Framing urban gardening and agriculture: On space, scale and the public

During the past ten years, both public policies and scientific research have tended to pay increasing attention to what they refer to as “urban gardening” and “urban agriculture”. In this paper I argue that the term “urban” poorly reflects the diversity of spatial references that underpin such projects. I explore the framing process of two competing agriculture and gardening projects in Geneva, Switzerland. I first show that the social and spatial frames of the projects, i.e. the central definition of a public and of a spatiality are inextricably linked. In the second part, I argue that by ranking the spatial units that ground the spatial frames of the projects according to the specific public they are aimed at, the most powerful actor makes competitive use of scale frames. This paper thus argues for more attention to the socio-spatial framing of urban agriculture and urban gardening projects. It contributes to the debate on the politics of scale by exploring how a scalar hierarchy is performed through the strategic deployment of spatial criteria by social actors. The hierarchy appears to be contingent and context specific, with prevalent notions of locality and proximity

Au-delà de l’agrarisation de la ville : l’agriculture peut-elle être un outil d’aménagement urbain ? Discussion à partir de l’exemple genevois

The contemporary relationship between city and agriculture is undergoing two processes: on the one hand the urbanisation of agriculture and on the other hand the ‘agriculturalisation’ of the city. The first proposition sounds obvious and refers to the effects of urban sprawl. The ‘agriculturalisation’ of the city may be a more surprising proposition, and is worth explaining. After identifying its main characteristics, we propose an analysis of this process in Geneva, Switzerland. In the last part, we put forward the limitations to the process, and by so doing, critically examine the role of agriculture as a tool for urban planning

De‐municipalisation? Legacies of austerity for England's urban parks

Parks are important urban infrastructures that contribute a broad range of health, environmental, social, and economic benefits. Despite this, UK parks' status as non‐statutory services makes them particularly vulnerable to local authority budget cuts. This paper focuses on parks in English cities as these were particularly affected by severe cuts to local government budgets 2010–2019. This period of austerity affected parks provision in various ways, including service reductions, increased reliance on volunteer labour, and pressure to generate commercial revenue. Combined with a series of other factors, including ongoing neoliberalisation, austerity‐driven changes left a range of physical, social, and institutional legacies. This paper explores these using the notion of de‐municipalisation to frame the discussion. The paper is based on an innovative synthesis of research conducted by the authors 2016–2022 and presented at the RGS‐IBG Annual Conference in 2021. The paper identifies that austerity‐driven changes included an experimental ‘shaking up’ of park governance, away from local authorities and with greater involvement from national‐level NGOs. Changes also involved a ‘breaking down’ of municipal management, with responsibility delegated to dedicated parks trusts but also to community groups and volunteers. Ultimately, austerity 2010–2019 altered parks governance, transforming the stewardship and condition of parks, reducing accountability and accessibility, and exacerbating inequities in parks provision. Rather than representing new directions, these changes perpetuate those instigated in previous austerity eras. The noted trend towards de‐municipalisation also reduces parks' capacity to serve as integrated infrastructures – something that may hinder efforts to make cities more sustainable and resilient

Events in the affective city: Affect, attention and alignment in two ordinary urban events

In a representational regime, planned urban events are used by urban planners to render urban projects visible and acceptable. As a corollary of the focus of urban studies on their representational dimension and in spite of a burgeoning literature on the notion of affective urbanism, the experiential character of events remains surprisingly unexplored. This paper argues that an ordinary regime of events is mobilised by city-makers to act on the embodied, affective experience of the city and on the ways urban dwellers know and act upon the city. By analysing planned urban events in their embodied, experiential dimension, we focus on the ways in which, through the design of ephemeral material dispositives, urbanists attempt to encourage citizens to incorporate ways of knowing and acting on space and on the modalities of knowing and acting that are at play. We stage an encounter between critical event studies and Ingoldian approaches to affect and attention, examining two urban events in a Swiss canton. We show how intense encounters with urban matter are staged in an attempt to modulate affects, guide attention, and produce alignment with a specific political project, asking urban dwellers either to embody a project still in the making or to cultivate expectations regarding an already-written future

« Les quatre mondes du lac Léman » ou explorer avec des non-voyants un paysage polysensoriel

Geographical research on blindness and visual impairment tends to focus on the difficulties and fears of the visually-impaired, thus excluding them from other approaches to sensitivity and perception, such as landscape studies. However, the daily experiences of those with visual impairments are not limited to such feelings. In an attempt to go beyond the usual oculo-centrism in landscape studies, this paper describes our exploration with visually-impaired people of the extent to which they can be said to experience feelings about landscape, and come to reflect on the polysensoriality of their perception of landscapes

Jardiner la ville néolibérale: la fabrique urbaine de la nature

Cette thèse traite de la nature en ville sous l'angle de sa fabrique, c'est-à-dire de l'agencement d'acteurs, d'outils et de discours qui concourent à la produire tant conceptuellement que matériellement. A travers une démarche ethnographique mobilisant la vidéo comme outil de recherche, elle s'intéresse à la mise en discours et en pratiques des politiques publiques de nature urbaine, et à la construction politique des rapports socionaturels en ville. Sur la base d'enquêtes de terrain menées dans le canton de Genève auprès de jardiniers professionnels et amateurs ainsi que de responsable administratifs, politiques et associatifs, ce travail fait l'hypothèse d'une néolibéralisation de la fabrique urbaine de la nature, et s'interroge sur la construction particulière de la nature qui la sous-tend. Elle ambitionne de comprendre comment les réformes néolibérales urbaines, qui mobilisent de nouveaux outils de gestion des services urbains et redéfinissent les relations entre services municipaux et société civile, construisent leur propre acception de la « bonne » nature. Cette thèse propose donc d'interroger, en partant des discours et pratiques des administrateurs et des jardiniers, la construction d'un rapport singulier à la matérialité dans ce qui est qualifié comme un régime urbain néolibéral

Les natures de la ville néolibérale

« Zéro phyto », gestion écologique : les espaces verts urbains longtemps conçus sur le mode « nature morte » de la tradition horticole se font de plus en plus vivants. Plus participatifs aussi, comme en témoigne la prolifé­ration des programmes de jardinage collectif. Cet ouvrage invite à com­prendre l’insertion de ces transforma­tions dans les nouvelles logiques de production de la ville et des services urbains. Sur la base d’enquêtes de terrain menées à Genève (Suisse) – auprès de responsables administratifs, politiques et associatifs, de travail­leurs de la nature, et de citadins-jar­diniers – il illustre la manière dont les politiques urbaines néolibérales faisant la part belle à l’événement, au managérialisme et aux partenariats publics-privés modèlent la ville vi­vante et le rôle qu’y jouent humains et non-humains. En détaillant le traitement réservé à différentes formes de végétaux – horticoles, vivriers, bio-divers – l’ouvrage développe des outils conceptuels pour une écologie politique du végétal urbain

Les natures de la ville néolibérale: Une écologie politique du végétal urbain

« Zéro phyto », gestion écologique : les espaces verts urbains longtemps conçus sur le mode « nature morte » de la tradition horticole se font de plus en plus vivants. Plus participatifs aussi, comme en témoigne la prolifé­ration des programmes de jardinage collectif. Cet ouvrage invite à com­prendre l’insertion de ces transforma­tions dans les nouvelles logiques de production de la ville et des services urbains. Sur la base d’enquêtes de terrain menées à Genève (Suisse) – auprès de responsables administratifs, politiques et associatifs, de travail­leurs de la nature, et de citadins-jar­diniers – il illustre la manière dont les politiques urbaines néolibérales faisant la part belle à l’événement, au managérialisme et aux partenariats publics-privés modèlent la ville vi­vante et le rôle qu’y jouent humains et non-humains. En détaillant le traitement réservé à différentes formes de végétaux – horticoles, vivriers, bio-divers – l’ouvrage développe des outils conceptuels pour une écologie politique du végétal urbain