Connect with urban plants, connect with time: inhabitants experience of seasonality in public space gardening context
Amélie DESCHAMPS, Avignon Université - UMR 7300 ESPACE, France
In 2021, more than seventy French cities had a policy allowing public space participatory greening (often named “greening licence”). They cheer city dwellers to vegetate micro-spaces (as feet of trees or holes in the sidewalk. Under conditions of austerity, these programs reveal a political will to promote urban greenery at lower costs. They pursue two goals: one toward urban resilience to global change and one concerning the experience of nature of urban dwellers. Municipalities incite inhabitants to develop a new connection to species through their plantation and maintenance. Yet, the care that needs to be provided to urban plants is challenging and time consuming because of the many difficulties inherent to public space gardening. However, few studies focus on the temporal dimensions of street gardening, both as the seasonality of plant life and the inhabitants time management needed. Therefore, this communication will analyse the effects of the different rhythms of urban gardening, from the point of view of both plants and humans, in a more-than-human perspective. Data were collected through ethnographic investigations in Lille, Lyon and Paris (France) combining semi-structured interviews with inhabitants and municipalities, and a series of photographs of greening licences taken at the same location at different times, between February 2019 and November 2020. We will show how the legal frame set by greening licences is also a temporal one, compelling inhabitants to provide a strict maintenance of their street garden without considering garden life cycle. It has two main consequences. In some cases, inhabitants follow strictly the rules, leading to a negation of plants life cycle, reducing them to their aesthetic characteristics. In other cases, inhabitants develop new strategies to turn plants into actors of the greening action, embracing their capacities and rhythms and recreating seasonality in urban built context.
Mots clés : Plants life|Urban greening|Participatory greening|More-than-human geography
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