Urban gardening and the struggle for social and spatial justice

Chiara Certomà, Susan Noori, Martin Sondermann, Chiara Certomà, Susan Noori, Martin Sondermann

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781526126092
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526126115
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The book presents an in-depth and theoretically-grounded analysis of urban gardening practices (re)emerging worldwide as new forms of bottom-up socio-political participation. By complementing the scholarly perspectives through posing real cases, it focuses on how these practices are able to address – together with environmental and planning questions – the most fundamental issues of spatial justice, social cohesion, inclusiveness, social innovations and equity in cities. Through a critical exploration of international case studies, this collection investigates whether, and how, gardeners are willing and able to contrast urban spatial arrangements that produce peculiar forms of social organisation and structures for inclusion and exclusion, by considering pervasive inequalities in the access to space, natural resources and services, as well as considerable disparities in living conditions.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16, Peace, justice and strong institutions

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Urban gardening and the quest for just uses of space in Europe

Chiara Certomà, Martin Sondermann and Susan Noori

Every bit of land you see around you, from the lawn across the street to the street itself to the schoolyard at the end, is used according to a decision made by someone. The decision may not have involved you at the time, but you’re involved now because it makes a difference in the kind of world you live in and react to every day. If land matters, so too do all the things that may or may not grow on it … You’re a player, which means you help determine how those spaces get used. (Tracey, 2007: 32)

Introduction

It seems that there are plenty of reasons to separate the humble, simple, minimal act of planting tomatoes from the noble and ambitious act of contesting the multiple manifestations of injustice. Consequently, urban gardening practices have been considered a trivial object of research for a long time, far from serious societal and political studies. Nevertheless, by seeing everyday practices as a form of political resistance (de Certeau, 1984), cultural geographers, urban planners and social scientists have been able to detect the highly revolutionary impact of gardening (in) the city for both transforming the urban environment and the constitution of society. This involves recognising the relevance of a myriad of supposedly non-significant acts – which support particular forms of life (Wittgenstein, 1953) while eradicating others – on the growth of the social and political imaginary. Planting tomatoes – under specific conditions and in specific contexts – has thus been broadly appreciated as a political gesture, and seeding wildflowers has acquired the status of a dignified social protest (see Certomà and Tornaghi, 2015). Very few scholars would today affirm that a bunch of people silently, even obstinately, caring for a piece of brownfield in the void left over by urban sprawl, are not advancing their claims about the character of place they want to live in and the society they want to be a part of (Tracey, 2007). The political nature of gardening, despite not immediately evident, has now been amply demonstrated by recent grassroots (e.g. the international Guerrilla Gardening organisation or the Incredible Edible Network) and institutional initiatives in Europe (see for instance the European networks supported by the COST Action TU1201 Urban Allotment Gardens in European Cities and the COST Action TD1106 Urban Agriculture Europe; the urbact project Agri-Urban; and Urban Green Labs), and documented by scholarly research (Eizenberg, 2012; McKay, 2011; Reynolds 2008).

In this book, however, we want to take a step beyond the simple claiming and legitimising political aspects of urban gardening, as we aim to investigate whether and how urban gardening practices are able and suitable to address social and spatial (in)justice in the urban context. The relationship between urban gardening practices and socio-spatial justice has been rarely investigated (see for instance McClintock, 2014; Milbourne, 2012; Miller, 2005; and Reynolds, 2014). This book aims to fill this gap through presenting scholarly analyses and reflections that unveil the consequences, potentialities and contradictions of urban gardening practices in the constitution of urban spaces and urbanity and examine their ability to address issues of social and spatial justice. Therefore, the contributions collected in our book principally explore the social and political aspects of urban gardening.

The focus on European cases is motivated by two primary reasons. First, the book builds upon the intense research conducted by European scholars collaborating on the COST Action Urban Allotment Gardens in European Cities, which devoted special attention to the analysis of land-use regimes in Europe and their historical development (Keshavarz and Bell, 2016). This means that although the chapters included report on examples from a set of European countries (notably the UK,¹ Italy, Denmark, Poland, Switzerland, Greece and Ireland), they are nonetheless ‘imprinted’ by a broader competence in the European context as a whole, acquired in the course of three years of joint research with COST Action colleagues. Second, the European understanding of social justice, together with the long-lasting commitment to the development and support of public welfare systems and the more recent focus on the constitution of an ‘enabling welfare state’ (BEPA, 2011), has always devoted particular attention to the proactive role of citizens (Davies and Simon, 2013). This makes Europe a perfect location for investigating urban gardening as a form of political agency combating social injustice and enabling democracies. Moreover, emerging interest in innovative forms of participatory urban planning and spatial governance has given rise to a new experiment in managing the commons (Bauwens and Niaros, 2018; Fox-Kämper et al., 2018) in the crowded European cities, largely inspired and supported by the social innovation mantra of European spatial policies (Caulier-Grice et al., 2012). With the aim of providing a comprehensive framework, the following pages discuss the nature of social and spatial justice, describe our understanding of urban gardening initiatives and explain how the latter are connected with the multiple manifestations of (in)justice in the city.

From social justice to spatial justice

Justice is a term we use in everyday language, but we are especially aware of justice in moments in which we are confronted with its negative manifestation – injustice. The meanings of justice range from individual virtues to ideals of societal order in which material and immaterial goods are fairly distributed, everyone has equal opportunities, and no one is privileged. Accordingly, social justice is considered as a guiding principle for individual action and societal coexistence in democratic and egalitarian societies (Özmen, 2014). The idea of ‘social justice as equality’ became largely popular during the 1970s, most notably after the publication of John Rawls’ work The Theory of Justice (Rawls, 1971). Since then justice has been variously conceptualised in the field of political theory with competing views entering the debate over time. The most impactful perspectives include the aforementioned John Rawls’ liberal approach of justice as (procedural) fairness in (structural) equal contexts of decision-making (Rawls, 1971); Jürgen Habermas’ deliberative approach pursuing a democratic consensus through rational arguments (Habermas, 1995); and more radical or agonistic approaches (especially Mouffe, 1993) which focus on (or, at least, positively acknowledge) the power of dissent.

Despite their differences, all these approaches revolve around the classic dispute of the alternative overall goals of liberty and equality (Bond, 2011; Mouffe, 2000; Özmen, 2014). In Rawls’ perspective on political liberalism, justice is a concept that works entirely in the political realm (Rawls, 1995). This includes the formal principle stating that everyone should be treated as equal in the absence of relevant reasons to discriminate, and the substantial principles that everybody is entitled to an equal distribution of benefits and burdens on the basis of needs. A broader societal view is advanced in Habermas’ theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1984; 1987), stressing the importance of communicative processes (under ideal theoretical conditions) as a pathway to more just practices in democratic societies. This theory has been widely reproduced in the field of spatial planning and development as a procedural ideal of communicative, cooperative or collaborative planning, especially in the urban context (e.g. Healey 1996; 2011). However, despite its enormous success in inspiring academics and practitioners, this democratic ideal of spatial planning is hardly fulfilled in spatial planning practices (Bond, 2011; Dyer et al., 2017) and it is questionable whether finding a consensus leads to just decisions at all (Cooke and Kothari, 2011).

Consensus-oriented approaches have attracted, in fact, a number of critical reactions, most notably Chantal Mouffe’s radical and agonistic pluralism theory, which argues that a consensus orientation encourages less active participation in democratic decision-making. It is rather the ‘power of dissent’ that vivifies democracy by ‘allowing for passions to be mobilised politically within the spectrum of the democratic process’ (Mouffe, 2005: 24). Hence the existence of alternative perspectives on the substantive meaning of social justice (and ways of achieving it) is one of the most important matters of dissent in modern democracies. Whatever definition of justice one might prefer, however, there are some points that need to be addressed. These include: the general/theoretical understanding of what justice is (substantive dimension); how decision-making processes are just and lead to more justice (procedural dimension); and to what extent the adopted form of resource allocation determines just and fair outcomes. Space is both a condition for the allocation process to occur – and thus represents one of the structural conditions for the exercise of justice – and a resource to be allocated. The chapters in this book make evident how spatial conditions and the use and distribution of spaces impact on many other aspects of life, including access to goods and services, education, and healthcare. To address the relationship between society and space, we need to shed some light on the substantive, procedural and spatial dimensions of justice – and their interdependencies. According to the societal concept of space proposed by Läpple (1992), physical spaces are products of societal practice, regulated through normative and institutionalised regulatory systems (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1Relational understanding of space and justice (own elaboration)

Physical spaces refer to patterns of functions and uses of space and therefore to their just (or unjust) distribution of spatial goods and functions (e.g. proximity to green spaces and social infrastructures, exposure to noise, quality of built environment, etc.), which are artefacts of societal practice. Societal practice encompasses all human actions (such as political decision-making over land use and spatial planning) and can vary considerably in terms of procedural justice (e.g. inclusive versus exclusive decision-making). In general, societal practice is always based on the systems of meaning which are shared by a society or societal groups, respectively. These systems of meaning encompass values, beliefs, attitudes and orientations of actors – here justice is addressed in its substantive (or ethical) dimension. Among these interdependencies, procedural justice plays a key role. Justice is inherent in the specific ways in which spaces are perceived, produced, used and appropriated by social actors. These processes are influenced or framed by regulatory systems including the institution...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Urban gardening and the quest for just uses of space in Europe
• 2 Conflation in political gardening: concepts and practice
• 3 City wastelands: creating places of vernacular democracy
• 4 Temporary urban landscapes and urban gardening: re-inventing open space in Greece and Switzerland
• 5 Urban gardening and spatial justice from a mid-size city perspective: the case of Ortobello Urban Garden
• 6 Community gardening for integrated urban renewal in Copenhagen: securing or denying minorities’ right to the city?
• 7 Limits to growth?: Why gardening has limited success growing inclusive communities
• 8 Is urban gardening a source of wellbeing and just freedom?: A Capability Approach based analysis from the UK and Ireland
• 9 Food for all?: Critically evaluating the role of the Incredible Edible movement in the UK
• 10 The foreseen future of urban gardening
• Index