This website is the output of the research studio “Re-Valuing Nature” which took place in the spring semester of 2019/20 in the Urban Studies program, Faculty of Architecture, Estonian Academy of Arts. Centered around a growing awareness of an environmental crisis that poses a possible catastrophic threat to civilization as “occidentals” know it, the studio explored the dialectics of urbanization and socio-ecological change through the lens of the question, how do we value nature? The thematic focus was wastelands and wetlands: non-conventional and alternative landscapes that have received significant scientific attention during the last decades.

 

Recently, the question of how to value wastelands and wetlands has been negotiated through preservation and restoration practices. Although endeavours to transform these landscapes into something more “useful” and therefore more “valuable” date back to centuries ago, the new environmental consciousness that emerged over the last half a century has redefined the approach to revaluation. “Nature changed in the 1970s,” writes political ecologist Cindi Katz (2005). Punctuated by the oil shocks and the crisis of overaccumulation, nature was no more an open frontier to be exploited. As the question of valuation started to be negotiated through conservation practices, terms such as “wise use” and “appropriate use” became instrumental. While these terms beg questions such as “what is wise” and “what is appropriate,” we found it mind-opening to rethink urban political ecology to unfold the complexities in conservation practices and their politics that coproduce nature and man.

 

In this website, we explore the (re)production of wastelands and wetlands and the question of valuation from a variety of scales. The existing scholarship on geopolitics reveals that it is crucial to explore landscapes in a cross-scalar way: not only at different spatial scales (such as global-local or urban-rural), but also at myriad cultural, political, economic, and historical intervals that construct those scales. Thus, rather than referencing a specific point on a linear, global-to-local axis, each project expands beyond its basic spatial scale to consider the elements that facilitate the oscillation between or beyond the macro-micro, urban-rural, or infrastructure-doorstep dichotomies.

 

In so doing, our projects explore the complex and process-based engagement of man and nature. Our concern here is not just what landscape is but also what landscape is for. While this website provides readers with a collection of responses to the question of how nature is valued, we aim to reveal the missing subject in the question to understand by whom, for whom, and under what conditions this valuing of nature occurs. This takes the form of multiple categories such as the commodification of nature, genealogy of landscapes, social landscapes, representation of nature, and (geo-)politics of restoration. While these categories were the frames through which we researched and analyzed our different case studies, they are by no means the only relevant categories. 

 

We invite our readers to approach each student’s project through these categories in order to build connections among the projects and situate the research in the context of this larger body of work regarding geographies of scale and urban political ecology.