Political Gardening in a Post-disaster City: Lessons from New Orleans

Abstract

The study examines the emergence of urban gardening activities in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research conducted throughout the city between 2009 and 2012, it examines the ways in which various gardening projects in New Orleans exhibit different levels and scopes of political engagement, with a particular focus on how they manifest (sometimes in contradictory ways) in the projects' missions and practices. On the basis of these findings, it is argued that current conceptualisations of political gardening are too limiting and do not account for the nuances of how politics shape, challenge and materialise in urban gardening activities. By highlighting the ever-shifting social, economic, and political context of the post-disaster recovery, the study illustrates how urban gardening is inherently political, but cautions that the extent to which gardening can subvert social injustice in the city may be limited.

Crisis and post-crisis urban gardening initiatives from a Southern European perspective: The case of Barcelona

“…Rosol, 2012), changing social and political circumstances both shape and reflect the form function and culture of actions of urban gardens and their members' activities. What we detected in Barcelona since 2008, but especially since 2011, is the emergence of political gardening (Certomà and Tornaghi, 2015;Kato et al, 2014) or radical urban gardening (McClintock, 2014;Mudu and Marini, 2018). In the light of our context, we understand political gardening as a wide variety of citizen-led practices pursuing social and urban transformation.…”

“…The Network of Communitarian Gardens has an explicitly political logic, concerned with broader social and political aspects beyond gardening and food (Kato et al, 2014). It fully expresses a wide and radical notion of political gardening, aiming to use gardening as an immediate tool to subvert structural injustice and neoliberal urban policies through reappropriation of space for use-value (for example, food production, greenery and leisure, among other activities) rather than exchange-value (Certomà, 2011;Certomà and Tornaghi, 2015;McClintock, 2014;Mudu and Marini, 2018).…”

“…These new forms of urban gardening are a reflection of ongoing changes in urban governance as a response to environmental challenges and to the impacts of the financial crisis or the crisis in democratic representation that plagues Western democracies. Urban gardening has an important role in crisis and post-crisis cities (Baudry, 2012;Kato et al, 2014) and may enhance urban socio-environmental resilience (Camps-Calvet et al, 2015;Colding and Barthel, 2013). Urban gardens are also championed by post-capitalist and social justice urban movements in their alternative imaginaries of social-ecological transformation (Anguelovski, 2013;Camps-Calvet et al, 2015;Tornaghi, 2014), in what could be defined as political gardening (Certomà and Tornaghi, 2015;Kato et al, 2014) or radical urban gardening/horticulture (McClintock, 2014;Mudu and Marini, 2018).…”

The Role of Urban Agriculture as a Nature-Based Solution: A Review for Developing a Systemic Assessment Framework

“…In particular, the social benefits of urban regeneration processes are emphasized in the studies. Urban gardening initiatives on abandoned land promote social interaction [95,99,100] and support residents after disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans by fostering self-governance and reclaiming public space and identity [101]. However, due to limited spaces in cities vacant spaces can also be welcome options for urban development and residents need public support to access this land for gardening [94].…”

The city politics of an urban age: urban resilience conceptualisations and policies

“…As with the temporal focus, the notion of persistence as a point of departure for urban resilience policies may bind together a desire to bounce back and a desire to fall forward. Local bouncing backtype recovery efforts for New Orleans, for example, have resulted in important lessons and best practices that are now transferable to other locales (Fussell, 2015;Kato, et al, 2013). From a persistence point of view, in acknowledging that such disasters will recur, policy-makers and organisations such as city-to-city networks may put forward experimental governance regimes to trial fall forward recovery measures not only to increase urban resilience at the local scale, but predominantly to draw lessons on how urban resilience could be strengthened across the globe (Bulkeley, et al, 2015;Evans, et al, 2016).…”