Slippery pathways to socio-ecological utopias of community gardening: examples from Poland

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ABSTRACT Alongside being viewed as institutional tools of sustainability policies, community gardens are also seen as an inclusive democratic public sphere and places of socially valued manual labour. In this article, we apply Hannah Arendt’s distinction between different types of work to investigate how community gardening ideals are materialised and abandoned. By focusing on the processes of work that create, maintain and modify gardens, we borrow Arendt’s concepts and make a conceptual contribution to the debates on the community gardens’ sustainability potential. We also propose a processual concept of slippage to understand the mechanisms by which departures from ideals occur. Our empirical analysis, based on narratives and observations of work practices in 12 gardens across Poland, demonstrates how the processual approach we advance provides a way to better understand the obstacles to democratic sustainability transitions and think innovatively about overcoming them.