Urban Space and Everyday Adaptations: Rethinking commons, co-living, and activism for the Anthropocene City

Abstract

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 present-day 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-than-human 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.

Full text

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Urban Space and
Everyday Adaptations
Rethinking commons, co-living, and
activism for the Anthropocene City
Mathilda Rosengren [1], Franziska Polleter [2],
Josefine Sarkez-Knudsen [3] & Flavia Alice Mameli [4]
[1] Malmö University (Sweden)
[2] TU Berlin (Germany)
[3] Lund University (Sweden)
[4] University of Kassel (Germany)
Abstract
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 present-
day 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-than-
human 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.
Keywords
Anthropocene, Deep adaptation, Relinquishment, Urban commons, Urban co-living, Green activism, More-
than-human urbanities, Urban design, Sweden, Germany
DOI
https://doi.org/10.47982/spool.2022.2.01

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Introduction
Predicting the future has always held a special allure for humankind. From the personal to the planetary,
predictions have served to instil a sense of control and security in an often ungraspable world. In the past,
this labour fell on prophets, seers, and other clairvoyants, reading the “signs” of earth and skies and calling
on the otherworldly to dare to make sense of the factual world to come. As Nostradamus, the doomsday
prophet par excellence of the last millennium, put it: “With astrological calculations certifying the prophecy
in the daytime; there is nothing more to the holiest future prediction than free courage” (Leoni, 2000 [1961],
p.131). Today, with scientifically established, human-induced climate change gradually altering every aspect
of life on Earth, many social scientific scholars have felt encouraged to predict the futurity of humanity at
large, and the specific causes and eects that our joint survival will depend upon. Nevertheless, though the
courage to face potential planetary doom is admirable, on multiple occasions these theoretical musings
have fallen significantly short when applied to an actual, situated present rather than a predicted, universal
future. In fact, in making haste to theorise our futures in the Anthropocene, social scientists run the risk of
ignoring how present-day actions may play a part in changing these prophesied trajectories.
In this paper we seek to address one such disputed theory, Jem Bendell’s (2020 [2018]) concept of “deep
adaptation” in the Anthropocene, through the lens of everyday urban life and practices in contemporary
Northern Europe1.1 Drawing on empirical accounts from a number of cities in Sweden and Germany, we
propose that such theorising need not uniquely be defined in relation to specific or dramatic turns of events
or “collapses” (like Bendell does), but instead can be advantageously approached through everyday practices
in each particular urban environment. Bendell’s theory has been adequately critiqued elsewhere, with many
sceptical of his doomsday prognosis of an “ecologically-induced societal collapse” and his “cherry picking”
of scientific data to further this theory of an irrevocable Armageddon (Hayward et. al. 2019; Nicholas et
al., 2020). We take these criticisms to heart while recognising the recent influence his theory has had on
Western environmental activism, rather than outright rejecting Bendell’s conceptual framework. In this
piece, we enter into a constructive yet critical conversation with the four key notions that he presents:
resilience, relinquishment, restoration, and reconciliation.
Bendell (2020) expresses the wish that these four “Rs” may act as a “useful framework for community
dialogue in the face of climate change” (p.23). Firstly, he promotes a concept of resilience that focuses
on how humans can develop psychologically and mentally resilient approaches as a means to tackle the
coming threats and traumas that the supposed climate collapse will bring about – arguing against the
climate science’s common notion of resilience, which he sees as primarily focused on material development
and progress. This, according to Bendell, appears counterproductive to a future in which material progress
might not be an option. The latter point feeds into the second “R”, relinquishment, in which Bendell argues
for people and communities to “[let] go of assets, behaviours and beliefs” that each in their own way would
worsen the impending collapse (p.22). Thirdly, restoration concerns how humans can rediscover and return to
older, more sustainable ways of living that the current “hydrocarbon-fuelled civilisation [has] eroded” (p.22).
This would mean reconnecting with the “natural” world, such as the rewilding of managed landscapes,
adapting diets to seasonal produce, and a return to ways of socialising that encourages “increased
community-level productivity and support” (p.23). Finally, reconciliation for Bendell means that humanity,
to “avoid creating more harm by acting from suppressed panic” (p.23), has to accept its ultimate demise as
part of the societal collapse to come.
Aside from the critique already recounted in the paragraphs above, we find a number of specific issues
with Bendell’s four “Rs”. There is a seductive logic in how their functions are left implicit and vague while
simultaneously being dogmatically focused on one singular, defining outcome – allowing readers to rally
1 With this narrow geographical focus, we do not seek to universalise the widely dierent and unequal experiences that the climate crisis has
brought, and will increasingly bring, about. Rather, this focus allows for a minute contextualisation of everyday practices in specific urban
and regional constellations, as is relevant to the argument of this article.

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around a common cause (the societal-ecological collapse) without encountering the struggle of finding
common ground in a world in which everyday, local experiences of the climate crisis vary greatly. This logic
does little to further constructive responses to the issues at hand beyond its obvious theoretical aspirations.
By only briefly explaining the concepts (both in the article itself and blog posts elsewhere), Bendell leaves it
to the reader to discern what the four “Rs” can actually achieve. In addition, with his eyes set on a projected
future that pivots around an inevitable (though also largely undefined) societal collapse, his four terms lack
the definitional malleability that would also make them useful to local, immediate presents.
In the following sections, we rework Bendell’s conceptual framework to respond to these concerns by
reintroducing the present with all its complexity and uncertain futurities. In four empirical “snapshots”, each
one put in conversation with one “R”, we show that resilience can be found in the “quiet activism” of leisure
gardeners (Pottinger, 2017); how ingrained notions of private or restricted land use may be relinquished
through less market-driven reappropriations of urban space as “commons” (Dellenbaugh et al., 2015); how
novel constellations of co-living restore old ideas of intragenerational and communal cohabitation in the city
(Dove, 2020); and, finally, how a path to reconciliation may be articulated through an ontological shift away
from anthropocentric urban practices and planning, towards one that recognises non-human animals and
plants as legitimate dwellers in the urban landscape (Hauck & Weisser, 2015). These accounts emphasise
the importance of paying “attention to the creeping changes, the incremental transformation of nature and
daily lives” that the Anthropocene invariably brings about (Castán Broto & Westman, 2019, p.128). Revealing
both the problems as well as the potential in the current restructuring of enmeshed societal, ecological, and
spatial urbanities, they point to how Bendell’s (2020) wish for a “creatively constructed hope” for the future
may be found, perhaps not in an impending global collapse, but in the ordinary adaptations and local actions
of the present (p.16).
A brief note on case study selection and methodology
The empirical delineation used to address the four “Rs” is intentional. Seeking to rearticulate and expand
on Bendell’s framework, we have worked with empirical examples drawn from the authors’ fieldwork in
Germany and Sweden. The cases have been selected for how they resonate with certain “Rs” and how these
resonations adequately illustrate the transformative potential of embodied, everyday urban practices –
hence the choice of the “snapshot” descriptor, rather than making claims to present a more comprehensive,
ethnographic picture. This separation does not, however, imply that there are no overlaps or connections
to be found between the snapshots (these will be highlighted in the text). We recognise that any urban
landscape contains far more complexities and contradictions than any framework, expanded or not, may
fully cover. Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity of the argument, and in respecting the integrity of the four
empirical snapshots, each R is put into a dialectical relation with one specific empirical example and the
associated everyday practices.
The brevity and exploratory nature of each example denote that the propositions made are not to be seen
as all-encompassing proclamations. Rather, the paper is intended as both a provocation and an invitation
to scholars and practitioners – beyond the geographical locations presented here – to critically assess and
rework frameworks with universalising aspirations like Bendell’s, which may lack the necessary empirical
grounding to appropriately sustain them when applied to present-day events. Methodologically, though the
four snapshots derive from four dierent research projects at varying stages of completion, they all align in
a shared commitment to ethnographically informed, qualitative urban research (Charmaz & Mitchell, 2007;
Low 1996). All presented data has been generated through semi-structured and unstructured interviews
with informants from a range of socio-demographic backgrounds2 with additional participant observation
and site visits where relevant and feasible.
2 Though often portrayed as such in mainstream media, our research has shown that the assumption that urban activism or ecologically
conscious everyday practices are performed by a largely homogenous, most likely middle-class, group of people is many times thoroughly

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Resilience
In this initial empirical snapshot, we address the first of Bendell’s four concepts, resilience, through the
practice of urban gardening. According to Bendell, the concept of resilience – one commonly used within
climate science – engages primarily with material development and progress. This, in Bendell’s eyes, is
counterproductive to a future in which material progress might not be an option. In response, as part
of adapting to climate change, he suggests a greater focus on the psychological aspects of resilience
through reconsidering taken-for-granted or valued norms and behaviours (p. 22-23). Nevertheless, we
find that this moving away from the material aspects of resilience simultaneously risks obscuring the
multiplicity of resilient practices and their inherent relationship between mind and matter. In his genealogy
of resilience, political scientist Philippe Bourbeau (2018) traces the concept’s roots in multiple disciplines
(from psychology, agriculture, engineering, and more recently the environmental sciences) and shows
how it holds a multitude of definitions. Resilience, according to Bourbeau, connotes both “toughness”
and “elasticity”, and can be understood as the ability to absorb or recover from disturbances and
reorganise with minimal loss.
Following Bourbeau, we adopt a concept of resilience that can simultaneously implicate its psychological
and physical aspects. Remaining sceptical towards a dichotomous approach to resilience, as suggested
by Bendell (2020, p.22), we instead engage with the elasticity of the concept – an engagement strongly
supported by the findings from the empirical study of leisure gardeners in urban and peri-urban southern
Sweden3. These gardeners are all seeking out more resilient methods for growing food in a response to
current food systems and future climate change projections. Visiting the gardeners at their allotments in
Scania, what became apparent was that changes in the physical and societal landscapes aected the ways
in which the gardeners considered and adapted to climate change both psychologically and materially. In a
display of “quiet activism” (Pottinger, 2017),4 the gardeners literally cultivated resilience through small,
everyday, embodied acts – both as a form of destabilisation of an agricultural status quo and as a concrete
pathway to a more sustainable future.
To make a resilient garden
One of the major issues when addressing eects of climate change is future production and access to food.
Current food and agricultural systems are causing environmental and societal problems. Monocultures,
overproduction, and pesticides exploit and degrade the soil and ruin natural ecosystems and biodiversity
along the way (Rosenzweig et al., 2001). Moreover, climate scientists warn that changes in climate and
environment will have an increasingly negative impact on food security in the future (Mbow et al., 2019)5.
misleading.
3 The empirical material we draw on in this section is part of an ongoing research project about gardening as a response to climate change,
conducted by Josefine Sarkez-Knudsen. The fieldwork involves urban gardeners and takes place at urban and peri-urban cultivation sites
in the cities of Lund, Malmö, and Höör in Scania, southern Sweden. In addition, data generated at Holma Folkhögskola, an adult education
centre in Scania, also form part of the empirical material. The centre oers courses on gardening and agriculture and has a strong focus
on sustainable forms of gardening, i.e. permaculture. Most of the projects’ informants have a connection to the school as either current or
previous attendants or teachers.
4 We borrow the term from geographer Laura Pottinger’s (2017) work among seed savers in the United Kingdom, who select and save seeds
to ensure biodiversity and challenge corporate control of food and seed systems. Pottinger characterises these embodied and tactile prac-
tices as “quiet activism”, which stands in opposition to the common understanding of activism as vocal and antagonistic.
5 Food security is, admittedly, a pressing and constant issue in many societies around the world, mostly aecting vulnerable and low-income
groups. Still, climate scientists in a recent IPCC report (Mbow et al., 2019) argue that climate change is worsening the situation and project

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Though food security is hardly a new issue, these projections reveal the urgency in finding possible pathways
to a more sustainable way of producing and accessing food. Together with a globally growing population,
the agricultural industries are facing massive challenges in accommodating future demand. Consequently,
as Bendell also argues (2020, p.8-9), this demands a rethinking of current food systems (Hulme, 2009). This
is something that all the gardeners mentioned below were acutely aware of, guiding both their everyday
actions as well as their long-term plans.
Recognising the above issues and reimagining existing systems require not only scientific and practical
know-how but also a sense of curiosity and experimentation. Mats6, a permaculture and self-suciency
course participant in his thirties, emphasised these two qualities as part of developing alternative strategies
for a more resilient food production. Mats is experimenting with nut trees with the plan to create a nut tree
orchard in the future. It is still not common practice to cultivate nut trees in Scandinavia, and only a few
types of nut trees thrive in the northern climate e.g., hazel, chestnuts, walnut, and the rarer Ginkgo Biloba.
Furthermore, it requires a lot of knowledge, skill, and maintenance to cultivate nut trees into an orchard that
provides an adequate yield (only establishing the orchard can take a good ten years or more). Nevertheless,
when established, a mature nut tree requires very little maintenance and oers yields for up to 100 years
(depending on the location and species). As a result, Mats argued that the meticulous work of cultivating
nut trees was “a good investment”, seeing it, in the long run, as a part of an alternative, resilient food
production system for the future.7
Spending a decade establishing a nut tree orchard challenges contemporary Western, and particularly urban,
notions of the spatio-temporalities of cultivation: how much time, space, and eort it actually takes to grow
nuts, vegetables, fruits, and so on. Additionally, developing an intimate understanding of this and other
aspects of cultivation practices might also be seen as an investment in future food security.8 Ellen, an urban
gardener in Malmö (figure 1), put it this way: “I think of this as a long-term project. I want to be good at this
[cultivating], and be able to produce a lot of food, at least during the summer I want to produce the food I eat.
I guess I just want to grow as much as I can!”9 Ellen expressed a wish to “know” the food that she consumes
and a desire to pursue a somewhat self-sucient way of life. Like nut trees, growing vegetables and fruit
in sucient quantities to sustain yourself requires knowledge, practice, and experience. Regularly toiling
away at her allotment in Malmö has raised Ellen’s awareness of the time it takes to grow a single vegetable.
According to her, this is a process that cannot, and should not, be pushed because “things take time.
We need to accept that things take time. Plants and vegetables take time.”10 As such, through her material
engagement with growing plants, Ellen has gained a novel, practical as well as conceptual understanding
of how to relate to food production – one perhaps more adapted to deal with our current climate crisis and
impending global food insecurities.
that it will be amplified in the future.
6 All names of the informants in this section have been anonymised.
7 J. Sarkez-Knudsen - Fieldnotes, February 13, 2020
8 The majority of the informants cultivate according to permaculture methods. Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is a resilient design
system that aims to create an agricultural system that meets human needs without exploiting natural ecosystems and resources (Cente-
meri, 2019; Holmgren, 2002).
9 J. Sarkez-Knudsen - Field interview, Ellen, June 2020
10 J. Sarkez-Knudsen - Field interview, Ellen, June 2020

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FIGURE 1 Urban gardening in Malmö
In sum, what the urban gardeners come to realise through the planning and practice of gardening itself
is that cultivating an allotment, or an orchard, requires attention and care, week after week, season
after season. In the way the slowness of gardening stands in contrast to industrialised farming and food
industries, it may be understood as a form of unassuming, or “quiet”, activism that questions the speed
and distance of dominant food systems (Pottinger, 2017). Though perhaps small in scale, urban gardening
challenges the fast-paced, large-scale food systems that supply urbanised lifestyles but equally distort the
temporalities of cultivation, such as those experienced in everyday urban gardening practices. The practices
bring to the fore that “everyday life remains shot through and traversed by great cosmic and vital rhythms:
day and night, the months and the seasons, and still more precisely biological rhythms”, in the words of
Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier (2004, p.73). Becoming (re)accustomed to, and accommodating
for, temporalities other than those of Western-made mechanical time thus equally question the
anthropocentric boundaries of this temporal construct (Jones, 2011). As such, a resilient future may be one
that acknowledges and raises the ontological properties of urban plants to a level that equals or transcends
the human ones –something we will return to in detail in the final R (reconciliation). What is more, in
order to cultivate a resilient garden of a both material and psychological kind, particularly in dense urban
environments, you need not only to adapt to alternative ideas of time but also of space. In the second of
Bendell’s “Rs”, relinquishment, we consider what it means to give up on ingrained notions of land ownership
and usage, in favour of embracing the urban commons.
Relinquishment
The relinquishing aspect of the Deep Adaptation framework proposes that people and communities should
do away with possessions, convictions, and practices that fuel Bendell’s supposedly impending socio-
ecological collapse. Mostly, the term comes with ascetic and frugal connotations, and this is also how Bendell

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seemingly employs it. Yet, instead of a concept built on renunciation, we propose that it can equally be read
as a more freeing, less disciplined “letting go” that allows for both ideas and materialities to be approached
and developed in dierent, less socio-ecologically disastrous ways. Seen in this light, relinquishment
becomes an intriguing and important notion to “think with” when considering alternatives to the present-
day appropriation and development of urban space (particularly as the construction industry remains one of
the primary sources of atmospheric CO2 pollution [see Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, 2020]). There are
few spatial practices that more succinctly question how to let go of dominant, Western ownership and land-
use structures than “commoning”. In 1990, political scientist Elinor Ostrom published the design principles
of successful common property management in the influential Governing the Commons (1990). Since then,
by drawing on Ostrom’s principles, the concept of the “urban commons” has been particularly tried and
tested in spatial approaches incorporating post-growth concepts, common good economies, and forms of
cooperative organisation (Dellenbaugh et al., 2015; Helfrich, 2014).
That being said, we are wary of approaching the concept of the commons as a panacea for urban spatial,
social, and ecological inequalities. As historian Daniel R. Curtis’ exposé of the equitability of medieval
commons concludes, the “powers [of said commons] were entirely dictated by the social context, and
dependent on the layers of power and social relations on top of which they were placed” (2016, p.658). This
emphasises the notion of approaching the commons as a verb, as a relational activity, rather than a static
asset (Linebaugh, 2008, p.79). Accordingly, we understand “commoning” as a means to democratically
renegotiate, at once, spatial practices and economic processes towards more sustainable societies. In Berlin,
the site of our second empirical snapshot, a plethora of spatial commons practices point to a range of ways
to expand Bendell’s idea of relinquishment – both in ideas of restricted property rights and the material
land itself. In their plurality, the city’s urban commons practices emerge as forms of everyday, open-
minded resistance. Commoning thus positions relinquishment as part of a resistance that does not imply a
complete rejection of current urban land uses and rights, but rather encourages productive reinterpretations
and transformations of prevailing urban conditions. Here we home in on two cases that highlight how
commoning and the notion of the commons balance these multiple expressions of relinquishment in
the German capital.11
To let go of the private - commoning for urban spaces
The present urban fabric of Berlin is an example par excellence of how commoning not only engages with
the materialities of unused or reappropriated land, but also represents a process in which dominant ideas
of property and work management are relinquished and reimagined to fit new socio-political and ecological
realities. In post-reunification Berlin, by being willing to relinquish widespread ideas of private interest and
short-term profiteering, urban citizens engaged in diverse commoning projects developed alternatives of
common ownership and flat hierarchies as their praxis. Potentially gaining much more than they “lose” when
forgoing a dominant, for-profit structure, the committed work of activists and civil society lies at the core of
these urban practices – stretching from real estate commoning projects such as artist collective ExRotaprint
(Brahm & Schliesser, n.d.) to urban gardening initiatives like the Gemeinschaftsgarten Moritzplatz
(Common Grounds, 2020).
11 The Berlin snapshot is drawn from Flavia Alice Mameli’s extensive research on the city’s commons and open spaces.

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FIGURE 2 Park am Gleisdreieck
One of the city’s most striking examples of urban commoning is the wasteland-turned-park story of the
Park am Gleisdreieck. A former railway area in the centre of Berlin, Gleisdreieck was redeveloped in the
2000s to a much-used, prize-winning “citizens’ park of the 21st century” (Grosch & Petrow, 2015, p.6). Caught
in the geo-political stalemate between West Berlin and East Berlin in the post-war years, the disused railway
yard became a 60 hectare urban industrial wasteland closed o to the public on both sides of the wall.
It was successively reappropriated by ruderal vegetation and informally used by more adventurous West
Berliners. The fact that the area was not consumed by West Berlin’s automotive infrastructural expansions
of the 1970-80s, nor during the reunited Berlin’s building boom in the 1990s, is the consequence of four
decades of resistance by local citizens. Many of these citizen activists had been using the wasteland as an
informal recreational common and used their intimate, everyday knowledge of the space to argue for it to
be safeguarded from a redevelopment that would deny both a human public as well as non-human animals
and plants their rights to the space (Lachmund 2013). After moving to a West Berlin street close to the
wasteland in the early 1980s, one activist recalled how he and his flatmates,

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…always went for walks at Gleisdreieck, it was an adventure playground. We would climb over the wall from
the Schöneberg side and walk across the area from there. The railway workers often told us o, but they never
did anything. … We weren’t really aware of what was special about the area, it was just fun to walk around
and explore. At that time, there were a lot of people out and about. We used to give each other the wink –
everyone knew that everyone else was also there illegally (Lichtenstein & Mameli, 2015, p.155).
Over the decades, these locals formed activist groups (such as BI Westtangete and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft
Gleisdreieck among others) which drew on a blend of political, legal, scientific, and social means to make
their case, successfully adapting the strategies to the changing times but always grounding them in
the everyday, civil engagement that they had with the wasteland. As another activist put it: “Generally,
I believe that we have achieved quite a lot. That the whole park would not have been built if not for the
commitment of the citizens…” (Lichtenstein & Mameli, 2015, p.155). Today, the Park am Gleisdreieck sports
over 30 hectares of green open space always accessible to the public, providing a green “bridge” between
previously divided city districts (figure 2). What is more, from an ecological viewpoint, the park is part of
the north-south green corridor (“Nord-Süd-Grünzug”) of Berlin, which connects multiple green spaces,
providing a much-needed infrastructure for urban non-human animals and plants to move in and out of
the city. The successful commoning eort of the Park am Gleisdreieck, which at least for now has saved an
exceptional socio-ecological urban landscape from the threat of private interests and redevelopment, has
set an example for what can be achieved in the city.
Nevertheless, as argued earlier, urban commoning needs to be approached as a continuous becoming of
everyday practices rather than a static spatial fix attained at a specific moment in time. What the cases
in Berlin show is that the relinquishing of certain material and societal structures simultaneously calls for
the insertion of other values, practices, and subjects to replace what has been “let go” of – something that
remains considerably lacking in Bendell’s account. In the case of the Park am Gleisdreieck, this replacement
partially relies on more highly valuing ontologies that go beyond the human – weaving the ecological tightly
with the political and social intentions of the activist groups’ commoning practices. This entwinement is
clearly visible in our second, more recent, case: the citizens’ initiative 100% Tempelhofer Feld. The initiative
is committed to the preservation of the 380 hectare open space of the old Tempelhof airfield, which
presently provides the locals with a vast common space to do sports, socialise, garden, etc., as well as
oering the endangered skylark (Alauda arvensis) nesting places in the tall grasses (Grün Berlin, n.d.).
Drawing inspiration from previous local activism, the initiative has defended the site as a vital urban space
by emphasising its simultaneously ecological, recreational, and cultural-historical values (100% Tempelhofer
Feld, 2020). Yet, though the initiative seems to have a majority of Berliners on its side – in 2014 they called,
and overwhelmingly won, a referendum on the matter – the pressures to at least partially redevelop the
inner-city area remain.12 This pressure has resulted in a continuous and evolving engagement with the site
on the part of the activists, who in their commoning practices need to be constantly alert to political shifts
and planning policies.
The uncertainties around the Tempelhofer Feld show how, though the integration of commons-based
initiatives is increasingly required in planning theory, it remains a struggle to implement them in practice.
The human geographers Samuel Mössner and Lelina Kettner found that, contrary to what the traditional
neoliberal criticism implies, administrative apparatuses are not necessarily adversely inclined to commoning
practices (Kettner & Mössner, 2020). It is rather that, within the framework of routine administrative action,
these kinds of initiatives are often marginalised. As emphasised in the above examples, the intimate,
present knowledge of an area or community structure, gained through the everyday engagement with
such space, forms a vital part in propositions on why and how to relinquish ingrained notions of ownership
12 Most recently, the Free Democratic Party (FPD) proposed to build 12,000 new apartments on the former airfield in what 100% Tempelhofer
Feld calls a blatant move to attract voters in the upcoming 2021 election (100% Tempelhofer Feld, 2020).

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and usage of space. Ultimately, ideas situated around the commons and commoning function as outlines
for how a self-determined and ecologically responsible society may come into being. A relinquishing of
urban space through commoning is a constant renegotiation of ideas, rights, and materialities in which,
in order to successfully let go of the “old ones”, an intimate knowledge of the land you want to “common”
is a prerequisite. What is more, just like we saw in our reworking of Bendell’s resilience, our notion of
relinquishing also partially relies on valuing ontologies that reach beyond the human urban dweller. What
is intriguing about these urban commoning practices is that they propose structural solutions in which the
spatial demands of humans and other-than-humans in the city are not put in opposition to each other but
instead are seen as co-creators of a sustainable present, as well as potential futures. This glaring blind spot
of Bendell’s – his diculty in imagining a deep adaptation that does not solely pivot around articulately
human actors and actions – will be addressed in the final section of this paper. Before this, however, we
move away from Berlin’s public domain to explore what may happen when old ways of communal living are
restored in the city’s more “personal” spheres.
Restoration
Bendell’s third key concept, restoration, argues for the return to earlier, more sustainable ways of living
(2020, p.22). Deeming our Western lifestyles as untenable in their current extractive and exploitative
forms, he calls for a revival of past ideas of how to organise and approach housing to ensure a remotely
liveable planet for coming generations. Nevertheless, as we have emphasised throughout this text, when
focusing on situated, everyday urban practices we discover that such “older” notions are already being
tested and reworked for contemporary lifestyles. In the empirical example below, we will see how ideas of
intragenerational cohabitation in Berlin may form one such part in a larger readaptation of former means
of living for, so to say, new ways of life.13 Throughout the history of humankind, an extended sharing of
living space has been the norm rather than the exception. For instance, in pre-industrial Northern Europe, a
household generally consisted of a large constellation of intra- and intergenerational family members and
a large number of servants (Egner, 1976, p.281). These arrangements changed drastically with the Industrial
Revolution and the increasing urbanisation of Europe. With it, living on your own or in smaller households
progressively became common practice (Fedrowitz & Gailing, 2003, p.21). The 19th century already saw
reactions against this change in societal constellations, with utopian ideas being formulated for urban
housing developments that were to encourage a return to a more collective way of life (Bertels, 1990, p.8).
Nevertheless, the dominant mode of habitation in 20th century Germany remained that of a nuclear family
household (Fedrowitz & Gailing, 2003, p.23). In conjunction with the post-war student movements of the
late 1960s and early 1970s, which sought to break out of old civic conventions, so-called “Kommunen”14 were
established to protest old structures and habits (Bookhagen, 1969).
Nowadays, shared urban living arrangements do not so often spring from political convictions as from the
pragmatic issue of housing shortages in sought-after urban areas – Berlin, the field city of our empirical
snapshot, again being a prime example of this. Yet, beyond such immediate practicalities, as we will see
below, these arrangements may also display a wish to “live dierently” in terms of societal norms. Ricarda
Pätzold (2019) at the German Institute of Urban Aairs defines collective living as a conscious decision to
13 Once again, we want to make clear that this is a highly contextualised reflection, focusing solely on the historical, social, and cultural set-
ting of Northern Europe.
14 The “Kommune” was conceived of as a place where like-minded individuals (not necessarily related or romantically involved) lived together
autonomously in a house or flat as part of a group.

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commit to, and live within, a community structure other than the nuclear family. As such, collective living
also diers from a standard house share, which is usually founded on a much more temporary, and socially
less committed basis (Pätzold, 2019, p.175). What is more, according to Pätzold (and resonating strongly
with the concerns of the resilient gardeners in section one), the turn to collective living also reflects the
growing awareness of and concerns regarding the causes and eects of climate change, with individuals,
couples, and families rethinking their living arrangements to lower their everyday environmental impact
(2019, p.176). Most interestingly, as the following empirical snapshot highlights, even in situations in which
restoring “old” approaches to everyday life and collective housing might not originate in climate concerns,
this move towards another kind of living may trigger the environmental consciousness and behaviours that
Bendell sees as essential for future human survival.
To reimagine the intragenerational household
During a recent fieldwork stint in Berlin, we spoke to two young families – Laura with her partner Dominik
and their toddler Henri, and Laura’s sister, Lisa and her partner Carl with their baby Pauline – who together
had formed a newly-constituted, collective household.15 On the first of January 2021, during the peak of the
second pandemic lockdown in Germany, the families had moved in together in a large apartment in Berlin.
After spending many years in other German and European cities, Laura and Dominik had moved to the city
about a year before and, when Lisa and Carl also sought to relocate there, the couples had been looking to
rent or buy separate properties near each other. When their individual flat searches remained unsuccessful,
the two sisters brought up the idea of moving in together. The idea had sprung from the common dream of
living in a community, as a big family, in which their children could grow up together. This morphed into more
specific discussions of how to share a household and what practical requirements were required from the
flat itself. Larger flats with both open, shared spaces as well as more private nooks are rarely found on the
Berlin rental housing market. In the end, the sisters narrowed their search to five-plus-room flats and finally,
they told us, they found a 220-square meter apartment for rent deemed large enough to fit both families.
What had started as a somewhat spontaneous experiment thus quickly became a solidified endeavour.
And though the initial grounds for moving in together had been predominantly social, as Pätzold noted
above, even after cohabiting for only a month the household had noticed how the set-up had had an
encouraging eect on reducing the use of natural resources in their everyday lives. As Laura put it,
Honestly, I don’t think it [climate consciousness] was the main reason why we moved in together. But it has
been a pleasant side eect and I think we all have benefitted from it. We are washing our laundry together
and sharing everything in terms of household items. For example, we [Laura and her partner] did not own a
fridge [before], now we are sharing one. However, we have three washing machines now standing in the
storage [space], but we use just one. We should think about giving some away, as we don’t need them in
the shared household!16
Aside from the obvious material aspects, the intragenerational collective recognised several changes in
their daily habits. They found that co-living aected their self-perception as well as their awareness of their
climate footprint both as individuals and as a group. Laura, who has the overall responsibility for the laundry,
noted that she uses the washing machine as often as before when there were only three of them, with the
main dierence being that the machine is now always full. As they are all sharing the bills for amenities,
Lisa also tells how they all have become much more aware of how they use resources in their daily lives:
15 The interview was conducted by Franziska Polleter as part of her ongoing doctoral research on collective housing in Germany.
16 The interview was conducted by Franziska Polleter as part of her ongoing doctoral research on collective housing in Germany.

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how they consciously regulate the temperature for the whole flat depending on the use of the room, or
that everyone takes a quick shower as they just have one proper bathroom. Moreover, Lisa hopes that this
will have a positive eect on the children as they grow up in a household with a stronger awareness of
the use of resources.17
These unassuming yet beneficial adjustments to everyday practices, described by the sisters, are
supported by architect Caroline Dove’s (2020) recent study of multi-generational housing projects. Just
like the experience of the Berlin household, Dove sees that shared households bring about many other
positive eects besides the social ones, such as health benefits, financial savings, as well as a significant
reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and a household’s general ecological footprint (see also Treeck &
Ambach, 2019). This observation is backed up by Lisa’s partner, Carl, who recounts how sharing groceries
and preparing and eating meals together saves a lot of time and energy, while reducing food waste.18
Nevertheless, this does not mean that the social aspect of merging the two households is any less
important to a climate-conscious future. As we have hinted at above, the families’ decision to live together
can be understood as a “rediscovery” of historical socialities of everyday life – playing into Bendell’s (2020)
proposal that the restoration of past social practices can help us to weather storms of the future (both
figuratively and literally). This is also true in the present, in the form of the pandemic “storm” that the
collective household was facing. Even though it was still early days for the new household, they had no
regrets about their decision to move in together during such a turbulent time. In fact, the conviviality of the
shared household was helping them all to cope during another national lockdown.19
To conclude, what the families were experiencing was not solely a rose-tinted restoring of “old ways” of
living à la Bendell but rather, echoing Bourbeau (2018), a more elastic rearticulation of these practices to
suit a turbulent present. The everyday practices of the cohabitants illustrate how collective housing may
provide a solution both to the “need to overcome isolation, and [the] demand for sustainable lifestyles today
and [in] the future” called for by environmental psychologists Dick Vestbro and Liisa Horelli (2012, p. 331).
Nevertheless, the experiences of Lisa, Carl, Laura, and Dominik also hint at the structural changes needed
to budge the deep-seated onus of nuclear families in European cities. For instance, the couples recalled the
diculties they encountered during their search for a suitable flat. For one, the current housing market in
Berlin has very little to oer in terms of apartments of the size and typology that comfortably suit collective
living arrangements. Secondly, both landlords, and society at large, still display a bias against co-living
alternatives. In fact, the couples had to fib a little bit to get invitations to see potential flats, having several
times been rejected at the application stage due to their cohabitation idea. Consequently, just as in the
previously addressed resilience and relinquishment cases, the change encouraged by restoration pushes
material, structural, and conceptual boundaries in urban space. The everyday changes made by those
humans reconsidering and experimenting with alternative ways of urban living play an essential part in
engendering this change. Nonetheless, in the fourth and final section we propose that to move towards
a truly transformative “adaptation” of urban space in the Anthropocene, these boundaries, and Bendell’s
framework with them, need to be pushed even further. And to do so we have to reconcile with a necessary
ontological shift that goes far beyond the human.
17 F. Polleter - Field interview, Lisa, January 2021
18 F. Polleter - Field interview, Carl, January 2021
19 F. Polleter - Field interview, Laura, January 2021

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Reconciliation
The final part of our empirical interrogation deals with the fourth “R” of Bendell’s conceptual framework,
reconciliation. As has been hinted at throughout the text, this R is perhaps the most all-encompassing of
the four, relating in one way or another to all the previous empirical snapshots. First, resilience in urban
gardening relies on learning from and appropriately adopting the alternative temporal qualities and adaptive
strengths that urban ecological constellations aord. Second, the relinquishing of the onus on private
property and the embracing of quotidian activities of commoning also questions the anthropocentric,
extractive claim to superiority that this form of “modern” society is invariably built upon. Third, the restoring
of earlier practices of cohabitation to enable more sustainable human urban dwelling also calls for re-
examining the ways in which we have been living, not only with other humans but equally in tune with the
temporal rhythms and spatial demands of other-than-humans.
An addition to the revised 2020 version of the original paper, reconciliation is also the least developed of
the four terms. Simply put, Bendell uses the concept to argue that humanity must make peace with its own
mortality and ultimate demise caused by the impending social collapse and climate crisis. Yet, once again,
he leaves it to the reader to untangle what this rather bleak statement may mean in practice. Embracing
this liberty of interpretation, we want to introduce a less sombre, but nonetheless existentially challenging,
path of reconciliation. Such a path is predicated upon an ontological shift, away from anthropocentric
urban practices and towards those that recognise non-human animals, plants, fungi and so forth as valued
residents and legitimate agents of any urban landscape. A navel-gazing focus on how to reconcile ourselves
with our own mortality only works to further the anthropocentrism that has put “us” in the current
climatological predicament in the first place. Instead, to borrow environmental philosopher Val Plumwood’s
(2002) much-used expression, what we truly need to reconcile ourselves to is “our ecological embeddedness”
(p.3). Echoing the various indigenous ontic-epistemic approaches increasingly addressed in planning theory
elsewhere in the world (see, for instance, Cooke et al., 2020), our reinterpretation of Bendell’s concept aligns
itself with Donna Haraway’s (2015) proposition that to “make kin” with other-than-human beings is both
the ultimate challenge and the definitive redemption that humanity is facing today.
For Haraway and many other multispecies scholars with her, it is in the everyday encounters and intimate
more-than-human interactions that recognition and acceptance of subjectivities beyond the human may
be cultivated – that is, where the foundation for humanity’s ontological reconciliation with the living world
around us is being laid (Tsing, 2012; van Doreen et al. 2016). A niche branch of urban landscape architecture
has kept such expanded notions of agency, embodiment, and spatio-temporality of plants at the forefront
of their practices for many decades.20 More recently, a growing number of urban social theorists (Metzger,
2015; Mubi Brighenti & Pavoni, 2020) and practitioners (Hauck & Weisser, 2015) have sought to include, and
actively build for, animals in urban landscapes. Yet, as environmental sociologist Jens Lachmund (2004)
observes, “[a]lthough increasingly backed by global discourses and policies, ecological planning has only been
successfully implemented in a limited number of cities” (p.242). Our recent research confirms that, despite
the “boom” in green infrastructure investments, green roofs and walls, and the like, many “conventional”
planning practices still only encourage largely ecological representations and ultimately only provide
a shallow engagement with the other-than-human urbanities (Rosengren, 2020a, p.147-157). In short,
reconciling with this significant ontological transition in urban environments demands a shift not solely in
planning theory, but also in our fundamental attunement to everyday involvement with other urban beings.
The following empirical snapshot from Gothenburg, Sweden, illustrates how a slight change in everyday
20 See for instance, Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi’s (2019 [1983]) seasonal engagement with urban trees in Italy, Gilles Clément ’s (1997)
“jardins en mouvement”, gardens in motion, in France, and more recently oces such as the Atelier LeBalto in Germany.

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perceptions can considerably alter the relationship between urban trees and professionals, pushing much
larger boundaries of who, and what, is considered an urban subject.21
To learn to perceive a more-than-human urbanity
During the past decade, Gothenburg has been playing catch up to accommodate for the influx of people
moving to the city. Lack of housing and inadequate commuter infrastructure has long plagued the inner-
city areas and, as Sweden’s second largest city prepares to celebrate its 400th anniversary (delayed by the
pandemic until 2023), it is also undergoing one of its most intense construction spells since its foundation
in 1621 (Caldenby, 2013, p.70). One of the most encompassing projects is the ambitious infrastructural
investment, Västlänken. A new commuter underground railway system set to run below the whole inner
city22 (Göteborgs Stad, n.d.), Västlänken came up against fierce criticism long before its construction began
in 2018. One particularly vocal opponent was Nätverket Trädplan (“the Tree Plan Network”), a citizen activist
group fighting what they deemed asw unnecessary fellings of Gothenburg’s mature urban trees. The city
has a long history of laypeople opposing infringements on green spaces in their neighbourhoods (Rosengren,
2020b, p.232, Rosengren 2020a, p.88). What made Trädplan stand out was how it had managed to
consolidate these older environmental struggles, connecting dierent activist groups and their localised
interventions to a city-wide, politically and scientifically well-informed network of resistance.23 Using all
legal means at their disposal, loudly disputing the municipality’s vision at public meetings, as well as holding
vigils and strapping signs saying “Let me live!” around the thick trunks of the threatened deciduous trees24
(figure 3), Trädplan were rallying against the planned felling or “dubious removal” of 500 inner-city trees
standing in the way of Västlänken (Göteborgs Posten, 2015).25
These actions publicly drove home the living connection Gothenburg’s trees (some older than 200 years)
forged between the city’s past, present, and potential future. Here, the kernel of Trädplan’s opposition
was that Gothenburg’s planners (of Västlänken and elsewhere) did not truly consider the ontological
needs of the trees to thrive in the city. What is more, in their way of being “between immediately mobile
mammality and relatively immobile geology” (Ryan, 2012, p.108), the trees’ fates were felt to intersect
with previous urban mismanagement and displacements of working-class communities still keenly felt by
many citizens.26 In defending the trees, Trädplan had thus become an “ecological killjoy” of Gothenburg’s
planning visions – making visible and validating urban beings of predominantly ignored socio-economic or
ontological standing, while poking holes and exposing injustices in dominant anthropocentric notions of
21 The empirical data that we draw on here is derived from Mathilda Rosengren’s year-long doctoral fieldwork in Gothenburg, Sweden, in
2016-17. The research formed part of the European Research Council funded project Rethinking Urban Nature based at the University of
Cambridge.
22 Gothenburg’s present public transport system predominantly consists of overground trams, trains, and buses.
23 M. Rosengren - Semi-structured interview, Trädplan member & founder, January 2017
24 M. Rosengren - Semi-structured interview, Trädplan member & founder, January 2017
M. Rosengren - Semi-structured interview, Member of Trädplan & local organisation, February 2017
M. Rosengren - Participant Observations, Public meeting “Flytta stora träd” (To move large trees), City of Gothenburg’s “Show room”,
September 2017
25 Though never confirmed by the municipality, the fact that they at all decided to undertake the costly and never-before trialled moving of
hundreds of trees (to other parts in the city or to rural nurseries to then be replanted after the construction work was done) instead of just
felling them, which seems to have been the initial plan, is a testament to the tenacity of the members of Trädplan.
26 M. Rosengren - Unstructured interview and site visit, Trädplan member & founder, May 2017

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urban progress.27 These disturbances were not taken lightly by the municipality, with Trädplan portrayed
many times as tiresome troublemakers. Yet, many planners and landscape architects also displayed a great
deal of empathy, if not for the activists themselves, then at least for the urban trees.28 Their aective
relationship to trees was discussed in the breaks of many a meeting, with a landscape architect once
joking: “If you, as a child, cry at the felling of trees, then you become a landscape architect later [in life]”, their
colleagues nodding in agreement.29 And, during a televised evening news report in February 2017, a municipal
worker being interviewed exclaimed: “I didn’t even see the trees before I started [working for Västlänken].
Now they are everywhere!”30
FIGURE 3 “Let me live!”
27 Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s (2010) “killjoy”, most well-known in its feminist incarnation, is someone who objects to a “collectively in-
vested form of life” (such as the patriarchy) by pointing out the failings of such a system and who is consequently seen to be disturbing the
collective peace by forcing this clear-sightedness on others. For an in-depth discussion of the expanded notion of the killjoy used here, with
the urban nature activist or scientist as an “ecological killjoy”, see Rosengren, 2020a, pp.232-266.
28 M. Rosengren - Participant Observations, Urban Planning Meetings, Gothenburg City Planning Oce, December 2016, January & February
2017
29 M. Rosengren - Participant Observations, Urban planning meetings, Landscape architecture oce, December 2016
30 M. Rosengren - Field notes, Municipal employee, Rapport [TV evening news report], Gothenburg, Sweden

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In sum, though municipal workers, planners, and architects had most likely encountered plenty of trees in
Gothenburg before, thanks to Trädplan’s persistent protests, they began to sense their ontological status
in the cityscape – they suddenly saw them. From their own accounts, this had clearly produced some form
of shift to their approach to the trees themselves as well as in their perception of the immediate urbanity
around them. The professionals were thus in the process of attuning their present, largely anthropocentric
practices to the more-than-human urbanity that now unfolded around them in their everyday movements
through the cityscape. Though perhaps a minor, personal change, this shift could be seen as a first, tentative
step toward “making kin” with the urban trees (Haraway, 2015). Our proposition, then, is that reconciliation
may lie not in the exclusion of humanity from a post-collapse future, as argued by Bendell (2020, p. 23),
but in the inclusion of other ontologies and epistemologies, beings, and belongings. It constitutes an active
“bringing back together” of a world in which being human is but one of many subjectivities. A pursuit that,
in practice, may very well start with the noticing of one particular urban tree.
Conclusion
Functioning as constructive provocations to Bendell’s doomsday prognosis of an impending socio-ecological
collapse, our four empirical snapshots allow for glimpses into how the socio-spatial practices of commoning,
co-living, and activism may be fruitfully reconsidered for the urban Anthropocene. Practically, they show that
the keys to possibly avoiding Bendell’s collapse can be found in unassuming, yet nevertheless important,
everyday actions in urban spaces. In this, each urban environment oers situated expressions of adaptations
tied to its specificities, with each embodied act’s unique mix of social, historical, cultural, political, and
ecological facets defining the “everyday”. Simultaneously, however, we can also discern some more
overarching propositions for the future in these empirically grounded accounts. In homing in on everyday
embodied urban practices – be they in the form of gardening, commoning, co-habiting, or advocating for
other-than-human beings – we discern how they may become the precursors to the fundamental changes,
or “deep adaptations”, required to sustain human and other-than-human life on planet Earth. Here then, in
borrowing from Michel de Certeau’s (1988) musings on ordinary life31, “everyday practices, ‘ways of operating’
or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity” (p.xi). Instead, they
surge to the fore, illustrating in practical terms how seemingly unassuming human and other-than-human
actions and relations come to alter or retain urban landscapes on public and private, local and global scales.
In highlighting these urban adaptations and agencies, we have pointed out both the potentialities
and shortcomings of Bendell’s universalising framework of resilience, relinquishment, restorations, and
reconciliation. Particularly exposed are the anthropocentric limitations that seemingly define Bendell’s
concept. These limits of imagination restrict the agential capacities, of humans and other-than-humans
alike, needed to tackle the framework’s intended outcome: to produce and maintain a “creatively
constructed hope” to assuage Bendell’s impending societal collapse (2020, p.16). Geographer Lesley Head
(2016) emphasises the proactive trait of acting as she, like Bendell, attempts to construct hope in the
middle of a climate crisis. “Hope [in the Anthropocene] is practised and performed,” Head notes, “it is a sort of
hybrid, vernacular collective worked out in everyday practice and experience” (p.90). In light of our empirical
examples, perhaps this definition of hope, which has “acting” rather than “collapse” as its defining feature,
would be more fruitful to adopt than Bendell’s (2020) “creatively constructed” one (p.16). Performing hope
in Head’s way encourages everyday practices that underpin more intimate understandings of our aective
and embodied, spatial and temporal, relations with a planet of which we are all invariably a part. As such,
they serve as important reminders that even in urban contexts – seemingly detached from “natural” worlds
– actions may be local in their iteration yet implicitly global in their impact.
31 We want to thank Reviewer 1 for highlighting this intellectual synergy.

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