Permits to burn: weeds,slow violence,and the extractive future of northern Australia

ABSTRACT

This essay narrates the ‘slow violence’, or creeping environmental harms taking place within contemporary environmental governance. It centres on a tall, dense and highly flammable introduced pasture species Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), which was listed as a weed across north Australian jurisdictions in 2008. Since this time, it has continued to expand its reach across the Northern Territory (NT). With a potential invasion range of over 380,000?sqkm², this grass is a serious threat to many more-than-human worlds in the north, including Indigenous-led and Indigenous-owned environmental service economies and multimillion-dollar projects engaged in savanna fire management for carbon credits. Drawing upon fieldwork and interviews with a range of public servants, landholders and researchers in the NT between 2015 and 2018, this essay demonstrates how environmental governance is being undermined through specific institutions and practices. Through an ethnographic reading of weed management documents, including several legal permits to grow Gamba grass within the NT’s ‘eradication zone’, this essay narrates the diverse threads of a pressing ‘slow’ disaster. The unfolding story of Gamba grass, we suggest, is instructive for those seeking to understand the present and future of resource extraction or ‘extractivism’ in Australia and elsewhere.     

Seeing the trees for the (urban) forest: more-than-human geographies and urban greening

ABSTRACT

Urban spaces have long been places to think through human relationships with nature. The recent shift in thinking from urban green space as outcome to urban greening as a process provides an opportunity to consider more explicitly how we engage with more-than-human worlds in urban spaces, in more differentiated ways, and for what ends. In this paper we contribute to growing interest in improved urban sustainability and well-being by bringing human geography perspectives on more-than-human worlds into conversation with the literature on urban greening. Drawing on key examples oriented around urban trees, we consider two main themes: sensibilities and belonging. We argue for an understanding of urban places as collective achievements that not only involve knowing and living with diverse humans and non-humans but also involve the re/making of sensibilities and belongings. Through this paper, we aim to open dialogue about how more-than-human geographies might help us to differently understand urban trees, contemporary urban greening, and people–plant relations.     

The politics of greening unceded lands in the settler city

ABSTRACT

Urban greening is a buzz term in urban policy and research settings in Australia and elsewhere. In a context of settler colonial urbanism, like Australia, a first fact becomes clear: urban greening is always being practiced on unceded Indigenous lands. Recognising this requires some honest reckoning with how this latest urban policy response perpetuates dispossessory settler-colonial structures. In this paper, we listen to the place-based ontologies of the peoples and lands from where we write to inform understanding the city as an always already Indigenous place – a sovereign Aboriginal City. In so doing, the paper tries to practice a way of creating more truthful and response-able urban knowledge practices. We analyse three distinct areas of scholarly research that are present in the contemporary literature: urban greening and green infrastructure; urban political ecology; and more-than-human cities. When placed in relationship of learning with the sovereign Aboriginal City, our analysis finds that these scholarly domains of urban greening work to re-organise colonial power relations. The paper considers what work the practice and scholarship of ‘urban greening’ might need to do in order to become response-able and learn to learn with Indigenous sovereignties and ontologies.     

Imagining the Dirty Green City

ABSTRACT

The green city is being elevated to the status of a self-evident good in the theory and practice of urban sustainability. A large literature documents the linked environmental, economic and well-being benefits associated with vegetating urban systems to maximise the ecosystem function. Contemporary urban greening seeks to challenge attempts to expel nature from the city in a quest for order and control. However, by imagining nature as a new mode of urban purification, much effort in the name of the green city inverts and reproduces dualistic understandings of natural and built space. In response, we disrupt the normative dialectics of purity and dirt that sustain this dualism to expose the untidy but fertile ground of the green city. We draw together Ash Amin’s four registers of the Good City – relatedness, rights, repair and re-enchantment – with the artworks of the Australian visual ecologist Aviva Reed. Our work seeks to enrich the practice of more-than-human urbanism through ‘dirt thinking’ by imagining the transformative possibilities in, of and for the dirty green city.     

Planning with complexity—how do we deal with stakeholder and spatial heterogeneity in land use planning?

Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(2):23–37, 2005

As a reaction to the 'top-down 'approach to rural development during the 1970's and 1980's, and in line with the increased focus on ‘putting farmers first’ (bottom-up) through local participation, new and integrated approaches to natural resource management (NRM) have been launched to generate sustainable development. This paradigmatic change has greatly influenced land use planning. Some of the implications involved in this change are discussed in this paper and based on empirical data from Tanzania and Botswana. In this paper we will discuss three critical issues related to land use planning for sustainable NRM: the complexity of livelihood strategies at the local level, the role of different stakeholder interests and the importance of spatial scale considerations. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding that the different and often erratic resource endowment of the rural households influences the strategies these households follow in order to meet their overall needs, rather than ‘simply’ maximizing agricultural yields. Furthermore, the importance of spatial scale, in relation to both different stakeholder interests and their needs will be discussed. The paper highlights the need to take community heterogeneity into consideration in land use planning if sustainable NRM is to be achieved in the future.     

Urban re-generations: afterword to special issue on the politics of urban greening in Australian cities

ABSTRACT

‘Urban re-generations' is written as an afterword to the special issue of Australian Geographer on ‘The Politics of Urban Greening in Australian Cities'. The collection prompts a deep questioning of reparative and regenerative work associated with greening, green spaces and green infrastructures. The climate-driven 2019-2020 bushfire crisis and COVID-19 have amplified the visibility of the more-than-human connectivity of our cities and the deep underlying structures of social and environmental inequity underpinning a variety of urban green spaces and agendas. Inspired by the articles in this special issue, the afterword explores how we might call back the grammars and practices of regeneration from their service to the neo-liberal, settler-colonial city and instead nurture reparative de-colonial practices that aid in the collaborative work of re-composing, becoming into better relation with, and working in modes of situated historical and cultural difference, with green and just cities.     

Challenging sub terra nullius: a critical underground urbanism project

ABSTRACT

Underground urban development is rapidly expanding. Like all forms of ‘development’, utilising the underneath of cities can present a range of possibilities and problems. Much underground urban development, however, has been conceptualised through a technical rather than a broader social lens. This is problematic, not least as these developments are usually financed with public money, while their governance is often realised through complicated and opaque public–private partnerships. In this context, the urban underground is often present as sub terra nullius: an epistemologically blank slate waiting to be exploited with the necessary technology and funding. In this paper, the author presents four analytical strata to help us to rethink how urban undergrounds are conceptualised and developed. Drawing on examples from Australia, she presents how we need to appreciate the more-than-human geographies of the underground (stratum 1); critically understand the dynamics of volumetric dispossession (stratum 2); question who owns the underground and how (stratum 3); and rethink how the underground is accessed (stratum 4). By engaging with these themes, we can explore ways to move subterranean urban development away from a technoscientific tunnelling decision-making process to one that engages with the social, political and economic implications of urban infrastructural projects.     

Using Multiple Methods to Understand the Nature of Relationships in Social Networks

Effective natural resource management (NRM) often depends on collaboration through formal and informal relationships. Social network analysis (SNA) provides a framework for studying social relationships; however, a deeper understanding of the nature of these relationships is often missing. By integrating multiple analytical methods (including SNA, evidence ratings, and perception matrices), we were able to investigate the nature of relationships in NRM social networks across five service types (e.g., technical advice, on-ground support) in our case study region, Daly catchment Australia. Only one service type was rated as highly associated with free choice in establishing relationships: technical advice/knowledge. Beneficial characteristics of NRM organizations, such as collaborative and transparent, were associated with the presence of freely chosen relationships between organizations. Our results suggest a need to improve our understanding of organizational roles and characteristics, in particular for use in applied NRM contexts, such as network weaving or disseminating information.     

Towards good governance of urban greening: insights from four initiatives in Melbourne,Australia

ABSTRACT

Urban greening can enhance sustainability and liveability, through conserving biodiversity, mitigating urban heat and enhancing people’s health and wellbeing. However, urban greening is complex, as it occurs in unique ecological settings, with social, cultural and economic factors shaping the forms it takes. This raises questions about the governance of urban greening, including what counts as ‘good governance’. In this paper, we first outline principles of good governance drawn from the natural resource management context. We then present four urban greening initiatives from Melbourne Australia representing different scales, land tenures and organising structures. Following this, we analyse how governance of the four initiatives addresses good governance principles. Our analysis shows that there are diverse ways in which urban greening can be practiced and governed. The importance of more ‘informal’ initiatives should not be discounted relative to formalised initiatives, as a spectrum of approaches can be seen as strength. Further, in determining what constitutes good governance, the standards against which initiatives are assessed should be tailored to their specific circumstances, and consider impacts to the environment itself. These findings point to good urban greening governance being both situated and principled.     

Process and Contextual Factors Supporting Action-Oriented Learning: A Thematic Synthesis of Empirical Literature in Natural Resource Management

Despite a long-term focus on learning in natural resource management (NRM), it is still debated how learning supports sustainable real-world NRM practices. We offer a qualitative in-depth synthesis of selected scientific empirical literature (N?=?53), which explores factors affecting action-oriented learning. We inductively identify eight key process-based and contextual factors discussed in this literature. Three patterns emerge from our results. First, the literature discusses both facilitated participation and self-organized collaboration as dialogical spaces, which bridge interests and support constructive conflict management. Second, the literature suggests practice-based dialogs as those best able to facilitate action and puts a strong emphasis on experimentation. Finally, not emphasized in existing reviews and syntheses, we found multiple evidence about certain contextual factors affecting learning, including social-ecological crises, complexity, and power structures. Our review also points at important knowledge gaps, which can be used to advance the current research agenda about learning and NRM.     

Urban greening,property and more-than-human commoning

ABSTRACT

Urban greening is about bringing vegetation into cities in ways that produce flourishing urban ecologies whilst also making cities more liveable for human inhabitants. We focus here on greening that is done through the maintenance or establishment of gardens, parks, urban forests and informal spaces. We argue that in contexts with established property law systems, such as Australia, making urban ecologies through greening is shaped heavily by relations of property tied to land. This includes constraining the extent to which urban greening can contribute to socio-ecologically just cities. We suggest that progressing greening that is more attentive to the geographies and temporalities of more-than-human life requires us to trouble the hold of property over greening. To do this we explore the possibilities opened up by the lens of urban commons/commoning. We engage with the emerging concept of more-than-human commoning as a way of attuning urban greening to nonhuman agency and affordances. We also grapple with the risk of obscuring or concealing difference between humans in the way commoning makes room for more-than-humans, especially in the context of settler-colonialism. We conclude by calling for a more overt politics of urban greening that encompasses diverse human and more-than-human experiences of the city.     

Contracts,Seagrass, and Discourses: nonhuman mediators in the planning of the Mangles Bay Marina

ABSTRACT

Planning with things other-than-human and exploring the more-than-human dimensions of cities has failed to ignite within the discipline of planning. Humans and the human perspective remain privileged throughout both planning theory and practice. However, slowly over the course of the past two decades there has been a trickle of Actor Network Theory-based planning studies allowing the discipline to dip its toes into the more-than-human realm. This paper uses empirical evidence to demonstrate the role and influence of particular nonhumans as active mediators in the politics of planning processes and the production of more-than-human urban spaces. In doing so, the paper raises ethical questions around the existing anthropocentric approach to the assessment and deliberation of planned development where living nonhumans are affected. Utilising the case study of the proposed Mangles Bay Marina, in the southern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, the paper will illustrate the influence of three types of nonhuman actors: living nonhuman species; discursive text and talk; and technical artefacts.     

Collaborative Governance and Conflict Management: Lessons Learned and Good Practices from a Case Study in the Amazon Basin

Abstract

Given the linkages between natural resources and social conflicts, evidence increasingly shows that successful natural resource management requires conflict mitigation and prevention. However, there may be a gap in practice between knowing what processes and tools need to be used to manage conservation conflicts and how to actually implement them. We present learning from a practice-based case study of conflict management in the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon that aimed to develop natural resource governance institutions and build stakeholder capacity, including of indigenous groups, to navigate existing conflict resolution mechanisms. Through applying good practices in conservation conflict management and collaborative governance, we generated important lessons on the practical considerations involved in collaborative conservation. These lessons, while specific to our case, could be applied to a variety of protected areas facing complex social-ecological systems dynamics and wicked problems.     

Unbundling property in Boston’s urban food commons

ABSTRACT

Households and community organizations are involved in the creation, use, care, and management of urban spaces, including through food practices such as planting, foraging, harvesting, weeding and pruning at the ambiguous edges of public and private property. Drawing on case studies in Boston, Massachusetts, we examine how commons are articulated through these practices, particularly in relation to multiple dimensions of property rights. Specifically, we ask how food practices can open urban spaces to negotiations around access, responsibility, care, and ownership, especially when (property) ownership is not an end-goal, but a circumstance shaping other practices. Using interviews and participant observation of individuals and organizations involved in urban food provisioning, we explore how households and community organizations are interrupting fixed notions of property ownership, by practicing urban commons. These practices and negotiations demonstrate ongoing shifts in the meanings of urban space with flexible understandings of property and ownership.     

Technical Note The b-function and variable stream buffer mapping: a note on ‘A GIS method for riparian water quality buffer generation’

Abstract

Mapping variable stream buffers in a vector environment in which buffer width values are delineated often yields inaccurate results. Possible vector solutions are either ineffective or inefficient, An alternate raster approach is presented here in which a buffer effectiveness-achievement function (b-function) is introduced to map desirable buffer zones at an individual cell level based upon areal differentiations in physical and ecological conditions. The implementation of b-function is made feasible by a GIS procedure devised in this article. This tested method can be extended to a variety of variable buffer studies, such as visual buffers, noise buffers, greenways, and urban natural buffers.

‘A robe can never be made of the fur from one fox's axillae’ (A Chinese idiom).     

Assembling Birrarung Wilam: a case study of Indigenous public artwork in the city

ABSTRACT

Indigenous public artworks in Australian urban spaces have challenged assumptions of Indigenous absence from the city. This paper examines the construction of Birrarung Wilam, in central Melbourne, in the period 2005–2008. We use archival documents and semi-structured interviews to analyse the collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants in a project sponsored by the city. We show the particular mediating contribution of ‘fabricators’: a group of commissioned workers and tradespeople with material-specific expertise. Person to person encounters occurred through the modules of project management, with limited scope for long-term engagement. Despite being embedded in formal state-based recognition, Birrarung Wilam asserts Indigenous self-recognition through the renewal and adaptation of Indigenous material practices and traditions and the refusal to provide straightforward interpretive materials at the site. The study provides support for arguments that challenge a simple binary of co-option and resistance in interpreting such public art practice.     

Care-full commoning at the Old Church on the Hill,Bendigo

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, the notion of the commons has been mobilised as a way to articulate the possibility of other ways of doing/being/thinking life which are at odds with the logics of enclosure. Whilst practices of care have been identified as central in sustaining commons, there remains a need for more detailed conceptualisations of how commons are maintained through everyday practices of care. In this paper we draw on research conducted at The Old Church on the Hill in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, to provide an account of the role, complexities and constraints of care in constituting a commons. Throughout the paper we develop the concept of care-full commoning which encapsulates the phases of care identified by Tronto (1993. Moral Boundaries, A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York: NYU Press) and is a term we use to describe the multiple ways that care is practiced through, in, and by human and non-human others that comprise commoning collectives. We discuss the everyday practices of care that have sustained this commons over time, arguing that paying attention to the work of care in maintaining commons is an important political task.     

“Turn your brand into a destination”: toponymic commodification and the branding of place in Dubai and Winnipeg

ABSTRACT

The selling of naming rights to corporate sponsors has led urban policymakers to increasingly view the identities of public places as rent-generating assets to fund urban infrastructure. Yet few scholars have critically analyzed this emerging global trend of toponymic commodification and the seeking of “naming rent.” Through a combination of archival research, on-site field observations, and semi-structured interviews, this study examines how the practice of toponymic commodification is transforming the cultural landscapes of contemporary cities by considering two naming rights programs: Dubai’s Metro Naming Rights Initiative and the Sponsor Winnipeg Program. In each case, we explore the implications of commodifying public place names as well as the conflicting perceptions of such sponsorship programs. In doing so, the present study illustrates how the selling of naming rights is reshaping the built environment into a space of symbolic/economic capital transformations as brands become destinations and public places are reconceived as marketing opportunities.     

The meaning of place: Attachments to Femundsmarka National Park,Norway, among tourists and locals

In Norway, the management of natural and cultural resources is subject to increasing public scrutiny. Conflicts are escalating over many issues concerning the balance between preservation and utilisation. Traditionally conflicts over issues like growth in commercial nature tourism, predator control, forest policies, protected areas management, cultural heritage protection, and rights associated with common access, have been explained in terms of opposing values, attitudes, and goals between urban and rural interests. However, historical differences between the urban and rural in terms of social conditions, employment opportunities, services, cultural norms, and lifestyles are no longer clear-cut or predictable. Nor can differences between urban and rural communities easily explain attitudes or values held in relation to the environment. To examine how a local community and a population of tourists feel about an area we examine data from two separate surveys from the Femundsmarka-Røros region in Southern Norway. This region includes a wilderness-type national park and a historic mining town recognised as a World Heritage Site and including a diverse agricultural landscape. We compare the perspective of the community with that of tourists regarding the strength and nature of attachment to place, and reasons and priorities for resource protection. We also assess how residence and experience of using the area affect attachment to place and attitudes to management priorities. The results have implications both for the management of this particular area, and for how we approach attitude diversity in resource management.     

Re-placing soil and its mattering in more-than-human cities

ABSTRACT

What role does soil play in sustainable design interventions and can it help to reconfigure human place experiences and human-nature relations in cities? Cities are home to a host of nonhuman actors that are overlooked or under-acknowledged in design and planning practices and in everyday dwelling. Soil is one such under-acknowledged urban inhabitant. In a period where cities and their inhabitants must adapt to the challenges of a changing climate, the paper draws together theory in design, planning and geography and empirical research with designers and residents in Australian cities to re-place soil as mattering in place(making) practices, everyday urban dwelling and urban sustainability transitions. The research contributes to recent work in (post)human geography to discuss ‘soil-planty mattering’, or the active role of soils and their intra-actions with other urban matter in shaping place. Soil-planty mattering is shown to disrupt human place(making), extending cities in material, temporal and spatial ways. In these extensions, the research suggests that soils have particular potential to re-orient human relationships with nonhumans in urban realms.