The common life of yards

Abstract

Recent scholarship has begun to reimagine the commons beyond its traditional meaning as a collectively owned and managed natural resource. Building on research that considers commons through the practices which produce and maintain them-commoning-this article analyzes how privately owned front and backyards participate in urban commons. Through ethnographic research in three neighborhoods of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the article shows how these commons are made in two key registers: through yards as shared territories and through everyday practices of sharing plants across individual yards. The article's central claim is that yards and the everyday practices which take place in and through them constitute one nodal point in the making of urban commons. In so doing, logics of private property come to be interwoven with logics of commoning. By finding a diverse range of common lives of yards, this article adds to emerging conversations about the nature of urban commons.

Transplanting, plotting, fencing: relational property practices in community gardens

“…Aside from asking what property represents, researchers ask through which practicesnaming, fencing, repairing and policing -property is made and what property subsequently makes people do (Blomley, 2015;Lang, 2014;Wekerle and Classens, 2015). A focus on practice shows how in everyday life people put property to use in ways that transgress the two classical categories of private and public property.…”

Autonomy, Erasure, and Persistence in the Urban Gardening Commons

“…Our second aim in this paper is to put community gardening into conversation with the recent surge of work on the commons and practices of commoning. Political ecology has long been interested in how common property forms offer a counterpoint to enclosure by state or capital, and in how differences of interest or power play out in the commons (see Eizenberg's [2012] seminal study of New York's community gardens as commons; see also Lang ; Turner ). Lately, focus has shifted from an emphasis on the commons as an institutionalised resource management regime to the practices of commoning as a “struggle for alternative futures” that refuse to treat life instrumentally (Kirwan et al.…”

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

“…Surprisingly few studies focus explicitly on the emotional lives of yards, in relation to their enviropolitical significance (but see Harris, Martin, Polsky, Denhardt, & Nehring, , Lang, , Lang, ). Throughout the above studies, there remains an emphasis on narrated experiences, quantifiable metrics about attitudes, and a focus on the presence or absence of lawns as the primary kind of environmental decision‐making.…”

“…The specific land use geographies as understood by local residents are invaluable to community groups engaged in processes of management and urban development. In addition, Lang () shows how inhabitants mobilize their own private yards in material and immaterial ways to develop and maintain communally gardened spaces. Lang argues these links can be understood as one type of urban commons.…”