Redemption and re-membering are made possible by the fact that nothingness (the wounded desert, the devastated cityscape) is not empty.

–Karen Barad, Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness

When reflecting on his life, Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared that his happiest moments were spent isolated and lakeside on the island of St. Pierre in Switzerland (Dienstag, 2006). Floating on the lake's surface, and looking up at the sky, he realized that he found pleasure that far exceeded the customary pleasure of his era (Dienstag, 2006). The source of this pleasure, he concluded, was the perceived extrication from the flow of time (Dienstag, 2006). This treatment of nature as a respite is not a novel concept; William Cronon (1996), in his article “The Trouble with Wilderness”, explored the notion of nature as a refuge from the ills associated with modernity especially among industrialist-capitalists who were both proliferating the modernist conditions they were taking recreational refuge from and benefitting the most from it. Both Rousseau and Cronon engage with nature through the lens of human-nature dualism – that nature is something separate from humanity – and a core feature of modernity (Lumsden, 2018). Recent investigations into the relationship between human-nature dualism and modernity have argued that the current climate and ecological crisis we find ourselves within, and our seeming inability and unwillingness to take meaningful action to address this crisis, may actually mark the end of modernity in itself (Lumsden, 2018). Turning our attention to urban studies, the question of how best to integrate nature into cities has an implicitly paradoxical dimension to it under modernity’s human-nature dualism. However, given the treatment of nature as a restorative amenity to the human spirit, through perceived extrication from time or other mechanisms, it is important to explore the theoretical implications of urban nature and the role it ought to play within urban sustainability.

This exploration will take place across three parts each interlinked but thematically unique. The first part will introduce concepts of sustainability with a particular emphasis on pragmatic approaches to sustainability that emphasize the spiritual dimension of urban nature as well as the concept of modernity central to our investigation. The second part will argue that urban nature exists along parallel continuums of development and simulation established by Hegel and Jean Baudrillard (1994) and that urban nature exists as a simulacrum of nature void of its initial interpretation under human-nature dualism (Lumsden, 2018). To explore this, a figure developed by Jakob Laage-Thomsen & Anders Blok (2021) in their article, “Varieties of Green: On aesthetic contestations over urban sustainability pathways in a Copenhagen community garden”, will be analyzed and adapted to present their examples of forms of urban nature as a process of development and simulation. Having argued that urban nature has been rendered void of the initial representation of nature, the third part will present the hauntological definition of void presented by Karen Barad (2017) that resituates sites of urban nature as contemplative sites capable of transcending temporality to invite consideration for alternative modes of being. This argument will be supported by the concept of enchantment which refers to the spiritually impelling events arising from encountering material evidence from different times. Ultimately, through this discussion, I argue that sites of urban nature provide atemporal anchor points capable of grounding a pragmatically oriented intergenerational urban sustainability ethic centered on spiritual edification that is capable of rescuing us from the Hegelian decay we are subjected to under the climate and ecological crisis defining the end of modernity.

Part 1: Sustainability and Modernity

Sustainability in Flux: Historical Notions and Emerging Themes

In her book, Pragmatic Justifications for the Sustainable City: Acting in the common place, Meg Holden (2017) describes how the concept of sustainability exhibits both sticky and slippery properties; slippery in the sense that sustainability is transitioning into a more complex and integrative concept that can be hard to concretely define while sticky due to the apparent value demonstrated through political success and the perceived social value encoded into its language. While sustainability is a concept in transformation, the intended target of its transformation can perhaps best be understood through the concept of just sustainabilities established by Julian Agyeman et al. (2016). In their article, “Trends and Directions in Environmental Justice: From Inequity to Everyday Life, Community, and Just Sustainabilities”, Agyeman et al. (2016) define just sustainabilities as going beyond purely ecological concerns and, instead, integrating elements of justice and equity much in line with Holden’s (2017) description of sustainability being valued by its expression of justice. While the transitory nature of sustainability can make precise definitions challenging, this difficulty could be a benefit in that allowing sustainability to be loosely defined allows it to be adapted to fit varying contexts as needed (Holden, 2017; Shirazi & Keivani, 2017).

In their article, “Critical reflections on the theory and practice of social sustainability in the built environment – a meta-analysis”, M. Reza Shirazi & Ramin Keivani (2017) provide an overview of the development of sustainability and the discourse regarding the proposed changes influencing the transition towards a more integrative concept. Historically, the concept of sustainability has been represented by a ‘triple- bottom’ line approach that considers three pillars – ecology, economy, and equity; discourse on this model has shed light on insufficient attention paid to the social sphere of sustainability (Shirazi & Keivani, 2017). This has resulted in proposals to revise the concept of sustainability ranging from the addition of a fourth pillar, described loosely as cultural sustainability, to a more radical approach, that moves away from the triple-bottom-line approach and instead contends that a triangle formed by place, permanence, and persons is the optimal framework for sustainability planning (Seghezzo, 2007, as cited in Shirazi & Keivani, 2017). While the inherent liquidity of a sustainability under refinement makes a formal definition challenging, which may even end up being a benefit in itself, the debate regarding the shape of sustainability in urban contexts has indeed been substantively beneficial in expanding the field through the folding-in of social considerations. To better understand the internal expansion, we can look to emerging themes to map the shifting topology of the concept of sustainability.

Agyeman et al. (2016) identify three emerging themes: practice and materiality, community, identity, and attachment, and human and nonhuman assemblages and just sustainabilities. Practice and materiality refer to systems of production and consumption on local and regional scales and seek to optimize them sustainably such that citizens have fair access to the necessary materials conducive to a good life (Agyeman et al., 2016). The community, identity, and attachment theme explores the importance of place in sustainability (Agyeman et al., 2016). Broadly, this means that communities are a composite of environment and culture, often referred to as nature-culture, within which citizens can derive individual and collective identities while collaborating to generate a shared future together (Agyeman et al., 2016; Wallin, 2022; Fredengren, 2016).

Agyeman et al. (2016) argue that sustainability ought to be expanded to include the nonhuman material world concerning justice in that the environment can affect how people form connections with the spaces they inhabit and thus preserving the fidelity of these environments is essential to safeguard communal well-being so much so that failure to protect the environment as a place-making agent can disrupt the ways in which individuals understand themselves thus constituting an act of injustice. This theme is explored by Jason Brown (2016) in “An Orange County Almanac” where he describes witnessing the removal of eucalyptus trees from his childhood neighbourhood. He writes:

I watched as the first few inches of the saw’s sweep transected the tree’s outer bark and newest growth rings. The tree rustled and I imagined the blade cutting through the growth rings that correspond to my thirty-something years of life on this earth. It would pass by rings made during my time in graduate school and college, the two years spent as a Mormon missionary in the Dominican Republic, high school, my first kiss, first camping trip, and my birth (Brown, 2016, 4).

Brown captures the ways in which changes to the environment go beyond aesthetic considerations and can challenge our identity and disrupt our sense of personal history. The final theme discussed by Agyeman et al. (2016), human and nonhuman assemblages and just sustainabilities, looks to human-nature interactions to argue that a poor environment is not only the product of injustice but also an indicator of future injustice given that a healthy environment is a prerequisite of achieving social justice. This understanding of nature as a precondition for social justice integrates a temporal dimension to the concept of just sustainabilities to include future generations and present sustainability as something necessarily intergenerational. By recontextualizing nature as something that we have a dynamic relationship with, rather than control over, sustainability considerations start to challenge the human-nature dualism implicitly contained within modernity.

Modernity, Time, and Spirit

Simon Lumsden (2018), In the article “Hegel and Pathologized Modernity, or the End of Spirit in the Anthropocene”, examines the conceptual transcendence of humanity over nature and its effects on sustainable development. He argues that the prospect of humans affecting the world on a geological scale – referred to as the Anthropocene – is facilitated through the spirit of modernity (Lumsden, 2018). Lumsden (2018) operates within Hegel’s concept of spirit to define modernity as a force that is both self-determining and self-producing. Further, Lumsden (2018) recounts the Hegelian concept of world history to argue that culture, especially that of modernity, follows four distinct phases: development, refinement, overrefinement, and decay. Central to the concept of modernity under a Hegelian interpretation is the replacement of God with humanity. Lumsden (2018) details that through modernity, humans pursue perfectibility and progress which leads to a perceived mastery over nature through the application of sheer will. In this way, modernity is the facilitating condition that allows for human-nature dualism to flourish – the perfectibility and progress we pursue require us to instrumentalize nature to our own ends (Lumsden, 2018). This denaturalization also had the unintended consequence of shattering the pre-modern understanding of time steeped in Christian eschatological thought such that the narrative of human history was no longer moving towards annihilation but instead undergoing a constant and endless pursuit of progress driven by the spirit-engine of self-determination (Lumsden, 2018; Austin, 2018).

Tereza Matějčková (2020) in her article, “Eternity’s Death in Modernity: A Case of Murder? Of Resurrection?”, argues that the transformation of time under modernity from something eternal to ephemeral does not actually emphasize the future, as the pursuit of progress implies, but rather overemphasizes the past due to the principle of perfectibility implicit contained within modernity (Lumsden, 2018). This principle of perfectibility is discussed by Rousseau in his writings in which he argues that the capacity to reflect on the past facilitates a perpetual dissatisfaction within oneself in line with Matějčková’s (2020) description of painful reflection under modernity (Dienstag, 2006). Working under the philosophical tradition of pessimism, Joshua Dienstag (2006), in his book Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, uses Rousseau, and other writers, to label this thematically emergent theory of painful reflection and time-consciousness under modernity as Cultural Pessimism. Further, Dienstag (2006) argues that under the self-producing conditions of modernity the pursuit of feelings, such as pleasure or happiness, keeps these feelings anchored forever in the future and out of our reach. In this way, cultural pessimism grants us the worst of both the past and future and the principle of perfectibility of modernity causes us to reflect painfully on the over-emphasized past in the pursuit of a self-produced undervalued future where our hopes reside just beyond our reach (Dienstag, 2006; Lumsden, 2018; Matějčková, 2020).

A Time of Crisis: Sustainability at the End of Modernity

Both Lumsden (2018) and Matějčková (2020) conclude that the climate and ecological crisis we face is causally related to modernity. They argue that the end of modernity is defined by the climate and ecological crisis and our inability or unwillingness to act toward mitigating the deleterious effects of limitless growth models (Lumsden, 2018; Matějčková, 2020). Lumsden (2018) uses Hegel’s concept of second nature to refer to culture, expressed as habits or norms, and the force they exert on our lives; given that modernity is self-determining and self-producing, what this looks like on the ground, so to speak, is the development of habits and norms that shape our identities. However, given that our habits and norms are the direct cause of the climate and ecological crisis which we currently face, the solution would require us to make fundamental changes to our second nature to avoid the worst consequences of modernity (Lumsden, 2018). In this way, the crisis is symbolic of Hegel’s final stage of world history – decay – in that modernity has facilitated conditions of collapse that our spiritual second nature will not allow us to adequately respond to (Lumsden, 2018). Lumsden (2018) and Matějčková (2020) both call attention to the concept of sustainable development as a way to respond to the crisis. While there is a necessity to respond to the crisis encoded in our daily conversations, the solution of sustainable development does remarkably little to challenge the notion of modernity as self-producing and not dependent on the conceptually held external nature under human-nature dualism (Lumsden, 2018).

Sustainable development, then, presents a conceptual paradox given its aim to respond to the deleterious material effects of human-nature dualism under cities while remaining entirely committed to the paradigm of modernity as self-producing and thus free from limitations suggested by the subservient natural world (Holden, 2017; Lumsden, 2018). In this way, the crisis that we currently face and fail to adequately respond to represents twin endings – that of modernity and that of the principle of progress (Lumsden, 2018; Matějčková, 2020). Though we find ourselves in a precarious, if not entirely harrowing, position, all hope is not lost. Though modernity removed us from the eternal and situated us within the ephemeral, the gateway through which we travel between these two temporal contexts is the nexus of consciousness and action (Matějčková, 2020). This gateway of consciousness, or contemplativeness, and action can be understood as metaphysical pragmatism in the realm of sustainability. Pragmatic sustainability, then, allows us to exercise our freedom, the true essence of the Hegelian spirit, to resituate ourselves into the eternal time modernity removed us from. Though our spirit may be degraded from the second nature encoded in modernity, we retain the ecological autonomy to engage in pragmatic action as it pertains to urban nature and escape modernity’s deleterious effects by reinserting ourselves into eternal time. This approach is in line with what Holden (2017) refers to as “the inspired model” of pragmatic urban sustainability where the catalyst for action resides in the realm of religion-spiritualism. We will return to pragmatically oriented sustainability in part 3 of this paper; however, before then, we need to discuss representative forms of urban nature.

Part 2: Forms and Contestation of Urban Nature

The Case of Urban Garden X in Copenhagen, Denmark

Jakob Laage-Thomsen & Anders Blok (2021), in the article “Varieties of green: On aesthetic contestations over urban sustainability pathways in a Copenhagen community garden”, examine the rise and fall of Urban Garden X in Copenhagen, Denmark to examine aesthetic contestations of urban green space; through this examination, they present a four-quadrant analytical grid that they argue is representative of the four dominant aesthetic domains of urban nature. Originating in 2012 and lasting until its demolishment by the City in 2018, Urban Garden X was a community garden that struggled to overcome issues regarding aesthetic imagery, debates over autonomy, and subservience to an education regime (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021). At the outset, the municipality required that work on the garden occurred through official procedures and contracts which forced the first wave of gardeners to collect themselves into a uniform body to participate in municipality-user dialogues (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021). The outcome of these dialogues was an imposed set of rules including a limiting on the permanence of the garden; gardeners were prohibited from planting trees or berry bushes, despite the pre-existence of berry bushes within the garden, to prevent the entrenchment of the garden in the eyes of the municipality (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021). Further, early on in the history of the garden, several core members got educated in the principles of permaculture which resulted in a series of placards throughout the garden explaining the fauna and design principles present as part of a community education campaign (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021).

The deployment of permaculture principles established an approach for the garden that, in turn, facilitated a hierarchy of knowledge, or perceived knowledge, dictating the correct way for gardeners to interact with the garden (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021). The requisite homogeneity expected by the municipality on the part of the gardeners in interactions facilitated the need for artificially maintained cooperation which may otherwise have grown organically through inter-garden interactions (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021). Additionally, the adoption of permaculture as the educational ideal deployed within the garden and enforced by placards imposed a theoretical requirement on ecological autonomy within Urban Garden X fundamentally counter to the voluntarily practitioner-based practice one would expect from an urban gardening initiative (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021). This can be seen in a Facebook post provided by Laage-Thomsen & Blok (2021) which states:

I do not like your slavish approach to how things should be done. What those of us living in the neighbourhood really love and enjoy about Urban Garden X is the freedom and sense of quietness we attain when we are in the garden. If we go by your methods, we would have no other freedom than the one you grant us and would just have to do as you tell us (287).

Finally, the requirement of impermanence established by the municipality cemented Urban Garden X as an ephemeral feature of the cityscape that had no future of its own.

The temporal limitation and the adoption of the permaculture education regime transformed Urban Garden X into a location and exercise of voluntary labour for the sake of an image of nature tenuously maintained within the present. Given these pressures, the garden struggled to maintain sufficient participation to meet the aesthetic requirements imposed on the garden and thus the garden was demolished in 2018 (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021). The demolishment of the garden resulted in public anger on the part of former volunteers including the statement:

Would it be hard to imagine that a new group of volunteers would be able to continue the garden with the same soil [...]? But no, completely contrary to a garden culture that evolves with time – from soil base to microorganisms, and that which lives on top and between – it was apparently already the plan to start from scratch in 2019 (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021, 291).

The failure of Urban Garden X, in this way, can be seen as the folding of communal engagement based on the artificially imposed need for cooperation in realizing ideologically imposed education and aesthetic regimes in an urban green space designed in such a way as to be locked in the ephemeral present.

The Collision of Modernity and Postmodernity in Urban Nature

The failure of Urban Garden X as an ephemeral feature maintained through a rigid ideological framework can be better understood as a fundamental incompatible between the concept of urban nature and of nature itself. In this way, the failure of Urban Garden X, and more broadly, the struggle with integrating nature, can be viewed as a fundamental misunderstanding between what Jean Baudrillard (1994) refers to as hyperreality and reality. In his book, Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard (1994) deals with the process of abstraction in creating models which he contends, through a precession of simulacra, become representations of the hyperreal rather than the real itself. When exploring the genesis of hyperreality, he states that “[the process of simulation] is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelopes it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” (Baudrillard, 1994, 2).

The emphasis Baudrillard (1994) places on the image is analogous to that of humanity under the Hegelian concept of modernity in that both the image and humanity are upheld as forces striving to subvert God (Lumsden, 2018). The key difference is the process of subversion by humanity defines modernity while the process of subversion by the image defines postmodernity; postmodernity is often asserted as a later form of modernity, but this specific distinction is beyond the scope of this paper (Matějčková, 2020). What is important for this discussion is that a simulacrum is an object under the process of simulation that represents something hyperreal rather than real and that we exist at the end of modernity on the threshold before postmodernity. The process of simulation is defined by four steps: a reflection of profound reality, a mask that denatures a profound reality, a mask that hides the absence of a profound reality, and finally an image bearing no reflection of reality – a pure simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994). I argue that Hegel’s concept of development; a four-step process of development, refinement, overrefinement, and decline (decay); is modernity’s analog to postmodernity’s process of simulation (Lumsden, 2018).

As we have discussed, the climate and ecological crisis we are experiencing define the decay of modernity – the final phase – and thus there exists an overlap between theories of modernity and postmodernity. This overlap, then, causes contestation between the role of humanity and the image as the successive icon of God. Focusing in on urban nature, Laage-Thomsen & Blok (2021) developed a representative analytical grid demonstrating the four modes of urban nature prevalent under current urban tensions that is representative but not exhaustive. For the purposes of this discussion, I believe the analytical grid is a suitable figure for representing forms of urban nature. The analytical grid operates on a two-axis continuum between pastoral nature and imbrication and a continuum between orderliness and wilderness gives rise to four predominant forms of urban nature – city-based nature preserves (wildness, pastoral nature), urban wastelands (wildness, imbrication), community gardens (orderliness, imbrication), and urban parks (orderliness, pastoral nature) (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021).

Each of these four forms of urban nature corresponds to both the four phases of modernity’s Hegelian development and postmodernity’s process of simulation and demonstrates concurrently both the development of human-nature dualism under modernity and the simulacralization of urban nature under postmodernity. Phase 1, city-based nature preserves (wildness, pastoral nature), corresponds to both development and a reflection of a profound reality; phase 2, urban wastelands (wildness, imbrication), corresponds to both refinement and a mask that denatures a profound reality; phase 3, community gardens (orderliness, imbrication), corresponds to both overrefinement and a mask that hides the absence of a profound reality; phase 4, urban parks (orderliness, pastoral nature), corresponds to both decline, or decay, and an image bearing no reflection of reality – a pure simulacrum (Lumsden, 2018; Baudrillard, 1994). Through reinterpreting this analytical grid, we can demonstrate the dual decline of nature under Hegelian development and the corresponding ascendancy of the image of urban nature under postmodernism. Both of these factors collide at the end of modernity to affect our understanding of urban nature within cities as was witnessed in the case of Urban Garden X in Copenhagen, Denmark.

What Then Becomes of Urban Nature?

The purpose of reinterpreting this analytical grid was not to necessarily propose a linear progress that each site of urban nature must go through to completion, but rather that the selected representative forms demonstrate that each site of urban nature is under some degree of contestation between modernity and postmodernity struggling to define itself as either a site of nature subservient to humanity’s self-producing spirit or an image being developed as an aesthetic ideal. The end state of decay and simulacrum are both a paralyzed space dominated by an awareness of regulation. Under modernity, decay marks a space in which humanity is no longer able to use the land for self-producing ends due to the atmosphere of authority mapped over it. Under postmodernity, the final simulacrum is an ephemeral space held to the standards of the present with no visible past and artificially restrained from evolving into a new future form. This contestation played out in Urban Garden X between the volunteer gardeners striving to impose permaculture theory on the garden imposed an authoritative atmosphere of power limiting the self-producing capacity of volunteers desiring to act and the municipal government, who ultimately demolished the garden when the necessary volunteer power could not be sustained to maintain the set aesthetic, established and maintained an ephemeral image artificially held in the present by limiting the type of vegetation allowed due to it being too permanent (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021).

What then becomes of nature at the end of modernity? Jason James Wallin (2022) explores this topic in the article “The Holocene Simulacrum” and concludes that nature continues to exist on the other side of this contest in the form of nature-culture, nature’s “horrific reimagining” sustained through the field of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) (239). Wallin (2022) argues that ESD, in its current form, contains the implicit assumption of human-nature dualism contained within modernity but reframes it through the lens of educational productivity by asserting that the climate and ecological crisis can be averted through technological ingenuity. This reframing of sustainable development implies that ecological salvation is something to be self-produced by spirit; this still casts nature as an external material source subservient to our desires even if our desires tend towards fantasies of noble salvation (Lumsden, 2018; Wallin, 2022). Under the lens of hyperreality, sustainable development does not represent a model of nature but a simulacrum of the self-producing principle of modernity embodied as productivity projected onto nature (Wallin, 2022; Lumsden, 2018). Ultimately, the outcome of ESD is either continued labour under the auspices of reformatted productivity loyal to the implicit assumptions of modernity that delivered us to climate and ecological crisis or submission to nihilism (Wallin, 2022). This need not be the case, however. The presentation of productivity as something that reduces us to either instruments in a large ecocide or conscientious objectors to societal participation overlooks the personal moral value gained through pragmatic action (Austin, 2018).

Even though nature is a contested arena under the collision of modernity and postmodernity, it still means something to people within an urban landscape that transcends the binary presented; this was evident in the quotes presented by Laage-Thomsen & Blok (2021) which pushed back on technocratic power structures being enforced on Urban Garden X. While the binary presented by Wallin (2022) presents a reasonable vision of urban sustainability in a time of collapse, it fails to sufficiently consider the potential for a life-enriching sense of meaning that can be interpreted through participation with sites of urban nature. Martin Drenthen (2015), in the chapter “Environmental hermeneutics and the meaning of nature”, explores what happens when we find ourselves stuck in interpretive loops such as that which we have found ourselves within regarding ESD. Drenthen (2015) argues that the path through these loops is to collide our understanding of our situation with that of others in different places and times; through these collisions, our horizons of understanding can be expanded to enrich our interpretation of our position. It is this horizon of thought that Wallin (2022) argues capitalism dominants entirely; while I agree, pragmatic engagement with urban nature provides an opportunity for self-investigation that can extract moral values from individuals and communities that can allow for us to better understand ourselves and the world with which we inhabit. In the next section, we will be looking more closely at particular forms of engaged pragmatic urban sustainability efforts. This next section will invoke the concept of hauntology, the field of analysis connecting the past and hopes for the future to the present, to demonstrate that pragmatic urban sustainability is a valid method for generating an intergenerational sustainable ethic within in cities (Fredengren, 2016).

Part 3: The Spirit of Sustainability Through Time and Practice

Vacuum Fluctuations: How Contemplation of Past and Future can Inspire the Present

The collision between modernity and postmodernity is unfolding in the realm of public nature as a contest between nature as a realm of self-production and self-determination subservient to humanity under human-nature dualism and nature as an aesthetic image artificially paralyzed with no regard for past or future. The progression of both to their end phase casts urban nature as spaces being hollowed out of conceptual meaning in a voiding process. This leads to the binary outcome presented by Wallin (2022) – that we either continue to labour under productive frameworks that delivered the ecological crisis to us, or we succumb to paralytic nihilism. Even so, this binary is representative of an either/or dynamic established by Søren Kierkegaard (1992) in his book, Either/or; Kierkegaard explores the concept of action from an extreme aesthetic standpoint in which any choice of action produces regret over having lost the experience of choosing the other and, therefore, it is preferable to reject the choice of either. Collapsing human action to a binary based on a teleology of our capacity to undue our second nature and avert the climate and ecological crisis still fails to escape the conception of time imposed by modernity in the pursuit of progress; premodern times steeped in Christian eschatological understandings of annihilation subvert the binary imposed by the teleology to either undo the climate crisis or not act all (Lumsden, 2018; Austin, 2018).

In the book, Learning to Die, Robert Brighthurst & Jan Zwicky (2018) explore the concept of living in the shadow of the climate and ecological crisis and hold that, for the individual, what is important is to hold an awareness of the premodern understanding of life Lumsden (2018) discussed in that all life ends eventually and that what is important is how we engage with the world. The problem then, at an individual level, becomes not how can we self-produce or own salvation, but how can we learn to understand and embody different modes of living outside of modernity? We return now to the discussion at the heart in part 1; the gateway between the eternal time modernity removed us from and the ephemeral time we have been situated within is the nexus of consciousness and action embodied by the inspired model of urban sustainability (Matějčková, 2020; Holden, 2017). In rejection of the binary proposed by Wallin (2022), the voidness of sites of urban nature provides sites capable of facilitating pragmatic action nested within the urban cityscape. Essential to this facilitation, however, is a reimagining of what it means for something to be seen as void.

In the article, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness”, Karen Barad (2017) uses Quantum Field Theory to explore how we understand spaces of voidness inspired by the field of hauntology. Barad (2017) argues that we need to shift our understanding of time such that time is not thought of as a contest between then and now where moments overtake each other and, instead, take a diffracted view of time where spaces have specific moments superimposed on them which allows for simultaneous interpretations of history and challenges the narrative imposed by modernity. To challenge time, to open up spaces as having multiple histories imposed upon them, and to treat the spectrum of histories of spaces as relevant in the present allows us to fully reckon with injustices past, present, and future by overcoming the erasure of injustice facilitated through the narrow conception of time facilitated by modernity (Barad, 2017). A diffracted view of time supports the goals discussed by Agyeman et al. (2016) such that spaces become essential for remembering past injustices and giving them weight in the present such that they are collectively felt and confronted (Barad, 2017). In this way, Barad (2017) defines the void as “the yearning and the imagining of what might have been, and thus also the infinitely rich ground of imagining possibilities for living and dying otherwise” (56). Therefore, sites of urban nature as void spaces, as facilitated by the development and contestation of modernity and postmodernity, provide critical sites of contemplation for imagining, or remembering, different modes of being (Barad, 2017). Moreover, the treatment of spaces as having different “time/s” superimposed upon them recontextualizes them as time-beings which are shaped and changed by the complex systems they are in conversation with (Barad, 2017).

The treatment of space as time-beings rather than merely a setting expands on the emerging themes of community, identity, and attachment as well as human and nonhuman assemblages and just sustainabilities to show that spaces are in flux and have their own histories and fidelity that we increasingly recognize as deserving of considerations of justice (Agyeman, 2016). In this way, urban nature is both a moral constituent as a time-being and a place-making agent that forms how we understand our personal histories and the histories of the spaces which we inhabit. This is exemplified in Brown’s (2016) witnessing of the removal of the eucalyptus trees of his childhood – their removal severed a visual cue of contemplation of his own personal history as well as that of the longer history of the community. Barad (2017) concludes by stating that what makes humans unique is our relationship with the ghosts of both our past and our speculative futures; mourning these ghosts does not involve memorializing them but instead carrying them within us and consulting with them through contemplation when considering the ways one engages with the world. In the realm of urban nature, taking a diffracted approach to understanding time allows us to both reckon with the ghosts of our past, in the form of a multi-faceted understanding of our history which imports injustices into the present where we may strive to unpack them, and the ghosts of our speculative futures as imaginings for what could be. This approach to contemplation in nature composes one-half of pragmatic sustainability; now, we must turn to action.

Ecophronesis as a Pragmatic Approach to Urban Sustainability that is Morally Enriching and Spiritually Rehabilitating

When writing about a potential reordering of morality in Western culture, Holden (2017) acknowledges the difficulty in this task given the necessity of deploying new ideas of justice in the public sphere. Similarly, the idea of overcoming our second nature and establishing new norms and habits that replace those which brought about the climate crisis is no small task (Lumsden, 2018). In a secular society, in which spiritual-religious awakenings are uncommon, the task of mass transformation to change our second nature is a challenge, but this need not be a source of failure of the inspired model of social sustainability as spiritual transformation can occur slowly at an individual level to scale up to the necessary changes in societal values. To achieve this, the developing theory of ecophronesis is of particular promise. Ecophronesis, first coined by Wei-Ning Xiang (2023) in 2016, is a pragmatic and virtue ethics-oriented approach to ecological action that emphasizes practical knowledge and contemplation on practice and virtue to facilitate right actions in an ecological context. Recognizing the inherent challenges to sustainable thought, ecophronesis prioritizes “moral improvisation” facilitated through action and reflective contemplation, which allows practitioners to discern the right action improvisationally across a variety of contexts (Xiang, 2023).

This approach to pragmatic action in the realm of urban sustainability retains the beneficial slipperiness discussed by Holden (2017) in that rather than relying on rules, it emboldens practitioners dedicated to their craft to reflect on their actions and the virtues they embody to enhance their autonomy to act improvisationally across complex and unique circumstances that arise in sustainability practices (Xiang, 2023). The introduction of virtue ethics to the conversation also enhances the conversation surrounding our inability to shed our second nature. In the article, “The Virtue of Ecophronesis: An Ecological Adaptation of Practical Wisdom”, Nicholas Austin (2018) explores the spiritual context of this practice; when viewing ecophronesis as a response to the climate and ecological crisis we witness at the end of modernity, attributing moral vices, such as “greed, self-indulgence, short-sightedness, cruelty, and arrogance”, to the second nature we collective are unable to shed we can effectively identify the problematic areas needing the be overcome (1010). In this way, the practical wisdom of ecophronesis is a ground-up approach framed around redefining what a good life means to us as individuals and how the virtues we define as compatible with living in harmony with nature can be embodied practically (Austin, 2018). Though Austin (2018) operates primarily within Christian terminology, this need not orient ecophronesis as a Christian practice as the pursuit of living in harmony with nature, and the virtues one feels facilitate this, are intensely personal and can serve as a secular practice or be enriched through theological interpretations from various religions.

In the article, “Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time Enchantment, Bog Bodies, Crannogs and ‘Otherworldly’ sites. The materializing powers of disjunctures in time”, Christina Frendengren (2016) explores how in a secularized and increasingly rationalized society, the quality of authenticity may receive an elevated status for individuals that manifests as a longing for different modes of being and a longing for religious-spiritual connection with the places they live. Fredengren (2016) argues that encountering material evidence of the history of a space can produce religious-spiritual awakenings in people through perceived otherworldly encounters in the form of enchantment which is described as an activating force capable of impelling ethical action from ethical contemplation through the evocation of emotions tied to encounters with different moments in time. In this way, the diffractive view of time described by Barad (2017) produces a folded view of past-present-future onto spaces where encounters with material evidence of these different moments of superpositioning can produce an enchanting effect that expands our understanding of moral cooperation with both other people occupying different moments as well as with these spaces themselves as these space facilitate secular hierophanies, moments of manifestation of the divine or sacred (Fredengren, 2016). Additionally, the folding of past-present-future onto spaces, and the development of sites where secularized hierophanies occur, can reframe the way we think of environmental ethics to establish a spiritual and intergenerational linkage of care of these spaces that enhances both social and political values in addition to personal values (Fredengren, 2016). Frendengren (2016) argues that in a secularized society, these otherworldly encounters can produce spiritual and moral effects similar to that of spiritual-religious awakenings and therefore act as a form of secular religiosity within the realm of nature.

Accessing the Gateway: A Pragmatic Approach to Restoring the Otherworld

Applying Barad’s (2017) definition of the void to sites of urban nature allows us to superimpose moments from the past, present, and anticipated future onto spaces to shatter the ephemeral aesthetic ideal of nature and invites contemplation on the ways in which the space has been used historically or could be used in the future. Combining this diffractive view of time with the theory of ecophronesis, as described by Xiang (2023), provides a framework of pragmatic urban sustainability that can be scaled up to challenge social and political norms (Austin, 2018). However, while this new framework for pragmatic sustainability demonstrates a contemplation-action pairing that can overcome the simulated image of nature realized by the precession of simulacra, as defined by Baudrillard (1994), it, in itself, does not fully reckon with the problematic elements of human-nature dualism imposed by modernity (Lumsden, 2018). Because of this, the inspired model mode of pragmatic social sustainability, defined by Holden (2017), is essential in realizing the moral-spiritual catalyst necessary to reform our relationship with nature. This is a particular strength of the theory of ecophronesis – it is a pragmatically oriented theory of ecological action that is centred around virtue ethics (Austin, 2018). In this way, we can explore the depths of our second nature and call attention to the vices which delivered the climate crisis to us that we are failing to sufficiently address; contemplation, then, goes beyond exploring the relationship between time and spaces we dwell in and helps us map our internal lives to excise vices and foster virtues that allow us to live in harmony with nature (Lumsden, 2018; Austin, 2018).

In a secularized society, as Holden (2017) notes, it is difficult to imagine mass spiritual transformations occurring within the impetus of dominant religious or spiritual traditions. As Fredengren (2018) observed, however, the increased desire for authenticity is overtaking sincerity in secularized society throughout modernity; treating sites of nature as capable of facilitating enchantment and secular hierophanies, that is, the sense of the manifestation of the divine or sacred stemming from encountering material evidence neighbouring moments represented by diffracted time, adds a spiritual component to urban pragmatic sustainability capable of generating the internal force necessary in an individual to motivate contemplation and action in the tradition of ecophronesis (Barad, 2017; Austin, 2018). The capacity of our current moment may be especially suited for this, as Fredengren (2018) reported that contemplation on preservation and decay were associated with entering and exiting the Otherworld. Given the atmosphere of decay, the climate and ecological crisis and the end of modernity drape over the urban landscape, sites of urban nature can become sites of secular hierophanies in which the nexus of contemplation and action can resituate us within the eternal time modernity removed us from and serve as the necessary spiritual catalyst to do the spiritual, moral, and physical work to preserve what we deem important and allow that which holds us back to slip away. Further, acknowledging space as subject to superimposed moments of time grounds the concept of intergenerational ethics in a revised understanding of what it means to cohabitate: spaces, such as sites of urban nature, belong not just to those of us in the present, but to those who occupied these spaces in the past and those who will occupy these spaces in the future. An awareness of this atemporal form of cohabitation gives those in urban nature an ability to recognize the material evidence of past occupation that shapes spaces as time-beings and produces an enchantment effect that grounds one's commitment to both the space and its occupant's past, present, and future (Barad, 2017).

Conclusion

In this article, we explored the climate and ecological crisis as a manifestation of the end of modernity as defined by our inability to overcome our second nature, expressed as our cultural norms and habits, which are the genesis of the crisis (Lumsden, 2018). We looked at the case of Urban Garden X in Copenhagen, Denmark as an example of the collision of modernity and postmodernity unfolding in the realm of urban nature. This case demonstrated how the restriction of the ecology autonomy of practitioners through educational and aesthetic regimes imposed by members of the garden and the municipal government ultimately created a paralyzed space with dwindling support (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2021). Further, the representative analytical grid demonstrating forms of urban nature developed by Laage-Thomsen & Blok (2021) was discussed to demonstrate the dueling process of Hegelian development and simulation as defined by Baudrillard (Lumsden, 2018; Baudrillard, 1994). This was used to argue that forms of urban nature are sites undergoing contested ideological processing under modernity and postmodernity which serve to subvert the figure of God from pre-modern times with humanity, under modernity, or the image, under postmodernity. This contest is expressed by dueling ideals imposed on urban nature either through educational regimes and practices or aesthetic guidelines, as was witnessed in Urban Garden X.

Further, we looked at how the outcome of this contest was observed to result in an either/or binary presented Wallin (2022) such that individuals either labour under sustainable development guidelines implicitly corrupted with the principle of productivity which caused the climate and ecological crisis or submit to nihilism. I reject this binary in favour of a non-teleological approach to urban pragmatic sustainability based on the inspired approach discussed by Holden (2017). The framework advanced here involved a redefinition of what it means for a space to be void based on Barad’s (2017) hauntological definition in which the void is a container in which our past, present, and future potentialities intermingle. This definition redefines our understanding of spaces as not, necessarily, subjected to linear time but superimposed time where multiple distinct moments in time may exert an influence in the present. As discussed by Fredengren (2018), an awareness of different times through material evidence encoded into the environment of urban nature can produce enchantment effects that are reminiscent of otherworldly encounters that can elicit strong emotional and spiritual responses in individuals capable of transforming ethical contemplation to ethical action. In this way, contemplation can both invite consideration for alternative modes of being within urban nature and help us refine our internal character and clarify how we wish to interact with urban nature. I argued that ecophronesis, a pragmatically oriented and virtue ethics-based approach that combined contemplation and action to perfect the moral improvisational capacity of ecological actors, was an ideal approach for engaging with urban nature as it retained the slipperiness that was beneficial to higher-level sustainability discourse as discussed by Holden (2017).

Instead of grounding urban sustainability on a teleology, we can use sites of urban nature as sites of personal edification that may scale up to supplant cultural and political norms but need not be judged based on their capacity to facilitate our salvation. This is important, I feel, as the neglect of spiritual and ethical concerns centered around how we engage with urban nature is at the heart of the climate and ecological crisis we now face. While this framework does not expressly deal with how those wishing to engage with urban nature can overcome authoritative educational or aesthetic regimes imposed on these spaces, as was the case of Urban Garden X, these decisions are likely best left to practitioners implementing the moral improvisation of ecophronesis to find specific local pathways that work for their situations. How we, individually, respond should not be measured in outcomes or a capacity to avert our annihilation, as the obfuscation of annihilation is an illusion of modernity, but instead by the capacity with which we push ourselves to grow as an expression of deep moral care for the earth and its constituents that we, in the past, present, and future, exist in relationship with. Who we are to become, both individually and societally, as the crisis grows will ultimately be a measure of the capacity each of us possesses for contemplation and what feelings this awakens with us.

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