Embodied connections: sustainability, food systems and community gardens

Abstract

Community gardens have been identified as providing a model for promoting sustainable urban living. They can also contribute to individual and community reconnection to the socio-cultural importance of food, thus helping facilitate broader engagement with the food system. Such processes may offer pathways to developing a deep engagement and long-term commitment to sustainable living practices predicated on the development of new forms of environmental or ecological citizenship. However, little attention has been paid to how this can be adequately harnessed. Based on an ethnographic study of community gardeners in the Australian Capital Territory, this article argues that fostering an embodied form of sustainability, which accounts for individual embodied engagement in these collective spaces, may play a critical role in achieving these outcomes.

Keywords:

• community gardens
• embodiment
• food systems
• urban sustainability