Civic modes of greening the city? Urban natures in-between familiar engagement and green critique

ABSTRACT

In this article, we deploy the loosely bounded phenomenon of “urban green communities” – in the shape of urban gardening, beekeeping, food collectives, biodiversity enhancement, tree planting and kindred citizen-based group practices towards urban greening – in order to probe the wide variations in modes of civic engagement with urban sustainability politics. As such, we explore the conceptual gaps opened up in-between everyday lifestyle politics, green social movements and critiques of neoliberal urban political economies, by leveraging a novel and fine-grained conceptualization of civic and place-based material participation built from pragmatic sociology. The work of Laurent Thévenot on regimes of engagement, in particular, allow us to trace translations in-between the familiar attachments and the public critiques undertaken by urban green communities in ways that expand the frame on socio-material politics relative to current research conversations. Empirically, we leverage this re-conceptualization as part of a comprehensive digital mapping exercise set in Denmark, in which we trace core patterns and differences in modes of urban-green politics at the level of everyday citizen practices and group interaction styles across a diversity of urban green communities. Having identified six such civic modes of urban greening and specified their group styles of engagement, we end by discussing the implications of our findings for questions of care, justice and democracy in sustainable city-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic environmentalism
• engagement regimes
• group styles
• material politics
• place attachment
• urban greening

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank participants at the EASST Conference Panel Uncertain futures: green alternatives and STS interventions, Lancaster July 28 2018, for apposite suggestions on the ideas presented in this article. They also thank fellow research and practice partners in the “Grønne fællesskaber i byen” (Urban Green Communities) project for continued support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 2008 is the year Facebook started its operations in Denmark. To validate our claim and findings on the rate of growth of urban green communities in this country (as per Figure 1), for each community we cross-checked with information on its year of founding stemming from outside the platform.

2 Here, ideally, the very question of the urban setting and its often convoluted sites and forms of politics also deserves further attention. However, this is beyond the scope of our present discussion (see Blok 2018 for an analysis).

3 For present purposes, we leave aside the more complicated conceptual architecture by which Thévenot (e.g. 2014) suggests to distinguish different grammars of 'commonality in the plural'. The important point, for our purposes, is that such grammars assume and rely upon those shared formats of engagement just outlined.

4 For lack of space, and given that our focus lies elsewhere, we do not present results from the focus group interviews. Overall, we would accept the potential criticism that ours represent at best an imperfect validation and that there is no easy way of knowing for sure how far from 'exhaustive' our online database is. However, as noted, we follow Venturini et al. (2018, 16) in suggesting that proportionality between our map and the observed phenomenon is a better ideal, and one for which the focus groups did provide backing.

5 While groups may pre-date their Facebook presence, starting as noted in 2008, our analysis so far suggests that even in such cases, our data captures the majority of groups' temporal trajectories (see also figure 1).

Additional information

Funding

The Velux Foundation supported this work, via grant number 14421.