Planning for Vita Activa—Labor, Work, and Action in a Communal Urban Gardening Project in Vienna

Abstract

Today, communal urban gardening (CUG) is a widespread phenomenon in European cities. Gardening has many positive qualities, ranging from growing healthy food to meaningful everyday life activities and political action. However, its integration into existing urban planning processes remains a challenge. Planning has a great influence on the qualities that can actually be realized by the gardeners. In order to develop a more appropriate planning process for CUG, a deeper understanding of the different activities that people engage in when they are gardening in an urban environment under given conditions is needed. In this paper, a garden project from Vienna is discussed against the background of Arendt’s theory of political action to advance the theoretical debates on the planning of CUGs. The case study shows that the three central spaces of a vita activa can emerge in one place if the appropriate framework conditions are provided through planning: containment, sovereign rights of use, egalitarian participation, plurality, and spatial organization towards the three activities of a vita activa: labor, work, and action.