In the fall of 2013 someone put a poster on the entrance doors to our community garden: The Political Activity of Allotment Gardeners. Here we must once again clear up the terminology being used. From his text, it was clear that the author was referring to urban gardens in general (allotments and community gardens), though the title only makes mention of allotments.
This was a professional text by an anonymous author published in the form of a poster (A2 format). In the text, on the topic of our community garden Beyond a Construction Site, the author had written his thoughts on the activities of our allotment gardening community and praised its social and political dimension. “Guerrilla gardening opens up spaces. It represents an urban-ecological intervention, and its goal is the transformation of public spaces and the integration of communities. At the same time it is a political statement which indicates the possibilities for social change and includes the creation and articulation of new forms of political subjectivity. As Negri would say, it is a renewed occupation of the public in the name of the group.”125 I immediately recalled a beautiful thought of Zdenka Goriup’s from her first research work on allotment gardening in Ljubljana, which had captured me completely and crystallised my thoughts regarding allotment gardening. Namely, Zdenka Goriup was an architect and she approved of allotment gardening in the city and recognised its potential. In this positive perspective on allotment gardening she also wrote this thought, which contains the political element that the article from the poster on our doors mentioned: “In a transparent and convincing way, allotment gardening shows how, with our own power, we can take care of our ‘needs’. For most people today, due to a sharp separation of functions (apartment, work, consumption, education, and enjoyment of free time) this has become hard to understand. A garden therefore leads to independent and creative work, and a sharp perspective on all that is
125This text was copied from a photo of poster fixed on the door of our community garden in November 2013. Later we found out that the poster was written in the context of Tribuna (a newspaper, which with a few gaps has been published continuously from since 1951 by a student organisation at the University of Ljubljana). The autumn issue 2013 was not printed in classical way, but texts in the form of posters were posted around the city with the contents of the article connected to the context of the lo-cation. Finally, last month (June 2014) the on-line newspaper Tribuna posted a link to the text’s author, Armando Garcia Teixeira.
The poster from our entrance door was also an interesting example of how the different theoretical and practical issues of this community garden are communicated with the neighbourhood (within and without).
http://www.tribuna.si/articles/politicno-delovanje-vrtickarjev (12.6.2014).
Poster on the entrance doors:
Politično udejstvovanje vrtičkarjev,
Photo by: Polonca Lovšin, November 2013
alive and beautiful. It represents the antipode of a world in which everything is obtained without effort, and which turns many away from doing something themselves.”126 This statement has a lot in common with the passivity of people, which has supposedly come about because of several decades of consumerism, and which, according to Goriup, discourages many from doing something themselves. At the same time I have already emphasised several times that in our prior socialist system individual allotment gardeners were understood as individualists who were only doing something for themselves and not for the community (Z. Goriup, 1984), and that gardening and working with the earth was taking people away from political work, which was what the Allotment Gardening University (1984-1998) was accused of.
The Political Can Be Seen in Each Small Step, in Each Decision
I agree that our community garden makes a more open, undetermined kind of engagement possible for individuals, and that this can take place within a different, more open, and informal kind of space and activity than offered by today’s social structures. I only hope that the others who are included feel the same way. All decisions of the project, even small ones, have an important aspect of the political and can be sensed as not only making a different kind of
community, but as being part of the project’s social aspects in general. The political is evident in each small step; from how we approached the site and neighbourhood and their residents, what was important for us, who we invited to collaborate, and around which concepts we developed the project. The political is also our attempt to turn attention to the importance of the social and political aspects of architecture and urban planning practices. The anonymous author of the text on our doors was wrong about the idea that our occupation of the space was “guerrilla” in nature. It was not. We had established a dialogue with the city, which is in my opinion an even more piercing and transformative method for the successful and gradual transformation of city policies, through the agreement and support of temporary use.
What Kind of City Do We Want to Live In?
Much more radical was the initiative “Teatro Valle Occupato”127 in June 2011, with the occupation of the oldest Italian theatre in Rome. Here artists were able to prevent the theatre’s privatisation, and with this act they sought to warn of an alarming condition within Italian culture and politics.
The initiative is committed to making Teatro Valle the first institution to function under the principle of self-governance. They are organising a widely spread campaign searching for public shareholders and gathering the necessary funds to establish the Foundation for the Valle Theatre as a Common. In the context of the action and events, which have been organised since the occupations, they invited David Harvey to come and speak and to reflect on their occupation. Harvey has been studying the connection between capital and urbanisation for
126 Zdenka Goriup, Planiranje in urejanje območij malih vrtov (vrtičkov) v Ljubljani (Planning and Regulating Allotments in Ljubljana), Urbanistični inštitut Republike Slovenije, Ljubljana 1984, pg. 11.
127 http://www.teatrovalleoccupato.it/. (18.9.2014).
many years and has presented numerous publications and texts the most widespread on humans Right to the City. The first to present this demand for a changed and renewed access to urban life was sociologist Henri Lefebvre in his book Le Droit à la Ville from 1968, or The right to the City, which is now a widespread slogan. As a guest of the occupied theatre, David Harvey emphasised that inclusion into cultural practices enables an alternative way of creating meaning in people’s lives. These practices often include a new way of establishing relationships with people, new ways of understanding nature, and a different sensitivity to the urban environment – in terms of how it looks and how we should feel within it, and the idea that we can experiment with everyday life. He continues by saying that this has a lot in common with the idea of “the right to the city”, in the sense that we build a city according to a different image; different from what was given to us, and different from what real-estate intermediaries or large financial institutions want. So, we do not want that kind of city, we want a different one, and when we ask about what kind of city we want to live in, we cannot overlook the fact that we are asking ourselves what kind of people we want to be – changing ourselves and changing the world go hand-in-hand.128
One hundred years ago Jane Addams saw the future of the city in the city’s parks. She saw the city parks as spaces for re-creation, because people of various nationalities and professions could learn tolerance of difference and co-existence in a heterogeneous society, which was characteristic of the modern city. Jane Addams encouraged “cosmic patriotism”: “The patriotism of the modern state must be based not upon consciousness of homogeneity but upon respect of variation, not upon inherited memory but upon trained imagination.”129
In the 21st century, community gardens have among others become spaces for learning tolerance of difference, to help empower residents for the kinds of spaces they want in their cities, and also spaces for practising ecology in everyday life.
Growing Food in Cities
At its core, by growing food in cities urban agriculture includes important aspects of the political.
By growing our own food we take one step out of the world of consumerism; out of processes which we automatically accepted a decade earlier. My parents never asked about the quality of food produced with the help of industrial agriculture and chemicals. The fact that food was transported from distant countries was not a problem for them. However, now we know that this increases traffic, uses natural resources (fuel), requires the construction of cold storage facilities and transport, and pollutes the environment. Not long ago it was a normal and even considered a part of modern living to buy fresh vegetables and other produce in stores. We did not ask ourselves about what a reduction in prices of produce meant for the local farmer, something
128ECF Interviews David Harvey, Teatro Valle Occupato, Rim, 28.9.2013.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ELlMjC8IU (18.9.2014).
129Jane Addams, Recreation as Public Function in Urban Communities, first published in 1912 in the American Journal of So-ciology v. XVII, Nr.5, March 1912, published in Hands-on Urbanism 1850-2012, The Right to Green, ed. Elke Krasny, Architec-turzentrum Wien, Vienna, 2012, pg. 102-104.
which was done in return for a profit for all those involved in the commercial chain. With our activity of producing local vegetables we are creating another system, and thus we are also influencing the old one. When we do our gardening on abandoned city land – while collecting rainwater, using home grown and autochthonous seeds, and creating compost – we improve the land of the city. By growing our own food we are making determinations about ourselves,
our food, and the future of our children. In this way, with small steps, we can also have an influence on the official order of the food chain. “A new food supply structure does not replace a traditional one, but rather complements it. Remote systems alone cannot nourish all urban residents at affordable prices. Remote food production now complements local ways of furnishing urban residents with their nutritional needs, thus greatly increasing the complexity of the urban food system.”130 Community gardens, allotment gardens and all other vegetable gardens make it possible to practice ecology on the level of everyday life, which results in an interruption in established consumer models, and a certain level of independence from the system. This is the resilience which group aaa talks about. So, with the creation of alternative forms of community and space we can say that growing vegetables is also a political act.
130 Jac Smit, Joe Nasr, and Annu Ratta, Urban Agriculture: Food Jobs and Sustainable Cities (2001 edition, published with permission from the United Nations Development Programme), chapter 1, pg. 19.
http://jacsmit.com/book.html (21.7.2014).
November 2011 Photo by: Kud Obrat archive
Polonca Lovšin, Between the Urban and the Rural, 2014 13 collages, 29.7 x 42 cm
Collage No. 12