Fences, seeds and bees: The more-than-human politics of community gardening in Rotterdam

Abstract

This paper explores the more-than-human politics of a community garden in Rotterdam, as an expression of sustainable and resilient city making. Challenging the anthropocentrism underlying most research on the politics of urban sustainability/resilience and urban gardening, the paper proposes a more-than-human assemblage approach to urban gardening politics. I argue that urban gardens can be understood as more-than-human configurations and conceptualised as urban garden assemblages. Such assemblages are processes with different temporalities and types of agencies (insects, plants, soil and fences) and can be analytically understood as more-than-human: (1) relations and performances; (2) power hierarchies/resistances; and (3) ethical co-becomings. Building on participatory ethnography, interviews and (online) documents, the paper then presents an empirical account of the Gandhi-garden, a community garden in Rotterdam, embedded in the global Transition Towns movement. The empirical case shows how mundane acts of pulling weeds and using permacultural planting methods are more-than-human place-making practices. It also highlights how, for example, human–soil, human–seed and human–bee entanglements challenge urban neoliberalism while gardeners experiment with sustainable food and a non-violent economy. The paper illustrates the ethico-political expressions of more-than-human community gardening through solidarity bonds with Palestine via olive trees and non-violence thinking, as well as some human/non-human ambivalences when dealing with dog waste and potentially harvest-stealing birds. Finally, the paper presents some reflections and contributions regarding scholarship in the fields of urban gardening, and sustainable/resilient city making.

Becoming‐Interdependent: Democratic Praxis In‐Against‐and‐Beyond Capitalism in Agrifood Collectives

“…Interpreting grassroots agrifood collectives' processes of becoming-interdependent as strategies for countering the historical and contemporary separations of capitalism, we suggest that becoming-interdependent, in ways yet to be explored, may also characterise other postcapitalist struggles such as commoning, building autonomy, or degrowth (Chatterton 2016;Chatterton and Pickerill 2010;De Angelis 2017;Hollender 2016;Schmid 2019;Wilson 2013). Moreover, as an analytical perspective, the lens of becoming-interdependent may stimulate further explicit explorations of postcapitalist possibility in the more-than-human politics involved in (collective) agricultural practices (Brice 2014;Ginn 2013;Jhagroe 2023;Krzywoszynska 2019) but also more generally (McKiernan and Instone 2016;Wright 2015).…”

“…Applying these modes of enquiry to the more-than-human politics involved in collective agricultural practices, scholars have explored situated political formations (and especially the practices of their negotiation) that contribute to a nuanced picture of the ambivalent and contradictory more-than-human relationships emerging in these practices (Fleischmann 2023;Ginn 2013;Jhagroe 2023;Krzywoszynska 2019). Specifically, they have scrutinised how specific other-than-human actors mediate social life and become active participants in political contests amongst humans (for vines, see Brice 2014; for slugs, see Ginn 2013).…”

“…The CSA collective and the more-than-human ecosystem they sustain can be thought of as particular, ever-evolving entanglements of humans and other-than-humans (Barua and Sinha 2023;Jhagroe 2023). We distinguish between three types of human-other-than-human relationships: (i) relations of care and mutual aid; (ii) relations of exploitation and conflict; and (iii) co-existence beyond care and exploitation.…”