Everyday (in)justices and ordinary environmentalisms: community gardening in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed increased academic interest in the relations between poverty, environment and place. Studies of poverty in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods have pointed to the contribution of despoiled local environments to social exclusion. Work in urban political ecology has highlighted the socio-environmental hybridity of injustices in the city, bringing a political dimension to debates on urban sustainability, while research on environmental justice has directed critical attention towards the local and everyday (urban) contexts of socio-ecological forms of injustice. This paper explores the everyday spaces and mundane forms of (in)justice through a case study of community gardening in cities. Drawing on materials derived from a recent study of 18 community gardening projects in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods in the UK, this paper highlights how these projects are using ordinary forms of environmentalism to produce new socio-ecological spaces of justice within the city.

Keywords:

• environmental justice
• community gardening
• ordinary environmentalisms
• everyday spaces
• urban
• UK

Notes

It should be noted, though, that the distinction between allotment and community gardening is becoming less clear.

Environmental organisations, such as Groundwork Trust, are also working with local groups in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods to create and improve public green spaces.

These methods included observations at project meetings and in the gardens, participant observation through volunteer gardening, and the use of digital still image and video cameras by the researchers and participants.

I am grateful to Wendy Ball and Richard Carter-White for their involvement in this fieldwork.

Guerrilla gardening represents a more immediate, individualised and aesthetic form of public gardening that is largely concerned with “beautifying empty space” and pays little regard to the ownership of the land (Reynolds 2008; see also Tracey 2007).