‘Cultivating Integration’? Migrant Space-making in Urban Gardens

ABSTRACT

Organized cultural encounters manage difference, conduct, time and space. Yet, alternative social spaces emerge besides these scripts. This article explores migrant space-making in integration gardens, an urban gardening association in Copenhagen aiming to ‘dismantle social and cultural boundaries’. The space of the gardens is multilayered. Firstly, it operates as an integration grid – a homogenizing-organized cultural encounter evolving around a foreigner–Dane binary. However, the gardens also emerge as a web of gardening, centered around plants and gardening practices, breaching multiple (hi)stories, locations, relationships, and materialities. The article juxtaposes the spatiotemporal logics of the integration grid and the web of gardening, analyzing the possibilities for action and relating they afford. The analysis contributes to theorizations of organized cultural encounters by highlighting the embodied, affective human and non-human agencies in divergent space-making practices. Discussing these multidirectional spaces, the article links conceptualizations of agency, bodies, affectivity, time and space.

KEYWORDS:

• Organized cultural encounters
• space-making
• urban gardens
• migration
• affect
• assemblage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Linda Lapiņa’s research focuses on social minoritization and majoritization processes in everyday encounters, and the interplay between space, embodiment, affect and temporality. Her analyses trace emergence and workings of intersecting markers, with particular focus on race/whitess, class and gender, from a decolonial feminist perspective. She recently completed her PhD thesis titled ‘Making Senses of Nordvest: Tracing the Spaces, Bodies and Affects of a Gentrifying Neighborhood in Copenhagen’. The thesis develops an affective, embodied methodology and discusses affective ecologies in feminist knowledge production.

Notes

1 I evoke integration as an empirical notion, as it is enacted in the gardens.

2 I am not including references out of concern for the anonymity of the association and the previous chairperson. For the same reason, informant names and some biographical details in the article have been changed.

3 I also spoke to members ‘born in Denmark’, but seldom refer to these conversations in this paper, as I focus on migrant experiences and agencies in space-making.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Det Frie Forskningsråd [grant number 1319-00042B].