Finding one's way in urban greenspaces: Engagement compositions between the familiar and the public

Urban greenspaces connect issues ranging from personal place attachments to abstract problems like climate change, making them interesting research objects for cultural and political sociology. Existing qualitative studies of urban greenspaces have successfully drawn on Laurent Thévenot's sociology of engagements. Developing an exploratory survey methodology for the Danish context (n = 1,130), we seek to complement this literature through a comprehensive mapping of the cultural patterning in urbanites’ engagements in local urban greenspaces. We coin the term engagement compositions to designate different (and sometimes opposing) combinations of familiar, planned, and justificatory engagements. We find that planned engagements follow two main dimensions of cultural preferences, ultimately yielding four different engagement compositions, each combined in specific ways with place attachment and moral evaluation. Most notably, what we call the ‘Calm Nature’ composition is associated with both familiar and green justificatory engagements, while a hitherto ignored ‘Social Park’ composition reflects young urban lifestyle engagements.