Cultivating responsible citizenship : Collective gardens at the periphery of neoliberal urban norms

Abstract: The growing human population is concentrating in urban environments across the globe, leading to urban expansion and densification. Consequently, political debates and social movements concerned with urban planning and land use have increased in relevance. Conflicts over urban space arise where people problematise and challenge dominant land-use rationalities, so it follows that one way of critically analysing dominant rationales of urban land use is to examine them in relation to collective action that challenges these norms.One example of counternormative practice are collective gardens, a subset of community gardens characterised by collective management and publicly-oriented programming. Because their use of urban land and collective social organisation appear inconsistent with the privatisation and free-market economy of neoliberal capitalism, studying collective gardens has implications for understanding these places as products of political forms of sensemaking, expressing grievances and demands that respond to the dominant political-economic context of contemporary urban life.Based on this understanding, this study explores discourses about the political significance of collective gardens as places where alternative norms of urban life are developed. What senses of place can be understood to be nurtured in relation to collective gardens, how does this manifest, and what is conveyed about citizenship and urban life in neoliberal capitalist contexts? These questions are investigated through a political discourse framework, supplemented by discursive theories of aesthetics, narratives, and sensemaking to learn about the meanings attributed to collective gardens as constituted within wider social contexts.The aesthetics of collective gardens are explored through multi-sited research at gardens across Germany and Sweden to analyse how urban space is materially reimagined. The study then turns to case studies in both nations to explore narratives – first to understand how local history sets up problems that are solved by the establishment of each garden, then to analyse how they are portrayed in discourses about urban development and social life. The study examines how the social critiques being fostered in these places convey a particular ethos of democratic citizenship, as well as how complex relationships to responsibility create situations where collectives resist neoliberal capitalist rationalities while also contributing to their objectives.