Cultivation Builds Community: Narrative in Urban Planning for Community Gardens

Elisabeth Haefs

Cultivation Builds Community: Narrative in Urban Planning for Community Gardens

ISBN 978-3-98940-035-1, 258 S., 20 Abb., kt., € 32,00 (2024)

ISBN 978-3-98940-041-2, 258 S., 20 Abb., € 28,50 (E-Book/pdf, 2024)

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.

Anhang (pdf)

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)