LOOK INSIDE: Re-scaling the Rural

Contents

INTRODUCTION vi

Introduction Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag

REACQUAINTANCES 2

Reacquainting Ourselves with the Gods of the Countryside? Rurality’s diverse place in post-COVID-19 times Keith Halfacree

CONTROL & ABANDON 14

Unsmart Landscapes: An unpredictable countryside as a future resort Jens Christian Pasgaard, Karen Olesen, Tom Nielsen, Morten Daugaard

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Co-Creating with Feral Landscapes: Delineating a useful definition and ontology of (re)wilding for the architectural fields Eric Guibert

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Learning from the Past to Understand the Present and Prepare for the Future: A landscape-based, cross-scale approach to visualizing sea-settlement-inland relations in the context of sea-level rise Katrina Marstrand Wiberg

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Attending Otherwise: Care ethics among conventional farmers in Denmark Cæcilie Kildahl Kramer

WASTES & REPAIR 78

Land Movement: What is the metropolitan area of Paris doing to its hinterlands?

Marie-Laure Garnier

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Liquid Futures: Floating biodiversity habitats Corinna Dean

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Composing the Rural as Common Ground Stefan Darlan Boris

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Scaling-Up: City farms: A model for growth and resilience Jane McAllister

COMMUNITIES & TRANSITIONS 128

The French Citizen Experience of the Rural Village of Saillans (2014–2020): A real and concrete utopia of participatory democracy facing the challenge of ecological transition Sabine Girard

142

Beyond the Plantationocene: Learning from the hyper specific rural wilderness of Agger Anne Mette Frandsen, Knud Aarup Kappel

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Place, Culture, and Heritage in Changing Rural Areas: Connections and challenges in Ebeltoft fishing harbor Mathilde Kirkegaard

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Village Spaces: Attached to the landscape and fixed to (remaining) functions Tina Vestermann Olsen, Ditte Bendix Lanng

REFLECTIONS 184

Rural Timescales: Towards a post-urban habitat Pieter Versteegh

END MATTER 204

Author Biographies

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Pictures Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag

Introduction

Precision-farming, renewable energy plants, data centers, biodiversity zones, home offices and increasing connectivity: new forms of rurality are emerging physically and conceptually, and new dynamics are at play between ‘human’, ‘extra human’, and ‘non-human’ scales. What social and environmental gains and losses are at stake here? And what kinds of new inter-scalar dynamics might emerge within these changing conditions?

While contemporary representations of the countryside underplay its critical role in providing food to cities,1 major changes in farming practices are underway as transitions from smallholdings towards industrial scale farming continuously impact rural landscapes, villages, residents, and identities. Rural villages, particularly those in farmlands, exist in fragile communal equilibriums of material and immaterial networks. At the community scale, they are vulnerable to demographic changes such as those brought about by urban migration. Such changes are exacerbated when politics favor the centralization of infrastructures2 and institutions and by the decline in farming livelihoods in the wake of the emergence of highly mechanized megafarms.

Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag

The conference learnt from its location too, as the Thy region is undergoing many of the socio-economic and environmental shifts being discussed: Thisted Municipality covers an area of 1,100 km2 and is currently home to 43,000 residents, but the population is dwindling, as is the case in many other rural areas across Europe, and indeed the world.4 And, as is also familiar in other rural regions, Thy has suffered the effects of the centralization of public amenities, such as schools, nursing homes, and other infrastructural services.5 Very contrasting migration tendencies are apparent here: the inland villages, originally built to house and service the large work force of the many farms and smallholdings, are now experiencing depopulation, abandonment, and decay; conversely, the seaboard villages have had much smoother transitions as they have been redeemed through tourism. Nature and natural forces play major roles in shaping this municipality too, in the ironically conflicted forms of nature reserves and renewable energy farms.

In May 2022, 80 academics and professionals with diverse rural interests from various disciplines and countries, gathered for a three-day Re-Scaling the Rural conference in the village of Agger, in the rural region of Thy (Thisted Municipality), in north-western Denmark.3 This event, which comprised talks, walks, site visits, and workshops, ignited a wide range of lively discussions and debates, and some useful friction too, as questions of scale in rural terrains and urban-rural dialectics were addressed. vi

Fig. 1.1: Walk and talk at the Re-Scaling the Rural conference, May 2022. [image: MMSK]

The fusion of smallholdings into megafarms in Thy has diminished the local farming sector’s dependence on labor from inland villages making traditional rural livelihoods less feasible. In turn this impacts the already ageing local demography, as younger people from the villages tend to seek educational and professional opportunities in the cities and not return. The social and economic imbalance between urban and rural is as visible in Thy as it is nearly everywhere in the Danish countryside: the decline in rural property values in recent decades means that the homes of the remaining rural population, apart from those in seaside villages, very often become unsaleable. Abandoned buildings in various states of disrepair have thus become a common sight in rural Denmark. In spite of this, the remaining residents of these once industrious villages seem to maintain a strong sense of belonging there. Spirited community volunteers help in this regard as their social practices can enhance and rebuild community cohesion and identity.

Decommissioned stations, closed inns, obsolete schools, and other buildings are condemned to demolition despite the importance they once had in the social lives of village communities. Their abrupt disappearance impacts communal

identities, as such buildings anchor immaterial heritage and collective memories that are irreplaceable and too often neglected because they can be hard to define.

The emergence of megafarms tends to disconnect informal cross-country mobilities (such as footpaths, hedgerows, and lanes) to facilitate modern heavy machinery. This has also led to biodiversity loss and greater species segregation. On the other hand, Thisted Municipality is home to the first Danish national park, National Park Thy, which has played a crucial role in securing wildlife habitats and has already led to the reintroduction of extinct species such as the European wolf.

Other more niche organic and hybrid initiatives have also begun to contest the dominant megafarm wisdom, working instead with more intrinsic and complex understandings of rural transformation.6 In contrast to the altered demography of dwindling inland farming villages, coastal village communities within the municipality have experienced a wave of counter-urbanism over the past decade. For instance, the village of Klitmøller, popularly known as ‘Cold Hawaii’, has become an attraction for people who used to live in the Copenhagen area, and where the exceptional conditions for windsurfing have rapidly increased its population and property prices alike.7 Other former seaboard fishing communities have similarly been redeemed by tourism.

Thy has a long history of developing renewable energy sources, not least because of its exposed North Sea-facing location; since the 1970s the development and testing of windmills in particular has played a part in Thy’s reputation as a self-reliant municipality in terms of electricity. For example, Østerild in Northern Thy is home to a huge wind energy test center, ironically much to the chagrin of environmentalists.

Here, fragile nature reserves are framed by windmills

Fig. 1.2: Stenbjerg fishing community at the West Coast of Thy. [image: MMSK]

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towering up to 450m above the landscape. In stark contrast to this scale, locally produced household micro-windmills have become a common sight in Thy as people respond to the energy anxieties that have emerged since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Altered demographics, altered scales in farming, and altered mobilities. Thisted Municipality embodies a catalogue of contrasting, and sometimes mutually opposed, rural trends, livelihoods, identities, and practices. These symptoms of a multi-faceted local rurality reflect many of the global trends and challenges that the conference attended to.

From the event’s very diverse presentations, discussions, walks, talks, and communal dining, the 14 essays that comprise this book subsequently emerged. They represent an eclectic snapshot of the various views and positions taken across scales and ruralities within the conference, as perceived though the lenses of architecture, landscape architecture, anthropology, the arts, and human geography.

Thus, Re-scaling the Rural offers some critical readings of contemporary rurality from the perspective of different disciplines and in the contexts of different scales in space and time. At a moment when rurality is becoming more central in the awareness of the Anthropocene crises of pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, wars, and rising inequalities, this collection of essays combines conceptual and practical

explorations, outside-in (from urban viewpoints), and insideout (from lesser known ruralities).

In the first chapter, geographer Keith Halfacree describes a radical rurality and sets it against major recent societal events to demonstrate that it is still conceptually operational. He proposes a three-fold lens for the understanding of rurality, through representations, practices, and lives. His essay therefore serves as a transition into the more field-specific and specialized essays that follow.

The publication then utilizes three thematic pairings: Control & Abandon, Waste & Repair, and Community & Transition for the subsequent sections, which each comprise four essays.

Dividing each of these sections are some of the photographs taken by myself over the past decade, of abandoned homes in rural Thy. One of these was partially deconstructed by me as a way of highlighting the memories contained within and inviting new dialogues with nature.

To conclude, architect and ruralist Pieter Versteegh provides a postscript essay, in which he places rurality in the context of capitalist modernity across different time-scales.

In summary, Re-Scaling the Rural aims to initiate a critical investigation of past, current, and possibly future concepts and interpretations of rural lives, scales, and perceptions.

Endnotes

2 Hans Skifter Andersen, Helle Nørgaard, Jesper Ole Jensen, and Carola Simon, Tilflyttere til Yderområder: Forandring, integration og strategier. SBi 2010, Nr. 52 (Hørsholm: SBI Publishing, 2010).

5 Louise Glerup Aner and Høgni Kalsø Hansen, Flytninger Fra Byer Til Land-Og Yderområder: Højtuddannede og socialt udsatte gruppers flytninger fra Bykommuner til land- og yderkommuner – mønstre og motiver (Copenhagen: SFI – Det Nationale Forskningscenter For Velfærd, 2014). https://www.vive.dk/media/pure/yzely0xk/277115

3 “Re-Scaling the Rural,” Aarhus School of Architecture. Accessed February 28, 2025. https://aarch.dk/en/re-scaling-the-rural

6 For example, Thy Whisky – A family owned company that combines whisky distillation with organic farming. https://thy-whisky.com/

4 European Commission, Eurostat, Urban Europe: Statistics on cities, towns and suburbs, 2016 edition (Luxembourg: European Union Publications Office, 2016). https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2785/91120

7 Ulrik Baltzer, and Simon Johansen, “Klitmøller: Byen i Thy, der dræber fordommene om udkantsdanmark”, Videncentret Bolius, October 9, 2021.

Accessed February 28, 2025. https://www.bolius.dk/klitmoeller-byen-ithy-der-draeber-fordommene-om-udkantsdanmark-37383

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Michael Woods, Rural (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010).

RESCALING THE RURAL

Fig. 1.3: Egebaksande; a decaying manor house in Thy, built in 1863. [image: MMSK]

Introduction

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REACQUAINTAINCES

Reacquainting Ourselves with the Gods of the Countryside?

Keith Halfacree

Rurality’s diverse place in post-COVID-19 times

INTRODUCTION: A PLACE FOR ‘RURAL’ TODAY? Throughout my career I have researched and taught about rural life today and the changing countryside. The focus has mostly been on the UK, not least to maintain a degree of spatial specificity and awareness – I work in a geography department after all – but many of the issues engaged with clearly also apply far beyond our little island. One issue I have consistently had to think about for all these years has been where rural or rurality or even just the more informal countryside stand today. Is it a term of contemporary significance or relevance?

Or am I still misleadingly foregrounding a spatiality whose time has been and gone? Is Fig. 1, with its stark brick backdrop, an indicative sign of the rural today? In his 1973 classic The Country and the City, Raymond Williams noted how “A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times”,1 but where is that first term today?

Is “country” still “contra (against, opposite)”2 the city in any active sense, or should it really be seen largely as a relic of the past?

Certainly, over the same period I have been an academic, numerous researchers have cast doubt on the significance of the rural today. Especially noteworthy were Keith Hoggart’s interventions from the late 1980s, not least his call to “do away with rural” as he argued that we no longer have in the UK significant processes in operation delineated at a local spatial scale whose spatial inscriptions distinguish rural from nonrural environments.3 Instead, ongoing and often rapid processes of capitalist restructuring result in a “spatial loosening of the elements once considered indicative of ... rural and urban”,4 with the increasing 2

conceptual redundance of rural as a result. Moreover, retaining the category can be obfuscatory, not least since intra-rural differences can be enormous and rural-urban similarities sharp.5 Hoggart’s critique – even for, somewhat ironically, a ruralfocused academic – was far from isolated. As far back as the early 1970s, in a presidential address to the US Rural Sociological Society, James Copp argued forcefully that: There is no rural and there is no rural economy. It is merely our analytic distinction, our rhetorical device …

We tend to ignore the import of what happens in the total economy and society as it affects the rural sector.

We tend to think of the rural sector as a separate entity.6 Consequently, we should perhaps have been quite unsurprised that “morbid thoughts about the rural abound(ed)” a few decades later,7 whilst Versteegh could reflect on a: recurrent reaction … to extinguish [rurality] as a category: the rural and urban are not to be different.

The contemporary urban is supposed to include the rural … Rurality … is to be urbanized.8 This chapter argues, however, in contrast to such morbid thoughts, that such talk of the end or redundancy of the rural, even in the most socio-economically advanced countries, is highly premature. Instead, and notwithstanding the “production of space”9 by supra-spatial concepts, from capitalism to globalization, the rural remains alive as an active concept today. This is not, though, to position rural areas as fundamentally different from urban areas (or from

A BRIEF (MODERN) HISTORY OF RURAL other categories of settlement geography, such as suburbs) but to argue that there is nonetheless enough life and causal influence from the rural that makes it still an important spatial category. Williams saw country associated with past and city with the future, with a resultant neglect of the present, but the former’s “pull … towards old ways, human ways, natural ways” will be argued in this chapter’s conclusion to provide important active critique in the present.10 In short, there is still much to be learnt from the rural even in our largely urban age.

The rest of this chapter is structured as follows. First, it gives a very brief history of the term rural, arriving at the threefold model that has underpinned much of my scholarship.11 Second, the concept of ‘post-productivist countryside’ to express today’s rural is outlined utilizing this model. Third, it is argued that such a countryside is now being challenged by a number of direct and indirect rural consequences of the UK’s Brexit from the European Union, experience of COVID-19, and the still emerging impacts of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

Yet also implicated in this challenge is a revival of a critical radical rural voice, which gives the chapter its title and is indicated in an ultimately hopeful conclusion.

Not to go back too far in history, the Industrial Revolution is a good place to start a brief history of rural. Simply put, this huge change for all aspects of society signified not only a massive growth of cities and urban life but also almost immediately prompted considerable disillusion with much of it. In the spirit of either/or dualism, this often instigated a new enchantment with the rural, expressed in the growth of Romanticism, the call of the sublime, and a discovery of positives in the wild(erness), and so on.12 Humanity was consequently seen as somewhat second rate within a perspective ranging from “God made the country… man made the town”13 to Engels (1845) discovering the “lowest stage of humanity” in a Manchester slum.14 However, there was no simple turn to the rural following the Industrial Revolution as the now rampant capitalism expressed itself in numerous ways through the cities, with rival discourses to the pro-rural also developing which expressed a hoped for urban in a positive way. For example, notwithstanding those slums, Engels, of course, joined with Marx to see hope for humankind very much in the city, largely dismissing the rural as a reactionary space to escape from. There were copious utopian urban thinkers and writers for whom urbanity expressed desired futures and a largely forgotten rurality, a not-to-be-lamented past.

The net result of all this cultural turmoil focused on urban and rural was that by the 20th century both terms were firmly in the discursive spotlight as lively rival spatial representations.

This attracted frequent attempts to pin them down. A quasimodernist absolutism was strong early on, as in Thomas Sharp’s notorious assertion of: The strong, masculine virility of the town; the softer beauty, the richness, the fruitfulness of that mother of men, the countryside ... The town is town; the country is country: black and white: male and female.15

Fig. 2.1: An Indicative Sign of the Rural Today? [Image: KHH] 3

Co-Creating with Feral Landscapes Delineating a useful definition and ontology of (re)wilding for the architectural fields

Eric Guibert

IS (RE)WILDING USEFUL TO THE ARCHITECTURAL FIELDS? Few words have reached such ubiquity as fast as rewilding in the last decade. It has been applied to a perplexingly broad range of practices: various forms of species and ecosystems conservation, land management,1 medicine, well-being (rewilding your guts), food production, wild fermentation,2 architecture, landscape architecture, and gardening.3 Within the architectural fields that are the focus here – landscapes and buildings – rewilding is often used as a synonym for greening, with varying degrees of wildness and at times, paradoxically, limited benefit to wildlife; examples include the addition of plants on walls and roofs of buildings and the creation of nature recovery frameworks.4 Some defend narrow definitions, usually that of their own practice and context,5 while others have stated that the concept is “nonsense”6 or a nostalgic return to archaic practices. Yet, as with all sudden cultural shifts, the word demonstrates a profound quality shared by a disparate community: one that is less about tangible things and more about the intangible conditions of ecosystems and the relationships that humans have with them.

Some projects are criticized for their colonial, or at least privileged, practices of exclusion.7 This article does not focus on this critical reading; suffice it to say that wild, or nature, can screen unsavory, if not cruel, behavior.

As a result, the term rewilding, or the preferred wilding as will be explained later, appears to many as vague; some may say useless. And yet, for all this seemingly contradictory diversity, it embodies a radical paradigm shift in design 28

Fig. 4.1: A Feral Landscape: Knepp Estate Wildlands. Originally agricultural land, it is primarily left to self-generate since the introduction of ancient domestic species – here a Tamworth sow – that are less aggressive and fearful of humans than their wild ancestors and yet able to live wild through the year. [© EG]

approaches – whether professional or everyday – towards a co-creative engagement with both ecosystems and species.

These designers trust that complex adaptive systems can choose and produce and nurture them to thrive.

Wilding matters because it potentially offers a solution to two of the greatest challenges of our Anthropocenic times: the 6th mass extinction of species and climate change. Wilded landscapes host more living beings and a broader diversity of species than highly maintained ones; their soils and plants can sequester more carbon; wilded hydrological systems are less prone to destructive flooding and have better water quality.8 Just as importantly, wilding is scalable; it collaborates with ecosystems to do the work, it is low energy, and low effort. The main challenges are its unpredictability and limited easily harvestable production.

Wilding is not defined here as a specific practice, but as a spectrum of practices with a shared ontology that is topical, necessary, and urgent. This broad generosity is essential for the effectiveness of the concept. The focus here is on wilding as a form of regenerative landscape practice, whether for ecological conservation, land management, human amenity, aesthetic purposes, or, as seems to be generally the case, a combination of all of them, in varying degrees.

Recent history with roots in the ’60s and ’70s The term rewilding is comparatively recent, yet many ecological conservation and landscape architecture and art practices since the 1960s have shared a similar approach.

The Oostvaardersplassen Park in the Netherlands, officially started in 1985, is often presented as the first rewilding project although the term itself was “coined in the mid1990s by a group of US conservation biologists led by Dave Foreman”.9 (Fig. 4.2) The so called “Dutch Serengeti”10 was

a polder originally intended for industry when reclaimed in the early 1970s. Subsequently left to its own devices, the site was favored by migratory birds.11 Ecological succession rapidly transformed the land into a mixture of grassland and trees. Succession is the dynamic process that bare land goes through over time as it experiences a gradual increase in organic matter as, firstly, small photosynthetic living beings such as lichen and mosses grow and decay; eventually these form soil, affording grassland, followed by scrubland, and, increasingly, mature woodland.

The ecologist Frans Vera, seeing the interaction between this process in Oostvaardersplassen reserve and the grazing of geese (that maintained open grassland), developed a then revolutionary, now increasingly accepted, “dynamic woodpasture” hypothesis that most of Europe in prehistoric time was not, as previously thought, a continuous forest with closed canopy, but an open woodland, with grassland maintained by “mega-herbivores” (wild bovids (cattle), suids (pigs), and equids (horses)) which, with weather and fire events, disturbed the tree cover into a “cyclic vegetation turnover”.12 As woodland began to encroach in Oostvaardersplassen, Vera decided to test his hypothesis by introducing large fauna that were genetically close, or behaved similarly, to those he imagined were present thousands of years ago. Vera thus sought to reintroduce ecological disturbances. Although Vera’s theory has not yet been fully demonstrated, the wilding techniques he employed are increasingly seen as an effective and cost-effective way of nurturing ecological functions and biodiversity.13 In the early to mid ’90s in the USA, discussion began about wilder, larger, and less populated areas, with a focus on the so called three Cs, or “cores, corridors and carnivores”.14 These large, interconnected territories are where apex predators were reintroduced to limit the overgrazing effects of over abundant mega-herbivores. The wolves in 29

Fig. 4.7: La Devaltière, France. The three-hectare property has been managed as a feral landscape since 2005.

Aerial view showing the full range of degrees of control that reveal themselves as textures. from the highest, with the smooth uniform industrial agriculture (bottom fields); to the wildest (primarily middle right). The top pastures follow regenerative agriculture principles – mob grazing – and are at a half-way level of control.

The center-left area is the gardened feral condition and includes meadows, woodland, and hedgerows. [© Robin Pembrooke]

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CONTROL & ABANDON

Co-Creating with Feral Landscapes

41

On the Thorsminde and the Gjøl Postcard to the Future (Figs 5.4 & 5.5), white lines show the cadasters and red footprints show buildings in the low-lying, flood-prone areas. The late 19th century coastline is marked with a red, dashed line: it demonstrates coastal erosion that has been ongoing here for at least 140 years. Nevertheless, ownership has been enforced, and buildings have been built where land may soon be under sea. Looking closely in the lower right corner, some cadasters are already just markings in the sea.

Urban zones sited upon a shared topography The map in Fig. 5.1 depicts the terrains of land and seabed as a coherent landscape without marking what is above and below sea level, implying that the line between land and sea is subject to change and negotiation. The gradient goes from white (deepest seabed) to black (highest hills).

The municipal boundaries and urban zones of coastal cities are marked on the shared terrain. The map reveals how administrative boundaries are disconnected from

the geomorphological characteristics of the landscape.

The dichotomy between landscape characteristics and administrative lines represents how urban development has interpreted the landscape as a two-dimensional canvas instead of a core premise for location. The map points to a relation between city, water, and landscape that becomes arbitrary and counterproductive; an approach to increasing flood risk described in research from the late 1960s onwards by, amongst others, Anne Whiston Spirn and Ian McHarg.30 In the context of sea-level rise and climate adaptation, this disconnection between landscape, administrative lines, and settlement patterns may influence how potential solutions are investigated and implemented. For example, when solutions for sea level rise-risk are evaluated locally, but larger landscape dynamics along the coast or further inland are ignored, it prevents unifying efforts across municipalities, and the focus is limited to immediate timespans such as the years 2050 or 2100. The same map indicates coastal cities as the extent of urban zones (red geometries). When studying the topography, the layout of urban zones indicates practices enforcing flood risk. For example, in the inner fjords of

Fig. 5.8: The historical late 19th century map shows the siting of Vejle on higher ground in the river valley, which resembles that of Aabenraa [see Fig. 5.7] 56

CONTROL & ABANDON

Eastern Jutland, the urban zone expands into low-lying areas where the mouth of the river meets the fjord (Figs 5.6, 5.8, 5.9). A more detailed map of these cities would show that they were initially situated on higher ground, surrounded by protecting wetlands, close to a stream (river) and with access to a harbor.

Postcards to the Future used examples from historical storm surges to show the relations between spatial context (settlement patterns and terrain) and the potential consequences of rising sea levels. For instance, during the Baltic Sea storm in 1872, the city of Nakskov on the island of Lolland experienced a water level of +2.15 meters; by contrast, the water level during the same storm was +3.34 meters at Aabenraa city (Fig. 5.7). Despite a difference of more than a meter, Aabenraa did not experience much damage, whereas the rising sea and flat terrain of Lolland caused dire consequences for the inhabitants. In Postcards, data on historical storm surges provides examples from the past that help us understand contemporary spatial conditions and extrapolate them into future scenarios.

Interconnected Cities: The coastal zone seen from the hinterland watersheds towards the sea This mapping process investigated the interconnectedness between inland cities and coastal cities (Fig. 5.11). The point of departure was the watershed and its main outlet to the sea; coastal cities generally are situated on the mouths of rivers. These connections mean that coastal cities can receive considerable flows of water from their hinterlands; in this sense, the flow paths and river systems connect cities as waterdrops on a thread. On a map, rivers may cross distances from a few kilometers to hundreds or thousands of kms from source to sea, connecting municipal boundaries, and rural and urban zones. Upstream decisions on land use and water management, such as cutting the vegetation of riversides, land cover, and infrastructure in the upstream hinterland, all influence the situations at the coastal cities.

Coastal cities of the future: The coastal zone seen from the sea to the inland Fig. 5.12 explores the spatial and scalar connections between present terrain and coastal cities as a sea-city-inland relation as seen from the sea. The zones between different elevations are emphasized as blue surfaces, to emphasize the point of view of the map, from the sea landwards. The subterranean landscape is shown, whereas inland terrain above 7.5 meters of elevation is whitened out. Cities are marked as circles; the blue color range indicates the elevation of the city.

On this map, larger-scale dikes are erased to clarify the spatial relations between sea, coastal zone, and inland. Dikes are integrated landscape elements too, of course; however, they may be topped or breached. If this happens, then distance to higher ground becomes essential. The mapping process pointed to different topics. For example, in Danish planning, the Coastal Proximity Zone (CPZ)31 is an administrative line defined as a 3 km offset from the coastline, unrelated to the landscape or the spatial situation. It means that, on Lolland, the coastal proximity zone is primarily flat and low-lying, whereas in Aabenraa, the CPZ consists of both lowland and moraine hills.

Fig. 5.9 [top]: Vejle early 20th century Fig. 5.10 [bottom]: Vejle 2020 with contemporary urban development Learning From the Past to Understand the Present and Prepare for the Future

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Fig. 7.8: The ISDI at Villeneuve-sous-Dammartin: slope profile from the road.

[Photo: M-LG for the exhibition “Terres en movement”, 2019]14

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WASTES & REPAIR

Fig. 7.9: The hillsides of the 30m high Villeneuve-sous-Dammartin ISDI as seen from the natural terrain in the foreground. [Photo: M-LG for the exhibition “Terres en Mouvement”, 2019]

Fig. 7.10: Geological map of Dammartin en Goelle, reinterpreted to show how the ISDI site was originally part of a river valley and how the soil deposits have transformed it into a mound. [Montage of satellite photo (IGN) and Geological map by M-LG for the exhibition “Terres en Mouvement”, 2019]

Fig. 7.11: Dumping of excavated soil in a landfill. The land beyond the perimeter of the facility is shown in black and white, to distinguish it from the varied colors of soil coming from across the Ile-de-France region. [Photo: M-LG for the exhibition “Terres en Mouvement”, 2019] Land Movement

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Fig. 8.6: Downstream from Cody Dock at low tide

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WASTES & REPAIR

Fig. 8.7: Floating Biodiversity Habitats design [Image: Design Studio student group work]

Fig. 8.8: Installing the Floating Biodiversity Habitats

Liquid Futures

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Scaling-Up City Farms: A model for growth and resilience

INTRODUCTION

THE CITY FARM MOVEMENT

City farms in the United Kingdom provide fascinating insights into an unusual form of governance that has been quietly scaling up over the past 50 years. In this chapter, I analyze the success of these small community led social enterprises in relation to some well-known academic theories using the Kentish Town City Farm in north London as a case-study. The aim is to better understand the interdependent mechanisms that contribute to the value of such resilient self-governed institutions, and suggest city farms are prime examples of “civic ecology”.1 According to Krasny and Tidball, civic ecology often emerges in local places that have undergone, or are undergoing, disruptive change, out of a love for nature and place attachment within a neighborhood that leads to stewardship practices. These practices bring together social, cultural, and environmental factors, and in so doing create communities.2

As the name suggests, city farms are located in urban centers. They aim to preserve and improve the sociomaterial landscapes in which they operate. Typically, they emphasize diversity as a critical component of individual and community well-being.

Fig. 10.1: Kentish Town City Farm: A typical day. [Image: JM] 112

Jane McAllister

The Federation of City Farms, established in 1980 to support and advocate for community farms and gardens, merged in 2018 with Care Farming UK to form Social Farms and Gardens (SF&G).3 Both community gardens and city farms offer a sense of rurality in the city and have similar missions, but city farms differ as they are places where the community works together in raising and caring for animals, as well as other agricultural and horticultural activities. The city farm movement started in the UK in 1972 with the Kentish Town City Farm, which today describes itself as a sanctuary in the city, a place where “everyone is welcome”, a place with “hands-on activities for early years to older people”, and where “the community comes together to care for animals, the land, wildlife and each other”.4 In 2024, there were 12 city farms and approximately 200 community gardens and allotments in London.5 City farms are almost always situated on land with little or no commercial value. Consequently, their existence, material development, and growth depend on the generosity of individuals in the community. Initiated as local concerns, they foster long-term community engagement with a place’s physical, social, and cultural landscapes, and the desire to “repair”6 and foster ethics of care7 and resilience within a setting.8 Individual and community well-being is nurtured through a hierarchy of undertakings that establish a variety

of socio-spatial practices which help form local identities, knowledge exchange networks, and create jobs.

Thus, city farms can be described as local, not-for-profit, uncertain microcosms. Their futures are uncertain because they tend to rely on gifted short-term land leases and voluntary labor, and must interweave simple and complex activities to achieve the stability of a “little world” or microcosm.9 Testaments from Kentish Town City Farm show that well-being is enhanced for those involved and such well-being is created and experienced by an individual’s actions in the setting. It is interesting to compare this with how the UK Government’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) measures well-being through surveys, including the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN)10 of individuals’ experiences of the State’s actions, rather than their own actions.

APPROACH This research, and my interest in city farms, grew out of my involvement in planning a new farm in the city of Oxford in 2013. As an architect, academic, and member of the steering group design team between 2017 and 2019, I was involved in developing site layouts, addressing various physical issues to do with the land, preparing building plans for regulatory approval, and helping devise affordable ways of involving the neighborhood as part of the building project. Once we had addressed the initial planning and statutory building issues, it was clear that the farm team could work independently to construct the farm facilities. At that point, the design team handed over and the farm has thrived since then, while my interest in city farms has continued academically and socially.

City farms rely on voluntary collaborative practices and sharing assets rather than supporting individual material or financial profit. So why are they (and community gardens) flourishing in such abundance? Even when they

illustrate the kind of social logic that Hardin argued against long ago in his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons”?11 The struggle for place-making in city farms is realized as a profit in terms of individual and social well-being, and reciprocity with the farm’s success and resilience. Why and how do such uncertain ventures foster community, expand their influence, and secure their long-term futures?

What is the underlying model and how does it operate?

This chapter attempts to capture the relationships between individual people, practices, farm projects, and the complex scales of the setting of the Kentish Town City Farm. I try to view the Farm’s ethical engagement at individual, community, and institutional levels through motivational, operational, and governance prisms, bearing in mind Maslow’s motivational hierarchy for the individual,12 Krasny and Tidball’s model of resilient civic ecology,13 and Ostrom’s “Governing the Commons”.14 I also attempt to explain how the Farm’s cultural capital is formed, becomes resilient, and grows with what I term “spheres of action” animating a form of governance that weaves people into the setting via their projects. The concept of spheres is intended to describe how the interconnectedness of three interdependent mechanisms facilitate scaling up and strengthening of resilience. The three spheres are formed by the agents (the setting and its socio-material conditions), the actors (the people who become part of the farm), and their activities (how the farm responds to the setting through people’s skills).

The focus here is on the (mainly volunteer) farm workers, whose skills contribute to incremental changes in setting, and on scales of individual and community involvement that can lead to complex forms of networking and governance that secure placemaking, well-being, and resilience. Thus, city farms are gradually transformed, from commercially unviable to valuable community assets, essentially from the bottom up. The notion of repair (of the socio-material 113

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The French Citizen Experience of the Rural Village of Saillans (2014–2020)

Sabine Girard

A real and concrete utopia of participatory democracy facing the challenge of ecological transition1 INTRODUCTION In the village of Saillans, residents demonstrated against the installation of a supermarket on the outskirts and against the opaque management of elected officials. In 2014, they formed a citizens’ list, won the municipal elections, and set up a radical and alternative governance system that still has repercussions today. This essay seeks to explain what happened in Saillans and what it can teach about democratic experimentation and the transformation of the dominant system in view of the current ecological, economic, and political crises that are associated with it.

The Saillans experiment was heavily publicized, and it contributed to a craze for citizen lists in the French municipal elections of 2020, partly because of the media’s ideological narrative which led to a certain belief in exceptionalism.

As a counterpoint, here I offer an informed glimpse into this profound experience, one that does not ignore the difficulties and doubts that were encountered. In the following pages, I seek to show this experience of local government as utopic in the sense that it proposes a radically different model of democracy. However, this is a concrete utopia anchored in the reality of a village confronted with profound change. Notably, the democratization of municipal governments is part of an ongoing process in rural areas that are experiencing an influx of urban residents fleeing the “barbarism” of the metropolis2 and increasing alarm about the effects of climate change.

With the rise of environmental concerns, the transformation of people’s lifestyles is becoming a major political issue.

This local democratic experience demonstrates an innovative approach to the challenges of the socio-ecological crisis. The case study has strong potential for transformation at scale; 128

it stands out from the option taken by the French State, for which the ecological transition is synonymous with green growth and is seen as a controllable process, driven by technology. Although part of an official administration, the experiment has similarities with alternative experiences promoted by social movements that aim to radically transform society and link ecological, democratic, and social justice issues.

After a brief reminder of the theoretical framework and methodological approach, this chapter analyses, firstly, the emergence of this concrete utopia and formation of an ideal, and secondly, its performance against the tests of reality and internal and external resistance. Finally, given that the experience of Saillans reflects transformations now underway in rural areas, it discusses its prefigurative nature.

DEFINITION, MATERIALS & METHODS Socio-ecological transition and concrete utopia Ecological transition is a watchword of the Anthropocene: it acknowledges the unsustainability of the current economic system in the face of planetary limits. Transition calls for the transformation of one system into another, whilst simultaneously addressing issues of production and consumption, biodiversity, social inequalities, democratic governance, etc. While the objectives of change are shared, visions of transition (in the sense of the purpose and design of the process) diverge according to the actors involved.

Approaches differ according to degrees of acceptance of capitalist hegemony and in the resulting modes of action that are proposed to accompany and pilot change.

Fig. 11.1: Saillans, Main Street

Alternative initiatives are multiplying but their radicalism is considered marginal; they are criticized for particularism, localism, and lack of realism. Yet it is precisely this double character, idealist on the one hand, rooted in local realities on the other, that is the basis of interest. Idealism, or the desire for a better world, makes it possible to reject the idea that there can be no alternative; it allows hope, it creates new apertures towards the future.3 However, such initiatives are often rooted in a reality from which they diagnose problems and draw solutions by observing what is happening in the margins and mobilizing the recesses of dominant thought.

Another world is necessary, possible, and already there: it

is in essence what some call “concrete”4 or “real”5 utopias.

They prefigure alternatives to the established order that are desirable, viable, and achievable.6 An ideal does not necessarily need to be formalized; creativity and bifurcation arise from indetermination, a certain conception of time distinguishes alternatives. It is not a question of waiting or of rejoicing or resigning oneself to whatever might happen, no matter what one does (deterministic view), nor of foreseeing an achievable future that can be planned.

The actions themselves generate and open-up possible futures; intentions shift to the importance of action and how to act.

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Beyond the Plantationocene Learning from the hyper specific rural wilderness of Agger

Anne Mette Frandsen Knud Aarup Kappel

Fig. 12.1: Fieldwork on the beach at Agger, Thy, June 2022

INTRODUCTION Taking ourselves “out there”, to be taught by places The task of seeing and understanding the thriving complexity of rural or peripheral places asks of us, as architects, to resist notions of lack, emptiness, and scarcity, and to rephrase, reset or maybe even rescale what we are looking for when we engage with their distinct qualities.

This process implies being outside of the Plantationocene and seeing sites as more than materials for human exploitation.1 Discovering places as something other than 142

plantation, requires engaging in tacit interactions, exchanges, experiences, and the creation of language-forms that arise in dialogue with site-specific phenomena. Releasing ourselves from plantationocene-oriented modes of practice means adapting to new sensibilities, incorporating new modes of data, and developing new kinds of language that can describe and connect findings. Moreover, moving beyond the plantation makes more evident the intrarelationality of a site or situation.

Conversations and understandings with human-based cultures connected to a site lead to what we describe as rooted entanglements between guests and inhabitants.

Such situated attention might, for example, weave together the perspectives of hyperobjects, UN SDGs, politics, and public debates with hyper specific observations of local phenomena within the ecosphere.2 In turn this position leads to a critique of romanticized, escapist, and touristic ideals, which tend to represent rurality through notions of purity, originality, and authenticity. This chapter, therefore, is concerned with how best to approach and appreciate phenomena within places that seem wild, alien or unruly, and how to develop architectural strategies and methodologies through encounters with hyper-specific phenomena that entangle us with sites without preconceived notions of what they represent.

AFTER THE PLANTATION: ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICES AND THE UNCOMMONING OF COMMONS In the political realms of municipalities, planning processes, and the construction of built environments, architects’ decisions affect what we think of as commons: materials and relations of the land, soil, places, territories, and agoras. From our point of view, architectural practices typically impose value systems on commons that prioritize human uses such as inhabitation, extraction, and production.

In other words – we understand architectural practices, broadly speaking, as an extension of the Plantationocene, as described by Haraway and Tsing, to summarize the anthropocentric understanding of the Earth’s surface as a reservoir of resources, which we term a production sphere.3 The imposition of value-systems implied in the

anthropocentric treatment of the materials and relations of the land, is further described and discussed by Marisol de la Cadena as a process of uncommoning.4 In restoring the idea of commons in a post anthropocentric world, de la Cadena introduces the notion of “human, but not only”, thereby implying that there are multiple not yet determined shared potentials within the relations and materials of the land, including its humans – but not only.

Underlining the profound difference in this restoration, de la Cadena says: “… what emerges through it is not a ‘mix’ of nature and human. Being composed as humans with nature – if we maintain these categories of being – makes each more. Entities emerge as materially specific to (and with!) the relation that inherently connects them”.5 From de la Cadena’s perspective, it can be said that our relations determine not only the value systems we impose, how we impose them, and onto whom and what, but that they also determine the imaginable value of our shared possible experience. Thus, we see a possible repositioning of the relational qualities in architectural practices as potentially deeply impactful.

The plantationocentric handling and dismembering of common terrain into pieces that can be put to human use, leads to our understanding of architecture as typically having agency in processes that partake in an ongoing uncommoning of the commons. However, working with de la Cardena’s notion of human, but not only offers us a possible transformation of what human use might be, and of value systems too. In our work, we explore architectural practices, agendas, and modes of involvement that question the value system of the plantation and examine what possibilities they present to an architectural gaze.

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Fig. 13.5: The intervention’s new yard and shed with the old boat. [Photo: MK] 162

COMMUNITIES & TRANSITION

Fig. 13.6: Local politicians, planners from the municipality, the different harbor associations, the new boat repair association and local inhabitants of Ebeltoft attend the opening ceremony. [Photo: MK]

Changing Rural Areas

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Fig. 14.2: Overview of village spaces in three villages The overview shows 33 village spaces across the three villages of Durup, Sparkær, and Vils. Each space is illustrated by a simple plan diagram showing its shape and relative size, and a photograph. Each square within the matrix corresponds to an area of 600m x 600m; the matrix thus enables comparison of size, shape, and extent of each space. The two main spaces selected for study in each village are highlighted 168

COMMUNITIES & TRANSITION

Fig. 14.3: Study spaces within the villages of Durup (above) and Vils (below).

Spaces are represented by a photograph and black demarcation on the village plan drawing

Village Spaces

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We are, today, renewing our consciousness of humanity’s dependence upon a fragile nature. By strengthening the path of rural evolution, humanity may be able to create an alternative to Polanyi’s regression into dictatorships and fascism. At the signs of European and American hegemonic collapse, peasant populations have renewed innovating roles to play: to reinitiate social, cultural, and economic diversity; to reappropriate subsistence economies; and to reinstall local democratic processes.

SECOND TIMESCALE: PROMETHEAN MODERNITY The second author addressed here is Ivan Illich. Illich (1926–2002) was an Austrian theologian, social critic, and (self-suspended) priest who focused on the impoverishing effects of contemporary productivist service society.

His writings, as we will see, are strikingly relevant to understanding rurality and peasantry, notably through three central notions of his thinking: tools, that he defines as anything helping to serve a purpose, from a hammer to a hospital; the vernacular, to be understood as knowledge, skills, culture, and practices based upon local use-values; and gender, a substantially human construction of diversity.21 Tools for Conviviality (1973) is exemplary for this approach.

Growth, Ivan Illich writes, is not an ideology, but the result of a historically unique mindset that turns tools from means into ends. Tools then escape political control and become radical monopolies. Radical monopolies are detained by single forces “while excluding from society people that do not use them”. As a result, productivism leads to modern poverty: the enslavement of humanity under a technocracy of increasingly mandatory services. To maintain humanity as free, creative, healthy, and resilient, Illich argues, it is necessary, in balance with a reasonable level of industrial production and technical advancement – which he calls heteronomous production, – to preserve gendered, vernacular, and convivial subsistence modes: autonomous production.22

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REFLECTIONS

Fig. 15.1: Timemap, Collage, 2024 [Image: PV]

Rural Timescales

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Contributors

Stefan Darlan Boris is associate professor PhD in landscape architecture at the Aarhus School of Architecture.

Through his research and teaching, he explores the relationship between urban nature, forest landscapes, biodiversity, bodily engagement, and beauty. He is one of the initiators of the Aarhus Landscape Laboratory and LAND LABS in the Aarhus River Valley, working with a cross-disciplinary group of researchers and urban planners. In 2014 he initiated the walking collective VANDR, carrying out walks in urban watersheds and along rivers in urban regions across Denmark.

Morten Daugaard graduated as a Major in Social Science from the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University in 1979. He has been affiliated with the Aarhus School of Architecture since 1974. His main fields in teaching and research have been architectural history and theory, urbanism, and landscape. He has been attached to the Centre for Strategic Urban Research in Realdania Research, with the related projects: “The City without Limits”, “Urban Policy and Strategies”, and “Qualifying Urban Landscapes”. His publications include “Qualifying Urban Landscapes” in Journal of Landscape Architecture 2010.

Corinna Dean PhD is a lecturer at the University of Westminster in London where she participates in the Environmental Humanities Research Group. Her current work looks at the intersection between ecologies, landscape, and buildings. These themes were the focus of a residency on the Isle of Sheppey where she studied erosion and perception, and a project at Cody Dock, London to create Floating Reed Bed Systems. She recently participated in the Incidental Unit project at the South London Gallery and ran the James Gowan construction shed project with Drawing Matter. She also runs the Archive for Rural Contemporary Architecture.

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BIOGRAPHIES

Anne Mette Frandsen is an architect and Teaching Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy, School of Architecture, Institute of Architecture, Urbanism, and Landscape. She is working towards a PhD with a project entitled “Towards an Ecology of Architectural Practices”. She has been a practitioner, teacher, workshop leader, and lecturer at the Academy since 2006, with a special interest in artistic and collaborative practices within architectural production. She worked at the architectural practice DOMUS from 2006 to 2012. She is currently active in ‘Radical Research CPH’, a laboratory platform that researches, invents, and creates habitats.

Marie-Laure Garnier is a landscape architect, and PhD student at CY and ENSP in Paris. Her professional experience includes working for the Regional Directorate of Environment, Planning, and Housing (DREAL), the Council of Architecture, Urbanism, and Environment (CAUE), and with landscape architect Claude Chazelle.

In 2019 she co-created the exhibition “Terres en Mouvement”, an examination of embankment landscapes in the Ile de France, presented at ENSP Versailles. She regularly collaborates with the Art and Design School at Talm le Mans. Her teaching and research focuses on urban metabolism and its relationship with landscape.

Sabine Girard is an agronomist and geographer, specializing in transdisciplinary research around the transformation of collective action and territorial public policies in response to social and ecological challenges. She is a researcher at the Mountain Ecology and Societies Laboratory (Lessem) at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (INRAE) in Grenoble. Her work explores the interconnected, complementary or competing processes of ecologization, democratization, and territorialization in public policies and practices, focusing on agri-food systems, socio-hydrosystems, and rural urbanism.



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Eric Guibert PhD is a gardener of landscapes, architect of buildings, researcher, and teacher. He teaches in London, running a design studio in the BA Architecture course at the University of Westminster, and a Masters in Landscape Architecture studio at The Bartlett, UCL, where he also leads a design studio and a theory seminar group on Feral Landscapes.

Keith Halfacree is reader in Human Geography in the Department of Geography, Swansea University. His research focuses on four overlapping areas: Discourses and representations of rurality and their links to practices such as migration, leisure, and developing a sense of place; Conceptual debates on rural change, rural futures, and the place of “rurality” within the 21st century; “Internal” expressions of, and cultural perspectives on, human migration (including urban-to-rural counter-urbanization) and their impact on institutions such as family and place; “Marginal” or “counter-cultural” geographies, expressed through music and alternative lifestyles.

Knud Aarup Kappel is an architect and assistant professor at the Royal Danish Academy, School of Architecture, Institute of Architecture, Urbanism, and Landscape. His art research engages with contemporary context studies. In 2021, his studio’s work was exhibited by Museum Thy in Agger. He is the founder and owner of the private consultancy bureau KAAK/Atelier for Byers Rum, which has a professional field of interest in rural, semiurban, and urban development including the development of holistic societies, strategic development plans, urban space programming, design, the transformation of places, and stakeholder involvement processes.

Mathilde Kirkegaard is an assistant professor at Aarhus School of Architecture where she combines a broader sense of heritage with planning in research engages with the architectural heritage sites, communities, intangible heritage, co-creations, and interventions. She is a member of the project Sustainable Cultural Environments which additionally looks at heritage sites from an ecological perspective. Mathilde’s Ph.D., undertaken at Aarhus School of Architecture (2018-2021), concerned the transformation of cultural environments. Previously, she studied Urban Design at Aalborg University (cand-polyt) and worked at two architecture practices: Urgent.Agency (2016-17) and Juul Frost Architects (2017-18).

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BIOGRAPHIES

Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag is an architect, educator, and researcher whose PhD, entitled “Transformation on Abandonment: A New Critical Practice?”, was awarded by Aarhus School of Architecture. He has seventeen years’ professional experience as an architect, and co-founded the practice Krag de Ridder ApS in 2006. Mo has been teaching and researching in the areas of adaptive reuse, transformation of depopulating rural villages, and radical preservation since 2010. In 2025, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts awarded him the Franciska Clausen honorary medal for his art practice of transforming abandoned buildings in rural Denmark.

Cæcilie Kildahl Kramer is a PhD scholar at Aarhus University’s School of Culture and Society, Department of Anthropology. Her research focuses on intersections between environmental sustainability, ethics, materialism, and cultural practices. Her doctoral project examines what it means to be a “good farmer” in Denmark, and with what implications for environmental care. With a keen interest in agriculture, she examines how material, technological, and political entanglements shape “the good”. Cæcilie also serves as editor of the ethnographic journal Jordens Folk.

Ditte Bendix Lanng is Urban Designer at the City of Aarhus, and former associate professor of urban design at Aalborg University, combining the fields of urban design with socio-technical studies and mobilities studies.

In her research, she engages in design experiments as modes of socio-cultural enquiry, in ethnographies of infrastructures, and in collective enterprises with publics, communities, and planning and architectural practice.

She is involved in spatial design, strategic planning, and mobility projects, and seeks to open up a space for knowing and designing for a wider host of spatial, socio-aesthetic, and ethical agencies of infrastructures.

Jane McAllister is an architect and Course Leader for the BA in Architecture at the School of Art, Architecture, and Design at London Metropolitan University, where she also co-teaches a design studio called ‘Crossing Cultures’, which explores the coincidence of migration, identity, and settlement. She has worked with live community projects in the UK and in Italy, and in collaboration with international Universities and NGOs. She is currently researching for a design-based PhD on community wellbeing within city farms in the UK.



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Sophia Meeres is a landscape architect and engineer, and a full-time lecturer at University College Dublin (Ireland) in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy. After 20 years in design and planning practice, mainly in France and the UK, Sophia joined academia. She has a special interest in wildlife, biodiversity, and our daily relationships with nature. Her current teaching and research focuses on trees and woodlands in times of climate change, and their place in Ireland’s towns and countryside. A co-founder of the ARENA network, Sophia is active in the alterRurality research group.

Tom Nielsen is an architect and professor of urban and landscape planning at the Aarhus School of Architecture. His research focuses on the transformation of Danish landscapes, cities, and urban systems.

This has included research into urban landscapes and public space, suburban transformations, urbanizing territories, and relations between urban concepts and values, and the ethics of contemporary urban transformation. His recent publications include two books from Danish Architectural Press: The City Denmark (forthcoming 2025, Danish edition published 2023), and Earthly Cities (2024).

Karen Olesen is an architect and associate professor at the Aarhus School of Architecture (since 2004). Her main areas of teaching are building design and transformation, and architectural theory. Her research interests include the aesthetics and ideologies that influenced urban design and architecture in post-war Europe, and how these differ from those affecting urban design today. She is part of the research group at Aarhus that published the book Gellerup in 2021 in which the history of one of the most controversial housing projects in Denmark is examined and critically discussed.

Tina Vestermann Olsen is an associate professor of urban design at Aalborg University within the urban design research group of transformation and mobilities. In her current research, she explores the transformational processes and potentials related to the design of public spaces in various geographies, among the rural territory of Denmark. She engages with on-site transformations through user-participation and temporary activation. She is an experienced urban design practitioner from various studio employments working with public space design, user involvement, and strategic transformation processes.

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BIOGRAPHIES

Jens Christian Pasgaard is head of the planning department in Varde Municipality, Denmark. He has worked as an independent consultant (2022-24) and as Associate Professor at Aarhus School of Architecture (20152022). He has also worked in various positions at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture (2004-2014). Jens has a broad professional profile, working across disciplines. His fields of interest are urban design, urban architecture, urban and landscape planning, architecture policies, and tourism planning.

Ben Stringer is a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Westminster, London, where he teaches design and cultural context, and contributes to the Environmental Humanities and Emerging Territories research groups. He is a member of the European Architecture Research Network (ARENA), the AlterRurality Network, and the New European Bauhaus Collective. His publications include the book Rurality Re-imagined (editor), the “Villages and Globalisation” issue of the journal Architecture and Culture (guest editor), and “The Politics of Landscape” issue of Landscape Research (co-guest editor). He also helped establish the Oxford City Farm.

Pieter Versteegh PhD (Architecture and Sciences of the City, ETH Lausanne), is a researcher, and professor. His research relates to post-urban dwelling and identity, and focuses on rurality and psychiatry within globalized urban western society. He is co-founder of ARENA (Architectural Research European Network Association) and the Psyché research association, and founder of the AlterRurality network. He has taught at the Western Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (HES-SO), the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, HES-SO Fribourg, ETH Lausanne, the Berlage institute, and the University of Kentucky. He has practiced, and still occasionally practices, as an independent architect in Switzerland.

Katrina Wiberg is an architect and associate professor in landscape architecture at Aarhus School of Architecture who works in the field of climate adaptation, conducting research through design and action research. Her PhD “Waterscapes of Value – value creation through climate adaptation in everyday landscapes” explored the benefits of a multi-scalar approach to urban development. Katrina’s research focuses on hydrological influences on urban landscapes in the context of climate change.

She has a longtime background in practice which influences her design research in terms of methods and her focus on transferability and interdisciplinary collaboration.



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