Ethnography of Urban Greenspaces

optional courses

The course is designed to bring students to the field of urban ecology and ethnography of greenspaces through a series of discussions and walks in the city. We will focus on three types of greenspaces: urban public park, allotment garden and community garden.

The course offers a peek into the complex world of nature/culture hybrids that city life is made of. Anthropology’s established interest in natural environments (as represented by environmental anthropology, for example) makes a twist in encounters with urban nature. The call to abandon the divisive line between nature and culture finds fertile ground in cities, whose „nature” is brought to life and maintained through complex assemblages of human and more-than-human actors that often have competing interests. (Shall an eco-friendly modern playground facilities that won in “citizens’ budget” competition be installed in the spot where a little lawn and a pond has been so far attracting local dwellers? Shall allotment gardens used by individual gardeners and located near the city centre be scrapped in order to establish a well-designed park accessible to all? What is a green city? And which shade of green is best?)

What is more, unlike agricultural environments, or deserts, oceans and forests, cities are places where anthropologists themselves live, as a rule. Studying nature in cities ethnographically continues the project of making anthropology’s subject matter less exotic and less dependent on perceptible spatial distance.

The course is designed to bring students to the field of urban ecology and ethnography of greenspaces through a series of discussions and walks in the city. We will focus on three types of greenspaces: urban public park, allotment garden and community garden.

Readings:

Issues:

*Bellow, Anne C. (2004) One Hundred Years of Allotment Gardens in Poland, Food & Foodways, 12: 247–276. <allotment gardens>

or:

*Maćkiewicz Barbara, Magdalena Szczepańska, Ewa Kacprzak, Runrid Fox-Kämper (2021) Between food growing and leisure: contemporary allotment gardeners in Western Germany and Poland, Die Erde. Journal of Geographical Society of Berlin, 152(1): 33-50. <allotment gardens>

Conan, Michel (1999) From Vernacular Gardens to a Social Anthropology of Gardening, in: M. Conan (ed) Perspectives on Garden Histories. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, pp. 181-204. <the idea of the

*Hayes, Samuel J., Bertie Dockerill (2020) A Park for the People: examining the creation and refurbishment of a public park, Landscape Research, doi: 10.1080/01426397.2020.1832452

or:

*Hennecke Stefanie (2011), German Ideologies of City and Nature. The Creation and Reception of Schiller Park in Berlin, in: D. Brantz, S. Dümpelmann (eds) Greening the City. Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, pp. 75-94. <parks, public spaces>

*Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierette (2014) „It’s a Little Piece of My Country”, in: Paradise Transplanted. Migration and the Making of California Gardens. Oakland: University of California Press, pp. 116-160. <community gardens>

or:

*Zukin, Sharon (2010) The Billboard and the Garden: A Struugle for Roots, in: Naked City. The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, Oxford Universty Press, pp. 193-218. <community gardens>

Jeromack, Colin (2014) Feeding the Pidgeons: Sidewalk Sociability in Greenwich Village, in: M. Duneier, Ph. Kasinitz, A.K.Murphy (eds) The Urban Ethnography Reader, Oxford University Press, pp. 235-251. <parks, public places>

*Kopnina Helen (2018) Plastic flowers and mowed lawns: the exploration of everyday unsustainability, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, DOI: 10.1080/17549175.2018.1527780

Kronenberg Jakub, Edyta Łaszkiewicz, Joanna Sziło (2021) Voting with one’s chainsaw: What happens when people are given the opportunity to freely remove urban trees? Landscape and Urban Planning 209, doi: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2021.104041

Kronenberg Jakub et al. (2020) Environmental justice in the context of urban green space availability, accessibility, and attractiveness in postsocialist cities, Cities, doi: 10.1016/j.cities.2020.102862

Low, Setha, Dana Taplin and Suzanne Scheld (2014) Urban Parks: History and Local Contexts, in: Rethinking urban parks: public space and cultural diversity, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 19-35.

*Perkins, Harold (2015) Urban Forests are Social Natures: Markets, Race, Class, and Gender in Relation to (Un)Just Urban Environments, in: L.A. Sandberg, A. Bardekjian, S. Butt (eds) Urban Forests, Trees and Greenspace. A Political Ecology Perspective. London-New York: Routledge, pp. 19-34. <environmental justice>

Putkowska-Smoter Renata, Jan Frankowski (2020) Right to the Map? Counter-Mapping Practices of Smog Alerts and Urban Greenery Movements in Poland, Society Register 4(4): 129-150.

*Stoetzer, Bettina (2018) Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin, Cultural Anthropology, 33(2): 295-323. <wildscapes>

https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca33.2.09

Collected volume: Brantz Dorothee, Sonja Dümpelmann (eds) (2011) Greening the City. Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.

Collected volume: L.A. Sandberg, A. Bardekjian, S. Butt (eds) (2015) Urban Forests, Trees and Greenspace. A Political Ecology Perspective. London-New York: Routledge.

-Konijnendijk van den Bosch, Cecil C. (2015) From Government to Governance: Contribution to the Political Ecology of Urban Forest, in: L.A. Sandberg, A. Bardekjian, S. Butt (eds) Urban Forests, Trees and Greenspace. A Political Ecology Perspective. London-New York: Routledge, pp. 35-46. <interests>

-Jones, Owain (2015) (Urban) Places of Trees: Affective Embodiment, Politics, Identity, and Materiality, L.A. Sandberg, A. Bardekjian, S. Butt (eds) Urban Forests, Trees and Greenspace. A Political Ecology Perspective. London-New York: Routledge, pp. 111-131. <relations with place>

-Braverman, Irus (2015) Order and Disorder in the Urban Forest: A Foucauldian-Latourian Perspective, L.A. Sandberg, A. Bardekjian, S. Butt (eds) Urban Forests, Trees and Greenspace. A Political Ecology Perspective. London-New York: Routledge, pp. 132-146. <managing of plants>

Theories:

Descola Philippe, Palsson Gisli (eds) (1996) Nature and Society. Anthropological Perspectives. London – New York: Routledge.

Dryzek, John S. (2022) The Politics of the Earth. Environmental Discourses, 4th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 1 on discourse approach).

Hastrup, Kirsten (2014) Nature. Anthropology on the Edge, in: Hastrup, Kirsten (ed) Anthropology and Nature. London – New York: Routledge, pp. 1-26.

Methods:

*Low, Setha, Dana Taplin and Suzanne Scheld (2014) Anthropological Methods for Assessing Cultural Values, in: Rethinking urban parks: public space and cultural diversity, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 175-194.

McGarry Karen Ann, Mannik Lynda (2017) Practicing Ethnography: A Student Guide to Method and Methodology. University of Toronto Press. (Chapters 2 on participant observation and chapter 5 on fieldnotes).

*Pink Sarah (2008) An urban tour. The sensory sociality of ethnographic place-making, Ethnography 9(2): 175–196.

Springgay, Stephanie, Sarah E. Truman (eds) (2018) Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World: WalkingLab. London – New York: Routledge. (Chapter 1 on a general approach and Chapter 8 „Queering trail”).

Students will learn to identify multiple actors involved the life of urban nature and describe their interests and power relations; students will be able to characterize selected conceptual approached to urban greenspaces, in particular, the contribution of socio-cultural anthropology to the studies of urban nature; students will learn selected methodological tools of urban ethnography (e.g. REAP, photo elicitation, walking interview).

In order to complete the course students are required to:

-actively participate in the course, incl. walks (the time spent on walks will reduce hours in the class, however please be prepared to spend more than 30 hours on group activities);

- discuss 8 obligatory readings (marked with * below, in several cases there are alternatives, marked with „or”) in class discussions;

-write the final assignment (in the form of fieldnotes - 5 standard pages), and

-make an oral presentation of these notes in the roundtable(s) at the end of the course.

Deadline: final versions of fieldnotes should be submitted (emai) by June 5, 2022.