Session details
Organizer(s)
Antonia Weiss (Universiteit van Amsterdam) and Elin Håkansson (Stockholm University)
Keywords
Urban Green Spaces, Social Inequity, Motion
Abstract
Rising inequality in cities presents a global concern today. Throughout history, green spaces have played a crucial, albeit largely overlooked, role in shaping social hierarchies. As sites for physical activity, social interaction, recreation and food production, green spaces have long been one of the most sought-after resources in cities, and a critical means of both creating and levelling social inequities.
Although urban inequality has been the subject of scholarly research for some time, green spaces have rarely featured in this. This session seeks to address this oversight by investigating the means by which urban nature has shaped the identities and opportunities of people of different gender, class an ethnicity. Despite, or perhaps because of, their ephemeral character, green spaces hold the power to affirm as well as challenge social hierarchies. Unhindered access to urban green spaces has traditionally been a privilege reserved for select groups. In addition, the specific ways in which different people could utilize urban nature for recreational or utilitarian purposes has always depended on their social status. At the same time, research has shown that social norms for spaces such as public parks often diverge from other public spaces, allowing people of different genders and classes to interact more freely here than elsewhere.
This session invites papers from scholars working on the past and present of urban green spaces, including gardens and yards, parks and promenades, waste lands as well as suburban and riparian landscapes. Presenters will assess the social meanings and workings of such spaces by considering their conceptualizations in text and images and/or by analyzing their design, appropriations and everyday uses. We particularly encourage contributions that look at these issues in relation to the conference theme of motion. By definition, natural spaces are persistently in motion, responding to changes in climate, season and weather. Moreover, human mobility has been a structural principle in the design of green spaces for centuries. But whose mobility do green spaces ultimately facilitate and to what end? And how has urban nature’s fleeting materiality rendered it an arena in which social hierarchies can be remade and contested?
Papers
Botanical Gardens as Spaces of Female Agency: Considering the Role of the Amsterdam Hortus Medicus and the Leiden Hortus Botanicus in the 17th Century
Author(s)
Catherine Powell (Ghent University)
Keywords
Botanical Garden, Female Agency, Gender and Natural Sciences
Abstract
Orphanages, hospitals, old-age homes: In early modern Netherlands, there were few places where women could participate in public life. Of course, women could assist their husbands at the shop, or even take over upon widowhood. Beyond such activities of economic subsistence, however, opportunities for female participation were scant and mostly existed within the private or quasi-private realm. Certainly, women were not welcome within the more prestigious and influential guilds or in the universities. At the Amsterdam Hortus Medicus, however, things were different: Dr. Johannes Snippendaal (and his successors) offered public lessons on herbs to apothecaries and their assistants, Liefhebbers, and youth. “Liefhebbers”, without restriction: all passionate enthusiasts, including female, were welcome. The same was true at the Leiden Hortus Botanicus. Women could come to the gardens and learn about herbs, plants, and flowers. They could also come visit the gardens for social purposes, or even to exercise their artistic abilities. Even more critically, although her opportunities were still more limited than a man’s, a woman could contribute to the creation and development of the garden by sharing specimens and the experience drawn from her own garden. She could also contribute to the dissemination of knowledge through art production as it related to the botanical garden.
This paper examines the role of the botanical gardens in Amsterdam and Leiden during the last quarter of the seventeenth century as sites of female agency, meaning spaces where women could speak and act for themselves as well as participate in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, notwithstanding their gender. The particular focus is on the experiences of artistic patron and amateur botanist Agnes Block; artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian; and artists Johanna Helena Herolt and Maria Moninckx. An examination of contemporary art and literature provides supporting evidence for the proposition that the Amsterdam and Leiden botanical gardens were public spaces where women, and their agency, could blossom.
At Home outside. Contributions of Women in Green Structure Design of Dutch Post-war Housing Districts
Author(s)
Imke van Hellemondt (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Bruno Notteboom (KULeuven)
Keywords
Urban Green Structures, City Planning, Female Contribution
Abstract
As a reaction to what was experienced as technocratic, top-down ways of designing and planning, there was an increasing attention for different types of users of urban green structure design since the 1950s, leading to active involvement in the 1970s. A historically sound understanding of the design and development of these housing districts requires not only design analysis (space and matter), but also the involvement of user perspectives and of the arenas in which design decisions were taken. In particular, we will raise questions about the female perspective on the relationship between private and public living environments, and the creation of space for children’s play and development. Also questions about the relationship between these residential areas and the larger urban region come into play.
One of the districts where women (organizations) were very active in pressure groups and the participatory process since the late 1960s is Buitenhof in Delft. Existing historiography of the area consists mainly of a reading of formal governmental policy and the designer as the main actors. Our aim is to correct this by bringing in a new perspective focusing on the female contribution. We situate this in a broader tendency of introducing new (including other-than-human) agents in the design of green structures, as participatory and ecological concerns went hand in hand. Doing so, the traditional label of women as representatives of the home and its environment can be understood in a more layered and complex way, demonstrating that women were not only passive users, but also active co-creators of these spaces, determining the positioning of playgrounds and schools in green structures, the organisation of mobility, and the shaping of soil and plants.
Gardening the Colonial Space: Green Areas and Company Towns in Africa
Author(s)
Beatriz Serrazina (Centre for Social Studies / Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, University of Coimbra)
Keywords
Company Towns, Colonial Green Spaces, Contested Power
Abstract
Colonialism and industrialism grew together in Africa during the 20th century. Under this scope, private companies spread throughout the territory as “pioneers of Empire” that would occupy and exploit vast areas in the hinterland. To gather people for such great ventures, companies created and designed several “company towns” and “model villages”. Architecture and urbanism were considered key tools to appease European settlers and African workers, both taking part in these processes of modernization of the landscape. Not only to counterbalance the presence of industrial plants and exploitation sites, but also to foster appealing built environments,
companies put a lot of effort into green spaces. On the one hand, settlements for European employees, often described as “garden villages”, were planned around woodlands, parks, greenhouses, swimming pools and playgrounds. On the other hand, “model villages” for African families were expected to have tree-lined streets and gardens, in order to bring in some “civilization”. Amid these two scenarios, planted forests were used as a segregation strategy, recalling the ideas of the “cordon sanitaire”. By addressing settlements designed by mining companies in Central Africa, namely in Angola and former Belgian Congo, this paper will explore the relationship between said green spaces and analyse their instrumental use as tools of “social engineering” so that the needs, fears and aspirations of inhabitants would be met. It will assess how spatial dynamics changed over time and how gardens became places for mediating and contesting colonial power. Moreover, it will also delve into the networks of gardeners and experts who travelled around colonial borders and kept contact with European Botanical Gardens, as part of a wider flow of knowledge production and circulation.
Social Mingling and Distinction in Pleasure Gardens in Late Imperial St. Petersburg and Moscow
Author(s)
Svetlana Ryabova (Higher School of Economics)
Keywords
Pleasure Gardens, Urban Recreation, Late Imperial Russia
Abstract
This paper aims at examining pleasure gardens in Late Imperial St. Petersburg and Moscow as leisure venues, where people from different social background could mingle and share their social and cultural experience, at the same time preserving their distinction. Open solely in the summertime, in the city centre, suburban parks and developing working outskirts, pleasure gardens provided access to anyone for the price of a ticket, which was relatively affordable to people with different income.
Pleasure gardens in suburban parks and urban area had their own distinctive features. The first ones had more space with a real park with dispersed recreation facilities: theatres, bandstands, restaurants, billiards, shooting galleries, bowling, etc. and offered more opportunities formotion. In contrast, pleasure gardens in working outskirts and the city centre usually had a very little ‘green zone’ and a high concentration of recreation facilities in a narrow space, becoming a metaphor of nature. Luxurious pleasure gardens for the rich were sometimes attended by public from the lower classes. Due to the fact that the latter could pay only an entrance admission and were not able to afford purchasing expensive tickets to the performances in several theatres or pay for a supper in a restaurant, they were promenading, listening to the music played in the bandstands, watching performances on the open stage from the far and observing people from the upper classes having rest, sharing their social experience with them and feeling their own respectability. At the same time, people from the upper classes could sometimes attend pleasure gardens in the working outskirts for having fun, participating in typical fairground entertainment and observing how common people are relaxing. Attending the same leisure resort, people from different social background did not mingle and preferred to preserve segregation. However, pleasure gardens provided them with a chance to encounter and get used to each other as well as share the same leisure experience with entertainment programme available relatively for everyone in terms of taste and understanding.
A Lake to Serve them All? Negotiating Society at the Shores of Rotsee
Author(s)
Linus Ruegge (Universität Basel)
Keywords
'Natural' Space in the City, Negotiating Use of Space, Governance Processes
Abstract
A body of water whets many appetites, and historically that was especially so, if said body of water was beleaguered by the many hungry bodies a city provides: Fishermen seeking to catch and garbage men seeking to dump, swimmers seeking pleasure and residents seeking silence, ice sellers and skaters seeking frozen water, rowers and birds seeking quiet waters, owners seeking no water at all but building plots instead. In the case of Luzern’s Rotsee the resulting conflicts were manifold, interests overlapped, and actors changed sides all the while the lake was transformed from a sewerage to a nature reserve and a world-famed rowing arena in the 20th century. The longing for the lake provides a lens to highlight not only the workings of local governance but the making of what today is deemed ‘natural’ on different levels - and on unequal terms.