PhD research

Dreaming of Forests, Planting in Pots:
Environmental Being, Care and Commitment
in 21st Century Barcelona

Flora Hastings

Thesis abstract:

All around the city of Barcelona, small huertos (vegetable allotments) are being set up by grassroots actors. This thesis explores the stewards of these (often ‘illegal’) green spaces, charting the environmental being and care of the Barcelonians who commit to these huertos and the struggles they face in this process. In understanding grassroots environmental change through post-humanist ontology, I trace how commitment to these green infrastructures is motivated by emergent forms of environmental being and subjectivity. I call this orientation to the world urban ecocentrism. While ‘ecocentrism’ describes an ontology whereby the health of non-humans and ecological processes are centred in daily experience, the ‘urban’ accounts for the ongoing negotiation of this orientation with the labour rhythms, economic relations and inter-personal dynamics of the city.

Tracing the tension between ‘ecocentrism’ and ‘urban’ allows me to reveal the emotional and affective strains that emerge as Barcelonians try to commit to environmental transformation in the city. My fieldwork (12 months) took place in three different huertos across Barcelona, allowing me to compare enactments of urban ecocentrism among three distinct demographic groups: former-peasant farmers, permaculturalists and Latina migrants-turned-plant carers. Through a novel combination of ontological, multi-species and psychological anthropological frameworks, I examine the emergent contradictions as these diverse land stewards publicly rewrote scripts for how urbanites could co-exist with the environment. By attending to the ways in which the three huertos served their distinct groups of stewards as spaces of continuity, transformation and refuge, respectively, I contribute a more nuanced perspective to the literature on environmental care and commitment within environmental anthropology. Through this, I delineate a crucial new arena for anthropological research in the face of impending climate crisis: the ecological discontent experienced in the process of enacting environmental change from deep within an urban context.

Key Terms: urban ecocentrism, ecological discontent, affect, personhood, ontology, neoliberalism.

Biography:

I am an environmental anthropologist, having completed my doctorate at SOAS, University of London. As a freelance journalist, I have published an array of long and short form photojournalistic articles exploring left-wing politics in Spain and the UK. I also deliver outdoors, sensorial workshops that aim to critically un-pack participants’ relations to the environment.

For any interest in or questions about my research, or journalistic commissions, email me at: florahastings3@gmail.com