ABSTRACT
Alongside the urgent transformations towards sustainability and next to the production of ecologically useful urban space, practices of aesthetically associating human habitats with “nature” are becoming significant. Indeed, semiotic artefacts semantically referring to “flora” frequently occur in physical space. While flora converts and binds carbon dioxide through photosynthetic processes, being an essential resource for sustainable environments, it also acts as a key resource in the production of public “green narratives” (Kosatica, 2024), thus offering the possibility to read sustainability in its semiotic formation. This chapter looks at the contemporary realisations of urban flora, and their potential effects on producing sustainable spaces. By discussing the semiotic dimension of urban plants, the author aims to expand possibilities in the semiotic landscape research and to contribute to the understanding of environmental challenges. The data were collected during fieldwork in different German cities – Ratingen, Essen, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Cologne – and analysed from a multimodal social semiotic perspective in concert with ecological insights. The author organises the data around three types of realisations of flora in urban space: (1) images of flora, (2) plastic plants and (3) organic greenery. By examining (un)sustainable place-making and following the lead of ecosemioticians, she ultimately scrutinises the extent to which these flora-associated emplacements work as visualisations of sustainable places by mimicking nature in idealised ways. Often, they function as a substitute for ecologically useful greenery, performing sustainability on a symbolic level while in fact producing unsustainable habitats.
