Storytelling Urban Nature: Situated Intervention as Environmental Theatre

This chapter describes how staging human and non-human actors can help sort and articulate attachments in a setting characterized by an abundance of normativities. Utilizing the notions of situated intervention and environmental theatre, we describe uncertain and shifting actor positions as the City of Copenhagen attempted to implement a strategy for urban nature. This process entailed a re-evaluation of what ‘nature’ might be in an urban setting and how people and government entities should relate to it. We describe an intervention whereby the staging process was used as a tool for (re)problematization in collaboration with involved actors. The process revealed that narrating stories to connect bureaucratic practice with concern for urban nature was more important than developing stronger management tools to account for urban nature, thereby revealing what was specifically problematic in the practice.