ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the notion of cultivating ecosystem conviviality helps bring attention to nourishing sites of local empowerment and ecological belonging that often go unnoticed in urban environments. We offer this notion as a complement to ongoing efforts of invigorating cultural ecosystem services (CES) with relational and embodied approaches. Through a transdisciplinary and mixed methodology of soil arts that includes artist-led open stages, ecosystem conviviality is explored through soil-centered practices in urban gardening and art. The chapter attends to how gardeners situate themselves not as receivers or producers of services but as entangled co-creators of open-ended ecosystems. This in turn calls attention to a needed shift in CES focus, from benefits and human well-being to considering ecosystem relations and values as embodied co-becomings, with consequences for sites, people, and soils alike. The aim of the situated practice-theory of soil arts that this chapter presents, is to offer new perspectives and methods for those involved with planning and management of urban ecologies, and others seeking more integrative ways of grappling with socioecological challenges and uncertainties.
