The Materiality of Everyday Practices in Urban Greenspace

Abstract

This paper investigates how urban greenspace is integrated in everyday practices of urban populations. What are the social functions that green areas serve, and how do people interact with the materiality of urban greenspace. The paper reports from a recent empirical study in Copenhagen, Denmark, and it seeks to qualify concepts of lifestyle and practice, i.e. concepts by which sociological studies can capture and understand patterns of actions in people's daily lives. Particularly it seeks to include an understanding of the role of materiality in the analyses of social practices. Inspired by actor-network theory the paper proposes to analyse the role of urban greenspace in everyday practices as actant functions performed by the greenspace and its elements. The question is which roles green areas play in people's lives and in the community. The study presented in this paper shows that urban green areas are included in everyday life as spaces for free time and household flexibility. They serve a number of different social functions by providing spaces for solitude, for being together and for the experience of civic diversity. And the possibility of having experiences of nature and landscape become an integral part of urban life.

Keywords:

• Lifestyle
• practice
• urban greenspace
• materiality
• actant function

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Signe Svalgaard Nielsen, Anne Jensen, Peter Kirkegaard, Muska Dastageer og Oskar Funk for their contribution to the study's observations and interviews and Anne Holst Andersen for inspiration. This work was sponsored by Realdania & the National Environmental Research Institute, Aarhus University.