Pawprints of Care and Resistance Exploring Prague’s Urban Nature Imaginaries through a Tabletop Role-Playing Game
(2025) HEKM51 20251Department of Human Geography
Human Ecology
- Abstract
- Urbanisation, climate crisis, and biodiversity loss are converging pressures that demand new imaginaries of urban life. Yet mainstream approaches to urban futures remain entangled in instrumental rationality and profit-oriented logics that often exacerbate social and ecological injustice. In the under-researched context of post-socialist cities like Prague, the need to explore alternative valuations of nature becomes both urgent and politically fraught. This thesis addresses the gap in research on plural values of nature and desirable urban futures by exploring how civic and NGO actors in Prague imagine urban nature futures, and how these imaginaries are shaped and constrained by prevailing socio-technical imaginaries and epistemic... (More)
- Urbanisation, climate crisis, and biodiversity loss are converging pressures that demand new imaginaries of urban life. Yet mainstream approaches to urban futures remain entangled in instrumental rationality and profit-oriented logics that often exacerbate social and ecological injustice. In the under-researched context of post-socialist cities like Prague, the need to explore alternative valuations of nature becomes both urgent and politically fraught. This thesis addresses the gap in research on plural values of nature and desirable urban futures by exploring how civic and NGO actors in Prague imagine urban nature futures, and how these imaginaries are shaped and constrained by prevailing socio-technical imaginaries and epistemic regimes. Drawing on Critical Utopian Action Research and ethnography, I organised Future Creating Workshops integrated with a bespoke tabletop role-playing game. This design aimed to open a space where another imaginary was possible while grounding visions in interlocutors’ lived experiences. The research reveals a fragile tension between pragmatic adaptation and transformative hope. While interlocutors articulated visions of more-than-human coexistence and mutual care, these were consistently constrained by dominant instrumental logics. Prague’s dominant imaginary treats the city as a growth machine to be optimized, where nature is legitimate only as quantifiable service or exchange value. By contrast, the interlocutors imagined a city with more-than-human rhythms, where kinship, reciprocity, and commons-based care organized everyday life. These visions were not utopias of excess. They were ťapičky - small pawprints of care and resistance based on dreams of having time to care. By treating imagination as both method and subject, this thesis contributes to urban political ecology and futuring practices. It shows how experimental, playful, and relational methodologies can open cracks in dominant imaginaries and support value shifts essential for a just and sustainable urban transition. (Less)
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@misc{9209918,
abstract = {{Urbanisation, climate crisis, and biodiversity loss are converging pressures that demand new imaginaries of urban life. Yet mainstream approaches to urban futures remain entangled in instrumental rationality and profit-oriented logics that often exacerbate social and ecological injustice. In the under-researched context of post-socialist cities like Prague, the need to explore alternative valuations of nature becomes both urgent and politically fraught. This thesis addresses the gap in research on plural values of nature and desirable urban futures by exploring how civic and NGO actors in Prague imagine urban nature futures, and how these imaginaries are shaped and constrained by prevailing socio-technical imaginaries and epistemic regimes. Drawing on Critical Utopian Action Research and ethnography, I organised Future Creating Workshops integrated with a bespoke tabletop role-playing game. This design aimed to open a space where another imaginary was possible while grounding visions in interlocutors’ lived experiences. The research reveals a fragile tension between pragmatic adaptation and transformative hope. While interlocutors articulated visions of more-than-human coexistence and mutual care, these were consistently constrained by dominant instrumental logics. Prague’s dominant imaginary treats the city as a growth machine to be optimized, where nature is legitimate only as quantifiable service or exchange value. By contrast, the interlocutors imagined a city with more-than-human rhythms, where kinship, reciprocity, and commons-based care organized everyday life. These visions were not utopias of excess. They were ťapičky - small pawprints of care and resistance based on dreams of having time to care. By treating imagination as both method and subject, this thesis contributes to urban political ecology and futuring practices. It shows how experimental, playful, and relational methodologies can open cracks in dominant imaginaries and support value shifts essential for a just and sustainable urban transition.}},
author = {{Gut, Petr}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Pawprints of Care and Resistance Exploring Prague’s Urban Nature Imaginaries through a Tabletop Role-Playing Game}},
year = {{2025}},
}