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The Sympoietic Orchard: Everyday Ways of Co-creating an Orchard

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At the Frontiers of Everyday Life

Part of the book series: The Urban Book Series ((UBS))

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Abstract

What can sympoiesis look like in the dappled light of an urban orchards’ everyday life? This chapter is an agripoetic inquiry in search of a sympoietic approach to orchard-making in a twenty-first century urban context. “Sympoiesis” is a twice-born neologism first forged by Dempster B: In: Allen JK and Wilby J (ed) Proceedings of the world congress of the systems sciences and ISSS), (2000) and then Haraway D: Staying With the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (2016) from the prefix sym (with) and the Greek root of poetry, poiesis (making). Sympoiesis is a way to name multispecies creation or (world)making. I will describe three approaches to sympoietic orchard-making I experimented in a communal orchard south of Paris: visiting, prolonging, and gardening possibilities. These immersive methods are not protocols I applied during fieldwork, but rather practices, or even postures, I came to embody in contact with the orchard, and then to name, with the help of orchard writing from poetry collections and gardening books, and in conversation with landscape thinkers such as Gilles Clément or Jean-Marc Besse and multispecies theorists in biology, ethology, philosophy, critical geography, and literature, including Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Emanuele Coccia, Frédérique Aït Touati, and Marielle Macé.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The AEV was founded in October 1976, by the same law which instituted the region of Ile-de-France. Its original mission was to protect green spaces in Ile-de-France. After a decade of reconstruction in the 1960s, there was a growing consciousness that urbanization and other forms of development endangered the regions’ rich biodiversity. Starting in the 1990s, the AEV expanded this mission to include farmland, ear marking a part of the properties it pre-empted for agriculture. The parcel the orchard is planted on is in an agricultural zone, and in its original bid, Au 36 stressed the historical precedents of orchards in the region surrounding Paris. For more on this, see Quellier (2003) Des fruits et des hommes. L’arboriculture fruitière en Île de France (vers 1600-vers 1800). Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes

  2. 2.

    Au36 Cabaret des cultures is a not-for-profit organization founded by Mariane Frisch, a French ceramist and activist, in 2008 in Leuville-Sur-Orge, a small town on the other side of the Orge from Brétigny, the Orge being a small river. Au36 was originally dedicated to organizing cultural events, with increasingly ecological tendencies. In 2015, Au36 morphed when Mariane Frisch and another member, Carol Williamson, a gardener and landscape designer, co-founded the orchard in Brétigny-Sur-Orge.

  3. 3.

    The Foundation for Nature and Mankind was founded in the 1990s, and funds grassroots projects to protect the environment and combat climate change.

  4. 4.

    « Orchard entanglement » is an expression I borrow from the title of Emily Didier Reisman’s 2020 doctoral dissertation at UC Santa Cruz, «Orchard Entanglements: Political Ecologies of Almond Production in California and Spain». I find the term particularly well chosen, in that it is both evocative of a tangle of branches or roots, but also of the less visual social entanglements knotting orchard dwellers together.

  5. 5.

    A phrase the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia borrowed from Donald Rumsfeld in his 2020 class at the EHESS, “La nature contemporaine”, to qualify our ignorance of our ignorance of what we call nature, masked by the taxonomic aspiration to exhaustively name discrete entities.

  6. 6.

    See, amongst others, Stefan Sobkowiak’s YouTube channel: Le verger permaculturel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-fKD72AtioxXV2C9oZf6ZQ); Orian T, Beyond the war on invasive species: a permacultural approach to ecosystem restauration, Chelsea green publishing, 2015; Leterme E, La biodiversité, amie du verger, Arles, Ed. Rouergue, 2018.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CRAL/EHESS, Paris, France

    Bronwyn Louw

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  1. Bronwyn Louw
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Correspondence to Bronwyn Louw .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Français de Géopolitique (IFG), Université Paris 8, Aubervilliers, France

    Hande Gülen

  2. Géographie-cités 5, Université Paris 1 - Panthéon- Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Ceyda Sungur

  3. EHESS, Centre Georg Simmel, Paris, France

    Adem Yeşilyurt

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Louw, B. (2023). The Sympoietic Orchard: Everyday Ways of Co-creating an Orchard. In: Gülen, H., Sungur, C., Yeşilyurt, A. (eds) At the Frontiers of Everyday Life. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46580-2_4

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