Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, we reflect on the bond between urban gardening and utopian imagination and their importance for performing landscape transformations. Inspired by the novel "The Fifth Sacred Thing" and Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy, we propose utopian imagination as a creative tool for STS.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution to "reflections on creative (writing) practices" explores the bond between urban gardening and utopian imagination to advocate them as modes for creative transformation. Rooting our focus in fieldwork we performed in urban gardening initiatives in Oslo, Utrecht and Amsterdam, we look into how they can be seen as turning the landscape into an expressive and nourishing medium that probes how the world could be. To broaden our focus, we introduce utopian imagination as a specific mode for transformation whose relevance goes beyond verbal communication and concerns imagination as a productive process that creatively prefigures and engenders new ways of social and ecological being. By taking Starhawk's solar punk novel "The Fifth Sacred Thing" (1993) as our inspiration, we will solidify the proposed bond between urban gardening and utopian imagination. To this end, we will engage with Paul Ricoeur’s approach to imagination to understand it as a form of negotiation with the environment beyond concepts and perception and, as such, an ecological endeavour. Engaging with a close reading of the repeated expressions of visions of a utopian future as found in the novel, we will explore how these become the means by which this very future is materialised within the storyworld. We will approach close reading of the novel as a nutritious, creative and reflective tool for imagining existing and future urban gardening. Thus, we aim to contribute to the larger field of STS by proposing utopian imagination as a medium for doing and making transformations within our foodscapes.