Planting Ahead Workshop Poster

Planting Ahead Workshop_Concordia_#16

“Planting Ahead: Nostalgia, Urban Green Spaces, and Future Visioning Workshop” is a one-day intergenerational workshop which explores people’s nostalgia for past experiences with green spaces and nature, to help them speculate, and design, better present and future green spaces. Nostalgia is commonly thought of as a passive, past-based, and subjective emotion. This workshop draws on established and emerging research, which suggests that nostalgia has the potential to do the opposite: to be an active, future-making, and collective emotion. In this sense, nostalgia unites people based on their past experiences and desires about the future. Instead of asking what people have lost, the workshop invites participants to reconsider what nature-based object they cherished in the past, things we may be in the process of losing. In other words, this is a nostalgia for something that is still here, albeit in a reduced or altered state; action can be taken to preserve, nurture, and curate it into what it was. The workshop’s goals are threefold. First, to unite younger and older adults based on their nostalgia for green spaces and nature. Second, to encourage participants to change their relationship with nostalgia, from an emotion tied to the past and its losses, to an emotion that unites people and generates hope. Third, for all participants, who will be grouped based on the nature-inspired things that they are still nostalgic for, to produce a future greenspace that conveys their nostalgia for the future. The first two goals made up the former part of the workshop: ice breakers, discussions, reflection circles, and group-making. The third goal made up the latter part: collective arts and craft, drawing, creative digital tools, participants created dioramas to portray their future green spaces. This workshop created intergenerational ties created between youth who are interested in climate activism and older adults who would like to share their lived experiences with a community. In addition, we will put together a report detailing the rationale, and quotes, behind each group’s future nostalgic green space. This report can be helpful for policymakers who would like to understand what youth (who cannot vote) and older adults think about our green spaces, as well as a blueprint for other organizations who are planning similar ventures. Contributors: Carly Ziter, Carmela Cucuzzella, Nicole Yu, Olivier Vallerand, Richy Srirachanikorn, Sarah Chamberland-Fontaine et Sinisha Brdar.

Negarsadat Rahimi