Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the notion of ‘nature in town’ in anthropology and other disciplines. It shows that in these, the city is often seen as a ‘background for life’. Building on the example of the growth of city soils, it argues for an alternative approach based on the life of cities.

Paper long abstract:

One implication of the notion of taskscape is to make an argument against the idea of the landscape being a 'background for life'. It entails that in a truly ecological view of the world, there cannot be such a thing as a 'background'. This paper examines how these entailments may concern present discussions about 'nature in town' - a notion that has gained importance in different fields since the 1990s. From offshoots in population ecology or ethology to the development of state led initiatives aiming at managing species and ecosystems in towns, it has added city areas to the list of biodiversity hot spots. Anthropologists are not left out of the subject, and have generally invested the notion as a 'hybrid' in which common categories of nature and culture are blurred and re-defined. The paper argues that in these approaches cities are often taken as a background to life, in terms similar to those Ingold aimed at overpassing in his writings on landscape. Building on the case of the study of city soils, I suggest that an approach in which soils are a multispecies compound taken in pedogenesis may provide a way around the 'nature in town' approach. Prolonging the recent soil science assumption that soil organisms 'altogether are the soil', I argue that humans too join them in pedogenesis. In this, the city stops being a background for lives, and becomes a processual entity in which humans, species and materials in fluxes shape one another.