in different societal arenas. With this approach, we aimed to formulate the reception of morethan-human approaches in processes of urban planning and design among several constellations of urban actors. We also aimed to address the citizen collectives’ concern regarding the need for more-than-human participation in processes of urban planning and design.

Track 1: Tracing Wild Bee Knowledges In the first track, we organized walk-along interviews with members of citizen and nature collectives, with the aim of developing a more com-

Illustration 12.3. Schematic representation of the three research tracks. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria.

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plex understanding of the relations between wild bees living at Friche Josaphat and their practices. In doing so, we perceive members of the citizen collectives as spokespersons for wild bee species by drawing a parallel with the role of community leaders in participatory research as border-crossers who are able to link different (social) worlds (Bastian et al. 2017). Furthermore, we were interested in the collectives’ activities and practices on site, to understand how their engagement and care for these wild bees manifests itself spatially. Two walk-along interviews with members of the collectives Sauvons la Friche Josaphat and Natagora were organized. During these interviews, members of the citizen and nature collectives were asked to guide us around, while answering questions about the wild bees living on Friche Josaphat. Respondents were asked to point out environments that they considered to be important for wild bees, and why. The tour was recorded using photographs and audio recordings. Informal conversations in which additional questions could be answered took place during the summer of 2021, during the bi-weekly meetings of the collective. Overall, respondents emphasized the unique qualities of the Friche Josaphat, referring to it as a refuge for wild bees in the dense urban fabric of the Brussels fringe. They were concerned about several urban development projects in the region that would affect wild bee populations on a larger scale. Furthermore, they stressed that the Friche Josaphat was not a homogeneous ‘herbaceous wasteland’, as mentioned in the environmental impact assessment (Aries Consultants 2019), but rather a site of heterogeneous micro-environments. According to them, this textured understanding of the site as a conglomerate of micro-environments is important, as wild bee species are depending on an interwoven fabric of small-scale habitats, as they can only bridge shorter distances for nesting and foraging (on average 200 to 300 metres) (Peeters et al. 2012). The data collected during the walk-along interviews allowed a reconstruction of the behaviour of wild bee species in time and space. This was crucial information to understand how these nonhuman beings were already inhabiting the site. Finally, it was also possible to come to a fuller understanding of how practices of these collectives are organized, which helped us in tracing the relations they establish with wild bees and multiple environments on a daily basis. These places were photographed, as a basis for a critical cartography in which insights from walk-along interviews are converted into so-called ‘visual narratives’, in which relationships between wild bees, the members of the collective and the space were assembled into a collage (Illustration 12.4). We preferred a collage technique so that the image can maximally reflect the texture of the different micro-environments.

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Illustration 12.4. A frame of the visual narrative integrating findings from the walk-along interview. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria.

Track 2: Articulating Wild Bee Knowledges In a second track, we aimed to articulate the wild bee knowledges unearthed in the first track in instruments of urban planning and design. By using ‘articulating’ as a concept, we want to refer to a process of ‘making legible certain elements for interpretation, evaluation, debate, or struggle’ (Ernstson and Sörlin 2019: 369). As this track ran in parallel to the development of four other design scenarios included in Plan B Josaphat – of which a detailed discussion lies outside the scope of this chapter – Plan Bee Josaphat was developed in interaction with the findings of other designers. What was specific about our scenario is that it aimed to push for a more democratic development of the site from the perspective of humans as well as nonhumans. Inspired by assemblage and relational theories (Law 2004; Bender and Farías 2011), we included nonhuman agency as well as a focus on understanding how wild bees’ and citizen collectives’ realms were co-produced and mutually constituting each other in time and place. To structure the design work, we decided to focus on the wild bee knowledges distilled during the walk-along interviews, and use them as

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an entry point to reflect upon ‘moments’ and ‘places’ of encounter between members of citizen collectives and wild bees. We also examined how the regional development plan would affect encounters between wild bees and citizens on site. We integrated our reflections in a narrated section (Illustration 12.5), as this type of drawing allows a visualization of interactions between members of the collective, wild bees and specific environments on the Friche Josaphat. On top, we added frames narrating the lifecycle of a mining bee, to explain how it interacts with specific environments on the Friche Josaphat during its life. We also overlayed the narrated section with a projection of the impact of the development project, to show how regional plans would restrict the bee’s movements in time and space. In this way, we want to inform planners and designers about the dependence of wild bees on the sites they are designing. This section makes visible relations that remained invisible in the separate categories of the environmental impact report (Aries Consultants 2019). Wild bees and the citizen collective are shown as active participants of Friche Josaphat, acknowledging their potential agency in its future development. In the design scenario, we further investigated these interactions by designing new ‘places’ and ‘moments’ of encounter, in which growing numbers of actors can be introduced. The ‘places of encounter’ are environments such as vegetable gardens, orchards and verges that trigger stewardship activities and encounters between citizens and wild bees. These places involve citizens in creating favourable conditions for wild bee species (for example, by adjusting topography or planting specific species). The ‘moments of encounter’, on the other hand, are linked to caring for wild bees on the Friche Josaphat, in direct or indirect ways. For example, in Illustration 12.6 we looked at how human activities can be synchronized with wild bee actions, as well as how this synchronization could be expanded to involve other practices, such as learning activities at local schools. By considering not only the places but also the moments in which wild bees and citizens can meet, we wanted to investigate how spatial design could evoke and accommodate interaction and exchange between more-than-human species. By also considering the temporalities of the design, alternative forms of collective care for the site could be explored. Additionally, it opens a reflection on the moments during which the desired development of the site could be renegotiated, among many urban actors. Thinking about the temporality of collective care is an important aspect, as without human intervention the grasses of Friche Josaphat would evolve into bushes and forest – habitats that are less attractive for wild bee species. Mowing the grassland and intervening in the site’s

Illustration 12.5. Narrated section integrating data collected during the walk-along interviews, as well as technical information from expert studies. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria.

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Illustration 12.6. Experiment with a way of drawing that combines the concept of the timeline with drawings of interventions at specific moments. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria.

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topography could be activities that would not only preserve the wild bee habitat, but also strengthen relationships between citizens, wild bees and the environment. Following the reflection on how ‘moments of encounter’ could be organized, design drawings such as plans and sections were developed (Illustration 12.7). In these plans, we focused

Illustration 12.7. Plan indicating habitat types linked to the phases of ecological succession, and the landscape and architecture typologies to be included as ‘places of encounter’. © Jolein Bergers, Bruno Notteboom and Viviana d’Auria.

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on inserting landscape elements and architectural typologies that would provoke forms of collective care for the site, as well as allow ‘other’ interactions with landscape through which new learning trajectories could be installed.

Track 3: Mobilizing Wild Bee Knowledges Ultimately, the design manifesto Plan B Josaphat was shared on the websites of the citizen collectives and sent to several administrations and policymakers, along with a petition signed by more than seventeen thousand citizens. In response to the publication of the design manifesto, authors of Plan B Josaphat were invited by several ministerial cabinets and regional administrations to present their work, including Plan Bee Josaphat. In this section, we will discuss the reception of the wild bee narrative among several constellations of urban actors. Discussing the manifesto with regional policymakers, the morethan-human approach of Plan Bee Josaphat made it possible to give wild bees presence in political contexts from which they are usually excluded. As our design scenario specifically addressed the needs of wild bees, it was possible to confront regional decision makers with the impact of building new infrastructures on wild bee nesting sites. Nonetheless, the wild bee narrative remained difficult to mobilize fully, as many of the discussions on a regional scale are steered by quantified objectives in line with the Regional Plan for Sustainable Development (RPSD) (Perspective.Brussels 2018), which focuses on more abstract categories such as ‘units of housing’ and ‘hectares of green infrastructure’. Design scenarios by other authors, such as ‘I love Josaphat’ (Beerten and Bruyland 2021) provided more concrete leads for discussion, as they were suggesting a calculable redistribution of buildings on already built-up sites. This was exemplified when a regional policy maker referred to Plan Bee Josaphat as ‘interesting, but still too much the subject of a theoretical discussion’. In discussions on a local scale, however, Plan Bee Josaphat found more resonance, especially with concerned citizens living in the surroundings of Friche Josaphat. Different from conversations with policymakers and regional administrations, Plan Bee Josaphat provided a narrative that could open up to citizens who wanted to become more involved in the design and creation of alternative habitats for the wild bee species of Friche Josaphat. It even resulted in a new initiative – ‘Donnons une voie aux pollinisateurs’ (which has a double translation: ‘give a voice to pollinators’ and ‘make way for pollinators’) – in which we plan to col-

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laborate with citizen collectives, schools and naturalists to explore the potential of small-scale design interventions for wild bee populations, on residual spaces in the surroundings of the Friche Josaphat. Using the methodology developed in the second research track, we aim to realize new ‘places of encounter’ where citizens, naturalists, students and wild bees can meet, and wild bee knowledges can be further exchanged.

Conclusion In this chapter, we tested more-than-human approaches in urban planning and design through an integration of wild bee knowledges of citizen and nature collectives in a ‘wild bee narrative’. To do so, we organized a research trajectory in three tracks running parallel to, and interacting with, the writing of their design manifesto, Plan B Josaphat. In a first research track, we investigated how interactions between wild bees, citizen collectives and the Friche Josaphat could be traced. We experimented with walk-along methodologies and the development of narrated sections to communicate our findings. Wild bee knowledges of members of citizen collectives provided an understanding of the interrelated nature of citizens, wild bees and the Friche Josaphat. Although the members of the citizen collective provided a complex insight into the lifeworld of wild bees, we are convinced that more in-depth research into more-than-human participatory methodologies (Bastian et al. 2017) could lead to even more interesting data for designers to work with. A second research track focused on the development of an alternative design scenario, Plan Bee Josaphat. Integrating wild bee knowledges from the first track allowed us to project the impact of the regional development plan on the wild bee biotope. The narrated section linked aspects of urban nature, such as soil, hydrology, flora and fauna, which remained separate categories in the environmental impact report (Aries Consultants 2019). Structuring our design proposal around the creation of ‘moments’ and ‘places’ of encounter, allowed us to speculate on a collective infrastructure as a ‘more-than-human project’ (Jasper 2020). The design research demonstrated the need for experimental spaces in the city, where new forms of more-than-human interaction, knowledge exchange and multispecies care can be tested. During the final research track, the wild bee narrative was mobilized among regional and local constellations of actors, to test its reception. In these conversations, the wild bee narrative did succeed in conveying the importance of repairing human–nature relations in different political contexts; however, it was more successful in co-productive settings

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on a local scale, where actors could think along and engage with the narrative. To conclude, experimenting with more-than-human approaches in urban planning and design required a critical re-examination of our own design practice and the methods through which we collect, integrate and mobilize knowledge about wild bee species. It was essential to become ‘situated’ and ‘involved’ with ‘other’ constellations of urban actors, human as well as nonhuman. We became more affected by the concerns of citizen and nature collectives, which also led to the initiation of ‘Donnons une voie aux pollinisateurs’. But the research trajectory also unfolded the agency of design in introducing more-than-human thought in contexts on different scales. Through the materialization of the wild bee narrative in drawings, plans, sections and a new project, we were able to contribute to an increased interest in the pollinators of Friche Josaphat. As such, we hope the introduction of a multispecies narrative can help to transcend the contradictions on the site.

Jolein Bergers is a PhD candidate in architecture at KU Leuven, and a collaborator of citizen movement BRAL. Her research focuses on the integration of multispecies knowledges in processes of urban planning and design, for which she intensively collaborates with various citizen and nature associations in the Brussels Capital Region. Bruno Notteboom is an engineer-architect, urban planner and doctor in urbanism and spatial planning. As of 2017 he is a professor at the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven. His research focuses on socioecological questions in landscape design and urbanism. Viviana d’Auria is an architect and an urbanist. She is currently associate professor in international urbanism at the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven (Belgium). Exploring ‘practised’ and ‘lived-in’ architecture is an integral part of her research within a more general interest in the transcultural construction of cities and their contested spaces.

References Apfelbeck, Beate, et al. 2020. ‘Designing Wildlife-Inclusive Cities that Support Human–Animal Co-existence’, Landscape and Urban Planning 200: https://doi .org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2020.103817. Aries Consultants. 2019. Richtplan van Aanleg: Josaphat (Effectenrapport) [Directional plan: Josaphat (Environmental impact report)]. Brussels.

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Bastian, Michelle, et al. (eds). 2017. Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds. New York: Routledge. Beerten, Jeroen, and Karel Bruyland. 2021. ‘I Love Josaphat’. Retrieved 1 March 2022 from https://www.ilovejosaphat.be. Bender, Thomas, and Ignacio Farías. 2011. Urban Assemblages: How ActorNetwork Theory Changes Urban Studies. London: Routledge. Bracke, Björn, et al. 2021. Cohabiter Dans La Vallée de l’Eure [Cohabitation in the Eure Valley]. Versailles: École National Supérieur de Paysage. BRAL and Natagora. 2021. Plan B Josaphat Manifesto. Brussels. Commons Josaphat. 2015. ‘Commons Josaphat D’une Réserve Foncière à Un Quartier En Bien Commun’ [Commons Josaphat: From a land reserve to a common neighbourhood]. Retrieved 12 January 2022 from https://commonsjosaphat .files.wordpress.com/2015/11/commons-josaphat_josaphat-en-commun01light .pdf. Danneels, Koenraad. 2021. ‘From Sociobiology to Urban Metabolism: The Interaction of Urbanism, Science and Politics in Brussels (1900–1978)’. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Antwerp and KU Leuven. Demey, Thierry. 1992. ‘La Ville Aux Cent Comites d’Habitants’ [The city of a hundred neighbourhood committees], in Bruxelles: Chronique d’une Capitale En Chantier 2. De l’Expo ’58 Au Siège de La CEE. Brussels: Legrain, pp. 281–321. Doucet, Isabelle. 2015. The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968. Oxfordshire: Ashgate Publishing. Ernstson, Henrik, and Sverker Sörlin. 2019. Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2008. Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gali-Izard, Teresa. 2019. ‘Regenerative Empathy: Complex Assemblages in a Shared Environment’, Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Garrard, Georgia E., et al. 2018. ‘Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design’, Conservation Letters 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12411. Hendrickx, Kris. 2020. ‘Op Stap Door de Josaphatsite, Waar Brussel Nog Wild Is’ [On a walk through the Josaphat-site, where Brussels is still wild], Bruzz, 3 December. Hough, Michael. 1989. City Form and Natural Process: Towards a New Urban Vernacular (Repr. in paperback.). London: Routledge. Houston, Donna, et al. 2018. ‘Make Kin, Not Cities! Multispecies Entanglements and “Becoming-World” in Planning Theory’, Planning Theory 17(2): 190–212. Ives, Christopher D., et al. 2016. ‘Cities Are Hotspots for Threatened Species’, Global Ecology and Biogeography 25(1): 117–26. Jasper, Sandra. 2020. ‘Abandoned Infrastructures and Nonhuman Life’, Society & Space, 30 November. Retrieved 24 January 2022 from https://www.societyand space.org/articles/abandoned-infrastructures-and-nonhuman-life. Kuhk, Annette, et al. 2019. Participatiegolven: Dialogen over Ruimte, Planning En Ontwerp in Vlaanderen En Brussel [Waves of participation: Dialogues on space, planning and design in Flanders and Brussels]. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Lepczyk, Christopher A., et al. 2017. ‘Biodiversity in the City: Fundamental Questions for Understanding the Ecology of Urban Green Spaces for Biodiversity Conservation’, Bioscience 67(9): 799–807. McHarg, Ian L. 1969. Design with Nature. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

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Peeters, Theo M.J., et al. 2012. De Nederlandse Bijen [The Dutch bees]. Leiden: Naturalis Biodiversity Center and European Invertebrate Survey. Perspective.Brussels. 2018. Gewestelijk Plan Voor Duurzame Ontwikkeling (GPDO) [Regional plan for sustainable development (RPSD)]. Brussels. ———. 2021. Josaphat. Richtplan van Aanleg (Informatief Luik) [Josaphat. Strategic development plan (informational annex)]. Brussels. Saintenoy-Simon, Jacqueline. 2018. ‘Aperçu Des Friches En Région de BruxellesCapitale: Un Jardin Extraordinaire’ [Overview of brownfields in the Brussels Capital Region: An extraordinary garden], Les Naturalistes Belges 1–31. Shingne, Marie Carmen. 2020. ‘The More-than-Human Right to the City: A Multispecies Reevaluation’, Journal of Urban Affairs 44(47): 1–19. Smets, Marcel. 1977. De Ontwikkeling van de Tuinwijkgedachte in België: Een Overzicht van de Belgische Volkswoningbouw in de Periode van 1830 Tot 1930 [The development of the garden city ideal in Belgium: An overview of Belgian public housing construction in the period from 1830 to 1930]. Brussels: Mardaga. Stengers, Isabelle. 2000. ‘Réinventer La Ville? Le Choix de La Complexité’ [Reinventing the city? The choice of complexity]. Presented at the Urbanités, rencontres pour réinventer la ville. van Stiphout, Maike. 2019. ‘First Guide for Nature Inclusive Design’. Retrieved 18 February 2023 from https://nextcity.nl/first-guide-for-nature-inclusive-design/. Vecchi, Riccardo de, et al. 2021. ‘Multi-Species Architecture Takes Central Stage at Venice Biennale’, ArchiPanic, May 29. Retrieved May 2021 from https://www .archipanic.com/multi-species-architecture-venice-2021/. Vereecken, Nicolas J., et al. 2021. ‘Five Years of Citizen Science and Standardised Field Surveys in an Informal Urban Green Space Reveal a Threatened Eden for Wild Bees in Brussels, Belgium’, Insect Conservation and Diversity 14(6): 868–76. Vink, Jacques, et al. 2017. Stadsnatuur Maken [Creating Urban Nature]. Rotterdam: nai010. Waldheim, Charles. 2010. Ecological Urbanism. Baden: Lars Müller.

PART III

deú Politicizing Urban Natures

deú CHAPTER 13

Reducing Vulnerability through Gardening? The Mobilization of Urban Natures during the COVID-19 Pandemic Andrew MacKenzie and Ginny Stein

Introduction In March 2020, Vanuatu was one of the first nations to close its borders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; two years later, the borders remained closed. The state of emergency declaration by the Vanuatu Government effectively crippled the tourism-dependent economy of Port Vila, the capital and largest city. Before the border closure, tourism employed approximately 40 per cent of salaried workers nationally, with over 80 per cent of those jobs being in the capital (World Bank 2020). The government had few cash reserves to care for the unemployed, and advised Ni Vanuatu (the vernacular name for indigenous citizens) living in the capital to support themselves by returning to their home villages. Through necessity or choice, many did return to the islands to wait out the pandemic. For those who could not return, gardening became a necessary adaptive action to stave off extreme poverty. This chapter illustrates how Ni Vanuatu in Port Vila mobilized urban natures through traditional gardening practices to reduce their vulnerability during the border closure and subsequent tourism shutdown. It details how cultural, institutional and political factors created spaces for opportunistic gardening to flourish on the urban fringe; but they ultimately failed to sustain a permanent shift to urban agriculture as an alternative to low paid, insecure, cash work in tourism. It is a story about how gardening reveals the dynamic interactions and tensions between those who organize urban natures through legal tenure and those

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Illustration 13.1. Island cabbage (Aelan kabis, Abelmoschus manihot) was extensively planted on vacant land around Port Vila in the weeks following the closure of the borders. © Ginny Stein.

ordinary practitioners who, through their own spatial tactics, opportunistically shape urban nature, particularly during disaster (Skår, Nordh and Swensen 2018). Gardening in times of hardship, while serving to reinforce cultural and community links through customary practices, was predominantly a tactic to survive until the marginalized residents on the peri-urban fringe were compelled to return to insecure, low-income work.

Background Until relatively recently, rural–urban migration in Vanuatu has been temporary. Rural villagers would travel to towns to earn cash by selling handicraft or fresh produce for a few weeks and then return to their villages. From the late twentieth century, with the growing formal economy, rural–urban migrants permanently settled in town. This change in migration patterns has resulted in a rapid and largely uncontrolled expansion of settlements on the peri-urban fringe (Lindstrom 2012). In the decade between 2010 and 2020, Port Vila’s population grew by an average of 2.2 per cent per year in the municipal areas, and 2.6 per cent in the peri-urban areas (World Bank 2020). While the city is growing at a greater rate than the rest of the country, three-quarters of Vanuatu’s population are predominantly rural subsistence gardeners. Because the majority are non-urban, there is little government interest in resolving

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Illustration 13.2. Manples Market, Port Vila. Seasonal produce supplied by local growers on sale at one of the daily markets in Vanuatu’s capital. © Ginny Stein.

the problems of rapid urban growth. As a result, urban planning policy is diffuse and poorly enforced, resulting in unregulated urban sprawl and the proliferation of informal settlements on the urban fringe. Policy responses to these problems have been inadequate due to the government’s lack of interest in urban planning and regulation. Compounding these chronic urban challenges are the hardships caused by more frequent and more intense natural disasters resulting from global warming. Following disasters, urban residents suffer from lack of support and are often advised by government to simply return to their home villages (Petrou and Connell 2017). Those on the urban fringe who cannot return to their ancestral island village have few support services, and risk falling into extreme poverty. Many turn to gardening as an adaptive tactic to avoid the worst effects of disaster. From April 2020 to November 2021, we documented the changing landscape patterns on Eluk Plateau as part of a larger research project to study the extent and nature of changes to Port Vila’s peri-urban landscapes caused by the pandemic. The images in this chapter illustrate these changes, and provide a visual cue to consider two major factors that shaped urban nature during the pandemic. On one hand, the state’s ambivalence towards urban planning and land use management entrenched a structural powerlessness upon the urban poor; preventing

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Illustration 13.3. In March 2020, Eluk plateau was a patchwork of vacant lots and newly planted gardens. © Ginny Stein.

them from accessing urban natures in a formal sense. On the other hand, poorly enforced and weak regulations, along with the tacit consent of absentee leaseholders, created spaces for opportunistic gardening to flourish on private property. The resulting patchworks of urban natures are a product of tacit agreements between gardeners and lessees. In this context, gardening helped to temporarily reduce vulnerability in Port Vila during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shaping Urban Natures through Gardening during Disaster The Ni Vanuatu who move to Port Vila organize their diaspora communities around kinship groups by establishing settlements on the urban fringe with support from friends and relatives from their ancestral village (Komugabe-Dixson et al. 2019). During the pandemic, gardening was critical for preventing the most vulnerable from slipping into entrenched and extreme poverty (Parrado-Rodríguez 2018). Gardening in Vanuatu is a cultural practice as well as an economic necessity. It allows communities to share knowledge and daily practices

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that culturally tie them to the kinship links of their ancestral islands (Lindstrom 2012). Traditional gardening in rural villages is synonymous with deep rootedness to place and the ecosystems that support daily life. However, this is not the case in Port Vila. During the pandemic, urban gardeners opportunistically mobilized urban natures on borrowed land and with the tacit consent of landowners. For these communities, gardening and daily life were governed by displacement. The relationships developed through gardening on Port Vila’s urban fringe did not depend on attachment to a particular place or set of social relations, but rather on the creation of fluid places; urban natures were constituted in patchworks and niches created through gardening, especially in response to disaster. However, these communities are not ‘placeless’ in the way that Marc Augé (1995) argues is synonymous with rapid urbanization. Instead, a more ephemeral conception of place is needed to describe these socio-ecological relations. Urban nature, like the gardeners of Port Vila, is adaptable to place constituted through displacement. In this way, the displaced reinforce their place in their diaspora community through mobilizing urban natures as an adaptive response to hardship.

Illustration 13.4. Newly planted gardens appeared on vacant lots at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. © Ginny Stein.

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Displacement should not be misconstrued as a necessarily traumatic experience. Ni Vanuatu have long navigated place and identity in terms of both rootedness and mobility (Lindstrom 2012). Therefore, participation in gardening is not just about placing migrants in urban nature to reduce vulnerability; it reinforces their kinship relations that are neither fixed nor stable (Ruiz-Ballesteros and Cáceres-Feria 2016). For urban gardeners, participation and place weave together in a way that is counterintuitive. In traditional village life, making one’s mark on the landscape is especially important given the significance of place in customary notions of identity and belonging. By contrast, urban life depends on adapting to the uncertainty and fluidity of place in the gardens on the urban fringe. This is particularly the case for the peri-urban communities without access to custom land. To mediate this relationship to place, internal migrants establish communities by mobilizing urban natures in and through shared practices derived from villages on their home islands (Lindstrom 2012). These urban migrants (poor and otherwise) mitigate this spatial instability by growing food from their home islands. The connection between custom

Illustration 13.5. Eluk Plateau, on the urban fringe of Port Vila, saw a significant increase in gardening activity following the closure of the borders in response to the pandemic. © Ginny Stein.

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and place merges in urban nature through the act of ‘eating food from a specific place [that] converts a person into a child of that place, and transforms it into home’ (ibid.: 7).

Shaping Urban Natures on Eluk Plateau Eluk Plateau is an elevated forty-hectare residential subdivision less than three kilometres from the centre of town. The customary owners of the plateau are from Pango, a large village to the south-west of Port Vila, and the plateau sits between the two. Pango and Port Vila share similar settlement histories; they are the oldest urban settlements in Vanuatu due to colonial interests dating back to the mid-nineteenth century (Rawlings 1999). This colonial history shapes perceptions that gardening is a quasi-recreational cultural practice rather than an essential function of urban life for many. Today Pango effectively serves as a relatively welloff residential suburb of the capital, with residents largely engaged in Port Vila’s service economy. Despite this history of urbanization, Eluk Plateau has remained relatively undeveloped until recently. It was leased

Illustration 13.6. Eluk Plateau overlooks the seaside village of Pango, one of the oldest villages on the island of Efate. © Ginny Stein.

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prior to the 2014 Land Reform Act, which was designed to limit corruption and restrict land grabs by expatriate settlers and powerful Ni Vanuatu families (Lane and McDonald 2005). In the late 1990s, an established expatriate secured the lease of two-thirds of Eluk Plateau from the Pango chief, with plans to create a golf resort and gated community for tourists and wealthy residents. The agreements made at the time between the lessee and the Pango chief expired upon his death, resulting in a land dispute between his successors. This created investment uncertainty for the developer who thus abandoned the plans for a golf resort. The land remained relatively undeveloped until 2016. Following a resolution of the land dispute, the lessee chose to subdivide the plateau and sell off individual lots after building a basic road network and installing water and power to each block. Between 2017 and 2020, as lots were leased and fences were erected, the plateau took on the appearance of a typical subdivision, with regular plots of mown grass fronting the unsealed roads. Over time, small concrete-block cottages were erected and, by the end of 2019, approximately 20 per cent of the lots contained a house. However, in early 2020, news of the pandemic spread. A state of emergency was declared in March, and many foreigners left as it was expected to remain in place well into 2022. On Eluk Plateau, the number of houses that were boarded up and vacated was noticeable. At the same time, many vacant lots were tilled or slashed in preparation for planting gardens.

Illustration 13.7. Despite the pandemic, new housing development is sprouting among the gardens on Eluk Plateau. © Ginny Stein.

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Illustration 13.8. The fencing of the northern end of Eluk Plateau with razor wire, highlighting the tenuous access to the gardens. © Andrew MacKenzie.

The gardeners on Eluk Plateau were not just from the adjacent villages and informal settlements. Ni Vanuatu landowners on the plateau also chose to garden to supplement their income. While the villagers and the landowners were essentially gardening in much the same way as each other, they experienced participation in these daily rituals very differently. Depending on their relationship to the landowning class, the gardeners adopted different tactics to access and shape urban nature (Monno and Serreli 2020). This is in large part because the gardeners on Eluk Plateau were subject to opaque agreements between the Pango village chief, the developer, and the landowning class of expatriate retirees, investors, and the new generation of middle-class Ni Vanuatu professionals.

Conclusions This chapter has illustrated how Ni Vanuatu in Port Vila opportunistically and temporarily reshaped urban natures to create an adaptive space to reduce their own vulnerability. During the pandemic, private

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land became community land, as gardeners were ‘tolerated’ by absentee or benevolent landowners who were focused on maintaining good relations with the local villagers. For opportunistic gardeners, daily life involved negotiating the limits of their physical and economic circumstances and the threats of arbitrary discipline imposed by custom owners and leaseholders. Gardening in times of hardship, while serving to reinforce cultural and community links, is predominantly a tactic to survive until the jobs return. Now that the pandemic is over, the gardeners are returning to insecure, low-income work in the tourism sector. The urban gardeners are not simply passive consumers of cultural norms and conventions; instead, they operate within weak regulations and opaque verbal agreements. They create their own adaptive space to reduce their vulnerability to disaster. In doing so, they live within and subvert the system at the same time. Gardening on Port Vila’s fringe highlights the inequalities embodied in the urbanization processes that favour economic development over the protection of productive urban natures (Keil 2005). The unintended consequence is that the participation in the cash economy, supported and encouraged by international aid partners, makes the substitution of gardening and the consumption of imported goods inevitable now that the disaster risk has passed, and things start returning to a new normal.

Andrew MacKenzie is Associate Professor and Director of Emalus Campus, University of the South Pacific, in Port Vila, Vanuatu. His research interests include urban landscape planning and policy. More recently his research has focused on urban greening and open space planning in small, developing Pacific island states. Ginny Stein completed her master’s in disaster resilience and sustainable development at the University of Newcastle after a lengthy career as a foreign correspondent and video journalist. She lived in Vanuatu from the onset of the COVID pandemic, and stayed four years. She has recently moved to Washington DC to take up a position with Radio Free Asia as its managing editor for South East Asia.

References Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso. Keil, Roger. 2005. ‘Progress Report – Urban Political Ecology’, Urban Geography 26: 640–51.

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Komugabe-Dixson, Aimée, et al. 2019. ‘Environmental Change, Urbanisation, and Socio-ecological Resilience in the Pacific: Community Narratives from Port Vila, Vanuatu’, Ecosystem Services 39: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2019.100973. Lane, Marcus, and Geoff McDonald. 2005. ‘Community-based Environmental Planning: Operational Dilemmas, Planning Principles and Possible Remedies’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 48: 709–31. https://doi .org/10.1080/09640560500182985. Lindstrom, Lamont. 2012. ‘Vanuatu Migrant Lives in Village and Town’, Ethnology: An International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology 50: 1–15. Monno, Valeria, and Silvia Serreli. 2020. ‘Cities and Migration: Generative Urban Policies through Contextual Vulnerability’, City, Territory and Architecture 7: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40410-020-00114-x. Parrado-Rodríguez, Cristhian. 2018. ‘Urban Rehabilitation and Hidden Poverty: La Mariscal, Quito’, Bitácora Urbano Territorial 28: 17–24. https://doi.org/ 10.15446/bitacora.v28n2.70065. Petrou, Kirstie, and John Connell. 2017. ‘Rural–Urban Migrants, Translocal Communities and the Myth of Return Migration in Vanuatu: The Case of Paama’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes: 51–62. https://doi.org/10.4000/jso.7696. Rawlings, Gregory. 1999. ‘Foundations of Urbanisation: Port Vila Town and Pango Village, Vanuatu’, Oceania 70: 72–86. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461 .1999.tb02990.x. Ruiz-Ballesteros, Esteban, and Rafael Cáceres-Feria. 2016. ‘Nature as Praxis: Kitchen Gardens and Naturalization in Alájar (Sierra de Aracena, Spain)’, Journal of Material Culture 21: 205–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/135918351562. Skår, Margrete, Helena Nordh and Grete Swensen. 2018. ‘Green Urban Cemeteries: More than Just Parks’, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability 11: 362–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/1754917 5.2018.1470104. World Bank. 2020. ‘World Bank Rankings 2020’. Retrieved 12 June 2021 from https://data.worldbank.org/country/VU.

deú CHAPTER 14

‘I Don’t Care about Tomatoes’ Building Situated Urban Commons in Girona Lucia Alexandra Popartan, Josep Pueyo-Ros, Enric Cassú, Richard Pointelin, Joana Castellar and Joaquim Comas

Introduction ‘We are happy to announce the birth of the first Sant Narcís peppers!’ celebrates a tweet: the newborn are not just any vegetables but the symbolic first breed of Menja’t Sant Narcís (MSN – in English, ‘Eat Sant Narcis’), an urban gardening project in Girona, Spain. For the people of Girona, the neighbourhood of Sant Narcís has always been ‘special’. It is known as the neighbourhood ‘beyond the railway’, a reminder of the physical and symbolic barrier cutting across the city, separating the centre from the periphery. The place has witnessed a permanent influx of new inhabitants from Southern Spain, and later from other parts of the world, making it one of the most ethnically diverse places in the city. The neighbourhood is peculiar in urbanistic terms too: individual houses, green spaces, and large sidewalks, thought as an aesthetic bridge between rural and urban. Created in 1944 during Franco’s dictatorship on the then outskirts of Girona, it was meant to respond to the post-Civil War housing crisis, worsened by several floods and the rural exodus. The project was inspired by the working-class architecture of Nazism, which in turn took its cue from the utopian ‘garden city’ model of Ebenezer Howard: satellite neighbourhoods, separated from the main centre with green space, proportionately combining countryside with urban and industrial areas (Batchelor 1969). In 2018, the ‘edible neighbourhood’ MSN added yet another stratum of utopian imaginary about urban natures in Sant Narcís. Thus, for some of the social movements involved (see next section), MSN was the

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excuse for pursuing an ideal community that was sustainable, diverse and democratic (MSN Ideari, internal document). Cultivating food in common and selflessly sharing it became a political ritual of community building. For other actors, especially at the official municipal level, MSN was an opportunity for place-branding and forwarding a neoliberal utopia, where urban greening was associated with economic growth and touristification. The fact that these two contradictory utopias coincided in this project speaks to the intricacies and tensions behind the emergence of urban commons, which can often escape overly ideological and big-brush analyses. In this chapter, we explore the term ‘situated commoning’ (Pikner, Willman and Jokinen 2020) to account for cases like MSN, where the emergence of urban commons cannot be easily assigned to an ideal type but instead it is shaped by diverse, often contradictory voices and pursuits. By ‘situated’ we understand a negotiated, intermediary space between utopia and practice, and between top-down and bottom-up dynamics. Using mixed methods of participatory research and discourse analysis, the chapter seeks to untangle the difficult dynamics of creating and taking care of commons at the intersection of different discourses and dynamics of power (Caffentzis and Federici 2014; Velicu and GarciaLopez 2018). We collected data between 2019 and 2022 from the MSN meetings and six semi-structured interviews with the municipality representatives, leading members of the Engine group (see next section) and volunteers. We looked at the tensions between groups and actors, and how (current and historical) ‘imagined communities’ shape the evolution of the project. We asked who is included and who is not in the new community, and why; and which storylines compete to dominate the design and evolution of the project. In the remainder of the chapter we first present the theoretical framework, and then give a short overview of the historical roots of the Sant Narcís project, showing how it emerges, its governance structure and how it matters for the construction of a commons-based initiative; next, we look at the discourses, tensions and contradictions that shaped the project from the beginning; we conclude by highlighting the importance of the case for the literature on commons and urban gardening as political projects.

Situated Commons and Urban Agriculture Urban agriculture has traditionally been envisaged as an opportunity to contest the neoliberal consensus and promote new political and socio-

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ecological imaginaries (Anguelovski 2013; Camps-Calvet et al. 2015). Given the often-declared politically contested nature of these initiatives, scholars have been inclined to analyse their political character, generating an interest from critical urban geography (see Tornaghi 2014) and political ecology (Classens 2015). The predominant politicized nature of these initiatives makes it unsurprising that the bulk of this literature is inclined to focus on bottom-up experiences: the relation with the state is often suspected of watering down the radicality of these initiatives, co-opting them in the frame of public discourses around social entrepreneurship and social innovation (Calvet-Mir and March 2019). Importantly, urban agriculture initiatives have been analysed from the perspective of creating new urban commons and how ‘re-naturalizing’ cities can be an alternative to either state-led or private projects. More nuanced accounts, however, point to the radical potential of top-down or mixed communing initiatives (ibid.; Colding and Barthel 2013). The commons theory has been developed through the work of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom (Ostrom 1990; Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010). This theory seeks to document and explain the possibilities of cooperation and collective action between individuals to address common problems (Ostrom 1990, 2009). Ostrom challenges the traditional rational, egoist model in neoclassical economics that underlies Garret Hardin’s famed scenario of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Ostrom and others (see Ungureanu, in print) argue by drawing on economics, anthropology and sociology that rational and autonomous individuals actually cooperate; one of Ostrom’s goal is to identify institutions and rational norms regulating cooperative human behaviour in collective organizations (Ostrom 2009; Velicu and García-López 2018). Nonetheless, the Ostrom liberal model has been criticized for being too limited; in particular, critics have argued that this model fails to question corporate capitalism and its impact on cooperative enterprises in society (Ungureanu, in print). A new strand of research has sought to rethink Ostrom’s theory. Radical scholars and activists argue that the underlying problem is not the lack of institutions, but the commons enclosures and individualist subjectivities generated by capitalism, which are at the basis of Hardin’s fable. The concept of ‘commoning’ was developed to name those social practices of reclaiming and sustaining the collective reproduction of commons (Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010; Bollier and Helfrich 2014; Caffentzis and Federici 2014). On account of this critique, they champion an anti-capitalist revolution. The goal is to break with the hegemonic capitalist democracy and the reconstruction of social practices engaged in reclaiming and sustaining the collective reproduction of com-

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mons (Chatterton, Featherstone and Routledge 2013; Caffentzis and Federici 2014). This model can take different forms, yet it is also criticized for the unfeasibility of the revolutionary agenda and its naive sociological view of the ‘natural goodness’ of popular collectivities (Velicu 2019). According to George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici (2014), the limit and danger of such initiatives is that they can easily generate new forms of enclosure, the commons being based on the homogeneity of its members, often producing gated communities. To account for these difficulties, critical scholars are rethinking commons as an interrelation of resources, communities and ‘commoning’. They call for more attention to the ‘internal processes of the commoning movements, as well as to the subjectivities that are (re)produced through them’ (Velicu and GarcíaLópez 2018: 13). Urban agriculture initiatives offer fertile ground for exploring these dilemmas. As the concept of urban gardening is flexible enough to fit different, even opposed, urban imaginaries, it is important to critically scrutinize the meanings and politics of gardening (Calvet-Mir and March 2019) and offer more nuanced accounts of how these initiatives emerge and endure. MSN is a case in point: commoning efforts involve a renegotiation of the (contested) political relationships through which everyday community affairs are organized and governed, determining who and what belongs to ‘the community’ that is necessary to hold commons together (Nightingale 2019). As this chapter shows, these emerging initiatives tend to move away from utopian desiderates and instead create relations that are messy, ambivalent and subject to power relations.

From the ‘Garden City’ to Edible Neighbourhood: Utopias and Power Dynamics Sant Narcís is nowadays a quiet Girona suburb, suffering from common urban malaises due to derelict infrastructures, long overdue public investment, and an aging population. Nevertheless, traits of the initial ‘garden city’ planning style are still visible: the unusual availability of green areas and the calculated diversity in the type of housing, ranging from very modest ones for the working class to the more luxurious ones meant for public servants favourable to the Francoist regime. Importantly, there is an acknowledged sense of belonging to Sant Narcís among its residents – a strong feeling of community, nurtured by the memories of the ‘garden city’ and a vivid cultural environment. The idea to build the MSN community garden in Sant Narcís belonged to a technician working in the municipality’s Economic Promo-

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tion department. His profile, his personal convictions and his political views were instrumental for MSN: an urban planner, well acquainted with the theory and practice of participatory urban projects, he also lived in Sant Narcís. His ideas were highly influential in the project’s initial design. Backed by local social movements such as La Volta (see below), he contributed to the ideological scaffolding of MSN, as denoted by the opening sentence in the project’s foundational document: ‘[T]he project is developed as a result of the urban concepts of utopian city (18th century), garden city (19th century), productive city (20th century) and edible and nurturing city (20th and 21st centuries)’ (MSN Ideari, internal community document). From the very beginning, he knew that even if the MSN were to be initiated and supported by the municipality, the project had to be ‘devolved’ to the neighbours. MSN ‘had to be completely transversal, with the involvement of all the local entities, or it would not work’ (interview #1, municipality representative). Thus, from the onset, the role of the municipality was meant to be gradually taken over by local entities. Importantly, the success of the idea depended on using the ‘right’ discourse when presenting the project to the higher decision-making ranks. Instead of talking about commons and alternative societies, the aforementioned technician’s strategy was to mobilize the rhetoric of economic growth and touristic promotion: ‘[I]n order to have the agreement of “the politician”, we “sold” the idea of making [Sant Narcís] a new touristic pole in the city . . . we also insisted on the issue of local economy that had not been given the needed public support, the public space has not been renewed, etc.’ (interview #2, municipality representative). Furthermore, the proposal strategically mentioned the possibility of associating MSN with Temps de Flors (in English, ‘Time for Flowers’), an iconic festival in Girona where the streets are richly decorated with flowers; it is also an important source of local revenue from the influx of visitors. This strategy worked as a form of inverted co-option: neoliberal talking points of economic growth and touristification were successfully instrumentalized by a council civil servant to convince the higher ranks of the institution to set up a progressive project. Once initiated, the governance of the project was entrusted to three bodies. First, the municipality, represented by four people: the technician from the Economic Promotion Department area we presented previously; the director of the local Civic Centre; the person responsible for the Sustainability Department of the council (in charge of public green areas); and a social worker. The municipality representatives acted both in their official capacities and as volunteers in the day-to-day management of MSN. Their mission was to provide institutional, legal and economic support to the actions and initiatives in MSN.

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Second, the Engine group was composed of local associations, and was in charge of the conceptualization of the project, its supervision and dynamism. The two associations with more involvement and with more capacity to mobilize people were the Neighbours’ Association and La Volta, an artistic collective. The Neighbours’ Association is a historical group in the neighbourhood, constituted in 1972 and acting as a lobby for local policies affecting Sant Narcís; it has direct contact with the city mayor and, thus has the ability to dominate the governance of the project. La Volta, in turn, is a progressive cultural association, which hosts artists in several locations in Sant Narcís. They are well settled in the neighbourhood and have an important role in the social life of the place. In the MSN story, La Volta was the principal actor defending a commons discourse in MSN. Third, the Action group was composed of individual volunteers, not only growing plants and organizing events, but also designing and building the communitarian garden. The declared intention of this threefold governance scheme was to reverse the top-down starting point of the project. The municipality representatives expressed several times their commitment to gradually cede all their decision-making power to the neighbours. ‘All is open and must be decided among all of us’ was a recurrent phrase in the first meetings. However, in practice, the process was far more nuanced. The municipality started with a preconceived idea of MSN, with few but non-negotiable premises, including that the garden had to be communitarian and the plants had to be grown in wooden boxes to allow speedy dismantling in case the project failed. Moreover, the Engine group decided the location of the project, the calendar of trainings, and the opening date. All in all, the objective of transferring decision-making power from the Engine to the Action group, driven by an ideal of direct democracy, had to face internal power tensions.

The Intricacies of Building Situated Commons Finding the right location for the project was the first test of the transition from a top-down initiative to a more horizontal management of the project. None of the locations proposed by the municipality convinced the Engine group, especially the Neighbours’ Association. According to activists present at the meetings, this was due to feelings of distrust of the inhabitants of the streets Narcís Xifra and Masmitjà (the initial locations proposed by the municipality), who expressed fears of invasion of the private property and vandalism. Therefore, the Engine group chose

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Illustration 14.1. Scarecrow in front of Menja’t Sant Narcís vegetable garden. © Joaquim Comas.

a location that was not anticipated by the municipality: Roma Street, an uninhabited pedestrian area stretching between two church buildings. As the project landed in the neighbourhood, the difference between the official discourse of the municipality and what the neighbours expected became more evident. Thus, even if reinvigorating the economy and the possibility of creating jobs in the community motivated the neighbours to get behind the project, other, less material concerns also came to the fore: the restoration of urban green, recovering traditional knowledge of growing plants, the personal well-being of the locals, and opportunities for intergenerational cohesion all generated consensus among the participants. In turn, there was considerable reluctance to transform the green space into a productive, edible one. In the imagination of many, the ‘garden city’ had to be purely aesthetic to be considered properly ‘urban’, while vegetables belonged to rural space. An oft-repeated idea was that the garden would increase the safety of the neighbourhood by reclaiming public spaces for the community. Understanding cohesion as a form of security for the neighbourhood played into idealized imaginaries of the community, and was encapsulated in an

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old campaign slogan for of Sant Narcís: ‘Neighbours take care of each other and protect one another!’ Yet, it was precisely the idea of safety that became one of the core hurdles for the project, and once again illuminated the diversity of urban imaginaries present among the neighbours. While the concept of ‘community building’ was well received by the locals, there was less agreement regarding the values on which this community should be founded. Questions such as ‘Who will take care of the space?’, ‘Who will own the vegetables cultivated there?’, and ‘Who will protect the space from vandalism and theft?’ seemed insurmountable at times. While some were worried about thieving, others argued that the issue was irrelevant because the goal was growing plants in common, not necessarily eating them: ‘I don’t care about the tomatoes, I care about growing them together’ (Fieldnotes, Action group meeting 2019), a member of the women’s collective asserted. Other participants, especially those representing La Volta, defended that the project was precisely a solution to vandalism, as the potential ‘vandals’ could in fact be engaged in the project. They even proposed the elaboration of a ‘Manual for the Good Thief’, instructing people on how to ‘steal’ the vegetables without harming the plants or damaging the wooden structures in which they grew. This debate was not easily settled, though: one of the neighbours was uncomfortable with the proposed lack of ownership and ‘aimless’ cultivation of plants: the goal should be selling or distributing the final products among the neighbours, otherwise ‘this would be a bad pedagogical strategy. We must encourage respect for the community actions and the common good’ (Fieldnotes, Action group meeting 2019). ‘Common good’ thus became an ‘empty signifier’ (Laclau 2005), as it meant different things to different people: for some, the value of MSN was associated with the ‘result’ of the work in common (in this case, fruits and vegetables), and it had to be given some material or even monetary use. Therefore, some form of enclosure was inescapable here, because even if the produce was shared, only a well-defined community had ‘right’ and access to it. For others, the value of the project resided in the process of production itself, and the socialization, irrespective of the outcome. The latter was moved by a clear political purpose: to create a community that could break away from capitalist imaginaries, and the privatization of public and common goods while practising alternative social relations. The community and its boundaries became an inevitable conundrum in the project as its foundational process was riddled with contradictions. The founding document is adamant about the desire to build an inclusive project:

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We are inspired in the concept of common good . . . we work collectively to build the community through a project that includes all the entities and all the people, whatever their origins, their social status, [or] their relationship with the neighbourhood: residents, users, passers-by, professionals. (Internal community document)

However, while the participants remained vocal about the need to build a project that reflected the social and ethnic diversity of the Sant Narcís neighbourhood, in practice the membership of the Action group was (and remains to date) dominated by white, Catalan, middle-class residents. Some mentioned the need to design more targeted strategies to encourage migrant communities to take part in the project. The idea of an ‘exotic orchard’ came across (interview, municipality #2), where migrants could cultivate their traditional plants. Yet it was less clear how this would work in practice, and the solutions revealed a certain in-built suspicion towards ‘the other’: ‘Let’s say a person works in this exotic orchard space, someone from Ghana, but she would work it together with some local, create a work tandem [to] ensure that they are transferring knowledge’ (interview #3, volunteer). In this sense, the language barrier was crucial, especially because MSN was initiated during the peak of the tensions between Catalonia and the Spanish state. The working language of the project was Catalan, which was a potential problem for the integration of other ethnic groups, including the Spanish-speaking community. The political context permeated the debates. One of participants even proposed that they could ‘translate the poster in English, in French, in Moroccan, but not in Spanish!’ (Fieldnotes, MSN meeting 2019) – an impractical solution because Spanish was also the language predominantly used by migrant communities to communicate with the locals. Thus, the intersection of different and often contradictory subjectivities became evident, where the national sentiments would collide with other ideals, such as openness and community integration (see also Popartan et al. 2020). However, as the project advanced between 2020 and 2022, many shifted or nuanced their initial views. The political-linguistic tensions subsided, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the independent aspirations onto the backburner of the political agenda. Ironically, the discourse of the commons, devoid of lucrative pursuits, was mentioned as a potential hurdle in this endeavour: Can migrant communities be interested in a [commons] project, given that their main concern is to have a job and improve their economy? Can people who suffer from the economic violence of a precarious labour market

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take on a common good project whose main benefit is social and not material? (Interview #4, La Volta member)

The issue of diversity remained to this day a matter of preoccupation, namely finding concrete ways to stretch the boundaries of the community and reach out to migrant collectives. The opening of an ‘African vegetables’ section was the latest attempt to live up to the goal of creating inclusive commons. Yet, the interviewed members seemed unconvinced about the potential effectiveness of the measure. In this sense, MSN highlights the difficult process of translating imaginaries into practices that could sustain the new commons. MSN reflects well what Kant famously called ‘unsocial sociability’: the ambivalence of human condition, torn between the propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition that constantly threatens to break up society (Oksenberg Rorty and Schmidt, 2009). In other words, ‘unsocial sociability’ points to the ‘natural’ inclination to social cooperative arrangements emphasized by approaches to commons, but also to a limit and an open dialectic between centripetal social forces and centrifugal individual and antisocial ones (see Ungureanu, in print). During the pandemic years, the ‘commons’ vision in MSN became increasingly consolidated amongst the community members. As the meetings notes reflect, several members, especially those less used to participating in communitarian projects, went through a process of learning about being and working in common. The conversations about ownership and ‘theft’ of the produce disappeared from the agenda as the community seemed to have internalized that the vegetables were for everyone, not only for those who cultivated them. None of the interviewees could point to a clear explanation for this change of ‘mood’, but the facts were clear: ‘people come here because they like to work the land together. They feel they can have an impact and change the neighbourhood’ (interview #6, MSN volunteer). The project remains open and self-critical, and it therefore contributes to questioning the current resource management system, the changing identity of the neighbourhood, and the future that is being built collectively every day.

Conclusion Using participatory research and interviews with local stakeholders, this chapter has documented the emergence and consolidation of Menja’t Sant Narcís, an urban gardening initiative in Girona that, in our view,

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escapes rigid categorizations of what urban commons can or should be. Initiated by the municipality and managed by grassroot movements, it strives to overcome the internal tensions between inclusionary and exclusionary dynamics inherent in any community formation, no matter how idealistic its foundational goals. In this process, ‘commoning creates socio-natural inclusions and exclusions, and any moment of coming together can be succeeded by new challenges and relations that uncommon’ (Nightingale 2019: 16). The chapter has explored the concept of ‘situated commons’, which, in our view, is well equipped to capture the emergence and evolution of such initiatives where forces of commoning and un-commoning are inescapable and yet are constantly escaped in the everyday practice of creating new collective subjectivities and social bonds.

Lucia Alexandra Popartan is an environmental social scientist and Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher at the University of Girona, LEQUIA research group. In her work, she has explored the contested politics of water and environmental technologies, taking a critical lens to nature-based solutions, circular economy and digitalization. Her research interests include environmental justice, degrowth, anti-privatisation movements, and the water-food-energy nexus in cities. Josep Pueyo-Ros is a postdoctoral researcher at the Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA, Girona, Spain). He is a geographer and holds a PhD in environmental sciences from the University of Girona. His research interests lie in the comprehension of socio-ecological systems, especially in the social valuation of ecosystem services and their coproduction by the interaction between natural and social systems. He is also interested in the usefulness of data science and big data to complement field data, especially spatial data and volunteered geographic information. Enric Cassú holds a degree in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Barcelona, a degree in philosophy from the Jean Jaurès University of Toulouse, and a master’s degree in Amazonian studies from the National University of Colombia. He has developed his research in the Wetlands Management group of the Amazonian headquarters of the National University of Colombia with the Tikuna indigenous people of the Yahuarcaca Lakes (Leticia, Colombia) and the cultural management of the territory. He is currently working on research and action on culture and art with the Cultural Association

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La Volta (Girona), and on ecological agriculture with the Milfulles Association (Salt). Richard Pointelin is project manager at the Department of Economic Promotion of the municipality of Girona. He is an urban planner and geographer, and holds a PhD in experimental sciences and sustainability from the University of Girona. His research focuses on the making of commons in the urban space, the redefinition of community spaces, and the place of the inhabitant in the making of the city. In his research and in his practice, he is inspired by the Right to the City (for all) and in creating concrete utopias on a daily basis. Joana Castellar is an agricultural engineer and a postdoc researcher at the Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA, Girona, Spain). She holds a PhD in the framework of the sustainability program at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. She has experience on ecological engineering and nature-based solutions, especially green walls, for the treatment of urban wastewaters. She is an active member of the COST Action Circular City and oversees the conceptualization of online tools for networking and knowledge sharing among urban food initiatives in the Edicitnet project (H2020). Joaquim Comas is leading the modelling and decision support system research line at the Evaluation and Technologies Area of ICRA. He is also a full professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of the University of Girona, where he is a member of LEQUIA research group. Currently, his main research activity is focused on the development of tools and technologies, including nature-based solutions, to foster implementation of circular economy in the urban water cycle (i.e. the recovery and reuse of water and nutrients).

References Anguelovski, Isabelle. 2013. ‘Beyond a Livable and Green Neighborhood: Asserting Control, Sovereignty and Transgression in the Casc Antic of Barcelona’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(3): 1012–34. Batchelor, Peter. 1969. ‘The Origin of the Garden City Concept of Urban Form’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 28(3): 184–200. Bollier, David, and Silke Helfrich. 2014. Patterns of Commoning. Amherst, MA: Levellers Press. Caffentzis, George, and Silvia Federici. 2014. ‘Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism’, Community Development Journal 49(S1): 92–105.

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Calvet-Mir, Laura, and Hug March. 2019. ‘Crisis and Post-crisis Urban Gardening Initiatives from a Southern European Perspective: The Case of Barcelona’, European Urban and Regional Studies 26(1): 97–117. Camps-Calvet, Marta, et al. 2015. ‘Sowing Resilience and Contestation in Times of Crises: The Case of Urban Gardening Movements in Barcelona’, The Open Journal of Sociopolitical Studies 8(2): 417–42. Chatterton, Paul, David Featherstone and Paul Routledge. 2013. ‘Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism, the Commons and Solidarity’, Antipode 45(3): 602–20. Classens, Michael. 2015. ‘The Nature of Urban Gardens: Toward a Political Ecology of Urban Agriculture’, Agriculture and Human Values 32(2): 229–39. Colding, Johan, and Stephan Barthel. 2013. ‘The Potential of “Urban Green Commons” in the Resilience Building of Cities’, Ecological Economics 86: 156–66. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Nightingale, Andrea. 2019. ‘Commoning for Inclusion? Political Communities, Commons, Exclusion, Property and Socio-natural Becomings’, International Journal of the Commons 13(1): 16–35. Oksenberg Rorty, Amelie, and James Schmidt (eds). 2009. ‘Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. ‘Building Trust to Solve Commons Dilemmas: Taking Small Steps to Test an Evolving Theory of Collective Action’, in Simon A. Levin (ed.), Games, Groups, and the Global Good. Berlin: Springer Heidelberg, pp. 207–28. Pikner, Tarmo, Krista Willman and Ari Jokinen. 2020. ‘Urban Commoning as a Vehicle between Government Institutions and Informality: Collective Gardening Practices in Tampere and Narva’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44 (4): 711–29. Popartan, Lucia Alexandra, et al. 2020. ‘Splitting Urban Water: The Politicization of Water in Barcelona between Populism and Anti-populism’, Antipode 52(5): 1413–33. Poteete, Amy, Marco Janssen and Elinor Ostrom. 2010. Working Together. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tornaghi, Chiara. 2014. ‘Critical Geography of Urban Agriculture’, Progress in Human Geography 38(4): 551–67. Ungureanu, Camil. In print. ‘Commons Democracy, Popular Municipalism, and Feminism: The Case of Barcelona en Comú and Ada Colau’, Antipode. Velicu, Irina. 2019. ‘Commons’. Dicionário Alice. Retrieved 12 June 2022 from https://alice.ces.uc.pt/dictionary/? id=23838&pag=23918&id_lingua=1&entry= 2455. Velicu, Irina, and Gustavo García-López. 2018. ‘Thinking the Commons through Ostrom and Butler: Boundedness and Vulnerability’, Theory, Culture and Society 35(6): 55–73.

deú CHAPTER 15

Urban Fog Oasis Conservation Endangerment, Invasiones and Informal Urbanization in Lima Chakad Ojani

Introduction The Peruvian city of Lima is characterized by an arid environment that transitions south into the Atacama Desert. Rain is rare, but cold ocean currents of the Pacific regularly generate thick, ground-touching clouds during winter. Consisting of airborne water droplets that are too small to precipitate, atmospheric moisture continuously blows over the cityscape. When encountering hilly parts of the city, the droplets cluster to form viscous masses of thick fog, occasionally making it impossible for residents to decipher beyond their immediate surroundings. Some of the mist is transformed into fog drip by rocks and the dry, low-growing vegetation. This process yields an astonishing environmental transformation, producing a significant volume of water that activates seeds and bulbs dormant beneath the soil, protected from the blazing sun. A short distance away from Lima’s traffic jams, these fog oasis ecosystems – or lomas – offer a safe space for viscachas, owls, hawks, reptiles and countless other nonhuman animals to roam undisturbed, except during a period of a week or two, usually around June, when a large number of people are drawn to the hills to witness the emblematic amancaes flower. While the lomas’ capacity to produce fog drip was compromised by waves of exploitation of trees and other natural resources in the past (Nieuwland and Mamani 2017), Limeñan conservationists have begun to see similar threats in the proliferation of new neighbourhoods across Lima’s historically peripheral districts. Through processes of informal urbanization, outer urban boundaries are pushed further back across the hills. If the city was once encircled by these hills, today it reaches

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beyond many of them, climbing to cover the remaining empty crests. Consequently, urban squatters and Lima’s informal land speculation economy are increasingly described by conservationists as ecological threats. The implications of these threats are imagined as extending beyond the fog oasis ecosystems. Hosting endemic species perceived as traditional symbols of Limeñan identity, the disappearance of these urban natures is framed by conservationists as a threat to the city itself. Over the past decade, the lomas have turned into objects of increasing environmental concern, spurring residents to engage in their protection and reforestation. In this chapter, I explore how discourses on ecosystem endangerment have become inextricably enmeshed with long-standing efforts by Lima’s affluent populations to reconstruct class and racialized hierarchies (Gandolfo 2009). I address this question by tracing how the term invaders (invasores), historically used to refer to informal residents, was invoked by conservationists to express contemporary environmental concerns. The conservationists maintained that invasores actively destroyed the loma ecosystems and therefore constituted a threat to Lima as a whole. Exploring this connection will lead me to suggest that loma conservation in Lima folds into the city’s wider political economy in ways that reproduce deep-seated forms of urban marginalization. Accordingly, this chapter contributes to a growing body of research on urban political ecology and the coproduction of social and environmental change (Braun 2005; Rademacher 2015; Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2017). At the heart of my argument is the larger question of how the urban built form is rendered an ‘environmental problem’ (Rademacher 2015: 145) and, in this connection, ‘how various forms of social asymmetry may be reproduced or reconfigured in the practice of place-specific urban environmental politics’ (ibid.: 141). In particular, my argument speaks to studies on the politics of endangerment and its implications for race-class hierarchies in the context of urban nature preservation (Choy 2011; Viatori and Scheuring 2020). By highlighting the relationship between urban fog oasis conservation and Lima’s history of informal urbanization, this chapter maintains that analyses in favour of ecosystem protection and convivial multispecies cities must also address questions of urban inequality. Overlooking such asymmetries risks exacerbating both environmental destruction and marginalization. The chapter first briefly describes the background of Lima’s history of informal urbanization over the past century. This sets the stage to illustrate the imagined ramifications of urbanization among my conservationist interlocutors in the Villa María del Triunfo district in southern Lima, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork between July 2018 and

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July 2019. Here, I refer to ideas expressed during an interview with a young artist and member of a loma association in the district. Given the pseudonym of Alonso, he framed the gradual disappearance of the local loma and amancaes flower as a threat to ‘Limeñan culture’. Alonso’s account resonated with views expressed by his many associates, including members of loma associations in other parts of the city. Next, I discuss how, in the conservationists’ view, the endangerment of loma ecosystems also entailed the endangerment of the city at large, feeding into deepseated imaginaries about threats of rural–urban migration and informal urbanization to Lima and Limeñan ‘cultural survival’. My account of the conservationists’ anxieties and their ensuing struggles then serve to interrogate the city’s politics of deregulation, whose micro-entrepreneurial approach to urban poverty has been criticized by numerous scholars (for example, Davis 2006; Mitchell 2009). Before summarizing my argument, I add another dimension to these critiques by suggesting that loma conservation repeats and possibly redoubles older forms of urban asymmetry by framing the city’s poor as ecological threats.

Informal Urbanization in Lima Lima’s history of informal urbanization goes back to the first half of the twentieth century, and should be understood in the context of the gradual intensification of migration from the country’s provinces. There were various reasons for these demographic changes: the city’s transformation from a political capital to a centre for industrial production and consumption (Ioris 2015: 79); the increasing difficulty of accessing arable land in the provinces (Gyger 2019: 13); and the conflict between the Peruvian state and the Maoist guerilla insurgent group the Shining Path, which culminated in the Fujimori regime’s violent clampdown on the group in the 1990s (Poole and Rénique 1992). These urban transformations were shaped by existing race-class hierarchies, with large segments of Lima’s growing population suffering from discrimination, including Afro-Peruvians and Asian, Amazonian and Andean non-Spanish-speaking migrants (Aguirre and Walker 2017). Ethnographic accounts attest to how this history lingers on into the second half of the twentieth century. For example, based on the fieldwork in Lima conducted in the 1970s, Peter Lloyd (1980: 129) posited the city’s expansion as the emergence of two separate worlds: ‘one of housing estates graded by income, the other of squatter settlements’. Peruvian sociologist Gustavo Riofrío (1978) had already described this division in terms of the ‘legal city’ and the shantytowns (barriadas) –

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a duality that informs contemporary, local discourses on (in)formality (Gandolfo 2013). These developments reach into the beginning of the twenty-first century, as illustrated in, for example, the form of ‘condominisation’ (Plöger 2010: 35), unequal access to water and public services (Ioris 2015), and other kinds of discursive and material marginalization that structure residents’ mobility and access to the city (Gandolfo 2009; Greene 2016; Viatori and Scheuring 2020). In the context of these urban transformations, informal settlements in Lima’s historically peripheral districts are often established through what is colloquially referred to as invasiones – a term that is used widely to describe what is by now a semi-institutionalized strategy for the city’s poor to obtain housing. In short, a group of people get together to construct small, improvised houses on a piece of unclaimed land. This construction often happens within a few hours and during the night or on a national holiday, when authorities are unlikely to react rapidly. Having set up their structures, ‘invaders’, or invasores, typically start to collect documents to claim rights to use the land, property ownership and infrastructure connectivity, sometimes collaboratively with neighbouring settlements. Overall, state responses to informal urbanization have been permissive: successive governments have considered this as the only way to meet Lima’s increasing demand for housing (Lloyd 1980: 5). Criteria for issuing property titles were lowered by Alvarado’s left-wing military government in the late 1960s, when the National Office for the Development of Young Towns and the National System of Support for Social Mobilization were created and ascribed with the task of stimulating community development whilst impeding land trafficking and speculation (Calderón Cockburn 2016). The concomitant name change from barriadas to ‘young towns’ (pueblos jóvenes) expressed the socioeconomic potential that authorities perceived in this form of urbanization. In the 1980s, the name was again replaced with ‘human settlements’ (asentamientos humanos), reflecting a technocratic turn, leaving the collectivist ideological underpinnings of pueblos jóvenes behind (Gyger 2019: 9). Renewed attempts to speed up the acquisition of property titles were later undertaken by President Fujimori in the 1990s, and were epitomized in the World Bank funded experiment ‘the Urban Property Rights Project in Peru’. This was an initiative that aimed to reduce state regulation and make it easier for squatters to formalize their dwellings and become part of the formal economy (Mitchell 2009). For residents who were unable to find a foothold in the housing market, these policies became an incentive to take matters into their own

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hands through invasiones. However, the hilly spaces where many land occupations currently occur increasingly intersect with the urban natural areas, which conservationists wish to protect from human inhabitation (Illustration 15.1). Organized in civil society associations, the conservationists expressed a deep concern about the disappearance of loma ecosystems inside or in the vicinities of their own respective districts. The ages of the association members varied. Most of the younger members were in their mid-twenties. They identified as Limeños and often came from families that had migrated to the city from the Andean and coastal provinces. The older members had a similar history of migration but had spent decades living in the capital’s self-constructed neighbourhoods. Some associations were involved in a more extensive loma conservation project, which was led by the United Nations Development Programme and drew on the concept of Ecosystem-based Adaptation. Over a period of twelve months, I followed these efforts on a regular basis, with a particular focus on a conservation association in Villa María del Triunfo. In the next section I describe some of the imagined consequences of informal urbanization among the members of this association.

Illustration 15.1. A recently formalized neighbourhood in the lomas in Villa María del Triunfo, Lima © Chakad Ojani.

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Amancaes and Invasores I met with Alonso in Villa El Salvador. An artist in his mid-twenties, he had spent most of his life in this low-income district, but his earliest memories were from the bordering Villa María del Triunfo, where he was born and now travelled to several days a week to engage in fog oasis conservation. Established in 1971, Villa El Salvador has been described by Helen Gyger as ‘paradigmatic of the participatory self-help ethos of the Peruvian Revolution, and an ideal vision of the regime’s engagement with the pueblos jóvenes (Gyger 2019: 309–10). Villa María del Triunfo came about through similar processes, albeit with less state involvement. While founded ten years prior to Villa El Salvador, Villa María del Triunfo began being inhabited more than twenty years earlier, initially by workers from other parts of the city and later by newcomers from outside the capital. Alonso had plenty to say about this form of urbanization. We looked for a less crowded area to sit down and chat. The streets were busy, but we eventually ended up in the corner of a park, which, he remarked, was typical of the district: a flat field filled with sand and gravel, without a single green patch in sight. Alonso was a sympathetic and soft-spoken person, always carrying a sketch pad in his backpack. Today he brought his art portfolio. It contained numerous illustrations of amancaes flowers and other lomarelated motifs. Our conversation centred mostly around these, as they were closely associated with his devotion to urban fog oasis conservation. Alonso told me that he first learned about the lomas a year or two ago, when he was looking for a subject for an art project. He visited the association in Villa María del Triunfo, and was immediately hooked. He gave various reasons for his dedication: ‘Firstly, I’ve always been interested in places where there’s nature. You always have to travel outside Lima to encounter such places’. He explained that he was previously unaware of the existence of the loma ecosystem, despite having spent his early years in the district: ‘When I got to know this place [the lomas], I thought that it’s important to take care of it, because there are very few natural ecosystems here [in Lima]’. His second reason had to do with his artistic practice: ‘I know I have artistic capacities, and I saw this [the lomas] as a place where I could develop my skills. There were many opportunities, for example mural paintings, workshops with local children, and so on’. He gestured at the gravel around us, emphasizing that the lomas are pertinent for Lima, ‘because, as you can see here, Lima is very grey, filled with concrete and roads. The parks are not looked after, and it’s dif-

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ficult to find green areas’. This was a concern that Alonso’s associates would frequently voice on the association’s weekly ecotourism walks, underscoring the recreational value of the fog oases. Echoing his friends, Alonso explained that green areas are only managed in a limited number of districts, and that all the city’s inhabitants should therefore take responsibility for the few that remain. In his and the other conservationists’ assessment, the authorities and district mayors should do more to promote conservation: ‘There is a lack of interest on their part,’ he said, ‘which is why the invasiones keep happening, without anyone doing anything to stop them’. Like many of his associates, Alonso thought of this development as a ‘demographic growth that is not being controlled by the authorities’. This problem, he maintained, is also growing because of the lack of conscience on the part of the very invasor. And also lack of awareness, because they [the invasores] don’t know anything about the subject. They don’t know the negative impact they are having. And there aren’t any campaigns to raise their awareness about these things.

I browsed through his portfolio, stopping at a series of illustrations that starkly expressed his anxieties. One depicted a foot about to step on an amancaes flower. The flower was often used by conservationists to symbolize the lomas, but as a flower whose annual blooming marked the emblematic but no-longer celebrated San Juan de Amancaes festival, the amancaes’ symbolic purchase stretched well beyond this. Last held in 1963, the San Juan de Amancaes festival used to be celebrated annually on 24 June, around the time when the amancaes usually blossoms in the hills. The flower appears as a central motif in paintings and in songs associated with the event, and for some residents it has turned into a symbol for the city itself. Over the course of my fieldwork, the conservationists made deliberate use of the amancaes in their various activities. They painted murals and sold key chains depicting the flower, and they were always careful to inform loma visitors about the flower’s endangered status. Alonso explained that the amancaes ‘symbolizes the culture of Lima’. He picked up the portfolio, adding: ‘It’s a human foot that is stepping on all of this. This foot represents the invasiones, and it’s destroying culture, conservation, even education. It’s like a self-destruction’. He meant that the land occupations are jeopardizing not only the ecosystem but the entire city, and thus the very invasores themselves. He said that to conserve the Limeñan culture it was necessary to also conserve the lomas, which is the only place where the amancaes grows: ‘As a species that is endemic to our city, the amancaes makes it all [conservation] much more important. We can’t allow the flower to become extinct’.

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Part of this work entailed the prevention of invasiones, but it also amounted to educating residents about invasive species, whose introduction conservationists often blamed on the invasores. Alonso said: ‘These [species] are not natural to the lomas, and they take up the space that should be left available for native species’. He and his associates believed that certain endemic species are vital for sustaining the lomas’s capacity to produce fog drip. As explained to me by another association member, this capacity is essential for the yearly reactivation of Lima’s remaining fog oasis ecosystems. Alonso’s next illustration (Illustration 15.2) summarized what the members saw was happening. ‘This page represents two realities’, he said, clarifying that these two realities are situated in the same place, in this very city. The man in the illustration is facing one of these realities, and he has his back against the other: ‘He’s walking away from nature, from the lomas, the ecosystem, and he is headed towards the smoke, chimneys, houses, and a dried-out loma without any life’. This movement away from these urban natures starkly conveys the conservationists’ diagnosis of what they feared was occurring in the city. What the man is walking away from represents a version of the city that might soon be little more than a memory. Against the background of these anx-

Illustration 15.2. Alonso’s illustration of the two realities, Lima, 2019. © Chakad Ojani.

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ieties, I will now explain how conservationists’ concerns about species and ecosystem endangerment mirror a wider discourse on the perceived endangerment of the city.

The Politics of Endangerment Alonso’s worries were shared by fog oasis conservationists around the city. The conservationists all believed that if the invasiones were allowed to continue, the lomas would eventually disappear. Aiming to prevent this development, they planned various actions: reforestation would enhance the lomas’s capacity to produce fog drip, whilst also occupying space that might otherwise be lost to new invasiones; ecotourism walks would draw together an environmentally concerned public, whilst simultaneously making it more difficult for invasores to advance across the hills unobstructed; and collaborating with similar associations in other parts of the city would allow conservationists to come up with new strategies, while putting pressure on local municipalities and the city to pay due attention. As I took part in these activities, I could not help but notice the coincidence between the term invasores and the oft-invoked conservationist tropes of endemic and (non-)invasive species, which were present in Alonso’s comments above. Obviously, the latter notions had not yet been articulated when the term invasiones was first used many decades ago to denote informal squatters – at least not in their contemporary form. Still, the consonance invites a comparison between contemporary loma conservation discourse and a considerably older imaginary of the city’s idyllic but degenerating past, originally articulated by a social and economic elite preoccupied with maintaining its privileges in a colonial order (Salazar Bondy 1964). Daniella Gandolfo has charted the various shapes that ‘Lima’s idyllic self-image’ (Gandolfo 2009: 218) assumed throughout the centuries, as well as its implications in discourses on stench, chaos, people overflow and urban decay. Several recent studies suggest how these imaginaries linger on into the twenty-first century (Gandolfo 2013; Greene 2016; Viatori and Bombiella 2019; Viatori and Scheuring 2020). For instance, Maximilan Viatori and Brandon Scheuring have described how protesters against a road expansion project in Lima tapped into oppositions that situated the perceived threat of informal urbanization against coastal nature and ideas about the latter’s ‘culturally cleansing properties’ (Viatori and Scheuring 2020: 92). As a consequence, parts of the Limeñan coast became partially restricted along deep-rooted race-class hierarchies that were characteristic of the city more broadly.

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Accordingly, in the Peruvian capital, ‘natural environments and relationships of class and politics are not just entangled but also actively produce each other’ (Viatori and Bombiella 2019: 10). ‘Nature’ in this context becomes ‘a proxy discourse for race-class’ (Viatori and Scheuring 2020: 92), which is suggestive of how something similar might be unfolding in the context of urban fog oasis conservation. Consider how the amancaes, in Alonso’s phrasing above, came to represent fog oasis ecosystems and ‘the culture of Lima’. Both were imagined to be imperilled by the very process of informal urbanization that has long been postulated as a threat to the city. Chiming with Timothy Choy’s ethnography on how environmentalism in Hong Kong turned into a preoccupation with culture and place, loma conservationists in Lima perceived a socalled ‘culture of informality’ (Gandolfo 2009: 63) as a threat not only to urban natures but to something considerably larger. To paraphrase Choy (2011: 30), the threat to the flower and the lomas was a threat to the city. It was a threat to something uniquely Lima (Illustration 15.3). As an endemic species that was threatened by the city’s long-standing history of informal urbanization, the amancaes flower’s gradual disappearance also marked the disappearance of the city as conservationists

Illustration 15.3. The amancaes flower in the lomas in Villa María del Triunfo, Lima, 2019. © Chakad Ojani.

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imagined it. While bemoaning the deterioration of what they thought the city had once been, Alonso and his associates simultaneously contemplated the possibility of another, different Lima (cf. Choy 2011: 28) – attainable, at least in part, through loma ecosystem conservation. Thus, as Choy has suggested in the context of Hong Kong, here too, notions of endangerment had shaped environmental politics and the politics of place and ‘cultural survival’. ‘Both domains focused on the prospect of a drastically changed milieu, and the prospects of a particular object within that milieu’ (ibid.: 27) – in this case, the amancaes and, by extension, the lomas more broadly. During my fieldwork, I also had the opportunity to follow the other side of this story. While several older conservationists spoke of their past actions in terms of invasiones, they no longer engaged in such practices and tried to discourage their neighbours from doing so. However, among residents who were actively occupying land next to their own respective neighbourhoods, I learned that these collectives had several concerns in common with the conservationists. For example, one family often complained about the condition of living under the risk of the potentially devastating consequences of an earthquake, exacerbated by the increasing number of constructions in the areas above their own settlements. Yet their conclusion was that, if land seizings were likely to happen anyway without repercussions from the state, then they might as well occupy the areas themselves before other, organized groups of land traffickers did so, as these groups were often impossible to hold accountable. In other words, to some degree, loma conservation and invasiones were but two different ways of dealing with a shared experience of state absence, widespread among local conservationists and so-called invasores alike. As evident in Alonso’s remarks about the lack of environmental concern among the authorities, both groups experienced a sense of living at the margins of the state (Poole 2004), where the latter was seen as recurringly failing to fulfil its obligations in various ways. The creation of a just multispecies Lima seems unlikely so long as other, long-standing forms of urban asymmetry are not given due attention. Before concluding this chapter, I argue below that analyses in favour of the preservation of urban natures become self-defeating if questions of urban inequality are left unaddressed.

Implications for the Multispecies City While drawing on discourses with a disturbing history, it must also be mentioned that several of my conservationist interlocutors exhibited a certain critical awareness about the discriminatory ideas embedded in

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representations of the city’s idyllic past. Alonso, for instance, actively questioned some of the symbolisms used in the San Juan de Amancaes festival, once his associates were in the midst of organizing their own version of this event in Villa María del Triunfo. The dilemmas raised by fog oasis conservation should therefore direct our attention back to where I began this discussion: Lima’s politics of housing. Ethnographic research reveals how biodiversity conservation and green capitalism can reproduce deep-seated asymmetries, sometimes resulting in new forms of environmental destruction (Kockelman 2016; Howe 2019). So too is this the case for fog oasis conservation in Lima. My research suggests that analyses in favour of convivial multispecies cities need to attend to political histories of inequality that influence and become enmeshed with discourses for the preservation of urban natures. Such analyses must directly critique both the politics responsible for environmental devastation and urban precarity. In Lima this is of special importance, because by focusing exclusively and uncritically on ecosystem conservation, there is a risk that such actions may fuel discourses that historically serve to marginalize the city’s poor. In the minds of those who have actively supported Lima’s microentrepreneurial approach to urban poverty, state regulation has been an obstacle to squatters’ entrepreneurial capacities and aspirations (de Soto 1989). Informality, they have maintained, should be seen not as a problem but as untapped economic potential. It has been imagined that by lowering the threshold for the attainment of property titles, the informal sector will eventually become integrated into the formal economy, above all because residents will now have assets with which to realize their entrepreneurial capabilities. While critics have demonstrated how deregulation and marketization can yield various forms of dispossession and existential insecurity (Elyachar 2005), this chapter has shown why this critique must also examine how neoliberal responses to urban poverty likewise fail to live up to local residents’ desires to preserve urban natures. By propelling environmental devastation, Lima’s politics of housing ultimately reinforces the very forms of marginalization that it claims to ameliorate. As I have demonstrated, this is so because urban environmental politics is informed by, and is thereby inseparable from, already-existing forms of social asymmetry in the city (Rademacher 2015).

Conclusion This chapter has argued for a focus on urban asymmetries in analyses of urban nature preservation, thus contributing to research on more-than-

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human urban relations with an emphasis on urban political ecology. To this end, I have shown how fog oasis conservationists in Lima drew on deep-seated imaginaries about informal urbanization as a threat to the city. After providing a background to Lima’s history of urbanization, a series of ideas expressed by Alonso highlighted the conservationists’ framings of informal squatters as ecological threats. Importantly, Alonso’s comments demonstrated that ecosystem endangerment was deeply enmeshed with notions about the endangerment of the city, which further meant that fog oasis conservation intersected with the politics of place and with the politics of Limeñan ‘cultural survival’. In the conservationists’ assessment, the disappearance of loma ecosystems also implied the degeneration of Lima. Yet, while loma conservation became a means to marginalize the urban poor, I have argued that, to some extent, conservation and invasiones alike were but different responses to a shared experience of state absence. Rather than critiquing urban fog oasis conservation as such, the chapter has therefore directed attention to the city’s politics of housing and deregulation more widely. Fomenting environmental devastation while simultaneously intensifying urban precarity, Lima’s politics of deregulation proved unapt for the creation of a convivial multispecies city.

Chakad Ojani received his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Manchester, and he is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. He has conducted ethnographic research on fog capture in coastal Peru and outer space infrastructures and imaginaries in Sweden. His work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology. References Aguirre, Carlos, and Charles F. Walker. 2017. The Lima Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braun, Bruce. 2005. ‘Environmental Issues: Writing a More than Human Urban Geography’, Progress in Human Geography 29(5): 635–50. Calderón Cockburn, Julio. 2016. La Ciudad Ilegal: Lima en el Siglo XX. Lima: Punto Cardinal. Choy, Timothy. 2011. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso.

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de Soto, Hernando. 1989. The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism. New York: Basic Books. Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gandolfo, Daniella. 2009. The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013. ‘Formless: A Day at Lima’s Office of Formalization’, Cultural Anthropology 28(2): 278–98. Greene, Shane. 2016. Punk and Revolution: 7 More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gyger, Helen. 2019. Improvised Cities: Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Howe, Cymene. 2019. Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ioris, Antonio. 2015. Water, State and the City. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kockelman, Paul. 2016. The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lloyd, Peter. 1980. The ‘Young Towns’ of Lima: Aspects of Urbanization in Peru. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. ‘How Neoliberalism Makes Its World: The Urban Property Rights Project in Peru’, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 386–416. Nieuwland, Bernando, and José Manuel Mamani. 2017. ‘Las Lomas de Lima: Enfocando Ecosistemas Desérticos Como Espacios Abiertos en Lima Metropolitana’, Espacio y Desarrollo 29: 109–33. Plöger, Jörg. 2010. ‘Territory, Local Governance, and Urban Transformation: The Process of Residential Enclave Building in Lima, Peru’, in Paul van Lindert and Otto Verkoren (eds), Decentralized Development in Latin America. London: Springer, pp. 35–48. Poole, Deborah. 2004. ‘Between Threat and Guarantee: Justice and Community in the Margins of the Peruvian State’, in Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 35–65. Poole, Deborah, and Gerardo Rénique. 1992. Peru: Time of Fear. London: Latin America Bureau. Rademacher, Anne. 2015. ‘Urban Political Ecology’, The Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 137–52. Rademacher, Anne, and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (eds). 2017. Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Riofrío, Gustavo. 1978. Se Busca Terreno para Próxima Barriada. Lima: DESCO. Salazar Bondy, Sebastián. 1964. Lima la Horrible. Mexico: Ediciones Era. Viatori, Maximilian, and Héctor Bombiella. 2019. Coastal Lives: Nature, Capital, and the Struggle for Artisanal Fisheries in Peru. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Viatori, Maximilian, and Brandon Scheuring. 2020. ‘Saving the Costa Verde’s Waves: Surfing and Discourses of Race-Class in the Enactment of Lima’s Coastal Infrastructure’, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25(1): 84–103.

deú CHAPTER 16

Haunting Natures The Politics of Green Reparations in Baltimore, MD Mariya Shcheglovitova and JH Pitas

Introduction In 2018, the Office of Sustainability and the Department of Planning in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, set an agenda to help to counteract racial injustices through urban nature. This agenda built on planning and policy discourses that entwine race and nature, and was formalized in the city’s Green Network Plan and an updated Sustainability Plan. These documents argued that planned urban nature had the potential to ‘improve health and economic well-being’ in neighbourhoods that were ‘still adversely affected by a history of harmful policies that entrenched racial inequity, like mortgage redlining’ (City of Baltimore Department of Planning 2018: 13). The term ‘redlining’ describes the practice of denying home loans to applicants based on their race, and it stems from maps produced in the 1930s for cities in the United States with a population above forty thousand by a federal agency called the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. In these maps the colour red was used to designate areas deemed ‘high risk’ for loans, making them a governmental tool for guiding mortgage lending in response to the foreclosure crisis of the Great Depression. Numerous scholars have documented how redlining maps reproduced uneven urban geographies by precipitating anti-Black mortgage lending policies, and providing federal backing to existing residential segregation practices (Pietila 2010; Rothstein 2017; Faber 2020). However, others have noted that focusing on the spatial patterns of housing segregation can downplay the market logics of devaluing Black communities (Imbroscio 2021; Zaimi 2020). Furthermore, the positioning of residential segrega-

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tion in the past through historical representations like redlining maps fails to acknowledge the reproduction of these structures through displacement and entrenched inequality generated by the combined effect of urban renewal programmes and the subprime mortgage crisis. While previous studies have examined how redlining impacts the distribution of urban nature, showing that redlined neighbourhoods have less tree canopy (Locke et al. 2021) and green space (Nardone et al. 2021), we investigate how planning initiatives aim to address the legacies of redlining through urban nature. This chapter asks how current planning policies aim to repopulate and revegetate geographies that have been cartographically stigmatized and materially disinvested by practices like redlining. We explore how reparative discourses position planned urban nature as a fix for racial injustice, making planned natures tools of the state entwined with racial capitalism. We argue that planning discourses that describe urban natures as strategies that ‘improve health and economic well-being’ do not fully encompass the transformative potential of reparations. Raj Patel and Jason Moore (2017: 213) call for ‘using reparation as a way of remembering how capitalism’s ecology has made the world’. Through examples of reparative and alternative framings of urban natures, we show how planned nature in the city can be ‘haunted’: a site for remembering capitalism’s failures, demanding a continued and necessary engagement with struggles for racial justice. We apply discourse analysis to planning documents, interviews, and popular media to highlight tensions between the framing of planned urban nature in city narratives oriented towards neighbourhood improvement and alternate representations that highlight planned nature as a site of critique. We understand discourse to extend beyond speech to include institutionalized patterns of knowledge, expertise and structures (Foucault 1970; Fairclough 1992). Our analysis relies on the triangulation of two interviews and participant observations completed between 2017 and 2019, and text analysis of policy and popular media documents such as Baltimore’s Green Network Plan, its Sustainability Plan, and articles and videos from the Baltimore Sun and WBAL-TV. By presenting contrasting narratives of urban natures, we follow Greg Marston (2004: 7) in ‘highlighting tensions between dominant and alternative discourses, and highlighting power relations through an analysis of hegemony and resistance’. We note how planners and planning documents make urban natures visible as reparation, a fix for racial injustices, and present resident observations on urban nature at a community event and an art exhibit as counternarratives. We begin by briefly reviewing the literature on the

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political ecology of race and nature. We then use the lens of ‘green reparations’ to critically reflect on interviews conducted by Mariya Shcheglovitova (hereafter Mariya) in May 2018 with two planning professionals who draw explicit links between high-profile police murders of unarmed Black people and a refocusing of urban greening discourses on racial justice. We complicate the narrative of repair through planned urban nature with perspectives drawn from the fieldwork of JH Pitas (hereafter JH) at a community event and an exhibit of a Baltimore-based artist that show how repair is an ongoing process that must acknowledge past and current injustices (Tacchetti et al. 2021). Policing is present throughout these three vignettes, linking urban natures to carceral geographies and their complicit role in devaluing Black life and sustaining racial capitalism. We develop the concept of ‘haunted’ urban natures as a heuristic that identifies how ‘race, space, and history hang together’ (Heynen 2018: 116) to rupture planning imaginaries of nature as reparation and manifest urban natures as sites of struggle for racial justice. In particular we identify ways in which past entanglements between public space, urban nature and white supremacy still loom as spectres in places where these struggles unfold.

Urban Natures and Racial Capitalism Recent scholarship in urban geography and political ecology has theorized the production of cities through the lens of settler colonialism and racial capitalism (Safransky 2014; Simpson and Bagelman 2018; Dorries, Hugill and Tomiak 2019; Miller 2020; Dantzler 2021). These studies have led to a deeper understanding of urban displacement and value extraction as enabled by the construction of racial hierarchies and identities. More broadly, Adam Bledsoe and Willie Jamaal Wright (2019) argue that global capitalism does not merely exist alongside anti-Black violence but depends on the devaluation of Black lives and spaces for its perpetuation. In his second progress report on political ecology, Nik Heynen (2016) argued that the murder of Freddie Grey precipitated a turning point for political ecology to more deeply engage with race as embedded in the interconnections between urban space and everyday experience. He proposed integrating theories of uneven development in Marxist political ecology with processes of racialization and devaluation through the lens of ‘abolition ecology’ to understand how racial inequalities have shaped the political ecology of cities. Work on race and nature has highlighted the way discourses, ideologies and the materiality of natures intersect with ‘racial ideas of bio-

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logical difference, purity and pollution, and the management of bodies and populations’ (Brahinsky, Sasser and Minkoff‐Zern 2014: 1137). The technologies of power that frame natures often exclude racialized people from ‘natural’ spaces (Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003; Byrne 2012). These exclusionary practices have been described as occurring through processes of ‘green gentrification’ in cities where greening is portrayed as a community asset that will attract developer interest but leads to the displacement of the neighbourhood residents whom the projects were meant to benefit (Dooling 2009; Gould and Lewis 2012). Our case study puts research on green gentrification in conversation with work in political ecology on race and nature by exploring the implications of bringing more nature into racialized spaces through urban greening initiatives – what we term ‘green reparations’ – and the ways that people living in these spaces interact with planned natures. Through this research, we respond to the call of Isabelle Anguelovski et al. (2019: 1079) to investigate the ‘multiple yet clashing values and significance of urban greening’, by proposing that urban natures are haunted by ongoing struggles for racial justice and can become sites that both seek to repair and critique urban inequality.

Green Reparations: Planned Urban Nature as Fix Ta-Nehisi Coates (2014) builds his ‘Case for Reparations’ through examples of decades of racist housing practices, like redlining, which dispossessed wealth from Black communities to secure the wealth of white communities. Reparations aim to restore generational wealth to Black communities on whose labour and exclusion the United States was built. Planning initiatives that aim to right the effects of redlining through greening put urban natures in conversation with city pasts and futures. In Baltimore, this is made clear through initiatives that use greening to ‘improve the economic vitality of neighbourhoods still adversely affected by the legacy of harmful policies like mortgage redlining’. This section presents interviews with city planners and a review of planning documents to explore how greening is framed as a form of reparation to intimately link planned urban natures to anti-Black violence and white paternalism and guilt. Stan and Jayne (all names used are pseudonyms) are planners working on implementing and envisioning new greening initiatives. During an interview, Mariya asked them to speak about how their work relates to redlining. Jayne began her response by alluding to the murder of Freddie Grey by Baltimore city police officers in 2015:

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I mean, a lot of different conversations overlapped in planning, but I feel like after the unrest in 2015 and even before that, I think the . . . mood in the country, that was also in the planning department as well. And people were getting much more focused on equity issues . . . And then we had the unrest, and then immediately after that, we all got together, and it was a very emotional time for lots of people. We were just like, ‘what can we do differently’?

Jayne’s retelling of a collective affective response to a national mood of racial reckoning describes how planning officials reconsidered their connection to Baltimore’s planning legacy. For Jayne and her colleagues, planning differently meant focusing greening efforts in redlined communities so that they could receive the benefits of planned urban natures. This framing of planning as a response to the reproduction of racial injustice makes urban natures visible as a proposed fix for historical inequities that can be corrected with more and better green space. The links between urban nature and community benefits are bolstered by conclusions drawn from scientific studies that map the uneven geographies of urban natures, and their associated correlates such as property value (Troy and Grove 2008), health (Kondo et al. 2018), crime (Shepley et al. 2019) and education (Browning and Rigolon 2019). While recognizing that past planning practices have disadvantaged majority Black neighbourhoods, studies demonstrating the correlation between urban natures and improved socio-economic conditions can be used to suggest that the simple presence of nature in a neighbourhood can correct inequities. Jayne’s appeal to the emotional response in the planning department to the murder of Freddie Grey and the unrest in Baltimore as the motivation for re-examining planning practices frame our reading of tensions between a desire to address structural racism through planning and the limitations of repairing injustice through urban nature. The contradictions embedded in the reparative discourses of planners evoke what others have called the ‘sustainability fix’ (While, Jonas and Gibbs 2004). The ‘sustainability fix’ builds on David Harvey’s ‘spatial fix’, where capitalist crises of overaccumulation are addressed through spatial expansion, moving the problems of production elsewhere. Capitalist expansion is further facilitated through the ‘sustainability fix’, where environmental goals are selectively integrated into urban governance structures and policies to promote urban growth. The United States Department of Agriculture, who collaborated with Baltimore City on a guide to greening vacant land, articulates a ‘sustainability fix’ approach when they write that one benefit of greening is reduced cost: ‘A growing body of evidence shows that managed green

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spaces reduce crime, increase property values and improve health. In addition, they cost less per acre to maintain than vacant buildings’ (USDA 2015). But this practice of equating planned greening efforts with social improvement makes the assumption that more green space is generating improvements in social indicators. This perspective troublingly omits the possibility that this relationship may be driven by a complicated political economy and history, where higher concentrations of managed green space are indicators of affluence and privilege (Shcheglovitova 2020). Furthermore, the focus on nature as a ‘cheap’ approach (Patel and Moore 2017) to urban planning serves as a strategy for putting nature to work to temporarily fix capitalism’s self-created crisis of urban decline. The contradictions of targeted greening as a fix are not lost on planning practitioners whose interventions in many ways are constrained by existing structures of inequality. Even while speaking about urban natures as reparation, Jayne and Stan pointed to the discrepancies inherent in this position. Jayne expressed that while the ‘hope’ is that green spaces ‘will be able to help with . . . revitalization, . . . they’re also in some ways a holding strategy’, where the ultimate goal is recovering a market that has been devalued through practices like redlining. Jayne hoped that ‘the bigger long-term permanent projects help to revitalize the area and then the temporary green spaces, as the area gets a stronger market, then those become new development sites’. By simultaneously framing urban natures as a fix and a holding strategy, Jayne explained an approach to planning that benefits from the future development potential offered by urban green space with the goal of recovering a market where ‘anti-Blackness is . . . an always-present precondition for capital accumulation’ (Bledsoe and Wright 2019: 12). Stan further expressed that while the hope is that planned urban nature will eventually contribute to ‘economic development’, greening also has short-term benefits such as ‘help on crime costs, policing costs, [and] security costs’. The association of green spaces with the ‘costs’ of policing ignores the cost of lives lost paid by Black communities disproportionately targeted by violent policing entwined with the state violence of land dispossession (Cowen and Lewis 2017). Through their association with crime and security, urban natures become enrolled in policing and surveillance (Braverman 2008), effectively reproducing racial violence rather than repairing it. The failure of green reparations lies in a white spatial imaginary that considers urban space as a source of exchange value (Lipsitz 2007) and entangles planned urban natures with the aim of policing Black communities and economic development that may be exclusionary of existing residents (for example, through green gentrification).

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Haunted Natures: Planned Urban Nature as Critique The previous section has highlighted how race and racism are embedded in planning language that aims to repair the spatial and social impacts of policies that have entrenched racial inequality in Baltimore. As a counterpoint to the reparative discourse of planned urban natures, we present field notes from a community event and popular media reporting on an art installation that position urban nature as ‘haunted’ – a site that evokes rather than repairs the past. The Community Event JH met Donovan at a community event where the goal was to clean up a garden and vacant lot in a south-west Baltimore neighbourhood. As JH and Donovan picked up trash, Donovan described growing up in Baltimore and the uneasy relationship he developed with public space. He explained that the police would target Black youths, particularly boys, for being out on the streets alone. He was repeatedly locked up or harassed for things he did not do. Sometimes, he recalled, they would line them up against a wall and assign them each fictitious charges: ‘You had drugs, you had a weapon, you were caught stealing’. ‘The point was to get them into the system’, he continued. ‘They wanted to get these offences on your permanent record’. It was not just youth who were the target of police ire; Donovan remembered seeing police slowly driving by with their windows down, yelling at anyone sitting on their stoops, telling them to get back inside. Such actions stifled social communication and further desolated the appearance of already depopulated neighbourhoods. He told JH that, at some point, you start to think to yourself: Why should I even bother? This society doesn’t want me; [it’s] working against me. It’s set up so that I fail in order for others to succeed. Why should I even try to make things any better? It makes the most sense to look after yourself, stay at home, do your own thing. This way, you can’t be exploited [or] taken advantage of by a system that’s stacked against you. (Revised field notes)

The past is simultaneously collective and personal. Our own lives have an arc and narrative, which we alone can grasp fully, but these narratives are also situated within a broader geography of experience. For Donovan, coming from a family with strong social ties and cohesion, he wanted to stand tall, make a difference, and ‘be somebody’. Yet being a young Black man came with its own set of baggage from which he found it difficult to escape. The past haunted his future.

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Donovan had mixed feelings about greening and the value that parks brought to his neighbourhood. On the one hand, cleaning and greening alone were not enough to make tangible progress on improving the quality of life for people. There were structural issues rooted in a long history of racism and exploitation that were impossible to resolve by adding more and better green spaces. Growing up, Donovan was also told to be wary of white people coming in with grand ideas, as these people were out to make a name for themselves and could exploit the community in the process. To him, greening was no different; this was a chance for politicians and scientists to glad-hand around and pat themselves on the back. However, even while reminding JH of the need to be critical when examining the role and intent of greening, Donovan showed up along with other family members and a youth group that he organizes to help to care for green space in his neighbourhood. The Public Art Installation Donovan’s critical and caring engagement with urban nature is echoed by the artist Loring Cornish, who closed his Baltimore-based gallery to work on an outdoor exhibit after Walter Scott had been shot and killed by a South Carolina police officer. The exhibit displayed dolls painted black and hung from a tree. Leaning against a brownstone that served as the backdrop for Loring’s exhibit was a message: LYNCHING STILL EXIST, WHITE POLICE USE BULLETS AND LAW TO LYNCH BLACKS LEGALLY. REST IN PEACE TO THOSE WHO WERE LYNCHED YESTERDAY & TODAY

‘I hung them from the tree’, Loring explained, ‘to let people visually see what we feel. . . . This is not something we should just gloss over. We’re actually feeling death in our community’ (quoted in Robinson 2015). Loring’s art recasts urban natures as sites of violence and mourning. For a moment, a tree on Baltimore’s street is a site that evokes Black death and anti-Black violence while pointing to its source – chattel slavery and the criminal justice system, which are ‘one and the same, haunting, replacing, reforming and rebirthing one other’ (Saleh-Hanna 2015: 5). Like Billie Holiday singing the words of Abel Meeropol’s song, Loring

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makes connections between nature and race, prompting the viewer to confront the Black bodies who are the ‘strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees’. Unlike planning initiatives that aim to right racist legacies by focusing on the promises of urban natures, Loring shows how these promises can be challenged when nature recalls the reproduction of death and the need to mourn. Baltimore’s collective past haunts greening activities. Baltimore’s Black communities continue to be testing grounds and launch pads for social, environmental and public health policies which claim to work towards alleviating past injustices. When city agencies affirm that greening can redress social issues linked to racist policies like redlining, they inadvertently invoke traumatic pasts and collective memories of community and individual oppression. Certainly, as suggested elsewhere (for example, Heynen, Perkins and Roy 2006), the uneven distribution of urban green spaces is an environmental injustice that must be rectified. But the discourses of, and policies underlying, planned urban greening reveal that they are in fact guided by visions of white urban natures that aim to police neighbourhoods grappling with the trauma of police violence while keeping them in a ‘holding pattern’ for future development. For some residents, the simple presence of externally planned urban natures may not signal improvement but instead recall haunting memories of past and current injustice.

Conclusions: Race, Nature and History Modern-day policies and representations of nature-based urban development produced by Baltimore’s sustainability agencies and their partners claim to be steps towards righting the effects of past racist housing practices like mortgage redlining. These practices and their representations left material legacies of neighbourhood disinvestment, including vacant lots and houses, and the emptying out of residents. This stark geography contributes to narratives that construct many of Baltimore’s urban spaces as empty and developable. One urban planner, interviewed during the course of this research, summarized these geographies as ‘just a kind of ghost town’. Katherine McKittrick reminds us of the racial logics at play in discourses such as ‘ghost towns’ when these spaces are ‘emptied out of life precisely because the historical constitution of these geographies has cast them as the lands of no one’ (McKittrick 2013: 7, emphasis in original). By explicitly referencing Baltimore’s racist histories, like redlining, planning discourses make these histories and imagined futures visible on their terms. Casting greening as a resolution

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to racial injustice is a framing that seeks to remedy problems through urban planning without addressing the root causes of the problems themselves. As a contrast to planning discourses, Donovan’s recollections and Loring’s art call forth urban natures as sites haunted by histories reproduced in the present. Baltimore’s majority Black communities were rendered ‘ghost towns’ through decades of surveillance, disinvestment, marginalization and failed planning policies, which are now perversely invoked through discourses and practices that seek to ameliorate these past wrongs through greening. On the contrary, uncritically framing urban nature as green reparation contributes to the same series of historical dispossessions of urban space as mortgage redlining and urban renewal by reterritorializing Black spaces as green amenities. It takes more than greening to undo histories of past injustice when exploitation and hyper-policing haunt memories and daily experiences of public space. Without more meaningful systemic change and distributed agency for planning and implementing greening plans, these spaces do nothing more than contribute to an already carceral urban landscape by invoking the past and haunting the present. Haunted rather than reparative urban natures recognize haunting as a ‘methodology of justice’ (Morrill 2017) that demands taking meaningful steps towards reparation through abolition and the return of stolen land and wealth (Movement for Black Lives 2021), as well as everyday practices of critique and care (Tacchetti et al. 2021). By co-opting urban nature as a site of critique, Loring’s art and Donovan’s perseverance point to what remains unfinished in planning – taking seriously the ‘possibility of planning in ways that counter, elide, and/or dismantle white and colonial spatial imaginaries’ (Bates et al. 2018: 254). Green space can and should be part of restoring wealth to Baltimore’s neighbourhoods. But repopulating and revegetating ‘ghost towns’ means grappling with the structures that (re)produce them as sites of the ‘racial other’ so that they can be emptied out of life (McKittrick 2013). Haunted natures demand a resolution that transcends textual references and translates into meaningful community-oriented investments; these natures are not an end point for value production but sites that challenge the mechanisms that extract value from Black lives and spaces. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the authors and do not represent the official positions or policies of the Office of Policy Development and Research, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, or the US Government.

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Mariya Shcheglovitova completed her PhD in geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she studied the political ecology of Baltimore’s urban forest. She currently works for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. JH Pitas has a PhD in geography and environmental systems from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Their dissertation is an urban environmental history of waste infrastructure in Baltimore, touching on key themes like inequality, labour and the materiality of waste. They have also published scholarship on geographies of death, nonhumans and environmental justice. References Anguelovski, Isabelle, et al. 2019. ‘New Scholarly Pathways on Green Gentrification: What Does the Urban “Green Turn” Mean, and Where is it Going?’, Progress in Human Geography 43(6): 1064–86. Bates, Lisa K., et al. 2018. ‘Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise/Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise/She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging/Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC/Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries/Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text/Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City/If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles/Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy/Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History’, Planning Theory & Practice 19(2): 254–88. Bledsoe, Adam, and Willie Jamaal Wright. 2019. ‘The Anti-Blackness of Global Capital’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37(1): 8–26. Brahinsky, Rachel, Jade Sasser and Laura-Anne Minkoff‐Zern. 2014. ‘Race, Space, and Nature: An Introduction and Critique’, Antipode 46(5): 1135–52. Braverman, Irus. 2008. ‘Everybody Loves Trees: Policing American Cities through Street Trees’, Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum 19(1): 81–118. Browning, Matthew, and Alessandro Rigolon. 2019. ‘School Green Space and its Impact on Academic Performance: A Systematic Literature Review’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16: 429. Byrne, Jason. 2012. ‘When Green is White: The Cultural Politics of Race, Nature and Social Exclusion in a Los Angeles Urban National Park’, Geoforum 43(3): 595–611. City of Baltimore Department of Planning. 2018. ‘Baltimore Green Network: A Plan For a Green and Connected City’. Draft Plan (March). Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2014. ‘The Case for Reparations’, The Atlantic (June). Retrieved 12 April 2021 from http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/thecase-for-reparations/361631/.

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Cowen, Deborah, and Nemoy Lewis. 2017. ‘Revanchism and the Racial State: Ferguson as “Internal Colony”’, in Abel Albet and Nuria Benach (eds), Gentrification as a Global Strategy: Neil Smith and Beyond. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 269–80. Dantzler, Prentis. 2021. ‘The Urban Process under Racial Capitalism: Race, AntiBlackness, and Capital Accumulation’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City 2(2) 113–34. Dooling, Sarah. 2009. ‘Ecological Gentrification: A Research Agenda Exploring Justice in the City’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(3): 621–39. Dorries, Heather, David Hugill and Julie Tomiak 2019. ‘Racial Capitalism and the Production of Settler Colonial Cities’, Geoforum 132: 263–70. Faber, Jacob W. 2020. ‘We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America’s Racial Geography’, American Sociological Review 85(5): 739–75. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. ‘Discourse and Text: Linguistic and Intertextual Analysis within Discourse Analysis’, Discourse & Society 3(2): 193–217. Foucault, Michel. 1970. ‘“L’ordre Du Discours”, inaugural lecture of 1970, translated as ‘The Order of Discourse’”, in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader. Boston, MA: Routlege, pp. 48–79. Gould, Kenneth, and Tammy Lewis. 2012. ‘The Environmental Injustice of Green Gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park’, in Judith DeSena and Timothy Shortell (eds), The World in Brooklyn: Gentrification, Immigration, and Ethnic Politics in a Global City. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 113–46. Heynen, Nik. 2016. ‘Urban Political Ecology II: The Abolitionist Century’, Progress in Human Geography 40(6): 839–45. ———. 2018. ‘Uneven Racial Development and the Abolition Ecology of the City’, in Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw (eds), Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene. London: Routledge, pp. 111–28. Heynen, Nik, Harold Perkins and Parama Roy. 2006. ‘The Political Ecology of Uneven Urban Green Space: The Impact of Political Economy on Race and Ethnicity in Producing Environmental Inequality in Milwaukee’, Urban Affairs Review 42(1): 3–25. Imbroscio, David. 2021. ‘Race Matters (Even More Than You Already Think): Racism, Housing, and the Limits of The Color of Law’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City 2(1): 29–53. Kondo, Michelle, et al. 2018. ‘Urban Green Space and its Impact on Human Health’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 15(3): 1–28. Lipsitz, George. 2007. ‘The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape’, Landscape Journal 26(1): 10–23. Locke, Dexter H., et al. 2021. ‘Residential Housing Segregation and Urban Tree Canopy in 37 US Cities’, Nature Urban Sustainability 1(1): 1–9. Marston, Greg. 2004. Social Policy and Discourse Analysis. Aldershot: Ashgate. McKittrick, Katherine. 2013. ‘Plantation Futures’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17(3): 1–15. Miller, Jessica Ty. 2020. ‘Temporal Analysis of Displacement: Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonial Urban Space’, Geoforum 116: 180–92. Moore, Donald, Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian (eds). 2003. Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference. Durhan NC: Duke University Press.

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Morrill, Angie. 2017. ‘Time Traveling Dogs (and Other Native Feminist Ways to Defy Dislocations)’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17(1): 14–20. Movement for Black Lives. 2021. ‘Reparations’. Retrieved 8 July 2021 from https:// m4bl.org/policy-platforms/reparations/. Nardone, Anthony, et al. 2021. ‘Redlines and Greenspace: The Relationship between Historical Redlining and 2010 Greenspace across the United States’, Environmental Health Perspectives 129(1): 017006. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP7495. Patel, Raj, and Jason Moore. 2017. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Oakland: University of California Press. Pietila, Antero. 2010. Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City. Washington DC: Rowman & Littlefield. Robinson, Laura. 2015. ‘Baltimore Artist’s Exhibit Inspired by Police Brutality’, WBALTV 11, 13 April. Retrieved 14 June 2022 from https://www.wbaltv.com/ article/baltimore-artist-s-exhibit-inspired-by-police-brutality/7093006#. Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing. Safransky, Sara. 2014. ‘Greening the Urban Frontier: Race, Property, and Resettlement in Detroit’, Geoforum 56: 237–48. Saleh-Hanna, Viviene. 2015. Black Feminist Hauntology: Rememory the Ghosts of Abolition. Champ pénal/Penal field XII. Retrieved 17 June from https://journals .openedition.org/champpenal/9163#text. Shcheglovitova, Mariya. 2020. ‘Valuing Plants in Devalued Spaces: Caring for Baltimore’s Street Trees’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3(1): 228–45. Shepley, Mardelle, et al. 2019. ‘The Impact of Green Space on Violent Crime in Urban Environments: An Evidence Synthesis’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16(24): 5119. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph16245119. Simpson, Michael, and Jen Bagelman. 2018. ‘Decolonizing Urban Political Ecologies: The Production of Nature in Settler Colonial Cities’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108(2): 558–68. Tacchetti, Madallena, et al. 2021. ‘Crafting Ecologies of Existence: More than Human Community Making in Colombian Textile Craftivism’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5(3): 1383–1404. Troy, Austin, and J. Morgan Grove. 2008. ‘Property Values, Parks, and Crime: A Hedonic Analysis in Baltimore, MD’, Landscape and Urban Planning 87(3): 233–45. US Department of Agriculture. 2015. Green Pattern Book: Using Vacant Land to Create Greener Neighborhoods in Baltimore. Baltimore, MD: US Forest Service. While, Aidan, Andrew Jonas and David Gibbs. 2004. ‘The Environment and the Entrepreneurial City: Searching for the Urban “Sustainability Fix” in Manchester and Leeds’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28(3): 549–69. Zaimi, Rea. 2020. ‘Making Real Estate Markets: The Co‐Production of Race and Property Value in Early 20th Century Appraisal Science’, Antipode 52(5): 1539–59.

deú CHAPTER 17

Urban Trees as ‘Furniture’? The More-than-Human Politics of Moving Gothenburg’s Mature Trees Mathilda Rosengren

Introduction On a September evening in 2017, the City of Gothenburg held a public meeting in its official showroom. Situated by the old harbour, on the top floors of a postmodern high-rise, the venue provided panoramic views of the urban fabric below. The last hours of daylight cast Sweden’s second largest city in a palette of matted colours: dark blues for the river mound and canals; pale yellows and reds for brick buildings and rooftops; varying greys for railway and road systems; and, further afield, deep greens for tree-lined streets and parks. These last two chromatic categories were the reason for the public meeting. In 2017, Gothenburg was in the middle of a major infrastructural redevelopment project called Västlänken (the Western link), set to connect suburban commuters with the city centre through a new under- and overground railway system (Göteborgs Stad n.d.). The ambitious, invasive, costly and long-term undertaking had been littered with complaints from its conception. One prominent reason for the discontent was the impact it would have on Gothenburg’s mature tree population. Protests had started in earnest when, three years earlier, the urban nature activist group Nätverket Trädplan Göteborg (the Gothenburg Tree Plan Network, or ‘Trädplan’) discovered plans to fell a considerable number of mature inner-city trees during the Västlänken groundwork (Göteborgs-Posten 2014). It was in many ways thanks to these contestations that this public meeting was taking place. I found myself there as part of my ethnographic fieldwork for my doctoral thesis (Rosengren 2020a), having spent the academic year of 2016/17 conducting participant observation and interviewing planners, activists,

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and other relevant actors in the city. This chapter draws on the data and findings from this research. The municipality-initiated meeting, entitled ‘How to Move Large Trees’, was intended to inform the public about the projected moving, rather than felling, of mature inner-city trees. These were ones that literally stood in the way of the planned infrastructure – their roots, trunks and branches hindering the expansion of underground tunnels and overground railway lines (Walter 2018: 50). Over three hundred large trees were to be moved, temporarily resettled (mostly in rural nurseries), and then later replanted in the city – though not necessarily at their place of origin (Walter 2018: 78–79). This, the municipality emphasized, was an undertaking of unprecedented scope on Swedish soil – both in terms of the number of trees being transposed and their maturity, many being over 150 years old. Yet, while the City purported that this was an exciting venture, Trädplan, among others, were less convinced. Being uncharted territory in Swedish urban nature conservation, they argued, this was a highly experimental enterprise, and the survival rate of the inner-city tree population was impossible to ascertain. Consequently, Trädplan vehemently opposed the optimistic municipal vision through both legal and physical undertakings, appealing each decision, and staging protests around affected trees. A multispecies battleground resonating with cities worldwide, this local standoff between municipal actors and urban nature activists sheds light on a larger debate around the rights of urban trees to exist within cityscapes. Found at the intersection between the built urban and its lively urbanities, there is a clear tension in perception between trees as objects that can be readily (re)moved to fit current planning purposes and aesthetics, and trees as lively subjects that have a right to thrive within the city. This tension may be put in relation to how urban environments have lately been proposed as key sites to address the urgency of reshaping human relationships to other-than-human ‘natures’ in the Anthropocene (Lorimer 2015). According to anthropologist Anna Tsing and her colleagues, ‘to survive [the Anthropocene] we need to relearn multiple forms of curiosity’ through the ‘attunement to multispecies entanglement’ (Tsing et al. 2017: 10). Yet, how may such Anthropocene attunements look in practice? As this chapter will show, to ‘simply’ move a tree unveils complexities of ‘being urban’ that stretch far beyond anthropocentric conceptions of the city today. Turning Tsing’s ‘curious’ lens to Gothenburg’s mature trees, I detect an opening for a concretization of a more-than-human urban politics of ecological killjoys, attentiveness, as well as attunements. It is a politics that upends what being in and of the city in actuality entails, and one where the mature tree emerges as a

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particularly pertinent empirical starting point for querying the practical recognition of multispecies entanglements.

Consider the Mature Urban Tree To consider the urban existence of mature trees means to consider notions of place and practices of more-than-human place-making. It also concerns a relational interspecies taking care and being cared for: the mature tree may require a specific amount of human intervention to thrive in the city but, in return, it may also provide multiple ‘cares’ to the urban environment and its inhabitants (Sjöman and Slagstedt 2015: 350–54). Not only beneficial as coolers of urban ‘heat island’, air cleaners, water retainers, and easers of human depressions (Gillner et al. 2015; Marselle et al. 2020), mature and ageing trees also provide invaluable habitats for various urban flora and fauna (Rosengren 2020b). Yet, for these positive impacts to take hold, urban trees must first be allowed to reach a healthy state of maturity (Nowak 2004: 45). Within the confines of Western dendrology, a tree that is deemed mature is one that has reached its full height and crown size. However, as even the speediest of species require many decades to attain this stature, even under optimal growing conditions, many deciduous tree species will take a human lifetime to mature (interviews and site visits 2016 to 2017, landscape architects, PoNF). A slower ascent to maturity affords the tree with a ‘liminal temporality’, granting the full-grown tree an intriguing ontological articulation ‘between immediately mobile mammality and relatively immobile geology’ (Ryan 2012: 108). This dialectical tension between ‘static being’ and ‘continuous becoming’ is particularly exposed in contemporary urban milieus, where a partial detachment from seasonal rhythms together with continuous changes to the built environment force the tree within the perimeters of mechanical time and city master plans (Leonardi and Stagi 2019:15). This ‘dialogue between trees as living organisms and trees as things’ (Braverman 2015: 133) is often riddled with questions of who (human and other-than-human) gets to govern urban space. With anthropocentric city planning mostly working against the ontological demands of inner-city trees, their maturities are thus signs of ligneous tenacity, grit, and considerable chunks of planning luck. Those trees that have managed to stay put in a hundred years or more consequently tell the stories of cityscapes of older planning visions and municipal blind spots (Rosengren 2020b). As such, mature trees are not only part of the urban landscape as distinctive places – providing the aesthetic, physical outlines of streets

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and parks, as well as being habitats to birds, bugs, fungi and lichens – but, as lively, ever-expanding beings, they are part of the relational cluster of human and other-than-human dwellers that invariably inhabit, change with, and make demands on the city. In Gothenburg, this sliding scale between subject and object, being and building, is partly the reason for the tense and often contradictory relationships formed between urban professionals, nature activists and mature trees. On the one hand, the municipal park and nature department (PoNF) has in recent years publicly emphasized the many ecological advantages of allowing trees to age and die naturally in the city (PoNF 2016). Moreover, maturity, stature, and species affiliation of specific trees have on several occasions explicitly altered new building projects. For instance, a municipal planner recounted how the initial plans for a university expansion had to be redrawn in order to accommodate a couple of mature trees. The changes were substantial enough that the planner and their colleagues had jokingly referred to the trees as ‘the golden ones’ (interview, December 2015, planner, City Planning Office). On the other hand, the dual nature of being conceived of as both ‘thing’ and ‘living being’ also ‘exert[s] a myriad of tensions into the management of street trees, . . . enabling certain forms of governance to emerge’ (Braverman 2015: 133). To consider the mature urban tree, then, also means to consider urban nature governance and governing.

A Moveable Tree, or ‘Trees as Furniture’ The Västlänken project – in which any tree’s individual value was secondary to urban development – exposed contentious structures of governance and governing in Gothenburg, arguably culminating in the costly and time-consuming moving of hundreds of trees. In early 2017, I visited one of the founders and coordinators of Trädplan (interview, January 2017, nature activist, Nätverket Trädplan). Referring to the recent tree policy of PoNF (2016), they expressed their frustrations with the municipality’s one-sided approach to its mature inner-city trees, treating them like ‘furniture’: For example, there is not a lot [written] about old trees but plenty more about new plantations . . . There is not much about how to value old trees, [or] that they have social, and health and recreational values and a cultural value, and so on. There’s nothing. . . like, it [the municipality’s position on trees] isn’t clear, rather it is ‘blah, blah’. Kind of, ‘well, it is nice with old trees but the city must evolve’ and you should look upon a tree ‘like furniture in the urban room!’ . . . And what that means [is]: furniture

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is something you can kind of move around, and then you don’t speak about trees as nature that is alive and in harmony with us, where respect [towards the tree] is shown.

According to this activist, the municipality approached urban trees as part of space but rarely of time, with their mature stature and long-term urban situatedness counting for little in current planning processes. If hindering a certain development or vision, as ‘things, or, in the case of urban life, as street furniture’ (Braverman 2015: 133), the trees were seen as easily discarded or replaceable, denying in the process their embedded pasts as well as potential futures. In such vision, the power to decide over, to govern, urban space explicitly lay in the hands of human beings – it was a quintessential anthropocentric politics for (some) humans by (some) humans. Clearly, to treat urban trees simply as moveable objects implies a restriction of their agential capacities. It is an infringement of what Tsing calls their relational ‘freedom to act’, which ‘depends on the bodily form [they have] inherited’ (2013: 30). Simply put, the uprooting of a tree also uproots its former ontological ability to act within an urban landscape. The relational spatio-temporal demands and accommodations that it has made to its environment as part of a more-thanhuman urbanity are consequently severed. Nevertheless, the notion of the non-agential, ‘moveable tree’ is not confined to Gothenburg, urban space, or the twenty-first century alone. At least since antiquity, trees have been moved and replanted. In those days, horticulturalist Harold Davidson notes, moving trees of a mature stature came with a sense of trepidation: Although we have little information on the early history of tree moving, it is known that the Greeks and the Romans must have moved large trees, as it is recorded in their writings that when they wanted to designate something that was impossible or at least difficult to perform, they said, ‘it was like transplanting an old tree’. (Davidson 1969: 16)

Despite these difficulties of tree moving, or ‘transplanting’, the practice has persisted, and various methods and apparatuses have been developed to make it a less temperamental undertaking (ibid.: 17). The desire to bend a landscape to an anthropocentric aesthetic speaks ‘of the human control of nature, and of a grace born of power’ (Dean 2015: 163). So, perhaps it is unsurprising that trees over the millennia have been transplanted as part of displays of power over ‘Nature’ (and, by proxy, other human beings). The moving and replanting of trees has been used to emphasize the extravagant properties and powers of mon-

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archs, to exhibit the ‘exotic Other’ from European colonies in botanical gardens, as well as to assert new urban ideals of modernity (Davidson 1969: 17; Dean 2015: 163). Today, there are few technical limits for moving mature and older trees (Pietzarka 2016: 169). Contemporary transplanting practices have thus made potential ‘furniture’ of trees of almost all ages and sizes. A mature tree’s century-long commitment to, and agency in, a place – its ‘faithfulness to its milieu’ in the words of plant philosopher Michael Marder (2014: 222) – can consequently be undone in a matter of years. Nowadays, the question for municipalities is not whether moving a mature urban tree is feasible but, rather, if it is worth it (Jim 2013).

Contesting the Moveable Tree In Gothenburg, tree transplanting is filtered through value systems heavily weighted towards what is considered economically viable, in a shorterterm sense.1 Furthermore, although the technical tools and knowledge for moving mature urban trees do exist, the commitment in terms of pre- and post-planting care to ensure a tree’s survival after a move can be a labour-intensive and drawn-out process (up to two years pre-move and six years post-planting) (Pietzarka 2016: 172; Trafikverket 2017: 11). Also, if a tree is past its prime (that is, it has passed maturity), or becomes infected by plant pathogens when roots and branches are cut during the pre-move preparations,2 it is unlikely that it will survive a move (Walter 2018: 76, 91). Consequently, according to forest botanist Ulrich Pietzarka, ‘[t]ransplanting large trees is regarded as exceptional, because it is time-consuming, expensive, and it holds some risks that are difficult to calculate’ (Pietzarka 2016: 175) – it is both easier and cheaper to simply replace mature trees with younger, nursery-cultivated ones. Heeding this exceptionality, what pushed the City of Gothenburg to move not just the odd affected tree but as many as three hundred of various ages, species and sizes? Early in their campaign, Trädplan warned those responsible for Västlänken that to count on only moving twenty-five trees, as was the initial projection, ‘would not get [the City] far’ in saving any trees (Göteborgs-Posten 2014). The activists instead called for Västlänken itself to be amended to fit the needs of the trees. At this point, the impact on Gothenburg’s mature trees had also started to concern architectural historians at the municipality (Göteborgs Stadsmuseum 2014; Göteborgs Stad 2015). They primarily sought to protect the cultural-historical values of an affected nineteenth-century inner-city

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area, and so suggested a temporary move of valuable trees. This second argument aligned more neatly with the municipal notion of trees as ‘furniture’, and in 2015 the municipality trialled lifting some mature trees in the area to explore the venture’s feasibility (Trafikverket 2015). Happy with the result, in May 2017 the amended ‘Tree Plan’ for Västlänken asserted that three hundred trees would be moved (Trafikverket 2017) – clearly prioritizing the economic and cultural-historical value of the trees above the ecological ones (Walter 2018: 88). This failure to further account for the ontological urban being of each tree came to a head at the aforementioned public meeting (participant observations, September 2017, public meeting, City of Gothenburg). The meeting consisted of three presentations by professionals with theoretical and practical experiences of transplanting trees: a Canadian tree-moving expert; an academic from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU); and a commercial tree consultant. They all held brief, systematic presentations where they described the common procedure for moving mature trees, and outlined examples of when such transplanting had succeeded. Nevertheless, despite their joint efforts, during the Question and Answer session it became apparent that many in the audience were unconvinced by the proposed undertaking. Drawing on data derived from scientific journals, Trädplan questioned why the experts had failed to address the specific situatedness of Gothenburg’s trees – an omission that made the activists concerned that the transplanting would not work in practice. The network’s ability to translate scientific text into effective protests, the coordinator of the group relayed to me, allowed Trädplan to come across as more than emotional ‘tree-huggers’ (interview, January 2017, nature activist, Nätverket Trädplan). Rather, they vocally presented an alternative perspective and political vision of the ontic-epistemic right of trees to the city, exposing the fact that none of the presentations had anchored their expertise to the actual situation facing Gothenburg’s trees. The presenters had spoken in the modestly optimistic, and speculative, terms of a commonly employed planning discourse, but they did not fully address the local spatio-temporal conditions – of climate, soil, and expansive urbanizations, as well as the exceptional number of trees being moved – right in front of them. Prodding this blind spot, the activists’ contestation was met with considerable dismay by the presenters: the Canadian expert mumbled something about not having read the papers cited, then grew silent. The SLU academic briefly criticized the studies that the papers were based on, and then went off on a decontextualized tangent about the right to academic freedom. But, out of the three presenters, it was the consultant who seemed the most unsettled. Turning to the activist who had posed

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the question, he snapped: ‘Excuse me, but what kind of background do you have? Do you know anything about this?’ (the activist quietly replied that they used to be a secondary school biology teacher). Defending the activist, the coordinator of Trädplan cut in and said: ‘We demand respect. You cannot speak to us like this’. This was met with dispersed cheers, and an old man shouting: ‘These are two-hundred-year-old trees!’ After the meeting had finished, the consultant came up to the activist and apologized for having, so to say, ‘spoken in affect’.

Affecting a More-than-Human Urban Politics In a country where the ingrained sociocultural and political norm is to strive for broadly consensual, almost depoliticized agreements (Giersig 2008: 130), this fraught exchange exposes the affectual underpinnings of any provocation that fundamentally questions the anthropocentrism in urban planning. Firstly, by using the same methods as the experts to make their point, thus forming an ‘ecological claims making’ out of ‘science’ and ‘reason’ (Lachmund 2004: 247), Trädplan seemingly destabilized the presenters. Secondly, the activists hit a raw nerve by exclaiming concern for, instead of faith in, the potential of a mature tree to recuperate after a move; scepticism, instead of marvel, towards the techniques being adopted; and disputing, instead of accepting, the expertise of the presenters. As such, it was not solely an unsettling of epistemology – of a collective, accepted idea of how to ‘know’ trees – which brought the consultant into the realm of affect. It also involved differing ontological perceptions: when faced with a diverging perception of urban trees, grounded in an articulated multispecies empathy as much as ecological know-how, the consultant had to confront not just the science upon which he based his expertise, but also his own, individual conception of the trees themselves. Consequently, it is probable that it was the questioning of this ‘ontic-epistemic conditioning’ (Colman 2017: 11) that triggered the outburst. To reassess his own standpoint, the consultant would have had to see both the trees he was encountering on an everyday basis, as well as the ones he dealt with professionally, in a different light: he would have to perceive them as beings rather than ‘furniture’, with the right to make claims to the city in ways that did not always serve humans. Responding to the activist’s contestation ‘in affect’ could be read as an attempt to return to a more comfortable status quo where trees were alive, yet moveable and expendable, and human priorities ultimately trumped any other-than-human claim to urban space. This affective reaction to Trädplan’s ontic-epistemic provocation resonates with feminist scholar Sara

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Ahmed’s notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’ (2010: 39) as someone exposing the inherent patriarchal injustices at the core of their society. By refusing to play along with a hegemonic belief system that they fundamentally disagree with, the feminist killjoy frequently meets outright rejection or belittlement from their surroundings. Similarly, according to its coordinator, Trädplan had often faced scorn when they had opposed the dominant, anthropocentric notions of the urban in favour of a more complex, multispecies levelling of agency and belonging in the city. In standing up for a certain more-than-human urbanity, Trädplan (along with the mature trees themselves!) thus became Gothenburg’s ‘ecological killjoys’. In Gothenburg and elsewhere, accounting for affective engagements then remains central to how a more-than-human urban politics may be developed. For, if following Ahmed, in taking on the role of the ecological killjoy by affectively disputing your anthropocentric surroundings, you may also obtain a greater freedom to act. The experience, she argues, ‘of being alienated from the affective promise [of society] gets us somewhere. [Killjoys] can do things, for sure, by refusing to put bad feelings to one side in the hope that we can ‘just get along’ (Ahmed 2010: 50). In Gothenburg, by refusing to ‘just get along’ with the vision of Västlänken, it seemed that both Trädplan and some mature trees (due to their cultural-historical and ecological values) had acquired some form of political clout. The municipal decision to move hundreds of trees can be perceived as an attempt to mitigate these negative sentiments – and perhaps distract from the five hundred trees that were still being felled (Trafikverket 2017: 19). As landscape architect Maria Walter asks after extensively assessing the municipal documents related to Västlänken’s transplanting venture: ‘Is [one reason for the moves] that the public need placating?’ (Walter 2018: 93). For transplanting a tree is obviously not an immediate death sentence, like a felling is. Although most reasons for the Västlänken moves were motivated by human desires to shape urban space, there were still aspects of care for the ontological needs of the tree embedded in the transplanting practices: aside from the affective dimensions, it calls for a certain attentiveness to the aforementioned dual characterization of urban trees, and of an attuning to their spatio-temporal and agential demands.

Towards a More-than-Human Politics of Attunement, or a Conclusion of Sorts What would it take to view urban space as belonging as much to trees as it does to humans; to value their right to make different, yet equally

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valid, ontological imprints on the urban landscape? Summing up the case of Västlänken, Walter concludes that the ‘efforts made [to protect] the trees in the project is yet another proof of the high values the trees inhabit [in Gothenburg]’; despite this, she adds, we nevertheless ‘do not refrain from appropriating [the trees’ remaining urban] grounds’ (Walter 2018: 92). As a conclusion of sorts, my final proposition of this chapter returns to Tsing and her colleagues’ (2017: 10) call for curiosity through attunements to ‘multispecies entanglements’ as key to surviving the Anthropocene. As seen in the Gothenburg activists, one entry point for such attunement is the cultivation of a less anthropocentric, but more affective, attentiveness to the other-than-human urban. In practice, this implies perceiving trees as infinitely more than street furniture, and as nothing less than lively urban beings in their own right. To attentively perceive urban trees in this way, in turn, encourages us to change with, to attune to, the trees. Such attunement means to grant a tree the agential and subjective qualities it is normally denied in the city – ‘to invest it with the ability to look at us in return’ (Benjamin 2015: 184). It is in this subjectification, I believe, that a more-than-human urban politics may emerge in full, calling on us to acknowledge and subsequently engage with the continuous multispecies negotiations and lopsided reciprocities that already exist in the urban landscape – ones that other-than-human urban dwellers, forced to respond to ever-increasing urbanizations, are already all too familiar with. Here, the transplanting of Gothenburg’s mature urban trees presents a situated example of how to begin to interrogate such philosophical and conceptual propositions of future multispecies cohabitation. The moving of the urban trees started in the autumn of 2017, and by the winter of 2018 most of the mature trees had been moved or felled. This was a tense time in the city, with affects and emotions running high: from Trädplan holding peaceful vigils for the old trees being felled, to a layperson physically attacking a professional worker as they were prepping trees to be moved (Vianden 2018). Yet this was also a period when municipal workers, intentionally or not, attuned their professional gaze to finally perceive Gothenburg’s tree population, only to discover that ‘now they [the trees] are everywhere!’ (Fieldnotes, February 2017, municipal employee). Finally, in January 2021, some of the temporarily resettled younger trees were retransplanted at new, final ‘homes’ within Gothenburg, with the intention to return most of the remaining older trees to their former grounds by 2026 (Rosholm 2021). So far, with most transplanted trees still in good health, the municipality is claiming the undertaking to be a success. But whether it is the dawning of a novel more-than-human approach to the city, or not, still remains to be seen.

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Mathilda Rosengren is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University. She is a visual anthropologist and urban geographer, particularly interested in the more-than-human entanglements, ecologies and ethnographies of the urban Anthropocene. She holds a PhD in cultural geography from the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.

Notes 1. The City of Gothenburg uses the so-called ‘Alnarp model’, Alnarpsmodellen (Östberg, Sjögren and Kristofferson 2013). Developed by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), it functions as national guidelines on how to compensate a tree in urban environments (Trafikverket 2017: 8). The value of urban trees is determined through the current price of equivalent trees at commercial plant nurseries, without any other forms of ‘subjective evaluations’ (Walter 2018: 29). 2. As was the case in Gothenburg when some trees due to be moved were attacked by Phytophthora ramorum, a pathogen responsible for causing sudden oak death (Walter 2018: 76).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. ‘Happy Objects’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader. London: Duke University Press, pp. 29–51. Benjamin, Walter. (1955) 2015. Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn. London: The Bodley Head. Braverman, Irus. 2015. ‘Order and Disorder in the Urban Forest: A Foucauldian– Latourian Perspective’, in L. Anders Sandberg, Adrina Bardekjian and Sadia Butt (eds), Urban Forests, Trees, and Greenspace: A Political Ecology Perspective. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 132–47. Colman, Felicity. 2017. ‘Preface’, in Marie-Luise Angerer (ed.), Ecology of Affect: Intensive Milieus and Contingent Encounters. Lüneburg: meson press, pp. 7–13. Davidson, Harold. 1969. ‘Moving Trees is Ancient Art’, Weeds, Trees and Turf 8(8): 16–17. Dean, Joanna. 2015. ‘The Unruly Tree: Stories from the Archives’, in L. Anders Sandberg, Adrina Bardekjian and Sadia Butt (eds), Urban Forests, Trees, and Greenspace: A Political Ecology Perspective. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 162–75. Giersig, Nico. 2008. Multilevel Urban Governance and the ‘European City’: Discussing Metropolitan Reforms in Stockholm and Helsinki. Weisbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Gillner, Sten, et al. 2015. ‘Role of Street Trees in Mitigating Effects of Heat and Drought at Highly Sealed Urban Sites’, Landscape and Urban Planning 143: 33–42. Göteborgs-Posten. 2014. ‘Västlänken förstör vårt gröna Göteborg’. Opinion piece. 4 June.

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Göteborgs Stad. n.d. Stadsutveckling Göteborg – Västlänken. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https://stadsutveckling.goteborg.se/vastlanken. ———. 2015. PM – Antikvarisk bedömning av de olika parkavsnittens betydelse för riksintressets samlade kulturmiljövärden vid Station Haga. Göteborg. Göteborgs Stad. Göteborgs Stadsmuseum. 2014. Åtgärdsförslag för Kungsparken/Nya Allén. Planering för Västlänken, station Haga, inom miljö av riksintresse för kulturmiljövården i centrala Göteborg. PM version 2, 2014-04-02. Göteborg: Göteborgs Stad. Jim, Chi Yung. 2013. ‘Sustainable Urban Greening Strategies for Compact Cities in Developing and Developed Economies’, Urban Ecosystems 16: 741–61. Lachmund, Jens. 2004. ‘Knowing the Urban Wasteland: Ecological Expertise as Local Process’, in Sheilla Jasanoff and Marybeth Long Martello (eds), Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 241–66. Leonardi, Cesare, and Franca Stagi. (1983) 2019. The Architecture of Trees. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Lorimer, Jamie. 2015. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marder, Michael. 2014. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press. Marselle, Melissa, et al. 2020. ‘Urban Street Tree Biodiversity and Antidepressant Prescriptions’, Scientific Reports 10(1): 1–11. Nowak, David. 2004. ‘Assessing Environmental Functions and Values of Veteran Trees’, in Giovanni Nicolotti and Paolo Gonthier (eds), Proceedings of the International Congress on the Protection and Exploitation of Veteran Trees. Turin: Regione Piemonte and Universita di Torino, pp. 45–49. Östberg, Johan, Johan Sjögren and Anders Kristofferson. 2013. Ekonomisk värdering av urbana träd – Alnarpsmodellen. Alnarp: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Pietzarka, Ulrich. 2016. ‘Transplanting Large Trees’, in Andreas Roloff (ed.), Urban Tree Management – For the Sustainable Development of Green Cities. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 167–76. PoNF. 2016. ‘Stadens Träd: Policy för park- och gatuträd i Göteborg’. Gothenburg: Park- och naturförvaltningen i Göteborg, Göteborgs Stad. Rosengren, Mathilda. 2020a. ‘Wastelands of Difference? Urban Nature and Morethan-Human Difference in Berlin and Gothenburg’. Doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge. ———. 2020b. ‘There’s Life in Dead Wood: Tracing a More-than-Human Urbanity in the Spontaneous Nature of Gothenburg’, in Matthew Gandy and Sandra Jaspers (eds), The Botanical City. Berlin: Jovis Verlag, pp. 229–36. Rosholm, Johan. 2021. ‘Dussintals träd flyttades till nya hem’. News report. Svensk Byggtjänst, Omvärldsbevakning [Swedish construction service. Environmental monitoring]. 3 March. Ryan, John Charles. 2012. ‘Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human–Plant Studies (HPS)’, Societies 2(3): 101–21. Sjöman, Henrik, and Johan Slagstedt. 2015. ‘Rätt träd på rätt plats’, in Träd i Urbana Landskap. Lund: Studentlitteratur, pp. 331–62. Trafikverket. 2015. ‘Provlyft av träd lockade besökare’. News report. 18 November. Göteborg.

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———. 2017. ‘Åtgärdsprogram för bevarande av träd i parker och alléer under byggandet av Västlänken’. Göteborg. Tsing, Anna. 2013. ‘More-than-Human Sociality: A Call for Critical Description’, in Kirsten Hastrup (ed.), Anthropology and Nature. New York: Routledge, pp. 27–42. Tsing, Anna, et al. 2017. ‘Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene’, in Anna Tsing et al. (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vianden, Liala. 2018. ‘Sabotagen mot Västlänken möts av dånande tystnad’. Editorial. ETC Göteborg. 1 November. Walter, Maria. 2018. ‘Flytt av stora träd som metod för att bevara gröna kulturmiljöer - med fokus på parkmiljöerna runt Station Haga i Göteborg’. Master’s thesis, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

deú CHAPTER 18

‘There’s a Strong, Green Wind Blowing’ Drawing the Politics of Street Trees in Practice Hanne Cecilie Geirbo and Ida Nilstad Pettersen

Introduction Street trees are high on the urban greening agenda, and cities worldwide have set specific and ambitious goals for tree-planting and tree canopy cover, from Oslo’s one hundred thousand trees by 2030 to New York City’s one million trees (Oslo kommune n.d.; Campbell 2014). Trees are promoted and valued as part of nature-based solutions and for their many potential benefits, such as the provision of ecosystem services. Within such frameworks, they are often allocated roles in response to human needs and demands, including reduced costs and resource use, flood control, reduced air pollution, cooling, and improved human health and well-being (see, for example, European Commission 2015). There may be broad agreement about goals for extensive tree-planting, but in practice, planting and coexisting with trees is not straightforward. Trees take up space above and below ground, interfere with views and cables, and contribute to gentrification (Donovan et al. 2021). They are alive, grow, need nourishment and die, all the while interacting with the world around them. In this chapter, we explore the politics of street trees drawing on research conducted in Norway as part of the project ‘Hug the Streets’. As part of an interdisciplinary team, we set out to investigate why plans for including trees in the streets are failing, and how trees can be starting points for exploring relations, conflicts and possible synergies between social, technical and ecological urban elements.

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To understand how street trees are woven into urban environments and are part of the fight for urban space, and to learn where the power lies and how that affects outcomes, we zoom in on the work of urban design practitioners. We focus on how they see, understand and connect to street trees from their various perspectives, and we do this by drawing on social practice theory (Schatzki 2012; Shove, Pantzar and Watson 2012). This perspective emphasizes how practices are routinized everyday activities consisting of many different elements, and how they are organized around shared ideas about what is normal and expected in different situations. Such understandings, priorities and commitments vary across professional groups. Thus, different ways of understanding and relating to living matter such as trees can create tensions and conflict. Practices further relate to and influence each other. This can in turn affect the outcomes of urban design projects. Even if it is all pervasive, the ‘world of practice’ needs to be uncovered, as it cannot be perceived directly (Schatzki 2012: 23). Relatedly, the literature on qualitative, ‘more-than-human’ and design research proposes sketching and drawing, combined with methods such as interviews and workshops, as ways of tapping into knowledge and experience. As part of qualitative interviews, sketching and diagramming (Crilly, Blackwell and Clarkson 2006; Bagnoli 2009) are seen as ways of moving beyond language to access other levels of experience. Wendy Steele, Ilan Wiesel and Cecily Maller (2019) suggest that sketching can help to decentre humans and to explore relational possibilities. In co-design, ‘making’ is seen as a way of giving shape to and making sense of the future (Sanders and Stappers 2014). Dan Lockton et al. (2020), for example, discuss how ‘thinking with things’ can be used in joint, interdisciplinary inquiries of experience and knowledge domains, and to imagine alternative realities. This chapter presents and discusses what we have discovered – through interviews aided by sketching, and a workshop with urban design practitioners – about the politics of street trees, conflictual views, controversies and practices. The study further illustrates the potential of interdisciplinary, explorative drawing as a way of engaging stakeholders in negotiating conflicts and reimagining multispecies urban spaces.

Methods This chapter builds on interviews and a workshop with urban practitioners in Oslo, Norway. In the interviews, we explored drawing as a method for capturing professional perspectives on street trees; in the

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workshops, we used drawing as means for collective exploration of challenges and opportunities for integrating trees in urban streets. The interviews were conducted in November 2017 and January 2018 with five individuals from the public and private sector, who were selected to represent different perspectives and practices, including city planning, architecture, landscape architecture, technical infrastructure and cultural heritage management. The interviews addressed the challenges and opportunities of including street trees in urban streets. The interviewees were asked to draw and talk about a diagrammatic sketch, showing what an ideal street section with street trees would be like from their perspective. The workshop ‘Fremtidens grønne bygate’ (Green urban street of the future) was held in May 2019, and involved actors key to the design, development and maintenance of Oslo’s streets. The goal was to engage participants in exploring connections and conflicts between practices, as well as possible synergies between urban infrastructures, ecosystems and residents. In the next section, we use the sketches drawn in the interviews to show and discuss the different perspectives.

Exploring the Politics of Street Trees In his book about drawing as an ethnographic method, Andrew Causey (2017) reflects on how drawing is a way of seeing. Drawings are not merely representations of what is seen, but products of choices about what to represent and omit, in contrast to photographs which are ‘visual stews of competing specificities, all weighted the same, visually and semantically’ (ibid.: 8). Drawing requires us to concentrate on the elements that represent our experience of the setting or the situation. Asking our informants to draw sketches of streets with trees gave us an opportunity to see their perspective, literally, and to discuss it with them. In the drawings below, there is a great difference between which street elements are represented and which are omitted. Drawn by a city council environment and transport advisor, this first sketch (Illustration 18.1) depicts three underground infrastructural layers for electricity, drinking water and wastewater, arranged separately to not interfere with each other. This is mirrored aboveground, with separate lanes for pedestrians, cars and bicycles. With its own space apart from the mobility zone, the tree is depicted as a passive element in a streetscape characterized by flow. Processual aspects such as an evolving root structure that might compete for space with underground infrastructure are not incorporated.

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Illustration 18.1. Trees within urban flows. Photograph by the authors, used with permission from interviewee.

The sketch below (Illustration 18.2), drawn by an arborist working for the municipality, emphasizes how trees are an active, evolving element in street infrastructure. The designated space underground for trees (marked by shaded fields), consisting of a mix of soil and stone, is optimized for tree roots, whereas the technical infrastructure, including water, sewage and internet cables, is located below the traffic lane, and so is apart from the trees. The roots can thus evolve freely without getting in conflict with pipes or cables, and infrastructure maintenance will not disturb the trees. The arborist sees street trees as part of the technical infrastructure, as providers of ecosystem services. With appropriate planning, they can contribute to stormwater management, reduce the amount of water that

Illustration 18.2. Trees as ecosystem service providers. Photograph by the authors, used with permission from interviewee.

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ends up in the sewage system, bind dust and reduce pollution, and be habitats to a variety of other species, promoting urban biodiversity. An Aesthetic and Sensory Perspective on Street Trees

Illustration 18.3. Trees as aesthetic elements. Photograph by the authors, used with permission from interviewee.

The third sketch (Illustration 18.3) is drawn by a landscape architect in an administrative unit under the city council. He has made space for a car, drawn at half the size of the cyclist to the right, stressing that the car has a necessary errand, such as a delivery to a shop. The sketch also shows a pedestrian, benches and two trees with large crowns, but not what is underground. Discussing the sketch, the landscape architect argued that trees are the street elements that contain the most meaning. They are storytellers and sources of experiences. Their age tells stories about the street’s history. Their seasonal changes connect humans to trees, and remind us that we too are part of nature. Ideal street trees bloom in the spring, get vivid colours in the autumn and have branch structures suitable for Christmas decorations. The landscape architect referred to research that found that access to trees can improve the well-being and health of urban residents.

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A Historical Perspective on Street Trees

Illustration 18.4. Trees from a historical perspective. Photograph by the authors, used with permission from interviewee.

The sketch drawn by an architect at the Cultural Heritage Management Office (Illustration 18.4) represents the street as historical site. It does not depict mobility or utility infrastructure, but architecture, such as the building to the very left, and historical remains, such as old curb stones and the remains of paving, indicated by a row of small squares in front of the building. For her, the ideal city street is historically recoverable; retaining underground layers enables later generations to find remains of the street’s form and function intact. This can also have practical value. In a street mainly used for transportation, asphalt may be the most practical road surface; however, if the street use or the means of transportation were to change, old paving may become attractive again. The Cultural Heritage Management Office is concerned with the historical dimension of individual trees as well as the greater picture – for example, how they relate to other street elements, and where they are placed. Historically, Oslo has not had broad avenues designed for street trees. It is characterized by rather narrow streets, flanked by low-rise brick buildings. Architecture, rather than trees and other vegetation, defines the streetscape. Still, Oslo is remarkably green, with a high number of parks of varying sizes. As expressed by the architect: In a way, it’s like magic. You have all the buildings, which are very visible, so it becomes an architectural space in an entirely different way than a

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street with trees, where the trees are dominating. And then you have all these grand spaces with very large trees . . . This becomes something that you glimpse somewhere up there, where a lot of greenery spills into the streetscape. That’s the kind of cultural-historical values that we are promoting. We find that it’s important to keep this characteristic, because this is the historical point of departure for Oslo.

Planting trees in streets where there have not been trees before will disrupt this rhythm of facades and lavish greenery, and large tree crowns obstruct the view of the beautiful, historic buildings that can connect citizens with the past. To protect these historical characteristics, the Cultural Heritage Management Office is frequently among the actors that oppose street tree-planting.

Hierarchies of Concern Aided by sketches, we found different professional perspectives on street trees, reflecting different professional practices. The technical perspective demonstrated by the environment and transport advisor and the arborist guides practices where street trees are seen as ecosystem service providers on the one hand, but as a threat to the smooth workings of technical infrastructure on the other. The aesthetic and sensory perspective held by the landscape architect approaches trees as everyday life companions, and fosters practices through which street trees complement the built environment in the design of good urban spaces. The historical perspective held by the architect at the Cultural Heritage Management Office frames trees as statements of identity and connectors to the past. This perspective is part of practices that cultivate the ability of trees to express the appropriate cultural and historical statements and connections. While there may be a mutual understanding between professional groups that different perspectives on street trees are valid and valuable, friction appears when they materialize in practice. Thus, when priorities need to be decided, the ‘hierarchies of concerns’ become apparent. A Hierarchical Relation between Technical Concerns and Sensory and Aesthetic Concerns The landscape architect working in the unit under the city council said that he often finds that collaborating with engineers in matters regarding trees is a struggle. While the younger generation of engineers seem to have been exposed to more interdisciplinary perspectives in their education, he argued that older engineers tend to be rather oblivious to

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other perspectives than the street being a technical place. What matters to them is getting there and getting through, not being there and sensing the street as a complete human being. Further, he argued that ‘old school’ engineers are not used to considering how the result of their work constitutes other people’s everyday life. Moreover, as their work concerns safety, they often come across as hard-nosed in interactions with other professional groups. As an example, he mentioned a discussion about including street trees in the plans for a major junction that comprised tram lines. Most of the year, the trees and the trams coexist in harmony, but for a few weeks every autumn there is trouble: leaves fall into the tram tracks, and if they are not removed before they heap up, they become a safety hazard. Rather than focusing on the aesthetic and sensory value that trees will add to an otherwise gloomy junction, the few weeks where the falling leaves represent a potential safety hazard are given priority. ‘The technical guys always win’, the landscape architect stated. Although this is a recurring source of frustration, he also understands why it is so hard for the technical professions to prioritize aesthetics over minor safety concerns. They are under pressure to succeed with many technical aspects, ‘and if the technical [part] doesn’t work, they get in trouble’. If technical concerns are placed above the aesthetic and sensory concerns connected to the well-being of urban dwellers, then a seasonal and manageable risk such as leaves in the tram tracks will trump a permanent sensory and aesthetic value when balancing the technical and natural elements of an urban space. The landscape architect argued that it is difficult to challenge this hierarchy because discussions often include a safety aspect. Safety arguments, he stated, often function as an emergency brake, ending the discussion. He exemplified this with a response from the fire and rescue agency regarding street trees. The agency requires seven metres of free space in front of buildings, so there will be room for a fire truck if needed. His proposal to plant trees generated this response: ‘Are you willing to take responsibility for people being trapped in a fire?’ This led to an abrupt end to the discussion, and prevented a potentially productive exploration of how street trees might be considered in safety procedures. The landscape architect described his experiences of a hierarchy of concerns prioritizing functionality and safety above pleasure and wellbeing. The representative of the Cultural Management Heritage Office also described her experience of certain concerns being valued more than others, starting her discussion by clarifying her position in a debate about whether to include street trees in Stortorvet, a central square in Oslo:

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I am very fond of trees and find that trees contribute tremendously [to] colour as well as light and bird life. But I think it is wrong to have trees in Stortorvet, because it’s in direct conflict with the place’s original spirit and heritage – and readability. You lose an architectural space that is one of the most important squares in Oslo.

Her need to emphasize that she is fond of trees before arguing against planting trees in this particular square indicates that being in opposition to street trees is an uncomfortable position. She elaborated on this: There’s a strong, green wind blowing. The green kind of trumps everything. It is hard to be against, in a way, when you have children, and you want the air to be clean and the insects to live, and bees and bumblebees [to] have a short distance to fly so they survive on the way to [the park]. Nevertheless, there are concrete, indisputable cultural heritage values, which are lost when changing [spaces] and filling [them] with trees, for example.

This quote outlines a moral hierarchy, where welcoming trees and other vegetation in the streetscape is generally understood as the right thing to do, and opposing it is morally suspect. The strong, green wind she describes is an external judgement, but her elaboration of the position reveals that the moral perspective is also internalized. It is hard for her to oppose street trees, not only because this is contrary to a generalized idea of what is good and valuable, but also because she shares the goals that the street trees are seen as fulfilling: biodiversity and clean air. A Hierarchy of Urban Nature A topic that emerged in the interview was the relation between trees and other urban natures. Oslo is located between a fjord to the south and great forests that flank the city to the west, north and east. During a defining growth period in the first half of the twentieth century, the prominent urban planner Harald Hals launched the idea that the fjord and the forests should remain linked by green corridors (Hals 1929). These five ‘green fingers’ were to ensure that the city dwellers could reach the fjord and the forest by foot or on skis, and that they had access to parks in their neighbourhoods. The green corridors are still a characteristic of Oslo, but bits and pieces of them have been sacrificed for densification, and the Cultural Management Heritage Office is concerned about this erosion: ‘For all these years we have said that these green corridors are worthy of protection and should be kept completely open. It is a great resource that people can go skiing from the forest and all the way down to the fjord, and that people can go hiking [in the city]’. Our informant

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pointed out the irony in how the ‘green fingers’ are treated compared to street trees: ‘It is kind of messed up when you nibble [at] pieces of these green corridors at the same time as you insist on having trees in the important urban spaces’. This account draws attention to a hierarchy between different kinds of urban nature. While street trees tend to lose when in competition with technical concerns, they seem to have the upper hand when competing for attention with other urban natures such as grass, shrubs and bushes. Why is that? Irus Braverman (2008) argues that street trees are assigned a privileged position in the dominant discourse about urban nature. Romanticist views of urban nature promote a normative discourse in which street trees are represented as inherently good and desired by everyone. Their privileged position can be traced back to European history, when allees or avenues and parks were signifiers of wealth and class. Further, in contrast to transient urban nature such as birds, trees can easily be fitted into legal categories such as private or public ownership (ibid.). Because of this, street trees lend themselves to frameworks of urban management. Trees might also have a competitive advantage in relation to other urban nature because they span the boundaries between many fields of human interest, such as biology, architecture, history and culture. This gives street trees a capability to attract a wide range of allies. Campaigns where citizens ‘adopt’ or email a tree (see Campbell 2014; Phillips and Atchison 2020) show that humans find it easy to identify and bond with trees.

Explorative Drawing as a Method in Negotiating Conflicts about Urban Spaces Seeing streets and street trees from the perspectives of different urban practitioners gave us insight into interdisciplinary tensions and the difficulties of finding room for exploring compromises and novel solutions when there is a lot at stake. Drawing as a way of seeing can be helpful for articulating such tensions; but could it also clear a pathway through which new urban opportunities can emerge (Steele, Wiesel and Maller 2019)? Triggered by this question, we decided to arrange a workshop for selected professionals. The workshop comprised nineteen participants from different municipal departments, utility companies and consulting companies that all encounter street trees in their professional practice. The participants were divided into interdisciplinary groups seated around a table. There was a pile of papers the size of the table, and each paper had a print of

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lines, figures and text to aid participatory notetaking and drawing. There was also a choice of cut-out figures of street elements, such as trees, trams and pedestrians, and symbols of underground infrastructure, such as sewage and electricity. These figures and symbols could be used instead of or in addition to drawing. The workshop had several stages. The groups first explored how street trees were seen through the participants’ own perspectives; they then identified and categorized the measures that could be taken to ensure that there would be space for trees in a street; and lastly they sketched how a street section might be designed to better accommodate trees. The last step also included a discussion of where compromises could be made, and how new solutions might be found and implemented. Each table had a member of the research project as a facilitator. Notes written by the facilitators have formed the basis for the following reflections. In the sketch (Illustration 18.5) there is a large tree with ‘100 years’ scribbled above. This refers to a discussion that the group had about conflicting timelines in street infrastructure. Trees can have long lives, growing and evolving throughout their lifespan. Technical infrastructure has a shorter lifespan, and repair and replacement often require digging in the root zone. To the left of the tree the word ‘salt’ is written, with one

Illustration 18.5. Drawing from group discussion. © Hug the Streets.

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arrow that points to the pavement and another that points to a bicycle lane. This is a trace of the group’s discussion about trade-offs in street design. Reduction of car traffic is on the political agenda in Oslo, and one measure to achieve this is to encourage winter cycling. A barrier to widespread winter cycling is ice and snow, and to mitigate this the municipality is doing extensive salting of streets and bicycle lanes. Salt, however, is harmful to the street trees, and so a measure intended to reduce pollution in the city in winter threatens the capacity of street trees to improve the environment of the city during the summer. At the very end of the sketch there is an upside-down sentence that reads, ‘Salt is worse than street heating’. This points to a possible way of solving this conflict: investing in street heating in main thoroughfares. One of the participants’ tables reported: ‘When we get all the disciplines together things come up so that we can take them into consideration – we don’t do that when we sit separately’. Organizational silos and strictly delineated areas of responsibility make it difficult to get the transdisciplinary overview that is necessary to identify the risks to the integration of street trees at a stage when major changes can still be made. At one of the tables, 3D-modelling including root zones among the infrastructural components was suggested as a practical solution to achieve interdisciplinary overview and to detect potential conflicts at an early stage in a project. There were also discussions that addressed conceptual aspects of street design. One discussion challenged the convention of symmetry in street design. Instead of planting trees on both sides of a street, space for trees could be allocated on the side where they would have the best conditions, such as sunshine, with technical infrastructure placed on the other side. As written in the upper left corner and represented by the figures glued onto the left lane, the sketch (Illustration 18.5) represents a ‘tram street’. The participants discussed the benefits of allocating different functions to different streets instead of trying to integrate a multitude of functions in the same street. This sparked a discussion of whether street functions should only be interpreted as technical functions, such as transport. If we have ‘tram streets’ and ‘bus streets’ and ‘car streets’, can we also have ‘tree streets’, where the functions and needs of trees are allowed to dominate?

Discussion In this chapter we have used drawing to explore the politics of street trees. We have explored how drawing can uncover ways of relating to

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trees and streetscapes in practice, with all its tensions between different perspectives and practices, and how it can be a way of negotiating any conflicts and reimagining streetscapes as multispecies urban environments. We have done this by seeing practices as routinized everyday activities, guided by, and reproducing, shared know-how and ways of understanding and relating to matters such as street trees. Trees are met with quite specific expectations and requirements by different professionals, and they are put to work in different ways, connected to their practices. We have seen how trees are understood to have ‘infrastructural relations’ to practices (cf. Shove 2017), through provision of ecosystem services and as nature-based solutions where they can take part in stormwater or air quality management, and in the implementation of urban plans. Moreover, they can be devices that are mobilized directly, for example as part of Christmas decorations. While acknowledging their general value and contribution to sustainable urban futures, some see them as conflicting with efforts to implement city plans, or as hindrances to keeping infrastructure intact or to accessing buildings. As physical urban elements, trees are pruned and disciplined so that their roots and crowns do not interfere with infrastructure such as cables, pipes and tram lines. Hierarchies of concern exist where conflicts occur between technical and safety-related perspectives and ‘soft’ concerns such as atmospheric and sensory qualities. Urban infrastructure can be seen as expressions of the modernist worldview where there is a sharp distinction between the manufactured and the ‘natural’. The view of nature as a provider of ‘ecosystem services’ or ‘nature-based solutions’ is furthering this worldview, enrolling urban natures in processes of neoliberalization (see Kotsila et al. 2021). Nature then becomes a technical element and economic instrument. By contrast, the aesthetic and sensory views of trees connect people to changing urban nature environments, serving as reminders that humans too are nature, dependent on other-than-human beings and ecosystems. Such perspectives and practices seem to lose out to the hard and short-term concerns, however, when autumn leaves obstruct the tram tracks or trees block emergency response vehicles’ access to buildings. The question is whether it is necessary to adopt techno-economic frameworks to level the debate and allow for exploration of new ways of designing and doing, or whether ‘conversation-stoppers’, which may prevent the inclusion of trees, can be avoided by categorizing and representing trees in new ways. How can representations of the urban be more inclusive of non-human nature, and the urban be integrated in understandings of street trees (and other urban nature)? The feedback

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we got from workshop participants was that it had been useful to explore the politics of street trees through interdisciplinary sketching. The discussions centred on interdisciplinarity in design processes, representations of street designs, technical solutions to reduce or avoid conflicts and conceptual explorations of different principles for planning and designing urban streets inclusive of trees. To realize targets of more street trees it would be useful to create arenas where practitioners can reconsider and further develop understandings by meeting across disciplines and organizations to share perspectives on street trees, discuss the tensions and conflicts and explore possible solutions. However, arranging such events and setting aside time for them within the resource constraints that govern the working days of these practitioners might not be realistic. Integrating interdisciplinary meeting points earlier on in urban design processes may be one way of making this happen in practice. Further, including street trees in representations that provide an interdisciplinary overview can be a way of challenging the hierarchy of concerns in the everyday practices of street planners and developers. As suggested by workshop participants, one possibility is to make sure that the 3D models used in planning represent street trees and not only the technical infrastructure. This would help to place street trees on a more equal footing, and as such would be an expression of the technical perspective on street trees. A topic for further research is whether other perspectives on street trees, such as the aesthetic, sensory and historical perspectives, can be integrated in a model used for practical planning of street construction. Representations matter, as do the dimensions they are based on and the characteristics they include. Questions for future research include: Do street trees and other urban natures have to participate on the premises set by the technical and human scale? And what representations are able to capture other aspects and temporalities, such as sensory qualities, relations to ecosystems, seasonal variation and changes over the lifespan of trees and other nature?

Conclusion In this chapter we set out to explore the politics of street trees. We have done this by using drawing as a way of seeing and uncovering practitioner perspectives, exploring relations between conflictual views and practices, and reimagining multispecies streetscapes. We have shown how different ways of seeing and knowing street trees across different



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practices can be a source of conflict that inhibits the realization of plans aimed at including more trees in the urban space. In addition to using drawing to get these different ways of seeing and knowing into view, we have explored and discussed how collaborative drawing can be used as a method for dwelling in interdisciplinary tension, so that ideas for solving these conflicts can emerge. As ways of reconsidering what is currently taken for granted, and exploring opportunities for change, we propose to establish arenas for interdisciplinary and generative exploration. They can be part of and go beyond urban design processes. Moreover, we encourage explorations of new ways of representing natures in the principles, tools and methods guiding the work of urban practitioners. Hanne Cecilie Geirbo is an associate professor in sustainable transitions at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design at Oslo Metropolitan University. She has an interdisciplinary background with a master’s degree in social anthropology, and a PhD in information systems. Ida Nilstad Pettersen is a professor at the Department of Design, Faculty of Architecture and Design, NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has a PhD in design for sustainability (2013), and her research addresses sustainability transitions, practice transformation, participation, consumption, and urban natures. References Bagnoli, Anna. 2009. ‘Beyond the Standard Interview: The Use of Graphic Elicitation and Arts-based Methods’, Qualitative Research 9(547): 547–70. Braverman, Irus. 2008. ‘“Everybody Loves Trees”: Policing American Cities through Street Trees’, Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum 19(81): 81–118. Campbell, Lindsay K. 2014. ‘Constructing New York City’s Urban Forest: The Politics and Governance of the MillionTrees NYC Campaign’, in L. Anders Sandberg, Adrina Bardekjian and Sadia Butt (eds), Urban Forests, Trees, and Greenspace. New York: Earthscan from Routledge, pp. 242–60. Causey, Andrew. 2017. Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Crilly, Nathan, Alan F. Blackwell and P. John Clarkson. 2006. ‘Graphic Elicitation: Using Research Diagrams as Interview Stimuli’, Qualitative Research 6(3): 341–66. Donovan, Geoffrey H., et al. 2021. ‘The Politics of Urban Trees: Tree Planting Is Associated with Gentrification in Portland, Oregon’, Forest Policy and Economics 124: 1–9.

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European Commission. 2015. ‘Towards an EU Research and Innovation Policy Agenda for Nature-based Solutions and Re-naturing Cities’. Final Report of the Horizon 2020 Expert Group. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Hals, Harald. 1929. Fra Stor-Oslo til Christiania: et forslag til generalplan for Oslo [From Greater Oslo to Christiania: A proposal for a master plan for Oslo]. Oslo: Aschehoug. Kotsila, Panagiota, et al. 2021. ‘Nature-based Solutions as Discursive Tools and Contested Practices in Urban Nature’s Neoliberalisation Processes’, EPE: Nature and Space 4(2): 252–74. Lockton, Dan, et al. 2020. ‘Thinking With Things: Landscapes, Connections, and Performances as Modes of Building Shared Understanding’, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 40(6): 38–50. Oslo kommune n.d. ‘Oslotrær’ [Oslo trees]. Retrieved 28 March 2022 from https:// www.oslo.kommune.no/slik-bygger-vi-oslo/oslotrar/#gref. Phillips, Catherine, and Jennifer Atchison. 2020. ‘Seeing the Trees for the (Urban) Forest: More-than-Human Geographies and Urban Greening’, Australian Geographer 51(2): 155–68. Sanders, Liz, and Pieter Jan Stappers. 2014. ‘From Designing to Co-designing to Collective Dreaming: Three Slices in Time’, Interactions (November–December): 25–33. Schatzki, Theodore R. 2012. ‘A Primer on Practices: Theory and Research’, in Joy Higgs et al. (eds), Practice-based Education: Perspectives and Strategies. Rotterdam: SensePublishers, pp. 13–26. Shove, Elizabeth. 2017. ‘Matters of Practice’, in Allison Hui, Theodore Schatzki and Elizabeth Shove (eds), The Nexus of Practices. New York: Routledge, pp. 155–68. Shove, Elizabeth, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson. 2012. The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How it Changes. London: SAGE Publications. Steele, Wendy, Ilan Wiesel and Cecily Maller. 2019. ‘More-than-Human Cities: Where the Wild Things Are’, Geoforum 106: 411–15.

deú CONCLUSION

Reflections and Future Directions for Researching Urban Natures Ferne Edwards

The chapters in this book have explored different conceptualizations and enactments of urban natures as they are made visible, reconnected to and politicized. This Conclusion revisits how the book has engaged with the theory, methods and practice of the more-than-human. It interrogates what types of urban nature are made visible and where, as well as the politics of this, in order to consider the spaces and temporalities of where urban natures live. Furthermore, this chapter highlights future areas for possible research towards strengthening the pathway to the more-than-human city.

Contributions to More-than-Human Theory Spotlighting Nature The city in the era of the Anthropocene poses new challenges and opportunities. ‘Nature’ – in and around cities, as humans and in its assemblage of humans and nonhumans – represents a powerful force that can impact both the degree and direction that cities, and human society overall, can take. However, as emphasized throughout this book, how ‘nature’ is framed determines how it will be perceived, governed and acted upon. The chapters in this book have attempted to unsettle an anthropocentric bias in numerous ways. While they retain an initial human perspective, they bring nonhuman others to the fore. Types of nature ‘made visible’ throughout these chapters fall into three rough categories: individual species; urban matter and processes; and assemblages of species,

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matter and processes at specific sites. Singular animal species include bees, bears, bed bugs and foxes; plant life includes indigenous foods, ‘weeds’, tomatoes and trees; and more-than-human matter includes soil, compost and fog. By focusing on a specific species, matter or process in greater detail, new layers of appreciation can occur, providing many ways to understand – and possibly coexist with – urban natures. While the book chapters are divided into various sections, all the chapters have sought to bring nature into the realm of the visible and sensible, often resignifying it in order to respond to it, pushing beyond commonly assumed tropes such as ‘weeds’, ‘predator’, ‘pest’ and ‘invasions’. Other chapters have presented ‘nature’ in broader sets of assemblages, ranging from landscapes such as the Irk Valley, which is full of bats, birds and badgers, to a compost bin, where bacteria breaks down organic matter into soil to sustain numerous life forms. Here a stronger focus on relationality and place is highlighted. This reminds the reader how place is constructed through an assemblage of beings, where their tensions and harmonies influence their atmospheres. The ‘natural’ world could potentially ‘absorb’ – or in other words, provide greater connections between – humans and their environments. For example, in Chapter 1, the human protagonist strolls through the valley in darkness observing nature, while in Chapter 8 it is the human ‘leftovers’ that are reabsorbed and transformed in the compost bin. Chapter 7 is another example where memories, identity and myth are inscribed in place (see also Chapter 16), providing a visceral and affective ‘hook’ that anchors humans to a wider world. These interlinked foci reveal a key difficulty in more-than-human theory, which is how to express where one species’ world ends and another begins: Are we telling enough of the story? Are we including ourselves enough – or too much – in how stories play out? Who or what are we leaving in or out of their telling? The chapters in this book advance these questions to stir the need for more narratives that could propel nuanced consideration of positionality and reflexivity towards more-than-human holistic accounts. Another way the chapters ‘make visible’ is to hand over their stories to nonhuman protagonists to craft the narrative of their cities by acknowledging their agency. For example, bed bugs and bears infiltrate Los Angeles’ homes and libraries (Chapter 4), foxes rule London allotments (Chapter 9), and street trees attempt to hold their ground in Gothenburg (Chapter 17). Here, humans are still present, yet they fall into the background to allow the nonhumans to ‘catch up’ in telling their perspective of, and agency within, the city. These chapters negate the portrayal of victimization or vilification of urban natures, placing them as equal – and persistent – actors in the co-construction of the city.

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What does this ‘making visible’ of urban natures mean then? One apparent outcome is how many tales reflect societal concerns of loss, guilt and responsibility. In general terms, the dynamic states of urban natures – such as ‘ghosts and monsters’ (Tsing et al. 2017) – remind humans of our place within the cycle, and of the impermanence of life. Akin to Hamlet’s keeping of Yorick’s skull on the mantelpiece, ‘nature’ is a symbolic reminder of the inevitable decay of the human body and of our temporary and fragile place within the world. The reappearance of urban natures in the various chapters can thus take us down even darker paths. For example, chapters 5 and 10 examine urban nature through our diets to emphasize how links to ‘wild’ and Indigenous meals have been misplaced. Consequences of this loss do not just represent an ‘alienation from the natural world, challenging mainstream ideas of “acceptable” foods, reclaiming the ability to source free foods effectively and responsibly, and altering perceptions of urban space’ (Chapter 5), but also highlight the blinding of the reasons that caused this loss. In Chapter 10, these reasons extend beyond the nonhuman to acknowledge the consequences of ‘the dominance of the colonial-built environment, colonial ideologies, and government control and determination over land use and management’. Chapters 11, 15 and 16 all raise the need for shifting classifications that are also bound within imperialistic and racist underpinnings, expressed by terms such as ‘native’ (Chapter 11) and ‘invasiones’ (Chapter 15), to ask how urban natures and all those related to them can best be cared for without perpetuating conditions of domination and exploitation. Hence, opening Pandora’s box to fully recognize the implications and complexities of urban nature can reveal an uncomfortable guilt and wider responsibility to redress injustices for many more. But rather than state that all stories of urban nature will lead down disquieting – yet necessary – paths of redress, the ‘making visible’ of urban natures also presents co-benefits of joy, sociality, flavour, security and (re)enchantment in many chapters. Insects inspire awe at urban events and activities (Chapter 2), beauty and a sense of safety and freedom are found in the city’s edgelands during the pandemic (Chapter 3), while citizens are ‘inspired in the concept of common good’ working on a community garden in Girona, Spain (Chapter 14). So too do unexpected friendships between wild foxes and retired gardeners emerge to remind us of the playfulness and ‘humility’ (for sake of a better word) that another species can bring (Chapter 9). Here, discourse in the chapters turns to aspects of value, care and governance. Would it perhaps not be beneficial to build on these and others’ efforts (Gandy 2016) to see more positive accounts of urban nature?

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Furthermore, all chapters offer alternative ways of conceptualizing and acting to engage with and support urban nature. Some unpick assumptions of traditional thinking, while others present their actions in cities, such as foraging tours in London (Chapter 5) and a First Nations bushfoods workshop in Brisbane (Chapter 10). For some authors (e.g. Chapter 10), siding with nature is a means of also ‘taking back’ security and power within human worlds, as described in Chapter 13 by how the Ni Vanuatu in Port Vila, Vanuatu, mobilized traditional gardening practices to reduce their vulnerability following the closure of international borders during the pandemic. In other chapters strategies for re-engaging with urban natures are formalized and large scale. Chapter 11 interrogates troubling assumptions within Aotearoa New Zealand’s national weeding programme between those who ‘really’ care and who belong, and outsiders, newcomers and threatening others who either do not care or ‘just do not know how to care’. Some chapters recount how people are standing up for diverse natures: for example, the needs of wild bees in the preservation of public land emerge in a design manifesto from the combined efforts of citizen collectives and nature associations in Brussels (Chapter 12); and the rights for street trees to remain in Gothenburg (Chapter 17). These two chapters – alongside Chapter 18, which shows the efforts by urban planners in Oslo, Norway – illustrate how urban natures can be, and sometimes are, integrated within urban design, planning and policy towards more-than-human cities. Spotlighting the Political As discussed in the Introduction chapter, urban natures are often bound within frames that assume moral judgements and power relations (Lakoff 2010). With respect to the natures in the book’s chapters, many initially fit Peter Atkins’ category of ‘transgressed’ species that are ‘judged to be vermin because they are “out of place” in the city’ (Atkins 2012: 3) – bed bugs, bears, foxes and ‘weeds’. However, through the authors’ thick description and analysis, these ‘beasts’ become (re)contextualized to occupy new categories of human/nonhuman place-based relations. For example, in Chapter 4, bed bugs are typically considered ‘pests’ and grizzly bears ‘predators’. But in the context of Mongolians living in the settler-colonial city, they take on shifting identities as co-colonizer (bed bugs) and native challenger (grizzly), and most importantly also as protagonists in co-determining who has the right to the city. In London, on the other hand, both foxes and ‘weeds’ occupy traditional categories of ‘pests’ for animals and ‘weeds’ for plants. Chapter 9

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refers to the common perception of foxes as a ‘fearful subject’, recounting a news report of a fox attack. Yet, the gardeners’ practices of care challenge binary conceptions of human/animal and nature/culture to reimagine allotments, not only as spaces of rational recreation for humans or as productive food landscapes, but also as sites of human and morethan-human play. So, too, do foraged ‘weeds’ take on new flavours, contesting notions of ‘acceptable’ foods, as participants on East End Jam (re)encounter the city by learning to ‘taste’ their neighbourhood, to use local resources differently – for nature interaction, communal knowledge production, and sustenance – and to share food collection, cooking and consumption (Chapter 5). Street trees feature in chapters 17 (Gothenburg) and 18 (Oslo). Treated as ‘furniture’ by the Gothenburg municipality in a massive undertaking to move mature trees, the author notes how the trees require multiple ‘cares’ – both from humans for their well-being and from the trees by acting as urban coolers, air cleaners, water retainers, or easers of human depression (see Introduction chapter), and as habitats for flora and fauna. By treating the trees as ‘furniture’, they become ‘things’ without agency that can be seen as being of lesser value, ‘easily discarded or replaceable, denying in the process their embedded pasts as well as potential futures’. Alternatively, interviews with urban design practitioners in Oslo illustrate how ‘hierarchies of concern’ influence choices that prioritize technical concerns, such as urban infrastructure, over sensory and aesthetic aspects of urban greenery. Again, such definitions – while understandable considering the complexity of urban needs – limit the full appreciation, co-benefits and agency of urban nature. Other political frames for nonhuman nature in the book include tensions in Vanuatu between people who organize urban gardens through legal tenure and practitioners and those who use opportunistic spatial tactics to shape nature, particularly during disaster (Chapter 13). This act becomes a ‘taking care of one’s community’ with help from an externalized nature to combat vulnerabilities propagated by the coalescence of a cash economy and international aid partners. In Chapter 14, the complexities of establishing and caring for a community garden as commons are examined with respect to the power dynamics it perpetuates. Both examples approach urban agriculture as a tool to address human need, but they also identify ‘nature’ as an ally to correct injustices that stretch way beyond the garden. Meanwhile, Chapter 15 takes a ‘caring for’ perspective to unravel and explore imagined natures in Lima and what this means for class, conservation, politics and access to place. Chapter 16 also interrogates embedded trauma and power within the relationship between urban greening and racial injustice, this time in Baltimore.

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These accounts demonstrate how such power-laden classifications of nature can be criticized, inverted and augmented. They broaden frames of urban nature to acknowledge new values emergent from relationships to history, place, other human and nonhuman natures, behaviour and more. Further, ‘care’ is revealed as a key catalyst to switch and strengthen these thick relational descriptions. One such complementary approach is by Wendy Steele, Ilan Wiesel and Cecily Maller (2019), who suggest unsettling traditional frames of ‘nature’ by introducing new frames of ‘wild, stray and care’. These malleable terms that allude to different and dynamic states (for example, ‘wild’ can suggest an authentic ‘first nature’; ‘wild-in-nature’ can infer natural predators or uncontrollable human behaviour) also suggest how identities of nature can shift between states. For example, ‘stray’ may shift to ‘care’ when new relationships (empathetic and possibly reciprocal) are acknowledged. However, as demonstrated here, care can be interpreted in numerous ways. For example, Lilian Pungas explores Joan Tronto’s (1993) five expressions of care to understand food self-provisioning: ‘caring about’, ‘care-giving’, ‘care-receiving’, ‘taking care of’ and ‘caring with’ (Pungas 2021: 59). This analysis reveals that care is not always reciprocal, fair or kind. This book’s chapters highlight possibilities for different applications of care that can go beyond human dominance. Hence, interrogating the politics of care in the framing of urban nature is another facet to be considered for pushing beyond perceptions of the anthropocentric city. Spotlighting Place These chapters not only look at urban natures but also at where they are located, shining light on often ignored parts of cities. The cities covered in this book are from all around the world: Manchester, London, Brighton, Girona, Brussels, Oslo and Gothenburg (Europe), Los Angeles, Baltimore and Lima (the Americas), and Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland and Port Vila (Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the South Pacific). These cities are large and small, hot and cold, north and south – some with grey concrete, others with green grass or jungle, yellow sand and blue sea – highlighting how nature continues to persist in diverse cities. The chapters in this book contribute to a broader movement that seeks to acknowledge the rights of nonhuman natures to the city. This concept extends from Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to urban life’ (2000) that sought to democratize access to the city through residents’ occupation and participation. The right to the city has three facets: (1) the physical right; (2) the right as ‘a work produced through the labor and daily actions of those who live in the city’ (Attoh 2011: 674); and (3) the right to active

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consideration in cities’ social and political decision-making processes. In other words, urban natures require the institutionalization of their right to access urban space (Shingne 2022). While this more-than-human right to the city is in no way achieved yet, this book’s chapters foster a shift towards this goal by problematizing human-centric assumptions, questioning traditional terminology and concepts, and opening up discussion about possible strategies and trajectories to get there. Within these cities, urban nature appears in parks, valleys and community gardens (chapters 2, 9, 10 and 14); in deserted areas left to ‘go wild’ (chapters 3 and 12); in the air, soil or sea (chapters 2 and 8), and along a city’s fringes (Chapter 3). So too do nonhuman natures travel and trespass – for example, honey bees and ‘weeds’ break free from designated zones – potentially causing human/nonhuman conflicts (chapters 2 and 11). The book chapters echo how such persistent encounters require revised classification and governance approaches to learn how to better ‘live with’ each other. Carrying forward the key tenet of ‘relationality’, anthropologist Sara Asu Schroer, among others (Schroer 2021; also see Sundberg 2014), reminds us of the knowledge, expertise and philosophy of Indigenous people, and how they may guide a rethinking of core categories from which we understand the world. With so many assumptions to unpick, diverse strategies at varying intensities are required to reach a wide audience. Tactics for ‘living with’ from the chapters include: an opening up to nonhuman others through exploration and experience (chapters 1, 3, 5); education, such as attending festivals or citizen science events (Chapter 2); reflexivity and problem solving for when conflict situations arise (chapters 4, 6, 9, 11); and through interventions, such as the creation of art, workshops, gardens, design protocols and policy (chapters 7–10, 12–18). Note that in all cases it is humans who need to make the first step.

Making Sense: More-than-Human Methods Diverse methods and perspectives are required for understanding the complex histories and assemblages of more-than-human cities. This section synthesizes and analyses characteristics from the methods used across the book chapters. Furthermore, it identifies additional perspectives that could contribute to the more-than-human urban agenda. • A grounded, reflexive and holistic approach Many chapters include approaches of multispecies or auto ethnography, participant observation and qualitative interviewing. In Chapter 6, the

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researchers critically interpret each other’s subjectivities to acknowledge the influence of hegemonic assumptions on their perceptions of nature. • Inclusive and democratic research, such as participatory design and observation Participatory design is practised in Chapter 12, involving participation from both human and nonhuman actors, and in Chapter 18, involving urban professionals, and centred on how to accommodate nonhumans. Chapter 2 also engages with wider spheres of participation through citizen science that can lead to greater engagement in conserving urban natures. • The role of affect Many researchers apply affect to disrupt human/nonhuman barriers for new knowledge. Walking is a popular method that employs a multisensorial, embodied experience. Such slow experiences can disrupt and sharpen people’s perceptions of nature, as expressed in Chapter 3: ‘Since I have started walking to these places, I have realized the view is always grander from the bottom, or half-way up. As the landscape emerges, that feeling of freedom washes through your body with every breath, every step’. Likewise, Chapter 1 applies night walking as a spatial practice to ‘gain knowledge about places through direct experience, and so better understand how the identity of places changes by night in relation to the day’. • Relational links to acknowledge other actors and processes Relationality is applied to move beyond anthropocentrism towards more-than-human worlds. Such applications may be considered as ‘less rational, more material, performative and dynamic’ (Maller 2021: 4), to focus on processes and multiple scales reflecting diverse life forms, where change in perception occurs in the ability ‘to resituate humans in relation to the multitude of other species and ecosystems upon which we are entirely dependent’ (ibid.). Chapter 5 applies participatory multisensory cartography to walk people through often undiscovered spaces in neighbourhoods to talk, listen, invite and show wild edible plants. Evoking memories and knowledge, these shared experiences can provoke a change in perception of food and place, complemented by shared cooking and consuming of the produce. ‘Cartography’ (aka ‘edible maps’) refers to the map of resulting experience. Similarly, Chapter 12 makes critical cartographies or visual narratives based on walk-along interviews, assembling collages out of ‘relationships between wild bees, the members of the collective and the space’.

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• Making it personal and political Acknowledging affect and reflexivity, the research can become personal. Chapter 7 provides a reflection on place, nature, memory and myths from the author’s life in two countries, while in Chapter 18 urban developers sketch their perception of trees in their professional practice. Urban natures can also live closely in our lives – the bed bugs in Chapter 4 being an intimate example. So too can the personal become political, where politics can be conveyed in numerous ways. Some social scientists believe they have a responsibility as activist scholars (Chapter 14) to represent human and nonhuman marginalized others. The new categorizations of nature discussed in this book also disrupt established ways of relating and being with nature. Disciplines, such as design, then take an active political role by instigating sustainable interventions. However, while the Lefebvrian ‘right to the city’ has been elaborated to encompass the ‘right to nature’, the ‘right of nature’ to the city is scantly expressed (Gandy 2021). • To be creative and innovative This book has used fresh formats such as narrations and photo essays to provide readers with alternative encounters with diverse natures (chapters 3, 7, 13). Creativity is associated with innovation, where through the senses, links between ideas can be developed, and new factors in changing environments can catalyse new possible relationships, spaces and visions. Future case studies could further embrace innovative approaches, such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and collective visioning, which could be applied to challenge traditional narratives (Goldstein et al. 2015). • To welcome interdisciplinarity Complementary disciplines highlighted in the book include anthropology, geography, STS, critical urban studies, urban design and planning, Indigenous studies, urban political ecology and participatory design. Future accounts could also benefit from further emphasis on approaches and insights from Indigenous perspectives, the arts, environmental humanities, STS, visioning and participatory techniques, and public health. All these approaches have highlighted important aspects towards developing diverse and holistic more-than-human methods. Their diversity represents a core step towards decolonialization – an essential step for the more-than-human – described by Sarah De Leeuw and Sarah Hunt as:

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multiple ways of knowing and being, especially those of Indigenous peoples and systems. It espouses efforts of undoing the privileging of nonIndigenous settler ways of knowing above those of Indigenous peoples. Decolonization as such is a more cerebral and reflective effort, a more introspective (to the discipline) call to re-think geographic knowledge, [and] to ask what space is open (or not) in our discipline for Indigenous voices and ways of knowing. (De Leeuw and Hunt 2018: 6)

These approaches have room for further elaboration. For example, the digital environment needs to be acknowledged in parallel to its growing influence in our lives. Other possible practices include evolving mapping practices that build on examples such as in Chapter 5 to support relational and community-based approaches (see Cohen and Duggan 2021). As mentioned, a greater deployment of collective imaginary activities could also be used to help visualize alternatives for the more-thanhuman city. Another radical technique for understanding urban natures is to use STS in innovative ways, such as night walks with bats (see Pollastri et al. 2021).

Putting the More-than-Human into Practice The application of more-than-human theory within the world meets its own set of unique challenges. The chapters here describe the potential hazards of applying Nature-Based Solutions (Introduction), and the conflicts – and subsequent tactics to overcome them – that can occur when a preference for one vision overrides another (chapters 9–16). I propose that the next steps for the more-than-human city need to occur in the real world to further iron out the potential inconsistencies between theory and practice; this could be as pilot projects, as teaching assignments, as interdisciplinary projects, and/or as design or grassroots’ experiments. Such advances would contribute most keenly to the evolving field of urban conservation, reframing and placing ‘nature’ within the city in its own right and thereby repoliticizing it.

Future Research Directions From this analysis, questions for future research include: • What new or revisited spaces in the city can be shared convivially between humans and nonhumans?

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• What frames, beyond care, can be created to (re)valorize diverse urban natures? • What new forms of more-than-human cohabitation can be envisioned? • What other connections can be drawn between human and nonhuman worlds in cities? How can these links be framed as attractive, accessible, just across species and sustaining? • How can creative formats be applied to engage the public in a transition to more-than-human cities? • What strategies can be implemented and maintained to give nonhuman nature a right to the city? • What new assemblages between place, people, nature and technology can foster new narratives of the more-than-human city? • What strategies can be developed to prevent these strategies from co-option by anthropocentric needs and desires? • How can resilient more-than-human cities be planned in the wake of increasing urban uncertainties? How can we develop strategies to ensure that they remain? The case studies begin to illustrate the rich diversity of possibilities for human/nonhuman cohabitation in the city. However, they also stop short of exploring the actual and potential heightened degrees of morethan-species proximity – questions that grow more pertinent for the future dynamic and compressed city (UN 2018). What of the insects and animals that live with us indoors? What plants can coexist in our homes without natural light? What of the microbes with which we share our bodies, and that affect our mental and physical health? What of urban waterbodies and their contribution to the more-than-human conversation? How do different types of cities relate to specific natures? The book asserts that creative, innovative and interdisciplinary approaches are required to resolve human/animal conflicts and to acknowledge potential spaces and strategies towards coexisting in the city.

Conclusion Constant insecurity has become a calling card of the Anthropocene – perhaps most keenly felt by climate change, which carries a sense of guilt, grief and loss for the likely extinctions to come (Head 2016). Such knowledge can tend to paralyse rather than mobilize action for sustainable change (Schultz 2021). However, this book documents examples of hope, where ways of living with nature in cities is shown to be both de-

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sirable and possible. It provides diverse, critical and grounded chapters that contribute a timely account of contemporary academic debates and lived encounters with urban nature. These nineteen chapters contribute to a greater knowledge and understanding of three pivotal questions of our time: Who and what are cities for? How can diverse natures coexist in urban environments? How are nonhuman natures politicized, and how does this impact their governance? Through these accounts that connect and question concepts  of  care, play, decolonization, race and identity, the authors have destabilized traditional boundaries towards reconceptualizing people’s relationships both with nature and with the city as a place for all.

Ferne Edwards has conducted research on sustainable cities across Australia, Venezuela, Ireland, Spain, Norway and the UK. Her books include the edited volumes Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices and Food, Senses and the City (both Routledge, 2021), and the monograph Food Resistance Movements: A Journey into Alternative Food Networks (Palgrave, 2023). She is based at the University of Surrey, UK.

References  Atkins, Peter. 2012. ‘Introduction’, in Peter Atkins (ed.), Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 1–18. Attoh, Kafui A. 2011. ‘What Kind of Right is the Right to the City?’ Progress in Human Geography 35(5): 669–85. Cohen, Phil, and Mike Duggan (eds). 2021. New Directions in Radical Cartography: Why the Map is Never the Territory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. De Leeuw, Sarah, and Sarah Hunt. 2018. ‘Unsettling Decolonizing Geographies’, Geography Compass 12: e12376. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12376. Gandy, Matthew. 2016. Moth. London: Reaktion Books. ———. 2021. ‘The Zoonotic City: Urban Political Ecology and the Pandemic Imaginary’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 46(2): 202–19. Goldstein, Bruce Evan, et al. 2015. ‘Narrating Resilience: Transforming Urban Systems through Collaborative Storytelling’, Urban Studies 52(7) (May): 1285– 1303. Head, Lesley. 2016. Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-conceptualising Human–Nature Relations. New York: Routledge. Lakoff, George. 2010. ‘Why It Matters How We Frame the Environment’, Environmental Communication 4(1): 70–81. Lefebvre, Henri. 2000. ‘The Right to the City’, in Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (trans/eds), Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 147–60. Maller, Cecily. 2021. ‘Re-orienting Nature-Based Solutions with More-than-Human Thinking’, Cities 113: 103155, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103155.

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Pollastri, Serena, et al. 2021. ‘More-than-Human Future Cities: From the Design of Nature to Designing for and through Nature’. Media Architecture Biennale 20 (MAB20), 28 June – 2 July, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands. ACM, New York. Pungas, Lilian. 2021. ‘Caring Dachas: Food Self-Provisioning in Eastern Europe through the Lens of Care’, in Anitra Nelson and Ferne Edwards (eds), Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices. New York: Routledge, pp. 59–73. Rosengren, Mathilda. 2020. ‘There’s Life in Dead Wood: Tracing a More-thanHuman Urbanity in the Spontaneous Nature of Gothenburg’, in Matthew Gandy and Sandra Jaspers (eds), The Botanical City. Berlin: Jovis Verlag, pp. 229–36.  Schroer, Sara Asu. 2021. ‘The Arts of Coexistence: A View from Anthropology’, Frontiers in Conservation Science 2 (November): 711019. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fcosc.2021.711019. Schultz, Nikolaj. 2021. ‘The Climatic Virus in an Age of Paralysis’, Critical Inquiry 47 (Winter): S9–S12. Shingne, Marie Carmen. 2022. ‘The More-than-Human Right to the City: A Multispecies Reevaluation’, Journal of Urban Affairs 44(2): 137–55. Steele, Wendy, Ilan Wiesel and Cecily Maller. 2019. ‘More-than-Human Cities: Where the Wild Things Are’, Geoforum 106 (November): 411–15. Sundberg, J. 2014. ‘Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies’, Cultural Geography 21: 33–47. Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Tsing, Anna, et al. (eds). 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. United Nations (UN). 2018. ‘68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050, says UN’. 16 May 2018, New York. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-re vision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html.

Glossary of Key Terms Affect: ‘The capacity or potential to affect and be affected by the world, largely through emotions and feelings’ (Maller 2018: 9; also see Massumi 2015). Anthropocentric humanism: A doctrine that placed nature at the service of humans (Fernandes 2007). Jan van Duppen (Chapter 9) refers to the related concept of an ‘anthropocentric focus’, where ‘only the scale perceptible to the human eye seems to be catered for, the domination of the “visible”’. Attunement: Refers to the ‘cultivation of a less anthropocentric, more affective attentiveness to the other-than-human urban’ (Rosengren, Chapter 17). Autoethnography: ‘Recognizes subjectivity in the research process, and is concerned with the interaction between a researcher’s understandings, actions and experiences in their social and cultural context with reference to their research’ (de Kleyn, Coffey and Bush, Chapter 6). Becoming: A concept by Donna Haraway (2008: 244) that acknowledges how humans and nonhumans co-create each other in a process of becoming: where ‘becoming is always becoming with – in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake’ (see the Introduction and Chapter 9). Care: A relational concept for thinking and living in more-than-human worlds, which includes ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Fisher and Tronto 1990: 40; also, Puig de la Bellacasa 2012 and 2017). Citizen science (CS): Typically applies open source, collaborative technology to collecting data for scientific research. Local actions are connected to global issues, where scientists benefit by gaining access to massive, dispersed data sets, while the public can contribute to solving real world problems (Dickinson et al. 2012). Collaborative autoethnography: De Kleyn, Coffey and Bush (Chapter 6) recognize how this research approach ‘[b]rings a research team to the method, and the interpretation of self, the group, cultural context and the research project becomes collective’ (Chang, Ngunjiri and Hernandez 2013; cited by de Kleyn, Coffey and Bush).

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Commoning: A concept developed to name those social practices of reclaiming and sustaining the collective reproduction of the commons (Caffentzis and Federici 2014). Connectedness to Nature Scale: A tool to measure the deficit of nature, as often experienced in urban locations (Cleary et al. 2018; cited by Qualmann and Vogel, Chapter 5). Convivial cohabitation: Refers to the process of devising strategies, spaces and behaviours that enable humans to live well with nonhuman others. Cosmopolitics: A new ecological politics based on consensus between humans and nonhumans (Hinchliffe et al. 2005). Country – connection to, and caring for: Country refers to Indigenous Australians’ physical and spiritual relationship to the environment. A ‘connection to’ Country recognizes the importance of the relationalities of care that extend to Aboriginal peoples’ ‘kinship systems and obligations between humans and more-than-humans, dreaming tracks, songlines, and performative, creative practices such as dance, story, song and mark-making’ (Chen, Chapter 10; see also Benson, Chapter 7). Cyborg urbanization: A concept to explore human-nature-city relations, where ‘[t]he urban world is a cyborg world, part natural/part social, part technical/part cultural, but with no clear boundaries, centres or margins’ (Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006: 11; also White, Rudy and Gareau 2016: 153). Dadirri: This word from the Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri languages of the Aboriginal people of the Daly River region, Australia, ‘evokes the need for deep listening, close observation and presence in the places we see as familiar. The concept of deep listening opens the pathway to walking with respect, a way for all of us to connect to the lands and waters’ (Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr 1998, cited by Benson, Chapter 7). Decolonizing nature: Seeks to recognize the uneven power flows that underpin the distribution, framing and management of nature within the settler-city (see de Leeuw and Hunt 2018; also Chapter 4). Dwelling: As an ‘immediate, yet also enduring and relational process’ of being in the world (Jones 2009: 266; also see Ingold 2000). Ecological killjoys: Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s notion ‘feminist killjoy’ (2010: 39) about refusing to ‘play along’ with the patriarchal hegemonic belief system, the concept refers to the attitude of opposing the dominant, anthropocentric vision of the urban and in favour of a more complex, multispecies agency and belonging in the city (Rosengren, Chapter 17).

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Encounters: See ‘Naturecultures’ below. Environmental grief / eco-grief: The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018: 275) Green gentrification: New or intensified urban socio-spatial inequities produced by urban greening agendas and interventions, such as greenways, parks, community gardens, ecological corridors, and green infrastructure (Anguelovski et al. 2018). Haunted natures: Mariya Shcheglovitova and JH Pitas (Chapter 16) claim that planned nature in the city can be ‘haunted’ by the remembrance of capitalism’s failures and racial injustice. Hence, meaningful reparations can only be achieved through abolition and the return of stolen land and wealth, and everyday practices of critique and care (Tacchetti et al. 2021). Mana: An inheritable spiritual power in Maori culture that fluctuates depending on deeds over one’s lifetime (Metge 1976: 8). Mana is interlinked with land (whenua), ancestors (tūpuna), spiritual identity and belonging (Mead 2003: 269f.; see Fischer, Chapter 11). Metabolic rift: A concept developed by Nathan McClintock (2010) to both acknowledge the break, and to re-evaluate values and ways to work within nature to advance eco-ethical human/more-than-human interactions and city/soil relations. More-than-human approach: Considers the needs, wants and rights of nonhuman life forms, matter and phenomena (see the Introduction). Multispecies ethnography: An approach that seeks to acknowledge the ‘interconnectedness and inseparability of humans and other life forms’ (Locke and Muenster 2015: n.p.) but also to force us to radically rethink ‘categories of all beings’ (Kohn, cited by Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 562–63). Native species: Defined by the European Environment Agency (n.d.) as ‘[p]lants, animals, fungi, and micro-organisms that occur naturally in a given area or region’. Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer discusses ‘native’ nature and differentiation between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ species in Chapter 11. Native Title: Refers to Australian legislation that looked to overturn the perceived non-existence of Aboriginal peoples’ connection to the land prior to colonization (see Chen, Chapter 10).

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Nature-based Solutions (NBS): Describing interventions from green walls to large-scale artificial urban ecosystems, NBS is an all-encompassing term that professes to ‘simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits, and help build resilience to the environment and people’ (European Commission 2022: 6). Naturecultures: A concept by Donna Haraway to express the relationalities across species. Based on the complex, affective relationship with her dog, she proposes that encounters between humans and nonhumans take place as situated naturecultures, where the actors ‘become’ through ‘the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter’ (Haraway 2008: 25; also see chapters 9 and 12). New materialism: Also referred to as ‘neo-materialism’, is a term that refers to a group of perspectives that de-centre and reposition humans among nonhumans, seeing the world as co-produced and humans as emerging ‘from and with it’ (LeCain 2017: 429), and matter as inherently vibrant (Bennett 2004; cited by Wing and Sharp, Chapter 8). NIMBY: Or ‘Not In My Backyard’, is a phrase that refers to ‘the protectionist attitudes of and oppositional tactics adopted by community groups facing an unwelcome development in their neighbourhood’ (Dear 1992: 288). Nocturnal praxis: Defined by Nick Dunn (Chapter 1) as ‘a mixed methods approach, combining nightwalking, reflexive writing and photography – to help to document the city and wider borough through an ongoing series of surveys’. Partition of the sensible: A concept by Jacques Rancière (1999: 30) that ‘makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise’. Phrenology: A pseudoscience from the Victorian era that measured the skull to identify character traits and mental ability – and, for some, to reinforce notions of racial supremacy (Benson, Chapter 7). Place guarding: A concept by Stephen Pritchard (2019) that expresses activists’ intent ‘to facilitate and enable deeper and more meaningful engagement with places as they already are’ (see Qualmann and Vogel, Chapter 5). Play: A concept developed by Jan van Duppen (Chapter 9) that draws on Haraway’s concept of encounters (2008) to express playful, care-taking yet irrational encounters between gardeners and foxes that demonstrate

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‘a playful mode that defies instrumental thinking and action (Huizinga 1971)’ (cited in Chapter 9). Pre-trauma: The traumatic imagining of (the environmental) catastrophe to come – which functions like a sort of ‘memory of the future’ (Kaplan 2016; cited by Richardson 2018: 2). Reflexivity: Part of a tradition in qualitative research that understands knowledge as socially constructed and co-produced through interactions between the researcher and a range of subjects (Phillips et al. 2013; cited in de Kleyn, Chapter 6). Right to the city: Henri Lefebvre (1968) argued that capitalism’s rise had not just created alienable labour but alienable space, resulting in ‘relations of class privilege and domination’ (Harvey 2012: xiv). Lefebvre called for the urban classes to actively involve themselves in the production of space (Lefebvre 2000: 154). Redlining: The term describes the practice of denying home loans to applicants in the United States based on their race (see Shcheglovitova and Pitas, Chapter 16). Relationality: A central concept in more-than-human studies that refers to ‘culturally relevant, interconnected thinking and collaboration that reinforces kinship and relatedness (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003), facilitates material connection and embodiment (Martin 2013), assists knowledge transference (Reser et al. 2021), and reasserts connections to place (Cumpston and Beer 2019)’ (Chen, Chapter 10). Settler-colonial city: The existence of a settler colonial polity is premised on continual violence so as to eradicate native presence in all its forms (Tuck and Yang 2012). These occur because settlers ‘strategies of territorialization involve . . . the distribution of nonhuman agents . . . to reorder spaces and places according to their own allied imperatives (Neale 2016: n.p.)’ (cited by Anyadike-Danes, Chapter 4). Social practice: A concept found in theories of social practice. It is conceptualized in different ways but used to understand the dynamics and complexity of everyday life and, for example, to create social change. For Clare Qualmann and Amy Vogel, Chapter 5, it is ‘an artistic medium that uses real world systems and activities to make things happen (rather than to make things like paintings or sculptures)’ (see also Geirbo and Pettersen, Chapter 18). Solastalgia: The diffuse sense of the end of the world, such as experienced in the loss or change of loved places and the disruption of life patterns as caused by climate change (Farbotko and McGregor 2010; Galway et al. 2019).

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Somaesthetics: A concept by Richard Shusterman (2008) that acknowledges an element of the corporeal turn that forefronts ‘visceral connections with the world, and human capacity to attribute meaning to experiences’ (Iared and Torres de Oliveira 2017: n.p.). Subnatures: ‘Those forms of nature deemed primitive (mud and dankness), filthy (smoke, dust, and exhaust), fearsome (gas or debris), or uncontrollable (weeds, insects, and pigeons)’ (Gissen 2009: 22). Sustainability fix: Refers to how capitalist crises of overaccumulation and expansion are addressed and further facilitated by selectively integrating environmental goals into urban governance structures and policies to promote urban growth (While, Jonas and Gibbs 2004). Terra nullius: Latin term that means ‘the land of no one’, used in international law (see Chen, Chapter 10). The Anthropocene: A new geological epoch in which humans have literally impacted the entire globe and all life on it (Gandy 2021). The more-than-human city: Seen as relational, political and diverse with the potential to be convivial: ‘not just to exist in the same time and space but actively and conceptually cohabit, interact and engage with other species as part of the practice of everyday life’ (Untaming the Urban 2016: n.p.; also, Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2006). Thing-power: A concept by Jane Bennett (2004: 348) that ‘gives the “stuff” of the world potential and potency’ by recognizing that things have ‘ontologies of their own that sit outside of the meanings or purposes that humans ascribe to them’ (Wing and Sharp, Chapter 8). Umwelt: the diverse worlds that nonhuman natures inhabit in the city, whereby: ‘Every organism creates a different world in its brain. It lives in that world. We are surrounded by millions of different worlds’ (Foster 2016: 6; also see von Uexküll 2010). Untaming the city: Described ‘as forms of producing the urban that are rarely acknowledged or recognized as productive pathways to rethink what makes and could make cities conduits of social and environmental justice’ (Allen, Lampis and Swilling 2016: 2). Urban foraging: The collecting of edible seeds, plants and flowers from public and private lands has grown popular since the early 2000s in the Global North (McLain et al. 2012; Shackleton et al. 2017; Nyman 2019). An under-researched phenomenon (Fischer and Kowarik 2020), existing studies highlight benefits including ‘development and transmission of ecological knowledge, recreational opportunities, mental and physical well-being . . . and strengthening of social ties’ (McLain et al. 2012: 1).

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. ‘Happy Objects’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader. London: Duke University Press, pp. 29–51. Allen, Adriana, Andreas Lampis, and Mark Swilling (eds). 2016. Untamed Urbanisms: Practices and Narratives on Socio-Environmental Change for Urban Sustainability. London: Routledge. Anguelovski, Isabelle, James Connolly, Melissa Garcia Lamarca, Hellen Cole and Hamil Pearsal. 2018. ‘New scholarly pathways on green gentrification: What does the urban “green turn” mean and where is it going?’ Progress in Human Geography 43: 6. Bennett, Jane. 2004. ‘The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter’, Political Theory 32(3): 347–72. Caffentzis, George, and Silvia Federici. 2014. ‘Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism’, Community Development Journal 49(S1): 92–105. Chang, Heewon, Faith Ngunjiri, and Kathy-Anne C. Hernandez (eds). 2013. Collaborative Autoethnography. New York: Taylor & Francis. Cleary, Anne, et al. 2018. ‘Predictors of Nature Connection among Urban Residents: Assessing the Role of Childhood and Adult Nature Experiences’, Environment and Behavior 52(6): 579–610. Cunsolo, Ashlee. 2012. ‘Climate Change as the Work of Mourning’, Ethics and the Environment 17(2): 137–64. Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Neville Ellis. 2018. ‘Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss’, Nature Climate Change 8: 275–81. Dear, M. 1992. ‘Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome’, Journal of the American Planning Association 58(3): 288–300. De Leeuw, Sarah, and Sarah Hunt. 2018. ‘Unsettling Decolonizing Geographies’, Geography Compass 12: e12376. Dickinson, Janis L., et al. 2012. ‘The Current State of Citizen Science as a Tool for Ecological Research and Public Engagement’, Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 10(6) (August): 291–97. European Environment Agency (EEA). n.d. ‘Native Species’. EEA Glossary, EEA website. Retrieved 2 January 2023 from https://www.eea.europa.eu/help/glossary/ eea-glossary/native-species. European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. 2022. The Vital Role of Nature-Based Solutions in a Nature Positive Economy. Retrieved 17 June 2022 from https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/307761. Farbotko, Carol, and Helen McGregor. 2010. ‘Copenhagen, Climate Science and the Emotional Geographies of Climate Change’, Australian Geographer 41(2): 159–66. Fernandes, Edésio. 2007. ‘Constructing the “Right to the City” in Brazil’, Social & Legal Studies 16(2): 201–19. Fischer, Leonie, and Ingo Kowarik. 2020. ‘Connecting People to Biodiversity in Cities of Tomorrow: Is Urban Foraging a Powerful Tool?’ Ecological Indicators 112: 106087. Fisher, Joan C., and Berenice Tronto. 1990. ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring’, in Nelson Abel (ed.), Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 36–54. Foster, Charles. 2016. Being a Beast: An Intimate and Radical Look at Nature. London: Profile Books.

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Galway, Lindsay, et al. 2019. ‘Mapping the Solastalgia Literature: A Scoping Review Study’. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16: 2662. Gandy, Matthew. 2021. ‘The Zoonotic City: Urban Political Ecology and the Pandemic Imaginary’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 46(2): 202–19. Gissen, David. 2009. Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw. 2006. ‘Urban Political Ecology: Politicizing the Production of Urban Natures’, in Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (eds), In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Hinchliffe, Steve, et al. 2005. ‘Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitan Experiment’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 643–58. Hinchliffe, Steve, and Sarah Whatmore. 2006. ‘Living Cities: Towards a Politics of Conviviality’, Science as Culture 15(2): 123–38. Huizinga, Johan. 1971. Homo ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in our Culture. Reprint from 1955 Paperback edition. Originally published in 1938 in Dutch. Boston: Beacon Press. Iared, Valéria, and Haydée Torres de Oliveira. 2017. ‘Walking Ethnography for the Comprehension of Corporeal and Multisensory Interactions in Environmental Education’, Ambient Sociology 20(3) (July–September). Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. New York: Routledge. Jones, Owain. 2009. ‘Dwelling’, in Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (eds), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography: 266–72. Kaplan, Ann. 2016. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kirksey, Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545–76. LeCain, Timothy James. 2017. ‘Natural Born Humans: Putting Culture, Science, and Religion Back into Nature’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture 11(4): 420–34. Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le Droit à la ville [The right to the city]. 2nd edition. Paris: Anthropos. ———. 2000. Writings on Cities. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Locke, Piers, and Ursula Muenster. 2015. ‘Multispecies Ethnography’, Oxford Bibliographies. Retrieved 1 June 2022 from https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/ view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0130.xml. Maller, Cecily. 2018. Healthy Urban Environments: More-than-Human Theories. London and New York: Routledge. Massumi, Brian. 2015. Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. McClintock, Nathan. 2010. ‘Why Farm the City? Theorizing Urban Agriculture through a Lens of Metabolic Rift’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3(2): 191–207. McLain, Rebecca J., et al. 2012. ‘Gathering in the City: An Annotated Bibliography and Review of the Literature about Human–Plant Interactions in Urban Eco-

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systems’, Environmental Studies Faculty Publications 10. Retrieved 1 December 2021 from https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/environment_fac/10. Mead, Hirini Moko. 2003. Tikanga Māori: Living by Māori Values. Wellington, NZ: Huia. Metge, Joan. 1976. The Māoris of New Zealand. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Neale, Timothy. 2016. ‘Settler Colonialism and Weed Ecology’, Engagement, 2 November. Retrieved 16 May 2021 from https://aesengagement.wordpress .com/2016/11/02/settler-colonialism-and-weed-ecology/. Nyman, Marcus. 2019. ‘Food, Meaning-Making and Ontological Uncertainty: Exploring “Urban Foraging” and Productive Landscapes in London’, Geoforum 99: 170–80. Phillips, Louise, et al. 2013. Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research: A Reflexive Approach. New York: Routledge. Pritchard, Stephen. 2019. ‘Place Guarding: Activist Art against Gentrification’, in Cara Courage and Anita McKeown (eds), Creative Placemaking: Research, Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, pp. 140–55. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2012. ‘“Nothing Comes Without its World”: Thinking with Care’, The Sociological Review 60(2): 197–216. ———. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Richardson, Michael. 2018. ‘Climate Trauma, or the Affects of the Catastrophe to Come’, Environmental Humanities 10(1): 1–19. Shackleton, Charlie, et al. 2017. ‘Urban Foraging: A Ubiquitous Human Practice but Overlooked by Urban Planners, Policy and Research’, Sustainability 9: 1884. Shusterman, Richard. 2008. Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tacchetti, Madallena, et al. 2021. ‘Crafting Ecologies of Existence: More Than Human Community Making in Colombian Textile Craftivism’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1): 1–40. Ungunmerr, Miriam-Rose. 1998. About Dadirri. Miriam Rose Foundation. Retrieved 26 May 2021 from https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/dadirri/. Untaming the Urban. 2016. Symposium. Retrieved 14 June from https://untam ing-the-urban.tumblr.com/symposium. von Uexküll, Jakob. 2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Trans. Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. White, Damian, Alan Rudy and Brian Gareau. 2016. Environments, Natures and Social Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. While, Aidan, Andrew Jonas and David Gibbs. 2004. ‘The Environment and the Entrepreneurial City: Searching for the Urban “Sustainability Fix” in Manchester and Leeds’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28(3): 549–69.

Index

Aborigines 177; Aboriginal viii, 19, 126, 127, 130, 164–178, 307 Aboriginal agriculture practices 19, 164 activism 71, 102, 190, 198 actor-network theory 13 Aelan kabis xii, 214 aesthetics 45, 55, 168, 177, 265, 284 affect 20, 27, 56, 59, 60, 75, 138, 153, 156, 200, 202, 271, 274, 278, 300, 301, 306, 313; affective 4, 5, 12, 106, 107, 114, 116, 149, 152, 171, 184, 255, 271, 272, 273, 294, 309 agency of design 208 agriculture viii, xvii, xx, xxv, 8, 25, 27, 28, 48, 59, 103, 149, 164, 167, 177, 178, 213, 225–227, 236, 255, 263, 297, 313 All-Ireland Pollinator Plan 50, 52 allotment viii, xi, xxii, 150–153, 155–162, 170 ambivalence 19, 215, 233 America xviii, 6, 86, 168, 188, 250, 263; American 6, 14, 45, 59, 76–78, 81, 82, 84, 86, 87, 154, 192, 193, 250, 261–263, 291, 312 Ancestors xxii, 19, 132, 134, 171, 176, 182, 308 animal 5–7, 13, 24, 25–30, 56, 59, 82, 128, 150, 153, 155, 156, 159–162, 165, 173, 196, 198, 208, 294, 303, 304; animals xxi, 1, 3, 4, 5–7, 13, 28–30, 50, 57, 60, 86, 87, 110, 130, 153, 157, 158, 161–162, 167, 173, 181, 237, 296, 303, 308, 314 alienated 67, 74, 272 Andrena bimaculata 197 antagonism 98, 102, 158, 236 anthropocene xxi, 1, 9, 25, 26, 29, 60, 68, 72, 137, 147, 148, 149, 250, 265, 266, 273, 272–276, 293, 303, 304, 311; anthropocentric xiv, xv, 3, 74, 161, 268, 272, 273, 298, 303,

306, 307; anthropocentrism 5, 7, 15, 271, 300 anthropocentric design xv anthropology ii, xix, 2–5, 12, 14, 22, 27–30, 46, 60, 71, 85–87, 102, 148, 189, 191, 223, 234, 249, 250, 276, 291, 305, 313; anthropological xix, 29, 249; see also Urban Anthropology, More-than-Human Anthropology, Multispecies Anthropology antibiotics 150, 155, 160, 161 anti-capitalist 226 anxiety 9 Aotearoa New Zealand viii, xviii, 19, 20, 134, 138, 143, 146, 148, 168, 179–181, 183, 185, 187, 190–192, 296, 298 architecture xii, xx, 13, 14, 24, 46, 50, 87, 177, 196, 205, 208–210, 223, 224, 250, 262, 275, 279, 282, 286, 291, 313 art xi, xv, xx, 14, 39, 50–52, 57, 59, 88–91, 93, 98, 100–104, 116, 125, 126, 135, 148, 165, 168, 169, 172, 173, 175–177, 234, 242, 252, 257, 258, 260, 274, 291, 299, 314 artist 37, 91, 101, 102, 126, 132, 134, 172, 239, 242, 253, 258; artistic xv, 14, 19, 84, 88, 90, 92, 104, 135, 168, 229, 242, 310 arts 2, 28, 46, 50, 51, 162, 172, 276, 291, 301, 305 artwashing 90 artwork vii, 18, 88, 90–92, 97, 98, 100 assumptions ii, xvi, 2, 7, 18, 23, 89, 92, 105, 106, 108, 115–118, 299, 300 atmospheres xvii, 38, 44, 152, 163, 294 attunement 265, 272, 273, 306 Auckland viii, xxii, xxiii, 19, 20, 140, 148, 149, 179–183, 187, 188–193, 298

316

Index

Australia xi, xviii, xxii, 105, 109–111, 113, 119–121, 126, 130, 131, 134, 135, 166, 167, 171, 173, 175–178, 181, 183, 191, 298, 307; Australian xi, xv, xxv, 19, 25, 26, 29, 48, 120, 121, 124–127, 134, 164–166, 168, 173, 175–178, 292, 307, 308, 312 autoethnography 106–108, 119–121, 306, 312; autoethnographic 18, 37, 106–108, 118, 119; see also collective autoethnographic; collaborative autoethnography Baltimore viii, 21, 26, 28, 252, 254, 255, 257, 260, 261, 263, 297 Barthes, Roland 4 bear vii, xviii, 73, 81–84, 86, 87, 96, 294; see also California Grizzly bear becoming 4, 6, 8, 18, 19, 40, 58, 79, 143, 146, 150, 155, 156, 160, 162, 189, 266, 306; ‘becoming with’ 4, 19, 150, 155, 156, 160, 162, 306; becomings 5, 80, 236 bee xi, xxiii, 20, 48–53, 56, 58–61, 194, 195, 197–208; bees viii, 4, 20, 47, 48–52, 56, 58, 60, 62, 194, 196, 200–202, 205–207, 210, 285, 294, 296, 299; see also bumblebee, wild bee beekeeping xv, 13, 48–50, 58 beekeepers 13, 48, 49, 51, 58 bed bug 18, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 84, 85; Bedbugs 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 85, 294, 296, 301 belonging viii, 5, 11, 19, 20, 72, 74, 125, 127, 131, 134, 164–166, 174, 180, 185, 189, 190, 218, 227, 261, 272, 307, 308 biodiversity xvii, 15, 18, 27, 47, 53, 89, 99, 103, 104, 111, 119, 137, 181, 185, 188, 189, 196, 209, 210, 248, 275, 281, 312 biology 3, 28, 61, 77, 120, 137, 145, 271, 286; biological 12, 27, 56, 59, 61, 83, 137, 190, 197 biosecurity 180, 192 B-Lines 53 Bombus hortorum 197 bottom-up 225, 226

boundaries xvi, 7, 8, 17, 71, 102, 115, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 163, 172, 184, 193, 231, 233, 237, 286, 304, 305, 307 boundary crossing 159 Brighton x, xvii, 62, 69 Brisbane 131, 165, 169, 170, 172–174, 177, 296, 298 brownfield 36, 194, 210 Brussels xxiii, 20, 194, 195, 197, 208–210, 296, 298 BugLife 50 built form xv, see also built environment built environment 34, 37, 44, 166, 174, 266, 283 bullshit jobs 68, 71, 72 bumblebee 197; bumblebees 285 bushfood 19, 165; bushfoods 165, 167, 169, 170, 173, 177, 296 bush tucker 172, 173 California 73, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 California grizzly 73, 75, 81, 82, 83 Californios 83 capitalism 10, 16, 28, 29, 37, 76, 86, 226, 248, 252, 253, 261, 262; capitalist 11, 109, 226, 231, 255, 311 care viii, xvi, xx, 5, 11, 12, 14, 18, 19– 22, 26, 28, 29, 34, 49, 72, 98, 102, 111, 115, 125, 127, 130, 140, 143, 148, 149, 150, 153, 155, 158–163, 168, 174, 178–180, 182, 184, 185, 187–193, 200, 201, 206, 207, 213, 224, 225, 231, 242, 258, 260, 266, 269, 272, 295–298, 303–308, 312, 314; caring viii, xvii, 11, 26, 58, 71, 148, 150, 153, 160, 167, 179, 180, 183, 184, 189, 190, 202, 258, 263, 297, 295, 305, 307, 312 cartography 103, 131, 200, 300, 304 Causey, Andrew 279, 291 change xiv, xvi, xviii, xx, 2, 9, 15, 17, 18, 24, 25, 29, 30, 37, 57, 58, 71, 90, 92, 97, 104, 106, 107, 116, 117, 119, 126, 136, 146, 214, 223, 233, 238, 240, 260, 267, 273, 282, 291, 300, 303, 308, 310, 312

Index Child, Lottie 93, 102 Cimex lectularius 73, 77, 77 circular economy 15, 24, 29, 234, 235 circularity 19, 139, 140, 142 citizen collective 194, 202; citizen collectives 20, 194, 195, 198, 199–202, 206, 207, 296 citizen science xxv, 17, 29, 50, 51, 52, 58, 59–61, 148, 210, 299, 300, 306, 312 City Beautiful movement 7 civilization 10, 67, 85 class 54, 74, 82, 90, 120, 221, 227, 238, 246, 286, 297, 310 climate 9, 15, 17, 18, 25, 27–30, 58, 107, 114, 119, 128, 136, 149, 270, 303, 310, 312, 313 climate change 9, 15, 17, 18, 25, 29, 58, 107, 119, 136, 303, 310, 312 co-becoming 11, 24; see also becoming; ‘becoming with’ co-benefits 15, 16, 28, 48, 58, 295, 297 co-colonizer 84, 85, 296 co-creation xvii, 14, 15 co-design xvii, 15, 278 coexist xvi, xx, 2, 284, 294, 303, 304; coexistence xvii, 18, 23, 50, 58, 208, 305; coexistences x, 39, 42, 44 cohabitation xv, 22, 159, 209, 273, 303, 307; see also convivial cohabitation collaborative autoethnography 306, 312; see also autoethnography; collective autoethnographic colonialism xxi, 28, 83, 87, 131, 165, 167, 178, 181, 182, 253, 314; see also settler-colonialism colonialization 6; see also decolonizing, decolonialization colonists 79, 84, 164, 79, 84, 164 commodification 167 common good 231–233, 295 commoning xxiii, 21, 226, 227, 234, 235, 236, 307; see also un-commoning commons viii, 21, 28, 71, 194, 209, 224–229, 232–236, 297, 307, 312 community x, xiii, xxii–xxiv, 2, 6, 10, 18, 19, 49, 53, 55, 58, 73, 76, 80–82, 84, 90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 103, 110,

317

128, 139–141, 144–146, 148, 149, 160, 167–170, 172, 173, 188, 190, 192, 200, 214, 217, 220, 222, 223, 225, 227, 230, 231–235, 240, 250, 252–255, 257–259, 263, 295, 297, 299, 308, 309, 312, 314 community garden 53, 169, 227, 295, 297; community gardens 19, 55, 167, 190, 299, 308 companion 5, 27, 29, 152, 159, 163; companionship 161 complex ecologies xv compost viii, 19, 136, 138, 145–149, 17l, 294; composting 19, 136, 138, 145–149 conflict xvii, 4, 5, 21, 22, 26, 57, 60, 77, 156, 159, 160, 239, 280, 285, 288, 291, 299; conflicts xxiii, 10, 16, 20, 22, 54, 159, 277, 278, 279, 286, 288–292, 299 connect 23, 39, 58, 125, 126, 127, 132, 134, 140, 144, 172, 173, 264, 281, 283, 304, 307; see also (re)connect connection xiii, xviii, 6, 14, 18, 19, 51, 88, 89, 92, 97, 100, 101, 102, 104, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 120, 125, 126, 127, 139, 144, 145, 165, 166, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 188, 218, 238, 255, 307, 308, 312; connection to nature xviii, 116; see also nature connection, disconnect, disconnection, (re)connect conservation viii, xi, xxii, xxv, 14, 15, 21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 47, 48, 52, 56, 57, 59, 61, 72, 120, 130, 182, 185, 186, 187, 193, 209, 210, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 265, 275, 297, 302, 305 constellation of actors 207; constellation of urban actors 196–197, 199, 206, 208 consumption 1, 17, 24, 78, 136, 137, 142, 144, 222, 239, 291, 297 contamination 161 contestation 34, 159, 236, 270, 271 convivial xiv, xv, 20, 21, 25, 44, 147, 238, 248, 249, 307, 311; conviviality xxi, 26, 90, 100, 104, 302, 313 convivial cohabitation 307; convivial relationship xv

318 co-option xvii, 228, 303 coproduction 44, 116, 234, 238 cosmopolitics 71, 307 council xxiii, xxiv, 37, 70, 77, 90, 103, 111, 114, 115, 133, 139, 180, 182, 190, 228, 279, 281, 283 Country xxii, 11, 19, 24, 26, 109, 125, 126, 128, 165, 167–170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 307; Caring for Country 167, 307 creative practice 39, 102, 103, 126, 127, 132, 167, 168, 175 crisis 10, 136, 224, 236, 251, 252, 256; see also environmental crisis critical analysis 164, 183 critical animal studies 7 critical cartography 103, 200; see also cartography critical geography 24, 236 critical urban political ecology xx critical urban studies 301 cross-disciplinary xx cultural connections 114, 168 cultural food growing 168, 169 cultural practice 37, 164, 216, 219 cultural heritage 110, 115, 282, 283, 285 cultural survival 239, 247, 249 customary 165, 168, 170, 172, 175, 214, 218, 219 cyborg urbanization 8, 26, 29, 307 COVID-19 viii, xviii, xix, xx, 20, 46, 62, 92, 108, 139, 149, 213, 232 Dadirri 126, 127, 133, 135, 307, 314; see also deep listening daily practice 179; daily practices 216 dark vii, xix, 33–35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 78, 87, 178, 197, 264 decolonialization 8, 301 decolonizing 25, 105, 117, 118, 121, 261, 263, 304, 305, 307, 312 degradation 138 deep listening 126, 132, 133, 135, 307; listening deeply 19; see also Dadirri democracy viii, 136, 146, 147, 226, 229, 236 deregulation 239, 248, 249

Index desert 238 design xv, xix, xxi, 2, 3, 13, 14, 16–18, 20, 21, 24–26, 28–30, 33, 34, 39, 44, 45, 54, 55, 89, 132, 134, 194–196, 199, 201, 202, 205–210, 225, 228, 232, 261, 278, 279, 283, 288, 290, 291, 296, 297, 299–302, 305; see also more-than-human design, participatory design, urban design design experiments 196 design interventions 55, 207 design manifesto 194, 206, 207, 296 design practice 196, 208; design practices 44 desire lines 128 deregulation 239, 248, 249 devil 69 diaspora 165, 191, 216, 217 disaster 21, 48, 86, 121, 214, 215, 216, 217, 222, 297 disaster risk 222 discipline 5, 24, 50, 222, 302; disciplines xvi, xix, 2, 5, 6, 13, 14, 22, 54, 57, 126, 165, 168, 290, 301 disconnect 49, 58; disconnection xiii, 100, 139, 144, 145; see also connect, connection discourse xx, 2, 7, 14, 15, 16, 57, 80, 103, 120, 179, 180, 187, 188, 191, 225, 228, 229, 230, 232, 245, 246, 252, 257, 262, 270, 286, 295, 309 discourse analysis 225, 252, 262 disgust 48, 96, 145, 149 dispossessed 74, 80 distancing 152, 154, 156, 159 drawing ix, xi, xiii, 19, 22, 53, 65, 71, 114, 200, 202, 204, 226, 247, 270, 277, 278, 279, 286–288, 290, 291; see also sketching dwelling 8, 27, 46, 291, 307, 313 East End Jam vii, 18, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95–97, 99, 101, 297 ecological killjoys 265, 272, 307 ecology xv, xvii, xx, xxi, 2, 3, 9, 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28–30, 45, 60, 86, 87, 104, 105, 110, 114, 120, 148, 149, 160, 177, 195, 196, 209, 222, 226, 236, 238, 249, 250, 252–254, 260, 262, 274, 301, 304, 312–314

Index ecosystem xii, xvii, 2, 3, 13, 15, 25, 26, 28, 91, 114, 142, 144, 161, 223, 234, 237, 238, 242–245, 247, 249, 277, 280, 283, 289 ecosystem services xvii, 234, 280, 289; see also nature-based solutions ecotourism 243, 245 edgelands vii, 17, 62, 71, 295 edible xvi, xvii, 18, 47, 93, 96, 169, 174, 224, 227, 228, 230, 300, 311 edible cities xvii Edible Nature-based Solutions xvi edible neighbourhood 21, 224, 227 education xxv, 60, 76, 87, 90, 91, 103, 114, 119, 120, 139, 145, 146, 149, 177, 178, 187, 243, 255, 292, 299, 313, 314 elimination 75, 82, 87, 178 Eluk Plateau xii, 215, 216, 218–221 embodied 13, 18, 19, 39, 125, 138, 143, 162, 171, 189, 222, 300 embodied learning 13; see also learning embodied practice 138 emotion 28, 134; emotional 2, 9, 14, 25, 26, 29, 52, 53, 99, 116, 255, 270, 312; emotions xix, 9, 10, 26, 53, 56, 273, 306 enclosure 83, 227, 231; enclosures 226 encounter xii, 52, 80, 85, 108, 110, 151, 152, 157, 158, 161, 202, 205, 207, 242, 286, 309; encounters vii, viii, xi, 1, 11, 12, 18, 19, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 44, 48, 60, 77, 80, 135, 136, 142, 150, 152, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162, 202, 274, 299, 301, 304, 308, 309; see also Natureculture endangerment viii, 237, 238, 239, 245, 247, 249 engagement xxiii, 20, 48, 50, 52, 53, 60, 76, 80, 85, 87, 90, 99, 109, 110, 114, 116, 137, 138, 139, 145, 146, 147, 148, 169, 171, 172, 189, 191, 200, 242, 252, 258, 300, 309, 312, 314 entanglements 4, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 38, 39, 50, 137, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156, 159, 161, 162, 180, 209, 253, 266, 273

319

environmental crisis 10 ecological grief 312 environmental grief 308 environmental humanities xxi, 6, 14, 28, 148, 162, 196, 301 Environmental Impact Report 198, 202, 207, 208 environmental justice 16, 24, 26, 105, 120, 193, 234, 261, 311 Environmental Science xx, 28, 149 environmental stewardship 13 equality 10, 13; see also inequality ethic 11, 163; ethical 44, 87, 91, 98, 106, 115, 116, 118, 144, 149, 188, 190, 193, 305; ethics xxiii, 4, 5, 8, 11, 20, 25, 59, 91, 119, 136, 142, 148, 153, 163, 180, 190–193, 312, 314; see also unethical ethnography ii, 3, 5, 12, 27, 28, 60, 92, 103, 104, 120, 148, 152, 162, 192, 246, 249, 299, 308, 313; see also autoethnography, multispecies ethnography European honey bee 48, 53, 56, 59, 60 events xiv, xix, 17, 50, 54, 170, 171, 172, 177, 229, 290, 295, 299 exclusion 9, 180, 188, 189, 236, 254, 261 experience xix, 14, 29, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 47, 52, 80, 98, 100, 104, 114, 115, 116, 118, 125, 127, 132, 157, 168, 184, 188, 218, 235, 247, 249, 253, 257, 272, 278, 279, 284, 299, 300 ; experiences xvi, xix, xxiv, 5, 12, 18, 19, 33, 34, 40, 51, 55, 56, 77, 80, 84, 85, 89, 92, 94, 98, 99, 101, 102, 107, 108, 109, 116, 126, 127, 142, 165, 168, 171, 193, 226, 260, 270, 281, 284, 300, 306, 311, 312 expert knowledge xvi; expert knowledges 20, 195, 196 extinction 14, 29, 30, 47, 104; extinctions 9, 47, 59, 303 extractivism 9 fable 64, 153, 163, 226 faeces 78 farming 139, 163; farmer 140; see also urban gardening

320

Index

fear xix, 48–49, 59, 61, 68, 86, 96, 101, 153, 250 Federici, Silvia, 227 feeling 9, 51, 57, 66, 100, 103, 111, 143, 189, 227, 258, 300; feelings 56, 98–99, 101, 116, 145, 188, 229, 258, 272, 306 feminist killjoy 272, 307 fertility 136, 138, 140, 142–46 festival xvi, xix, xxi, 50, 59, 90, 228, 243, 248; festivals 17, 50, 60, 299 First Nation 125, 134; First Nations 109–110, 114, 132, 165, 169, 175, 296 flagship species 56, 61 fog 21, 237, 238, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 294 folklore 35 food growing 144, 164, 166–169, 171 food production xxii, 111, 115, 136, 143–144 food system 143; food systems 144, 165, 167, 169, 174, 175 fox 41, 150–151, 153–163, 297; foxes xxii, 19, 35, 71, 150, 152, 154–162, 294–297, 309 frame xix, 8, 11, 115, 201, 226, 254–255, 304; frames xv, xvi, 15, 18, 22, 105, 116, 182, 202, 283, 296–298, 303 future xix, 9, 27–28, 40, 55, 58, 86, 99, 119, 142, 146, 166, 171, 174, 187, 189, 191, 202, 233, 256–257, 259, 273, 278–279, 290, 293, 301–303, 305, 310, 313; futures xxi, 2, 25, 45, 149, 209, 254, 259, 262, 268, 289, 297 Gamilaroi 165, 168, 170, 173, 175 garden 36, 45, 53, 93, 130, 138, 140, 143, 150, 152–153, 155–156, 161–162, 169–171, 210, 224, 227–230, 235, 257, 295, 297; Gardens 7–8, 10, 19, 35–36, 55, 69, 119, 124, 144, 152–153, 167, 190, 202, 216–218, 220–221, 223, 236, 269, 297, 299, 308 gardening xviii, xx, 19–21, 92, 99, 147, 157, 159, 162, 213–219, 221–222, 224–225, 227, 233, 236, 296

Garden City 210, 224, 227–228, 230, 235 gender 38, 46, 161, 170 generative 19, 138, 142, 147, 223, 291 genocide 75, 87 gentrification 9–10, 16, 90, 104, 254, 256, 261–262, 277, 291, 308, 312, 314 geography xx, 2–3, 5–7, 14, 24–25, 28, 30, 45, 147, 152, 226, 236, 249, 253, 257, 259, 260–261, 274, 301; geographies xxi, 6–9, 22, 25–26, 28, 30, 59, 162, 192, 251–253, 255, 259, 261, 292, 304–305, 312 Girona xxiii, 21, 23, 224, 227–228, 233, 234–235, 295, 298 governance xvii, 2, 29, 105, 111, 114, 119–120, 192–193, 225, 228–229, 250, 255, 267, 274–275, 291, 295, 299, 304, 311 governing xvii, 18, 22, 119, 236, 267 governmentality xvii grassroot movements 234 green 2, 9, 14–15, 16, 24–25, 27, 30, 33, 34–36, 38, 46, 55, 67, 88–89, 95, 104, 119– 121, 145, 179, 181, 190–194, 206, 209–210, 223–224, 227–228, 230, 235–236, 242–243, 248, 251–256, 258–263, 275, 277, 279, 282, 285–286, 298, 308, 309, 312 green amenities 260 green corridor 34; green corridors 285–286 green gentrification 9, 16, 254, 256, 261–262, 308, 312 green reparations 251, 253–254, 256, 260 grief 9, 23, 26, 131, 141, 303, 304, 308, 312 grounded approach 106, 114, 299; grounded approaches 106, 116 Hackney 90–91, 103, 104 Hals, Harald 285, 292 Haraway, Donna xix, xxi, 4–5, 11, 26, 150, 152–153, 159–160, 162, 306, 309, 313 Hardin, Garret 226

Index Harvest Stomp Community Festival 89–90 haunted 21, 252–254, 257, 260, 276, 308; haunting 251, 258–260 haunted natures 257, 260, 308 health xx, 13, 33, 38, 46, 52, 72, 89, 91, 99, 105, 127, 139–140, 155, 167, 171, 176, 178, 192, 251–252, 255–256, 259, 262, 267, 273, 277, 281, 301, 303, 312; healthy xvii, xxi, 137, 161, 181, 266 healthy urban environments xvii, xxi hierarchy of concerns 284, 285, 290 hiking 89, 285 history xx, 2, 8, 17, 19, 20, 24, 33, 37, 45, 72, 75, 86, 131, 134–135, 166, 180, 187, 189, 191–193, 219, 236, 238, 239, 241, 246–247, 249, 251, 253, 256, 258–259, 261, 263, 268, 281, 286, 298 historical perspective 282–283, 290 honey bee 48–50, 52–53, 56, 59–60, 299; see also European honey bee Honey Bee Watch 50, 52, 56 hoó-nahr 82 hope 10, 26, 60, 256, 272, 303–304 housing 21, 65, 80, 92, 194, 206, 210, 220, 224, 227, 239–240, 248–249, 251, 254, 259, 262 household 41; households 138, 143, 145–146, 149 hubs 139, 144–147 human/nonhuman relationships xv, 17; human/nonhuman learnings 14; human/nonhuman worlds 12; human/nonhuman entanglements 4, 16 human-centric 2, 12, 17, 299; humancentred 16, 34, 134, 147; humancentredness 13 human-nature relationships 29, 196 hybrid 3, 29, 30; hybrids 14; hybridity 5 identity 2, 4, 19, 26, 30, 37–38, 53, 96, 103, 125, 127, 131, 159, 166, 177, 181–182, 185, 190–193, 218, 233, 238, 261, 283, 294, 300, 304, 308, 312

321

imagination xxii, 3, 16, 40, 45, 47, 86, 153, 230 imagining xvii, 9, 44, 121, 310 imaginary 10, 21, 26, 152, 189, 191, 224, 245, 256, 261, 302, 304, 313 immersive experience 56, 116; also see experience immigration 74, 87, 180, 187–189, 192, 262 implementation 3, 235, 289 Indigenous 6, 10–11, 16, 19–20, 29, 75, 79, 81, 83, 106, 118, 121, 130, 132, 135, 165–166, 167–168, 171–175, 176n2, 176–178, 213, 234, 294–295, 299, 301–302, 307 Indigenous knowledge 133; Indigenous knowledges 29 Indigenous art 173, 175, 176 Indigenous epistemologies 16 industrialization 35–37, 68 inequality 16, 71, 238, 247–248, 252, 254, 256–257, 261–262; see also equality inequalities 16, 188, 222, 253 informal urbanization 21, 237–241, 245–246, 249 informality xxi, 28, 236, 246, 248 infrastructure xiv, 15, 115, 174, 206–207, 240, 261, 265, 279–280, 282–283, 287–290, 297, 308; infrastructures 182, 206, 209, 227, 249–250, 279 injustice 9, 20–21, 252, 255, 259–260, 262, 297, 308; injustices 16, 251–253, 259, 272, 295, 297; see also justice insect 17, 47–48, 50, 53, 59–61, 87, 95; insects 39, 41, 47–51, 54– 56, 58–61, 77, 79, 85–86, 131, 285, 295, 303, 311 interdependence 1, 11, 137, 142; interdependencies 13, 19, 138, 143, 161; interdependency 184 interdisciplinarity 290, 301 interspecies 1, 13, 14, 19, 27, 29, 150, 153, 162, 163, 266; interspecies encounters 19 intervention 3, 22, 54, 101, 138, 202, 262, 266; interventions 15, 55, 89,

322 ref 104, 204, 207, 256, 299, 301, 308–309 interview 50, 58, 135, 139, 201, 239, 254, 285, 291; Interviews xxiv, 17, 50, 138–139, 145, 152, 180, 199–201, 203, 225, 233, 252–254, 278–279, 297, 300 invasive 2, 20–21, 87, 172, 183, 185, 187, 244–245, 264 invasive species 185, 187, 244–245 inventories 197 invisible 15, 40, 175, 202; invisibility 33, 47, 57, 167, 170–171 Irk Valley xxii, 33–35, 37–44, 294 Iron Age 67 institution 228; institutions 5, 105– 106, 108–109, 118, 226, 236 justice 8, 13, 16, 24, 26, 105–107, 115, 117, 120, 193, 236, 250, 252–254, 258, 260–262, 311; recognition justice 106. See also injustice kinship xix, 11, 153, 163, 165, 167, 169, 173–174, 216–218, 307, 310; kinships 152, 175 knowledge products 195; knowledge production 18, 97, 101, 108, 114, 297 Korean 77 Koreatown 76–77, 79, 80, 81 Kroeber, Alfred 82, 86 labour 34, 66, 71, 73, 153, 175, 232, 254, 261, 269, 310 land xxii, 36, 41, 55, 54, 65, 67–68, 71–72, 75, 83, 91, 110–111, 115, 126–128, 130–134, 140, 143, 164, 166–167, 169, 170, 172, 174–175, 177, 181–182, 187, 209, 214–215, 217–218, 220, 222, 233, 238–241, 243, 247, 255, 256, 260, 263, 295–296, 308, 311 land trafficking 240 landscape xvi, 34–36, 38–40, 46, 66–67, 72, 74, 84, 89, 94, 102, 111, 135, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171, 175, 176, 181, 205–206, 208, 215, 218, 222, 260, 262, 266, 268, 273, 300 landscape architecture 13, 196, 279

Index learning xvii, 13, 19, 47, 52, 115, 121, 126, 131, 142, 171, 177, 202, 206, 233, 297; see also embodied learning leisure 68–69, 70, 74, 89 Lefebvre, Henri 73–74, 76, 86–87, 304, 310, 313 Lévi-Strauss, Henri 3, 27 Lima 21, 237–239, 241–250, 297–298 listen 54, 108, 111, 126, 132, 300 living with xvii, 5, 23, 154, 299, 303 local xvi, 10, 16, 18, 21, 36, 40, 49, 50–55, 58, 66, 82, 85, 89, 92–93, 101, 111, 114–116, 119, 126–128, 130, 134–135, 139, 144–146, 154, 161, 170, 176, 179–185, 187–189, 202, 206–208, 215, 222, 228–229, 232–233, 239–240, 242, 245, 247–248, 250, 265, 270, 275, 297, 306–307 local food movement 48 London 19, 38, 45, 50, 71, 79, 89, 93, 102–104, 150, 154, 162, 294, 296, 298, 314 London Fields 93 London Legacy Development Corporation 89; see also abbreviations Los Angeles 18, 73–86, 261, 294, 298 loss xix, 9, 16, 18, 23, 29, 30, 45, 48, 52, 104, 130–132, 169, 295, 303, 308, 310, 312 make visible xvii, xviii, 2, 5, 17, 18, 47–48, 53, 56–58, 71, 106, 294; made visible 9, 17–18, 33, 50, 90, 293 management 8, 33, 36, 60, 104, 114–115, 121, 137, 143, 145, 147, 166–167, 174, 178, 180, 190, 215, 228–229, 233, 234, 254, 267, 275, 279, 280, 282–286, 289, 295, 307 mana 182, 308 Manchester xxiv, 34–38, 44–46, 249, 263, 298, 314 mapping 1, 3, 12, 26, 50, 53, 60, 131, 170–171, 174, 302, 313; maps xviii, 37, 53, 59, 83, 100, 251, 252, 300 marginalized xix, 5, 7, 10, 14, 44, 47, 115, 214, 301; marginalization 9, 238, 240, 248, 260

Index master plan 194, 197, 292; master plans 266 materiality 1, 4, 57, 136–139, 142, 146, 253, 261 Meanjin 165 medicine 50, 71, 89, 155, 167, 170, 173, 175; medicines 169, 170 Menja’t Sant Narcis xxiii, 21, 224, 233 metabolic rift 27, 137, 142, 149, 308, 313 methodology 22, 34, 38–39, 44, 103, 107, 165, 207, 260; methodologies xviii, 6, 46, 103, 106, 109, 117, 121, 162, 207 microbes xviii, 1, 143, 161, 303 migration 20, 34, 46, 74, 76, 165, 175, 180, 191, 214, 223, 239, 241 mobility 218, 240, 279, 282 Mongolia 76, 79, 82, 86; Mongolian 18, 73, 75–76, 80–82, 84–85; Mongolians 73, 76, 80, 82, 84–85, 296 more-than-human xiv, xv, xx, xxi, xxii, 1–6, 8, 9, 11–17, 19–20, 22, 24–27, 29, 30, 33, 38, 41, 44–46, 50, 52–60, 121, 127, 136–138, 141, 147–148, 153–154, 160–164, 169, 171, 175, 179, 194, 196–197, 199, 202, 207–210, 264–266, 271–276, 278, 292–294, 296, 299–306, 308, 310–311 more-than-human anthropology 4 more-than-human approach 273, 308; more-than-human approaches 12, 44, 196, 199, 207, 208 more-than-human design 13, 26, 54 more-than-human entanglements 11, 19, 50, 161, 274 more-than-human participation 25, 199 more-than-human relationships/ relations 2, 147 more-than-human understandings 2, 20 motorway 35, 65; motorways 65–66 multiplicity 160, 197 multisensory 17, 34, 39–40, 56, 88–89, 92, 95, 98–99, 101, 103, 300, 313 multispecies xv, xvi, 3, 8, 12–14, 17– 18, 20, 22, 27–29, 33, 34, 39, 40, 44,

323

46, 58, 86, 87, 140, 147, 150–153, 159, 162, 190, 207, 208–210, 238, 247–249, 265–266, 271–273, 278, 289–290, 299, 305, 208, 313 multispecies care 207 multispecies city 33–34, 39, 44, 58, 162, 247, 249 multispecies ethnography 3, 12, 27–28, 86, 308, 313 multispecies narrative 208 multispecies relations xvi, 159 municipality 225, 227–230, 232, 234–235, 265, 267–270, 273, 280, 288, 297 mutuality 5, 159 narrative 14, 18, 114–117, 131, 194, 201, 206–208, 253, 257, 294; narratives xiv, xx, 10, 12, 19, 23–24, 39, 57, 106–109, 114, 116–118, 121, 176, 189, 200, 223, 252–253, 257, 259, 294, 300–301, 303, 312 narrative section xi, 202–203, 207 National Park City 89 native viii, 53, 75, 82, 84–86, 87, 112, 166, 167, 197, 244, 262, 295, 297, 308, 310, 312 native bee 49, 60 native nature viii, 179–180, 182, 185, 187, 189, 191, 308 natural disaster 215 nature activist 264–267, 270 Natureculture 14, 26–27, 150, 152–153, 161, 309 nature association 194, 196–197, 296 nature connection 88–89, 92, 98–102, 106, 114, 119, 312 nature-based 2, 16, 21, 30, 119, 259 Nature-based Solutions xvi, xvii, xix, 14, 25–29, 46, 107, 119, 234, 235, 277, 289, 292, 302, 304, 309, 312; see also NbS; see also ecosystem services nature walks, 17, 50, 54–56, 59, 197, see also walking, walks negotiations 13, 22, 180, 190, 191, 227, 273 neighbourhood xii, xxiiv, 9, 18, 21, 49, 76–77, 91, 94, 97, 100–101, 111, 152, 154, 180, 182, 185, 209,

324

Index

224, 227, 229–230, 232–233, 237, 241, 247, 251–252, 254–255, 257, 258–260, 295–296, 300, 309 neoliberal xvii, 11, 14, 16, 21, 109– 110, 121, 180, 190, 192–193, 225, 228, 248, 250; discourse; neoliberal utopia 225; neoliberal utopias 21; neoliberalism 8, 102, 107, 120, 250 New Zealand xviii, xxii, 19, 20, 134, 135, 138, 143, 146, 148, 179, 180, 181, 183–187, 189, 190–193, 296, 298, 314 Ni Vanuatu 20, 214, 216, 218, 220, 221, 296 nightwalking 17, 37, 39, 45, 309 NIMBY-ism 49–50, 58–59, 312 nocturnal vii content, xxii, 17, 33–35, 37–39, 41, 44–46, 78, 309 nonhuman xv, xvii, xviii, xix, 1–7, 9, 11–18, 20, 22–23, 27, 35, 39, 48, 50, 53–55, 58, 59, 70, 73, 75, 76, 80–81, 85, 101, 128, 137, 141, 143, 146, 159, 174, 185, 195–196, 198, 200–201, 208–209, 237, 293–301, 303–304, 307; nonhumans 1, 3, 5, 13, 14, 17, 28, 44–45, 49, 58, 71, 75, 84, 137, 143, 153, 194, 196, 201, 261, 293, 295, 300, 302, 306–308, 310–311 nonhuman agency 4, 201 nonhuman beings 3, 18, 73, 75–76, 80, 81, 85, 200 nonhuman relationship xv normative behaviour 88, 92 novel ecosystem 2; see also ecosystem ontology 166; ontologies xvii, 11, 16, 57, 109, 115, 118, 137, 140, 168–169, 250, 311 Oslo 277–279, 282–285, 288, 291– 292, 296–298, 311, 314 Oso 82, 83 Ostrom, Elinor 226, 236 other-than-human 27, 265, 266, 267, 273, 289, 306; other-than-humans 1 Pango, xii, 219, 220, 221, 223 participatory planning 194 participatory research 14, 24, 200, 209, 225, 233

peri-urban 214, 215, 218 Peru 240, 249; Peruvian 237, 239, 242, 246, 250 pest 75, 78, 81, 83, 84, 294; pests 47, 48, 51, 75, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 85, 86, 179, 185, 296; pesticide 48 Pestival 50, 51, 53, 56, 59, 60 philosophy xx, 14, 28, 29, 61, 87, 104, 177, 299, 314 photography 37, 72, 152, 163, 309 place viii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, 2, 6, 13, 18, 19, 24 , 30, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 44, 46 , 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 60 , 64, 65, 68, 69, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 102, 103 , 104 , 106, 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 142, 143, 145, 147, 152, 158, 163 , 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176 , 178, 179, 185, 187, 189, 190, 200, 201, 209, 217, 218, 220, 224, 225, 229, 235, 238, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 261, 264, 265, 266, 269, 284, 285, 290, 294, 295, 296, 300, 301, 303, 304, 310, 314; places vii, 6, 1, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 21, 28 , 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 44, 45, 55, 56, 59, 66, 67, 70, 71, 75, 76, 80, 90, 101, 109, 110, 115, 120 126, 140, 146, 163 , 177, 178 , 181, 183, 200, 202, 205, 207, 217, 219, 222, 224, 242, 250, 253, 297, 298, 300, 307, 309, 310; place-based 171, 296; placeless 217 place guarding 90, 104, 309, 314 places of encounter xii, 202 place-making xvii, 14, 60, 90, 223, 314 planning xx, xxi, 10, 13, 14, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 44, 59, 72, 87, 102, 103, 110, 119, 120, 121, 166, 178, 192, 194, 195, 196, 199, 201, 207, 208, 208, 209, 215, 222, 223 , 227, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 261, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 270, 271, 274, 279, 280, 290, 296, 301, 312, 313, 314 plant xviii, 35, 94, 99, 103, 111, 156, 172, 173, 174, 185, 197, 198, 274,

Index 275, 284, 294, 313; plants 1, 4, 28, 56, 62, 93, 99, 110, 114, 130, 138, 141, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 181, 183, 184, 185, 189, 191, 192, 229, 230, 231, 232, 263, 269, 296, 300, 303, 311; native plants 170, 172, 174, 181, 183, 192 play 1, 19, 26, 74, 76, 126, 150, 152, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 272, 294, 297, 304, 307, 309; plays xix, 75, 155, 156, 158, 185, 259 playground viii, 93, 112, 151, 162 policing 160, 253, 256, 260, 261, 291 politics viii, ix , xv, xvi, xviii, xx xxi, 5, 6, 7, 10, 20, 22, 23, 26 , 28, 29, 30, 37, 60 61, 71, 85, 86 , 87, 90, 102, 103, 111, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 148, 148, 149, 153, 177, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 209, 227, 234, 238, 239, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 265, 268, 271, 272, 273, 275, 277, 278, 288, 290, 291, 293, 297, 298, 301, 307, 313, 314 policy xx, 7, 14, 15, 24, 26, 28, 34, 44, 87, 102, 104, 106, 111, 114, 119, 120, 147, 149, 166, 167, 206, 215, 222, 251, 252, 261, 262, 267, 275, 291, 292, 296, 299, 314 political ecology xvii, xx, 2, 3, 9, 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 120, 222, 226, 236, 238, 249, 250, 253, 254, 260, 262, 274, 301, 304, 313 pollination 53 pollinator 50, 52, 53, 58, 62, 140 Pollinator Observatory project 50, 52 pollution 117, 138, 181, 183, 191, 254, 277, 281, 288 Port Vila xii, 20, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 296, 298 positionality 18, 91, 108, 109, 114, 117, 294 possum skin cloaks 172 posthuman xxi, 2, 28, 102, 15; posthumanism xv, 26, 149; posthumanist 4, 13, 305 practice vi, ix, xvii, xx, 1, 3, 5, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 28, 37, 39, 44, 45, 56, 59, 60 , 88, 90, 91,

325

92, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 117, 118, 126, 127, 131, 132, 136, 137, 138, 142, 144, 147, 161, 164, 165, 168, 169, 172, 175, 179, 180, 180, 185, 188, 189, 190, 190, 196, 208, 209 , 216, 219, 225, 228, 229, 232, 234, 235, 238, 242, 251, 256, 261 , 265, 268, 270, 273, 277, 278, 283, 286, 289, 290, 291, 292 , 293, 300, 301, 302, 310, 311, 314 ; Practices xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xx, 4, 6, 10, 11, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 29, 34, 44, 45, 47, 56, 57, 59, 75, 82, 88, 89, 93, 98, 101, 103 , 106, 109, 117, 118, 135, 139, 141, 143, 147, 149, 153, 154, 156, 159, 160, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 172, 174, 175, 180, 184, 185, 187, 188, 191, 192, 195, 196, 200, 202, 213, 214, 216, 218, 226, 233, 236, 247, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 259, 260, 261, 266, 269, 272, 278, 279, 283, 289, 290, 291, 292, 296, 297, 302, 304, 305, 307, 308, 312 praxis 34, 37, 38, 39, 44, 103, 162, 168, 176, 178, 223, 309 pre-trauma 9, 310 proximities 17, 99; proximity 1, 159, 303 public xx, 16, 18, 20, 21, 26, 36, 37, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 60, 80, 81, 88, 92, 94, 98, 102, 104, 119, 121, 148 , 152, 153, 166, 167, 171, 172, 192 , 194, 195, 210, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 240, 245, 253, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262 , 263, 264, 265, 270, 272, 279, 286, 296, 301, 303, 306, 311, 312 , 313 purity 183, 191, 254 race x, 8, 21, 38, 70, 238, 239, 245, 246, 250, 251, 253, 254, 257, 259, 261, 262, 263, 304, 310 racism 187, 193, 255, 257, 258, 262 rebirth 139, 140, 141 reciprocal 13, 82, 147, 298 reciprocity 139, 141, 142 (re)connect xviii, 2, 14, 18; (re) connecting viii, xvii, xxiv, 18, 22, 88;

326 (re)connections 136, 139; see also connect 23, 39, 52, 58, 125, 126, 127, 132, 134, 140, 144, 172, 173, 264, 278, 281, 283, 289, 304, 307 redlining 21, 251, 252, 254, 256, 259, 260, 262, 310 regeneration 35, 40, 44, 136; regenerations 120 regulation 15, 25, 80; 215; regulations 179, 216, 222; see also deregulation relational viii, xiv, xviii, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 18, 19, 22, 54, 56, 57, 102, 106, 114, 116, 137, 138, 139, 152, 160, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 190, 201, 266, 267, 268, 278, 298, 300, 302, 306, 307, 311 relationality 11, 19, 29, 59, 165, 168, 169, 294, 299, 300, 310; relationalities 1, 307, 309; relational practice(s) 4, 19, 165, 168, 169, 172; see also more-than-human relations, non/human relations re-naturalizing cities 226 repair 11, 136, 141, 144, 153, 183, 184, 253, 254, 257, 287, 306 reparation viii, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 261, 262, 308; reparations viii; 251, 262, 308; see also green reparations representations 21, 33, 105, 106, 107, 114, 117, 118, 119, 160, 177, 183, 248, 252, 259, 279, 289, 290 research vii, xi, xiii, xiv, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 7, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25 , 26 , 27 , 37, 38, 45, 46 , 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60 , 71, 76, 85, 86, 87 , 89, 91, 92, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103 , 104 , 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 135, 146, 147, 148, 152, 153, 157, 162, 165, 169, 172, 175, 177, 178, 180, 190, 191 , 195, 196, 199, 200, 207, 208, 209 , 215, 222, 223 , 225, 226, 233, 234, 235, 236 , 238, 248, 249, 254, 259, 261, 262 , 263, 265, 277, 281, 287, 290, 291, 292 , 293, 300, 301, 302, 304, 306, 310, 312 , 313, 314

Index resilient 2, 14, 146, 303; resilience 119, 128, 141, 222, 223, 236, 304, 309 resistance xx, 2, 8, 9, 23, 28, 59, 90, 193, 252, 304 resources xiv, xvii, 1, 18, 28, 46, 47, 49, 52, 58, 60, 64, 65, 67, 70, 71, 90, 101, 149, 167, 191, 196, 227, 287, 297 right to the city 17, 37, 44, 73, 74, 75, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87, 197, 210, 235, 296, 298, 299, 301, 303, 304, 305, 310, 312, 313 risk xix, 11, 47, 60, 145, 156, 160, 179, 215, 222, 247, 248, 251, 284 safety vii, xix, 17, 62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 111, 117, 183, 230, 231, 284, 289, 295 scale xvi, xix, 15, 25, 51, 53, 89, 103, 119, 139, 142, 143, 144, 146, 161, 167, 175, 183, 198, 200, 206, 207, 208, 267, 290, 296, 306, 307, 309 Scalpland xi, 131, 132, 134, 135 science xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 1, 4, 6, 13, 15, 17, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 46, 50, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 83, 84, 115, 120, 125, 148, 148, 149, 163, 192, 193, 209, 201, 234, 263, 271, 291, 299, 300, 301, 305, 306, 312, 313 science and technology studies 6, 13, 148, 301; see also STS 14, 301, 302 sense xvi, xviii, 9, 10, 13. 16, 17, 34, 39, 53, 54, 58, 59, 68, 80, 82, 84, 96, 107, 116, 118, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134, 142, 155, 166, 171, 216, 227, 232, 233, 247, 257, 268, 269, 278, 295, 299, 303, 310, senses xx, 9, 10, 13, 14, 18, 23, 25 59, 60, 78, 92, 99, 301, 304; sensing xi, xvii, 4, 9, 12, 33, 44, 113, 284 sensorial xix, 12, 52; sensory xiii, xvi, 54, 55, 60, 42, 99, 104, 114, 171, 281, 283, 284, 290, 297; see also multisensory sensory engagement 99 settlements 59, 65, 214, 215, 216, 219, 221, 239, 240, 247 settler 75, 81, 84, 85, 118, 121, 132, 220, 302; settlers 75, 81, 83, 85

Index settler city 8, 307 settler-colonial 8, 18, 73, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 105, 109, 165, 167, 176, 178, 253, 262, 263, 296, 310, 314; see also colonialism situated knowledge 115; situated knowledges 20, 153, 195, 197, 199 sketching 278, 290; see also drawing ix, xi, xiii, xxiv, 19, 22, 53, 65, 71, 108, 114, 200, 202, 204, 205, 208, 226, 247, 270, 277, 278, 279, 286, 287, 288, 290, 291 smart cities 14, 16 smell 7, 54, 92, 99, 111, 116, 170; smells 7, 54, 97 social movements 103, 224, 228 social practice 18, 22, 88, 90, 82, 97, 98, 188, 191, 226, 278, 292, 307, 310 social practice artwork 18, 88, 92, 97, 98; social practice artists 90 social practice theory 278 sociality 3, 29, 60, 276, 295 soil 1, 19, 114, 125, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 148, 149, 156, 159, 161, 198, 207, 237, 265, 270, 280, 294, 299, 306; Soils 136, 137, 110, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 168, 197 somaesthetics 99, 104, 311, 314 solastalgia 9, 26, 310, 313 South Downs National Park 68 space xxi, xxiii, 8, 9, 11, 15, 17, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 36, 37, 38, 46, 55, 58, 59, 60, 65, 71, 72 , 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 102, 104, 106, 117, 139, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 190, 192 , 200, 202, 209, 210, 221, 222, 224, 225, 228, 230, 231, 232, 235, 237, 241, 245, 249, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260, 261, 263, 266, 268, 271, 272, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 287, 288, 291, 292, 295, 300, 302, 310, 311, 313; Spaces viii, xv, xix, 2, 6, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28, 30, 38, 40, 55, 71, 75, 77, 84, 85, 88, 93, 98,

327

101, 110, 111, 115, 119, 120, 136, 138, 139, 143, 159, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 194, 196, 207, 208, 213, 216, 224, 235, 244, 253, 254, 256, 258, 259, 260, 263, 278, 283, 285, 286, 293, 297, 299, 301, 302, 303, 307, 310, 314; see also urban spaces Spain xviii, xx, 21, 23, 59, 223, 224, 234, 235, 295, 304; Spanish 75, 81, 82, 232, 239 species xv, xvi, xix, 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 17, 22, 26, 27, 30, 35, 40, 44, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56, 59, 61, 73, 75, 77, 80, 83, 85, 87, 103, 110, 130, 141, 147, 150, 152, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 170, 171, 173, 174, 184, 182, 183, 184, 190, 195, 197, 198, 200, 202, 206, 208, 209, 210, 238, 243, 245, 246, 266, 267, 269, 281, 293, 294, 295, 296, 300, 303, 308, 309, 311; species shifting 14; native species 188, 244, 308, 312, 313; non-native species 183, 184, 188, 308, 312; invasive species 185, 187, 244; non-invasive species 245 Spiers 98, 101, 104 spokesperson 200 stewardship 13, 202 street trees ix, 22, 89, 111, 261, 263, 267, 274, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 294, 296, 297 streetscape 279, 282, 283, 285 stewardship 13, 202 subjectivity 12, 28, 107, 306; subjectivities 5, 117, 226, 227, 232, 234, 300 subnatures 39, 311 sustainability xix, 21, 24, 27, 28, 29, 57, 90, 104, 119, 120, 136, 149, 178, 223, 228, 235, 251, 252, 255, 259, 263, 291, 311, 312, 314 sustainability fix 263, 314 state 8, 73, 74, 76, 83, 98, 232, 239, 240, 247, 248, 250, 252 stray xvi, xx, 298 struggle 185, 201, 283; struggles 2, 21, 24, 38, 46, 195, 196, 239, 252, 253, 254

328

Index

survival 10, 20, 121, 239, 247, 249, 265, 269 tactics 21, 49, 214, 221, 297, 299, 302, 309 temporal 96, 262; spatio-temporal 16, 268, 270, 272; temporalities 16, 202, 290, 293 theory xvi, xx, 1, 3, 5, 13, 14, 19, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 44, 45, 74, 86, 87, 104, 137, 138, 139, 147, 148, 149, 165, 209, 226, 228, 236, 249, 261, 274, 278, 292, 293, 294, 302, 312, 314 threat 84, 130, 177, 183, 185, 238, 239, 245, 246, 249, 250, 283 throwntogetherness 156, 159 top-down 196, 225, 226, 229 Tongva 75, 82, 83 tourism 20, 60, 181, 192, 213, 222 transdisciplinary xvi, 13, 14, 288; 135 transformation 2, 11, 13, 20, 24, 35, 118, 176, 181, 182, 237, 239, 250; transformative 252 tree-planting 277, 283 trespass 72, 299; tresspassing 17 Turrbal xxiii, 165, 173 UK xvii, xx, xxi, 23, 24, 26, 33, 46, 53, 59, 60, 72, 89, 102, 103, 104, 304, 313; see also United Kingdom xviii, xxiii, 53, 104 Ulaanbaatar 81, 82 umwelt xv, 4, 8, 311 un-commoning 21, 234 unethical 49; see also ethic ethics, ethical United Kingdom xviii, xxiii, 53, 104; see also UK untame xiv, xv; untaming xiv, xv, xvi, xxi, 8, 22, 30, 311, 314 urban activism 198 urban agriculture xvii, 8, 27, 28, 59, 149, 213, 225–227, 236, 297, 313 urban anthropology ii, xix, 4; see also cultural anthropology 250; 314; social anthropology 223, 249, 291 urban commons viii, 21, 224, 225, 226, 234

urban design 17, 20, 21, 45, 196, 199, 209, 278, 290, 291, 296, 297, 301 urban ecosystem 3, 26 urban foraging vii, 18, 88, 89, 90, 97, 99, 101, 103, 104, 178, 311, 312, 314 urban gardening 21, 224, 225, 227, 233, 236 urban greening xvi, xvii, 11, 23, 105, 106, 107, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 222, 225, 253, 254, 259, 275, 277, 292, 297, 308; urban green space 72, 120, 210, 256, 262 urban inequality 238, 247, 254 urban infrastructures 279 urban imaginaries 227, 231 Urban Indigenous 167, 176 urban metabolism 26, 209, 313; urban metabolisms 8 urban nature xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxiv, 2, 13, 14, 17, 20, 21, 22, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 44, 46 , 47, 48, 50, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60 , 89, 90, 98, 101, 107, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 180, 181, 184, 187, 188, 189, 196, 197, 198, 207, 210 , 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 221, 238, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260, 264, 265, 267, 275 , 285, 286, 289, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 304; urban natures i, ii. iii, vii, viii, xvii, xviii, 2, 7, 12, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26 , 31, 33, 44, 47, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 123, 127, 152, 209 , 211, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 224, 238, 244, 246, 247, 248, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 285, 286, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 313 urban nature research xvii, xix urban planning xx, xxi, 14, 20, 28, 44, 102, 103, 119, 166, 178, 195, 196, 199, 201, 207, 208, 215, 256, 260, 263, 271, 274 urban political ecology xx, 2, 3, 22, 26, 30, 222, 238, 249, 250, 262, 301, 304, 313 urban practitioners 278, 286, 291

Index urban space 38, 74, 93, 101, 104, 150, 156, 235, 253, 256, 260, 266, 268, 271, 272, 278, 283, 284, 291; 295, 299; Urban spaces viii, 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 76, 84, 88, 136, 138, 142, 156, 159, 166, 167, 168, 172, 196, 259, 260, 262, 286 urban sprawl 215 urban sustainability xiv, xx, 14, 24, 223, 262, 312 urban trees ix, 21, 22, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 274, 291 urban turn 6 urban wildlife 7, 24, 27 urban wildlife studies 7 urbanism xvii, xx, 34, 75, 190, 196, 208, 209, 210, 223, 250 utilitarian 2, 5, 142 Vanuatu 20, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 296, 297 villages xii, 69, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 221 visceral 51, 52, 99, 131, 139, 294, 311 visible vii, xvii, xviii, 2, 5, 9, 12, 16, 17, 18, 22, 31, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 71, 81, 84, 85, 90, 106, 107, 108, 109, 143, 161, 202, 227, 252, 255, 282, 293, 294, 295, 306, 309; see also invisible 15, 40, 175, 202 visual methodologies xviii visual narrative xi, 200, 201; visual narratives 300 vulnerability viii, 162, 184, 213, 216, 218, 221, 222, 223, 236, 296 walk-along interview xi, 201 walking 19, 37, 38, 39, 45, 46, 49, 54, 55, 57, 60, 62, 65, 66, 67, 89, 92, 93, 97, 99, 102, 103, 111, 112, 126, 132, 133, 134, 135, 170, 171, 244, 300, 307, 313

329

walks xiii, 17, 39, 50, 54, 55, 56, 59, 62, 89, 90, 116, 173, 197, 243, 245, 302; see also nature walks waste x, 36, 43, 103, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 261 ways of knowing xi, xvii, 12, 18, 105, 106, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 169, 177, 197, 302 weeding 20, 110, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 187, 188, 189, 296 wild vii, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, 3, 7, 17, 20, 24, 29, 36, 45, 52, 55, 58, 62, 71, 72, 75, 76, 85, 150, 153, 156, 160, 163, 182, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 292, 295, 296, 298, 299, 300, 305, 313 wild bee 20, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 208; wild bees 28, 196, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 210, 296, 300 wildness 7, 69, 154 work xiv, xvii, xx, xxii, xxiv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 19, 23, 25, 26, 27, 38, 46, 51, 53, 69, 70, 71, 72 , 74, 80, 90, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 110, 114, 117, 118, 127, 131, 132, 134, 137, 141, 143, 150, 153, 156, 159, 160, 162, 171, 179, 185, 187, 192 , 201, 206, 207, 213, 214, 222, 226, 228, 231, 232, 233, 234, 244, 249, 253, 254, 256, 258, 259, 270, 278, 284, 289, 291, 298, 308, 312; workshop xxiv, 90, 94, 100, 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 278, 279, 286, 287, 290, 296 Yuggara 170, 173 Zoom tour 139, 140 3D-modelling 288