In recent years, research in urban agriculture (UA) initiatives has adopted a more critical and transdisciplinary approach, proposing that UA enables shifts in socio‐economic, community, environmental and urban paradigms. Following this critical agenda, this paper draws attention to the multi‐scalar transformative potential that participation in community gardens (as a form of UA) can provide to volunteers, informed by a feminist approach. Firstly, we review the literature on the diverse gendered benefits, and degrees of empowerment women have experienced from working in community gardens, both individually and collectively. Examples from the literature review are informed by concepts from feminist geographies that support the exploration of community gardens as sites of embodied, relational and multi‐scalar experience. Following that, we expand the discussion to review opportunities community gardens offer individuals to gain greater awareness of symbolic forms of oppression, and envision alternatives for social change, drawing on feminist geographies in ways that move ‘beyond gender’. These benefits are mostly informed by conscientisation, decolonial and feminist political ecology approaches. Finally, the paper suggests that community gardens can be conceptualised as feminist spaces, given their fluidity and capacity to enable critical perspectives in volunteers, which may result in alternative forms of political action. The paper concludes with suggestions for further critical research on UA spaces.

<p><b>Recent research has highlighted the importance of more-than-representational, more-than-human and feminist theories in the co-constitution of bodies, identities and places. In particular, the notion of affective atmospheres has been used by geographers to better understand the affective forces which are transmitted in place and how they help people to connect to and rework their subjectivities. On the other hand, community gardens have been explored within geography as spaces that foster community connection, social action, and critical approaches to the prevailing socioeconomic system.</b></p> <p>In this thesis, I explore the embodied (affective, emotional and multisensory) practices of volunteers working in community gardens paying particular attention to the gardens’ materialities and the agency of non-humans (sentient or not) present in these spaces. Adopting a more-than-representational approach, this thesis contributes to current debates around urban green spaces and urban agriculture and to emerging methodological approaches involving affective practices and more-than-humans. Using a qualitative mixed-methods methodology conducted in three community gardens in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, from January to July 2021, I explored the relations emerging from pre-cognitive responses to community gardens’ environments, acknowledging that these relations are also influenced and partially shaped by a reaction to socially constructed discourses and structures. In doing so, my thesis contributes to expanding the scholarship on innovative methodologies which explore embodied and non-discursive forms of knowledge production.</p> <p>My focus is on exploring how gardening in collective spaces can facilitate subjective meaning-making processes, raise gender awareness, and commit to an ethics of care that incentivise more horizontal and responsible co-existence with other beings, challenging dominant patriarchal and exploitative discourses and practices. Applying a feminist lens to the relations and practices that take place in community gardens also assisted me in exploring other aspects of the experience and agency of more-than-humans (including the women) that are also connected to feminist projects of experiential, adventurous, solidaristic, caring and inclusive forms of (co)becoming with the environment.</p> <p>In my thesis I argue that community gardens are embraced by affective atmospheres co-created by a myriad of entities, which facilitate dynamics of (co)becoming between the volunteers and the place from their embodied interactions, reflecting on participants’ agency and revealing multi-level practices of care (and exclusion). In doing so, this thesis reveals how atmospheres of creativity, safety, tranquility, and empowerment enrol and transform different actors in these gardens given the porosity between bodies and the environment. In the current context of mental health and environmental crises, my focus on the importance of affect and emotions in dynamics of (co)becoming in community gardens reveal the nuances of power struggles in the everyday, and possibilities to rework our relations with ourselves and the other more-than-humans that co-create these atmospheres.</p>