Bringing Urban Parks to Life: The More-Than-Human Politics of Urban Ecological Work

Abstract

Using gestion différenciée in Geneva, Switzerland, as a case study, this article puts the politics of labor at the center of a political ecological analysis of efforts to “ecologize” the design and maintenance of urban parks. The article first highlights how the neomanagerial scripting of an “ecological” mode of managing urban parks reshapes social configurations of work by increasing the uneven distribution of agency and visibility among park workers. It then argues that ecomanagerialism also redefines the boundaries of the work collective itself, as plants shift from being understood as “undead commodities” to “nonhuman laborers.” To elucidate the social implications of the enrollment of plants’ capacities, the article advances an understanding of urban ecological work as more-than-human. The article discusses the role played by understandings of what urban nature should be, and what it should do, in producing and justifying new divisions, hierarchies, and forms of unevenness within the urban ecological workforce.

以瑞士日内瓦的差异化管理为例, 以劳工政治学为核心, 本文对城市公园的生态化设计和维护进行了政治生态学分析。文章首先强调, 城市公园的生态化管理如何加剧公园工作人员的行为和可见度的不平等分布, 进而重塑了劳动的社会形态。由于植物从“非死亡商品”转变为“非人类劳动者”, 生态管理主义还重新定义了劳动群体的范畴。为了阐述植物的社会效益, 本文发展了城市生态工作不仅局限于人类的观念。城市的本质是什么、城市应该做什么？本文讨论了对这两个问题的理解如何产生、证实了城市生态劳动力不平等的分配、等级和形式。

Usando como estudio de caso la gestion différenciée in Ginebra, Suiza, este artículo coloca la política laboral al centro de un análisis ecológico político del empeño emprendido por “ecologizar” el diseño y mantenimiento de parques urbanos. En primer término, el artículo enfatiza cómo la escritura neogerencial de un modo “ecológico” de administración de los parques urbanos remodela las configuraciones sociales del trabajo, incrementando la desigual distribución de la agencia y la visibilidad entre los trabajadores de los parques. Después de eso, el artículo sostiene que la ecogerencia también redefine los límites del propio trabajo colectivo, en cuanto las plantas dejan de ser interpretadas como “mercaderías vivientes” por “trabajadores no humanos”. Para dilucidar las implicaciones sociales de matricular así las capacidades de las plantas, el artículo promueve un entendimiento del trabajo ecológico urbano como más-que-humano. El artículo discute el rol que se juega con las interpretaciones de lo que debe ser la naturaleza urbana, y lo que ella debe hacer, para producir y justificar nuevas divisiones, jerarquías y formas de irregularidad dentro de la fuerza laboral ecológica urbana.

Key Words:

• labor
• nonhuman labor
• plant politics
• political ecology
• urban parks

关键词:

• 劳动力
• 非人类劳动力
• 植物政治学
• 政治生态学
• 城市公园。

Palabras clave:

• ecología política
• parques urbanos
• políticas de plantas
• trabajo
• trabajo ni humano

Acknowledgments

This article was (too) many years in the making, and I am indebted to many. First, thanks are due to Juliet Fall for supervising the doctoral work from which this material is derived. At a later stage, conversations with James Palmer and Jamie Lorimer and constructive feedback from Dan Bos and Tim Schwanen helped to sophisticate the argument of the article. I’m also grateful for the informal feedback received when presenting various versions of this article at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (San Francisco, 2016), the Annual International Conference of the RGS-IBG (London, 2016), and workshops on “Approcher les problèmes d’environnement comme des situations de gestion?” (Strasbourg, 2016) and “Perte de biodiversité, New Public Management et néolibéralisme” (Lille, 2017). This research would not have been possible without the collaboration of Geneva’s green space service and the involvement of gardeners, help gardeners, and managers in the RD-1 team and the cimetière Saint-Georges. Finally, I want to extend my thanks to three anonymous reviewers for their detailed and generous comments and to James McCarthy for making this a smooth publication process.

Notes

1 Union Suisse des Services des Parcs et Promenades (USSP).

2 Original: “L’apparition plus ou moins simultanée des politiques environnementales et des injonctions à la performance tend à naturaliser l’idée selon laquelle la gestion de la nature s’incarne invariablement dans ce cadre managérial” (Daniel 2010).

3 Original: “il convient d’interroger … la nature des nouvelles configurations sociales que ces injonctions contribuent à générer” (Daniel 2010).

4 The service is divided into three units: the “office,” which is the strategic organ of the service; the production unit, made up of the horticultural production center and the tree nursery; and the maintenance unit, made up of park-based teams.

5 This idea of living “with” weeds in a new way has one exception: species deemed invasive. As I have written elsewhere, these are the only exception to the “zero-herbicide” rule (Ernwein and Fall 2015; Ernwein 2016). In Geneva, the mobilization of plants’ capacities is not explicitly made in the perspective of biological pest management; however, similar discourses and processes are found where that approach is adopted—see Ernwein and Tollis (2017) for a comparison of gestion différenciée in Geneva and biological pest management in Grenoble.

6 This critique extends beyond Perkins’s work. By focusing on a demonstration of animals’ capacity to labor, most existing work (e.g., Barua 2017) does not engage with the intricate relation between the exploitation of human and nonhuman labor.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marion Ernwein

MARION ERNWEIN is a Departmental Lecturer at the School of Geography and the Environment and a Junior Research Fellow at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests lie at the intersection of urban political ecology and more-than-humanism, with a focus on work, embodiment, affect, and the nonhuman within neoliberal urbanism.