ENACTMENTS OF URBAN NATURE: CONSIDERING INDUSTRIAL RUINS

Post‐industrial imagery and the functions of ruins can evoke novel dimensions of spatial structures and organization. This article discusses the question of how interactions between urbanity and nature are articulated and enacted within the redesign of industrial ruins. The socio‐ecological configurations produced in this process include multiple realities about nature that become fragmented and contested in practice described by various authors using different concepts which are viewed critically. The concept of urban nature is elaborated because it enables one to problematize more‐than‐human entities in making particular commons and can reveal some interactions between semiotic and ecological systems. Theoretical approaches are illustrated by a case study of initiatives taking place in the former heating plant of Tallinn. The study indicates that engagement with nature has evolved through abstract vitalization visions of the ruins and moved to tactile encounters of experimental gardening. The evolutionary aspects of nature were used as guidelines for enabling weak structures of creativity, and the rationalities behind the experimental garden got contested and partly refocused over time.