A queer ecofeminist approach to creating unproductive spaces and new urban landscape imaginaries
ALAP ( Alternative Landscape Architectural Practice) is a series of experiments entangled in urban nature, searching for ways to cohabitate with the other-than-humans by creating spaces of biodiversity. We love exploring terms such as weed, vacant lot, unproductivity, lazy, queer...
Local
Hungary
Budapest, 8th district. Szeszgyár utca 12
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
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No
As an individual in partnership with other persons
First name: Anna Last name: margit Gender: Female Age: 30 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Hungary Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Kazinczy utca 8 Town: Budapest Postal code: 1075 Country: Hungary Direct Tel:+36 20 253 0937 E-mail:annamargit92@gmail.com Website:https://www.instagram.com/anna.margit/
First name: Elise Last name: Heral Gender: Female Age: 29 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: France Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Amsterdamer strasse 5 Town: Berlin Postal code: 13347 Country: Germany Direct Tel:+33 6 23 42 77 32 E-mail:eliseheral@live.fr
ALAP ( Alternative Landscape Architectural Practice) is a series of experiments with urban nature from a queer ecofeminist perspective. It is a practice, a field guide and a research for creating diverse urban natures of cohabitation with the other-than-humans, stepping into the realms of nature conservation, urban ecology, advocacy, art, environmental and social justice. We are exploring how urban ecologies of the ‘unproductive’ lands - wasteland, brownfield, vacant lot, marginal spaces, can become important spaces for diverse social, ecological and cultural practices to cohabitate. We imagine approaches, experimentations and explorations that engage with what is already here, ignored, excluded, in order to enrich local biodiversity and take responsibility for the climate and social crises.
As queer women, we are looking for marginal spaces, practices and voices relating to urban nature, where we can create new imaginaries. We are experimenting both with short and long term interventions that allow for situations that cultivate spontaneity, heterotopias and biodiversity.
Our different strategies are inspired by local socio-political contexts of Berlin and Budapest. The pilot project started in February 2021, by rewilding an 8000m2 industrial, privately owned plot of land in the center of Budapest. From a 20 year old lawn, we encouraged the growth of an queer ecofeminist public park, nature preserve and urban farm. Since November 2022, we work in Berlin, planning for new projects: - a library-nursery of weeds, growing plants that are overlooked, foreign or banal, to be planted in public spaces, to contribute to the creation of cosmopolitan ecologies, - creating architectural visualizations to hang as promoter style billboards on the fences of vacant plots / a mobile ecofeminist library that can be installed as a resting spot in pastoral style city parks that have a history of exclusion based on gender, sexuality, race, species, and abilities.
queer ecofeminism
urban ecology
unproductive lands
intersectionality
mutual-aid
We are interested in questioning the exclusionary and controlling imaginaries of knowledge production, design, governance, restoration ecology and conservation, that often render some group of people ‘unnatural’ (queer, non heterosexual people), ‘harmful’ (BIPoc) or into productive bodies to extract ( women, PoC or workers in the productive landscapes of agricultural production). In response, our approach is based on seeing people as part of nature, without intrinsic right or wrong. Instead of accepting a notion of nature, one that commodifies and extracts, we are looking for ways of multispecies cohabitation.
We create with found materials, only reusing, recycling and growing. In practical terms, in our pilot project, Szeszgyar, we were interested in how to build a community park out of materials that are considered waste in the city. Decomposed horse manure, extracted soil from building sites and city parks, wood chips from green waste removal companies, kitchen scraps from neighbors are all accessible locally, in huge amounts. 23 heavily mulched garden beds are housing selected drought tolerant plants, spontaneous vegetation and whatever neighbors brought and planted where they found space, spreading across the 8ooom2 meadow.
We are encouraging biodiversity also by building a wildlife pond to fight the droughts and successfully advocating to the local authorities for not mowing.
We hosted regular mycology and gardening events, awareness raising events on ecofeminism, and let trees, grasses and wildflowers to grow, turning the bare land into an incredibly biodiverse, drought tolerant meadow. We rewilded by protecting, advocating and letting-grow.
Through seeking collaboration with organizations in Berlin, we are looking for ecosystems with similar concerns (Club Real, SUZ, Berlin Mondial). Interested in continuing to decommodify our relationship with the land, building imaginaries of inclusionary landscapes and creating space for ‘unproductivity’.
We wonder, if by seeing ourselves as a landscape, a multitude of different life forms, would the spell of the individualist society break? Would we stop calling everything that is not ‘us’: nature, only to then dominate and destroy it? We created and want to keep creating spaces for rest and joy, for people to meet, build community, observe flowers growing, listen to bees, birds and laughs. We believe this is possible in the urban setting, through allowing more control for the other-than-human parts of nature to shape our cities.
Through offering tactile experiences, allowing people to garden, touch what is growing, opening up closed off spaces, allowing to sit or lay wherever, letting plants thrive and sharing knowledge about them, allowing people to bring in their projects and voices, we are designing situations for spontaneous interactions to grow, flourish and shape less productive and extractivist spaces, challenging prevailing imaginaries of nature.
Landscapes often serve to reinforce nationalism, based on exclusion, and imaginary history (for example the English pastoral is particularly widespread landscape design). We are interested in creating different aesthetics from the manicured parks, based on biodiversity and inclusion.
In our pilot project people are engaged in the making of the space, of maintaining it, picking up garbage after others, building a wildlife pond, hosting their own events ( be it feminist self-defense class, to neighbors organizing birthday parties), and eating from communally managed garden beds. We are thriving to create a sense of community and belonging to the land, where wild urban nature is not seen as an ‘insanitary, weedy wasteland’. The goal is to empower people to see themselves as vectors for change in an ecosystem, where we no longer see ourselves as individuals, and where mutual-aid is valued, all participating according to our abilities and power to tackle the climate crisis.
The queer ecofeminist approach questions hetero-patriarchal, capitalist ways of making space and creating knowledge, favoring a narrow set of social interactions. We advocate for more biodiverse urban nature, with human diversity, by questioning privileges, dismantling barriers of physical space and language. We encourage a multitude of imaginaries, experiences, and needs, especially of marginalized entities such as plants, bees, queer people, women, PoC, ‘unruly bodies’. Marginal urban spaces with blurry ownership, or lax regulations, are where there is still room for unruly ecological assemblages and the commons, outside the public/private propriety, based on solidarity and shared responsibility.
This takes very different shapes in Berlin or Budapest, but all of our projects are accessible to join with no monetary contribution.
While in Berlin, the emphasis is on new collaborations, conserving spaces by growing an appreciation for wild urban nature, through queer ecology walks and readings, growing seedlings of weeds.
In Budapest, next to these goals, we focused on space making, in a city with little biodiversity and many highly controlled parks. We created a sense of abandonment and wild nature that contradicts the common anxieties over urban wilderness favouring unwanted interactions.The 8000m2 lot was mowed for 20 years into a lawn, following regulations, but also a garbage dump that only drug dealers and the most marginalized frequented, exposed to extreme violence, especially women. With nothing to lose, neighbors and authorities favoured our approach of letting-grow. The space now hosts multiple interactions between new groups and new groups coexist: artists, (citizen) scientists, plants, local kids, dog walkers, birds, people in difficulty, bees etc. Neighbors and queer youth spontaneously manage and grow this open, public park, through regular meetings. All can bring projects, following a common code of conduct of biodiversity and mutual respect
We would like to dismantle the fears provoked by wild urban nature, and lack of human control over public space. Spontaneous, cosmopolitan nature can be an important public space, opposing the rigidity of pastoral style public parks, allowing for marginalized political and cultural practices, redefining access to the city for queer people, women, PoC. Our concept is continually evolving, reflecting the many who have brought their points of views.
In our pilot project we observed complex socio ecological dynamics asking for more inclusionary practices. When bored teenagers living in deep poverty broke in, to smash and set things on fire, instead of calling authorities, we engaged in a conversation with them, explained what we were doing and asked them to join in rebuilding, which they did. We also secured funds with the help of Budapest Pride, to hire someone offering them afternoon activities of their choice (carpentry). We also invited people to co-work from the garden to keep it open every day, allowing the space to become a public park, minimizing destruction occurring when the space is closed off, and encouraging people to share in the responsibility for keeping up the space.
During Ecofeminist Festivals, reading circles, conversations, gardening days, weed walks, all together we hosted over 2oo events in 2 years in Szeszgyar, we try to offer moments for reflection and experience sharing. We are all part of an ecosystem, not above, not an external force but one that is inseparable, living in constant contradictions, digesting, composting, growing, reorganizing, being reorganized, composted, digested. Different skill sets are valued. Biodiversity of species, of approaches and ideas are fought for. We are striving to give space to voices excluded from mainstream discourses, specially of queer people who are targeted by the Hungarian government's propaganda, by for example organizing many queer markets and hiring queer refugees to work in the garden
Our concept started to develop in Budapest and continues to progress in Berlin by applying to several grants (Urban Praxis, Ristkakers Fellowship, Sozial Marie, Maecenia Frankfurt, Migrationsrat Berlin), meeting local artists and scientists and building out collaborations with Schul Umwelt Zentrum, Make-Up and Club Real.
In Budapest we quickly gained visibility by offering a project that is bold and innovative in the Hungarian socio-political context. When opening the big blue gate many overlooking the land came down to join in the garbage picking on a cold Sunday.Others came gardening, or to the ‘‘imaginary bar’ event to picnic. Slowly, through different programs, people who joined became points of contact with institutions. The local policeman brings his daughter to observe the flowers growing. Municipality workers came gardening first, later secured us funds for our Ecofeminist Festivals, and invited us to workshops on how to become more accessible for the local roma community. Local leftist politicians joined our ecofeminist festivals and took ample selfies (so far this has been the extent of their engagement), Budapest Pride activists resting in the park helped us secure fundings from Planned Parenthood and gaining online visibility, but also to deal with the anti LGBTQ government propaganda, and navigating the local dynamics. Neighbors who joined in building a compost pile connected us with CEU (Central European University) and ICLEI Europe, who ended up funding some of our projects through grants, and invited us to workshops on intersectional self-governance, feminist city making and community engagement. We were part of IMPACT23 at Pact Zollverein, exchanging with activists from around the world. A young landscape architect from the municipality of Budapest has been our collaborator since the beginning, and together we created an urban planning class about the project at MOME Architecture School where students gave their insight and volunteered with us.
Ecofeminist thinkers' work (through reading, meeting in Budapest and Berlin) fuelled the development of our projects, helping us understand the different power struggles, the link between the binaries of nature/culture, woman/man, emotion/reason, white/non-white. Understanding intersectional systems of oppression made us more aware of our privileges and the exclusions we are facing, as queer (portrayed as unnatural) women (closer to nature).
Queer ecology unsettles and widens what has been established, by allowing multiple sexualities to exist, dismantling binary views of gender. It contributes to dismantling the heteronormative, patriarchal, extractivist world view’s translation into the creation of physical space. In our case, the field helps us to analyze urban nature from a feminist, post colonial and post humanist start point, to widen our imaginary landscapes.
Anna Margit, co-creator of the project is trained as an architect, at the National School of Architecture of Versailles and worked in the field of architecture and landscape architecture in New York. Elise Heral, co-creator is trained in biology, timber engineering and sustainable forest management, currently working at WWF Germany, in sustainable management and trade of resources. We are interested in nature conservation as a way to create more biodiversity and allow for spontaneous assemblages to happen, one that rejects the idea of returning to an imagined historical ground zero, false idyll.
The field of landscape design and urban planning is historically marked by preoccupations with the effects of urban space on human sexuality, racist ideas of sanitation and the creation of space to control urban population. We are influenced by current movements turning these upside down and looking for ways of multispecies cohabitation. Postcolonial thinking helps us understand the dynamics of development/ under development, our privileges and responsibilities and the intersectionality of our struggles.
We are looking for spaces that are at the margins of the capitalist, extractivist system. We are looking for islands of undevelopment, of unproductivity, of laziness, of weeds. Hoping to connect different islands of approaches, multitudes of imaginations, that are not looking for simplified solutions, of generic, easily describable and marketable approaches, but ones that thrive on the chaos, contain multitudes, allow for experimentations and explorations instead of solutions. We are offering no solution and design. We are offering no plan, no vision of a past when nature was more pure, no vision of a future pure and idyllic. Our concept is a collection of small scale interventions, of responses to a few contemporary challenges we encountered, for a world full of complexity and chaos. We are offering spaces for spontaneous naturecultures, critiques and new imaginaries to emerge. We are offering space to imagine biodiversity, cosmopolitan ecologies, community and cohabitation with also the other-than-humans.
By creating sites of discovery and experimentation we challenge unified concepts of cultural landscapes, allowing for new explorations of the city and new relationships to emerge.
We are creating an aesthetic, based on biodiversity, collaboration based on mutual-aide and shared responsibility and space seen as the commons.
We think that developing a queer-ecofeminist approach is relevant in all contexts, because it is about understanding prevailing systems of domination and the creation of more inclusive, diverse communities, based on interspecies cohabitation, solidarity and mutual-aid collaborations.
We are interested in what can be done with little monetary resources, outside of the realm of public/private, productive/unproductive, nature/culture binaries. We would like to create case studies of our interventions, describing the methodologies, techniques used and what we learned, highlighting that each of us can contribute in their own way and we are all part of an ecosystem even if some have way more power than others.
Despite the rapid urbanization, capitalist pressure to develop all lands in the city, there are still plenty of marginal spaces that can be opened up for the commons (people and other-than-humans) We ask for more spaces to be left alone to rewild, which does not ask for more monetary investment, only less. With less institutional control, less weeding, there is space for more stable ecosystems to develop, allowing for new imaginaries to evolve. In Budapest it is by recreating untamed wilderness that we would like to advocate for a queer ecofeminist approach towards urban nature, and in Berlin, by building more collaboration, preserving what is left, appreciating and reframing their importance, as part of the commons.
Our process and actions, such as creating a mobile ecofeminist library brought to parks, growing seedlings of overlooked and foreign plants called weeds to restore their appreciation, mapping spaces of urban nature appreciated by FLINTA people, rendering through architectural visualizations alternative projects imagined by divers people, and reclaiming vacant lots, lawns and marginalized spaces are all replicable and adaptable because they are based on collaborations and flexibility organically developing decentralized organisms.
The individualist society we live in degrades our relationship to nature, thought of as a commodity, leading us to the current climate disaster. It is also a social crisis, and it is hard to imagine other ways of sharing resources. Many feel powerless and exhausted. We are interested in space for rest and imagining new possibilities.
We have to learn how to live in the ruins of capitalism, by radically changing our perspective, cultivating a new kind of acuity and sensitivity. Above all we need to learn to find allies in unexpected places, potentially in plants, animals, and microorganisms. We need to look at them carefully, getting rid of supremacist views. Humans are not insular entities. Life is a web of interdependencies and collaborations, often without stability. We are interested in the ecologies of disruption, in species that live together in uncertain environments. These cohabitations are not necessarily collaborative, they can take place without harmony, but they form new assemblages, unexpected alliances. This is life in the ruins.
We challenge biodiversity loss. We advocated against mandatory mowing in our pilot project and by asking neighbors to come together to build a pond that supports the wildlife, during droughts, as well as social isolation and lack of collaboration. Shading roofs and plants collect rainwater. Heatwaves are more bearable among trees and tall grasses. By using what is found in the city to build garden beds growing organic food we are fighting the narrative of waste, reframing the notion of weeds, showing how food is grown, rendering visible that cities don't exist as an island, but require lands put to productivity way beyond administrative limits. Backlashes to feminist critique and especially trans inclusive ones are growing. We addressed this in many radio, newspaper and public talks where we were interviewed in Hungary, giving legitimacy and visibility to the topic, despite prevailing government propagandas.
