Unbundling property in Boston’s urban food commons

Abstract

Households and community organizations are involved in the creation, use, care, and management of urban spaces, including through food practices such as planting, foraging, harvesting, weeding and pruning at the ambiguous edges of public and private property. Drawing on case studies in Boston, Massachusetts, we examine how commons are articulated through these practices, particularly in relation to multiple dimensions of property rights. Specifically, we ask how food practices can open urban spaces to negotiations around access, responsibility, care, and ownership, especially when (property) ownership is not an end-goal, but a circumstance shaping other practices. Using interviews and participant observation of individuals and organizations involved in urban food provisioning, we explore how households and community organizations are interrupting fixed notions of property ownership, by practicing urban commons. These practices and negotiations demonstrate ongoing shifts in the meanings of urban space with flexible understandings of property and ownership.

Care, commoning and collectivity: from grand domestic revolution to urban transformation

“…Many of the practices we are interested in understanding as sites of domestic revolution can also be theorized through lenses of citizenship and the right to the city (Falú, 2014), social reproduction (Katz, 2001), and commoning (Federici, 2011). And while we see the value all of these perspectives and draw on them in our previous work (Morrow & Dombroski, 2015;Morrow & Martin, 2019;Parker, 2016Parker, , 2015Werner et al, 2016), they are sometimes at risk of becoming free-floating abstractions unmoored from a historical-material-feminist grounding in the everyday life of diverse women, cities, and households. Thus, while extant urban literatures on social reproduction, commoning, citizenship, and the right to the city all have important contributions to offer, they sometimes miss the broader connection between home, care, and urban transformation that materialist feminists bring to the table.…”

“…These endeavors might be closely scrutinized and perhaps widely shared, serving as inspiration for a contemporary feminist materialist politics that draws from but goes beyond the experiments featured in the Grand Domestic Revolution. In our research, for example, we have explored the growth in urban homesteading (Parker & Morrow, 2017), and efforts to create more collective infrastructures for urban food provisioning -such as community kitchens and food cooperatives for shared canning and yogurt making (Morrow & Dombroski, 2015;Morrow & Martin, 2019). We are also excited about contemporary efforts to create urban food commons in cities, through DIY urban infrastructures such as community fridges that help users to decommodify and share surplus food without stigma (Morrow 2019a(Morrow , 2019b, as well as community kitchens and cooking projects that bring locals, migrants, and asylum seekers into intimate contact over shared meals, collective cooking, and sharing knowledge about traditional recipes.…”

Troubling care in the neonatal intensive care unit

“…To think about care as multiple and to see the various forms it can (and must) take, we consider the community of actors and actants providing care in the NICU. As a practice, care is relational (Morrow and Martin, 2019). Care as multiple captures the social practices it is embedded in and makes visible mutual aid, belonging and exclusion.…”

The production of urban commons through alternative food practices

“…Urban spaces become commons when they are appropriated, cared for, managed and shared by city dwellers who feel not only a right to inhabit and use these spaces but a collective responsibility towards them (Morrow & Martin, 2019). As many scholars have theorised to date, the idea of commons must be placed into a wider context than a simply bounded territory or static space.…”

“…By their collective activities related to food provision, they reconfigure and appropriate public and private spaces, transforming them into urban commons. As stated by Morrow and Martin (2019) urban food provisioning presents a novel case for exploring how everyday practices can create commons. This paper addresses a gap in the previous research as to date, buying groups have not been researched in detail in the context of production of urban commons.…”