Un-guided journeys: Tracing the multi-layered temporalities of Amager Commons in Copenhagen,Denmark

Abstract

Based on collective walks, this article explores the entangled, multi-layered temporalities of Amager Commons, and how these might offer possibilities for new relationships with urban environments. The article draws on and contributes to scholarship on arts-based, collaborative methodologies, urban nature-cultures, and more-than-human temporalities. Having been used as common farmland, a garbage dump, and a shooting ground for the military, today Amager Commons is a high biodiversity zone, located close to central Copenhagen. Increasingly put to multiple recreational uses, the Commons is also subject to urban development. While spatial politics and planning initiatives enact the Commons on a linear timeline of preservation and development, our walks enabled explorations of the Commons’ multi-layered temporalities, shaped by emergent, heterogeneous ecologies. Engaging with creative writing, sensory ethnography, memory work and two unguided tours, we develop a multi-layered, porous and polyvocal methodology to foster reciprocity and socio-environmental care for urban ecologies. The article contributes to methodologies in urban studies and cultural geography, with a focus on temporalities, urban nature-cultures and commoning. We invite you, the reader, to venture into the text and immerse yourself in it as if walking in the Commons.