Havana

Mapping Lived Experiences of Urban Agriculture

Susan Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000615210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

Following the crisis of the Special Period, Cuba promoted urban agriculture throughout its towns and cities to address food sovereignty and security. Through the adoption of state recommended design strategies, these gardens have become places of social and economic exchange throughout Cuba. This book maps the lived experiences surrounding three urban farms in Havana to construct a deeper understanding about the everyday life of this city. Using narratives and drawings, this research uncovers these sites as places where education, intimacy, entrepreneurism, wellbeing, and culture are interwoven alongside food production. Henri Lefebvre's latent work on rhythmanalysis is used as a research method to capture the everyday beats particular to Havana surrounding these sites. This book maps the many ways in which these spaces shift power away from the state to become places that are co-created by the community to serve as a crucial hinge point between the ongoing collapse of the city and its future wellbeing.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201410-1

1.1 Urban Agriculture in Havana

Food shapes a place and there is a direct relationship between cities and the sustenance they provide to their inhabitants. How a city procures, produces, and distributes food is an everchanging interplay of its people, processes, and places. Agriculture has historically been part of civic life, with garden plots and the pasturing of animals occurring within the communal commons of cities and towns. To reflect this connection, the word ‘agriculture’ is derived from the Latin words agri meaning field and colere which denotes caring or cultivation. The original idea of farming was as much about tending the earth as it was about advancing an idea, or the collective identity or culture of a place.¹ With industrial agriculture, this connection no longer exists as the production of food is separated from the point of consumption and, in doing so, it has also moved away from the original definition of the word. However, care and growing still exist alongside one another within urban farms as they continue to create deep connections between people, production, and specific place s.

People engage with urban agriculture for various reasons. Some participate in it as a hobby, enjoying the visceral connection to nature through this social and ecological activity. Communities are often concerned with the authenticity of their food and a local garden empowers this connection. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, those facing extreme hardship grow food close to where they live to feed their families and to keep starvation at bay. The last reason on the list mobilised urban agriculture in Cuba. However, the deployment was not only developed by desperate and hungry citizens but it was also actively organised by the government both nationally and locally. Since the Special Period of the 1990s this movement has evolved to become much more than the human desire for food sovereignty and security but rather it is linked to the original definition of efforts. So, while these sites of urban agriculture might be considered an ‘agriculture’—involving care and culture—bolstered by broad community unusual research area for an architect who is interested in studying Havana, Cuba, it was the co-creation of these cultivated spaces throughout this palimpsestic city that piqued my curiosity as to how one might re-consider the possibilities of urban space and question how these sites might ‘act as generators—or, more precisely, as re-generators’ of this collapsing city.²

Urban agricultural gardens are located within all of the municipalities and neighbourhoods of Havana (Figure 1.2) and, in contrast to the city’s declining built environments, these sites of urban food production have been successfully implemented through seamless cultivation-to-community connections. The study is particularly interesting as these productive sites are embedded into all of the social and political tiers of the country and the community. These gardens exist in-between the triumph of the Revolution that promised equal access to provisions and healthcare and the everyday realities surrounding the scarcity of food and medicine. The sites are dependent upon the resourcefulness of the workers, the demands and preferences of local consumers, access to infrastructure, and the realities of the surrounding context. Influenced by global, seasonal, and everyday rhythms, these spaces represent a paradigm shift from a state supply of food to local self-sufficient provisioning within the emerging Cuban entrepreneurial economic model. Involving spatial tactics of appropriation and negotiation, these gardens are simultaneously places for pleasure, celebration, and survival. And ultimately, these gardens are full of the ‘subversive potential of urban spaces’ as they offer an understanding that the world must not only be interpreted but is always changing, just as it had done during and after the Revolution.³

Figure 1.2 Map of Havana showing sites of urban agriculture visited throughout the province

So how should one go about unpacking the tangle of people and places surrounding these gardens within the city to reveal their characteristics? It is clear that ‘[t]he supply of food to a great city is one of the most remarkable of social phenomena’ so studying such spaces will disclose much about the place, especially since the preparation, production, and consumption of food within cities each have their own intrinsic rhythms.⁴ These rhythms are grounded within everyday life and embrace domesticity, employment, provisioning, education, healthcare, and ecology, and so it would seem important to uncover the beats of quotidian activities surrounding these sites. Taking this as a direction, this book adopts a conceptual framework surrounding the study of site-specific everyday rhythms based upon Henri Lefebvre’s incipient work on rhythmanalysis, to study the city. These beats are not understood as scientific but as atmospheric, process, people, and place dependent.

1.2 Research Questions

The research draws on the work of Lefebvre to question how sites of agriculture within communities affect urban life in Havana, not by serving as a neutral backdrop for food production but rather as enabling a deeper understanding of the city: spatially, socially, economically, and ecologically. It focuses on people and how they participate in everyday life. The quotidian activities that surround these sites render an understanding of the city as being ‘ordinary’. For Amin and Graham, this idea of ordinary encompassed everyday life and the political, economic, and social layers that contributed to the specific experiences of the city.⁵ Jennifer Robinson used the term ordinary to describe cities, as opposed to categories such as Western or third world, developed or underdeveloped, global north or global south, as she believed these other terms suggested an understanding of a city that is striving to develop into something else and somehow does not feel that it is modern—and so her use of the term ‘ordinary’ meets the city where it is at.⁶ Either of the two definitions of the word ordinary support a study that encompasses the quotidian life of the city of Havana. This is an important moment to capture as the city of Havana hovers at the point of multiple possibilities and paradoxes, including socialism or capitalism; collapse or development; scarcity or abundance; and global isolation or integration.

The research considers the following questions within different sites of urban agriculture and their surrounding community:

1. What spatial practices and patterns (rhythms) are demonstrated in and around sites of urban agriculture?
2. How do sites of urban agriculture affect their surrounding neigh-bourhoods?
3. Do these urban gardens contribute to the resilience of the city?⁷
4. What can we learn about urban development from these sites?

This research believes that urban agriculture in Havana enables positive change, that these gardens enhance the lived condition of their communities and that this, in turn, improves the city socially, economically, and ecologically in addition to providing food security and sovereignty. These spaces are performative and sensorial; the activities within and around them, the smells, colours, and textures improve the urban realm.⁸ With this in mind, this study documents the spatial practices and patterns of these sites to understand their impact within communities in Havana.

1.3 Using Henri Lefebvre as a Guide

Architects and planners have readily absorbed Lefebvre’s work on the Production of Space without necessarily linking it to his larger body of work involving the Critique of Everyday Life or Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life; in each of these he proposed analysing urban rhythms. The Production of Space asserts that space is a social product that is composed of overlapping and contradictory criteria that change over time. These modifications are due to the specificity of the urban context and the activities that occur within and around the space, the conscious ideas that designers used to create it, and the experiences and encounters that occur within it. Rhythmanalysis gives us a methodology with which to study this concept dialectically by helping us to understand the multiple rhythms of these sites and how they intersect with the everyday life of the city to create a collective oeuvre.⁹ The overarching strategies for looking at these sites in the city are derived from Iain Borden’s Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body; and Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman’s Henri Lefebvre, and include the principles discussed in the following sections.

1.3.1 Encounter

This study involves participation. Just as Lefebvre’s studies involved going ‘into the field’ and partaking ‘in real life’ so this work engages with the sites of urban agriculture with an understanding that in order to get to know something one must in some small way interact with it.¹⁰ Perspectives from inside and outside the space are mutually important in The Production of Space, as Lefebvre considered concurrent encounters and interconnections between the perceived, the conceived, and the lived dimensions of space. Multiple actors shape these urban agricultural sites, including the state, the planners, the producers, the community, and the consumers, all within the physical realities and contexts of the different sites. These relationships are not static but in constant flux, such that one could think of them as on-going reproductions of space. An encounter with a site of urban agriculture requires studying a site in multiple ways:

1. Spatial practice or perceived space. This is the study of the physical or material aspects of a site and includes characteristics...