(Commons-Office), a network for community gardens and urban agriculture in Berlin, ... the socio-ecological urban metabolism and sketches the analytical and ...
Mapping difference in urban agriculture A scholar activist project As part of the panel “Politicising the food movement in urban contexts” I will present my action research dissertation on urban food issues, especially my experiences in the areas of collective knowledge production and collective mapping. As an active member of the Allmende-Kontor (Commons-Office), a network for community gardens and urban agriculture in Berlin, and a member of the educational collective orangotango, I present this research from a scholar activist point of view. In my presentation, I offer a critical analysis of urban agricultural multifunctionality and its ambiguous tendencies. The analysis questions the urban agricultural capacity for changing the socio-ecological urban metabolism and sketches the analytical and methodological framework for action research within the context of urban agriculture's contradictions In a time of multiple crises on the doorstep of the “millennium of the cities”1, the supposed oxymoron “urban agriculture2” is part of a different and diametrical processes. On the one hand, traditional peri-urban agriculture and intra-urban gardens are getting swept away and turned into concrete in the face of growing city populations and rising land prices within the context of neoliberal urban transformation processes. On the other hand, the ongoing migration process is moving millions of peasants to urban peripheries - or absorbing those living at the urban-rural edge - and with them their families, knowledge, seeds and animals. Instead of the expected wide range of urban possibilities, they are facing urban marginality, which leads to a reproduction of rural survival strategies within cities (Bagli 2006: 101). The steady rural-urban flow, the fact that urban subsistence farming has always gained importance in times of crisis3, and an apparently broader societal change towards a greater ecological consciousness are providing fertile ground for a diversified production of urban environments. It seems that the urban agriculture movement is flourishing everywhere and spreading its revolutionary seeds from New York's community gardens to Cubas huertas urbanas, from Berlin's interkulturelle Gärten to Barcelona's huertas communitarias. But urban agriculture still runs the risk of fading away, not only from the loss of urban green spaces but also by abandoning the potential of a different socio-ecological urban metabolism. Instead of collectively discussing the struggles of urban farmers historically rooted in the “environmentalism of the poor” (cf. Martinez-Alier 2002: 10), urban agriculture is in danger of 1
Kofi Annan at the opening of the Urban21 conference (http://www.unric.org/de/pressemitteilungen/4546) “Urban agriculture is an industry located within (intra-urban) or on the fringe (peri-urban) of a town, a city or a metropolis, which grows and raises, processes and distributes a diversity of food and non-food products, (re)using largely human and material resources, products and services found in and around that urban area, and in turn supplying human and material resources, products and services largely to that urban area” (Mougeot 2000: 10). 3 E.g. the allotment gardens in Europe during and after World War I & II (e.g. Crouch and Colin 1988). 2
being misappropriated by mainstream discussions (e.g. by discourses shaped through the “gospel of eco-efficency” (cf. Martinez-Alier 2002: 5)) and transformed into a part of the emerging dominant urban “green” development practices and discourses. In principle, I agree with the understanding of urban agriculture as a multifunctional phenomenon with positive social, economic and ecological effects (cf. Mougeot 2005, Halder 2009). But we are facing a tipping point in the development of urban agriculture practices and discourses: from subsistence farming in times of crisis4 and grassroots environmental activism5 to a mainstream “development tool” (Smit et al., 1996: 9), tendentiously stylish middle-class recreation gardening with futuristic architectural features (cf. Gorgolewski et al. 2011) and inner city agrobusiness production6. The so called urban agriculture “movement” (cf. Bellows 2010), as “part of an unusual and amorphous political movement” (Müller 2011: 31) faces critical analysis of its multifunctionality (cf. McClintock 2013; Allen 2008). However, the movement is responding to critics. Critical collective mapping workshops (cf. orangotango 2012) and the “Urban Gardening Manifest” (cf. www.urbangardeningmanifest.de) are two examples that show how research has informed gardening activism (c.f. Tornaghi and van Dyck 2014) and can be part of the process of repoliticising urban food production by using popular education methods within collective mapping and collective knowledge production (cf. Halder and Jahnke 2014; Halder et al 2012).
4
Beside the allotment gardens and the more recent phenomenon of millions of urban subsistence farmers in African, Asian and Latin-American cities (cf. Mougeot 2005, Streiffeler 2001), Cuba has an outstanding position in the actual perception of urban agriculture in times of economical crisis (cf. Altieri et al. 1999). 5 E.g. community garden movement in New York City (cf. Martinez 2009). 6 E.g. the creation of the world’s largest urban farm in vacant plots in Detroit (http://www.hantzfarmsdetroit.com) or the efficient city farming project in Berlin (http://www.ecf-center.de/).
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