City Nature

Faced with climate change and its challenges, many cities are seeking to protect, restore, repair and recreate their natural ecosystems.

This year’s City Nature programme focuses on Graz’s living environments and ecologies. The aim is to read the city in its totality as a constantly changing organism – as a continuous interplay between human and non-human beings, between animate and inanimate nature.

The methods employed by young disciplines such as multispecies ethnography and multispecies urbanism visualise the complexity of the relationship between anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic activities. The view of the biodiverse city of Graz opens up new perspectives: selected Graz ecosystems and typologies are used to highlight historical developments and changes. Current conflicts and potentialities within the network of relationships in an organically and non-organically growing city define and shape the present. Is it possible to restore and rethink our emotional and biological relationship with nature? And what would that mean for the Graz of the future?

Beyond the two exhibitions In the Gardens and Courtyards of Graz and Habitat Graz, the Graz Museum is somewhere to experience the interplay between city and nature – by pausing for a moment in the courtyard oasis, and joining us for action, ideas and discussion.