Arnaud Frauenfelder

The Two ‘Ages’ of Modernisation of Allotments: Changing Moral and Aesthetic Models

This chapter sheds light on the principle transformations to allotments taking place in Western Switzerland since the middle of the twentieth century. Based on a methodology combining an analysis of both written and spoken sources, it focuses on two periods (1950–1960 and 2000–2010) characterised by notable regulatory changes, demonstrating the extent to which the action taken by ‘reformers’ of these green spaces is grounded in different moral and aesthetic models, the nature of which mutates over time. Firstly, faced with the spectre of the rural wasteland in an urban setting, this chapter documents the transition, in the mid-twentieth century, of the traditional allotment into a clean, tidy familial pleasure garden. Secondly, we see how, throughout the 2000s, these reforms are undertaken with a view to rethinking the spectacle of the formal garden (in favour of a much more fluid style), and its use (‘less privatised’) in a context where new forms of urban gardening (community gardens), ‘taking up less space’ and ‘more integrated into the urban fabric’, continue to thrive. Finally, the chapter seeks to understand how the social history of these two ‘ages’ of modernisation of allotments can be interpreted as a long process of dual construction based, on the one hand, on a succession of off-putting images produced by the ideological and moral configuration dominant from one historic context to another and, on the other hand, on a process of social regulation and normalisation applied to communities perceived as marginal to or unaffected by mainstream concerns.

Whose poor? Social welfare and local political boundaries

The right to live somewhere is the sign and the condition for local belonging. Since every society helps its own poor, domiciliation constitutes the basis of a lifeline for the poor. This has two obvious consequences. First, this organization establishes a local community supervision upon the poor (their behaviour, their movements, etc.), linking them to their parish or their commune. Second, it excludes the poor who are without domiciliation, thus creating poor vagabonds. It also has a third consequence, which is at the core of this article: the policies of social assistance contribute to defining territorial belonging. The process of designating populations entitled to claim financial assistance thus raises the question of what being a member of a group formally means. If every society helps its own poor, the way in which membership is conceived, handled as a theme and institutionalized within the society proves to be eminently variable between the end of the nineteenth century and today. It moves through three dominant ideal types (stability, mobility, dignity) which do form a sequence but do not thoroughly replace each other.

The recipients of public welfare: the example of two Swiss cantons around 1890

In democratic societies the legislator holds the power to define and impose legitimate representations of the world. In other words, it institutes society ‘by establishing a common judicial and political sphere, setting the rules that ensure the daily functioning of democratic life and the relations between groups and individuals’. As a body of regulation, arbitration and delimitation it produces norms, as well as discourses on these norms. The analysis of the legislator’s debates (not on the rhetorical level, but on that of the content and ideas employed), in regard to social and archival elements allowing for an understanding of the impact of the developed policies, offers an insight into the changes at play. When it began to legislate on matters of social policy at the end of the nineteenth century, the state (in Switzerland as in other European countries) intervened in a field which up to then had essentially been reserved for private charity and the church. Because of that, the new legislation marked a change in the conception of social assistance: it was no longer a private matter. It was a time of intense exchanges in the social laboratories of the new century: Bismarckian social insurance was an alternative to charitable assistance, allowing for mediation between antagonistic components of the social body. While such social insurance did not appear in Switzerland at that time, debates about it often served as a canvas for parliamentary interventions on welfare, which shows that the alternative was known. Thus, for example, the authorities in the canton of Vaud, during discussion related to the 1888 Loi sur l’assistance des pauvres et les enfants malheureux et abandonnés (Act on Welfare for the Poor and Abandoned and

Les destinataires de l'assistance publique. L'exemple de deux cantons suisses vers 1890

En legiferant en matiere d’assistance sociale, l’Etat fixe des regles et de cette maniere norme en meme temps qu’il produit des statuts et des comportements. Le pauvre qui demande assistance doit non seulement posseder un statut qui officialise son appartenance au cercle des destinataires potentiels, mais, en plus, il est tenu d’etre dans une des situations ciblees par l’assistance publique. Mais quels sont les statuts et les situations reconnus ? Cet article tente de repondre a cette question sur la base des debats autour de la legislation d’assistance dans deux cantons de Suisse romande vers 1890.