Urban greening, property and more-than-human commoning

ABSTRACT

Urban greening is about bringing vegetation into cities in ways that produce flourishing urban ecologies whilst also making cities more liveable for human inhabitants. We focus here on greening that is done through the maintenance or establishment of gardens, parks, urban forests and informal spaces. We argue that in contexts with established property law systems, such as Australia, making urban ecologies through greening is shaped heavily by relations of property tied to land. This includes constraining the extent to which urban greening can contribute to socio-ecologically just cities. We suggest that progressing greening that is more attentive to the geographies and temporalities of more-than-human life requires us to trouble the hold of property over greening. To do this we explore the possibilities opened up by the lens of urban commons/commoning. We engage with the emerging concept of more-than-human commoning as a way of attuning urban greening to nonhuman agency and affordances. We also grapple with the risk of obscuring or concealing difference between humans in the way commoning makes room for more-than-humans, especially in the context of settler-colonialism. We conclude by calling for a more overt politics of urban greening that encompasses diverse human and more-than-human experiences of the city.

KEYWORDS:

• Commoning
• commons
• more-than-human
• greening
• urban
• green space

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the Eastern Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands this work was conducted, respectfully recognizing Ancestors and Elders past, present and emerging.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Benjamin Cooke is a human geographer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, and the Centre for Urban Research, at RMIT University. Benjamin’s research centres on the social and critical dimensions of nature conservation, which encompasses private land conservation, rural-amenity landscapes, green cities and urban greening, property rights and socio-ecological commons/commoning.

Ani Landau-Ward teaches in the Bachelor of Arts, International Studies and is a Research Officer at the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University. Ani is a Ph.D. candidate with an MA in International and Community Development, her previous research has analysed the history and promotion of property rights institutions in the UN system. Her current work critically examines recent technological changes in transnational land administration practices and their governance.

Lauren Rickards is an Associate Professor in Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University, where she co-leads the Climate Change Transformations Research Program in the Centre for Urban Research. Lauren is a Lead Author with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Lauren’s research focuses on climate change responses and especially the interface with sustainability, land and rural issues.