Ideas of dead, inert space, non-living, machinelike reflexive controlled bodies and passive, meaningless things are very modern. At the very heart of the program of modernity, resource exploitation and consumption is the idea that non-humans have no agency – they are simply resources to be manipulated and exploited at our will. Mostly leaving aside the more and more evident ethical concerns of this worldview and this setting of the human – non-human boundary, this volume attempts to explore what social sciences have to say about the relationship between the human and non-human. The intention of this book is to offer a non-human perspective. We realize that it is sometimes difficult to say whether the outcome of such a perspective would be just a shallow tendency to anthropomorphize, or whether we could reach some of the previously unseen properties of non-humans. Being aware of the dangers, this volume puts together different case studies that are more or less inspired by this non-human perspective. The aim is to explore what has been for a long time put aside and to provide new insights, new revelations that can lead social science to undiscovered or hidden realms. The outcome of this thrilling adventure can in the end be a discovery that the role of natural and social sciences, or even more, the character of the nature-culture dichotomy would have to be re-evaluated.

The book explores the issue of non-humans and their role and position within contemporary social sciences. Inspired by current trends of bridging the dichotomy of nature and culture, the authors use the “non-human“ as a prism that offers a different perspective of the world, society, culture, and last but not least, being(s). To start paying attention to non-humans has the potential to hybridize social sciences and in turn enrich them as well as to offer social scientists novel perspectives and tools to approach social phenomena. Such an attitude might in turn lead to a reassessment of understanding of the relationship between the world and being, and of the categories of being and subject. Hence the potential of non-humans to stimulate an ontological shift within social sciences. The view of the “human” and “non-human” as oppositional categories is a remnant of essentially modernist thinking. This book represents a response in terms of an attempt to think about humans and non-humans outside of the binary division. The authors thus want to contribute to the hybridization of social sciences and throughout the book they deal with ontological, epistemological and thematical shifts stemming from the hybridization. If the non-human does not exist as a negation, the boundary between the two becomes unclear and overlapping. It is with this hybridization, the blurring of the boundaries, that we are able to come closer to those who inhabit the world: non-humans and humans alike.

The book attempts at exploring allotment gardens / garden colonies, a potent field of study for social scientists dealing with urban issues. Based on a qualitative field research, the book offers an insight into the world of allotment gardens in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, and by means of them maps the history and current situation of this specific form of urban nature in a post-socialist metropolis. Stretched between sociology, anthropology and social ecology, it emphasises the latter and aims at assessing the role of allotment gardens in and for the urban space from the point of view of sustainable development and its three main pillars – economic, societal, and environmental. The methodological grounding of the book, however, allows for a nuanced depiction of the life of allotment gardens and for presenting the emotional value gardens and colonies hold for their gardeners. All the studied garden colonies represent spaces where community can thrive, where people can form emotional bonds towards (a part of) urban space and where society is based on solidarity and cooperation rather than market mechanisms. Though economic importance of allotment gardening for gardeners is negligible due to the leisurely nature of gardening, societal role of allotment gardens and their environmental function within the city proves noteworthy. The authors argue that with respect to their historical roles and values they can hold for both gardeners and wider urban (community) context, garden colonies could be a glimpse of the environment-friendly urban future. The pressure under which they have been put recently by the politics of contemporary urban development might however turn them into not only the shadows of the past but also the shadows of the future never to come.