This chapter is an account of a day-long collaborative workshop held in Växjö, Sweden, for the municipality’s earth week series of events in March 2022. The collaboration was between ourselves as the Regenerative Energy Communities team (a three-year Swedish Energy Agency funded project currently in its first year), the local Hofs Lifs cultural center, and researcher Jorge Zapico’s LNU Climate Neutral Växjö 2030 project. Titled Regeneration 2030 m3, the workshop was an attempt to work collaboratively with Hofs Lifs’s ongoing proposal to transform a roughly 2000 m2 parking lot in Växjö city center to a space for climate neutral, community-centered production of food by the year 2030. As announced in the invitation to the event (https://regenerative-energy- communities.org/regeneration-2030), the workshop proposed to do so by working “hands-on with tools of regenerative farming, carpentry, DIY electronics, soil science and further materials in order to collectively address how a parking lot might be remade into a regenerative space for community agriculture and cultivation.”
The workshop brought together twelve participants and mixed practices from regenerative agriculture with those of art, design, and citizen science. In giving this account, we have focused on the uncertain complications, tensions, and energies that spilled out of the collaboration, the event, and its crossings. We give voice to what we see as a two-sided unease in our own project that also manifested itself in the planning of this day. The unease is partly one of working practically with technoscientific and technocratic paradigms and imaginaries, but it is also our caution of what it means to work with regeneration and the regenerative as a practice (see Glossary). This account of the framing, planning, and events of the day is an opportunity to share stories about the challenging sedimentations of working with material resistances and of deep, ongoing damages. We describe our speculative attempts at remediation and crossings, as well as the generative prompts and lingering questions that emerged as a queer, open-ended set of collectively made regenerative prototypes loitering in between spaces of a seemingly fixed and sealed present, deep-time past, and future possibility.
Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.