Tracing the multilayered temporalities of Amager Commons, Copenhagen - Enacting Alternate Futures

This article contributes to scholarship on urban naturecultures, more-than-human temporalities and arts-based methodologies. It draws on collective walks that we organized in Amager Commons in 2020-2021. The Commons is a former salt meadow, located close to central Copenhagen. Having served as a common for pasture, a garbage dump, and a shooting ground for the military, today, Amager Commons is a high biodiversity zone. While increasingly put to multiple recreational uses, the Commons is also subject to urban development. Consequently, the Commons comprises a battleground for diverse spatiotemporal logics: preservation (of biodiversity), neoliberal urban development, environmental activism, of multiple species living and breeding in the commons.

By wallowing in the multi-layered soils and entangled ecologies of the Commons, we trace how its heterogeneous pasts rupture into the present. This exploration is collective and co-created through walking and noticing, by extending one’s sensorial apparatus. Listening, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling are framed into cross-modal performative engagements enabling us to become with the entangled naturecultures of the Commons, shaped by emergent and heterogeneous processes and more-than-human presences. We engage polyphonic writing to show how the entwined temporalities of the commons hint to alternate futures, enacting multispecies, heterogeneous imaginaries of the Commons.