Planning for Vita Activa—Labor, Work, and Action in a Communal Urban Gardening Project in Vienna

Rita Mayrhofer

doi:10.3390/su13179864

Abstract

Today, communal urban gardening (CUG) is a widespread phenomenon in European cities. Gardening has many positive qualities, ranging from growing healthy food to meaningful everyday life activities and political action. However, its integration into existing urban planning processes remains a challenge. Planning has a great influence on the qualities that can actually be realized by the gardeners. In order to develop a more appropriate planning process for CUG, a deeper understanding of the different activities that people engage in when they are gardening in an urban environment under given conditions is needed. In this paper, a garden project from Vienna is discussed against the background of Arendt’s theory of political action to advance the theoretical debates on the planning of CUGs. The case study shows that the three central spaces of a vita activa can emerge in one place if the appropriate framework conditions are provided through planning: containment, sovereign rights of use, egalitarian participation, plurality, and spatial organization towards the three activities of a vita activa: labor, work, and action.

Highlights

Since communal urban gardening (CUG) has unfolded its diverse, including political, potential especially in times of crisis, I explore here the extent to which CUG supports a vita activa and can, be a space for political action in the Arendtian sense, the spatiality associated with it and the extent to which Arendt’s political theory of action can support spatial theories and planning concepts like Innenhaus and Außenhaus, which is used in German-speaking countries
Parallel to the rise of the Social, in modernity the built form has lost its mediating capacity to distinguish private from public [40]. Preserving this difference is a central aspect of the planning approach that was applied in the case study and tested for its relevance to a vita activa
This paper was about how CUG can transform monofunctional green spaces of a social sphere into spaces for a vita activa, where people are active next to and for each other, and with each other

Summary

Introduction

Community gardening has repeatedly contributed to solving urgent problems in the past. Since communal urban gardening (CUG) has unfolded its diverse, including political, potential especially in times of crisis, I explore here the extent to which CUG supports a vita activa and can, be a space for political action in the Arendtian sense, the spatiality associated with it and the extent to which Arendt’s political theory of action can support spatial theories and planning concepts like Innenhaus and Außenhaus, which is used in German-speaking countries. Parallel to the rise of the Social, in modernity the built form has lost its mediating capacity to distinguish private from public [40] Preserving this difference is a central aspect of the planning approach that was applied in the case study and tested for its relevance to a vita activa

Vita Activa in the Innenhaus and Außenhaus Planning Concept

The Threefold Spatiality of Vita Activa

The Subsistence-Productive Space

The Co-Present Space

The Transformative Character of the CUG as Vita Activa

Re-Politicization by Gardening

Conclusions