Dear all
we are planning a special issue of a journal on political
urban gardening and city planning, please find below the
complete call. Feel free to circulate it widely.
Looking forward to receiving your expressions of interest!
Best
Chiara

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Call for papers “Political gardening and city planning”


Summary

This is a call for papers for a special issue of a journal
on political urban gardening and city planning to be
proposed for publication to Environment and Planning A or
Urban Studies.

We are interested in bringing together high level
contributions focusing on citizens’ engagement in the care
or re-invention of public space, and on the use of
critical urban gardening as a means of political
expression (addressing issues such as the privatization of
public space, redistributive policies addressing spatial
inequalities, environmental problems, food security and
safety…).

Our proposal is aimed at providing policy planners,
researchers and citizens with a comprehensive overview on
the fast-growing, varied and challenging urban gardening
movement, its claims and its innovative proposals. The
collected articles would have either a theoretical or a
policy focus, and the special issue would have an
international and multidisciplinary perspective.

Project description

In the last decade, a large number of grassroots gardening
groups with a political stance have emerged in the cities
of the global north. Urban harvesters, guerrilla
gardeners, community growers, landsharers are among the
actors in a wide range of initiatives which have
mushroomed, participated in and initiated by groups that
cut across age and class categories. They are
reinvigorating the meaning of cities as laboratories for
political experiments. From marginal and neglected urban
spaces at the city periphery, to urban greens and parks in
well maintained city centres, public space gardening is
emerging in different urban settings, assuming different
forms and expressing a range of political meanings that is
worth exploring. While they all help to reinvigorate
global environmental consciousness, the range of claims
expressed in the micro-politics of garden activism is
quite diversified: DIY landscaping and engaged ecology,
digging for anarchy (self-sufficiency for escaping
capitalists transactions), promoting community empowerment
and food sovereignty, proposing new forms of environmental
planning, achieving environmental justice, etc..

Political gardening addresses some of the most striking
contemporary social issues, such as the role of urban
grassroots movements, the links between space and
politics, the post-modern fragmentation of the individual
self and the reconstruction of an innovative collective
identity. Not to mention the overcoming of a
discourse-based political activity in favour of a more
practice-oriented one. It articulates urban politics in
terms of inequality, division, exclusion, contestation,
resistance and inclusion, and regards place as a fluid
space of complex power-geometries and thus, by
‘spatialising’ the grand narrative of globalisation,
allows plural and radical openness and a creative kind of
politics.

While there is a tendency to particularly focus on the
progressive element of these stances, we also expect to
find conservative oriented inward looking communities,
gardening public land in the name of the “big society”. We
are interested in papers which investigate political
gardening within the wider political spectrum.

This work is aimed at theoretically exploring a number of
problems raised by political gardening and the relevance
these initiatives have for planning policies and practice.
A first crucial issue political gardening addresses is the
shrinking availability of non-commodified space
(especially green space) in the late-modern cities, which
corresponds to the very possibility for people to have at
their disposal a sufficiently large, healthy, decent,
non-degraded and non-polluted space for personal and
social enjoyment. This relates to the possibility for
public gardens to increase solidarity, reduce crime, and
produce relevant changes in community confidence and
cohesion together with making ordinary places pleasant,
engaging and vibrant. As a consequence, people may
experience a new sense of belonging to the community they
engage with (sometimes at the border of the existing rules
and sometimes by intentionally breaking them), and may
feel empowered to intervene on the material arrangement of
the urban public space (specifically, cities streets,
plot, squares, bed flowers…).
We particularly welcome contributions which look at how
these initiatives challenge or create a dialogue with
existing city planning practice and at their effects on
urban policy agendas.

Useful references

A number of texts (and their analytical limits) has helped
framing our questions. Our intention is that this special
issue will continue what has been initiated by these
contributions and we recommend that prospective authors
are familiar with them:

MCKAY George (2011), Radical gardening, Frances Lincoln
Limited: London
O’BRIEN Dan (ed.) (2010), Gardening. Philosophy for
everyone, Wyley-Blackwell
HINCHLIFFE Stephen and WHATMORE, Sarah (2006), “Living
cities: towards a politics of conviviality”, Special
'Technonatures' issue of Science as Culture, 15(3):
123-138
HOU J. et.al (2009), Greening cities, growing communities.
Learning from Seattle’s urban community gardens, Seattle &
London: University of Washington Press
HOU Jeffrey (ed.) (2010), Insurgent public space.
Guerrilla Urbanism and the remaking of contemporary
cities, London: Routledge
RICHARDSON Tim and KINGSBURY Noel (eds) (2005), Vista. The
culture and politics of gardens, Frances Lincoln: London
PINKERTON Tamzin, HOPKINS Rob (2009), Local Food. How to
make it happen in your community, Transition Books
REYNOLDS Richard (2008), On Guerrilla Gardening: A
Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries, Bloomsbury
Publishing PLC
TRACEY David (2007), Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto
New Society Publishers

Disciplinary and geographical approaches

The proposed collection is intended to privilege a
transdiciplinary approach and encourage the adoption of
varied methodology for social and urban research.

We are interested in analytical approaches to
radical/political gardening which go beyond academic
disciplines and /or which bridge academic and non-academic
perspectives (hence transdiscplinary). The purpose of the
work is also to overcome the classic participatory
research and planning methods by effectively learn from
practitioners experience in the exploration of new
possibility in the arrangement of city space. We welcome
contributions from activists, action researchers and third
sector organisations.
 From the geographic point of view, while our interest is
mainly focussed on cities of the global north, we aim at
broadening a view on political gardening which is –at
least in terms of literature- mostly represented by
anglo-american cases.
  

Submission format and Deadlines

To express your interest please send an abstract of at
least 800 words to [log in to unmask] and
[log in to unmask] by the 31st of May 2012

Notification of acceptance: 17th June 2012

First paper draft: 31st August 2012


Editors:

Chiara Certomà, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Political
Science Department, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies,
Pisa, Italy, [log in to unmask]
Chiara Tornaghi, ESRC Research Fellow, Cities and social
justice research cluster, School of Geography, University
of Leeds, UK, [log in to unmask]


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Chiara Certomà

Post-Doc Research Fellow
Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies
Piazza Martiri della Liberta' 33
56127 Pisa, Italia
[log in to unmask]
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