Bugs in the system: Re-grounding planning and environmental assessment practice : The case of Blodstensskogen, Uppsala

Sammanfattning: This case study focuses on the planning practice for the building project in Blodstensskogen, Uppsala (SE), that started in 2010. I put together a creative framework of more-than-human theory and methodology, addressing the case as a material-semiotic practice within a natureculture. I deploy analytics and methodological concepts from feminist Environmental Humanities and posthumanities and from new materialism theory with the aim to investigate human-nature relations as well as environmental imaginaries performed in the case. Through the more-than-human framework other subjects are highlighted like the threatened cinnober beetle that contributed to a halt of the building project. Giving rise to a flickering in the description and terms of relating to Blodstensskogen, the beetle acts as a ‘bug’ in the planning process, disturbing standard practice and environmental imaginaries. I use the ‘bug’ as a guiding concept to emphasise the more-than-human materiality of the practice as well as to illuminate where environmental imaginaries and human-nature relations are challenged. The study suggests that by standing in material-semiotic solidarity with other-than-human species and calling for more responsibility, citizen activists introduced a post-anthropocentric approach to the planning practice. The Environmental Assessment report reflects Blodstensskogen differently, showing a use-based relation and atomised perspective on the ecological happening. While a potential Environmental Impact Assessment would be more promising in terms of making more complex accounts of ecosystems by suggesting advanced understanding of relationality, in practice the effectivity of those assessments for sustainability goals may be limited by the guidelines’ anchoring in human-centred philosophy as well as the current negligence of diversity of methods. Re-grounding planning practice, facilitated by arts-based approaches, could allow planning practitioners to transgress disciplinary boundaries, unsettling the compartmentalisation in handling the urban development project and make space for diverse and more layered accounts of Blodstensskogen. It could further allow to address colonising conceptualisations, in order to make urban planning practice in this case and future cases in Uppsala more effective with regard to sustainability.