Search Results

In the midst of an IT boom, middle class individuals in Bengaluru [Bangalore], India are “putting the garden back” by growing fruits and vegetables on their private terraces for home consumption. This paper considers the motivations for cultivating home gardens among Bengaluru’s organic terrace gardening community, demonstrating, along with other chapters in this volume, an effort to cultivate "life" in the midst of an ongoing "death" of urban ecologies. Terrace gardeners use memories of Bengaluru’s verdant past to condemn its present, and describe their cultivation activities as a response to worsening health and environmental conditions in the city. However, class and caste inequalities affect OTGians’ abilities to engage with a broader community of urban food producers. These inequalities limit the transformative potential of organic terrace gardening as an intervention into decaying urban bodies and ecologies.

This concluding chapter briefly reviews the different, sometime diametric, ways in which the literature conceptualizes urban gardening. It brings together enthusiastic approaches that understand urban gardening for its transformative potential to materialise new ideas of cooperation-based relations and sustainable urbanism, and critical approaches that analyse it as another form of greenwash and as another strategy of neoliberal development. The chapter then discusses how the different chapters in the book have come to terms with this gap of understanding urban gardening and the resolutions and new directions for understanding they offer. The chapter concludes with outlining the main contribution of the book to current and future understanding of urban gardening.

This chapter offers a case study counter-history rooted in the “Rust Belt” city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This counter-history is meant to both complement and challenge versions of the past that inform mainstream contemporary creative placemaking. By recognizing these parallel histories in a place few observers examine, it is our hope that we can offer a new wellspring of ideas for placemaking efforts. Far from the sources of the so-called creative economy, we see an urban history that sets the contours for a new approach to creative placemaking. Focusing on Milwaukee allows us to see how history informs placemaking in ways that many contemporary practitioners and observers have yet to fully realize. At the same time, it highlights a history that is often overlooked, shed in favor of a “post-industrial” urban order. Counter to contemporary neoliberal arguments, that is not the only choice. In this chapter, all of these issues will coalesce around the budding field of urban agriculture, in which Milwaukee has emerged as a hub with global influence. To its practitioners, urban agriculture is more than about growing food, it is about growing community and new forms of urban redevelopment. It is also about creating and navigating new relationships.

New forms of urban gardening are gaining a momentum in cities transforming the conventional use and functions of open green and public space. They often take place through informal and temporary (re)use of vacant land consisting part of greening strategies or social inclusion policy through new modes of land use management, green space governance and collaborative practices. Particular emphasis is placed on shifted meanings of the notion of open public space by referring to its openness to a diversity of uses and users that claim it and relates to the questions of access rights, power relations among actors, negotiations and the so called right to use and re-appropriate land. By using examples drawn from the Greek and Swiss case, this chapter underlines differences and similarities in urban gardening practices, social and institutional contexts, collaborative governance patterns, motivations, levels of institutionalisation, openness and inclusiveness of space. More specifically it calls attention to the critical role of the temporary nature of these initiatives in relation to their multifunctional, spatial and socio-political aspects that affect new configurations of urban green areas and public space as well as related planning practices.

The increasing number of metropolitan areas worldwide suggests to more in-depth investigate metropolitan neighbourhoods in order to explain the complex social dynamics emerging in these new contexts. As a matter of fact, the majority of the existing studies on spatial justice provided analyses and investigations focused on metropolitan settings. However, the issue of spatial justice also involves smaller urban areas and further research is needed in that sense. Our investigation analyses a case study of urban gardening that has been developed with the aim of valorising the central neighbourhood of an Italian mid-size city through proposing participatory planning interventions and requalification of urban sites. The urban gardening initiative has included several actors within the process of implementation. The investigated group of people potentially subjected to the spatial injustice is formed by the residents and the local retailers. A comparison between different stakeholders’ perspectives is provided in order to measure the positive and negative impacts of the initiative on the local community.

This chapter discusses grassroots gardening and farming projects in children’s books authored by DyAnne DiSalvo-Ryan, Sarah Stewart, Rebecca Elliott and Jacqueline Briggs Martin. The chapter focuses on micro-scale projects that couple the pastoral ideal with the idiom of citizenship, weaving together the community and the nation. Drawing insights from American studies, urban studies, and citizenship studies, the chapter explores the ways in which children’s narratives developed around the theme of neighborhood beautification and growing food to rejuvenate communities, enhance social capital, and, above all, revive the idea of the city as an intergenerational polity of citizens.