Urban Gardening as Politics

Description

While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify ‘the urban’. Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote –among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption. The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 List of figures......Page 8 List of tables......Page 9 List of contributors......Page 10 Acknowledgements......Page 14 1 Politics and the contested terrain of urban gardening in the neoliberal city......Page 18 2 Everyday (in)justices and ordinary environmentalisms: community gardening in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods......Page 29 3 A practice-based approach to political gardening: materiality, performativity, and post-environmentalism......Page 49 4 Cultivating food as a right to the city......Page 63 5 Public-access community gardens: a new form of urban commons? Imagining new socio-ecological futures in an urban gardening project in Cologne, Germany......Page 83 6 Challenging property relations and access to land for urban food production......Page 106 7 UK allotments and urban food initiatives: (limited?) potential for reducing inequalities......Page 125 8 Contesting the politics of place: urban gardening in Dublin and Belfast......Page 149 9 Exploring guerrilla gardening: gauging public views on the grassroots activity......Page 165 10 The making of a strategizing platform: from politicizing the food movement in urban contexts to political urban agroecology......Page 184 11 Contesting neoliberal urbanism in Glasgow's community gardens: the practice of DIY citizenship......Page 203 12 Political gardening, equity, and justice: a research agenda......Page 226 Index......Page 233