Cultivation Builds Community

This book develops methods to analyse how urban planning texts narrate urban practices. It sets out to answer the question why community gardening projects can become exclusive and disadvantageous to urban communities and how such processes are entwined with narrative structure. The book applies this narrative analysis to texts from the cities of Portland (OR) and Essen (Germany). Cultivation Builds Community therefore uses an interdisciplinary approach to urban planning texts for municipal community gardening programmes, focusing on implied exclusions, inclusions, and the ubiquitous promise of community building. Through its persuasive nature and its benign appearance, this promise simultaneously obscures a lack of clarity as to how the community can be built, and who might be excluded in the process. In consequence, plans for gardens can go unquestioned and their impacts left unmonitored.


Formal community gardening programmes are increasingly used in municipalities' approaches to tackling social inequality as well as environmental issues. While these programmes are generally well-researched, a closer look at how this form of planning for gardening in an 'inclusive green city' works on a narrative level is overdue. This monograph is the first book-length study to address the narrative structure of community gardening texts in urban planning, and the first book to address this narrative topic in a transatlantic context, considering the respective situations of community gardening in the US and Germany.


CONTENTS


1Introduction 1
1.1"From Green to Grey to Green": Transatlantic City Scripts 3
1.2Dissertation Structure 7


2Context: Cities and Community Gardening 9
2.1Cities: Portland and Essen 9
2.2Introduction of Community Gardening 22
2.3Community Gardening in the US and Portland 25
2.4Urban Planning and Community Gardening 34
2.5Community Gardening in Germany and Essen 38
2.6Federal and Regional Community Garden Planning in Germany 40
2.7The "'Gardens as Good'-Dilemma" 48


3City Scripts: Sustainability, Inclusivity, and Utopian Models 51
3.1The Sustainability Script 51
3.2The Inclusivity Script 55
3.3Utopian Models and Urban Planning 62


4Method: The Analysis of Emplotment in Urban Planning 68
4.1Emplotment: A Narrative Scaffold 69
4.2Practical Research Methods 75


5Clearing & Enclosure: Creating a Garden 79
5.1Introduction 79
5.2Clearing the Urban Forest: Of Weeding and Other Horticultural Activities 84
5.3Enclosure: Fencing the Garden 102
5.4Conclusion 128


6"Cultivation Builds Community" (CBC): Tracing a Minimal Narrative 129
6.1Introduction 129
6.2Cultivation and Community Building 137
6.3Prefiguration: Precursors of "Cultivation Builds Community" 152
6.4Configuration: "Cultivation Builds Community" in Planning Documents 163
6.5Refiguration: Echoes of "Cultivation Builds Community" 183
6.6Conclusion 205


7The Fruits of Community Gardening: A Conclusion 207


8Works Cited 214