Growing utopia – undoing risk through self-sufficiency and urban gardening?

Abstract

This paper analyses how the utopia of self-sufficiency functions as a response to risk and uncertainty. Recent decades have witnessed the proliferation of risk. Risk has become a way to understand and govern individual lives and society that reproduces existing inequalities whilst producing inequality due to its co-articulation with race, class and gender. Risk also distributes responsibility since every individual is made responsible for the management of the ever-increasing risks we face in modern society. In Sweden, the interest in gardening and cultivating vegetables has become more common, often motivated by ideals about self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency becomes a way of dealing with ecological risk and uncertainty. However, the narrative of self-sufficiency also upholds an imaginary of a different society and a different future, and thus has distinct utopian features. By looking at the growing trend of self-sufficiency through the lens of intersectional risk theory, this article analyses the doing and undoing of risk through narratives of self-sufficiency, and the ways that narratives of utopia can be a way of undoing risk.