Existing in physical spaces and in cultural imaginaries, cities are produced out of a complex interplay of material and semiotic processes. Research on efforts to ‘green’ the city have concentrated on the renegotiation of material urban natures, particularly in relation to policy challenges such as urban heat, pollution, climate change and resource constraints. Taking urban greening activities in Australia as its focus, this paper asks how concepts, narratives, symbols and dreams of naturalness and unnaturalness are being renegotiated in cities. These activities are shown to construct and signify a range of different urban imaginaries and to invoke both utopian and dystopian futures. Encompassing imaginaries of ecology, sustainability, community, belonging, progress, health and prosperity, amongst others, urban greening fuses affective, technological and political registers of concern and aspiration. In everything from scientific epistemology to social movements to planning instruments, urban greening is shown to encompass a good deal of ambiguity, contradiction and diversity in the ways in which cities and their futures are imagined.

Place is an elusive yet hopeful concept drawn on by urban academics and professionals alike as they pursue solutions and approaches to building more sustainable and resilient cities. Meaning remains central to much western place scholarship and practice. For example, placemaking activities in cities, such as urban greening, aim to reengage and reconnect people with their local urban environments. Yet with contemporary understandings of place as relational and dynamic, place can be a challenging concept to think through and bring about “better” and more “sustainable” cities. A further challenge with place is that the emphasis on its social elements can obscure the ways place is socio-ecological. As part of broader research on the socio-ecological entanglements of place and placemaking in cities, this paper uses a more-than-human frame and narrative analysis to explore urban greening by residents and sustainability professionals in sustainable residential design projects in two Australian cities. The analysis reveals the role of greening and greenery in the dynamics of how place experience is made. Further, it reveals the ethical and political dynamics of these human-non-human entanglements.

Urban spaces have long been places to think through human relationships with nature. The recent shift in thinking from urban green space as outcome to urban greening as a process provides an opportunity to consider more explicitly, how we engage with more-than-human worlds in urban spaces, in more differentiated ways, and for what ends. In this paper we contribute to growing interest in improved urban sustainability and well-being by bringing human geography perspectives on more-than-human worlds into conversation with the literature on urban greening. Drawing on key examples of particular experiences and practices with urban trees in Australia, we orient our consideration around three main questions: how are trees considered to belong in the urban?; how do tree worlds become sensible within urban places?; and, what does responsibility to tree worlds look like in greening practices? In considering these questions, we aim to open discussion and create dialogue about how more-than-human geographies might help us to understand contemporary urban greening processes differently.

Urban green spaces are receiving increasing scholarly attention regarding their functioning as commons. While the commoning literature acknowledges commons as complex sets of unequal needs, rights and responsibilities, this has largely excluded those of non-humans. In this paper we aim to unpack the concept of commoning as being inclusive of nonhuman others as participants in commoning. This allows a deeper recognition of the benefits and risks that can emerge through urban greening processes. It also embraces the unequal power relationships that emerge in more-than-human commons, and the agency of non-humans to transgress normative and property boundaries. Commoning must be opened up to the greening that happens in private spaces, in order to fully account for the public goods and bads that non-humans contribute as agents in more-than-human assemblages. This paper explores examples of plant, animal and insect relations, and the expansive socionatural systems they are part of, that are generating public good benefits and undermining human conceptions of private property ownership and green ‘space’ through boundary transgressions. Different kinds of power relations and agency are at play when we are attentive to the nonhuman world as collaborating in commoning, which unsettle assumptions about who participates in the urban greening.