Book review: re:development: voices, cyanotypes and writings from the green backyard edited by Jessie Brennan

In Re:development: Voices, Cyanotypes and Writings from the Green Backyard, editor and artist Jessie Brennan brings together a range of contributors to reflect on a grassroots communal growing project in Peterborough, ‘The Green Backyard’. Including the voices of those involved in the development of the site, this beautifully presented volume offers materially grounded insight into the importance of communal urban green spaces, writes Helen Traill

Book review: engaged urbanism: cities and methodologies edited by Ben Campkin and Ger Duijzings

In Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies, editors Ben Campkin and Ger Duijzings bring together contributors who are challenging assumptions surrounding urban research methodologies. Exploring questions of authorship, expertise and situated knowledge, this is a well-designed and timely book that showcases an array of creative and critical approaches to urban research, finds Helen Traill

Food banks, community gardens and I, Daniel Blake

My research into community growing projects and the film I, Daniel Blake seem initially to have little in common. Yet they both engage with a critique of the way our society deals with people in need. The indictment of the benefits systems in I, Daniel Blake is a powerful one. In moving, simple terms, it provokes the audience with its portrayal of the effects of the benefits system on human lives. I left the cinema with one question: how is it possible to help? Community growing projects do offer a possible answer, but a limited one

Book review: Reimagining sustainable cities: strategies for designing greener, healthier, more equitable communities by Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan

In Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities, Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan explore ways to make urban places more sustainable, drawing on examples from across the world. This book presents a rich and useful starting point for reimagining and reinvigorating cities today, writes Helen Traill. Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities. Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan. University of California Press. 2021

Feeding our sociological imaginations….

Helen Traill, PhD Student, reflects on the annual Sociology retreat at Cumberland Lodge. There comes a time at the end of January when the cold persists and London seems grey and dismal; when you can’t help but think grey, dismal thoughts. It is a good time to escape London for a weekend, and that’s part of what the annual Sociology department retreat to Cumberland Lodge offers. This year, our focus was on Using Theory in Sociological Research, as a complement to last year’s focus on methods. We were lucky to have a number of distinguished guests, but the value of the weekend goes much further than the experience of meeting with highly esteemed colleagues. Cumberland Lodge itself is very committed to educational work, and to be allowed to use it annually is itself a great boon to the department. But it also provided the most delightful setting–with a grand piano and grander staircases, a lot of antique furniture and tapestries, all in the peaceful setting of Windsor Park

Sociology as a Pandora’s Box

by Helen Traill, Doctoral Researcher in the LSE Department of Sociology Capturing quite what is so enriching in sociology is difficult. It’s the idea soup: the zing, the thrill of fitting things together; the frustration at past theorists when it doesn’t; the possibilities of new research paths; the opportunity to pursue your curiosity about the social world. But I knew this as a master’s student and then purposely left sociology, albeit for a mere 2 years. The reason I came back? Because sociology ruined me. That rich experience and exposure to a serious craft infiltrated my imagination and left an indelible stain

Book review: handbook of gentrification studies edited by Loretta Lees with Martin Phillips

In the Handbook of Gentrification Studies, Loretta Lees with Martin Phillips bring together contributors to explore different types of gentrification around the world, debate the term’s utility for describing diverse phenomena and consider modes of response. The volume offers a good starting point for understanding the wide-ranging discussions of gentrification, underscores the need to approach it flexibly, comparatively and through a cosmopolitan lens and also invites reflection on the complicated potential offered by communal resistance, finds Helen Traill

Book review: Reimagining sustainable cities: strategies for designing greener, healthier, more equitable communities by Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan

In Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities, Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan explore ways to make urban places more sustainable, drawing on examples from across the world. This book presents a rich and useful starting point for reimagining and reinvigorating cities today, writes Helen Traill. Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities. Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan. University of California Press. 2021

Community as idea and community practices: tensions and consequences for urban communal growing in Glasgow

In an era of ‘community empowerment’ and the devolution of welfare responsibilities to local groups, it is important to understand what community comes to mean in everyday life. Through two growing projects in Glasgow, this thesis discusses such meanings in local processes of exclusion and urban land development, and uses the sites to explore too the politics of collective growing. To do so, I consider the meanings, tensions and contradictions that emerge between the practices of being communal and the naming of such as community. I draw on a multi-sited ethnography and in depth interviews to elucidate the emergence of that which comes to be called community as a situated, empirical phenomenon. As an overburdened concept, I suggest community is not necessarily the most helpful analytical term to describe the collective activity in both case studies. Instead, I argue for seeing community primarily as a frame that guides and makes sense of communal practices. Whilst some hope has been located in community gardens and similar urban interventions as potential sources of renewal and collective resistance to the harsher vagaries of neoliberal capitalism, this thesis argues that communal growing does not present a systematic alternative, although it does appropriate urban land in occasionally subversive ways. Communal growing does however offer insights into the complexities of creating places for autonomy and survival in austere conditions. I reflect on the selective reproduction of class and social exclusions in growing spaces, and the tentative production of a time and space outwith the logics of the capitalist city, and yet within its bounds. Ultimately this thesis argues that community is not an anodyne or empty concept, but rather a dynamic and symbolically important idea shaping local urban life

The idea of community and its practice: tensions, disruptions and hope in Glasgow's urban growing project

The question of what community comes to mean has taken on increasing significance in sociological debates and beyond, as an increasingly politicised term and the focus of new theorisations. In this context, it is increasingly necessary to ask what is meant when community is invoked. Building on recent work that positions community as a practice and an ever-present facet of human sociality, this article argues that it is necessary to consider the powerful work that community as an idea does in shaping everyday communal practices, through designating collective space and creating behavioural expectations. To do so, the article draws on participant observation and interviews from a community gardening site in Glasgow that was part of a broader research project investigating the everyday life of communality within growing spaces. This demonstrates the successes but also the difficulties of carving out communal space, and the work done by community organisations to enact it. The article draws on contemporary community theory, but also on ideas from Davina Cooper about the role of ideation in social life. It argues for a conceptual approach to communality that does not situate it as a social form or seek it in everyday practice, but instead considers the vacillation between the ideation and practices of community: illustrated here in a designated community place. In so doing, this approach calls into focus the frictions and boundaries produced in that process, and questions the limits of organisational inclusivity