Cultivating an Alternative Subjectivity Beyond Neoliberalism: Community Gardens in Urban China

Abstract

In the literature, community gardens feature as contested spaces: They are radical spaces used by grassroots movements to claim the “right to the city,” organized garden projects attached to neoliberal strategies, or physical breeding grounds for neoliberal citizen-subjectivity. Long established in many Western contexts, community gardens were not evident in China until a group of scholar-activists in Shanghai initiated the practice in 2016. Drawing on two flagship community garden cases in that city, we investigate the emergence and development of community gardens and discuss the ways in which they instantiate neither a radical nor a neoliberal political vision. Our observations show that a nonprofit organization—rather than the local citizenry or municipal government—proactively advanced the production of community gardens and the discursive construction of community participation over time. The rationale underlying this practice arises from organizers’ framing of the community gardens as an “experiment of governance innovation” that dovetails with a broader reorientation of China’s urban renewal agenda from demolition and reconstruction toward a people-centered incremental urban regeneration characterized by mass mobilization and social participation. We argue, therefore, that the community garden phenomenon reifies an alternative subjectivity—one that emphasizes the increasing visibility of social organizations as a state “flanking mechanism” to achieve extraeconomic objectives in urban governance. We also advance a pluralist understanding of China’s urban governance beyond a growth-chasing logic to embrace the increasing complexity of the state ethos and societal instruments at play in and associated with this sphere.