Читать книгу The Unsettling Outdoors - Russell Hitchings - Страница 20

My topic is now fixed. What remains are questions about how to go about exploring it. Building on the suggestion that the problem partly stems from the relatively recent human migration to cities, I take everyday life in one city as a focus. This is London. London is a city that contains various social practices that may be serving to separate pattens of everyday life and the possibility of beneficial greenspace experience. Though there is a relative abundance of greenspace in this city, I should emphasise upfront that I do not want to imply that, as soon as Londoners venture outside their buildings, they will immediately step into a restorative paradise teeming with healthy trees and plants. Rather my idea is that, in order to understand the likelihood of greenspace benefits infiltrating everyday lives, both in this city and elsewhere around the world, we can benefit from stepping back from the greenery focus and turning to how outdoor environments are handled by those with an established relationship with particular practices.

Four practices are considered and four characterisations of how people ended up relating to the outdoors are offered. First, I consider the practice of office work, how that has been studied with regard to greenspace experience and how those currently involved can end up ‘forgetting’ about outdoor environments nearby, whether green or not. Second, I turn to the practice of recreational running, how running has been connected to greenspace benefits, and why those who currently run indoors on treadmills do so partly because they are ‘avoiding’ exactly those outdoor environments in which they feel running should ideally happen. Third, I consider how well the idea of shopping fits with how Britons handle their domestic gardens and how, despite the ways in which some London garden owners are unsettled by the suggestion of living plants, they can end up ‘succumbing’ to the pleasures of a less controlling approach. Finally, we take a short trip away from the city to consider what has been said about the benefits of camping in more ‘natural’ environments before turning to the practice of showering and the ways in which young people (who otherwise wash more than most) cope with the challenge of a summer music festival. Here I examine how some of them can end up ‘embracing’ the dirt and discomforts of a shared experience outdoors in greenspace away from town. Together, I will argue, these processes (of forgetting, avoiding, succumbing and embracing) deserve more attention, despite rarely being the focus of those aiming to foster greenspace experience.

But before that, I want to say more about research methods since this book is also about strategies for studying social life. These are my concerns in the next chapter. Within it, I make a case for attending to how people speak of the social practices they are involved in carrying out and how practices can encourage people to speak in certain ways. I will also say some more about where we will go to explore environmental estrangement in the four case study chapters that follow. But, for readers who are less interested in research methods, it is possible at this point to skip forward to the case studies. As we go through those, the book will move from spaces of work, to spaces of exercise, to spaces of leisure, both at home and away. In this respect, it gradually turns to social contexts in which we might imagine there to be increasing amounts of time and inclination to revel in enjoyable and beneficial engagements with outdoor environments. These chapters will consider the extent to which this is the case before the book ends by drawing a series of broader conclusions about how the social future of greenspace benefits is investigated and influenced.