Aesthetic politics and community gardens in Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the complexities of aesthetic politics in urban geographies using the case of community gardens in Singapore. Drawing from qualitative research, our findings suggest that community gardeners in Singapore attend to aesthetics – in particular the order and beauty of production spaces – in response to expectations and pressures anchored to the realities of a manicured “green” cityscape. These pressures are enforced not only by the juridical and executive powers of governmental and institutional authorities, but also through the diffused power of the “aesthetic gaze” – a set of aesthetic expectations that emanate from multiple actors across hierarchies to discipline community gardeners. However, rather than merely comply, community gardeners are aware of the impacts of aesthetic expectations on their everyday gardening and therefore are able to negotiate, and at times resist, these powers with varying degrees of agency and strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetic politics
• aesthetic governmentality
• urban agriculture
• community gardens
• Singapore

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Yale-NUS College for the grant it provided to support the research project. We would also like to thank the participants of the Yale-NUS CIPE Summer Research Programme, the 2019 Agrarian and Food Studies Workshop in Singapore, Prof. Jane Jacobs, our anonymous reviewers, and the editor who handled our paper for their helpful feedback. Finally, we express our sincerest gratitude to all our research participants, especially the community gardeners.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Pudup (2008) prefers the term “organized garden projects” due to complications with the term “community.” Community gardens are often conflated with urban agriculture, but here we treat the former as just one of several initiatives under the latter.

2. We refer readers to Horst et al.’s (2017) review of urban agriculture for a rich discussion of these tensions.

3. Although not exactly the same, Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible is associated with Foucault’s governmentality (May, 2008).

4. Directly related to green urbanism is green environmentality where the environment is rendered intelligible and governable via techniques of government, such as land surveying, mapping, and statistics (Rutherford, 2007). Pow (2018) coins the term eco-aesthetic governmentality to illustrate the combined power and effects of environmental and aesthetic governmentality. In this paper, we center our inquiry on aesthetic governmentality.

5. We do not have the exact numbers to show an increase in food production in community gardens in Singapore, but our field research suggests that many community gardens have just recently increased their edibles production. An NParks official also mentioned to us that there has been an increase in interest in edibles production among CIB gardens in the 2010s.

6. One residential community garden is located in a lower-income neighborhood with a few rental blocks – heavily subsidized public housing catered to the financially needy – in the immediate vicinity. A majority of the members of this garden tend to be the elderly who have limited financial resources. The other residential community garden is situated in a higher-income neighborhood. The two student-led gardens, on the other hand, are situated in institutions that generally educate middle- to upper-class students.

7. We discuss these competing discourses in another paper.

8. Much of what we discussed in this paper refers to the “visual” aspects of aesthetics. We do recognize that aesthetics can be multi-sensorial. Indeed, a few community gardeners mentioned aspects such as the smell of flowers and compost. However, we focused on the visual because that dominated much of the conversation on aesthetic politics in community gardens in Singapore.

9. In addition to social class, we also looked at difference along racial lines. However we did not find any revealing pattern with respect to race and aesthetic politics, although we do not discount possible connections. Perhaps a more comprensive research in this regard is needed.