Cultivating Everyday Life: Yards, Nature and Time in the City
2015-09
Loading...
View/Download File
Persistent link to this item
Statistics
View StatisticsJournal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Title
Cultivating Everyday Life: Yards, Nature and Time in the City
Authors
Published Date
2015-09
Publisher
Type
Thesis or Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on everyday practices in residential yards, in the context of recent shifts towards urban sustainability policies and projects. Yards, and the variegated access to these private landscapes, are deeply political, and shaped by fundamentally racialized histories of home ownership and urbanization in US cities and suburbs. Yards are also an arena in which people are confronted with an array of contemporary social and environmental issues. Through qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork with residents in three diverse Minneapolis neighborhoods, I studied how yards are inhabited, experienced, and cultivated. I also analyzed municipal sustainability policies and environmental advocacy projects, to situate residents’ experiences within regimes of urban governance. I found yards are experienced and understood by residents in much more diverse and complex ways than is generally considered from scholarly and policy perspectives. Engagement with yards often involves decades of maintenance, cultivation, and care. I have found a surprisingly diverse range of informal property arrangements and sharing economies, with varying forms and meanings across and within study areas. Engagement with yards also depends on embodied skills, socioeconomic positions, and capacities to pause and attune to more-than-human rhythms. I argue yards and yard practices contribute to the reinforcement of certain fundamental urban logics such as private property and the production of a discrete and manageable nature. But everyday yard practices also provide disruptions to these logics and create the conditions for new social relations to emerge, such as urban commons in variegated forms. Furthermore, cultivating yards entail affective attunements between human practice and encounters with more-than-human organisms, within the context of sociopolitical relations at multiple scales. Thus, the research contributes to debates about urban environmentalisms by considering sustainability in terms of experiential and affective registers beyond best practices and measure. The research also reveals diverse and collective practices of property ownership and stewardship, in the midst of what is often considered the most iconic landscape of American private property – neighborhoods of single family houses. Finally, the research contributes to recent calls within geography about the possibilities and limitations of a renovated phenomenology in the ways geographers study and represent diverse human experiences.
Description
University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2015. Major: Geography. Advisors: Vinay Gidwani, Helga Leitner. 1 computer file (PDF); 393 pages.
Related to
Replaces
License
Collections
Series/Report Number
Funding information
Isbn identifier
Doi identifier
Previously Published Citation
Suggested citation
Lang, Ursula. (2015). Cultivating Everyday Life: Yards, Nature and Time in the City. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/191319.
Content distributed via the University Digital Conservancy may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor. By using these files, users agree to the Terms of Use. Materials in the UDC may contain content that is disturbing and/or harmful. For more information, please see our statement on harmful content in digital repositories.