Abstract
This article analyses the design and outcomes of the research project Rewilding Lystrup, which involved a partnership with local authorities in Aarhus, Denmark, to merge two distinct processes: climate adaptation and the biodiversity transformation of a public park. Our key interest in the article is the potential offered by experimental participatory events to support the biodiverse transformation of public areas by creating micro-utopian entanglements of citizens and nonhuman organisms. The article will focus on three experimental participatory events enacted as part of the research project: (1) public dialogues and workshops, (2) the arrival on the scene of charismatic cows, and (3) pop-up events in the form of participatory playing. The article concludes that this kind of material citizenship is a powerful strategy for stimulating public engagement in building more biodiverse futures. The strategy thus materializes micro-utopian spaces where the importance of biodiversity can be rehearsed and sensed by local communities. In this way, a culturally transformative zone of dreaming while doing—or doing dreams—is enacted.
Biodiversity is under significant pressure all across Europe, and Denmark recently hit a new low in its reservation of mainland areas for wild nature. Other comparable countries have more wild nature than Denmark. One of several obstacles for creating more biodiversity is the lack of aesthetic acceptance of the uncontrolled messiness of biodiverse habitats. This article outlines a particular strategy for involving and sensitizing local communities in biodiverse transformations of a public area to counteract a functionalist attitude to nature in Europe in general and in Denmark in particular. Our main interest in this article is thus to explore the potential offered by what we call “experimental participatory events” (EPEs) to support the biodiversification of public spaces by creating scenes of entanglement between local residents and nonhuman living organisms. In other words, the EPE’s primary role in this study was to present and experiment with the introduction of an alternative to the functionalist discourse on nature that is currently prevalent in Denmark and many other countries. In this way, the article presents and analyses a highly contextualized example of public involvement in biodiverse transformations, but the strategy used is transferable to other contexts, not least because of its focus on continuous interaction with local competences and agencies.
We define an EPE as a particular strategy for facilitating potentially transformative processes in local settings. The strategy is participatory because it engages local community members and relevant institutions in the co-planning and co-production of material and local transformations; it is eventful because it acts through demarcated disjunctures that break with the routines of everyday life by creating alternative affective experiences; and it is experimental because it generates interdisciplinary and self-reflective interventions—often with unpredictable consequences—which, as part of the process, become visible and therefore available for measurement and analysis. The article will focus on three key instances of EPEs from the Lystrup research project to be introduced below, and will analyze and reflect on how and why the participatory events caused (or in some cases did not) particular effects in terms of the project’s goal: staying with the trouble of species extinction and creating a more entangled and biodiverse ecology.
The EPEs were used as a strategy to engage people from the local community in their local park, to stimulate learning about biodiversity, and also to pave the way for the creation of a park that involved local people much more actively, while supporting the transition toward a biodiversinesque aesthetics. In this sense, the EPEs were used to stimulate entanglement between humans and nature and between species. A fundamental premise in the engagement process was that any further activities in the park would depend on the active involvement of local community members. If interest and engagement proved to be lacking, the activities in the park would be limited to the demonstration of a biodiversinesque urban park design. In this sense, local residents’ involvement and participation was deployed not to decide on the theme and goal of the overall transformation (e.g., supporting biodiversity) but as a tool to invite local people to engage in, learn about, and entangle themselves with the further development of the new park and its creatures. In the words of Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons (2001), the aim was to move science into the agora and thus create a more unpredictable (but also locally embedded) space for research effects through this act of profound localization. Sixty-six percent of Denmark’s land is reserved for agriculture (the highest level in the European Union), and Denmark occupies a sad position at the bottom of the European countries league table for the designation of land for rewilding purposes—for example, with only 8% of the land area designated as Natura 2000. 1 By failing to use biodiversity and ecosystem services in broader adaptation and development strategies, Denmark puts itself at increased risk of adverse climate impacts as people and ecosystems become less resilient and increasingly vulnerable. Sustainably managing, conserving, and restoring ecosystems can enable people to adapt to the impacts of climate change and disasters (Lo, 2016). As the article will argue, larger numbers of biodiverse futures in concrete, sensuous form may be the way to go to change discourses and attitudes in Denmark.
The Scene for Biodiverse Entanglement
Lystrup is a town of some 10,000 inhabitants, located 10 kilometers to the north of Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city. A series of floods in 2012 caused substantial damage and disruption to infrastructure, private homes, and companies. This led the Aarhus municipality to decide on an alternative way to adapt to the problem of climate change. Rather than investing in gray infrastructure—for example, expanding the sewage network for flood prevention—it was decided that Lystrup should become a pilot project for the municipality using nature-based solutions (NBS) to adapt to climate change, including rainwater storage lakes, dikes, and ditches in urban areas in the town. NBS are living solutions inspired and supported by nature, which simultaneously provide benefits—environmental, social, and economic—and help build resilience. NBS bring more natural features and processes into cities, landscapes, and seascapes (European Commission, 2015). A total of 12 NBS projects were planned in Lystrup as part of the municipality’s climate adaptation plan (Aarhus Municipality, 2014), making this the largest contiguous climate adaptation project in Denmark at the time.
Depending on the habitats and species introduced, NBS per se do not necessarily improve biodiversity, but they offer a new opportunity to engage with the biodiversity agenda. Our interdisciplinary research team—comprising researchers from environmental economy, biology, and cultural studies—therefore approached the municipality about the possibility of combining NBS to the challenges of climate adaptation with the creation of habitats of increased biodiversity that could involve local residents in both the design and the implementation phase. Together with the municipality, we agreed on the case area of a large 5- to 6-hectare urban park, Hovmarken, in the middle of Lystrup for this experiment (Figure 1).
A GIS (geographic information system) representation of Hovmarken, Lystrup.
A rainwater lake, rainwater dikes, and ditches were planned there, with the objective of stopping, slowing, or containing water masses in the event of heavy rainfall. Traditionally, public works undertaken in green areas, such as the creation of ditches and dikes, are followed by spreading nutrient-rich topsoil after the work is completed and establishing traditional lawns. Green lawns were originally established to resemble European floodplain meadows and pasturelands, but because they are hybrids originating from the same few nurseries or seed mixtures, the result is the creation of monocultures of a few species with no equivalents within the native European environment (Ignatieva & Ahrné, 2013). Consequently, the lawns no longer contribute to biodiversity. Modern urban green lawns have for this reason been coined “green deserts” to express their low environmental value (Allen, Ballmori, & Haeg, 2010). In Hovmarken, we suggested that in the areas where public works were taking place, the topsoil layer should be replaced and instead a demonstration habitat established that was capable of flourishing in nutrient-poor conditions. On the mineral soil layer, we introduced sand, with vegetation and seeds taken from a disused protected sand quarry in the area. Here we planted perennials such as Pilosella officinarum, Anthyllis vulneraria, Campanula persicifolia, and Campanula rotundifolia, taken from the same protected sand quarry, in a sparse pattern. The objective was not only to mimic traditional pasturelands and floodplain meadows—important habitats for birds and insects that are under severe pressure across Europe—abut also to demonstrate a different ecological design principle for urban green parks (the biodiversinesque) as an alternative to the common homogenized picturesque–gardenesque aesthetic of urban parks and private gardens (Ignatieva & Ahrné, 2013). Without the nutrient-poor preparation of the soil, pastureland/meadow land plants would not be able to survive (Figure 2). To improve the aesthetics in the first years until the perennial plants were fully established, we sowed a mixture of native annual flower meadow seeds, creating a virtual sea of colorful flowers (e.g., Lotus corniculatus, Leucanthemum vulgare) (Figure 3).
The nutrient-poor soil ready for native plants to get a grip.
Colorfull flowers sewed for the first yar after the reconstruction of the park.
Before the finalization of our biodiversity-enhancing activities, we began to involve the local community in co-creating additional interventions in the park. We hoped to be able to create a “strongly contextualized” research project capable of creating “socially robust knowledge,” defined as knowledge production focused on acting on a problem (species extinction) and on stimulating discussion, engagement, controversy, and learning among relevant stakeholders (institutions, local residents, researchers) while acting on the problem (Nowotny et al., 2001). The process was thus designed with the twin aims of enhancing biodiversity and engaging members of the Lystrup community in the activities and interventions related to the park. The strategy of creating EPEs was thus developed and tested as an attempt to stay with and act on the trouble (Haraway, 2016) of declining biodiversity and increasing species extinction. We adopted this strategy in an attempt to create an alternative to the proliferation of dystopian representations of the disastrous effects of climate change on the planet across both fictional and documentary media genres. We chose to use EPEs because they present affectively strong, localized, live versions of micro-utopias, understood as concrete, small-scale actualizations of a potential future.
Theoretical Framework
Nature Regimes, Material Participation, and the Problem of Species Extinction
One of the theoretical premises of this project is that the meaning of nature has been shifting throughout history and that we have to consider the nature–culture interrelationship as entangled and interrelated according to the different nature regimes reigning in certain cultural, social, economic, and geographical contexts (Descola, 1996; Escobar, 1999). The prefix “re” in the rewilding initiatives that our project could be seen as partaking in could be misleading as it would suggest that it is possible to regain a form of original wildness that possibly has never been. Taking our point of departure in the three nature regimes pointed out by Escobar (1999), namely the organic, the capitalist, and the technological (Escobar, 1999), our project is to be seen as a reaction to and an intervention in the dominant nature regime in Denmark, which is capitalist and a result of a modern epistemic governmentality. Nature therein is considered a resource and a commodity that can be capitalized on, whether that happens through extremely efficient, mass-industrialized and monocultural forms of agriculture, as in our Danish case, or whether it happens through the development of new ways of seeing and objectifying landscapes that cultivate a romantic tourist gaze, which also commodifies nature as something that can be capitalized on (Urry, 2002). What we ask with our project is whether it is possible to shift toward more organic forms of the nature/culture dichotomy. Trying out an experiment of living with nature, instead of living on and looking at nature, is what we hope to achieve with this project.
In Staying With the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway discusses the much-used concept of the Anthropocene, a term coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stormer in 2000 to describe an epoch when “the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable” (p. 17). The Anthropocene is counterbalanced with the concept of the Chthulucene, a term that designates an epoch etymologically linked to the Greek chthonic (lower) earth gods and thus activates a new, large narrative of sustainable entanglement. This concept has fewer associations with human destructiveness, and it stresses the “sympoietic kinship” between species and the “possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance” (Haraway, 2016, p. 37), while confirming “on-the-ground collectives capable of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning, and of living and dying well” (Haraway, 2016, p. 51). It is obvious that urgent discussions on climate change have actualized the search for approaches to the human–nature entanglement that grant agency and independence to nature despite the uneven relationship of power between the two. Apart from the science and technology studies–based theories that Haraway (2016) represents, feminist and decolonial indigenous approaches flourished in these years (Braidotti, 2013; Lugones, 2010; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Zaragocin, 2018), as well as approaches that investigate affective and sensuous relationships to nature that go counter to the more instrumental versions of the human–nature relationship, for example, Jamie Lorimer (2007). These critical approaches that highlight the interdependency and innate affective bonds between species build on reflections from early, largely unacknowledged scholars in the field of environmental studies, such as Freudo-Marxist sociologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1956) and biologist Edward O. Wilson, whose work Biophilia (1984) is essential to understand that species diversity existed prior to humanity and that the tendency to attach to life and lifelike processes is genuinely human and something that will save humanity from itself, as Wilson normatively claims. Fromm—on whom Wilson builds his argument of an innate human attachment to nature and environment—terms biophilia as love of life that tends to evacuate the ambivalent nature of affective attachments. In Fromm’s theory, biophilia is a “total way of being related to the world,” and the Frommian love of nature means four things: (1) “an active concern for nature’s growth and prosperity, (2) responding to and meeting its needs, (3) respecting nature’s independence from human interests, and (4) knowing nature without dominating it” (Gunderson 2014, pp. 191-192). Fromm was thus an early frontrunner in the cultivation of ecological mind-sets that relativize and historicize the human–nature relationship adequately. Wilson took up the biophilia concept from a biology perspective but with an acute awareness of his own entangled relationship with the world he writes about, hence his auto-ethnographic writing style that is highly suggestive and interesting. Haraway’s (2016) Staying With the Trouble can here be seen as a later addition that invents the term Chthulucene to announce the return of a more entangled story of a better future: The Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen—yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant drama of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the Earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story. (p. 55)
In this way, Haraway enacts a narrative and epochal framework for thinking about how to “go on” to act in ways that support the creation of complex alliances between species, which stay with the trouble through telling new stories and assembling elements in ways that react to environmental disturbance, such as declining biodiversity, in sustainable ways.
Although biodiversity is under significant pressure all across Europe, despite international political aims to halt and reverse its losses (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2010; European Commission, 2011), Denmark figures at the bottom of the list in Europe in terms of reserving land areas for wild nature. Other countries with a comparable population density, such as the Czech Republic or Poland, have far more wild nature than Denmark. Also, The Netherlands, which is comparable in size but with triple population density, has 50% more Nature 2000 protected areas than Denmark. This lack of protected and high-quality nature in Denmark is a legacy of the numerous land reclamation projects to create space for agriculture that have taken place in Denmark between 1750 and 1970 (Pedersen, 2010). This was done by turning heath land into fertile agricultural land; draining lakes, moors, and fjords; and straightening rivers. A huge amount of “nonfunctional” nature areas was destroyed in favor of agricultural land that was institutionalized, financed, and systematized by the state, with strong bonds to actors with vested interests: the agricultural organizations and a private foundation funded in the mid-19th century that specialized in reclaiming nature. These projects were portrayed as an employment measure since the 1930s, in addition to increasing agricultural production. During the golden period of land reclamation from 1940 to 1970, the Danish state subsidized two thirds of all reclamation costs. By the beginning of the 1960s, an emerging political awareness of the environmental costs and the growing affluence in society diminished the economic role of the agricultural sector and undermined the motive of land reclamation as an employment measure, which led to a radical shift in 1970: Reclamation subsidies were stopped, and the state ended the state grants to the private foundation (Pedersen, 2010). Since the mid-1980s, public-funded nature restoration projects and subsidies to farmers attempt to reverse the damage done to nature, partly driven by the European requirement to restore water quality, but the scale and pace of making up for the damage to nature hardly reach the level of zeal seen in the land reclamation years up to 1970. Denmark continues to have the highest share of agricultural land in Europe and defines itself as an agricultural nation.
The European Environment Agency (2016) has recognized the main pressures on biodiversity and ecosystems in Europe as habitat fragmentation and change, pollution, nutrient enrichment, invasive alien species, unsustainable land use management, and climate change. A precipitous loss of native habitats has meant dramatic declines in populations of insects and birds. Because lawns cover a significant portion of open space in urban areas, our project is part of a move toward a biodivernesque process of design and management of urban green space that is unfolding across Europe and is capable of contributing to improving biodiversity levels. Although creating biodiverse habitats in urban “green deserts” is unlikely to help the particular species under threat of extinction, bringing other life forms close to people’s doorsteps may pave the way for the biophilia hypothesis—an intrinsic human need for deep ecology and intimate associations with the natural environment, something that is particularly seriously threatened in Denmark (Kellert & Wilson, 1993).
The traditional management of urban parks across Europe does not include biodiversity conservation as one of its objectives. Rather, parks are kept according to a traditional aesthetics of a well-groomed area modeled on an English Victorian park (Ignatieva & Ahrné, 2013)—with extensive, intensively managed lawns and flowerbeds, and trees of exotic origin, indicating order and the control of nature (Allen et al., 2010; Ignatieva & Ahrné, 2013). Nonnative exotic species do not support the presence of native pollinators and other fauna. Grass clippings are also left on the ground after mowing, and they act as a fertilizer, creating a hostile habitat for vulnerable or rare meadow flora and associated pollinators. These homogeneous lawns exclude the diversity of native meadow flora, and thereby food for a wide range of native insects; and native flowering bushes and plants that would ensure a full-season food source for wild pollinators are also lacking. When trees are sick or age, and acquire dead limbs, rot-holes, or loose bark, they are typically removed, including the root stump; as soil and grass take their place, what could have been a rich habitat for many species of animals and fungi, some of which are rare, is lost. Finally, traditional park management does not seek to create specific habitats for nature types under pressure.
The Aarhus municipality’s policy in the case of a park like Hovmarken is extensive management. It is mowed once in midsummer, and a few areas are intensively managed so as to allow for recreational activities such as picnics and football. The timing of the midsummer mowing is contrary to the needs of birds and insects.
Integrating biodiversity objectives into park management, in stark contrast to traditional urban parks policy, would comprise a number of radically different elements that would significantly change the aesthetics of the urban park. These would include the following:
The removal of grass clippings, which over time create a nutrient-poor habitat
Support for the insect and bird population by scheduling mowing once in spring and once in autumn and by introducing grazing animals—through selective grazing, excrement, and disturbance of the soil, these animals create a multitude of small habitats, which would attract a wider range of plant species, beetles, and butterflies, which in turn increases the opportunities for additional bird species to find food
The creation of nutrient-poor habitats by scraping off the nutrient-rich surface topsoil and introducing grassland species with up to a hundred different herbs, flowers, and grasses
Leaving sick trees and dead wood in situ
Planting native tree and bushes
Creating small habitats and places for shelter and nests
Ensuring the planting of flowering plants, bushes, and trees during the whole growing season.
The local community involvement part of the experiment was limited from the outset to activities that would enhance awareness, implementation, and management of the aforementioned items as particular ways of staying with and acting on the trouble of species extinction. Serious engagement in stopping the decline of biodiversity and creating interspecies kinship requires not just new forms of participation but also the acknowledgment of new practices and agencies as “participatory” and “participants,” respectively. The concept of participation has received increased academic interest over the past decades, both as a descriptive term that captures transformations linked to digital technologies (Bruns, 2008; Carpentier, 2011) and as an ideal or solution that can be used to mold institutions and authorities to be more relevant to individuals (Simon, 2010). As we planned and developed our research project, we were inspired by three important strands of current research on participation. The first understands the concept of participation as a political and democratic one (Arnstein, 1969; Pateman, 1970). It stresses the importance of creating situations of actual co-decision (here related to initiatives in the park) between community members and authorities. The second strand approaches participation as a process of putting together (or creating assemblages of) nonhuman, human, institutional, and technological components that have an interest in investigating multiple capacities, outcomes, and effects (DeLanda, 2006; Stage & Ingerslev, 2015). This line of thinking is highly inspired by both the materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) and the actor–network theory of Bruno Latour (2005) and John Law (2004). In this perspective, participatory situations are to be designed, approached, and analyzed as very specific and complex assemblages involving a variety of interests, motives, and effects.
The third (and related), material approach focuses on processes of materializing participatory and sustainable practices (Marres, 2011, 2012b). We have drawn on Noortje Marres’s work on material participation and sustainable technologies and her description of the potential of materialities to frame or code everyday situations as arenas for participatory citizenship. In a sense, the Lystrup park project is one big living experiment attempting to create and recode—in collaboration with local community members—the meaning and importance of the materiality of the park: the flowers, the water, the trees, the animals. It also aims to create processes of “co-articulation,” in which material practices are invested with a range of differing values that can coexist without conflict. A flower is not just a flower—it is a biodiverse flower. Taking care of it is accordingly a multivalent practice, with multiple values of local, affective, political, and sustainable importance. We have also drawn on Marres’s (2012b) concept of the “material public,” which focuses on “public engagement as an embodied activity that takes place in particular locations and involves the use of specific objects, technologies and materials” (p. 7). Our project is not just, therefore, an attempt to appeal to the traditional “informational citizen” as a politically speaking subject. Rather, our aim is to try to understand the creation, maintenance, and development of materiality—in this case, the park, the small free library, the voluntary groups—as a new, important form of everyday political participation and one that is crucial for establishing the “on-the-ground collectives capable of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning, and of living and dying well” that Haraway (2016, p. 51) speaks of.
Micro-Utopian Experiments
In Hovmarken, our challenge was to “sensitize” biodiversity as an affectively and politically involving topic. We had no charismatic flagship species like polar bears, lions, or pandas, so obviously capable of arousing sympathy, compassion, and empathy, to help us (Lorimer, 2007). Our material strategy therefore aimed to create “micro-utopian” moments, which might be capable of revealing or motivating forces, energies, and networks on which a different future could be built.
We therefore combined the idea of material participation with the concept of “micro-utopia,” as proposed by Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) in Relational Aesthetics. We also incorporated the idea of a “politics of possibility in the here and now,” as advanced by Gibson-Graham (2006) and Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy (2013). In short, we considered our living experiment, including various elements of local community participation, as a political act that might demonstrate on a tiny scale what a more Chthulucenique relationship between man and nature could look like. Our hope was that the experience of influencing the living experiment would empower the local people concerned, as they experienced their democratic power transforming a public place.
To analyze our experiment in Lystrup, we used Marres’s (2012a) four different perspectives—epistemic, discursive, ontological, and material—on the experiment as an instrument of public engagement. The epistemic understanding of the public experiment views it as a pedagogical device for the transfer of knowledge between science and its publics. In our experiment, the guided tours led by biologist Rasmus Ejrnæs, a public figure, played that role. Whereas the management of the park to prevent future flooding is quite established in local residents’ minds, the biodiversity theme is new and somewhat unknown as a political endeavor that implicitly criticizes the profit-oriented and functionalist practices affecting nature that are so prevalent in Denmark. The discursive perspective on public experiments touches on the publicity side of experiments in social and political life. In our case, it became clear that public participation in climate adjustment policies and in the general management of public parks has become a dominant municipal strategy. The ontological account of public experiments focuses attention on the specific experimental site as a place where socio-material relations are reconfigured in such a way as to counteract the strongly functionalist discursive framing of nature in Denmark. The experiment thus initiates new relations and orchestrates new beginnings. In Lystrup, nonhuman actors were introduced, in the form of calves. Species that are often experienced and positioned as less “cute” in this specific cultural context, such as insects, were also introduced and “nursed,” with insect hotels built and set up in the park by fourth-grade (10-year-old) school students from the local Elsted School during a learning module (Figure 4). Finally, the material account of public experiments understands them as “experimental installations [that] appeal to people’s senses, and, as material set-ups, they address audiences as embodied actors, allowing for playful forms of interaction” (p. 91). This sensitizing playfulness was achieved by adding short-term events to the longitudinal material changes taking place in the park. We held three workshops for local groups of scouts, who worked on inventing new games and activities for their fellow school students at the annual Day of Nature organized by the Danish Society for Nature Conservation and the Danish Outdoor Council in October 2016 (Figure 5).
Insect hotels built and set up by fourth-grade school students.
KFUM scouts developing biodiversity games, September 2015
From Nicolas Bourriaud, we took the idea that creating everyday micro-utopias can be a way to react against abstract utopianism in the form of concrete, material, and everyday actualizations of an utopian impulse (Blanes, Flynn, Maskens, & Tinius, 2016; Bourriaud, 2002). Unlike Bourriaud, however, in our experiment, we were not dealing with the relationship between artists and local residents, even if our biodiversinesque aesthetics do challenge public park aesthetics in Denmark. We were creating micro-utopian environments collaboratively through a series of interventions between researchers, local residents, and their park. Altering ecosystems to increase biodiversity as an alternative to municipal park management offered a possible utopian, (re-)enchanted, and alternative nature–culture entanglement between the nonhuman species in the park and local community members. The utopian potential offered by this “rewilded” landscape is the posthuman ethics of responsibility and care that it offers both as an experience and as a provocative encounter (Braidotti, 2013). Rewilding initiatives in formerly managed spaces such as public parks often provoke criticism and contestation of the ownership and caretaking of the park, and of the aesthetic norms of such types of landscapes. This is a sign that utopia is “centrally concerned with those changing interests, desires, identifications, and forms of embodiment that happen as people (and other forms of life) experience other ways of living.” (Cooper, 2014: 34) Utopias can accordingly cause both cultural attraction toward and repulsion from the new potential future (Levitas, 2013). Materialized micro-utopias thus create the possibility of materially encountering other worlds, other relationships, and other self-understandings and experiences of the embodied self. In that sense, micro-utopias are “events” that do more than derive their meaning from their historical context. Understood as events that can alter existing frames of understanding, micro-utopias are not inscribed in the world but, rather, open a world for new emergences (Romano, 2009). This points to a new form of entangled subjectivity toward the immediate ecology. Looked on as events, micro-utopias thus instill potentiality into the context; they offer space for the advent of a possible new world for somebody. At the same time, however, this potentiality can also throw into vivid relief the existing characteristics of the context (the institutions and persons with an interest in what the event renegotiates). We will return to this later.
Continuing our endeavor to allow micro-utopias to come into being, we draw on the work of the economist-geographer team Gibson-Graham, who throughout their publications (Gibson-Graham, 1996, 2006; Gibson-Graham et al., 2013) theorized the possibility of political action in the here and now, primarily through sustainable place-based initiatives and community economies. Our experiment connects to and has the capacity to encourage an emergent political imaginary of this kind at various levels. First, our project is site specific. It is local, but it is also connected with other places afflicted by climate change; and what we choose to do in that area is accordingly connected to a sustainability agenda. In Gibson-Graham’s (2006) words, it has the double “role of place as a site of becoming, and as the ground of a global politics of local transformations” (p. xxvii). Second, the experiment put on display an “everyday temporality of change and the vision of transformation” (p. xxvii). Third, there was the potential for the subjects involved in these processes to be transformed by the project. Gibson-Graham calls this a change toward “more ethical practices of self-cultivation” (p. xxvii). Fourth, our case has an aspect of community economy because of the informal group that was created during the process, which is an example of a collaborative economy enabling communal ownership of animals in public spaces. The biophysical commons, here in the form of cows, thus adds to the biophysical and cultural commons of the park (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013).
Experimental Participatory Events in the Project
The experiment in the park in Lystrup was designed in five main phases: (1) exploration and fieldwork (August to November 2014); (2) early engagement with key local stakeholders and institutions (November 2014 to May 2015); (3) public engagement and co-creation of future initiatives in the park through community meetings and workshops (May 2015 to October 2015); (4) implementation of initiatives and events (September 2015 to end of 2016); and (5) exit and project closure (2017). In what follows, we focus on three types of EPEs that took place in Phases 3 and 4: public dialogues and workshops, local implementation of the cow-grazing group, and pop-up events in the form of bio-tours and the development of site-specific play activities. To understand the mobilizing and micro-utopian potentials of these EPEs, we focus on three analytical levels:
1. The level of imagination: This analytical level focuses on the EPE in its virtual form: how it was conceptualized, how different parts with specific properties were prepared for assembly in the actual event with the aim of creating new futures and capacities (DeLanda, 2006), and how different individuals and institutions became involved in the process of planning how the future event would take shape. This analytical level includes the existing institutions and individuals with an interest in and the energy to engage in transforming the park in the future. This allows us to keep our focus on the level of imagination on the futurity of the event—on how the event-to-come or the event-not-yet-realized was constructed and prepared for.
The remaining two levels focus on the realized event and its effects but in two different ways: as revelation and as an invention of the context:
2. The level of revelation: By revelation, we mean that besides producing a range of effects on its own, the EPE allowed already existing institutions, social relations, elements, and investments in and around the park to be seen anew and acknowledged. As an example, a fallen tree not only performs change—a new vertical aspect of a tree in its “overturned” state—but it also reveals organisms already living in the earth underneath it or an existing set of strong personal relations between users of the park. These revealed dimensions can be intended or unintended outcomes at the level of imagination. Some revelations were already imagined as potential effects, and a number of them also revealed themselves in more surprising ways. In singling out this level of analysis, we acknowledge that the EPE did not construct the context ex nihilo; it made an intervention that revealed, framed, and condensed the existing dimensions in or truths about the context of the intervention.
3. The level of invention: The last level of analysis is on the new effects created by the EPE. On this level, the EPE is understood as a force of social and cultural transformation, with novelty introduced through disjunctures or nonhabitual experiences, encounters, and sensations. The questions guiding the focus of attention were these: What was created through the events that was not already there beforehand in some form or other? What material, relational, discursive, and affective transformations were not merely revealed but produced in and by the event? This level of analysis is important because the project did not just assemble existing parts of the environment. It also introduced new ones—new habitats, species, or natural organisms. On the level of imagination, these inventions were both intended and unintended. They produced multiple forms of temporary or stable effects simultaneously.
We are, of course, aware that the three levels of imagination, revelation, and invention are often hard to distinguish clearly from one another. We, nevertheless, argue that they can help to analytically clarify the more or less successful ways in which the reiterative processes of designing, representing, and presenting a local context intertwine in the EPE’s attempt to “stay with the trouble” of species extinction.
EPE I: Public Dialogues and Workshops
In Phase 3, we invited local residents to a public dialogue meeting in collaboration with the local community council. We reached out to local residents through various channels—including the local newspaper; announcement on the local community council website; announcement on the local Facebook group; posters placed at central meeting points, including the local library, the local sports facility, and the local supermarket; and by distributing flyers to all households within three rows’ vicinity of the park. The 2-hour public meeting at the local sports center attracted some 75 people, seated around tables in groups of between 8 and 10. After the welcome, we held a “check-in” round, where people were asked to tell us their name, why they had come to the meeting, and what they hoped the outcome of the meeting would be. The reactions and statements revealed a quite strong desire for more engagement with the local community. Numerous people complained that the park was simply a space for getting across, dog walking, and biking—not somewhere to spend time or interact. One of the most critical comments included the strongly expressed wish for reassurance that the potential changes in nature diversity would be permanent and not disappear after a couple of years. The recent floods had also facilitated a rather positive attitude toward the park transformation. People understood the changes as a way of securing the area and their homes against future crises, with the added benefit of building a more interesting nature environment. Based on expert input, people were then invited to discuss and note down their ideas, wishes, and resources so as to participate in transforming the park.
The concrete suggestions made during the public dialogue meeting included the following:
More nature (lakes, trees, flowering herbs, and grazing animals; nesting boxes for birds, bats, and insects; hibernation for amphibians; land art; and biological decomposition)
Stimulation of communities (a cow-grazing voluntary group, a bee group, beer groups, an annual maintenance day, and community gardens)
More places to spend time in (a grill area, shelters, benches, and a pavilion)
More focus on bodily sensations and experiences (exercise and fitness; a Tarzan track, a ropeway, and a sandpit; petanque; and pathways)
More edible nature (herbs, fruit trees, vegetables, berries, and beehives)
Dissemination of information about nature and biodiversity (a small free library, games and learning, dissemination on biodiversity and local history, and notice boards on wild edible plants)
The participants also expressed their desire for the long-term engagement of neighbors in the maintenance of the park and for agreeing on the level of park management with the municipality. Based on the clearly voiced interest during the public dialogue meeting to engage in, co-plan, and co-produce biodiversity-enhancing actions in the park, we planned for a series of two deliberative follow-up workshops to investigate the concrete extent of public engagement in biodiverse transformations and what kind of biodivernesque urban park they would want to invest themselves in. By offering interdisciplinary and self-reflective interventions, we looked for evidence of aesthetic preferences and longings for nature.
The first workshop took place in June 2015, followed by the second in September 2015. The workshops were open to all those interested in engaging actively in the co-creation process, and they were designed to progress toward planning and co-producing increasingly concrete actions and events while raising the prospects of a transformative experience.
The same people participated in both workshops, and they had all attended the first public meeting. Sixteen people participated, enabling an in-depth process and deliberation. Eleven of the participants were female and five male, evenly spread over an age range from 34 to 88 years and diverse in terms of education and income. Compared with the sociodemographic composition in Lystrup (Aarhus Municipality, 2016), the people attending the workshop represented all income groups in line with the local distribution, with fewer people in the low-income group and more people in the highest-income group. In terms of age, the voices of people younger than 35 years were not represented, and clearly more female citizens participated in the workshop than male. The area is predominantly Danish, with 95% of the population Danish citizens, which the workshop clearly reflected, with only Danish citizens participating.
After the welcome and starting dinner, we summed up the results of the public dialogue meeting and provided visualizations of concrete possibilities from elsewhere in Denmark, based on the ideas from the public meeting. The imagined purpose was to create the sense that change was possible and concrete and to allow everyone to engage in the concrete transformation processes. We then initiated discussion of the various ideas to gain an understanding of which ideas might materialize.
The second, experimental part of the workshop comprised a writing exercise, followed by a quantitative assessment of nature perceptions. The writing exercise was intended to understand the participants’ perceptions and associations of nature experiences, how a “natural” park looked to them, their affective connections with nature, and how the park could be transformed into a place that would allow meaningful experiences of nature. There were three writing sessions of about 8 minutes each, asking for a description or drawing of, first, a childhood experience of nature the participants remembered particularly well; second, their most recent significant experience with nature and what it meant to them; and third, a visualization of themselves in the park in 5 years’ time in an optimal world. Which of the many possibilities had been realized at this point? What was happening in the park on a particular day? How did the park look, sound, smell, and taste? At the end, some of those taking part shared their narratives of being in the park with their family and seeing a new and wilder nature grow, for instance. This produced the rather poetic experience of giving shape to a utopian future through these acts of writing.
The quantitative assessment, administered through individual questionnaires, aimed to understand the participants’ environmental paradigm, how far they would be willing to go in rewilding the park, and their willingness to participate in its transformation. The assessment revealed that the park was used frequently; most of them passed through it by bike or took a walk on a daily or almost daily basis, and a fair share enjoyed the views in the park. Asked what possibilities and experiences they and their families would like to see more of in the park, almost all rated as important, or somewhat important, experiencing edible nature, enjoying flowering trees and bushes, seeing birds, making space for nature, and learning more about nature. Other elements of nature that did not seem particularly important to some participants included watching amphibians, grazing animals, and having places for children to play. The majority also wished to see more insects, small mammals, and mosses/lichen. The participants were then asked which natural elements they would like to see in comparison to the present and to what extent. Four elements were wished for “to a great extent” by the majority of participants: a waterhole, areas with biodiverse flower meadows, wetland areas with marshland plants, and nest boxes for birds. Table 1 lists the rankings of nature-enhancing elements based on the number of participant responses of “to some extent” and “to a great extent.”
Ranking of Answers (“to some extent” and “to a great extent”) to the Question “Which nature-enhancing elements would you like to see established in the park and to what extent?”.
We asked the participants to indicate how far they agreed with a number of statements relating to the role of nature and biodiversity in society and in the lives of private citizens. The participants largely agreed that everybody has a shared responsibility to protect and enhance biodiversity and that it is not only up to the public sector to ensure this. Their responses indicated that public parks should be managed with the objective of biodiversity and that there should be minimum requirements for this, but they were split over whether biodiversity should be a more important management objective in parks than public preferences and use. Conversely, most of the participants did not agree that minimum requirements should apply to their own private gardens. Table 2 shows the spread of answers.
Agreement or Disagreement With Statements Relating to the Role of Nature and Biodiversity in Society and in Private Citizens’ Lives.
The workshop ended with a discussion of next steps as well as some individual statements of participants’ willingness to engage in the various activities that had been discussed and suggested.
The aim of the second and final workshop was to come to some decisions about what concrete nature-enhancing activities should take place and where, how to organize them, and what timeline to develop. Other purposes were to allow the participants to get to know one another better, to create a space for arranging how to proceed, to constitute working groups, and to consolidate public engagement with local partners. The 2-hour workshop was designed and facilitated in collaboration with the community council, the municipal unit responsible for park management, the municipal unit responsible for biodiversity and nature management (permits), the local office of the national conservation association (with experience in organizing grazing groups), the local library (a key player in the free library and knowledge dissemination/sharing initiative), and two microbusinesses (design of the free library and game development). Researchers from Aarhus University hosted and led the workshop in the local sports center. From the two workshops, there emerged a group of between 10 and 20 people willing to invest time and effort in transforming the park.
We proposed four thematic tables. These reflected the trajectories emerging from the first dialogue meeting and the first workshop. We also had a fifth “open table” to accommodate new ideas:
Grazing group and nature management
Free library/land art
Community gardens/edible nature
Areas to dwell and green playing concepts
Other ideas not included in the four trajectories
Where people chose to sit revealed a clear preference in particular for a cow-grazing group, a free library/land art, and edible nature. All of these activities showed a strong inclination toward functional activities involving nature, confirming the general perception of nature as being primarily functional and output oriented.
The three process events (the public meeting and two workshops) revealed a widely felt willingness by the community to accept biodiverse transformations of the park, as well as a desire for more meaningful communities and opportunities for spending time in the park and not just passing through it. Furthermore, a small group of still more dedicated individuals was partly revealed and partly formed through the process. In this way, key individuals for future developments in the park were identified. Importantly, the three events also invented—through processes of participatory co-decision—four principal future trajectories of action to secure biodiverse entanglements of species in the park. The first was a cow-grazing group, based on local membership and leadership. The second was a small free library in the park, focused on sharing books, seeds, and plants, and hosting insects, managed jointly with the local library. The third was the establishment of zones of edible nature in the park. This idea generated a lot of support during the meetings but never took off as a residents’ initiative. The fourth was to turn the “transit” park into a space for play, creativity, learning, and spending time. In the following, we will look further at two of these trajectories—the first and the fourth.
EPE II: The Arrival of the Charismatic Cows
One of the new events that developed through the public meeting and workshops was the formation of a cow-grazing group organized and run by local community members. Just as important was the arrival in the park of large animals. This idea of the volunteer group was mentioned early on in the process and mobilized a lot of interest, and this group is today independently organized and run by local community members. In 2015, four calves owned by the volunteer group and five calves in 2017–2018 grazed in the park. Members of the group pay for a share of the calves (40 shares in all) and receive a share of the meat when the animals are slaughtered after a year of grazing in the park. Even in the first year, the shares quickly sold out. In all 3 years, the release of the animals into the park has been an important local event, attracting a turnout of 50 to 100 people and media attention. The event mirrors a growing tradition in Denmark of “re-enchanting” life in the countryside, for example, the moment when cows are released onto the grass again after a long winter inside, leading to scenes of ecstatic “dancing” animals (see Figure 6).
A calf photographed and posted on Facebook by a local and characterized as “charismatic”.
In its prerealized, virtual form, the calves’ arrival in Hovmarken was imagined by the research team as supporting biodiverse development and maintenance of the park, spurring a renegotiation of what a public park might look like, what it could be used for, and how local communities could engage with a park and help establish a more formalized or institutional structure to ensure long-term community involvement after the end of the project period. The calves’ arrival was, in other words, imagined as an effective way of committing a group of local community members to the park’s biodiverse development. It was, in fact, seen as the most demanding and difficult task, because of the need for memberships, payment for shares, scheduled maintenance of fences, and so on. What was revealed in the process, however, was that the most demanding task was also the most popular. We believe this is so because the idea is somewhat familiar—Denmark is a country with a strong agricultural tradition—and easy to relate to because of the twin outcomes of biodiverse park management and meat for local households. Quite simply, a strong willingness surfaced among the workshop participants to engage in organizational commitments in combination with leadership competences.
However, the announcement of the plan to graze calves in the park also revealed conflicting understandings of what a park is and should be used for, and of the relationship between the city and rural areas. It stirred quite a lot of bewilderment and confusion. Some neighbors argued that they had left the countryside precisely to avoid living close to animals and insects and the smells associated with them. On the Lystrup Facebook page (with approximately 8,400 members), discussions played out concerning the possible problems town residents living near the animals would face and the community’s (perhaps lack of) ability to take care of them collectively. The event in waiting thus revealed a fear of flies and of irresponsible local youngsters harassing the calves. The latter was based on previous experiences of mistreatment of grazing horses in a nearby area. In this way, the introduction of a citizen-led group both stimulated the utopian vision of a more connected and engaged community and highlighted a lack of local confidence in their ability to make it work.
It was, however, striking how the actual release of the calves into the park in 2016—as a lively nonhuman factor—changed the affective level of engagement and interest both in the group and in the research project. Also striking was how the grazing calves became a proof of the community’s ability to produce a different collective future. The community seemed rather divided about the group at the beginning of the process, but today an atmosphere of affection toward the animals and the group seems to have become more prevalent. One way of tracing this effect is to study the local community Facebook group, which was until the release of the calves not particularly engaged with the project. On the day of the release, one resident posted pictures of the four calves and a group of onlookers, and wrote, Simply a fantastic initiative. 4 happy calves as lawnmowers and later delicious steaks. In the middle of Lystrup—GREAT that this is possible. A huge thank you to the locals, the board, Aarhus University, Aarhus municipality and many more. It will be a pleasure to walk through this neighbourhood.
And community members continue to share images and videos of the calves online. Here the calves take up a substantial part of the visual documentation of the park. In one comment, a community member articulates very directly the affective and nonhuman charismatic qualities of the animals: “These Dexter cows are very impressive, incredible with all the beautiful colors. What a charismatic and massive presence.” The liveliness, innocence, and calmness of the calves thus stimulated the formation of a caring public affectively focused on collectively protecting and nurturing the animals, practicing an environmental and community-engaged ethics of care.
The visible communication on the Facebook page is, of course, not sufficient to verify that the general local perception of the project and biodiversity has changed, but it nevertheless indicates that local interest and positive affects seemed to increase with the advent of animals in the park. A number of local citizens clearly used social media to acknowledge the material transformation of the park and the new atmosphere created around the cows. Other community members, however, were aware of potential hazards related to signs of animal illness, problems with the fences, and the risk of children throwing stones at the animals (and the possible need to form a local group to keep an eye on the animals). However, the initial reservations expressed online seem to have developed into a more affectionate tone and a shared desire to keep the animals protected and the material setting in a good condition. On the Lystrup Facebook page, people continue to share images, monitor the animals’ well-being, and post questions about them, and the group also encourages people to help with minor tasks like filling drinking bowls with water. In both years, the removal of the now fully grown calves prompted expressions of sadness and longing: One resident posted an image of a toy cow looking at the now empty hill where the calves had grazed, thus introducing a new set of affects by expressing a playful longing for nonhuman company and relationships in the park.
The event of releasing animals into the park brought about a change in its communicated affective ecology (Davidson, Park, & Shields, 2011) and, furthermore, became the starting point for a new, institutionalized “community of practice” (Wenger, 1998), collaborating to create and uphold a material experiment in sustainable meat production. The event and the grazing group are clear examples of “material citizenship” in that community members collaborate to bring about sustainable change by engaging in tangible processes of fence maintenance, creating watch rotas, filling drinking bowls, arranging group weekends, and so on. The group can thus be understood not as composed of controversial idealists but, rather, as comprising first movers who through their project triggered a collective outburst of interspecies care. What the research team had imagined during the process meetings as a most difficult and controversial project thus revealed a great deal of commitment and desire for materially transformative communities and also a local, perhaps even a Scandinavian ethos of abiding by a body of rules and a sense of order, even during these renegotiations of the role and function of the park. Furthermore, the group introduced a new political utopian practice that, rather than being based on abstract knowledge about biodiversity, proved to be based on a very practical experience of how to create an assemblage of place, community members, nature, and animals with positive biodiverse effects. In that sense, the event and practices of the group are more about doing, living next to, and sensing/documenting biodiverse entanglements and changes than about knowing and talking about them.
Our micro-utopian experiments also showed that a different sense of time could be installed. Agrarian time thus suddenly entered urban space. Stine Krøijer (2010) describes how multiple times can coexist simultaneously and how the future is traceable as a latent active time in the present. In a sense, the rearrangement of the park brought new cyclical rhythms to the fore and also made clear how urban time is faster and more reluctant to wait than rural time. An example was the rather long process of waiting for native species to grow in the nutrient-poor soil. This did create some local impatience. When will the park be beautiful again? Why is the municipality not fixing this immediately? But it takes time for biodiversity to develop. Although the uprooting of a dying tree, the installation of insect hotels by local schoolchildren, and the idea of having cows in the park following an annual cycle were, on one hand, important landscape design experiments in their own right, their micro-utopian aim was also to frame and create the acceptance of slower, cyclical time processes. As micro-utopias, these were designs for the sensation of another, more sustainable understanding of time to arrive in the community. The sensation of a deeper time was staged through the cows in their cyclical movement through being put out to pasture, their slaughter (in a meat-focused society such as Denmark), and their return in the form of a new batch of cattle, as well as in waiting for the native floral species to grow and saturate the environment.
EPE III: Guided Walks and Site-Specific Playing
Whereas the establishment of the grazing group and the free library were the primary long-term participatory projects in the park, a considerable amount of short-term learning and playing engagement also took place within the project period. As an example, two students from Aarhus University’s Experience Economy program, Simone Hougaard and Cecilia Clemmensen, developed a biodiversity game for the park (hosted in the small free library). They also designed a learning event together with one of the local schools (Elsted School), where fourth- to sixth-grade students learned about biodiversity and designed and set up their own insect hotels in the park. In this section, we will present and analyze two additional activities realized in our park: the biodiverse guided tours given by biologist Rasmus Ejrnæs in August 2015 and June 2016 and the Day of Nature on September 13, 2015, when scouts from Lystrup, Elev, and Elsted invented site-specific prototype outdoor activities and games for local children to try out.
The guided tours in the park were popular and on both occasions attracted some 50 local people. These were people who we assume “knew” the park but wanted to rediscover it in its “enchanted” form, or they just wanted to find out more about what was going on and thus perhaps “learn to be affected” by the changes (Latour, 2004). The guided tours were imagined primarily to communicate the site-specific biodiversity initiatives and potentials in the park. One could say that the tours were mostly planned to transfer knowledge about biodiversity as a new global challenge that was also relevant for citizens of Lystrup. Tour guide Rasmus Ejrnæs took local community members around the park to particular sites: the nutrient-poor soil area, the artificially created lake, the uprooted tree. The tour very much incorporated and launched the elements of “sight sacralisation” enumerated by Dean MacCannell in his book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976/2013): naming, framing, enshrinement, and mechanical and social reproduction. The naming of particular native species on the nutrient-poor soil has its own sensuous and poetic quality: In kællingetand (“bird’s foot trefoil”), kransnålalger (“charophytes”), vandaks (“pondweed”), vejbred (“fleaworts”), and skeblad (“narrowleaf water plantain”), you can almost taste the names—rare, unknown, and full of aesthetic delight. The framing and enshrinement strategy was apparent in the contrast Ejrnæs drew between the liveliness of the park rewilding initiative and the biological deserts of “normal” Danish public parks composed of lawns: To rewild by creating fertile, nutrient-poor areas as well as water environments without fish is to provide perfect environments for creating life by hosting threatened butterflies, insects, and native species. Ejrnæs also approached the utopian dimension of the park by showing off the clear water in the lake, the slow-growing native species, and the buzzing insect life on the uprooted tree and in the insect hotels. The mechanical and social reproduction of this event is very evident on the local Facebook pages, where many photos of the biodiversity in the park are posted. Ejrnæs himself continues to inject energy into the project by posting photos and short texts giving updates on the biodiverse status of the park, so unlike other parks in Denmark.
Although knowledge transfer was the imagined outcome of the guided tours—and a sharpened eye as well as language for new species were acquired—the enthusiastic local response proved to be an unintended by-product of the tours. The sheer number of people taking part in these events took us by surprise. What was revealed here was an endorsement of a kind we did not expect—a genuine interest in the park. Adding to this, the contagious enthusiasm mediated through Ejrnæs’s words, gestures, and, later, postings was important in creating and strengthening engagement. The message seemed to be that this area is worth noticing, taking care of, showing to others. Touring is typically something we do as tourists or visitors to new and unfamiliar places, not in areas we know well. A guided tour to our own local area is thus in itself a newly invented form; on one hand, it takes us through familiar territory with a new eye looking for emergent signs of biodiversity and re-enchanting the homely landscape, but on the other, it allows us to follow an enthusiastic body (the guide) through a landscape and thus to become attuned to the landscape in new ways. The tour is thus a way of tasting the new entangled relationship—a relationship also nurtured in postings of photos tracking the life of animals and plants in the area.
As part of the project, we put on a public event for National Nature Day in September 2015. Our imagined objectives were (1) to develop site-specific play activities intended for the park, (2) to raise awareness of parks as local nature sites and local natural resources among families with young children (a group less represented at the public meeting or workshops), and (3) to ensure that the play activities and games increased the understanding of biodiversity among both the young scouts who were developing them and the local children who tried them out. We organized three workshops with local scouts in August/September to develop the games. The immediate concrete output was different play concepts. Three games that emerged from the process were the Bird War (an individual competitive game focused on stealing eggs from others’ nests), the Medicine of the Vikings (a group activity based on collecting plants to secure the survival of the tribe), and the Treasure Hunt (a biodiversity quiz using the smartphone as GPS). The latter was created by the older scouts (aged 16-19 years). The families (about 80 people) who showed up on National Nature Day tried out the games even though the rain was pouring down.
These play concepts were imagined as a co-created process by and for local people, with the twin aims that they might (re)discover the park as a rewilded landscape to be used in new ways and also be stimulated to (re)imagine the role and importance of play. In real life, we had to network hard to gather enough scouts and their leaders to develop the concepts and try them out at the park. We expected this development phase to be easier than it actually was. What this work revealed on Nature Day, however, was the astonishing support from volunteer organizations in the local community. Strong bonds of solidarity, local engagement, and loyalty to local initiatives came to the fore. These volunteers could be said to invest their time and effort in the local community through “serious leisure”: a specific type of activity in between work and casual leisure. Serious leisure is characterized as voluntary and providing few or no economic benefits for the people engaged in it, but also as being taken very seriously by the volunteers as an important source of self-fulfillment, personal identity, and community building (Stebbins, 1982). What was invented was obviously the co-created play activities and games presented, but it also included local competences to design play concepts and experiences among the scouts. In this way, “the desire to learn,” which is important for volunteers engaged in serious leisure, was acknowledged as a key component of this participatory involvement in biodiversity through play (EuMon, 2008).
Conclusions
Adaptation to climate change by public authorities is underway across Europe from national policies and regulations to local implementation by municipalities and regions. Increasingly, nature-based solutions are integrated into adaptation plans and measures such as creating natural water retention areas in parks and on farm fields to protect against urban flooding; restoring wetlands to protect against sea-level rise and storm surges; or increasing permeability in urban areas by introducing more green infrastructures to decrease urban heat island effects during excess heat waves and pluvial flooding. The case in Lystrup is an example of using a public urban park to retain and slow down water flows during extreme rain events to protect property values and infrastructure. Originally, the adaptation plans by the Aarhus municipality omitted any notion of biodiversity or public co-creation, which is characteristic of the traditional adaptation measures in Denmark and across Europe. Most adaptation measures that apply nature-based approaches to date disregard the nature quality that the measure could be a catalyst for and forgo the opportunities to engage the public in building more biodiverse futures. The approaches for preparing EPEs can be easily implemented outside Denmark and adapted to local circumstances in other countries for supporting the biodiversification of urban and rural areas.
In the Lystrup case, we aimed to create and sensitize local communities to engage in biodiverse transformations and entanglement between species in order to counteract a pronounced functionalist and capitalist nature regime in Europe in general and in Denmark in particular. This was done through a particular strategy of devising a range of EPEs through which more biodiverse futures could be imagined, felt, and co-produced in collaboration with local community members and stakeholders. We believe we succeeded in producing and cultivating cultural and local knowledge and affective belonging to this small piece of land, which could be the recipe for the transformation of similar territories under strong influence of modern epistemic and capitalist orders. Similar experiments in predominant capitalist nature regimes could be done taking into consideration the normal level of participation of civil actors in communal activities, the engagement of neighboring institutions and associations (schools, libraries, organizations), and the willingness of the authorities to cooperate and distribute initiative. Both the research process and its outcomes took shape as EPEs: Public meetings and workshops are EPEs that foster new concrete designs that actually materialize the micro-utopian vision of interspecies kinship in both long-term schemes (e.g., the grazing group and the free library) and short-term, everyday experiments (e.g., guided walks and play activities). The EPEs were intended to be the means through which both the biodiversity agenda and the new interspecies life in the park would be realized. An important finding in the project was that the EPEs attracted audiences and tended to become the goal of the whole project, whereas the biodiversity agenda was only a by-product, at least among the adult user groups. We were more successful in attracting younger groups to interspecies exchanges with tiny animals and native plants. Through these EPEs, both community members and organizations gained the opportunity to immerse themselves in new forms of material citizenship that indirectly support a biodiverse development. The goals of installing a more organic nature regime, living with other species, and “staying with the trouble” were indirectly attained, although the biodiversity agenda presents a break with the capitalist view of nature in Denmark to such a degree that—unlike the calves—it cannot become the subject of love at first sight.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the fruitful collaboration with Municipality of Aarhus, Aarhus Vand, the Danish Society for Nature Conservation, Counterplay, Habitats, Lystrup library, Lystrup-Elsted-Elev Council, KFUM-Scouts from Lystrup-Elsted-Elev, Bureau Detours, The Libraries of Aarhus Municipality, Simone Hougaard & Cecilia Clemmensen, Anders Boisen students of Experience Economy, ARTS, AU, Dina Matzen during the planning and execution of the demonstration and research project activities.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was financed by Aarhus University Strategic Research funds from DCE for the project “Permeable Green City Aarhus - Combining life policies, biodiversity, citizen empowerment and sustainable urban drainage to create an ecologically and socially resilient city”.
