Sauer, Katarina Munch

In this thesis we seek to understand how nature effects humans and how humans percieve, understand, uses and senses nature. We have examined this as a casestudy in an eco-village/cohousing in Denmark; Karise Permatopia which is located in Faxe municipality. The residents of Permatopia share a sustainable ideology, which affects all aspects of their co-habitation, from the social life, to their form of governance to their view on and way of living with nature.We ascribe to Hartmut Rosas theoretical work and understand the society we live in as alienating and accelerating, characterized by high speed and a constant need for e.g. economic growth. We also introduce his term resonance as an opposition to the alienation that humans can experience in an accelerating society. Rosa seeks to explain that without alienation there would be no resonance.Through various qualitative methods we examined how the residents of Permatopia understand and resonate with nature in their everyday life. We examined the residents perception of nature with Hans Fink and Karsten Elmose Vad’s definitions of dominating nature perspectives in Denmark.Result: We found that, although the residents have different nature perspectives, there are still some great general similarities in the way the residents use nature and resonate with it. Through our analysis we found three topics in which the residents experience, resonate with and understand nature as: The sustainable nature, Nature as a breath of fresh air and Nature as a playground.Through community and a common ground on climate and environmental importance the residents seem to find meaning with nature as an opposition to the alienation they experience and describe surrounds them. All the residents we met in our study has moved from the city to the countryside, where Permatopia is located. We can thereby conclude with this study, that nature seems to be a contrast and where the residents find meaning for some parts of their lives, as they resonate with nature

A dialog with nature - a Visual Etnographic Study of a Co-housing Community's Relation with Nature

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Roskilde Universitet