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Politics and the contested terrain of urban gardening in the neoliberal city
Chiara Certomà and Chiara Tornaghi
1. Introduction
When in January 2012 we issued a call for papers for what would later become a special issue on “political gardening” for the journal Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, we were not confident about whether such a juvenile research topic would have been effectively able to attract the broad interest of worldwide scholars. At the time very few contributions explicitly connecting grassroots gardening practices with political activism had been published (notably Crouch and Ward, 1997; McKay, 2011); and the very idea that cultivating plants in the city could have been understood as a political gesture was – for many scholars and even practitioners – still quite a bizarre one. However, urban harvesters, guerrilla gardeners, community growers, and landsharers were promoting a diversified set of projects that, while interstitial and very often considered residual, were nonetheless significantly challenging the mainstream place-making of cities in the Global North and the face of the neighbourhoods in which they were located. The enthusiasm of gardeners made it apparent that a garden was much more than a parcel of land where flowers and vegetables are grown, instead it could be seen as a project to address social, cultural, or economic uneasiness. The increasing number of everyday experiences of grassroots actors together with the contemporary proliferation of scientific contributions – exploring the scope, meaning, and potentiality of urban gardening for addressing both ecological, environmental, social, and economic functions – reassured us about the potential interest this idea might have attracted. We proposed, therefore, in our special issue (Certomà and Tornaghi, 2015) that a new topic of research was actually emerging in social studies under the label of “political gardening”. Not surprisingly soon after we circulated the call for papers in 2011 further publications came out, explicitly pointing out the political aspects of gardening (i.e. Eizenberg, 2012a; Reynolds, 2015). These were soon followed by a large number of works that enriched the debate with new perspectives and deeper analyses, many of which are cited across this book, in particular in chapters 1 and 3.
The current interest in social science research for political gardening motivates the collection (in revised form) of the original papers published in our special issue of Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, which is enriched with new contents and landmark contributions. The aim of this book is to offer the reader with an overview of the diverse claims proposed in the micro-politics of garden activism, ranging from DIY landscaping and engaged ecology, to “digging for anarchy” and counter-neoliberal development, food sovereignty and the reconstruction of the urban commons, community empowerment and the “right to the city”. The social solidarities and divisions, empowerment and learning processes, conflicts and negotiations of which these projects are fraught, are discussed in this compelling collection of chapters unpacking the forms, functioning, and meanings of urban gardening in the context of the neoliberal transformation of cities in the Global North. We believe they can contribute to a critical discussion of the “politics of urban space” (Tornaghi, 2014), and enrich the emerging debate on radical, critical, and political gardening (see, for example, Certomà, 2015).
This introductory chapter is structured as follows: in the next section (n.2) we locate the analysis of political gardening within a discussion on “the post-political”, while in the following section (n.3) we propose a transversal reading of the chapters and introduce the narrative of this collection. In doing so, we aim to signpost the main issues emerging from within contemporary initiatives of political gardening, and we then conclude with a synopsis of the 12 chapters of this book. This introductory chapter is complemented by the concluding one (Chapter 12), in which we reflect on some key lessons learnt in light of the most recent debates in post-political literature.
2. Gardening in a post-political age
It is now broadly acknowledged that in the post-political age (Mouffe, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2008; Heynen et al., 2006), instead of being the outcome of regional and supra-regional parliamentary activity, politics turned out to be the emerging effect of extra-parliamentary negotiations between composite networks of actors upon common interests (Sassen, 2007). In such a context, Swyngedouw suggests that the “rise of a neoliberal governmentality […] has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management” (Swyngedouw, 2009, p. 604). The new regimes of policing as “governance-beyond-the-state” (Swyngedouw, 2008) accentuates the imperatives of a globally connected neoliberalized market economy and, contrary to the belief that “new forms of neoliberal urban governance widen participation and deepen ‘democracy’, […] this post-political condition in fact annuls democracy, evacuates the political proper – i.e. the nurturing of disagreement through properly constructed material and symbolic spaces for dissensual public encounter and exchange – and ultimately perverts and undermines the very foundation of a democratic polis” (Swyngedouw, 2009, p. 53). Nevertheless, the prominence of economic actors and global political elites taking advantage of the outward delocalization of political agency and largely contributing to the emergence of a neo-liberal governmentality, often comes together with an unprecedented dynamicity of the governance sphere allowing new actors to operate in an enlarged and fluid political arena – despite being only partially able to actually re-politicize it (Diaz-Parra et al., 2015). Swyngedouw himself recognizes the possibility for progressive, egalitarian, and inclusive urbanites in spaces where “alternative forms of living, working and expressing are experimented with, where new forms of social and political action are staged” (Swyngedouw, 2009, p. 59). He further recognizes that this space corresponds to Soja’s Thirdspace (Soja, 1996), at once real and imagined; a space whose unregulated and disruptive character allows the emergence of non-planned and spontaneous urbanity (Groth and Corjin, 2005). It is here where discontents of the post-political assessed the emancipatory potential of anti-austerity protests (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014) and critically engaged with the contemporary de-politicization of public debate. This included attempts to re-signify political agency through innovative forms of agency (such as experiments with informal economies, artistic performances, deliberately open transformation of public space via informal planning processes, etc.) that entail direct negotiations with private actors, companies, and associations, without the mediation of national and local authorities whose exclusive authority over territory and people has progressively diminished. However, it needs to be acknowledged that in the city increasingly animated by new political subjects, the recent demise of urban insurrectionary and radical movements of social justice and equity (i.e. Occupy, Podemos, Right to the city platforms, etc.) and the even stronger bite of austerity politics, scholars’ optimism about the actual possibilities of these new political subjects to bring about transformative social change is vanishing. Contradictions, co-optation, institutionalization, and domestication have been permeating, insinuating, and transforming many of these initiatives and movements.
It was precisely when the contradictions began to emerge that we were looking to build a debate on political gardening. The question we posed was not so much whether urban gardening was political or post-political as a whole, but rather how, in what conditions, with which visions, contradictions, strengths, and facing which challenges, it could become a tool for progressive and emancipatory political agency in the neoliberal city. We agree with Passidomo that “While community-scale interventions may not interrupt the ‘annihilation of space’ by globalized capital, they do offer ‘political moments’ which can secure durable changes with the potential to ‘trickle up’ spatial scales” (Passidomo, 2016, p. 274); and we wonder what is the role of urban gardening in the neoliberal planning and governance model, and how it can achieve justice in the socio-political constitution of contemporary urbanity.
We are intrigued by direct action and practice-based approaches in the negotiation of public issues via the (material) building up of alternative settings. Citizen-led and grassroots-led claims over public land, spontaneous appropriation and rehabilitation of marginal and neglected spaces at the city periphery, new bilateral agreements for sharing private land beyond that predicated by conventional property rights, community stewardship of urban greens and parks, were just a few of the arrangements through which gardening in both public and private spaces was taking place in various urban contexts across the Global North. These practices are generated by a complex political universe of urban gardeners whose aims (taking power, contesting power, abolishing powers, etc.) and means (peaceful protest, direct action, guerrilla uprising, riots, cultural opposition, DIY practices, etc.) are definitely heterogeneous; and whose struggles are often the result of their participation in, and learning through, translocal networks.
While heterogeneous and fragmented, we look at urban gardening as a distinctive and interesting field of investigation where political activism and place-making from below finds a fertile ground for merging and mutually constituting each other. Urban gardeners, guerrilla gardeners, harvesters, producers, and sharers have been forcing us to reconsider how the politics of urban space is determined by new forms of agency that affects our traditional understanding of urbanity.
As much as we have learnt about the multiple ways in which piecemeal, inter-stitial, and hands-on practices of resistance have worked through the gardens, our research trajectory on political gardening and the urban cultivation of food, even in the wake of its mainstreaming, has also taught us to see its limits. It has pushed us to see its structural residual position, the constraints of the food-disabling city (Tornaghi, 2017), and the spaces of resistance from which alternative visions of the world are nurtured, and solidarities shaped (Cadieux, 2013). The space of the urban gardens is a conglomerate of contradictory stories, people, and visions. The emerging awareness of climate change, food crisis, and unsustainable urbanization has opened up a space where new capital fixes are taking place, new “ways to markets” are being funded by transnational funding agencies, and where public authorities seek help in managing vulnerable constituencies and building resilient communities. These contradictions render the sphere of urban gardens a problematic one. But even as new competition for spaces, funding, legitimacy, survival, and resistance emerge, they still maintain their intrinsically political, non-consensual nature.
3. The multiple political meanings of gardening
The mushrooming of urban gardening initiatives in the past five years has been matched by sustained academic interest. Literature on urban gardening and its sister urban agriculture have been fuelled by the “discovery” of food in the city – a kind of “Eureka!” moment in urban and geographical studies. Many of these studies had a predominantly functional perspective – how they can solve problems of neoliberal urbanization such as food poverty, social disgregation, ill health, and climate change. To a much lesser extent researchers have been questioning the multiple meanings, contradictory practices, or inspiring stories that emerge in the day-to-day working of the gardens: the self-help, voluntarist, ambivalent, or even co-opted practices. Their cognitive dissonance. Their frictions with issues of survivalism.
The chapters included in this book aim to investigate and reflect on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of gardening initiatives, by questioning and interrogating them as forms of political agency that contest, transform, and re-signify the urban. As editors we are interested in understanding the potential of urban gardening practices as agents of counter-neoliberal transformation of the city. We haven’t taken the progressive political stance as a starting point, but as a working question.
The authors included in this collection have used a plurality of theoretical tool-kits in their investigations, which include: the Lefebvrian and the Post-Marxist reading of autogestion and the collective management of (public) space, fuelled by a political awakening and mediated via the “right to the city” discourse (see chapters 4 and 5); the Political Ecology approach to environmental injustices (Agyeman and Evans, 2004) generated by everyday practices (see Chapter 2); the political urban agroecology perspective and its focus on more-than-human multi-species solidarities, socio-ecological justice, and post-capitalist perspective (see Chapter 10); the community economies perspective of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006) and how it is able to produce alternative processes of social reproduction in the capitalist society (see Chapter 6); the DIY-oriented citizenship theory in the interpretation of guerrilla gardening groups (see Chapter 9); or the material semiotic approach to Post-environmentalist theory which generates a new performative form of politics in the garden (see Chapter 3).
In light of this diversity the following chapters offer the reader a compass to navigate the multiple forms in which the political unfolds in the gardens; and how it deals with cogent issues, such as the struggle/s for land access, food governance and justice, equity and sustainability transition, and contrasting social inequalities mediated by the spatiality of community gardens.
As a form of political urban activism, urban gardening initiatives are often in contrast to the pervasive neoliberal planning of city life (Sbicca, 2016), which produces the erasure of public spaces and commons, the decrease of social cohesion and solidarity links, the privatization of leisure and free time activities and subjugation to exploitative food regimes. Not accidentally many urban gardening initiatives are described as forms of “contested spaces” or “right to space” (Schmelzkopf, 2002), “actually existing commons” (Eizenberg, 2012b), counteracting and resisting rigid social doctrines (McKay, 2011) or inventing new forms of quiet activism (Pottinger, 2017). Nevertheless, it is hard to find a common definition for the variegated panorama of gardening initiatives under the pressure of contrasting forces (Darly and McClintock, 2017). They can be co-opted by neoliberal institutions (Allen and Guthman, 2006; Pudup, 2008), increase the process of uneven capitalist development (McClintock, 2014, 2018), or reinforce racism, oppression, and exclusion mechanisms (Ramírez, 2015; Safransky, 2014). As a consequence, scholarly readings frequently offered a concurrent description of urban gardening as a neoliberal(ized) practice (Pudup, 2008) fueling gentrification processes and broadening the distance between subsistence gardening for the poor and leisure gardening for the wealthy (Quastel, 2009).
While acknowledging these trends and other forms of neoliberal enclosure brought forward through urban gardening (i.e. the dismantling of social services and the privatization of public land as in Tornaghi, 2014), it is nonetheless important to be wary of reading the interests of deprived people as only consumption-increasing strategies, while many gardeners often combine the two ideas of improving urban ecologies and having extra means for helping the needy (Flachs, 2010). Urban gardens are frequently described as improving the environmental and social quality of city space through sol...
