Chiara Certomà

Critical urban gardening as a post-environmentalist practice

This paper investigates the emergence of the urban gardening movement as a form of post-environmentalist political practice. Despite the general acknowledgment of the relevance of environmental issues in the contemporary world, according to Post-Environmentalism, environmental thinking is becoming increasingly “de-politicised”. The aim of the paper is to suggest that “re-politicisation” of environmental politics is possible, taking into account the political practices emerging in urban space. The attachment to place materiality can, by means of common practices, make evident forgotten or ignored environmental relations; and it can make them a “public issue”. These kinds of practices relay upon the association of humans and non-humans, as crucial actors in the political constitution of urban space. For instance, critical urban gardening practice may oppose the mainstream of environmental politics; it implies the use of biological material as a form of political expression, and activates material-semiotic networks existing in the urban environment.

Political gardening. Transforming cities and political agency

In the last decade, a large variety of grassroots actors – urban harvesters, guerrilla gardeners, community growers and landsharers – have been promoting a diversified set of projects that, while interstitial and very often considered “residual”, are nonetheless significantly challenging the mainstream place-making of cities in the Global North, and sometimes changing the face of the neighbourhoods in which they are located. These initiatives unfold in a variety of forms: the spontaneous appropriation and rehabilitation of marginal and neglected spaces at the city periphery, new bilateral agreements for sharing private land, community stewardship of urban greens and parks in well-maintained city centres are just a few of the arrangements through which gardening in both public and private spaces is taking place in various urban settings. While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection aims to investigate and reflect on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives, by questioning and interrogating them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify “the urban”. While as editors of this special issue, we are interested in understanding the potential of urban gardening practices as agents of counter-neoliberal urban transformation, we do not take the progressive political stance as a starting point, but as a working question. We are interested in exploring what ideas about the city and belonging these practices embody and bring forward, how they make use of biological material as a means of political expression, what innovative relations of care, decision-making and politics of place they build, and what weaknesses, contradictions or emancipatory potentials they carry with them. Our aim is to populate the link between political gardening and the politics of space with a range of reflections that, seen in their complexity, constitute the basis for furthering urban politics from the ground up. As readers will be able to appreciate in this special issue, the claims expressed in the micro-politics of garden activism are quite diversified: DIY landscaping and engaged ecology, “digging for anarchy” and counter-neoliberal development, food sovereignty and the reconstruction of the urban commons, community empowerment and the “right to the city”. The social solidarities and divisions, empowerment and learning, conflict and negotiation of which these projects are fraught, are discussed in the seven papers in this collection. The analysis is largely based on empirical research and analysis of the forms, means and practices of urban gardening in 11 cities: Dublin (Ireland), Belfast (Northern Ireland), Leeds (England), Plymouth (England), three undisclosed locations in the West Midlands (England), Cologne (Germany), Toronto (Canada), Los Angeles and New York (USA). We selected these cases on the basis of the distinctive character of urban gardening

Informal planning in a transactive governmentality. Re-reading planning practices through Ghent’s community gardens:

This article addresses a new mode of planning that involves a collaboration between State, private and community actors in the context of growing urban gardening movements. It questions the view of urban gardening as a manifestation of citizens’ dissensus towards administration’s institutional planning, and the expression of urban ‘counterplanning’ whose aim is to resist the consequences of a neoliberal governmentality. Although this interpretation of urban gardening is to a certain extent true, it does not completely explain some current developments in socio-spatial planning practices. In order to fill this gap, the article advances a theoretical analysis of the emerging governmentality generated by an intensified relationship between institutional, private and community actors. The theoretical analysis is complemented by the example of representative urban gardening projects in Ghent, a dynamic and inspiring mid-size city in Belgium, providing an ideal context for exploring the transformation of planning practices and their socio-political underpinnings. The article concludes that urban gardening practices exemplify an emerging informal mode of planning supported by a new transactive governmentality, which may lead to a co-creative transformation of public urban space.

Expanding the ‘dark side of planning’: Governmentality and biopolitics in urban garden planning:

This article analyses Bent Flyvbjerg’s ‘dark side of planning’ theory and proposes to increase its critical strength by including, together with ideas of rationality and power, two further theoretical tools: the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and biopolitics. The potentiality of this inclusion is exemplified by the analysis provided about the influence of 18th-century colonial governmentality on the real rationality of public garden planning in the modern liberal cities of most western European colonising countries. It aims to show that Flyvbjerg’s concept of ‘real rationality’ can be usefully regarded as the product of a broad interpretation of biopolitical technologies, including the disciplining of non-human further than human life, which makes it possible to control the ‘uncivilised’ instincts of society through public garden planning. This article aims to suggest, that by digging deep into the hidden rationality of planning, even in those cases in which only the progressive face of power is apparently involved, a dark side of planning is unavoidably present in the form of a disciplinary power.

Ecology, environmentalism and system theory

Purpose – To consider the links between ecology, environmentalism and system theory.Design/methodology/approach – The concept of system and its philosophical implications are examined in relation to ecology and environmentalism.Findings – That in human systems complexity is organised through forms of hierarchy, coevolution connected to the environment, emergency and information phenomena which transform disorder into order. Concludes that these traits have a deep impact on the system man – environment and offer opportunities for scientific research and social mobilisation to think and act in a broader context.Originality/value – Political near scientific thought as presented encourage a rethinking or concepts such as resposibility limit, diversity when the future of the earth is deemed to be threatened.

Standing-up Vineyards: The Political Relevance of Tuscan Wine Production:

This paper investigates the philosophical and political assumptions supporting the commonly held view of ‘place identity’, exemplarily represented by the Tuscany region in Italy and its wine. It focuses on the production process of one of the most expensive and highly rated Italian wines, the Brunello di Montalcino, produced in the southeast of Tuscany. The Brunello di Montalcino wine area in Tuscany has a leading role in Italian wine production, and it represents an enormously successful example of place authenticity protection, promoting high-quality standards of economic solidarity and a fulfilling sense of well-being. This paper puts into question the romantic and fascinating image of Tuscany by offering an alternative portrait of the material-semiotic networks constituting the specificity of this place. The case for the analysis is provided by the diplomatic impasse between Italy and the United States in 2008. Anomalies in the wine production process were detected by a massive use of technological control devices; this put in ‘danger’ the reputation of the Italian wine makers and overturned the tradition, local authenticity, and identity of Tuscan wines—and eventually the identity of the Tuscany region itself. In reconstructing the way in which Brunello di Montalcino wine materially shapes politics, economic relations, social behaviours, landscape, cultural production and international narratives, the paper analyses the related material-semiotic networks. These analyses show that local identity does not naturally grow out of the soil but is generated and preserved by a long retinue of global-based practices and connections. Brunello, a symbol of authentic Tuscany, only exists as Brunello and can be enjoyed as such through the mediation of a large apparatus of very specific scientific knowledge, laboratory practices and protocols, administrative procedures at different geographical scales, and certificates and licences. Paradoxically, we need the global to protect the local.

Nonextractive Policies as a Path to Environmental Justice? The Case of the Yasuní Park in Ecuador

In an era when the race for access to natural resources deeply affects social justice issues, the proposal to leave the oil in the Yasuni Park in Ecuador underground represents an innovative initiative. The Yasuni Park, a UNESCO world biosphere reserve in the Ecuadorian Amazonia, is a hotspot of biological and ethnic diversity whose reproduction capacities have been increasingly jeopardized in recent decades, particularly because of oil extraction activities. The Yasuni-ITT initiative proposes to leave over 846 million barrels of oil in the ground, not only to protect forest biodiversity, but also in order to foster innovative strategies of energy production and consumption, to face climate change, and to advance an alternative model to the carbon emissions market.

The Evaluation of Sustainability of Organic Farms in Tuscany

Sustainability evaluation with an updated version of MESMIS Framework has been conducted in 5 organic farms in Tuscany, characterised by different management approach. The real differences is, indeed, determined by motivations that explain how the landscape, the work structure and the cultural heritage are organized, giving the present assessment of the Tuscan rural world.

Crowdsourcing process for citizen-driven governance

The chapter explores the current evolution of smart city paradigm characterized by worldwide-raising, spontaneous and bottom-up socio-technological networks that produce non-planned forms of citizen empowerment in urban governance, via crowdsourcing processes. It focuses on the role of citizen-centred data-richness for unlocking the full potential of people empowerment, which is currently less explored than top-down governance processes. Building upon the mounting critique toward the technocratic paradigm of smart city and the evidence of progressive diffusion of ICTs in public life, the following pages analyse how crowdsourcing can contribute to the creation of smart cities not as the outcomes of top-down, governmental programs or the business strategy of major technology companies, but rather as the consequence of self-empowering practices performed by social actors with the aim of improving the organisation and functioning of the city. Particularly, the chapter suggests that socio-technological networks can use crowdsourcing to spontaneously generate unpredictable positive effects, i.e. can deploy and operationalize the full potential of community-based initiatives, emerging from the interactions between heterogeneous social actors.

Postenvironmentalism beyond Post-environmentalism

This chapter starts with the consideration that different post-environmentalist theories seem to be unable to provide an inspiring message for people engagement in environmental issues and introduces an alternative perspective based on the post-modern material-semiotic theory. This emerged from the seminal contribute of science sociologists and critical geographers which explored the constitutively heterogeneous characters of socio-environmental agents as both natural and cultural at once. From such a perspective, the chapter investigates how material semiotics can contribute to overcome existing interpretations of post-environmentalism, by challenging common understanding of the world ontology as well as mainstream epistemological perspective. The result suggests the need for a new gaze on existing forms of environmental commitment, which is here named as postenvironmentalism (without hyphen) through which the whole, multilayered, complex process of making and unmaking the world performed by hybrid assemblages is regarded as a political activity.