The politics of greening unceded lands in the settler city

ABSTRACT

Urban greening is a buzz term in urban policy and research settings in Australia and elsewhere. In a context of settler colonial urbanism, like Australia, a first fact becomes clear: urban greening is always being practiced on unceded Indigenous lands. Recognising this requires some honest reckoning with how this latest urban policy response perpetuates dispossessory settler-colonial structures. In this paper, we listen to the place-based ontologies of the peoples and lands from where we write to inform understanding the city as an always already Indigenous place – a sovereign Aboriginal City. In so doing, the paper tries to practice a way of creating more truthful and response-able urban knowledge practices. We analyse three distinct areas of scholarly research that are present in the contemporary literature: urban greening and green infrastructure; urban political ecology; and more-than-human cities. When placed in relationship of learning with the sovereign Aboriginal City, our analysis finds that these scholarly domains of urban greening work to re-organise colonial power relations. The paper considers what work the practice and scholarship of ‘urban greening’ might need to do in order to become response-able and learn to learn with Indigenous sovereignties and ontologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Greening
• political ecology
• more-than-human cities
• Indigenous ways of knowing
• responsibility‌
• settler–colonial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Libby Porter is an uninvited guest living on Wurundjeri Country. She is Professor of Urban Planning at RMIT University where her work considers the relationship between urbanisation, dispossession and displacement.

Julia Hurst is a historian (Darug/Dharawal) woman living on Kulin lands. She has a Masters of Urban Planning and is a University of Melbourne Indigenous Post-doctoral fellow in the Faculty of Arts.

Tina Grandinetti is an Uchinanchu (Okinawan) scholar from occupied Hawaiʻi. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University exploring the intersections of property, housing injustice, and settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi.

Notes

1 Aunty Joy Wandin Murphy has given both permission and blessing to share this knowledge in this paper.

2 For further discussion on Country, see Rose (1996). We capitalise Country to both specifically mark this meaning for the reader, and to give Country due respect as a proper noun.

3 While we acknowledge Haraway’s (e.g. Haraway 2016) use of this term, our own use here does not derive from a reading of Haraway. Our own thinking about becoming response-able is the response we feel drawn to make from reading Indigenous feminist scholarship and theorisation.