Chaired by Michelle Bastian
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.
Mathilda Rosengren: Temporalities of an Urban Commons: bird-times, waste-times, and in-between-times at Spillepengen in Malmö, Sweden
If, as anthropologist Tim Ingold (1993:152) would have it, any “landscape is constituted as an enduring record of … the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it”, how are we to understand perhaps the most slippery of urban landscape iterations – the commons?
While the concept of the urban commons has been extensively debated – be it through specific examples (land use, ownership, and appropriation) or in greater abstraction (justice, materialities, and atmospheres) (Borch & Kronberger 2015; Dellenbaugh et al, 2015) – the basis of these inquiries has been predominantly spatial and, with some exceptions (see Metzger 2015), centred on human needs and actions. As such, the possible temporalities and other-than-human agencies of the urban commons remain underexplored – encouraging a narrow, acutely anthropocentric notion of this urban landscape.
In this paper, by positioning more-than-human temporalities as central to the very notion of this landscape of urban peripheries, in-betweens, and justice, I propose an alternative reading of the commons as a relational and pluralised landscape defined as much by multiple temporalities and beings, as by entities of space.
Empirically situating this proposition at Spillepengen in Malmö, Sweden, which throughout the centuries has enacted various versions of commons for the city, I trace bird-times, waste-times, and in-between-times to paint a landscape where past and present generations’ appropriations are distinctly more-than-human, and always temporally as well as spatial defined. Finally, looking forward, I make a tentative suggestion on how this multi-temporal and multispecies picture may be used to sketch a commons for a future, less anthropocentric, urban existence.
Bio: Mathilda Rosengren is a visual anthropologist and human geographer with a particular interest in more-than-human entanglements, ecologies, and ethnographies of the urban Anthropocene. She completed her doctoral studies at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge in 2020 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Urban Research, Malmö University. Her work straddles the intersection of critical urban and landscape studies, urban geography, and the environmental humanities and it is especially informed by more-than-human geographies and multispecies ethnographies. Beyond this, she is also interested in integrating various visual methods as part of research methodologies and for broader disseminations purposes. In 2021-2022, she coorganised the Urban Studies Foundation-funded seminar series, Temporalities of Urban Natures, together with Dr. Lucilla Barchetta (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice).
Elena Ferrari: Making time for street gardens (soil) care
In areas undergoing urban densification processes, permeable soils and vegetation in the street environment play a key role in the design of liveable cities and their management is becoming an essential matter in urban agendas. In Berlin, small roadside areas, such as tree pits, are managed by citizens as gardens: Places of sociality and creativity, where the work of human with soil, plants and urban animals is noticeable. Despite the multiple benefits of citizens' engagement in the streetscapes care, such practices are often neglected in urban strategies and embedded in neoliberal urban governance schemes as voluntary labour. In this article, I employ a feminist angle, drawing on Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's work 'Making time for soil care: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care' (2015), to examine the role of care and time in Berlin's street gardens. The study unfolds around a multi-perspective investigation of the street gardens’ soil, as a lens for discussing the unity of social and ecological matters and the different temporalities underlying them. The contribution outlines how citizens' work can influence the protection of street natural assets, suggests new design trajectories and relates to cultural narratives.
Bio: Elena Ferrari is an urbanist and landscape designer based in Berlin. She recently completed her PhD in Urbanism (Iuav University of Venice) with a research entitled 'In-between Nature', which addressed the concept of hybrid urban landscapes in contemporary Berlin. She is interested in the interconnection between humans and nature in cities, a topic she addresses in her work through different methodological sensitivities and collaborations in a multidisciplinary perspective. Currently, her research focuses include marginal urban landscapes, urban gardens and citizen science. In recent years, she has been researching the transformation of urban gardens in Berlin and Warsaw (Humboldt University of Berlin and University of Lodz) and she has been engaged as a co-creator in 'Open SoilAtlas’, a Berlin urban soil counter-mapping project led by citizen scientists (project co-funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme, coordinated by Feld Food Forest, Action, King's College London).
Henriette Steiner: How Architecture Comes into Being: The Hybrid Collaborations that Shape Our World
The material structures of the built environment that emerged during the post-war period in Denmark reflect a society which was undergoing a rapid and all-encompassing transformation. The architecture reflects a society, which strived for high moral standards of equity and equality. Yet the design ethos of the Danish post-war welfare state was a grey form of welfare constructed out of bricks, concrete and asphalt, and, overall, it was mindful neither of the ecological toll taken by its expansive building programme nor of the extractive and unequitable capitalist regimes that brought it into being. Histories of architecture of this period which is often called the Golden Age of Danish architecture design tend to focus on a few master architects, although this massive transformation was one which was facilitated by numerous collaborations between many different people with different disciplinary skills. Yet, we may say, these collaborations also involved the material context such as the building materials used (brick, mortar, concrete, iron, glass, steel etc.) and the surrounding natural world (trees, plants, grasses, soil, animals, etc.). Echoing the words of political philosopher Alyssa Battistoni, we may call this a form of ‘hybrid work’ which includes relations of dependency not just between humans but also between human and non-human species; which I will rephrase and replace with the notion ‘hybrid collaboration’. Exploring this notion, I will discuss examples of hitherto invisible economies of collaboration, cooperation and conflict that underlay the common effort of how architecture came into being in the context of Danish post-war welfare state architecture. It does so by following some central protagonists around the construction of Kildeskovshallen, a swimming pool and sports and cultural facility in the suburban municipality of Gentofte, just north of Copenhagen. When reading this project in this way, alternative themes such as empathy, compassion and quasi-ecocritical formulations of dependencies between different human beings and with the natural environment, as reflected in different ethics around collaboration and sustainability, all snap into focus. It shifts our focus on Danish architecture and design in the emerging mid-century welfare state away from questions of equality and equal opportunity for humans – for example, in Kildeskovshallen’s case, the provision of sports and cultural facilities to all citizens – and towards broader questions of equity and justice, both harnessing and critiquing the expansive post-war growth of the urban built environment.
Bio: Henriette Steiner is Associate Professor in the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. She gained her PhD in Architecture in 2008 from the University of Cambridge, UK, and was Research Associate in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich in Switzerland for five years. She has been a visiting Associate Professor at the Department for Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in 2021 she was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Landscape Architecture at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna. Henriette works on the history and philosophy of architecture, landscapes and cities. Through her research and teaching, Henriette strives to inspire more self-reflective, diverse, equitable, and compassionate spatial practices for designing cities and landscapes. Her research investigates how shifting historical structures – morals, ethics, politics and cultural practices – shaped and continue to shape the buildings, cities, landscapes and cultural imaginaries we have inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries’ Western industrial culture. Henriette is joint project leader (with Svava Riesto) on Women in Danish Architecture 1925–1975, a three-year research project that aims to provide a more just and complete understanding of architecture history by highlighting women’s contributions to the architectural disciplines in Denmark.
Jan van Duppen: ‘Half an hour can feel like an afternoon’: Conflicting and Intersecting Temporalities at a community garden in Berlin
Jonathan Crary argues that one of the forms of disempowerment of the 24/7 capitalist economy is its ‘incapacitation of daydream … that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow or vacant time‘ (Crary 2014, p. 88). This begs the question: what sort of space could be helpful in resisting the restless demands and continuous interface of the new digital economy? Urban gardens, for instance, can offer citizens the opportunity to tune into the cyclical rhythms of the seasons, allowing for the multi-modal sensorial explorations of naturecultures, a slowing down, a temporary escape from the pressures of paid work and social obligations (Crouch and Ward 1997, Schoneboom and May 2013, Odell 2019). Following on, this paper does not understand cities solely through the prism of ‘neoliberalism’, nor does it want to idealise community gardens as spaces of restorative escape. Instead, it develops a nuanced understanding of the intersecting, overlapping and conflicting temporalities enacted whilst volunteers garden together at the Prinzessingarten in Berlin. It discusses the shaping and falling apart of more-than-human collectives, and the new temporalities that emerge in the intricate processes of this ‘becoming-with’(Haraway 2008, Phillips 2020), whilst responding to that other temporality of the climate emergency.
Bio: Jan van Duppen is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at the GeoGender Lab - Humboldt Universität Berlin. His work stretches across cultural geography and urban studies and weaves together the themes of the commons and the multispecies city, play and work, and mobility and travel. He has experience in ethnography, photography, and participatory design processes. Jan holds a PhD in Geography from the Open University (UK). A selection of his published works: ‘Caring for Foxes at the Allotment’ (chapter in the ed. vol. Urban Natures, in print with Berghahn Books), ‘Daydreaming of Ping-Pong Publics’ (2021) in ‘Anachoresis: Upon Inhabiting Distances, ‘Seeing Patterns on the Ground’ (2020) in the Open Arts Journal and ‘Picturing Diversions’ (2019) in Roadsides.