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The nature of urban gardens: toward a political ecology of urban agriculture

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Abstract

With a few notable exceptions, urban garden scholarship tends to be either celebratory or critical of the role urban gardens play in wider political, social, cultural, economic and ecological dynamics. Drawing on urban political ecology scholarship, this article explores the question of nature within scholarship on urban gardens. I argue that failing to adequately scrutinize the co-constitutive character of nature and society has led some scholars to overlook the potential for urban gardens to achieve broader socio-political goals, and led others to overstate the potential. Employing a political ecology approach to urban garden analysis clarifies the material and discursive role of nature in urban garden practice, and ultimately contributes to untangling the potential and limits of urban gardens as sites of socio-political change.

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Notes

  1. For the past two summers, I have tended a 140 square foot garden in the front yard of my apartment in Toronto, Ontario. I have previously grown vegetables in Windsor, Ontario and Calgary, Alberta in urban garden projects I helped launch in each city.

  2. As one anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out, questions of urban gardens and alternative urban food politics are inevitably intertwined with the multiple and competing claims to urban space, and thus linked to themes of food access, inequality and marginalization. I agree wholeheartedly but leave a more thorough treatment of this question of space to subsequent work and authors. For a stellar review of ‘food politics’ see Levkoe (2011).

  3. For some early work documenting the agency of non-human actors, see Wolch and Emel (1995, 1998), Philo and Wolch (1998), Wolch (2002).

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Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Dr. Gerda Wekerle for providing feedback on an earlier version of this article. My deep gratitude also goes to Dr. Harvey James and four anonymous reviewers for their insightful, constructive and helpful comments. Any shortcomings of the piece remain mine alone.

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  1. Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 4700 Keele St, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Michael Classens

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Classens, M. The nature of urban gardens: toward a political ecology of urban agriculture. Agric Hum Values 32, 229–239 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9540-4

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