Picturing Urban Green Attachments: Civic Activists Moving between Familiar and Public Engagements in the City

Introduction: Moral Complexities of the Green City

In recent years, ideas and practices of urban ecology have gained in importance among city governments worldwide, in reference to sustainability as one among a set of new urban planning ‘truths’ (Blok, 2012; Sassen, 2009). Whether embedded in backyard gardening efforts or massive low-carbon traffic infrastructure projects, urban places and spaces now routinely find themselves subject to environmental valuations, by a plurality of expert and non-expert actors. More often than not, sustainability emerges here as a site of new controversy, as neighborhood groups, civic associations and urban activists invest the term with widely divergent senses (Raco and Lin, 2012). Urban ecology, in short, has come to be inscribed in those webs of ambiguity, tension and dispute so characteristic of urban life and its complex politics of living together across difference.

In this article, we seek to address questions of how the lines between ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’ – in C. Wright Mills’ (1959) famous terms – are drawn and redrawn, justified and contested in and around urban planning processes and practices of sustainability. Such lines, we assume, are provisional and contested. They are subject to the way urban sites are inscribed in the promises and powers of urban planning, and how resulting visions of the ‘good city’ are negotiated and contested (Abram and Weszkalnys, 2011). Importantly, as plans come to implicate a diversity of urban lived realities, they spur new critical activities that seek to render place-based attachments to urban ecologies relevant to common concerns. Such civic engagements, we argue, which move and translate between the ‘personal’ and the ‘public’, are key to forging a viable sociological approach to the cultural politics of urban sustainability.

Theoretically, we develop these claims by way of invoking French pragmatic sociologist Laurent Thévenot, whose work in the sociology of moral and political ordering, we suggest, has much to offer to the analysis of urban culture, activism and politics – even as this ‘urban connection’ remains so far underexplored (cf. Albertsen and Diken, 2001). In particular, we seek to show how Thévenot’s notion of ‘regimes of engagement’ (2007) – intended to grasp the variety of cognitive and evaluative formats by way of which human beings are invested in their environment – allows us to enrich debates on civic urban culture. By highlighting a situational variability in the cultural forms and sources of civic activism, from ‘familiar’ attachments to specific sites to generalized visions of the ‘just’ city, urban ecology is shown to involve a range of moral-political tensions and ambiguities of building ‘commonality in the plural’ (Thévenot, 2012, 2014) in the city.

Via pragmatic sociology, this article thus aims to bridge otherwise separate debates: whereas human geographers have started inquiring into the ‘more-than-human’ politics of urban ecologies (Hinchliffe et al., 2005), sociologists have so far failed to make ecological contestation in the city central to research on what, following Manuel Castells (1983), is known as ‘urban social movements’ (Leontidou, 2006). In this context, we suggest, the pragmatic sociology of Thévenot allows for a productive extension of themes developed – outside of urban settings – via cultural approaches to social movement activism (Jasper, 2010). In particular, set against existing theories (e.g. of ‘framing’), pragmatic sociology affords a more substantive view on the moral work involved as activists forge attachments to specific place-based ecologies, while navigating institutional settings that encourage and constrain different forms of engagement. In doing so, it also invites a de-centering of the very notion of urban social movements, in highlighting a set of more mundane critical practices at the intersection of urban activism, politics and everyday life.

In empirical terms, we focus in this article on a specific case of urban activism and citizen engagement, revolving around a large-scale sustainable urban development project in Copenhagen, known as Nordhavnen (The North Harbor). ¹ This architectural project promises to radically transform a 300-hectare post-industrial space just north-east of city center, today a feral site of grasslands and bushes and home to various outdoor leisure activities. While politically invested with high hopes for bolstering the image of Copenhagen as an ‘eco-metropolis’ (Blok, 2012), this development project also threatens to unsettle a range of established urban habits, many of which involve an active appreciation of the ‘natural’ qualities of the site. In the language of pragmatic sociology, then, Nordhavnen has become a site of ambiguity and tension around different cultural-political visions and valuations of the ‘green’ city (cf. Thévenot et al., 2000).

In an ongoing research project, we trace the complex moral-political trajectories of Nordhavnen in urban policy documents, architectural visions, activist interventions and civic practices. ² In this article, we rely in particular on qualitative interviews and informal talks with various small groups of ‘coincidental’ civic activists, who have come to be practically engaged in the future fate of this urban ecology. Positioned between ‘ordinary’ inhabitation and organized non-governmental politics, these civic actors, we aim to show, embody a range of familiar attachments to the site of Nordhavnen. In analyzing the creative moral and critical capacities involved as activists move between familiar and public engagements in the city, we highlight how photographs, drawings, and other forms of visualization allow for the shared expression and translation of embodied forms of attachments not well accommodated by the semantic apparatuses of expert urban planning.

In the next section, we unfold Thévenot’s notion of regimes of engagement, and relate this to debates in urban sociology on participation, sustainability and justice. We then outline the cultural-political constraints shaping current planning visions for Nordhavnen, before turning to analyze in more depth the plurality of civic engagements it engenders. In conclusion, we sketch how pragmatic sociology may contribute to an understanding of urban politics as inclusive learning processes (McFarlane, 2011), more hospitable to a wider diversity of personal attachments to the city and its ecologies.

The Justified City: Regimes of Urban Engagement

Among its many virtues, the pragmatic ‘sociology of critique’ initially developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2006[1991]) may be said to open up a culturally sensitive approach to issues of rights and justice in the city (Albertsen and Diken, 2001). Focusing neither on the structural power of capital and state, as in post-Marxist urban studies, nor on new ‘post-political’ governance networks (Raco and Lin, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2009), pragmatic sociology instead accords theoretical importance to how an everyday sense of the just is put to work in situated critical activities. In value-pluralist societies, disputes revolve around a limited number of grammars of the common good, or ‘orders of worth’, which confer legitimacy on persons and things by ‘qualifying’ them for public judgment. While each grammar serves as a resource for actors to reach agreement, their mutual incompatibility induces a constant source of cultural-political uncertainty. In critical situations, conflicting judgments are ‘put to the test’, as actors attempt to verify the solidity of bonds that confer value (grandeur) on particular social and material arrangements. ³

Cities, we might say with Boltanski and Thévenot, are arrangements of plural and co-existing orders of worth, existing in tension and compromise. Hence, importantly, the history of urban planning interventions and diagrams – and the public concerns to which they have given rise – may be rewritten as the history of successive justifications and critiques, as planning makes promises about and thus performs the ‘good’ city (Abram and Weszkalnys, 2011). In the modernist city, for instance, primacy is ascribed to what Boltanski and Thévenot call industrial worth, conferring value on functional land-use, long-term planning and technical efficiency. More recently, notions of the ‘creative’ and ‘knowledge-intensive’ city rely on heavy investments, on the part of urban policy and planning elites, in the projective worth of networked innovation, as an integral part of the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005[1999]).

Despite the standardizing efforts of modernist planning, plural orders of worth thus (literally) find their place in the contemporary city, and each condition a set of conventional urban engagements (Albertsen and Diken, 2001). The market worth of competition and exchange, for instance, conditions the commercial life of cities, infusing its shopping arcades and market-places; while civic worth, pertaining to the general interest and egalitarian solidarity, is inscribed in diagrams of town halls, assemblies and squares, often the backdrop to popular protests (Leontidou, 2006). More recently, visions and practices of urban ecology are shaped in reference to green worth – a novel grammar of the common good which, as Thévenot and others show (2000), emerged via environmental critiques of the 1970s in reference to the health, vitality and sustainability of ecosystems.

The language of orders of worth represent a first development in a new pragmatic sociology of moral and political ordering, limiting itself to forms of constructing commonality that involve highly generalized frames appropriate for public judgment and critique. Later on, in extending the model, Thévenot refers to such engagements as the ‘regime of justifiable action’ – contrasting this, heuristically, to the ‘regime of familiar engagement’ and the ‘regime of engagement in a plan’ (2007). While important, then, public acts of justification and critique do not capture the full variety of cognitive and evaluative formats by way of which urban actors – including planners, activists and ordinary citizens – engage the social and material arrangements of the city. Other forms of engagement, situated ‘below’ the level of publicity implied by justifiable action, may be equally important to the analysis of urban culture and politics.

Each regime of engagement, according to Thévenot (2014), entails a kind of information format that captures relevant parts of reality; a kind of capacity, or power, for maintaining personal identity and community; a kind of good associated with a basic confidence in oneself and others; and a kind of mutual extension which supports constructions of commonality of unequal scope. In justifiable action engagements, for instance – the most ‘publicly’ demanding regime of engagement – reality is grasped according to a cognitive format grounded on the conventional qualification of persons and things (orders of worth). Such moral conventions endow agents with the capacity to act as qualified persons, partaking in the specification of the common good according to a formalized use of language, oriented by demands of a public order characterized by generality.

The regime of engagement in a plan, by contrast, involves grasping reality as appropriate means or instruments to the execution of intentional action. While often taken as ‘common sense’, this form of engagement involves conceiving of the agent in specific terms, as an autonomous individual endowed with the capacity to project herself into a planned future. Needless to say, the very notion of urban planning relies heavily on this regime of engagement, including in the way public participation in planning is typically construed in terms of ‘stakeholders’ expressing their ‘interests’ in terms of available ‘options’. Far from being a neutral process, this form of mutual extension towards commonality – what Thévenot (2012) dubs ‘individuals opting in a liberal public’ – entails strong constraints on legitimate urban engagements, as highlighted also in critical discussions on technocratic forms of urban sustainability politics (Raco and Lin, 2012).

In the regime of familiar engagements, finally, the continued use of immediate human and material surroundings sustains a personalized and localized good: feeling at ease (Thévenot, 2007: 416). On the path of gradual familiarization, the embodied human being marks out particular points of attachment to an experienced milieu, turning such marks into personal clues that lend themselves to comfortable movements and gestures of a mostly non-verbal kind. More than ‘dwelling’, familiar engagements with appropriated things and inhabited places depend on sustaining dynamic practices and relations with a lived-in environment, urban or otherwise. Moreover, while highly personalized, this form of engagement also lends itself to a specific construction of commonality, based on sharing what Thévenot (2012) calls ‘personal affinities to commonplaces’ – a linguistic trope, a literary poem, or indeed an urban site of memory and emotion.

In terms of urban culture and politics, as noted, this expansion of the pragmatic-analytical frame allows for a fine-grained analysis of the moral work involved as activists navigate the uneven terrains of urban places and institutions. To get a sense of this process, consider the case of Thomas, a Copenhagen bird-watching enthusiast and – later on – an activist deeply engaged in the future of Nordhavnen. For many years, Thomas has been visiting the outermost part of this place, known colloquially as Stubben (‘The Stump’), long a feral, green and unplanned site of bushes and marchlands, an urban wild (Hinchliffe et al., 2005). He goes here to watch for birds rarely encountered this close to the city; and like his fellow bird-watching enthusiasts, over time, he develops an intimate familiarity with the place, its routes and passages, and its multiple forms of non-human life.

Over time, as planning starts targeting Nordhavnen for urban development, Thomas finds it increasingly difficult to sustain his familiar engagement in this urban wild. The land developing company tightens rules of access to Stubben, pushing him to adjust embodied habits and spurring him to engage in critical dialogue with municipal regulators. He makes these dialogues available on a new (web-)blog, alongside pictures of birds, addressing the bird-watching community. Thomas’ relation to the site is thus dramatically transformed: it becomes an object of planned engagement, a matter of defending his ‘interests’ vis-a-vis land developers; and in the process, he engages publicly in justifications for the common good, pointing to the green qualities of the site. In his spare time, however, he increasingly frequents other urban wilds.

This simple story – resonating, no doubt, with myriad similar urban experiences – makes clear how the pragmatic sociology of Thévenot allows for a rethinking of culture, activism and politics in the city. Practices of urban activist critique, it suggests, involve lived realities of familiar and place-based attachments, which must be rendered common in order to qualify for public judgments. Such processes, notably, are themselves generative of new urban publics, forming around shared concerns with specific commonplaces, such as Stubben (cf. Thévenot, 2014). Moreover, they entail a capacity to move between familiar, planned and justified forms of engagement – and, to handle the tensions that arise from the fact that such plural engagements render urban realities in different cognitive and evaluative formats, unequally suited to constructions of commonality.

Critical urban ecological engagements do not necessarily amount to a fully fledged urban social movement; indeed, in Nordhavnen, the situation is better described as one of ‘fragmented’ and ‘partial’ urban publics of shared attachment and concern (cf. Pellizzoni, 2003). We return later on to a more in-depth analysis of civic urban engagements with planning and sustainability in the Copenhagen case. First, however, we set the scene by sketching the moral-political grammars shaping planning visions for Nordhavnen, including its various compromises and constraints.

Nordhavnen: A ‘Compromised’ Urban Design

If, as Abram and Weszkalnys (2011) argue, the professional practice of urban planning can be seen to mediate central tensions in capitalist democracies, then ‘sustainability’ has increasingly emerged as the cultural-political territory on which to achieve such settlements. Since the early 1990s, the rhetoric of sustainability has been taken up in city policies worldwide, partly in response to new globalized governance coalitions (Raco and Lin, 2012; Sassen, 2009). As such, the language of sustainability has come to be invoked as a new standard of evaluation, by which urban planners justify their future-oriented interventions and developments for the city. At the same time, urban activists deploy the term as an objection, used to critique current situations and practices.

So far, however, it remains sociologically underexplored just how and why the framing of ‘sustainability’ takes on specific forms in different cities, and with what cultural-political effects. According to Raco and Lin (2012: 204), for instance, urban elites in Taipei adopt the consensual language of sustainability largely to diffuse long-standing conflicts over the city’s entrepreneurial redevelopment and the environmental concerns it generates. Such conflicts, between market and green forms of worth, are arguably constitutive of sustainability as a ‘compromised’ formula, containing within it different formats of moral evaluation (Thévenot et al., 2000). Yet, as we will argue for the case of Nordhavnen, exactly how such compromises work out, and what forms of critical urban engagement they engender, depend on situated urban histories and realities.

In the compromise, according to Boltanski and Thévenot (2006[1991]: 277), ‘participants do not attempt to clarify the principle of their agreement’; in other words, actors agree to suspend a dispute, but without settling it through recourse to a legitimate test. In this sense, compromises differ from a purely ‘strategic’ negotiation of interests according to power and authority, in that actors remain vulnerable to critique according to different orders of worth. While some compromises become solid due to their entrenchment into material arrangements, others remain fragile because of their composite nature. Far from embodying a ‘consensual’ post-political vision (Swyngedouw, 2009), urban sustainability, we argue with Boltanski and Thévenot, constitutes just such a ‘compromised’ cultural-political territory, full of ambiguities and critical inversions of worth, and with degrees of fragility and stabilization varying between and within cities.

Since the early 1990s, planners and policy-makers in Copenhagen have sought to position the city as an ‘eco-metropolis’, enacting a range of (comparatively) ambitious environment and sustainability strategies, including plans to become the world’s first ‘carbon-neutral’ capital by 2025. Such initiatives have been driven, in part, by an active concern for city image, or what Boltanski and Thévenot call the worth of fame: being internationally perceived as ‘clean’ and ‘green’ is seen to help the city attract people and investments (Blok, 2012). The Nordhavnen urban development project is set within this changing territory. In the initial framing of the project – elaborated between policy-makers, land developers, and architectural professionals – the overall vision is one of the ‘sustainable city of the twenty-first century’. Within this industrial vision of the public good, ecological challenges come to justify the need for new large-scale technical interventions. However, as a ‘compromised’ form of justifiable action, the rhetoric of ‘sustainability’ at the same time obscures certain elite commitments, operating ‘below’ the level of publicity, and characteristic of contemporary urban planning (cf. Raco and Lin, 2012).

First, urban planners involved with Nordhavnen routinely work on a widespread, albeit implicit, agreement as to the legitimate composition of ‘sustainability’, as evinced in the following excerpt from a planning document: ‘A sustainable city is not just about environmental responsibility, but also about value creation and social diversity.’ Here, sustainability emerges as a compromise between three orders of worth: a green order, where negative impacts on the environment are to be minimized; a market order, as the site adds competitive value to the city; and a civic order, where social diversity is projected as a measure of the strength of urban collectives. How tensions between these divergent commitments are to be handled remains unstated; indeed, in planning rhetoric, incompatibilities are downplayed via a language of ‘harmonious’ integration. Moreover, when tensions do emerge, these are not addressed primarily via public debate, but rather through forms of standard-setting that rely on particular types of authorized planning expertise.

In the language of Thévenot (2009), then, urban sustainability policy-making tends to assume the strategic form of stakeholder ‘governance by standards’. In official hearing processes on Nordhavnen, for instance, organized industry (market) and environmental (green) groups often share a common language, based on technical jargon and measures, which facilitates interaction without open confrontation (cf. Raco and Lin, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2009). Hence, environmental groups skeptical of plans to move the traffic-heavy container harbor of Copenhagen to this ‘sustainable’ site are forced, in hearings, to make their case primarily via reference to technical standards of air- and noise pollution. This process imposes heavy constraints on the ability of activists to either deploy familiar attachments or to spur public debate in reference to the common good.

Second, such constraints are solidified in the case of Nordhavnen by particular institutional relations between developers and planners. City and Harbor (By og Havn), the development company in charge of the project, is owned jointly by the Danish state and the municipality of Copenhagen, while acting as an independent agent, mandated to generate economic value via land sales in the new district. The revenue raised is then reinvested, in part, in the construction of a new public metro line. This political-economic construction embodies, at the level of material arrangements, a moral-political compromise similar to that of ‘sustainability’ rhetoric: the project generates land revenues (market worth) on publicly owned land (civic worth) – with the prospect of thereby contributing to the expansion of public transport (green worth). Again, tensions and conflicts involved in this power-laden construction tend to remain ‘below’ the level of public debate.

In sum, the case of Nordhavnen arguably illustrates a number of the wider tensions wedded with the increasingly dominant agenda of urban sustainability. As a cultural-political territory composed of plural orders of worth – market, industrial, fame, civic, green – the sustainable city remains a fragile and ambiguous compromise, both as an object of planning justification and as a target of activist critique. To solidify the needed compromises, however, conflict tends to be confined to the level of expert stakeholders engaging in coordination of plans and standards. On this point, our Thévenot-inspired analysis converges with the diagnosis of urban sustainability as expressive of certain post-political tendencies (Raco and Lin, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2009). Still, in contrast to this diagnosis, the pragmatic sociology of Thévenot allows us to maintain a view to the tensions and conflicts arising from such domination of the planning regime – and to search for alternative cultural and moral sources of critique and activism in the green city.

Civic Engagements with Nordhavnen: Picturing Urban Attachments

While the Nordhavnen planning authorities have taken great care to orchestrate official hearings and public meetings, the project has not been the subject of widespread media attention or intense party-political debate. Such a lack of overt public-political confrontation, however, does not imply a lack of civic engagements; only these engagements happen via other, less ‘visible’ urban geographies. This state of affairs poses methodological challenges for the urban sociologist: how to uncover critical civic practices which occur largely outside of what Thévenot calls the regime of publicly justifiable action? In this article, rather than public media or protest actions, we take hearing processes – part of the planning regime itself – as our point of entry for locating civic activism. By following the textual traces of concern and critique left by ‘ordinary’ people and non-governmental organizations within hearing processes, one discovers an extensive and dispersed web of civic activities, rooted in a diversity of urban lived realities in and around the site.

Rather than an urban social movement, this web of critical activities, we suggest, may fruitfully be thought of as ‘partial’ urban ecological publics, called into existence by the planning moment itself (Abram and Weszkalnys, 2011). These partial publics range from small-scale acts of ‘spontaneous’ activism to more ‘organized’ forms of civic engagement (cf. Leontidou, 2006); what they share, however, is a contentious commitment, rooted in habitual familiarity, to various ecological valuations put at stake in the politics of this particular site. In our research, we have located, and conducted interviews with, organized spokespersons of seven such grounded activist publics, spanning issues of wildlife preservation, recreational spaces, transport and energy. In what follows, we concentrate our analysis on three cases, illustrative of tensions arising at the margins of the planning regime and the various forms of critical moral work undertaken by activists.

While, in each of the three cases of civic engagement, citizens have come to exercise some level of influence on Nordhavnen and its future, they nevertheless vary, in important ways, in terms of their ‘success’ of political mobilization. Even when ostensibly ‘failing’, however, our main point will be that these activist engagements, in their different ways, succeed in opening up new public spaces and bringing forth conflicting valuations as to what should count as green and ‘sustainable’, thus pointing to alternative urban ecologies largely overlooked by the powers of planning. In each case, we stress how such critical effects depend on the way urban activists move between familiar and public engagements in the city; and these translations, in turn, entail an active engagement in processes of image-making, as legitimate cognitive and evaluative media for explicating and sharing particular site-specific sensibilities. More readily than the textual means favored by urban planning, we suggest, visuality lends itself to the particular form of commonality expressed in personal attachments to commonplaces (Thévenot, 2014).

‘Breathing Spaces in the City’

In accordance with our interview appointment, we meet Inger, a teacher by profession and chairman of the ‘Harbor Committee of Østerbro’ (Østerbro Havnekomité), in one of their wooden houses, situated in a quiet green area next to the water at the tip of present-day Nordhavnen. Hosted by a small number of dedicated citizens, the Committee act as legal caretakers of this plot of land, open to the general public, and committed to the pleasures of outdoor activities afforded by the site. Since its formation in the 1990s, the Committee has been an informal meeting place for citizens critical of the way harbor fronts of Copenhagen have increasingly been taken over by commercial office buildings. Now, the civic forum is reacting against the way Nordhavnen may be undergoing a similar fate.

On behalf of the Committee, Inger has long engaged in official planning and hearing processes. However, she has also played a leading role in more informal critical events, trying to document the site-specific qualities which they feel should be preserved. This includes drafting a so-called ‘visual hearing response’ entitled ‘Dreams of life in Nordhavn’, composed of photographs conveying its moods and atmospheres, and accompanied by text that justifies a particular cultural version of urban ecology:

To create life quality in a big city there has to be public spaces, which are democratic, just, sustainable and tolerant. In the future, society will make higher demands on feelings, the possibility of experiences, and for the use of the senses. There will be a need for breathing spaces in the city – places for active living and playing and places for peace, tranquility, absorption and reflection. ⁴

This text is followed by a string of aesthetic photos, depicting butterflies, birds, grasslands and relaxing people (see Figure 1), thereby serving to visually index the tranquility and sensual experiences afforded by the green qualities of this urban wild.

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Figure 1.

The visual hearing response (Harbor Committee).

The visual hearing response is notable for the way it blends familiar and justifiable formats of urban engagement – while also mimicking a well-known planning genre, that of the public hearing. Taken by fellow outdoor enthusiasts, the photographs communicate a sense of familiar engagement in the milieu of Nordhavnen, based on particular landscapes and habitual bodily clues and movements. In this way, the visual format signals how such personal attachments may be difficult to verbalize, and thus require a different medium of expression. Indeed, this point is reinforced in the choice of words, emphasizing the need for ‘feelings’ and ‘senses’ – itself hinting at a link between familiar engagements with the natural qualities of the site and the justifiable worth of inspiration.

More explicitly, the visual hearing response also serves to qualify Nordhavnen in terms of civic worth: the document links the site to more general issues of quality of public life in the ‘big city’ of Copenhagen. In a language of solidarity, it emphasizes the ‘democratic, just, sustainable and tolerant’ qualities of an urban green commons. Created by the Harbor Committee, the visual hearing response is endorsed by a number of grassroots non-governmental organizations, representing the voices of outdoor enthusiasts, ornithologists, cyclists and environmentalists. As such, the document arguably marks a civic-green renunciation of the dominant compromise of ‘sustainability’ deployed among urban policy elites – a point made explicit by Inger in our interview:

The biggest problem is the way the economy [of the project] works in relation to the metro. […] They need the money [from sale of land]. And this means there will not be many possibilities for green spaces and small parks.

Notably, Copenhagen grassroots activists mostly refrain from making this critique of the market during official hearings; they seem aware of the cultural-political constraints imposed by such ‘strategic’ stakeholder forums. Indeed, the very shape of the visual hearing response, which moves between familiar and justifiable formats, may itself be said to embody a critique of the domination of this regime of planning engagement. Like the public area tended to by the Harbor Committee – and likely to be sustained as an ‘autonomous’ site for several years to come, while planning slowly encroaches – the document thus marks an alternative cultural-political vision and valuation, more hospitable to a set of familiar attachments to urban ecology and urban wilds.

‘This Harbor Should Remain Untouched’

The municipality of Gentofte, a predominantly upper-middle class residential area, lies a few kilometers north of Copenhagen, along the same coastline as Nordhavnen. From her long-time home near the coast, Gerda – a lawyer by training and now into her 60s – has been following the new development plans closely, ever since learning of the prospect of having a large-scale container terminal and four giant windmills as visibly intrusive neighbors. As president of FOGUS, a local organization committed to preserve Gentofte’s heritage and cultural environments, Gerda has become a ‘coincidental’ urban activist, expressing her concern by submitting hearing responses and setting up informal citizen meetings.

The engagement of FOGUS in the planning of Nordhavnen centers on a number of concerns with the nearby Hellerup harbor, considered a place of domestic value for its cultural heritage and scenic beauty. Gerda fears that developments in Nordhavnen may irretrievably damage this familiar cultural landscape by altering the currents and flows of the passing waters. At the same time, giant cranes and windmills may negatively affect the aesthetic quality of views from the harbor and surrounding residential areas. Such adverse effects, she believes, are entirely unwarranted and amount to a form of expropriation, for which the planning authorities of Copenhagen fail to assume responsibility.

In attempts to make such concerns palpable to her fellow citizens, Gerda has engaged in critical work of image-making: using a combination of official documents and personal photos, she has assembled a view of the future waterscape of Nordhavnen, as seen from a position in Hellerup harbor (see Figure 2). Situating the viewpoint, these visuals seek to render explicit a sense of place-based concern, by juxtaposing genres of home photography, map-making, and a quasi-architectural visual language of abstract markings for the height of future buildings and the width of land expansion. As a format of urban activism, such visual collage renders a set of personal attachments to a commonplace (i.e. Hellerup harbor) in a format amenable to the forging of commonality.

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Figure 2.

A situated view of planning encroachments (FOGUS).

FOGUS deploys Gerda’s images as tools of mobilization during citizens’ meetings in the local area, where they serve as ‘counter-visuals’ to the official urban futures projected by Copenhagen planners. Transformed into public posters, the visuals thus acquire instrumental functions in an activist plan; while at the same time signaling a justifiable civic critique of the (in-)actions of municipal authorities. Indeed, according to Gerda, the failure of municipal authorities to themselves produce such visualizations exposes a set of wider problems in the legal and political procedures of planning:

There are many similar cases, where something is done without people’s consent. Where the necessary conditions for serving the common good are not fulfilled. Other considerations are given weight. There’s too much bulldozing, and people feel powerless. In the old days, politicians used to discuss matters in more concrete ways.

In fact, the activism of FOGUS did help bring about changes, in however situated ways: as public resistance to the projected giant windmills in Nordhavnen was picked up by a local Gentofte member of parliament in 2010, this part of the plan for a sustainable city of the future came to be legally terminated. To Gerda, however, this is not the main issue. She fears that urban authorities will keep neglecting the rights of citizens to have a say in matters of concern and attachment to traditional cultural landscapes.

‘A Special Place of Mixed Natures’

By the time we interview Thomas, the bird-watching enthusiast, he has stopped frequenting the urban wild spot of Stubben at the outermost tip of Nordhavnen. Throughout the 2000s, he recalls, this was a particularly good place for watching birds close to the city, as grasslands and bushes made for a wide variety of species, both resident and migratory. Even as the area would attract its share of fellow bird-watchers, Thomas – by then a geography student – enjoyed coming here alone, often in the early mornings. While small enough to be covered in a single walk of up to five hours, the area was still large enough to sustain an atmosphere of tranquility and solitude in ‘nature’.

Around 2008, as he becomes aware of development plans, Thomas gets together with five friends from the bird-watching community to form Stubbengruppen (‘The group of Stubben’). The group’s main organizing principle is a (web-)blog, on which they post information and photos on birds recently spotted at the site (see Figure 3). ⁵ The blog serves to share information useful to everyday practices; at the same time, it becomes a tool, intended to influence municipal authorities by making them aware of wildlife in Stubben. Such green qualities of an ‘oasis in the big city’, the group suggests, are of value to all Copenhagen citizens. The blog, in short, becomes a point of translation, linking personal affinities to planning interests and justifiable public engagements.

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Figure 3.

Blogging attachments to birds (Stubben).

As Thomas’ engagement in the planning regime intensifies, he start contacting other urban wildlife amateurs, in the hope that knowledge of different bird species, as well as various plants and insects, may sway municipal authorities to protect the site. It turns out, however, that the birds frequenting Stubben cannot be considered rare or endangered according to official biodiversity classifications. Instead, interest starts coalescing around the presence of green toads (bufo viridis), a species considered protection-worthy according to the European Union (EU) Habitats Directive. This official status elevates the green toad to important political standing: its habitats must now be maintained and cared for by municipal authorities and experts.

While not the main subject of familiar ecological practices and attachments to the site, for a while the green toad emerges as a wedge for forging new alliances among conservationists and activists in Nordhavnen. Its presence draws the attention of the large-scale Danish Society for Nature Conservation (DN), seeking to leverage the toad to argue the case for turning the site into a landscape protection area. Soon, however, such activist plans dissipate, as municipal authorities engage in technical accommodations. Two lakes are set aside for protection, and authorities prove forthcoming in altering care-taking practices at the site. Beyond this, however, developments proceed as planned.

The notion of biodiversity, in short, proves double-edged to the activists: while opening up planning engagements, it also entails a green-industrial compromise, in which certain aspects of urban ‘nature’ (green toads) attain value via expert processes of classification on a transnational (EU) scale. To the bird-watching enthusiasts, this state of affairs is far from a full recognition of the urban ecological qualities of Nordhavnen, which Thomas aligns rather to an inspired notion of the unplanned creativity of nature:

It was a special area. […] When they removed the large part with bushes and forest, it became more of a swamp, and this turned out to create good living conditions for lapwings to settle. It did not compensate for the previous bird life, but it is funny how new things emerge, and how little it takes to foster mixed natures.

For a while, Thomas continued his work to document such qualities, enacting small-scale opinion polls among visitors to Stubben meant to convey the values embedded in its lived realities. Now, he has given up this endeavor; as developments encroach and birds disappear, the location no longer affords a familiar sense of place-based attachment.

Conclusion: Between Familiarity and Urban Learning?

In this article, we follow urban activists as they move and translate between ‘personal’ and ‘public’ critical engagements in the green city, thereby contesting how such boundaries come to be drawn and redrawn in processes of urban planning. Invoking pragmatic sociology in general, and the work of Laurent Thévenot on regimes of engagement in particular, we analyze how activists engage with the future fate of Nordhavnen, a large-scale sustainable urban development project in Copenhagen. Here, spurred by the planning moment itself, we show how a range of civic associations and partial urban publics come into being, based on a heterogeneity of valuations, concerns and familiar attachments to this particular city-based ecology. Such engagements, we suggest, are crucial to the wider cultural-political tensions and ambivalences of urban sustainability.

In particular, in analyzing the cultural and moral capacities of urban ecological activists, we stress the role assumed by various forms of image-making, involving photography, drawings, mappings and websites. Such practices of visualization, we suggest, allow activists to express, share and render publicly visible a range of embodied attachments otherwise not easily accommodated in the semantic apparatuses of urban planning. Acting as ‘counter-visuals’ to the powerful future- and image-making regimes of architects and other urban experts, such pictures embody a set of alternative visions and valuations, related to the more-than-human life of urban wilds (Hinchliffe et al., 2005). As such, the visual engagements of urban activists serve to open up a field of tension around what should count as green and ‘sustainable’ in the city; a field of tension, notably, that seems hospitable to the particular form of commonality expressed in what, following Thévenot (2012, 2014), we dub personal attachments to urban commonplaces.

In this respect, our argument extends the suggestions of Hinchliffe and others in human geography (2005), who seek to grant cultural and political recognition to the multiplicity of relations through which civic associations and attachments to urban ecologies are woven. Their suggestion that, at present, urban wilds are only weakly connected to urban futures (2005: 645) resonates with our findings from Copenhagen – even as the Nordhavnen development project is invested with green ambition. Without prior formatting within technical expert categories, urban activists, we suggest, find it difficult to have their more proximate and familiar ‘natural’ attachments recognized and cared for. Urban sustainability emerges here mostly as a case of ‘governance by standards’ (Thévenot, 2009), constrained by the ‘strategic’ format of planned engagement among expert stakeholders (cf. Raco and Lin, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2009).

More explicitly than existing work on urban and other social movements (e.g. Jasper, 2010; Leontidou, 2006), however, we seek in this article to stress the creative moral work of urban ecological activists, as they seek to build new and alternative forms of commonality. Here, the vocabulary of Thévenot proves helpful in clarifying the critical capacities needed for activists to move and translate between plural engagements and formats of expression, in order to aggrandize intimate forms of ‘trouble’ up to public claims for rights to the green city. While, as Thévenot notes (2012: 18), this chain of translation is extremely demanding – because testimonies of familiar experiences do not lend themselves immediately to a public format – we have aimed here to empirically register some of the investments and visual genres by which urban activists nonetheless succeed in rendering their place-based attachments relevant to common concerns.

In a wider theoretical perspective, our case study is meant to suggest how Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology of moral and political ordering contributes valuably to debates on urban culture, activism and power. This contribution, we suggest, is twofold. First, the sociology of critique developed by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006[1991]) allows us to reconceptualize urban planning diagrams as sites of conflict and compromise among plural grammars of the common good. As a cultural-political territory, we show, the sustainable city remains an ambiguous compromise, caught between (at least) market, industrial, fame, civic and green grammars, concerns and valuations. The ‘compromised’ nature of urban sustainability as highlighted by pragmatic sociology, we argue, stands in contrast to an analytics of ‘post-political’ urban governance (e.g. Raco and Lin, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2009), by pointing attention to dynamic relations of contestation between planning and activism, shaped by situated urban histories and realities.

Second, and importantly, Thévenot’s (2007, 2009, 2012, 2014) subsequent expansion of this model into a theory of regimes of engagement, we suggest, allows for a comprehensive rethinking of the urban culture and politics of life together. In specifying different moral-political formats for engaging the social and material arrangements of the city, Thévenot allows us to analyze the situated processes of building ‘commonality in the plural’ in the city. This framework proves particularly important, we argue, in cases of urban dispute – such as those of environment, sustainability and ‘greenness’ – in which familiar attachments to specific place-based ecologies form an integral, and yet under-recognized, part of the conflict. Rather than anti-capitalist urban social movements or reactionary cases of NIMBY (‘not-in-my-backyard’) (Leontidou, 2006), ecological activism in the city, we suggest, is best understood as rooted in the lived realities of familiar and place-based attachments, concerns for which spur new urban publics into being.

On this note, we want to end by suggesting that French pragmatic sociology may contribute importantly to a novel conception of urban activism and politics as inclusive learning processes (McFarlane, 2011), more hospitable to a wider diversity of attachments to the city and its ecologies. As Thévenot suggests (2007: 420), the opening up of public debating spaces, particularly in disputes about the environment, calls for a renewed receptiveness to testimonies given in familiar formats of cultural expression. Such testimonies are not well accommodated by conventional planning spaces. In this context, what Colin McFarlane (2011: 92) calls ‘urban learning forums’ – established through activist engagements at the fringes of urban planning – may stand a better chance of promoting that ‘education of attention’ needed to make the affected familiar attachments of others matter in democratic processes of composing life together in the city (Thévenot, 2007).

What we analyze in this article, then, may be seen as situated experiments in such a new urban political ecology, organized around a set of informal and partial urban learning forums. The experiments converge on the notion that justice in the green city hinges on finding ways of building commonality, and modes of differing, which will be more hospitable to a wider set of personal attachments to more-than-human urban ecologies. The fact that such experiments remain fragile and fragmented suggests that more work lies ahead, practically and theoretically. As Thévenot argues in relation to ‘commonality in the plural’ (2012: 19), ‘once a more balanced view is gained thanks to the acknowledgement of the different grammars, we are better equipped to analyze the dynamical and creative crafting of mixed combinations’. Our discussion, we hope, may point the way for more sociological engagement with the new mixtures of urban ecology.