Urban gardening as a risk-reduction strategy – an intersectional analysis of top-down gardening initiatives

Abstract

In cities around the world, urban gardening is increasingly used as a municipal strategy to tackle both environmental and social risks. In this study we draw on critical and intersectional studies of risk to analyse municipalities’ framing of urban gardening as a way to illuminate how it is entangled with contemporary structures of power. The material consists of strategy documents and information on the municipalities’ websites, and the texts were analysed using critical discourse analysis, which enabled us to integrate a sociocultural, an intersectional and an ecopolitical theoretical approach to risk. We identified two discourses: an eco(no)logical risk discourse where ecological risks were addressed within a capitalist market logic, and a social risk discourse, where focus was on gardening as work training and integration. We found that within these discourses, several gardening subjects appeared, and these could be positioned as either capable of solving and/or mitigating risks, or as at risk and in need of intervention. The results show how the top-down initiating of urban gardens display contemporary inequalities in urban spaces, which are crucial to identify in order to create city spaces that are safe, inclusive and enjoyable for all citizens.

Keywords:

• Urban gardening
• intersectionality
• risk
• cDA
• biopolitics

Introduction

In the past 15 years, interest in urban gardening has increased due to its potential to contribute to sustainable urban development from economic, ecological and social perspectives (Lang 2014). In most Western countries, a growing number of administrations are trying to develop a policy on urban gardening (or urban agriculture, as it is sometimes also referred to), which includes all practices related to the growing of food within and near cities; from inner city allotments and community gardens to peri-urban off-ground cultivation. While early urban gardening mostly referred to allotment gardens, recent developments concern a wider spectrum of collaborative and organized initiatives, including both public and private actors (Nikolaidou et al. 2016). In Sweden and many other European countries, urban gardening emerged as citizen-led initiatives during the 1800–1900s urbanisation era (Björklund 2010), and has since then continued to be organised predominantly as community-based activities. However, in recent years, urban gardening has increasingly been appropriated and used by municipality officials and city planners as a risk-reducing strategy and as a means to stimulate economic growth. As a result, cities around the world are looking to integrate urban gardening into policies to strategically address risks such as food insecurity and climate change, while simultaneously acknowledging the potential of urban gardening in regard to creating attractive, vibrant and sustainable cities (Eizenberg and Fenster 2015; Ernwein 2017; McKay 2011). While urban gardening may have the potential to reduce immanent risks and simultaneously challenge norms on large-scale food production, the integration of urban gardening into public strategies may also be read as a form of governance that has an ideal citizen in mind (Tornaghi and Certomà 2019).

In the past, urban gardening was very much connected to the post-war economic crisis and social unrest aimed at complementing national food production. Periods of economic wealth changed the priorities and the land for public allotments gardens were reduced and, as Ernwein (2017, 5) noticed, was turned into ‘non-desirable relics of the past’. In some cases, they were considered to be carrying a socialist heritage based on the idea that everyone should have the opportunity to grow their own potato. Although urban gardening is today often presented as an innovative way of tackling contemporary risks, its history matters for how it is understood and reinvented. In Sweden, gardening emerged in the outskirts of city areas during the urbanisation era, but was used in schools (school gardens) and included in children’s education already in the 1800 century (Björklund 2010). Learning about nature and humans’ place in it can in fact be seen as an important part of the building of the Swedish welfare state. The role that nature and gardening have had in Swedish education shows how (the mastering of) nature has been used to discipline and construct good, competent and healthy citizens. Engaging with nature has also lead to the categorisation of people, with Carl von Linné’s (1707–1778) work on naming and categorising plants, animals and humans as the most prominent example. Linné’s categorisation contributed both to an understanding of humans as imbedded in and dependent on nature and to the racist, patriarchal positioning of the European (white) male at the top of the pyramid, that still haunts our understandings of human and nature (see for example Schiebinger 2004 for a more detailed discussion).

When municipalities now, once again, start to promote urban gardening, it is possible to say that it is done as a form of mitigating strategy to contemporary risks with nostalgic references to the past, but also reframed by contemporary city planning. Many municipalities use gardening as a strategy to meet economic, social and ecological risks (Lang 2014). As researchers in the field of critical and intersectional studies of risk, we find it important to analyse municipalities’ framing of urban gardening as a way to illuminate how it is entangled with contemporary structures of power. In this study, we explore risk discourses in four Swedish municipalities’ websites and strategy documents, with a focus on how these discourses can be understood from an intersectional viewpoint and with regard to ecopolitics.

Before presenting the results from our analysis, we will describe the research background, the theoretical and methodological approaches that this study relies on, and how the material was sampled and processed. We end by discussing how the risk discourses that were identified differ and overlap and how they in different ways contribute to the governing of the municipalities’ inhabitants.

Research background

As mentioned in the introductory section, urban gardening is not a new phenomenon, but in recent years, there has been an increase in municipal interest in urban gardening, and during the twentieth century, local municipalities in Sweden (as elsewhere) have started to develop urban gardening policies (Nikolaidou et al. 2016). Previous critical studies of the ways in which municipalities promote urban gardening have highlighted how urban gardening often becomes connected to the implementation of a market-based and entrepreneurial approach to public space production (Perkins 2010). Further, there is an underlaying class politics within their agendas where gardening is used to create hegemonic sociocultures, dominated by middle-class imaginaries of what the city space should be (Domene and Saurí 2007). This risks leading to reproductions of socio-spatial inequalities, either through the unequal spatial distribution of community gardens that reinforces already attractive, upper-middle-class neighbourhoods (Eizenberg and Fenster 2015, Ghose and Pettygrove 2014), or a co-optation of grassroots motives within the framework of neoliberalisation, producing neoliberal subjectivities (Barron 2017; Ernwein 2014, 2017). However, although top-down implementation of urban gardening may have these implications, it is also seen to have a community building and integration potential (Aptekar 2015; Karge 2018) and serves as a place-making strategy (McClintock 2018; Purcell and Tyman 2015; White 2011). Urban gardening has further been promoted as having environmental benefits such as decreased carbon dioxide emissions (Koroļova and Treija 2018; Nogeire-McRae et al. 2018; Weidner, Yang, and Hamm 2019) and the potential to secure risks of food shortages (Barthel, Parker, and Ernstson 2015).

Continuing this critical line of research into urban gardening as a contemporary governing practice and resistance strategy, urban gardening and public community gardens have always had political and ideological connotations with political implications connecting environmental, economic and social processes, as well as processes of identity formation (Certoma and Tornaghi 2018). Previous studies have shown how gardening in cities have been used as a way for citizens to reappropriate urban spaces, and increase the spatial justice in cities (Barron 2017; Eizenberg 2012; Stehlin and Tarr 2017). Thus, while the urban gardening movement started as a way to secure food supply, it soon emerged to integrate both governance and resistance on several levels.

From what these studies collectively prove, gardening has different connotations when performed in the city compared to when performed in the countryside– this includes both the social benefits associated with gardening, and the ways it is used as governance. Harvey (1985, 1987) has drawn attention to the urbanisation of nature and the links between urbanism and the commodification of nature in contemporary anthropocene governance. The commodification of nature, which urban gardening is a contemporary example of, has colonial and gendered connotations, as the management of nature tends to ignore the realities and lives of indigenous populations, and valorizes production over reproduction (Elmhirst 2011; Mollett and Faria 2013; Moore, Kosek, and Pandian 2003). Further, gardening sites are places where gender relations are played out, for example through the organization of heavy work, repetitious work and representation in community boards that often follow gendered stereotypes (Parry, Glover, and Shinew 2005). Gardens are also places where class and ethnic divisions may be at work, as different social groups put different meaning into gardening – for example in regard to if the garden predominantly serves as a space for food production, or rather has an aesthetic value (Aptekar 2015). Thus, both the organization of urban gardening, and gardening as a practice, is to be seen as permeated by power structures.

Reading urban gardening discourses – theory, methods and material

Looking to explore how gardening is articulated in contemporary public documents in Sweden, we turned to four Swedish municipalities’ online information texts and strategy documents for urban gardening. The selected municipalities are similar in size, but they also have important differences in terms of geographical location (i.e. climate zones¹), population density and dynamics in the interplay between the local government and grassroots movements. Two of the municipalities are known for having well-developed urban gardening strategies and a large proportion of the population engaged in urban gardening. The other two have developed gardening strategies and have intentions to increase urban gardening in their municipalities. The municipalities all have both agricultural and urban areas, yet none of them have a big-city area. Together, the material amounts to some 90–100 relevant pages of text. This includes strategy documents specifically developed about urban gardening, extracts from documents that mention urban gardening and refer to the strategy of urban gardening, and documents that are referred to in the strategy for urban gardening. The documents that either refer to or are referred by the urban gardening strategies include a diverse set of documents, such as; pollution strategies, work training programmes and growth strategies.

As we believe that the municipalities’ texts on urban gardening bear witness to contemporary discourses that operate within the framing of urban gardening, it is the discourses themselves, rather than the documents and specific municipality statements, that are the principal subjects of analysis here. For this reason, the material is read as a whole; the various texts are assembled and approached as a single document in which different discourses can be expected to be found. The differences between municipality statements are therefore of lesser significance and can instead be treated as expressions of discourse (Fairclough 1995; Meyer 2001).

To analyse the documents, we have used Norman Fairclough’s (2013) critical discourse analysis (CDA), together with intersectional risk theory (Giritli Nygren, Öhman, and Olofsson 2020) in order to explore how these discourses, intersect with power structures and ideology. As a methodology, CDA works well with intersectional risk analysis, since it draws attention to the fact that the role of policy is not to ‘fix’ an existing ‘problem’ – policies are rather to be seen as a part of the ‘doing’ of social reality. This combination also opens for an analysis that reaches beyond Anthropocentric understandings of nature and sustainability and offers a possible way to analyse how human/nature power relations are intertwined or entangled with neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy/racism, patriarchy etc. (Olofsson, Öhman, and Giritli Nygren 2016).

When developing CDA, Fairclough (2013) suggested that texts are to be analysed first from a descriptive angle, focusing on the central object of the text (in this case risk constructions) and how it relates to certain activities and actors, second from a processing angle, focusing on social relations and finally from an explaining angle, focusing on ideology. Following Larsson (2018), who combines Douglas’s (2002) sociocultural approach to risk with intersectional analysis of risk, we believe that the ways in which risk links to culture and power and what bodies or objects are described as being at risk can be illuminated if these different approaches to risk are combined. Therefore, we have approached the texts from a sociocultural (descriptive), intersectional (processing) and ecopolitical (explaining) angle, as a way to analyse how risk discourses intersect with power on several levels.

Using Douglas’s (2002) sociocultural approach to risk which we used for the descriptive angle, we have paid attention to what is considered a risk, and how gardening is described to be able to minimise it. From this view, risks are not simply seen as actual dangers, but also as social constructions that tell something about society and its norms, values and moral. This enables us to turn our attention to the ways in which risks appear in the municipalities’ promotion of urban gardening, what actions and actors are linked to certain risk descriptions, and how risk relates to the idea of an ideal citizen.

Next, the intersectional perspective which we use as the processing angle is aimed to contribute with insight on how power and governance are at work in the risk discourses. In intersectional risk studies, power structures are understood as intersecting with each other and with concepts of risk (Giritli Nygren, Öhman, and Olofsson 2020). In such cases, risk and risk prevention, becomes rhetorical devices for a kind of normalising politics that connects human bodies with policy issues and constitutive power, in short, as an example of the strategies and mechanisms through which the production of specific gardening subjects takes place (cf. Giritli Nygren 2019). In this way, risk discourses also enable individual identities to be linked to urban gardening in the means of disciplining, normalising and protecting citizens. That said, risk can only be understood by simultaneously exploring how multiple power structures influence articulations of risk and how the ways in which risk is done reproduce those structures. By applying an intersectional risk perspective, categorisations can be problematised and inequality can be made visible. Risk articulations are thus seen as a form of practice that does something to discourses.

Finally, the ecopolitical perspective, which we use as an explanatory angle, makes it possible to analyse how risk and governance is embedded within an anthropocentric paradigm. The current phase in the history of the Earth has been conceptualised as the anthropocene, in which humans have become a significant, perhaps dominant, environmental and geographical force. It has been suggested that in the anthropocene, ‘mastery of nature’, as endeavoured by the Enlightenment, is a widely accepted part of human development. Consistent with the view that reason and science would inform universal or absolute knowledge and mitigate civic risk (Tulloch and Lupton 2002), the mysterious natural world came under increasing scrutiny and under the anthropocene, a separation of society/nature perpetuating into modernity emerged. This perspective directs our analysis towards questions of (1) how the division human/nature is articulated at the websites, (2) how the anthropocene is interlinked with entrepreneurial city planning and neoliberal capitalist ideologies and (3) what implications it might have on the imagined gardening subjects. Through this lens, it is interesting to think about how the urban is related to gardening in municipality texts– if it is just a spatial signifier for gardening or if it also serves as a disruptor and/or reinforcement of anthropocene and neoliberal narratives.

By integrating these different perspectives in CDA, it becomes possible to analyse the complex ways in which risk in the context of urban gardening becomes entangled with the doing of social categories, city spaces, and the human/nature divide.

Risk discourses in Swedish municipality texts on urban gardening

In the following sections, we will describe what risk discourses we identified when reading the municipality texts on urban gardening. In an early reading of the documents we identified three discourses through which the risks that urban gardening was promoted as a solution to were framed. These discourses were an economic market discourse, an ecological discourse and a Swedish welfare discourse. When continuing our analysis, we noticed that the economic market discourse and the ecological discourse were closely intertwined and impossible to separate and we have therefore chosen to address them as one risk discourse, an eco(no)logical risk discourse, although incorporated by several, sometimes contradictory, values. As the term eco(no)logical indicates, the discourse accommodates two intersecting discourses: one on ecological risk and the other on economic growth (Nicolae, Roman, and Cotorcea 2018). Within the Swedish welfare discourse urban gardening was turned into a strategy for normalizing politics fostering included and resilient subjects, this logic makes urban gardening a solution to social risks. We have therefore chosen to call this a social risk discourse. In the following we will present our analysis of these two discourses. Our focus will be on highlighting examples from the municipal documents and analysing how the risk discourses were incused by intersecting power structures and ecopolitics.

Eco(no)logical risk discourses

Ecological sustainability was highlighted in most municipal documents, and urban gardening was broadly thought of as a way to create a better environment in towns and as a possibility to mitigate the overhanging risk of climate change and the many risks occurring as a result of a heated climate. This included the risk of food shortages, which called for measures to secure spaces for gardening and agriculture – in towns and in the more agricultural areas in the municipalities. However, as noted above, ecological risks were almost always articulated within a neoliberal capitalist economic rationale, where economic growth was an unproblematised ideal for development. An example of how this kind of eco(no)logical risk discourse could appear in the municipal documents is this quote from one of the municipalities’ strategies on urban gardening:

We believe that the need for locally cultivated food will be increasingly important as climate change and the demand from customers increase. Farmlands will eventually be invaluable to us and we therefore need to follow our plan and protect the farmlands in the future. But also find strategies and measures to secure production of locally cultivated food. The focus of the municipality’s usable lands will be a gradual transmission to ecological production.

In the quote, the risk that climate change constitutes is addressed parallel to the increase in customer requests; thus, ecological risks and market triggers both work as motivators for more locally grown food. In Douglas’s (2002) sociocultural approach to risk, the way in which risks are described and related to certain actors is crucial for the analysis. Following this approach, it is interesting that climate change is, in this context, both approached as a real risk and as a risk that is abstracted to customers’ experience and navigation of risks. The solution to climate risks – the protection of farmlands – thus responds to both the risk itself and to market logics, which reveals how economic risks of failing to satisfy the customer demand are also at stake here.

Furthermore, the quote includes the reader in an ‘us’ (‘farmlands will eventually be invaluable to us’), which could refer to inhabitants in the municipality or the human species as such. It is also this ‘us’ that needs to make a change to battle climate change. Thus, in this outline of ecological sustainability, the reassessment of farming is encouraged as a form of human agency that can generate positive change. This echoes Harvey’s (1987) notion that humans are always positioned as the only force in power over Earth’s development.

Another example of eco(no)logical discourses is to be found in this quote from a municipal strategy document from 2014:

The request for locally cultivated food strongly increases; it has started to transgress into the urban environment and creates great benefits other than the economic and ecological. A positive trend for locally produced food is to be seen in [the region] which is supported by important mega trends nationally and globally. The production of food needs to strongly increase globally and in Sweden, the request on sustainable food is bigger than the supply.

Even though the quote emphasises that there are more benefits of (urban) local agriculture and food production, it is only the ecological and economic benefits that are mentioned, and most emphasis is placed on the economic motives for increasing local food production rather than, for example, food justice. Again, the failure to respond to customer requests for locally grown food can be interpreted as a risk. When pointing towards what needs to be done, the quote does not link the preferred action (the need for increasing local food production) to a pronoun, which can be compared to the presence of an ‘us’ that is urged to take action in the previous quote.

In the material that we analysed, it is also evident that urban gardening is very much linked to local development. For example, one of the municipalities wrote that gardening in the municipality can ‘contribute to a more attractive and greener municipality’ and make ‘the people of [the municipality] experience a greater sense of community and responsibility for their neighborhood and town’. Following Aptekar’s (2015) findings on how different societal groups associated gardening with different values, the aesthetic value associated with gardening is most commonly appreciated by a white middle-class population, while the lower classes and immigrant gardeners tended to focus more on gardening as food production. Highlighting this specific value of urban gardening can therefore be understood as a construction of the gardening subject as a white, middle-class individual, a process that contributes to prioritising some citizen’s needs over others’. Alongside the prioritisation of white, middle-class imaginaries of gardening, municipalities could also use gardening to attract certain groups of people to the municipality. An example of what this could look like is to be found in a report linked on one of the municipalities’ websites:

/…/urban gardening can be a trademark-strengthening and profiling investment that will help attracting just the target groups of cultural and creative people that are needed to realize the other development areas [that are mentioned in the report].

This quote displays a perspective on gardening as an implementation of market-based and entrepreneurial approaches to public space production. The profile of people that the municipality wants to attract is heavily inspired by Richard Florida’s (2002) idea of a creative class that carries skills and capital that can be transformed into economic growth. In both quotes, gardening appears as both visually pleasing and creative, rather than primarily as a means for food production. Thus, following Giritli Nygren, Öhman, and Olofsson (2020) intersectional approach to risk, the eco(no)logical risks that the municipalities seek to mitigate through urban gardening are deeply rooted in class.

Returning to the ‘us’ in the first (and second) quote that included the reader, it becomes evident that this ‘us’ is not only defined by an antropocentric perception of the human species as the only possible saviour of planet Earth (Harvey 1987), but also points to a particular perception of this savouring subject, a position attired to a specific group of prosperous people who are assigned the agency to create positive change.

Social risk discourses

The social risk discourse that was visible in the municipality texts entails the idea of gardening work to have the potential of solving social problems, such as health problems, segregation and unemployment, as well as fostering a sense of community and belonging among the municipality inhabitants. For example, one of the municipalities we studied used urban gardening in a work training program for long-time-unemployed inhabitants. Following Douglas (2002) in focusing on what actors and activities that risks are linked to, it is notable how the gardening subject in the social risk discourse is positioned as at risk, which can be contrasted to the gardening subject in the eco(no)logical risk discourse, which was rather seen as having the ability to minimize societal risks by contributing to growth. The at risk gardeners in the social risk discourse are positioned neither as a agents shaping urban gardens nor as land owners – rather, they are positioned as in need of intervention. For this interventionalised gardener, the activity of gardening is not an own initiative, but something that is assigned to them to form them into more employable subjects on the labour market, by rehabilitating and educating them. Thus, the interventionalised gardening subject is also a governed object, which – if let loose – would damage rather than benefit the communal wealth.

The reason to why the individuals in the work training program had been unemployed for a long time varied – whilst some had never really managed to enter the labour market, others had used to work but were later forced to quit, often due to mental illness. In the first of these groups, there were both immigrants, who did not manage to get a job after arriving in Sweden, and young Swedes, who – due to mental illness or disabilities – had difficulties pursuing and keeping a job. Overall, mental illness problems seemed to be common among the gardeners in the program, hence the municipality’s focus on health and rehabilitation. One example of how this was expressed is to be found in an article that the municipality published on its website with the headline ‘Urban Gardening is Supposed to Make People and Plants Sprout’. In this article, the project leader is quoted as follows:

If urban gardening can offer personal development and a path to the labour market, it is win-win. I also think that the daily activity can in itself make many feel better: here [in the project] we work outdoors with our hands, and we see a concrete result of what we do, and we have organized work in a way so that the participants will have big influence over the work.

In the quote, a parallel is made between the growth of plants and personal growth. To be outside and work with the hands and eventually be able to see something grow was stated to be a healing and strengthening practice that could be used as rehabilitation. The fact that gardening was thought of as rehabilitation and thus was seen as well-suited for work training programs confirms to what previous studies have argued: there seems to be a continuation through time and space that gardening work has therapeutic and disciplinary power that can contribute to municipality agendas for the inclusion of people considered to be at risk (Parr 2016). From an intersectional viewpoint (Giritli Nygren, Öhman, and Olofsson 2020) it is evident that in the case of the interventionalised gardener in need of rehabilitation, risk intersects with class, as well as with ethnicity and (dis)ability.

Aside from the incorporation of gardening into work training programs, gardening was also promoted as a means to increase the sense of community and trust, and public health in the communities, and to decrease social risks such as segregation and distrust. Thus, it was not only pictured as rehabilitating for individuals, but as rehabilitating for communities and society at large. One example of how gardening could be used in a sense that moved beyond work training and governing of individuals is the use of gardening in both elderly and child care, which is meant to make the time for the elderly and children more meaningful. On one of the municipalities’ websites, one can read about how gardening is used in a building that accommodates both elderly care and child care:

In elderly care and daycare, gardening provides an extra dimension in the daily activities and it becomes a common project between the departments.

This way of using gardening in municipalities echoes the Swedish history of school gardens, although in this new form of institutional gardening, it is not only used as education, but also as a social activity. It is clear that gardening was by the municipality viewed as a meaningful activity where people can meet over generations and cultures, and thus it can be used to counter segregation. Another expression of how gardening could be framed as integration of generations was through a reference to the initiative Co-grow. Co-grow was actually not a municipality initiative but a grassroots movement that one of the municipalities mentioned on their web page. The idea behind Co-grow is the pairing of individuals with unused farmland and individuals without land, but with an interest in gardening. On Co-grow’s website, the benefits of the initiative are described as follows:

Garden-sharing strengthens the sense of community and trust in society. It is most common that younger and older people share a garden, which means that Co-Grow contributes to meetings over generations. Further, to be outdoors and work in the garden, and eating home-grown vegetables strengthens the health.

As in the very first example, where gardening was used as work training and rehabilitation, co-grow is yet another example of how gardening was framed as an activity that could decrease segregation between generations.

Returning to Douglas’s (2002) sociocultural approach, where the solution to risk is also in focus, it is interesting how nature and gardening are framed as the solution in the social risk discourse, and as a resource that can be integrated in social welfare interventions where people can be trained and healed. When thinking of risk in relation to how nature and culture are divided and related in the framing of urban gardening – which constitutes a specific form of urbanization of nature (Harvey 1989) – we see how risk discourses position both nature and gardeners (humans) in particular materialised and physical locations and in power asymmetries (cf. Olofsson, Öhman, and Giritli Nygren 2016). Taken together, using nature to solve social risks can be understood as a social appropriation of nature, where it is viewed as a resource that can be used to socially upbuild and maintain human societies.

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to explore risk discourses in municipality documents on urban gardening in order to unpack how risk intersects with power structures and ecopolitics in contemporary municipal decision-making. Using critical discourse analysis, we analysed Swedish municipality texts from a sociocultural, intersectional and ecopolitical approach to risk. We identified two dominating risk discourses: a discourse on eco(no)logical risks, where ecological and economic perspectives on climate change were integrated, and a discourse on social risks, where the focus was on urban gardening as a rehabilitating and inclusionary practice. It is interesting to note that, while discourses on ecological and economic sustainability were highly intertwined, discourses on health and rehabilitation did not seem to overlap with either ecological or economic discourses.

Using the sociocultural approach (Douglas 2002) – with a focus on the articulation of risk, risk subjects and solutions to risk – we noted how the urban gardener was differently positioned in relation to risk in the two discourses. The gardener could be positioned as either an unemployed risk subject in need of intervention (in the social risk discourse) or as a wealthy risk-mitigating subject with the potential to ‘save’ both the local area and the planet (in the econological discourse). It became evident that it was this latter group of gardeners that the municipality had in mind in their attempt to create ‘attractive and greener’ municipalities. Structural social problems and their solutions were thought of as a kind of embodied capital that could be attracted or managed in different ways. However, it is noteworthy that this group, which the municipalities favoured and wanted to attract, was never addressed as subjects in need of integration, which was the case with the (unemployed) risk subjects. Rather – even though they are likely to be newcomers in the municipality – they were repeatedly addressed as the solution to economic and social challenges. As mentioned in the beginning, urban gardening strategies may also be read as a form of governance that has an ideal citizen in mind (Tornaghi and Certomà 2019) where strategies for urban gardening becomes agendas also for interventions on human life i.e. a mode through which gardening subjectivities are produced, being at the same time both enabling and suppressing.

Bringing in the intersectional approach to risk (Giritli Nygren, Öhman, and Olofsson 2020), one could say that being an integratable subject was about possessing certain resources – having an academic education, being Swedish-speaking and not having mental or physical disabilities – that could generate growth in the municipality. Thus, although gardening may have the potential to bring together people of different classes, ethnicities and ages – an aspect that previous studies have often seen in gardening initiatives (Koroļova and Treija 2018; Nogeire-McRae et al. 2018; Weidner, Yang, and Hamm 2019) – the discursive positioning of different gardeners, and the spatial positioning counteract the ideal of strong and integrated local communities. To establish different types of classed subject positions in relation to urban gardening can also be read as implicit strategies of what Domene and Saurí call the ‘hegemonization of class-specific socionatures’, i.e. the relation between class-produced natures and local development, where ‘class and power relations appear to legitimise some of these natures over others’ (Domene and Saurí 2007, 287).

Finally, using the ecopolitical approach, we have added a critical focus on how nature is used and appropriated in the urban gardening discourse. The development of agricultural practices such as urban gardening can have the power to address the commodification of nature (Castree 2003) and dissemble the municipality from the transnational horticultural industry and its pressures. This is particularly true when performed and initiated by local citizens who refuse to let private actors hold exclusive power over food production. However, gardening was rarely restricted to concern citizen-led practices in the municipal strategies, but municipalities tended to include all farming and gardening activities that were going on in the area – also commercial initiatives. In general, urban gardening and other forms of local food production could only be highlighted in terms of environmental benefits if they were also compatible with a capitalist market logic. In this context, mitigating climate change was not only seen as a matter of reducing ecological risks, but also as a customer preference – which makes visible the capitalist structural boundaries that the municipalities needed to navigate within.

As we have seen, the framing of urban gardening subjectivities takes place and is positioned differently in relation to nature and land. Nature and culture are in this way combined to form an urban political ecology that combines the powers of nature with those of, for example, class. In previous studies, through which writers respond to climate variability by reclaiming humanity’s environmental responsibility and agency to change the course of Earth’s history, this approach can be seen as a vital part of anthropocene discourse. The narratives that celebrate urban gardening offer a new environmental humanities paradigm that underscores and narrates the human potential for positive change. Further, the fact that ecological risks are addressed within a capitalist risk rhetoric, where human goodwill and the market seemingly exist as integrated and unquestionable factors, supports an approach to gardening fueled by contemporary anthropocene governance (Harvey 1985, 1987). In this governance, nature is urbanised and integrated into the logics of the neoliberal city.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas.

Notes

1 Using the Swedish division of climate zones, ranging from 1 to 8 and where 1 represents the mildest climate and 8 the coldest, the municipalities in this study were located in zone 1, 2, 4 and 6.