Environmental forms, from a theoretical perspective to concrete case studies in urban planning

Nathalie Blanc

Intersecting Environmental Humanities (HE) and the New Materialism (NM), this article proposes a specific approach to forms, metamorphoses, and uncertain futures. We favour an approach incorporating aesthetic dimensions, as well as theories from the NM, to propose the conceptual expression of “environmental forms”, in order to renew the often techno-centric environmental analysis and research in the field of humanities and social sciences. We intend to focus on the process of “environmentalization”, considered distinct from a usual definition of humanity as ontologically separate from other living beings, and ascribed in a traditional opposition between nature and culture. This process of creating environments means to build a system that unites the stakeholders with variations in time and space. In the first section, we will discuss the question of forms, whose history is strongly associated with the history of art and aesthetics (Goethe Kant, etc.). Secondly, we will try to highlight the contributions of Karen Barad’s theories on intra-agentivity regarding the issue of environmental forms. In a last section, we will highlight how spontaneous environmental forms such as community gardens, or animals in cities, as well as contemporary “green” urban planning is a way to take into account environmental forms as a way to co-produce “natureculture” in cities.

Conclusions

Environmental forms highlight the meaning assigned to places, i.e., the values incorporated into determined forms. Regardless of whether we are talking about ordinary environmental forms (e.g., a communal garden), or extraordinary ones (e.g., the Earth, greenways and wetlands, remarkable mountains and valleys), the representations place the parties and the entire environmental form within an important relationship for given individuals or groups.

Therefore, the aesthetic experience constitutes a mode of intermediation between the requalification of the environment by the individuals or the civil society and the construction /reconstruction processes of collectives or local communities, whereas the exogenous forms of revalorization (i.e., through redevelopment, transformation of the image of the neighborhood, social support, etc.) do not generally recognize the universes of meaning and relationships through which citizens connect with their environment (Blanc, Emelianoff, 2008). Civil society organizations mobilize relational universes to environments that are likely to set in motion territorial transformation. They enable circular production between the territory and the collective and generate a commitment that makes sense as much in the transformative actions of the milieus as in the collective itself. However, this commitment can have a democratic aspect by increasing the competence and legitimacy of the actors, taking the experience into account and including local residents in the scope of the action. The forms of the environment in this sense offer a complex, socio-natural take on these transformations.

Hence, some environmental forms give rise to an ethical-aesthetic value that produces a specific configuration on which many agree or disagree, producing temporary consensus as well as dissensus or dynamic conflicts [18]. Landscape and heritage for example comprise these environmental forms that give rise to social and legal conventions. Environmental forms are intermediaries in the governance of social and environmental relationships. Forms convey complexity as they integrate, organize and coordinate both the whole and parts within their surroundings.

Lastly, talking about forms means introducing the seeds of a rebellion against contemporary approaches that favour techno-centric processes and a productive approach to nature. Nature could therefore be defined, in terms of tradition and from the perspective of its acceptance and definition, as being all of what – unintentionally or otherwise – produces environmental forms in overlapping material-discursive practices (Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012, p. 50), i.e., a crucible of metamorphoses and exchanges between practice and representation, matter and image, perception and concept.

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[18] Thanks to Andrej Radman who most interestingly reviewed this paper and added some comment referring to the work of Chantal Mouffe : http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html : “What is at a given moment considered as the ‘natural’ order - jointly with the ‘common sense’ which accompanies it - is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices; (…) An agonistic conception of democracy acknowledges the contingent character of the hegemonic politicoeconomic articulations which determine the specific configuration of a society at a given moment. (…) According to the agonistic approach, public spaces are always plural and the agonistic confrontation takes place in a multiplicity of discursive surfaces. (…) My approach is therefore clearly very different from the one defended by Jürgen Habermas, who when he envisages the political public space (which he calls the ‘public sphere’) presents it as the place where deliberation aiming at a rational consensus takes place. (…) according to the perspective that I am advocating, the impediments to the Habermasian ideal speech situation are not empirical but ontological and the rational consensus that he presents as a regulative idea is in fact a conceptual impossibility. Indeed it would require the availability of a consensus without exclusion which is precisely what the agonistic approach reveals to be impossible.”

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