Gardening on rooftops, balconies, and terraces is a popular trend. After thirty-five years of experience, Susan Brownmiller writes with honesty and humor about her oasis twenty floors above a ...Manhattan street.She reports the catastrophes: losing daytime access during building-wide renovations; assaults from a mockingbird during his mating season. And the joys: a peach tree fruited for fifteen years; the windswept birches lasted for twenty-five. Butterflies and bees pay annual visits. She pampers a buddleia, a honeysuckle, roses, hydrangeas, and more. Her adventures celebrate the tenacity of nature, inviting readers to marvel at her garden's resilience, and her own.Enhanced by over thirty color photographs, this passionate account of green life in a gritty, urban environment will appeal to readers and gardeners wherever they dwell.
While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of ...food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify ‘the urban’.
Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote –among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption.
The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city.
1. Politics and the contested terrain of urban gardening in the neoliberal city Chiara Certomà and Chiara Tornaghi 2. Everyday (in)justices and ordinary environmentalisms: community gardening in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods Paul Milbourne 3. A practice-based approach to political gardening. Materiality, performativity and post-environmentalism Chiara Certomà 4. Cultivating food as a right to the city Mark Purcell and Shannon K. Tyman 5. Public-access community gardens: A new form of urban commons? Imagining new socio-ecological futures in an urban gardening project in Cologne, Germany Alexander Follmann and Valérie Viehoff 6. Challenging Property Relations and Access to Land for Urban Food Production Gerda R. Wekerle and Michael Classens 7. UK allotments and urban food initiatives: (limited?) potential for reducing inequalities Wendy M. Miller 8. Contesting the politics of place: Urban gardening in Dublin and Belfast Mary P. Corcoran and Patricia Healy Kettle 9. Exploring guerrilla gardening: gauging public views on the grassroots activity Michael Hardman, Peter J. Larkham and David Adams 10. The making of a strategizing platform: from politicising the food movement in urban contexts to political urban agroecology Barbara Van Dyck, Chiara Tornaghi, Severin Halder, Ella von der Haide, Emma Saunders 11. Contesting neoliberal urbanism in Glasgow’s community gardens: the practice of DIY citizenship John Crossan, Andrew Cumbers, Robert McMaster and Deirdre Shaw 12. Political gardening, equity and justice: a research agenda Chiara Tornaghi and Chiara Certomà
Chiara Tornaghi is Research Fellow in Urban Food Sovereignty and Resilience at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), Coventry University, UK, and Chair of the AESOP Sustainable Food Planning group
Chiara Certomà is Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Development (CDO), Ghent University and affiliate Researcher at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa
With its control of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and tea, cotton, and indigo production in India, Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dominated the global economy of tropical ...agriculture. InColonizing Nature, Beth Fowkes Tobin shows how dominion over "the tropics" as both a region and an idea became central to the way in which Britons imagined their role in the world.
Tobin examines georgic poetry, landscape portraiture, natural history writing, and botanical prints produced by Britons in the Caribbean, the South Pacific, and India to uncover how each played a crucial role in developing the belief that the tropics were simultaneously paradisiacal and in need of British intervention and management. Her study examines how slave garden portraits denied the horticultural expertise of the slaves, how the East India Company hired such artists as William Hodges to paint and thereby Anglicize the landscape and gardens of British-controlled India, and how writers from Captain James Cook to Sir James E. Smith depicted tropical lands and plants.
Just as mastery of tropical nature, and especially its potential for agricultural productivity, became key concepts in the formation of British imperial identity,Colonizing Naturesuggests that intellectual and visual mastery of the tropics-through the creation of art and literature-accompanied material appropriations of land, labor, and natural resources. Tobin convincingly argues that the depictions of tropical plants, gardens, and landscapes that circulated in the British imagination provide a key to understanding the forces that shaped the British Empire.
This book offers advice to guide you in the all-important "when-to" such as when to prune shrubs, when to fertilize lawns -- and when to plant annuals and perennials. Author Beth Botts shares her ...years of hand-on experience to answer your questions. Beth's advice covers not only the when-to but also the how-to (a part that's missing from other garden books.
The cross-cultural exchange of ideas that flourished in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries profoundly affected European and Islamic society. Gardens of Renaissance ...Europe and the Islamic Empires considers the role and place of gardens and landscapes in the broader context of the information sharing that took place among Europeans and Islamic empires in Turkey, Persia, and India.
In illustrating commonalities in the design, development, and people’s perceptions of gardens and nature in both regions, this volume substantiates important parallels in the revolutionary advancements in landscape architecture that took place during the era. The contributors explain how the exchange of gardeners as well as horticultural and irrigation techniques influenced design traditions in the two cultures; examine concurrent shifts in garden and urban landscape design, such as the move toward more public functionality; and explore the mutually influential effects of politics, economics, and culture on composed outdoor space. In doing so, they shed light on the complexity of cultures and politics during the Renaissance.
A thoughtfully composed look at the effects of cross-cultural exchange on garden design during a pivotal time in world history, this thought-provoking book points to new areas in inquiry about the influences, confluences, and connections between European and Islamic garden traditions.
In addition to the editor, the contributors include Cristina Castel-Branco, Paula Henderson, Simone M. Kaiser, Ebba Koch, Christopher Pastore, Laurent Paya, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Jill Sinclair, and Anatole Tchikine.
This paper explores the concept of prosumption in the world of food. Prosumption is a combination of production and consumption: food prosumers are people who actively produce food for ...self‐consumption. Besides reflecting on sociological conceptualisations of prosumption, this exploratory study uses an online survey (N = 835) and semi‐structured interviews (N = 12) to examine prosumption empirically. Respondents, living in Almere, the Netherlands, have mostly personal and pragmatic reasons, such as the enjoyment of gardening and the pleasure of producing food, to engage in some form of prosumption. Respondents are hardly motivated by profound concerns about sustainability or a wish to create a ‘radical’ alternative food system. We argue, therefore, that a more pragmatic approach to the concept of prosumption in the field of food is more appropriate than sociological interpretations linking prosumption to such grand themes as power, capitalism and activism.
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