Paper short abstract:

From the 1980s to the present day, regulation and imagination of green spaces within the urban-industrial fabric of Zurich changed from static relicts to dynamic matrixes, thus similarly reflecting capitalist valorization of space as well as conceptual shifts towards a non-essentialistic nature.

Paper long abstract:

I focus the transformation of specific urban green spaces in Swiss postindustrial cities: former industrial sites, wastelands and other spaces not fully integrated in processes of valorization around 1980. Historic source material reveals a then popular perception of the respective spaces as «islands» or «oases», imagined as refuges for natural and human inhabitants somehow endangered. Obviously, this metaphoric framing as relicts/reservations was echoing traditional concepts of nature conservation.

First steps towards a transformation of this dichotomous spatial imaginations occurred throughout the 80s and 90s: In the realm of alternative culture, it was the cultural revaluation of marginalized (semi-)public spaces, in planning it was a shift towards user-orientated design stressing spatial modifiability, while in ecology it was a reformulation of conservation strategies like the dismissal of nature-city-dualism and the reconceptualization of urban nature’s spatiality as network of lineaments.

In the light of Zurich’s economic boom after the year 2000, the new millennia witnessed further dynamizations in the designs of urban green spaces: institutionalization of interim uses, conservation strategies like wasteland-rotation, «pixelation» of green spaces («pocket parks», temporary «mobile gardens») etc.

It remains an open question whether this rule of spatial mobilization – which is notably reflected by social sciences’ recent conceptualizations of (urban) natures as dynamic assemblages and fields of becoming – should be interpreted as the capitalist manufacturing of a «liquid nature» (Bonneuil 2015) or just as a neoliberal take-over of intrinsically emancipatory conceptualizations of post-essentialist natures (Braun 2015), designing a path for «conviviality in a living city» (Hinchliffe/Whatmore 2006).