Cultivating commoner subjectivities and transforming agency in commoned urban gardens

Abstract

Commoning as a mechanism for transforming agency and subjectivities is relevant in a contemporary urban context structured by neoliberal capitalist relations that work to alienate people, suppress agency and enclose spaces. Despite wide agreement that commoning practices mediate subject formation and agential change, little has been written on the epistemological and ontological grounds for understanding how commoning practices achieve this. Grounded in the social realist theory put forward by Archer (2000), which suggests understanding transformations linked to agency and subjectivity as outcomes of the dialectical relation between agency and structure, mediated by practice in space and over time, this paper analyses the burgeoning practice of urban gardening in common in the City of Stockholm, Sweden, with respect to its potential to transform agency and subjectivity. I find that (i) conditioned by structural context, gardeners assume a variety of (contradictory) subjectivities (the commoner, the white encloser, the unpaid public manager and hobby gardener), and (ii) that through the collective nature of the gardens, roles are created and a corporate agency emerges, which (iii) allows some gardeners to become social actors whereby they can live out their personal identities and change the structural context for others.