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Not only do infrastructures put matter in motion, they also provide salient accounts of political struggles and everyday accommodations. Today, many municipalities promote them as part of "green" and "sustainable" solutions for the future. Concurrently, the more-than-human social sciences are going through their own "infrastructural turn," with an impetus to acknowledge actors beyond the human - that is, the ecologies of plants, animals, and fungi. This paper joins the call to include the ontic-epistemic realities of lively, other-than-human beings. Homing in on one ecological actor, the white willow (Salix alba), in Malmö and Scania, Sweden, I show that more-than-human infrastructural relations are far from novel occurrences. By adopting a ligneous, relational dialectic of agency, I account for the willow's shifting spatiotemporal positions and how the tree connects Scania's and Malmö's infrastructural past, present, and potential futures to wider discourses of sustainability and urban change. In Malmö, such discourses reflect the current implementation of a "green" infrastructure of "eco-pathways" (Ekostråket). Focusing on the willow, I question the municipal promise of "green" infrastructure as a panacea for humanity’s challenges in the Anthropocene.

Hur ser den ideala handledningsprocessen och handledaren av akademiska uppsatser ut? I denna korta text reflekterar jag över hur detta kan (och kanske bör) te sig i praktiken. Utifrån vetenskaplig litteratur, anekdoter från akademin och mina egna erfarenheter, föreslår jag ett anammande av ett reflexivt, relationellt förfaringssätt som har både process och produkt i åtanke. Här blir handledningen inte bara ett sätt att få studenter att uppnå de stipulerade kursläromålen utan också en viktig del av introduktionen till den akademiska sfären i stort., What do the ideal supervision process and supervisor of academic dissertations and essays look like? In this short text, I reflect on how the two can (and perhaps should) appear in practice. Drawing on scientific articles, anecdotes from academia, and my own experiences, I propose the adoption of a reflexive, relational approach, which takes both process as well as product into account. Here, supervisions become not only a means to ensure that students achieve the stipulated course goals, they also play an important part in introducing them to the sphere of academia at large.

This paper addresses Jem Bendell’s concept of “deep adaptation” in the Anthropocene through the lens of everyday urban practices in contemporary Northern Europe. It proposes that this “deep adaptation” should be defined less in relation to a socio-ecological “collapse” and more through everyday occurrences in presentday urban environments. Entering into a critical conversation with Bendell’s conceptual “4 Rs” framework, the paper draws on primary data from several cities in Sweden and Germany to show how, in practice, resilience can be found in the “quiet activism” of leisure gardeners; how ingrained notions of restricted land use may be relinquished through “commoning” urban space; how novel constellations of co-living restores old ideas of intragenerational urban cohabitation; and, finally, how a path to reconciliation may be articulated through an ontological shift away from an anthropocentric urban planning, towards one that recognises other-thanhuman beings as legitimate dwellers in the urban landscape. Accounting for urbanities of enmeshed societal, ecological, and spatial trajectories, the paper reveals an inhibiting anthropocentrism in Bendell’s framework and ultimately points to how his “creatively constructed hope” for the future may be found, not in an impending global collapse, but in everyday adaptations and embodied acts that stretch far beyond the human.

Allmänningar och stråk för rumslig rättvisa

This thesis explores more-than-human entanglements of contemporary urban environments in order to develop a rearticulation of urban landscapes as spaces decidedly beyond the exclusively human. Taking its cue from the question “How do we live with urban difference today?,” such spaces, the thesis argues, emerge through, as well as change with, a variety of socio-ecological entwinements. It proposes that alternative ways of living in urban landscapes may be detected, as well as potentially fostered, if we turn our attention to other-than-human being, becoming, and belonging in the city. Subsequently, it investigates how this, in practice as well as in theory, changes the ways in which human city dwellers consider other-than-human urban expressions. Based on twelve months fieldwork in Berlin, Germany, and Gothenburg, Sweden – following a mixed methods approach of participant observation and in-depth interviews with urban planners, park managers, local activists, and decision-makers, complemented by a visual anthropological practice – the thesis examines several urban green spaces (recreational areas, ecologically protected nature-parks, industrial wastelands and old cemeteries) where other-than- human bodies have been given space and time to develop without direct or invasive human interference. These spaces, the thesis shows, have also become sites of potential contestation and change, challenging who and what belong in the urban milieu. On the one hand, the cities currently face increased influxes of human residents as well as acute housing shortages, with calls for intensified densifications and developments of interstitial urban land growing ever louder. At the same time, with the monocultural shaping of the rural areas outside the cities, spontaneous urban green spaces are being touted by local experts as increasingly important sites of biodiversity. Interlacing these empirical examples with a series of theoretical approaches on how to conceive of the urban, diver, ERC Advanced Grant "Rethinking Urban Nature"