Keep off the grass! New directions for geographies of yards and gardens

Abstract

This paper provides a critical assessment of geographic research on yards and private gardens, with a focus on how geographers study people's engagements with more than human organisms and surroundings. Geographies have come alive as assemblages of lively materials, distributed agencies, and animated political and material flows. At the same time, there is renewed interest on the part of geographers to better take into account lived experiences and the embodied politics of difference. Relations between people and their everyday surroundings are central to these critical analyses. This paper examines one such potent realm of these everyday engagements: the yard. These are spaces intimately bound up with uneven geographies of residential development, as well as places of creativity, care, and failure. Contemporary environmental efforts increasingly enroll the yard or garden as a crucial interface through which to refashion relations between water, infrastructure, particular species, chemical inputs, and food systems. This paper identifies two themes within contemporary yard and garden research, as well as ongoing tensions. I argue that the familiarity of such spaces to Anglophone geography challenges and invites further methodological experimentation and analysis. Yards and private gardens also provide purchase on pressing questions of social inequalities, property, and nature. Thus, I identify two directions for future yard research: developing more experimental methodological approaches beyond a focus on lawns and better situating yards within broader geographies of inequity and the production of geographic knowledge.

Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography

“…Much of this work is therefore concerned with the mundane and the everyday, tracing close personal relationships between people and plants, notably within urban gardens (Bhatti et al, 2009;Ginn, 2014aGinn, , 2016Hosking and Palomino-Schalscha, 2016;Lang, 2018aLang, , 2018bMoore et al, 2015;Shillington, 2008) and urban forests (Jones and Instone, 2016;Phillips and Atchison, 2020;Shcheglovitova, 2020). As argued by Lang (2018b), there is an environmental imperative to learn more about the experiences of people and plants in everyday life in order to connect the socio-political aspects of how people live with their broader ecological impacts, particularly within cities (see Gandy and Jasper, 2020a).…”

“…Much of this work is therefore concerned with the mundane and the everyday, tracing close personal relationships between people and plants, notably within urban gardens (Bhatti et al, 2009;Ginn, 2014aGinn, , 2016Hosking and Palomino-Schalscha, 2016;Lang, 2018aLang, , 2018bMoore et al, 2015;Shillington, 2008) and urban forests (Jones and Instone, 2016;Phillips and Atchison, 2020;Shcheglovitova, 2020). As argued by Lang (2018b), there is an environmental imperative to learn more about the experiences of people and plants in everyday life in order to connect the socio-political aspects of how people live with their broader ecological impacts, particularly within cities (see Gandy and Jasper, 2020a). Alongside the marginally more established political ecology-style approaches to plant life in geography (see Argüelles and March, 2021;Fleming, 2017), much of the work which I locate within this strand of 'vegetal geography' borrows from the environmental humanities, considering how the everyday stories we tell about plants can provide new insights into how vegetal life is experienced, imagined and valued (Phillips and Atchison, 2020).…”

A2. Dinámicas urbanas y territoriales : metabolismo, desigualdades sociales, resiliencia y regeneración. Vol. 1

“…De forma paralela, otras disciplinas como la geografía, la sociología, la biología o la antropología, también venían realizando investigaciones en torno a cultivos vernáculos desde sus perspectivas particulares (Kimber, 2004). En las dos últimas décadas -en el marco del giro material que han experimentando diversas disciplinas-los cultivos vernáculos son objeto de un renovado interés dada su situación estratégica en la relación entre el ser humano y el resto de entidades vivientes a través de una cotidianeidad que también permite abordar cuestiones clave de desigualdades sociales (Lang, 2018).…”

Conspicuous reserves: Ideologies of water consumption and the performance of class

“…As social status in cities is increasingly performed through economic class, water practices have become both an instrument and a symbol of success. Demonstrating class through water allocation results in class‐based water aesthetics in the form of landscaping (Lang ; Larson and Brumand ; Robbins ) but is also written over the bodies of citizens in their hygiene and clothing (Geels ; Luna ; Zimring ) and in environmental narratives that span scales (Luke ). People's physical and social mobilities are functions of class‐based relationships of access to urban infrastructures (Harvey ; Massey )—adequate water access can boost or drag the economic achievement of a family (O'Leary ).…”