Chaired by Kristine Samson
What does it mean to learn to live with time beyond human scales in today’s rapidly expanding cities? What possibilities for exploring temporal ruptures, alignments and dis-synchronicities emerge when we juxtapose “the urban” and “nature”? And how do these “times out of joint” offer ways for re-thinking the very categories “urban”, “nature” and “human”?
More-than-human explorations of urban space-times illuminate complex challenges, but also possibilities for being, becoming and co-existing otherwise in contemporary cities. While emerging scholarship shows that time and temporalities matter in multiple ways for understanding multispecies co-existence, much urban nature scholarship still focusses singleheartedly on spatial tensions and entanglements. Such focus leaves temporalities underexplored, while risking to implicitly reinforce anthropocentric worldviews. As such, urban nature scholarship risks (re)producing perspectives which omit integral parts of more-than-human urban life – an omission that becomes particularly problematic within the new contested, geological era of the Anthropocene (or Capitalocene, Plantationocene, or Chthulucene).
Delving into the realm of the seasonal, cyclical, circadian, and so forth, temporalities of urban life, this panel seeks to explore that which lies far beyond linear and mechanical time in the urban landscape. By broadly addressing how we understand, approach, and make use of times and temporalities of so-called ‘nature’ in urban environments, the panel examines how different temporal articulations shape and affect urban landscapes, and by proxy the more-than-human city. Featuring urban nature scholars and practitioners from various disciplinary backgrounds (the humanities, social sciences, landscape architecture, as well as artistic research and practices), the panel provides numerous perspectives of how to approach our co-existence with urban natures through the lens of more-than-human temporalities.
Johanna Just: Drawing a vital milieu: an approach towards representing more-than-human relations
Understanding how organisms, including humans, relate to soil, water, air, climate, and to each other is crucial for developing more sensitive spatial design and research projects. However, effectively highlighting the significance of these perspectives remains challenging without accurate ways to represent them. This paper introduces a method for drawing a vital milieu, an innovative approach for visualizing more-than-human temporal and spatial relations, that diverges from anthropocentric and flattening drawing modes. The proposed method begins with the life cycle of a non-human protagonist, serving as the foundation for a circular calendar. This calendar depicts an organism’s milieu in a plan surrounded by a series of sections showing the elements the organism inhabits over time. It displays the quality of soil, water, and air as well as climate information to convey complex environmental processes and to show an inhabited, vital environment utilizing a fractal-based visual language developed in Rhino and Grasshopper. The representation method provides information to support design and decision-making processes in architecture, landscape architecture, and related fields, and encourages exchange between designers and experts from the natural sciences. By advocating for a reorientation towards more-than-human temporalities and modes of inhabitation, the approach seeks to inspire more caring and inclusive spatial practices.
Bio: Johanna Just is an architect and doctoral fellow at the Institute for Landscape and Urban Studies at ETH Zürich. In her work, she traces relationships between more-than-humans and the environment in the Upper Rhine Plain and explores new modes of spatial representation. Currently, she is guest editor of the 2024 special issue of the gta papers on Amazônía together with Ciro Miguel and Santiago del Hierro Kennedy and founding editor of DELUS, the journal of the LUS institute, together with Sara Frikech. Johanna studied Architecture at the University of Hanover and IUAV Venice and holds a MArch Architecture degree with distinction and Bartlett Medal from the Bartlett School of Architecture. Johanna has worked in architecture and art practices in the UK and Germany and taught at the Bartlett and Oxford School of Architecture on architecture and landscape architecture programs.
Chero Eliassi: ‘A Culture of Place’ in Swedish Allotments: Gardens as Therapy and Threat in Holma, Malmö
In the modernist Swedish welfare landscapes constructed during the Million Programme, outdoor spaces were designed in a rationalised manner, following governmental research guidelines. While spaces for cultivation did not exist in the original drawings, allotments can now be found in almost all suburbs built during this period, which have also become sites where many migrants to Sweden have settled. Today, the sociocultural and international diversity of plot-holders and their gardening techniques makes these gardens unique. Further, as bell hooks (2009) describes it in ‘Belonging: A Culture of Place’, relocated people – who were once connected with the soil – often seek to reconnect with nature for healing purposes.
Many suburban gardeners understand allotments as spaces for therapeutic experiences, especially because the majority of the plot-holders have, in their previous ‘lives’ abroad, had a connection to gardening and lived on ‘plant time’. Yet these feelings among gardeners have met different municipal responses where the gardens and the plants’ therapeutic role are alternately supported or questioned. This paper studies the approach toward allotments in the diverse welfare landscape in Holma, Malmö, where the municipality of the city aims to use the allotments as educational and interactive spaces, but on the other hand, has threatened demolition by municipal authorities because of a lack of maintenance by plot-holders.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with plot-holders, site analyses, and published materials, I present narratives of these important suburban landscapes and explore the differences and similarities between both cultivation practices and municipal responses to them in Holma and other Swedish allotment gardens in welfare landscapes. Unwrapping layers of cultural values and histories related to gardens as restorative spaces for migrants in different landscapes, I ask: How do cultivation practices and their material manifestations relate to notions of identity, nostalgia, belonging, and municipal control in Sweden?
Keywords: allotment garden, welfare landscapes, belonging, municipal control, Malmö
Chero Eliassi is a landscape architect, researcher, and since 2021, a doctoral student at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). She researches how the outdoor environments of the Million Programme neighbourhoods, built between 1965 and 1974, have – through a social, ecological, political, and spatial perspective – transformed and been used after their construction. In recent times, Eliassi has written about the material object of sand in a playground, and various changes that have shaped the welfare playground since its construction in the late 1960s in Kalmar. Further, Eliassi has written a paper on cultivation and the collective belonging among migrants in Swedish welfare landscapes, as well as the cultural and spatial practice of ‘Newroz’ in a Stockholm suburb in comparison with the practice in a Kurdish-populated city in Northern Kurdistan (Eastern Turkey). Eliassi also investigates how these diverse outdoor environments can be considered a part of the Swedish landscape cultural heritage.
Linda Lapina: The dirtier, the better? Temporalities of regenerative agriculture at a farmer’s market in Copenhagen
Focusing on Grønt marked, an outdoor farmers’ market in Copenhagen, this paper explores the temporalities that emerge in intra-actions (Barad, 2007) between locally grown vegetables, eaters, growers and other bodies in gentrifying urban space. Grønt marked is a part of a growing regenerative agri-food movement in Denmark. Started in 2019 by a group of volunteer international food professionals and activists, the market blossomed during the COVID-19 lockdowns as a “safe” outdoor social event. In 2023, the market has grown from a monthly event to a weekly Sunday market from May to December in three different locations. The market offers affordable stalls to producers of local, regenerative foods, on the condition that the food is sold by the producers.
Based on fieldwork and conversations with organizers, eaters and growers since 2021, I explore the temporalities that emerge around the locally grown vegetables sold at the market. These vegetables are often unusual, smaller, dirtier, strangely shaped and more expensive than supermarket produce. This brings up questions of food justice and access, echoing existing critiques of “slow food” and “slow living” (see, for instance, Sharma, 2014). However, the slowness also entails that labour otherwise undertaken by (underpaid) manual laborers, like distribution and cleaning of the vegetables, is now performed by the eaters themselves. Shopping and preparing food takes time in a different way. In addition to rhythms and tempos of food access and preparation, the market also enacts certain seasonalities. In addition to the vegetables reflecting the changing seasons, the market takes place outdoors, exposed to sun, rain and wind. In addition, for many eaters, the soil on the vegetables embodies proximity to soils and “nature” outside the city, hinting to urban-rural and sometimes intergenerational temporalities. The paper inquires how these different temporalities (re-)articulate urban spaces and ecologies, and how they gesture towards food presents, futures and politics in and beyond the city.
Linda Lapiņa (pronouns she/they/it) works as associate professor of Cultural Encounters and Global Humanities at Roskilde University in Denmark. They are also a dancer and a psychologist. Linda grew up in Latvia, where she learned to speak with plants and soil from her grandmother. They work with affective, embodied methodologies, drawing on affect theory, intersectional feminisms, environmental humanities; more-than-human and arts-based approaches. Linda seeks to foreground plurality in knowledge production, exploring potentialities for transformation of knowledge systems, ourselves and the world(s) we seek to (un)know and know otherwise. Linda’s research focuses on urban ecologies; cultural/environmental encounters; race, whiteness and intersectionality; intergenerational and more-than-human embodied memory.
Kristine Samson – discussant
Bio: Kristine Samson (she/her) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University. She is an urbanist and environmentalist interested in societal and environmental change through arts-based and embodied methodologies. Working specifically with co-creation, she is preoccupied with collective knowledge production across different communities and seeks to cultivate social and environmental care through participatory processes.