Agonistic temporalities of urban natures: Green space decay and redevelopment in Turin and Gothenburg

In recent decades, urban natures have provided salient entry points to examine the socio-ecological transformations of cities. These changes are often highly diversified because of site-specific evolutionary and historical peculiarities – complicating catch-all attempts to both theorise about and plan for urban natures. Nevertheless, urban nature scholarship and municipal planning’s overriding focus on the spatiality of cities often overlooks these diverse cycles, rhythms and trajectories that comprise urban green spaces. To remedy this, we argue for an approach that takes the full breadth of urban nature temporalities into consideration, in practice as well as in theory. To this end, we consider the temporalities of urban natures, in their wider pluralistic, polyvocal and multiple forms. We do so through a multi-sited ethnographic study of divergent more-than-human temporalities in the redevelopment of informal green spaces in two post-industrial European cities. Specifically, we look to the regeneration of abandoned and decaying riparian zones in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Turin, Italy, as fruitful sites for exploring how diverse temporalities expose the tensions between municipal planning imperatives and more-than-human relations. Drawing on the work of philosopher Chantal Mouffe, we develop the concept of agonistic temporalities to theorise these confrontations as inherently pluralistic and productive for the politics of planning the more-than-human city.