The Practice of Collective Escape

Abstract

Escape is an enticing idea in contemporary cities, faced with among other things increasing inequalities and segregation, neoliberal governance, COVID-19 and the encroaching effects of climate change. Community growing projects offer a localized intervention in this landscape, a humble and hopeful attempt to provide a haven in an otherwise hectic and stressful cityscape, offering an escape into a different rhythm within city life. They can offer a reimagination of everyday urban life through practices of being communal and inclusive, and through challenging relations to urban land. In the contemporary climate of suspicion around immigration and difference in the UK, community has the potential to become a nostalgic throwback, but it also presents a horizon of renewal. But spaces of escape have an ambiguous politics, especially around who gets to escape, and what any escape means in relation to wider patterns of urban injustice. What is the balance of communal safety and care against social exclusion, upon which retreat is so often predicated? Drawing on ethnographic research in communal growing projects in Glasgow, this book explores the rhythms, politics and dynamics of community, asking who benefits from escape and how it actualizes a vision of a more just city. With the increased political salience of community in rhetoric around localism and community empowerment, this is a timely consideration of the tensions and consequences of urban communality, exploring the interconnections of community, justice and inclusion, DIY urbanism, and the politics of everyday life.