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Contested Greenspace Solidarities?

Asymmetric Valuation Compromises and Civic-Material Tensions in Copenhagen Allotment Gardens

Nicola C. Thomas and Anders Blok

Abstract

Urban allotment gardens constitute urban natures with a rich history as well as potential public redevelopment land. While many cities in Europe struggle to protect allotment gardens from competing land-use forces, in Copenhagen, allotments are classified as valuable urban nature and enjoy special protection. We analyze the social and political conditions and consequences of this unique situation. Taking a closer look at the governance arrangements and what we refer to as asymmetric civic-public compromises enabling the protection, we show how this is resulting in new material conflicts between civic and municipal actors. We argue that the conflicts are related to the unresolved issue of competing visions of civic, green, and market sustainability shaping contemporary urban development in Copenhagen and beyond and which are starkly revealed within allotment gardens.

Cover Nature and Culture

In  Nature and Culture

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
262–287 (26 total)
Restricted access

Daoist Political Ecology as Green Party Ideology

The Case of the Swedish Greens

Devin K. Joshi

Abstract

Green parties were once hailed as offering a “new politics” vis-à-vis the political establishment by proposing radical political, economic, and environmental reforms, but they have since transformed in many countries to become more moderate and pragmatic. While some doubt whether their ideology still contains any essential core, I contend that a unifying link can be found in the philosophy of the Daoist sage Laozi. I illustrate this by analyzing the party program of Miljöpartiet de Gröna (Sweden's Environmental Green Party), one of the world's most electorally successful green parties. As demonstrated here, this green party's current ideology strongly reflects key imperatives of Daoist political ecology revealing the philosophy's durability and attractiveness over time and its perceived relevance to pressing issues of sustainability and climate change.

Cover Nature and Culture

In  Nature and Culture

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
288–313 (26 total)
Open access

Everyday Security Practices in Gang-Controlled Neighborhoods in San Salvador

Chris van der Borgh

This article looks at the everyday security practices of local residents in violent local orders, where capacities and strategies of state and non-state armed actors to produce regularity and stability are weak and contested. It discusses the case of gang-controlled neighborhoods in the metropolitan area of Greater San Salvador, El Salvador, in the years 2017–2018, when security “provision” of armed state and nonstate actors was weak and contested, and as a result civilians mostly took care of themselves. The article analyzes the main characteristics of local violent orders, the insecurity experiences of local residents, and the everyday practices of local residents to deal with these circumstances. It argues that in neighborhoods where security provision by state and non-state actors is weak and contested, everyday security practices of local residents are key to understanding the functioning and reproduction of the local forms of “disordered order.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
1–20 (19 total)
Open access

Everyone’s an artist?

Class, precarity, and the distribution of creative labor

Natalie Morningstar

This article examines the endurance of traditional class labels among precarious workers in post-recession Dublin. It argues that tensions remain between creatives and non-creatives due to: (1) divergent class concepts, (2) a lack of social engagement, and (3) unequal access to economic, social, and cultural capital, which creatives mobilize to protect some highly vocational artistic labor. It is thus not a shared experience of the same kind of precarious exploitation that unites the precariat but a trap held in common, whereby self-actualization through labor is construed as a route to freedom. Drawing on Karl Marx’s theory of emancipation, I suggest that attempts to redress precarization should focus on undermining this encroachment of work into life, which I argue results in exploitation and alienation for all precarious workers.

Cover Focaal

In  Focaal

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
1–14 (13 total)
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Glaciers in the Anthropocene

A Biocultural View

Daniel Gaudio and Mauro Gobbi

Abstract

Disappearing glaciers are one of the most evident signals of climate change of the current period in Earth's history, the Anthropocene. In this article, we discuss the side effects of the glacier melt from a biocultural standpoint, moving from the Southern European Alps to a global context. Specifically, we highlight what we are losing from a cultural and naturalistic perspective but also, paradoxically, what we could “gain” if we were able to understand more deeply, and with an interdisciplinary approach, glacial dynamics and their role for human society. Glaciers can teach us several stories, but we are quickly approaching the last chance to listen to them.

Cover Nature and Culture

In  Nature and Culture

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
243–261 (19 total)
Open access

A mutable space

Identity in the ruins of a polyethnic town camp, Outback Australia

Alana Brekelmans

As that which troubles simplistic binaries, ruins provide an entry point for scholars to conceptualize time, space, and identity as multiple, fragmented, and mutable. Th is article contributes to these studies by interrogating Australian settler-colonial time-space narratives (chronotopes) of White dominance through engagement with counter-narratives of mutable materialities and identities. Through ethnography of a commemorative event in a rural Australian town, I show how peoples of mixed Aboriginal and Asian descent negotiated racialized ruins to reassert narrative agency. I argue narratives of identity—when reremembered through spatial understandings of multiple community membership, re-lived through embodied experiences, and re-collected through affective engagement with ruins—create a mutable space to disrupt settler-colonial chronotopes, revealing narratives of hybrid, polyethnic, and polyracial belongings in Australia.

Cover Focaal

In  Focaal

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
1–14 (13 total)
Restricted access

The OECD Water Governance Principles in Flood Risk Management

Understanding Conflicts and Frictions in Dutch Flood Protection

Nadine Keller, Barbara Tempels, and Thomas Hartmann

Abstract

The OECD Water Governance Principles provide a guideline for good water governance. However, these principles can conflict with each other when applied in practice. This contribution aims to understand which dilemmas arise and how such conflicts play out. It is explored in an in-depth case study on Dutch flood risk management in which conflicts between the principles emerge when applied to flood risk management practice. Interviews with water managers were used to collect data on which principles contradict each other and how these conflicts work out in practice. The study reveals that although the principles seem obvious, some principles indeed clash when applying them, while others do not lead to conflicts. Principles on efficiency, trust, and engagement have high potential for conflicts.

Cover Nature and Culture

In  Nature and Culture

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
314–336 (23 total)
Open access

On self-reliant masculinities and rural returnees in ethnic China

Suvi Rautio

The shift in China’s national economy from industrial manufacturing to technology and IT has placed constraints on the lives of rural-to-urban male migrant workers from the lower social strata. As the pace of out-migration in China slows, male rural returnees are harnessing self-reliant masculinities to reclaim status and heighten a sense of collective pride in and affiliation with their natal village. Centering on two ethnographic case studies of Dong ethnic minority male rural returnees in the autonomous district of Guizhou Province, the analysis in this article contributes to critique on the recent unfolding of the state-led “crisis of masculinity” to highlight the wider socioeconomic conditions that continue to deepen the inequalities and felt anxieties of male rural returnees.

Cover Focaal

In  Focaal

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
1–14 (13 total)
Restricted access

Scaling Back and Fitting In

Envisioning the Futures of Environmental Cultures

Christian Diehm

Devall, Bill. 2020. Living Deep Ecology: A Bioregional Journey. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D'Alisa, and Federico Demaria. 2020. The Case for Degrowth. Medford: Polity.

Cover Nature and Culture

In  Nature and Culture

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Review Article
Pages:
337–346 (10 total)
Open access

“While it lasts”

Strategizing with precarity in internationally funded project labor in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Nejra Nuna Čengić

This article traces transformations of labor through an exploration of a relatively new employment sector in supervised postsocialist, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where internationally funded, temporary, project-based contracts are the rule. Focusing on atypical white-collar precarious workers who have strung together 10 to 25 years on successive short projects in IGOs and NGOs in Sarajevo (under the umbrella of democratization, peacebuilding and EU integration agendas), I investigate their ways of strategizing to accumulate such continuity through cultivation of three kinds of assets: sector-specific competences, favorable positionality, and a disposition of optimism. I argue that their “successful” strategizing, generally in line with neoliberal rationality and mainly developed within this sector, is facilitated by similar structural conditions of overall precarity, temporariness and provisionality in wider BiH society.

Cover Focaal

In  Focaal

Published (Print):
01 Dec 2022
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
1–14 (13 total)