Grounding and Worlding Urban Natures: Configuring an Urban Ecology Knowledge Project

Abstract

Central to this book are an urge and a curiosity to multiply the understanding of urban environments by taking in a wider urban experience. Rather than a global model that tries to grasp and decode urban environments in the same way wherever they appear, we have worked with the idea that what is required is an approach that sustains the multiplicity of urban nature, that affords and provides space for various ways of knowing and ways of being within and in relation to urban nature, and that produces an epistemologically and ontologically rich object of study, opening it toward conversations, collaborations, debates, and contestations. In a world that is urbanizing rapidly across a diverse set of cultural and biophysical contexts, it is crucial to open our understanding of urban nature toward a broader urban experience. At the very end of the volume, it is time to reflect on how the growing community who share an interest in urban environmental studies could move on in future work. One way of taking the project forward would be to engage in a critical and constructive relationship with urban ecology as conceived within the environmental sciences. The meeting between scientific and narrativebased ways of knowing urban environments could focus on how knowledge is used in tangible conflicts and controversies. Sara Whatmore and the broader conceptual work built in the field of science and technology studies have opened one practical avenue. In her work on flooding in English towns, Whatmore brought natural and social scientific scholars and representatives from the 13 Grounding and Worlding Urban Natures: Configuring an Urban Ecology Knowledge Project