The Botanical within the Built: Visual Art and Urban Botany (original) (raw)
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REFUGIUM WA: Crafting Connection Through Plant-Relating Arts-Science Experiences of Urban Ecology
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Various platforms have demonstrated the value of hands-on activities – such as community gardening and crafting – in making meaningful connections and collective identities for a sustainable and resilient future. In his seminal book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes how these activities can be an opportunity to engage with 'flow' – a highly focused mental state that increases awareness, connectivity and well-being. In Through Vegetal Being (2016), philosophers Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder also argue that it is through 'vegetal' (or plant relating) activities in particular (e.g. touching and smelling plants), that our relations with the more-than-human world can be reignited. Drawing upon these publications and others, this paper explores how combining these two modes of thought – to enable 'flow' through shared 'vegetal' or plant-based activities – may assist communities in gaining a greater awareness of and connection to sustainability. The potential of plant-based creative activities are examined through a recent, practice-led, arts-science research project (Refugium WA, Australia 2017), which used scientific knowledge and 'vegetal' or 'botanical' crafting as a way of engaging people in biodiversity issues. The project employed the community in creating mini native plant-sculptures which were temporally installed at the State Library of Western Australia. Indication of flow, increased nature-connection and biodiversity understanding were explored through gathering observations of the participants, pre-and post-activity surveys and discussions. The research sought to examine the capacity for vegetal-crafting activities to lead to new modes of arts-science communication that connect people to the importance of biodiversity in urban spaces.
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Social & Cultural Geography, 2014
Greening public city space is a growing issue in France. With examples drawn from Paris and Montpellier, this article seeks to understand what happens when city-dwellers green the public space outside their door and when policies encourage spontaneous flora on the street. Plants were already part of ancient cities and have been a tool for urban planning since the nineteenth century leading to the development of public green spaces and street-tree planting. Urban ecology sparked an interest for spontaneous flora in the 1980s. Public policies concerning water, climate, and biodiversity have been trying to take this unbidden vegetation into consideration since the beginning of this century. Besides, the social sciences have shown that city-dwellers are interested in plants to embellish their balcony, and in city gardens and parks. We tried to find out if this vegetation can be more than just a tool to plan, to green, to bring biodiversity, and to beautify urban space. We argue that letting planted and unbidden flora colonize sidewalks and allowing people to act directly on it brings residents and plants to co-inhabit and co-domesticate the streets, and challenges the timelessness of a city by introducing a life cycle.
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Gardens in the Gallery: Displaying and Experiencing Contemporary Plant-art
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This article explores different institutional approaches to exhibiting and maintaining living, plantbased sculptures, and installation art. By studying the creation and management of artworks by Gilberto Esparza, Michael Wang, Precious Okoyomon, and Daniel Lie, this article considers how cultural institutions can incorporate ethics of more-than-human care in their conservation practices. As each of these artworks grows, decays, and dies through differing states of institutional intervention (or lack thereof), their provocative experiments through the themes and aesthetics of queer ecology, vegetal technoscience, and botanical decolonization invite museum staff and visitors alike into biodynamic, multisensory engagements with multispecies collaboration that turn the white cube into soil and green.
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Requiem for the weeds: Reflections in Amsterdam city park
Sustainable Cities and Society, 2013
"Human and plant relationships are described within the rich tradition of multispecies ethnography, ethnobotany, and political ecology. In theorizing this relationship, the issues of functionalism, and interconnectivity are raised. This article aims to re-examine the position of plants in the context of contemporary urban spaces through the prism of environmental ethics. Despite conceptual plurality and socio-cultural complexity of human–plant relationships, social scientists fail to note how the perception of ‘greenery’ has objectified plants in urban environment. Without seriously considering bioethics, theories of human–plant relationship might fail to note exploitive anthropocentric relationship between humans and plants in urban spaces. The article is inspired by reflections of urban flora in Amsterdam, The Netherlands."
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This paper addresses three interventions into urban green spaces—a wetland in Cape Town, a post- industrial site in New York, and a park outside London. Through their different contexts, they help to grasp a wider phenomenon: the protection of urban nature through the development of protective narratives. We analyze these interventions as examples of “value articulation”, which we view as a relational and sociomaterial practice that requires the enrolment of people, plants, and things that together perform, spread, and deploy stories about why given places need protection. For each case study, we also highlight the moments when narrative practices move beyond mere protection and start to change the very context in which they were developed. We refer to these as projective narratives, emphasizing how novel values and uses are projected onto these spaces, opening them up for reworking. Our analyses of these successful attempts to protect land demonstrate how values emerge as part of inclusive, yet specific, narratives that mobilize and broaden support and constituencies. By constructing spatial linkages, such narratives embed places in wider geographical ‘wholes’ and we observe how the physical landscape itself becomes an active narrative element. In contrast to rationalist and external frameworks for analyzing values in relation to urban natures (e.g., ecosystem services), our ‘bottom-up’ mode situates urban nature in specific contexts, helping us to profoundly rethink planning and practice in order to (i) challenge expert categories and city/nature dichotomies; (ii) provide vernacular ways of knowing/understanding; and (iii) rethink the role of urban designers.
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Experiencing the visual field of vegetation spaces in urban botanical gallery.pdf
Botanical parks been placed in residential and commercial areas in Kuala Lumpur to reduce the massive development impact. Low level of the awareness towards the application of the experiencing architecture lead to the inefficient inspirational vegetation space in Kuala Lumpur. This research aimed to optimize the visible experience of vegetation spaces in order to bring out the experiencing visual field of vegetation spaces hence stimulate the aspect of loving trees. The objectives of the research are to identify types of experiential spaces in the presence of green plants in botanical gallery based visual experiences and supported by smell and touch depending on space’s program. Next, the frequency of the architectural vegetation interventions towards human’s emotional need was measured and space syntax visual graph analysis was applied in finding the relation between visual connections and green plant spaces. This research focused on developing the green visual experiencing architecture by providing every aspects of design elements in designing vegetation spaces. This study hoped on providing better botanical architectural interventions towards the public. In seeking the possible solution, content analysis through literature reviews, case studies and a questionnaire were conducted throughout the study. This research has listed down the strategies and design elements in developing experiencing architectural philosophy based on visual field precisely in providing future inspirational vegetation spaces.
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Grounding New Narratives of ‘Plantness’ in Botanic Garden Design. A place for art-based research?
Ri-Vista. Research for Landscape Architecture, 2024
Through two examples of artworks, both historical and contemporary, water colour and installation, this article considers possibilities for art-based research to ground new narratives of ‘plantness’ in botanic garden design. In so doing the author suggests that art can open windows on a little-known world; and confront the human viewer with narratives that provoke them to re-calibrate their ideas about, and feelings towards, plants. Thus, questions are also asked of landscape architecture and the ways in which it might respond to such art-based research works and considers emergent questions for design practices wishing to make ‘Life as Plant’ more public and specific. Attraverso due esempi di opere d’arte, sia storiche che contemporanee, acquerelli e installazioni, questo articolo considera le possibilità della ricerca basata sull’arte per fondare nuove narrazioni sulla ‘pianta’ nella progettazione dei giardini botanici. Così facendo l’autore suggerisce che l’arte può aprire finestre su un mondo poco conosciuto; e confrontare lo spettatore umano con narrazio- ni che lo spingono a ricalibrare le proprie idee e sentimenti nei confronti delle piante. Pertanto, ci si interroga anche sull’architettura del paesaggio e sui modi in cui potrebbe rispondere a tali lavori di ricerca basati sull’arte e si considerano le questioni emergenti per le pratiche di progettazione che desiderano rendere ‘La vita come pianta’ più pubblica e specifica.
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