Keep off the grass! New directions for geographies of yards and gardens (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Suburban Front Garden: A Socio-Spatial Analysis
Nature and Culture, 2009
This article argues that the physical structure of the front garden and its ecosystem is determined by an ensemble of diverse social and natural processes. The essential social form is that of visuality, an abstract compositional force that provides conventions for assessing objects as well as for reshaping their surface countenance and establishing their location within the garden. Accordingly, the social processes of visuality are materially realized in the labor processes of gardening, while their consumption is mediated through the concrete process of gazing. The identified social processes include the prospect, aesthetic, and panoptic dimensions of visuality. Labor conceives and creates them, while the physical structures and the natural processes reproduce and maintain them beyond the production time attributed to gardening. But they are increasingly undermined by the natural tendency of the plant ecosystem to grow. Consequently, the essential contradiction of the front garden is how the laws and tendencies of the plant ecosystem act as a countertendency to the social forms of visuality. This article demonstrates that beneath the surface appearance, there exists complex relationships between nature and society in this space we call the front garden.
Unearthing the Sociology of Urban Garden
2024
As environmental awareness grows and global supply chains become increasingly fragile, urban gardening has seen a surge in public demand. While allotments as a horticultural source of individual well-being have been widely studied in social psychology, their significance for societal cohesion has not yet been sociologically theorized and empirically investigated. Focusing on Germany, a country with a long tradition of urban allotments commonly known as “Schrebergarten,” we conceptualize urban gardens as multifaceted social units characterized by both material and associational dynamics. Since becoming institutionalized by 19th-century conservative social reformers, they have been conceived as loci of family retreat, depoliticization in quasi-homeownership, private insurance against food price inflation, and embourgeoisement of the working classes. Drawing on unique panel data (1990-2013), we challenge the petty bourgeois image of the Schrebergarten, showing that it brings together heterogeneous strata of educated left-wing citizens with ecological concerns, particularly in urban areas and East Germany, with no evidence of political embourgeoisement. If anything, the Schrebergarten increases secular social and political engagement beyond family life, facilitating social integration, especially for foreign citizens. Overall, the Schrebergarten disappoints most of the socio-political expectations classically ascribed to it and should rather be considered as a site of socialization and politicization.
Reclaiming urban space as resistance : the infrapolitics of gardening
Revue Française d’Études Américaines, pp. 33-49, 2012
Even though half of the world's population now lives in cities, the “right to the city,” which was called for by Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s, is not yet a reality for all. Not only do most urbanites lack the power and ability to shape their living environment, but they are sometimes excluded from the so-called public space altogether. Against this double rejection of their right to the city, some of them have imagined, whether consciously or not, daily acts of resistance by marking their surroundings or subverting their use. Urban gardening, despite its apparent innocuousness, has proved to be a powerful tool for protesting against the urban condition as shaped and defined by the ruling powers, both public and private. Even though the practice is now gaining recognition all over the world, the claiming of urban space—even minimal—through horticulture is still underway.
Cultural Geography and Gardening Activism
Breath Mark, 2012
Perhaps what gives gardens their political meaning are those practical features that all gardens—including dooryard gardens, house gardens, community gardens, allotment gardens and school gardens—share in common.1 According to Clarissa Kimber (2004), “[a]ll . . . gardens depend on the gardeners for maintenance and are spaces made meaningful by the actions of people during the course of their everyday lives” (p. 263). More than philosophers, cultural geographers have consistently explored the connections between community gardening and political activism. For example, Lauren Baker (2004) has conducted research on Toronto’s Community Food- Security (CFS) movement, which is not only about gardening, but also about challenging the food system status quo (especially its corporate leaders) and securing alternative food sources (food security) for area residents (especially immigrants and the poor).2 Christopher Smith and Hilda Kurtz (2003) consider the controversy over New York City Mayor Giuliani’s plan to auction and redevelop the land occupied by 114 community gardens, describing it as “a politics of scale in which garden advocates contested the fragmentation of social urban space wrought by the application of neoliberal policies” (p. 193). Giuliani’s redevelopment project exemplifies neo- liberal economic policy, for it attempts to privatize public use land, maximize property values and, ultimately, remove government involvement in a free market.3 Mary Beth Pudup (2008) describes the conflict between New York City gardening activists and the Giuliani administration in the early 1990s, claiming that “gardening in such collective settings is an unalloyed act of resistance” (p. 1232). Poised to contest neoliberal policies at various geographical scales (local, city-wide and state-wide), members of New York City’s gardening coalition successfully ended Giuliani’s ambitious plan to redevelop and auction the public land. The city’s extensive network of community gardening activists, including guerrilla gardeners, prevailed.
Urban Gardening South of the Tracks in Middletown, USA: An Embedded Qualitative GIS Approach
MS Thesis, Ball State University, 2012
While the globalized restructuring of manufacturing economies has marked many cities in the Midwest as places in decline, urban residents continue to mold the changing landscape to meet their needs and desires. Gardening is one socio-spatial practice that has expanded within the spaces left behind by a shrinking population and vacated industrial, commercial and residential properties. But not enough researchers have grappled with the social and political aspects of gardening. Gardens in general, and vegetable gardens in particular, sit at the nexus of a range of human constructs: urban land use, aesthetics, property law, social and class structure, economy and food. More specifically, little has been written on the distinguished history of urban gardening in Muncie, especially within the context of the “Middletown Studies” sociological tradition. Qualitative GIS represents an emerging mixed methods approach to geographic inquiry and a promising venue for an embedded exploration of gardening. Engaging with several “channels” of data collection, including participant observation, I use such an approach to combine fieldwork, spatial analysis, ethnographic inquiry, and an archival survey into an examination of how urban gardening in Muncie relates to broader economic forces. I ask what roles does gardening play in the physical landscape and social sphere of the south side of Muncie.
Transplanting plotting fencing: relational property practices in community gardens
Environment and Planning A, 2016
Community gardening is an increasingly popular phenomenon. Local governments wishing to ‘green’ the city and make the urban environment more ‘inclusive’ sometimes promote community gardening as a means to meet policy goals. Scholars from various fields have been keen to focus on these positive promises of community gardening. However, community gardens are not inherently different from their surroundings or good in themselves as they are connected to wider urban landscapes and routines through practice. Building on empirical research that I conducted at three community gardens in Sydney, Australia, I reveal how property is practised in three gardens with different property models, focussing on three practices – transplanting, plotting and fencing. I show that community gardeners produce property relationally and that through each of these practices they create overlapping understandings of common and private property. Gardeners have contradictory motivations that are geared both towards community inclusion and the protection of personal interests. The paper reveals that while feelings of ownership contribute to a sense of community belonging, they also help legitimatise a defensive and exclusive spatial claim.
Geographies of landscape: Representation, power and meaning
Theoretical Criminology
Green criminology has sought to blur the nature-culture binary and this paper seeks to extend recent work by geographers writing on landscape to further our understanding of the shifting contours of the divide. The paper begins by setting out these different approaches, before addressing how dynamics of surveillance and conquest are embedded in landscape photography. It then describes how the ways we visualize the Earth were reconfigured with the emergence of photography in the nineteenth century and how the world itself has been transformed into a target in our global media culture.
II International Conference on Landscape and Urban Horticulture, 2010
Gardens are political spaces rife with contradiction. Historically, artists and filmmakers have represented them as cultivated enclosures that convey a sense of paradise when juxtaposed with the reality outside the garden gates. Germany is home to approximately one million private allotment gardens that are clustered together in colonies and open to public view. Sown throughout a dense urban setting, Berlin allotments offer a glimpse into the simultaneously public and private, German community garden subculture. Kleingärten associations embody a desire for a contained, self-sufficient utopia that acts as an idealized micro-version of the larger society. This site-specific inquiry into Kleingärten will culminate in an extended video art piece through the combination of taped conversations with Berlin gardeners in their allotments, the use of text, narration and both direct and constructed sound. It will address the central question: When recording people in their idealized environment, where is the line between documentary and fiction? This ambiguity points to an inherent dialectic between modes of documentation and the presumption of objectivity.
Framing urban gardening and agriculture: On space, scale and the public.
Geoforum, 2014
"During the past ten years, both public policies and scientific research have tended to pay increasing attention to what they refer to as ‘‘urban gardening’’ and ‘‘urban agriculture’’. In this paper I argue that the term ‘‘urban’’ poorly reflects the diversity of spatial references that underpin such projects. I explore the framing process of two competing agriculture and gardening projects in Geneva, Switzerland. I first show that the social and spatial frames of the projects, i.e. the central definition of a public and of a spatiality are inextricably linked. In the second part, I argue that by ranking the spatial units that ground the spatial frames of the projects according to the specific public they are aimed at, the most powerful actor makes competitive use of scale frames. This paper thus argues for more attention to the socio-spatial framing of urban agriculture and urban gardening projects. It contributes to the debate on the politics of scale by exploring how a scalar hierarchy is performed through the strategic deployment of spatial criteria by social actors. The hierarchy appears to be contingent and context specific, with prevalent notions of locality and proximity."