Topic
‘City of Better Cohabitation’: The Biophilic Tartu in Contemporary Estonian Poetry
In their introduction to the recent edited volume Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience and Resistance: Cities Under Stress (2025) the editors Eric Prieto, Liam Lanigan and Anni Lappela emphasise the crucial importance of studying urban environments, which constitute the habitat of a rapidly growing number of humans across the globe, in the face of the current climate crisis and related environmental threats. The importance of the entanglement of the ‘built’ environment and the ‘natural’ environment characteristic of cities is gaining increased attention as sustainable, green cities emerge as targets in urban planning and management. Together with Riga in Latvia and Aarhus in Denmark, the Estonian city of Tartu is part of the international urban nature project UrbanLIFEcircles (https://finestcentre.eu/project/urban-life-circles/) that is scheduled to run from 2022 to 2027. The project’s stated goal is ‘to increase urban biodiversity, create an interconnected network of green areas, mitigate the impacts of climate change, and provide a good living environment for all’ (https://rohering.tartu.ee/), which ties in with concepts such as Timothy Bealey’s ‘biophilic city’ characterised by its inclusion of elements of wildness, and Jennifer Wolch’s ‘zoöpolis’ that zooms in on the co-existence of human and animal dwellers in urban spaces.
Since 2015, Tartu has also been part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, designated as a City of Literature; since 2017, the city has supported the remunerated year-long position of the city writer. This has certainly contributed to the enhanced engagement of contemporary authors with the city space and the developments within it. The proposed presentation seeks to observe the urban imaginary of Tartu as it appears in contemporary Estonian poetry (including the verse of erstwhile City Writers Kristiina Ehin, Carolina Pihelgas and Maarja Pärtna) from the perspective of the city as a multispecies environment, with a special focus on urban plant life.
Ene-Reet Soovik (University of Tartu)
Ene-Reet Soovik is an editor of the journal Sign Systems Studies published at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and member of the Estonian Research Council’s research project ‛Meaning of endangered species in culture: ecology, semiotic modelling and reception’. Her scholarly interests include literary urban studies, ecocriticism, geocriticism, and contemporary poetry; she has published in all of these fields both in Estonia and internationally. She is currently guest editing a blue humanities special issue of the journal Methis. Studia humaniora estonica.