Urban gardening and the struggle for social and spatial justice

Abstract

It is increasingly clear that, alongside the spectacular forms of justice activism, the actually existing just city outcomes from different everyday practices of performative politics that produce transformative trajectories and alternative realities in response to particular injustices in situated contexts. The massive diffusion of urban gardening practices (including allotments, community gardens, guerrilla gardening and the multiple, inventive forms of gardening the city) deserve a special attention as experiential learning and in-becoming responses to spatial politics, able to articulate different forms of power and resistance to current state of unequal distribution of benefits and burdens in the urban space. While advancing their socio-environmental claims, urban gardeners makes evident that the physical disposition of living beings and non-living things can both determine and perpetuate injustices or create justice spaces. In so doing, urban gardeners question the inequality-biased structuring and functioning of social formations (most notably urban deprivation, lack of public decision and engagement, and marginalization processes); and conversely create (or allow the creation of) spaces of justice in contemporary cities. This book presents a selection of contributions investigating the possibility and capability of urban gardeners to effectively tackling with spatial injustice; and it offers the readers a sound theoretically-grounded reflections on the topic. Building upon on-the-field experiences in European cities, it presents a wide range of engaged scholarly researches that investigate whether, how and to what extend urban gardening is able to contrast inequalities and disparities in living conditions.