Remind: Call for contributions to edited book "Just Green:
Urban Gardening and the Struggles of Social and Spatial
Justice"
Deadline 15th of February
With the support of COST Action TU1201 “Urban Allotment
Gardens in European Cities - Future, Challenges and
Lessons Learned” (www.urbanallotments.eu) & in
collaboration with the International Conference “Growing
in cities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban
Gardening”, University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Northwestern Switzerland, September 2016
(http://www.urbanallotments.eu/final-conference.html)
Editors: Chiara Certomŕ, Susan Noori and Martin Sondermann
Target publisher: Manchester University Press
(http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/)
Authors who already submitted or intend to submit an
abstract to the forthcoming conference “Growing in cities:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Gardening” are
invited to submit their abstract also to the edited book
project “Just Green: Urban Gardening and the Struggles of
Social and Spatial Justice”.
Please note that this edited book proposal is NOT intended
as proceedings of the conference; proceedings of the
conference will be separately issued by the organisers of
the conference.
Those who are not to take part in the conference are also
invited to discuss their interest with the editors
(addresses below) and to submit their abstract.
Book topic description
Urban gardening practices are broadly (re)emerging
worldwide as new forms of bottom-up socio-political
participation, addressing - together with environmental,
planning and food questions- the most fundamental issues
of spatial justice, social cohesion, inclusiveness, social
innovations and equity in cities.
Today, urban gardening has become a global movement aimed
at engaging people to collectively design, organise,
realise and take care of public green spaces in their
cities, by transforming neglected spaces into pleasant,
engaging and vibrant places. The forms and organisation of
urban gardens are highly context-dependent, but in
general, these encompass community gardens, guerrilla
gardening or street gardening, and allotment gardens.
These initiatives are in most cases intended for
education, leisure and socialisation; contrasting food
insecurity and social disadvantages; community-building;
health promotion; engaging marginalised social groups in
the city life; and advancing environmental-friendly
lifestyles.
However the relationship between urban gardening practices
and spatial justice has been rarely discussed per se. The
effectiveness of urban gardening in addressing the current
social and spatial injustices in cities is the core
interest of this book.
The idea of spatial justice emerged from the apparent
existence of a reciprocal relationship between spatial
conditions and social disparities. By adopting a spatial
consideration of justice, it becomes evident that the
distribution of opportunities, material and non-material
benefits, services and resources are not equally spread
through the space, which overlaps with the unequal
distribution of wealth and power occurring across the
society. In many contemporary cities, the spatial
arrangement produces peculiar forms of social
organisation, and structures for inclusion and exclusion
characterised by pervasive inequalities in the access to
space, natural resources and services, as well as
considerable disparities in living conditions. The
physical arrangement of urban space determines and, at the
same time, is determined by the existing spatial
inequalities, and is mainly manifested in the marginal
(and marginalised) areas where environmental problems are
pervasive and severely affect the structure and
functioning processes of urban agglomerations. Indeed,
space is not only the location in which justice and
injustice occur, but also the object of social justice
claims; for example, the citizens’ request for available
public spaces to be freely enjoyed in the cities. Space,
use of urban space and spatial justice intersects directly
with the issues of class, gender, race, religion and
culture. Space is a vector for justice that makes it
possible to articulate different forms of power,
domination, resistance and alternative to the current
shape of the cities.
Since the 19th century, traditional allotment gardens have
been established by local or central administrations
almost everywhere in Europe as self-help tools for the
poor and disadvantaged people. However, it is only with
the rise of the social justice movement and the urban
counterculture in the 1960– 1970s that they have been
complemented or in some cases replaced by different forms
of urban gardens with a clear socio-political and
contestative motivation. Concurrently, the works of some
social scholars such as Lefebvre, 1974; Harvey, 1990; and
Soja, 1989 who demonstrated that the production of space
impacts the social groups and their opportunities,
accelerated the emergence of new bottom-up urban gardening
projects as a manifestation of the “right to the city”
(Purcell, 2013). In fact, urban gardening initiatives
became a symbol for contrasting the consequences of
neoliberal governmentality, e.g. the erasure of public
spaces, the decrease of social cohesion and solidarity
links (Hou, 2010) and is therefore seen as part of the
struggles for “right to space” (Schmelzkopf, 2002). Urban
gardening initiatives can address a number of spatial
inequalities while reducing disaffection toward places and
social community, and increasing community confidence and
cohesion.
Despite most of the literature on urban gardening adopts
an advocacy approach as forms of resistance initiatives
contrasting rigid social doctrines (McKay, 2011) through
political gestures (Certomŕ & Tornaghi, 2015), or even
means for addressing social injustices (Reynolds, 2014),
an opposite perspective describes it as a neoliberal
manifestation of individual and quasi-autarkic citizens’
action (Pudup, 2008), able to determine controversies and
injustices including new forms of enclosures or
gentrification (Rosol 2012). In some cases, urban
gardening initiatives are promoted by administrations
themselves for stimulating dispossessed people to engage
in the restoration of derelict urban spaces that are of no
interest to private investors (Smith and Kurtz, 2003), or
they are promoted by corporations as a greenwashing
strategy. In addition, the attribution of urban gardens as
common goods of general public interest needs to be
questioned as they might be a selective or even exclusive
good only. While it is true that in some circumstances the
social-egalitarian aims of gardening have been initially
advanced by educated and wealthy people (Schmelzkopf,
1995), on the other hand the interpretation of urban
gardening as a neoliberal practice has been criticized for
broadening the distance between subsistence gardening for
poor people and leisure gardening for wealthy people
(Quastel, 2009) as it flatters deprived people’s interests
as only consume-increasing strategies, and denies their
socio-environmental commitment (Flachs, 2010). Both
perspectives are intended to be analysed in the present
collection of contributions.
Invited contributions
We are interested to receive contributions that explore
urban gardening as a form of democratic and participatory
urban development able to tackle spatial justice, social
cohesion, inclusiveness, social innovations and equity
issues. Critical readings of these relationships are
highly welcomed, focusing on the socio-political and
ethical perspectives, and the structural and procedural
dimension of the spatial justice and equality struggle.
Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are acceptable
provided that they offer a theoretical perspective on the
innovative strength of activists and community
organisations’ agency. Case based and comparative pieces
are highly encouraged.
References:
Certomŕ C and Tornaghi C (2015) "Political
gardening.Transforming cities and political agency", Local
Environment, 20 (10)
Flachs A (2010) Food for thought: The social impact of
community gardens in the greater Cleveland area.
Electronic Green Journal 1(30): 1–9
Hou J (2010) Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism
and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. New York: Taylor
& Francis.
McKay G (2011) Radical Gardening. London: Frances Lincoln
Limited Purcell M (2013) Possible worlds: Henri Lefebvre
and the right to the city. Journal of Urban Affairs 36(1):
141–154.
Pudup MB (2008) It takes a garden: Cultivating
citizen-subjects in organized garden projects. Geoforum
39(3): 1228–1240.
Quastel N (2009) Political ecologies of gentrification.
Urban Geography 30(7): 694–725.
Reynolds K (2014) Disparity despite diversity: Social
injustice in New York City’s urban agriculture system.
Antipode, 47 (1)
Rosol M (2012) Community Volunteering as Neoliberal
Strategy? Green Space Production in Berlin, Antipode, 44
(1)
Schmelzkopf K (1995) Urban community gardens as contested
space. Geographical Review 85: 364–381.
Schmelzkopf K (2002) Incommensurability, Land Use, and the
Right to Space: Community Gardens in New York City, Urban
Geography, 23 (4)
Smith C and Kurtz H (2003) Community gardens and politics
of scale in New York City. Geographical Review 93(2):
193–212.
Proposed contribution
Author(s):
Tentative title:
Key words (max 5):
Content (500-700 words):
Please specify the content, argument, and sources (include
key references). Explain how this contribution advances
the current status of literature in the reference field,
and describe the reasons for specific example(s) (if any)
to be considered and for the adopted methodology.
Number of line drawing and b/w photos:
Have you submitted or do you intend to submit an abstract
(and later a paper) to the “Growing in Cities” conference?
If yes, what section?
Author(s)’ Short Bio:
Please return the format by 15th of February 2015 to
[log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask];
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Chiara Certomŕ
Research Fellow, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa
http://cdg-lab.dirpolis.sssup.it/en/staff/academic/chiara-certoma/
+39 338 3858424 (mobile); cccertoma (skype)
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