Urban commoning counters the passive consumption of the neoliberal public realm by engaging communities in productive cultivation and maintenance of collective resources. Community gardening is just one manifestation, but one that offers a focal point for a wider debate about the nature of the public, and challenges and conflicts inherent in the common. Do communal spaces complement or fundamentally resist the classic idea of the civic public realm as a ‘world of strangers’ (Lofland 1985)? What is particular about the ecologies that allow commoning to happen? What are the tensions between openness and access, the intimacy of community, but also conflicts that arise within collective management? And what can we learn by listening in to the role of voice, communication and atmosphere in these questions? The seminar was co-hosted by gardener and organiser Carole Wright in a community garden in Blackfriars Estate, London, and the afternoon walk explored the diverse manifestations of community gardening in the immediate surroundings.
At the opening of the seminar, a question was raised about the importance now of conversations around community gardening, which has been so thoroughly studied, practised and argued for. The conversation through the day – touching on issues of racialised inequalities in access to community gardens, in class tensions within them, the role of policing and both public and private money, and the potential to have agency in all these issues – showed that they can work as a distillation and critique of important current tendencies within the wider urban public realm.
To frame the conversations, I offered a set of practical considerations about community gardens and their relationship to their surroundings. It is on these material and organisation details, I would argue, that we can base a grounded conversation about the politics they enact.
<aside> 🚧 Boundaries Given most gardens are fenced off, do they allow the space to be visible or not? Are the gates open or locked, and at what times? Who holds the keys? How is the transition from the public into the communal staged? Is access predicated on belonging to a certain community (ie. being a resident of the housing complex a garden is located on) or on joining an organisation?
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<aside> 🧩 Communality Is everyone acting upon the same ground or are there subdivisions within the garden? Is there a singular identity or banner to gather around, or are there multiple groups? What are the mechanisms for creating social connection between users? How does communication and decision-making take place, through what media or forms of organisation?
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<aside> 🌽 Resources Is the garden focused on producing space or producing resources? What gaps in provision of access to resources are being filled? Are plants grown as a means to produce conditions and actions beyond themselves (gardening as social service), or for their own utility (gardening as agriculture)? What are the systems for distributing the resources and the role of money? Are resources available to anyone, or only those involved in the act of commoning?
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Cecily Chua presented her volunteer work at the Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers and Refugees as a practical example of some of these questions. As well as providing advice and support for immigration, housing benefits, education and so on, the centre facilitates gardening as part of health and wellbeing for clients referred for therapeutic reasons such as PTSD. The two spaces they operate – an allotment and a garden – are implicitly framed as commons in that the community of clients using them have both ownership and responsibility for maintenance, with volunteers there as facilitators, rather than as being ‘provided’.
Discussing the vegetable garden, which is a plot within a larger set of allotments, Chua mentioned some of the benefits and tensions. The diversity of backgrounds of the group of 10-12 clients who drop into the garden, often bringing seeds and cuttings, means an unexpected range of food plants are grown, some of which uncommon in the UK – tarot, ginger, bitter gourd, physalis, purslane. This allows seeds to be banked, leaving a long term trace of those who have passed through and made their mark.
Though the vegetable garden is in no way open to the public, there is an interface with other allotment plot holders. As allotments have closed external boundaries, those within them feel a degree of entitlement to communicate with and ask favours of clients or comment on the use of the space, for example that it was ‘not productive’ enough during the pandemic. This kind of micro-public, where the community of clients is also implicated in the concerns of a wider but looser community that is not initiated into the atmosphere of care within the day centre, brings tension.
Chua also talked about collective activities in the gardens – ‘sketchy and DIY’ building projects using scrap and donations to construct a shared pizza oven, pond, shed, or nature shelter. The construction process is very slow, communication-heavy, consensual – the pizza oven took 6 months for example. But this slowness, mediation and experimentation is part of the aim of building together as a way to help people develop voice and agency.
“Everyone has very different ideas of how things should be done… The cooking days are really exciting, and really stressful. There’s the fire element. You’re having to mediate people’s different desires about what should go in, when it should go in, who goes first.”
She described how it is always possible to include food from the garden when someone cooks, but it varies as to what. “The main aim is not growing loads of food, but that everyone is included, has autonomy, and feels part of it”. In this sense, whilst the aim is to grow resources, it is less for the resources and any value in distributing them, than the psycho-social value they can have in enabling communication and empowerment.
Borbála Soós proposed to expand the conversation to think about how commoning continues to intersect with conditions of wildness that go beyond what has been constructed by humans. Air, uncultivated land, all that which lies outside of imperial structures, city walls, dominant systems – all these can be thought of as ‘wild commons’. Thinking this way requires a physical and metaphorical reclaiming of the ‘wild’ from a colonial lexicon, that has positioned it as everything that is ‘other’ or ‘subject to’ Western capitalist extraction.
For Soós, then, the wild and the common are inherently connected. Wildness has been constructed in Western societies as a pure nature without a trace of the human, but as Malcolm Ferdinand argues, pre colonial inhabitation of the wild is more contingent, with a use and stewardship that protects ecologies but does not ‘look like’ wilderness (Ferdinand 2019). Commoning, in its mediaeval definition, is traditionally a careful use and maintenance of uncultivated spaces where naturally-growing resources can be collected and used. Thinking of the wild now as a place of agitation, unrest, and the creative imagining of new forms of social ecology, rather than a place to be ‘conquered’, how can we continue to common the wilds?
If nature and the wild are socially constructed, the social model of disability applies, in which disability is seen to be produced by malfunctioning environments rather than malfunctioning bodies. “It can be questioned how the borders between natural and unnatural are maintained, and for whose benefit.” Power dynamics as to who is seen to ‘belong’ in this pristine wild can be seen in linguistic associations (queer = toxic; immigrant = invasive; mobility aids are artificial and cut off from nature). So commoning is also about claiming presence in the wild through alternative forms of social and cultural production within nature.
The discussion started with a focus on food as a central focus that allows us to imagine how commoning works. Commoning is a way to have access to means of production of some of the conditions of one’s own life, not always being subject to fixed and pre-defined environments. Cecily Chua added that many of the clients cultivating the garden come from agricultural backgrounds and while all else in their lives may be unstable, food is a powerful link back to home and the sense of agency that comes with it. So what is the line between agriculture and gardening, between infrastructural food production that underpins human life, versus the process of gardening as a kind of cultural or spiritual nourishment? Marco Veneri, linking to his presentation in the Green Infrastructures seminar, suggested that the interesting thing is connecting these scales, for example by using food hubs to bring different scales of production together to offer access to better food.
Questions of ownership were raised. Urban commoning mostly happens on privately-owned land like the Blackfriars Estate the seminar was located on, owned by Peabody housing association. Commoning is often a form of access to and use private land, creating a kind of ‘third’ condition between public and private but not an alternative ownership model in most cases. Commons-like approaches or aesthetics are beginning to be used in small corners of public parks, though, especially in Paris where most new green spaces include a fenced-off ‘community garden’ where, unlike the public parts of the park, users can cultivate vegetables and other plants. Tenancy and ownership of surrounding housing also play a role. Carole Wright mentioned that it would be difficult to set up a garden on an estate subject to the ‘right to buy’ policy (allowing flats to be become privately owned and often rental properties) because of the fast turnover of residents. A stable community and people that have time are key conditions for developing durable commoning.
Shared garden within a new public park in the north of Paris