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- Convenors:
-
Snjolaug G Johannesdottir
(University of Iceland)
Sigurlaug Dagsdottir (Univercity of Iceland)
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Short Abstract
This panel explores how urban nature is perceived, narrated, and entangled with memory, emotion, and place in the city.
Long Abstract
This panel explores the role of nature in the experience and narration of urban environments. While cities are often thought of as the antithesis of nature, urban spaces are shaped by diverse natural presences—from weeds breaking through pavement cracks to ocean air, mountain views, and cultivated gardens. These elements are not merely backdrops to urban life; they shape the way people sense, remember, and relate to the city.
We invite contributions that explore how sensory engagement with natural elements (such as scents, sounds, or visual traces) influences personal or collective narratives of urban places. How do natural features—trees, birds, water, wind—coexist with concrete, glass, and steel in memory and story? How are emotional, affective, and embodied experiences of the city mediated through encounters with nature, whether wild, planned, or accidental?
By focusing on narratives of urban nature, the panel speaks to broader questions of how environment, memory, and imagination intersect in contemporary folklore and ethnology. We welcome papers that examine these themes from diverse cultural, methodological, or theoretical perspectives.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Monday 15 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
This paper examines how anecdotal memories contribute to place-making and attachment in Reykjavík’s city centre. Focusing on sensory and mnemonic engagements with the urban nature of Lake Tjörnin, it considers how the lake shapes and sustains people’s emotional bonds with the city.
Paper long abstract
Lake Tjörnin is a defining landmark in Reykjavík’s city centre. Enclosed on three sides by the city’s oldest neighbourhoods—with the historical centre to the north, residential areas ascending on either side, and a small park to the south—the lake functions as a spatial opening within the urban fabric. Its expanse extends the line of sight, offering a widened perspective that embraces both the surrounding townscape and, beyond it, the mountains outside the city. Animated by birdlife and vegetation lining its banks, Tjörnin has long served as a place of pause and recreation, offering momentary relief from the surrounding urban environment.
This paper explores how sensory encounters and the anecdotes that emerge from them contribute to place-making and attachment in this area of urban nature. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2022 and 2024—including video-recorded in situ group sessions and self-guided solo walks—the analysis situates these accounts within discussions of affective geography, phenomenology of place, and vernacular heritage. It examines how sensory and mnemonic engagements with Tjörnin—and its daily and seasonal rhythmic changes in light, weather, vegetation, birdlife, and the cultural life of the city—mediate relations between people, memory, and environment. Anecdotal memories of minor incidents, remembered privately or with peers and retold across generations, function as everyday heritage practices that embed personal recollection within shared narrative traditions. The paper argues that such sensory impressions and narrative practices transform Tjörnin into a storied landscape, sustaining an ecological connection, emotional continuity, and belonging amid urban change.
Paper short abstract
The narratives of the residents of a particular functionalist apartment house in Bratislava reveal how urban nature—trees, scents, light, and courtyards—coexists with concrete, nurturing sensory attachments, a sense of belonging, and the collective identity of its inhabitants across generations.
Paper long abstract
The Avion apartment house, built in 1931 in Bratislava’s Blumenthal (Flower valley) district, represents more than a functionalist icon of interwar modernism. It embodies an interweaving of urban nature, memory, and a sense of belonging across generations of its residents. Their narratives and stories reveal how sensory encounters with the surrounding natural environment have shaped their everyday lives in the house. Trees in courtyards, seasonal scents drifting through open windows, the play of sunlight across façades, or the presence of small, cultivated gardens on rooftops and park spaces nearby create affective anchors of home. Even in times when these natural elements were diminished—through wartime devastation, socialist urban planning, or the noise of a nearby bus station—residents’ narratives return to memories of greenery, seasonal rhythms, and sensory connections with the environment.
Nature thus emerges as a constitutive element of belonging: memories of children playing in courtyards, “cvrkot” – buzzing of nature observed from windows, or blossoms in adjacent streets are inseparable from narratives of urban life in the house. These recollections show how natural presences coexist with the concrete, glass, and steel of the functionalist project of Avion, producing layered attachments to place. They also reveal tensions, as noise and pollution disrupt sensory ties, yet reinforce desires for restoration and continuity.
By situating the research within broader debates on urban ethnology and memory, this paper argues that nature in the city is an active participant in shaping emotional geographies, collective memory, and enduring senses of home in urban environments.
Paper short abstract
The proposed paper analyses the everyday cultural practices and relationship of boatmen and divers with the river Yamuna in the city of Delhi to articulate their sense of identity and idea of home through a memory of the river and interaction with non-human elements like water and boats.
Paper long abstract
The proposed paper aims to analyse the oral narratives of the riverine community of boatmen and divers settled along the banks of river Yamuna in the city of Delhi in order to articulate their sense of identity and notions of ‘home’ in a rapidly urbanising city. Their rituals and everyday cultural practices centred either around the river water or their boats are examined to understand their idea of ‘home’ as some of them live permanently on the boats parked along the rivers edge or have built houses there.
The boats on river Yamuna are seen as liminal, hybrid spaces not only because human communities live on them and make a complex, diverse livelihood but also because this environment is neither fully land nor entirely water; it represents the fluid and complex worlds that lie within the rivers. The boats, thus, promote the boatmen’s fluidity and hybridity as a cultural and social community, with their own set of rituals and practices.
The paper will also situate their sensory experience of the river, the smell of its polluted waters or swimming in it to understand how degradation/pollution further impacts their embodied relationships with water. The embodied, sensory engagement of boatmen with water, including smells, tactile interactions, and emotional attachments will be discussed to highlight a lived ecology often excluded from policy frameworks which consequently impacts their relationship with the river in the city.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how overlooked forms of urban nature—such as weeds, moss and wildflowers in cracks—become anchors of memory and narrative. By tracing stories around these micro landscapes, we can explore how the ordinary green disrupts and reshapes urban belonging.
Paper long abstract
Urban nature often hides in plain sight: weeds growing through sidewalks, ivy climbing neglected walls or moss softening stone. These modest presences may seem peripheral, yet they hold narrative and mnemonic power, shaping how people relate to the city. This paper explores how everyday encounters with such micro landscapes generate stories that bridge the human and the nonhuman in urban environments. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and personal accounts, I show how weeds and other overlooked plants become markers of resilience, nostalgia, or transformation—reminders of childhood landscapes, signs of ecological change or emblems of persistence against concrete order. These stories complicate the view of cities as purely human-made spaces, instead revealing urban life as co-constituted by natural presences both cultivated and uninvited. By attending to how people speak about plants in cracks and corners, I argue that urban folklore is deeply entangled with ecological perception and affective experience. Weeds, often dismissed as nuisances, act as storytellers in their own right, rooting memory, emotion and place in the crevices of the city. This perspective not only broadens our understanding of narrative ecologies but also highlights how small, unremarkable forms of nature sustain urban imaginations and attachments.
Paper short abstract
In Reykjavík’s historic cemetery Hólavallagarður, trees, animals, and seasonal change intertwine with memory and emotion. This paper shows how urban nature becomes a site of solace, reflection, and intergenerational remembrance.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores place attachment by analysing how memories and emotions shape relationships with places linked to the past. The research is set in downtown Reykjavík, the city’s oldest district—an area imbued with memories and emotional connections for many residents. Data were collected using two complementary methods: solitary walks with audio-visual recording glasses, which captured the participants’ visual and verbal observations as well as ambient sounds, and walk-along interviews conducted together with the researcher.
Within these walks, Hólavallagarður—Reykjavík’s oldest cemetery—emerges as more than a burial ground: it is a green refuge in the city, a site of play and exploration, and a place where memories of loved ones, history, and mortality intertwine. Participants describe the cemetery as a childhood playground, a shortcut in everyday life, and a site of solace and reflection. Graves evoke stories of ancestors, public figures, and tragic fates, while family rituals of visiting and tending to graves sustain intergenerational bonds. Encounters with plants and animals, alongside the presence of the dead, create a layered atmosphere where life and death coexist.
By focusing on Hólavallagarður, we show how urban nature mediates affective engagement with the city, shaping narratives of belonging, continuity, and transience. The cemetery illustrates how natural and cultural elements in urban spaces are entangled in personal and collective memory, and how encounters with urban nature can evoke both tenderness and confrontation with mortality.
Paper short abstract
The paper explores how children, through sensory and imaginative engagement with urban nature, create narratives interwoven with memory, emotion, and place—allowing the youngest to narrate the city as a living, storied space.
Paper long abstract
In the paper we will presents educational project focused on developing narrative thinking in early childhood, grounded in the theoretical framework of narrative knowledge ( Ricoeur, Kearney, Gadamer). The project emphasizes the cultivation of children’s narrative competencies, including dialogical listening, imaginative engagement with diverse perspectives, temporal orientation of life experiences, and the development of practical wisdom in ethically complex situations.
The project explored how natural elements—such as trees, birdsong, weather, and overgrown paths—become important narrative actors in children's experience of the city. Through experiential walks, observation, intergenerational dialogue, and meetings with local figures (including poet and musician), children explored the layered histories and cultural traces of their neighborhood. They discovered forgotten names, historical sites and personal stories linked to specific places.
The children responded by creating twelve original narratives—poems, stories, visual art, riddles, and short films—that were integrated into a participatory map of Vodmat. This process shows how even the youngest urban dwellers engage in the co-creation of place, where different places become narrative touchstones. The paper argues that such storytelling constitutes a form of ecological and narrative citizenship, in which nature is not only seen and sensed, but storied and remembered as integral to urban life. It reflects on how this process bridges ethnographic practice, folk narrative, and early childhood pedagogy. It argues that children’s storytelling fosters a form of narrative citizenship, enriching our understanding of place as a lived, narrated, and collectively imagined reality.
Paper short abstract
Building on ethnographic research, this paper demonstrates how older adults living in Warsaw experience urban heat. It showcases how they feel heat in their bodies, readjust their daily routines and how their affective relationship with the city changes during the summer.
Paper long abstract
Europe is one of the fastest heating continents due to anthropogenic climate change and environmental shifts. While southern Europe faces unprecedented temperatures, it has been culturally more used to heat. In contrast, cities in central-eastern Europe have historically adapted to cold temperatures and now have to completely re-adjust, learning how to cope with and adapt to heat. And within such cities, there are groups of people who are particularly vulnerable to heat stress, due to a combination of social and physiological factors. Older adults, above 65 years old, are such a group, often more isolated and at risk of dehydration or heat stroke, forced to re-learn how to live in an urban environment in the summer.
This paper builds on ethnographic research conducted in Warsaw, Poland, in 2021-2022, that consisted of long-term participant observation and interviews with 10 people above 65 years old, focus groups with 81 people and participatory workshops with a group of 15 older adults. It demonstrates how older adults living in Warsaw experience urban heat, showcasing how they smell, see and feel it, how they adjust their daily routines and how they narrate and explain the changes they have noticed happening in the weather, their city and their bodies, throughout their lives. Theoretically focusing on the framework of embodiment, the paper discusses how older adults’ affective relationship with the city is mediated through heat.
Paper short abstract
Folklore collector J. K. Harju’s writings about marginal city life in Helsinki in the 1960–1970 are stored at the Finnish Literature Society archives. In my presentation I will discuss Harju´s collection and tell how the nature and the materiality of being unhoused is presented.
Paper long abstract
Folklore collector Johan Knut Harju (1910–1976) created a roughly 20 000-page collection to the Finnish Literature Society’s (SKS) folklore archives during 1961–1976. Helsinki born Harju suffered from alcohol addiction which among other problems left him unhoused. Harju experienced homelessness and spent his time on the streets as well as in prisons, welfare institutions and night shelters where he created his documentations about marginal city life by writing personal narratives and by interviewing others. During the 15 years he wrote to the archive he interviewed over 900 people.
In my presentation I will discuss Harju´s collection and how the materiality of being unhoused is presented. In contrast to the misery unhoused men encountered, Harju told the archive about “drifter”” lintsari”– lifestyle that for Harju was defined by freedom. Drifters are “like birds of the sky, visible to us during the day but disappeared somewhere at night”, he said.
In the narratives where Harju or his interviewees talk about experiencing homelessness in urban environments, the nature is always present. Life threatening nordic winters are met with bonfires or air vents found in public space pumping warm excess air to ice cold nights. Seeking shelter under bridges or temporary camps offer a place to rest from the hostile cityscape. The place under the bridge is a wasteland paradise, “a home to love” when it rains.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the usage of the concept of "cityscape" in Finnish urban planning and showcases how the concept often neglects such things as nature and change and over-emphasizes the significance of buildings and their visual characteristics such as facades.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the concept of cityscape (kaupunkikuva in Finnish) and how it is interpreted in Finnish city development and city planning language. According to Hentilä and Wiik’s (2003, p. 7) definition "the cityscape refers to the visually perceptible whole formed by buildings, structures, and nature together." Furthermore, it “is the visually perceptible dimension of the built or urban environment, which typically holds significant architectural, aesthetic, or other cultural value." (Tieteen termipankki 2025).
In many Finnish cities, there are “cityscape councils” or “cityscape architects”, that evaluate city plans and building projects and their impact on the cityscape. Consequently, the “cityscape analysis” has traditionally been conducted in an expert-driven manner. These analyses are typically based on visual observations made by professionals during field visits, where aspects such as, building characteristics and forms, building density, heights and widths, as well as the adaptation of buildings to one another and to the surrounding environment are examined.
This study examines different definitions of the “cityscape” collected from sources such as legislation, reports and dictionaries to understand how they define a “city” and its significant qualities. Besides the expert-led nature, the challenge of the concept is that it focuses on the visual and static interpretations of the city, whereas it often neglects such things as nature and change and over-emphasizes the significance of buildings and their visual characteristics such as facades.
Hentilä, H-L. ja Wiik, M. (2003). Kaupunkikuva asukkaiden kokemana: Vantaan kokeiluprojektin kuvaus. Ympäristöministeriö.
Tieteen termipankki. (2025).
Paper short abstract
The unwavering public interest in the pungent blooming of a “misshapen phallic giant” (Amorphophallus titanium) inspires reflections on the glass house as a place of encounter, where shared cultural histories are woven and the multi-species-network of urban co-creation is unveiled.
Paper long abstract
Summer 2025, Berlin’s botanic garden is celebrating the tallest single flower bloom in its history. Towering at 2,36m, the fully erect “misshapen phallic giant” (Amorphophallus titanium), or “corpse flower” (bunga bangkai), is a pungent spectacle of unwavering public fascination, haunting collective narratives of the global north since its introduction at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in 1889. As the loop closes and a diverse crowd’s gasps mirror those of their city-dwelling ancestors from another century, this paper invites its reader to reflect on the glass house as a place of encounter.
Since the dualistic and oppositional approach traditionally utilized when attempting to situate the human animal in a hierarchical pyramid of life (Plumwood 1993), led to a hyperseperation from the natural world that ties us to “the sixth great extinction crisis” (Hall 2011), the post-anthropocentric turn (Braidotti 2013) seeks different modes of reconnection. I suggest that the scope of the city, as a place inhabited and shaped by a pluralistic multi-species community, is unveiled through the encounter with – and experience of non-human personhood (Hall 2011) in meeting spaces like the botanic garden, thus uncovering contact zones (Haraway 2008) between different modes of life.
Shared cultural histories of human and plant life emerge as the theatre of glass encloses, highlights and facilitates sensorially engaging interspecies encounters, emphasizing the complexity of human cities as places of overlapping „Umwelten“ (Uexküll 1909) and realities. This paper traces these vines of connection and examines the prerequisites for their flourishing in an uncertain planetary future.