This chapter suggests that the notion of cultivating ecosystem conviviality helps bring attention to nourishing sites of local empowerment and ecological belonging that often go unnoticed in urban environments. We offer this notion as a complement to ongoing efforts of invigorating cultural ecosystem services (CES) with relational and embodied approaches. Through a transdisciplinary and mixed methodology of soil arts that includes artist-led open stages, ecosystem conviviality is explored through soil-centered practices in urban gardening and art. The chapter attends to how gardeners situate themselves not as receivers or producers of services but as entangled co-creators of open-ended ecosystems. This in turn calls attention to a needed shift in CES focus, from benefits and human well-being to considering ecosystem relations and values as embodied co-becomings, with consequences for sites, people, and soils alike. The aim of the situated practice-theory of soil arts that this chapter presents, is to offer new perspectives and methods for those involved with planning and management of urban ecologies, and others seeking more integrative ways of grappling with socioecological challenges and uncertainties.

As urban development continuously causes ecosystem degradation, wetland restoration is being pushed for by international as well as local initiatives, programs and funding. But restoring amphibious urban terrains is far from a straightforward process. Diverse human and non-human ways of knowing, valuing and living with ecosystems come to the fore in claims about imperatives for their restoration on the ground. To the background of historical and contemporary injustices entangled with environmental management across the world, including Sweden where state-driven settler colonialism in the 19th century underpinned large-scale drainage of marshes in Sápmi, the ongoing mobilization around wetland restoration calls for careful inquiry and raises concern about how restoration expertise give prominence to certain urban futures at the expense of other, potentially more just and inclusive. This presentation will discuss a recently started project that addresses questions about the ongoing constructing and establishing of restoration expertise, and the diverse grounds for expertise included and excluded from this making. It addresses these questions through fieldwork around urban wetland restoration where an array of expertise seeks legitimacy, restoration as a partly backward-looking activity collides with planning’s future oriented vision, and where wetlands transcend ontological and organizational water-land separations. 

En junikväll 2024 samlades en brokig skara av planerare, konstnärer, forskare, arkitekter och odlare hos tillsammansodlingen Bellevue Farm vid Brunns- vikens södra strand i Stockholm. En tillsammansodling är en odlingsplats som förvaltas gemensamt av dess medlemmar och är ofta organiserad genom en ideell förening. Under kvällen fördes samtal om jordens plats och betydelse i växande städer och de nya urbana jordkulturer som växer fram runt om i landet. Därtill undersöktes jordens värden bortom att behöva tjäna som resurs för människor att nyttja. Tillsammans uppmärksammade vi hur levande jordrelationer stärks och uttrycks i tider av klimatkris och omställning, särskilt i urbaniserade samhällen där klyftan generellt har ökat mellan människa och natur. Jordarna under våra fötter, det de är och ger, är något som lätt tas för givet medan maten tryggt återfinns på hyllorna i livsmedelsbutiken. Insikten om myllans betydelse för den biologiska mångfalden och klimatarbetet även i städerna har ökat på senare tid. Klotets tunna hud utgör ett okänt universum av myllrande liv, en levande bioinfrastruktur, som stadsbor har kommit att engagera sig i allt mer. En central fråga under junikvällen på Bellevue Farm handlade om vad vi kan lära av dessa framväxande jordkulturer?

 Metro stations around the world are equipped with gate infrastructure to collect fares from passengers. At the Stockholm metro, the regional authority replaced tripod turnstiles with electronic gates aiming to better prevent fare evasion and increase revenue following reduced public transport subsidies. In this article, I engage with the politics of fare collection by attending to the gate environment in metro stations as constituting a milieu designed to regulate circulation. Rather than examining the gate milieu through its upfront purpose of fare collection, I critically examine the urban political relations generated and foreclosed in encounters with the material and semiotic properties of the gates. The margin of indeterminacy presented as the gates’ doors slide open upon a ticket validation, invites passengers to assist the gates, in either blocking or letting pass the following passenger to get through. Together with the regional authority’s framing of fare evasion as a cause for a degrading public transport infrastructure, the gate milieu pulls passengers into performing the work of fare collection. As such, the gate arrangement individualises responsibility among passengers for the maintenance of the metro as a collective good. Ultimately, the gate arrangements and the moralized repertoire in which they are inscribed, reveal how fare collection infrastructure risks contributing to escalating urban injustices in times of late industrial urbanity.

This article is about small-scale independent single-store retailers that have been in business since the first half of the 20th century – an overlooked group of actors in retail research. Research has mapped the broader structural changes in the retail industry that have benefitted large-scale operations during the last decade. Still, there is an absence of explanations for the continuous existence of small-scale retail businesses with product lines competing with large-scale actors. Retail research tends to take economic profitability and growth as starting points to interrogate the capacity of businesses to successfully compete. Against this background, the longevity of inner-city small-scale independent stores dating back to the early 20th century remains a puzzle, which calls for looking towards alternative theories to find reasons for the persistence of this line of retail. We engage with this puzzle by exploring practices of valuation engaged by store owners in a selection of small-scale, independent stores established in Gothenburg and Stockholm (Sweden) before the 1950s. We draw on understandings of values as produced through social practices and inquire how forms of caring practices figure in the day-to-day maintenance of the stores as means through which they produce value. The article builds on ethnographic fieldwork focusing on in-store interviews with store owners, employees, and customers complemented with observations. We find that care figures in these stores as expressions of attention and presence, of maintenance and of tacit knowledge, and suggest that the retailers’ focus on the caring practices identified – rather than on prioritizing growth – is key to their continued, long-term existence. Anchored in an understanding of retail as situated in broader social and political processes, and as such also impacting society at large, we moreover emphasise the importance of attentiveness and valuation of, the caring practices that small-scale store owners engage in. 

In response to the changing landscape of planning actors, planning literatures are exploring the implications that the extended presence of consultants have on planning processes. From relying on assumptions about “the primacy of public planners and/or definitions of a public interest” (Raco, 2018: 124), recent attention to planning consultants complicates presumptions about their expanded presence as singlehandedly implying a privatization of urban planning (Inch et al., 2023; Sturzaker and Hickman, 2023). In this paper, we take cue on these works by adding complexity and nuance to the role that planning consultants are playing in planning processes. Through an understanding of expertise as emergent, performed and thus in constant flux (Björkman and Harris, 2018), we ask: how are planning consultants conceiving of their expertise, and how do they situate their expertise in relation to other planning actors?

Urban planning is undergoing an ecological turn in attempts to address climate and biodiversity crises. Ecosystem service (ES) assessments has gained influence in this turn, as a means to address environmental issues. The critique on ES stresses that these evaluations of nature’s value in terms of how well an ecological phenomena serves human well-being rely on anthropocentrism and fail to acknowledge for multi-species interdependencies. In this paper, we seek to resituate the human in ES by visiting urban gardeners’ work with soils. Soils, a bioinfrastructure invisible in ES assessments and approached in urban planning as an extractive resource, have proven generative for social sciences and humanities to rethink human-environment relations. Joining this line of work, we draw on our own and others’ ethnographic engagements with soil practitioners. Urban soil growers define themselves and their practices in terms of servicing (rather than merely receiving) and caring for local ecosystems. These care practices are informed by a concern for the environmental challenges that we are facing on different scales and unequal terms. To learn from and find ways to recognize these practices, we try out a reconceptualization of ES from a receiving position of services towards an ecosystem caring. This implies grappling with the notion of care as accommodating ambivalent human-environment relations beyond technoscientific management of bioinfrastructures.

In this article, I consider the relationship between urban planning and context by investigating the planning practices associated with a land-use plan in Bordeaux described as “adapted to context.” Invested with flexible rules, the plan description followed a tendency in French urban planning concerned with being strategic, prospective, and participatory. It was also the result of metropolitan planning. Through an ethnographic account, I show how local politicians’ references to context related to concerns with mayoral authority in times of planning powers transferred to the metropole. Using permit reviewers’ skills, mayors mobilized flexible rules to manipulate building permit decisions prepared in compliance with the metropolitan plan. It is widely acknowledged that urban planning is affected by as well as affecting different contexts. I outline a complementing approach by drawing on engagements with context in anthropology and STS-scholarship, to propose that the practices associated with the same notion in Bordeaux are telling of how urban planning contributes to making contexts. Since calls for context direct attention and shape which issues and local communities are prioritized, these insights on the relationship between planning and context urge attention to how appeals to context, as never value-neutral or ready-made, gain importance across different urban planning issues and settings.