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]
http://www.sssup.it/context.jsp?ID_LINK=1259&area=91