Urban agriculture in the making or gardening as epistemology

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the production of Prairie Urban Farm, an urban agricultural initiative in the Canadian city of Edmonton, Alberta. Motivated by our involvement in the initiative and guided by a broader interest in the evolving meaning and politics of urban agriculture, the paper presents Prairie Urban Farm as a negotiated and emergent social space. Rather than limit understandings of the initiative to official representations and discourses, the analysis draws on interviews with regular volunteers as well as personal reflections to emphasise everyday urban agriculture – those practices, understandings, and motivations often subsumed under official framings or tropes that together characterise the everyday, lived aspects of urban agriculture. The paper pursues tensions between Prairie Urban Farm understood as a sustainability and food security initiative and more ambivalent understandings. We ask, is Prairie Urban Farm, officially presented as an urban agriculture and food security project, not simply a community garden by another name? Obscuring these boundaries through a detailed ethnographic and qualitative analysis, we make an argument for finding value in urban agriculture beyond discursive tropes and in relation to the reflexive possibilities engendered within a view of gardening as epistemology.