Cities and Urban Nature

In this lunchtime seminar, we will investigate encounters with nature in urban spaces through contributions from Andy Morris and Dan Robinson.

Thinking through the relational geographies of humans and starlings in Rome

Andy Morris (Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer, Geography and Environmental Studies)

This paper is formed from a series of reflections on fieldwork undertaken in the Italian City of Rome during 2019 and 2022, considering the entangled lives of hundreds of thousands of winter roosting starlings and the human inhabitants of central Rome. More specifically, I use these reflections to propose ways of thinking about the relational geographies that intersect, overlap and come into tension in various ways through the materials, practices and routines that constitute their urban living together.

In recent years the lives of starlings have been inscribed into the spatial politics of Rome as the city’s human residents have protested over increasing degradation centred around failed waste management and street cleaning systems and the sights and smells associated with this, including the effects of hundreds of thousands of starlings roosting in the city. In a bid to move starlings on, the city authorities have employed the use of megaphones to issue starling distress calls, trained Harris Hawks to deter them and utilised a series of tree pruning strategies to disrupt the starlings’ favoured roosting spots. Yet the starlings continue to respond by navigating their own geographies of the city, prompting a series of unfolding spatial negotiations as different versions of the city play out.

All of this informs a more-than-human Rome constituted of a series of temporal and spatial relations where humans and starlings engage with varying degrees of intensity, their lives rubbing up against each other and, in so doing, pointing to ways of thinking more broadly through the geographies of the more-than-human city of the anthropocene.

Investigating place

Dan Robinson (Program Leader, Photography, Moving Image & Short Courses, Open College of the Arts [OCA])

Dan will introduce his art research-practice, which has often focused on participation and place. He will introduce two interventions in teaching about place. The first, Arts & Environment, was an OCA study events series, informed by the Open University module TAD292: Art and environment, which evolved into a free open learning resource. The second, Investigating Place with Psychogeography, provides students with the opportunity to investigate psychogeography as ‘a way of moving through an environment; and a framework for creative practice’.

Details of Dan’s relevant art practice can be found online here:

• Thinking Space for the North, art project to reimagine a derelict farmhouse into a low impact residency / B&B at Grizedale Arts.
• Starterculture.uk, a creative learning consultancy that works in the areas of art, environment, and ecology, including in-person and online learning visits in urban nature, including cIty allotments, botanical gardens, and nature reserves.

Two padlet resources structuring place-based learning and study event resources for the OCA study events series Arts & Environment can be found online at the following web addresses:

• Arts & Environment program resources (padlet.org)
• Arts and Environment: Activities (padlet.org)

You may also be interested in this blog about the impact of module TAD292: History of the OU