Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores urban nature conservation in Helsinki as a contested space where care operates as both generative and ambivalent. It examines how conservation practices shape values, impose hierarchies, and raise ethical questions, proposing situated care for multispecies futures.

Presentation long abstract

Amid accelerating urbanisation and biodiversity decline, conservation landscapes are increasingly framed as sites of refuge and ecological repair. Yet the practices that sustain these spaces are deeply entangled with ethical negotiations, asymmetries of power, and contested visions of care. Situating my presentation within the politically contested field of urban nature conservation in Helsinki, southern Finland, I will discuss how conservation interventions can portray care as both a generative and ambivalent force. While aimed at fostering conditions for more-than-human flourishing, practices of care simultaneously impose dominance, exclusions, and hierarchies of value. Examining how these conservation categories are instrumentalised in urban planning reveals the mechanisms through which different types of values are extracted from land. Consequently, environmental protection practices raise the question: who is being cared for, and at what, or whose expense?

Approaching nature reserves as more-than-human contact zones, I argue, allows us to acknowledge and navigate the emergent tensions that arise when differing ontologies encounter one another, highlighting the onto-ethical dimensions of the material constructedness of care in conservation practices (Lopez et al. 2025). By foregrounding attentiveness and response-ability (van Dooren et al. 2016), the presentation contributes to debates on care as resistance and alternative world-making in times of ecological crisis. Ultimately, I propose that cultivating care in urban conservation demands situated practices that challenge technocratic logics while imagining more convivial futures for multispecies life.