Cultivating A Social Ecology (Final Copy)...of cities (Carson, 1986). Recently the investigation of...
Transcript of Cultivating A Social Ecology (Final Copy)...of cities (Carson, 1986). Recently the investigation of...
Cultivating a Social Ecology:
Voices From Community Gardens On Social Nature and
Environmental Justice
by
Chris Bisson
Faculty of Geography and Environmental Studies
Carleton University
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Abstract
Community Gardens are spaces where certain ideas of society and nature come
together in ways that challenge conventional narratives of one another. Social ecology,
a school of thought focused on blurring the lines between the nature and people in
terms of justice and oppression, has primarily focused on materialist political economies
of cities (Carson, 1986). Recently the investigation of ontology have been introduced to
the field through poststructuralist theory, and community gardens provide a clear case
where the social constructs of discourse are important to understanding the nature-
societal dialectics of social ecology (Clark, 1997). Through a discourse analysis of
accounts given by community gardeners on their experiences gardening in Ottawa this
thesis shows that spaces such as community gardens, which are ultimately very limited
in their ability to radically alter the political economies of food production in cities, stand
as important spaces where more radical discourses on social ecology may occur.
These discourses are fundamentally important in building such movements as they act
as spaces for marginalized peoples to ontologically challenge their marginalization. As
written by bell hooks (2009), wilderness can become a place to challenge and resist
oppression. In the case of this thesis, community gardens provide an example of ways
in which other kinds of nature can produce similar effects.
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Table of Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................ p.4
Theory: Place, Society, Nature and Discourse ................................................... p.7
Methodology ........................................................................................................ p.20
Methodological Structure ........................................................................ p.20
Research Area ................................................................................... p.24
Research Method ................................................................................... p.26
Critical Discourse Analysis ........................................................................ p.31
The Gardens .............................................................................................. p.33
An Environmental Materialist History of Ottawa ................................................... p.35
Early Resource Development .............................................................. p.35
Victory Gardens and World Wars I & II ................................................... p.38
Post-War Urban Growth and The Rise of Community Gardening ........ p.40
Social Justice & Nature: Discourses of Social Ecology ........................................ p.44
Community Gardens and Social Justice ................................................... p.44
Community Gardens and Nature/Environment ........................................ p.50
Social Nature and Community Gardens as Heterotopias .................. p.56
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... p.62
Bibliography ......................................................................................................... p.66
Appendix I: Interview Questions ............................................................................ p.73
Appendix II: Maps ............................................................................................... p.75
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Introduction
Community gardens assume many forms, and take various meanings for a
diverse number of people. They can resemble anything from centrally-owned rental plot
systems to communitarian guerrilla gardens on abandoned land. The American
Community Garden Association (n.p.) defines it simply as, “Any piece of land gardened
by a group of people”. They are places both profound in their conceptual simplicity as
well as their elaborate political implications. As places where peoples and groups are
actively engaged in the process of using land to produce their own food, community
gardening assumes the right of people to have economic determination over the use of
city space. The nature of this geographic emancipation is that it problematizes the
dominant normative discourses on food production, and nature and community in the
urban landscape. Such counter-hegemonic discourses aim at producing an ontological
basis of changing the materialist conditions of peoples and communities. This research
seeks to illustrate how such cultural forms of resistance produce landscapes where
people are empowered within their economies as well as a part of local ecologies.
The combination of social ecology and poststructuralist methods sets the task of
integrating the critical examination of ontological assumptions into the framework of a
radical environmental materialism. In line with the Marxist materialist tradition of
research, social ecologists have sought to analytically understand power through the
investigation of control over economic and political affairs of groups and peoples.
Poststructuralism on the other hand has approached an understanding of power
through the investigation of cultural meaning and the relationships they produce.
Though these two methodologies have been subject to heated contestation in the social
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sciences in the past century, the works of the past few decades have shown how the
two can be successfully merged in pursuit of an understanding of power, society and
nature.
In the case of urban food economies the goal was to understand the sorts of
meanings and relationships that inform economic behaviour surrounding grassroots
food production systems in city space (Bell & Valentine, 1997). I focused on a small
aspect of the greater food system of Ottawa, which is food production through
community gardening. I have chosen this small-scale food system in order to
understand the relationship between alternative discourses on nature and city space,
and the movement to resist economic and cultural hegemonies of food production.
Focus on small-scale systems is important because it is in these margins where
resistance can occur. Specifically this research has focused on discourses of economic
empowerment delivered through communication of Ottawa’s urban-natural landscapes.
In keeping with the dialectic logic of the social ecology method I have set out to find
discourses, which deconstruct binaries that divide the urban from the natural in the city
landscape as well as the social from the environmental in the political landscape.
The social ecology of Murray Bookchin (2004) proposes that the global
destruction of ecological systems, which create social systems of hierarchy and
exploitation, that subject groups and peoples to oppression through systems of
hierarchy and exploitation that subject groups and peoples to oppression. He also
assumes that the process can be reversed, that through the empowerment of groups
and peoples in their economic determination they can both resist oppression and live
harmoniously as a part of global ecological systems (ibid.). The space in which this
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empowerment can partially occur is within the particular construct of social nature found
within environmental justice. While this space is created discursively it is also
manifested physically in forms such as community gardens that contest the meaning of
society and nature in landscapes producing heterotopias.
In this thesis I also seek contextualize the current social and environmental
condition of Ottawa through a history that parallels Bookchin’s social ecology narrative.
Through a heritage of colonial resource extraction, World Wars, and intense
urbanization, this history of Ottawa demonstrates why there was a need for community
gardening in the production of social and environmental justice.
The overall goal of this thesis is to gain an understanding of how social justice
through economic and social empowerment may be driven through discourses of nature
and how environmental discourse can act as an avenue for social justice.
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Theory: Place, Society, Nature and Discourse
Social ecology as a theory is now entering a new phase since the death of
Murray Bookchin in 2006. With the introduction of poststructuralist theory, new themes
such as social construction, discourse and power, and othering are combined with
Marxist and anarchist theories of capital, social movements and hierarchy. In its
application to geography social ecology can be understood through the lens of space
and place through principles of landscape, heterotopia, and social nature.
Social ecology begins with an understanding of environmental justice. This form
of justice has had many different meanings since the idea emerged in 1982 as a social
movement in Warren County, North Carolina. At that time, lower-income and racialized
peoples were subjected to the construction of a toxic waste dump near their homes with
no democratic input (McGurty, 2000). Not merely a movement advocating equality in
environmental risks and benefits, it has come to represent the democratic participation
of diverse communities over the control of natural resources (Scholsberg, 2004).
Schools of thought such as social ecology suggest a political framework that
attempts to explain oppression and ecological destruction and restore environmental
justice. Fundamentally social ecology seeks to examine the place of human
communities in ecological systems. Rather than focusing solely on the role of state
policy and economic systems in relation to the natural environment as in political
ecology, it also examines the role human power relationships and hierarchies play in
the health of ecological systems (Clark, 1997). In social ecology the well being of
society and nature are dialectically united in order to understand how the nature of one
effects the other. This theory identifies ecological destruction in situations of social
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marginalization, and equally, social marginalization in instances of ecological
destruction (Light, 1998; 5 - 8).
The dialectic link between social oppression and ecological destruction are
evident in cases where imperialist, statist and capitalist projects are involved in
simultaneously producing both. One case is in the development of the Athabasca Tar
Sands where the pursuit of profits for industries and governments depends on the
dismantling and toxification of the natural landscape, which occurs at the same time as
the experience of displacement and poisoning by impoverished and racialized peoples
living in the vicinity. In some aspects, the oppression of these peoples are the direct
result of the pollution generated as in the leaching of mine tailings into the water system
and its impact on human health. In other ways they are not directly correlated but part
of the same process, such as the government’s issuing of land grants to multi-national
industries for profit simultaneous to the retraction of community health funding and
education programming in Original Nations’ communities (Polaris Institute, 2010).
Social ecology exists through the confluence of two evolving theoretical streams.
The first begins with the critical evaluation of neo-Malthusian biological and cultural
ecologies in the 1970s by political economists forming the project of political ecology to
understand how markets and state policies effect the environment (Page, 2003). The
second is found in the intellectual tradition of the communist and mutualist
libertarianism from the mid-nineteenth century works of Emile Proudhon, Peter
Kropotkin and Michael Bakhunin (Carson, 1986). Social ecology, in this case acts as a
continuation of political ecology project under the new objective of critically examining
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the role of all hierarchical power structures and its role in the dialectic ecology of society
and nature.
Murray Bookchin is the name most recognized in the field of social ecology for
his contribution to naming and defining the school of thought. His works have focused
primarily on understanding the organization of communities in the urban environment.
His most prominent work focuses on modelling a form of “municipal libertarianism”,
which suggests that highly democratic federated municipalities replace the role of the
state. In this eco-utopian system he advocates the collective and mutualist organization
of resources in urban areas (Bookchin, 1986 -a). Because of their role in economic and
social empowerment as well as ecological rehabilitation in cities community gardens
stand as a clear example of this framework applied to the organization of urban land.
The relevance of Bookchin’s work in the study of geography and political ecology
is something that has remained disturbingly under-appreciated. His anthology
discusses a vast array of critiques and innovations that are almost specifically
geographic in theme. From his work discussing the descaling of political representation
over space through his libertarian municipalism, to his historical materialism of the
development of urban landscapes Bookchin would certainly be considered a political
geographer in today’s departments (Bookchin, 1986 -b). The implications of his works
on resistance movements are also incredibly geographic in nature such as the Reclaim
the Streets Movement (Guardian, 2006), which is a clear case study in using landscape
discourse as resistance. He is also a pioneer of interdisciplinary studies, engaging in a
political ecology of urban communities far before the establishment of the field. He also
was an ground breaker for the environment movement, publishing his first book Our
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Synthetic Environment on the dangers of pesticide use in March 1962, before Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring in September of 1962.
Despite his prolific success and influence in the fields of urban studies and
environmental ethics through his effective criticisms of biocentrism and ecocentrism,
Bookchin’s continued assertion of control over the direction of the field throughout his
life limited its application. Through powerful criticism of his contemporaries, social
ecology become stuck in the materialist tradition of thought (Light, 1998; 343 - 284).
Bookchin’s persistent neglect of feminist theory and alimentation other ecological
schools of thought leading social ecology to the margins of the social sciences (Carson,
1986).
Likely his most controversial stand was his unrelenting attack on all that he
considered to be “postmodernism”. Labelling all continental philosophy stemming from
Friedrich Nietzsche as “postmodern nihilism”, he has criticized the spectrum of theorists
that have challenged the objectivity of reason in epistemology as self-referential. He
claims that such arguments are dangerous and liberalist because of the supposedly
bleak unimportance it places on revolution and liberation. Though his critical works on
“postmodernism” show a deep and intriguingly novel insight on the genealogy of this
school of thought, it is unfortunate that he has disregarded all critiques of ontology
entirely. It may be true as he very effectively argues that Heideggerian and existentialist
postmodernism are specifically nihilist and anti-humanist in ways that have generated
complacency to oppression and has resulted in the subjection of peoples to unthinkable
acts of violence. He also criticizes the likes of Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida as the
basis of the failure of the New Left in the Paris student riots of 1968 because of their
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complete vagueness on alternative societal structures in the face of seemingly
inevitable cycles of power imbalance (Bookchin, 1995). However what Bookchin
neglects is the praxis that has been driven through the work of poststructuralists in
producing anti-oppressive and consensus decision making models. Poststructuralism in
practice has also produced the bases of a wide range of feminist and post-colonial
projects that tangibly challenge patriarchy and imperialism from a new cultural critique
that is often unproblematically combined with social movements aimed at resisting
capitalism and governments, and constructing alternative political economies.
Furthermore poststructuralism has acted as the vehicle to challenge the forms of
oppression that have been largely taken for granted in materialist discourse such as the
marginalization of the differently abled, gay/lesbian/bi/trans (GLBT) peoples and every
intersection produced in the connection of different oppressions (Dempsey & Rowe,
2004).
In the last decade this use of poststructuralism has become popular and
theorists have began re-evaluating the role other critical fields of social sciences in
social ecology. One need only look at the introduction of poststructuralism into political
ecology to see the appeal of opening up social ecology to what lays beyond
environmental materialism (Peet & Watts, 1996). However it is interesting to note just
how absolutely opposed both Bookchin and Foucault would have been to the use of
these two methodologies simultaneously. Bookchin opposed the supposed “nihilism” of
poststructuralism, and Foucault has said that in terms of nature: “My back is turned to
it” (Darier, 1999). It seems that this paper ventures into dangerous territory by mixing
the works of two thinkers.
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Before advancing any further in this mixing of theories Foucault’s
poststructuralism will need some explanation. Poststructuralism is essentially a study of
how power and relationships are negotiated over the contestation of meaning
(Murdoch, 2006; 4 -11). It holds great significance for the discipline of geography
because it acts as an effective tool for understanding how relationships are
communicated in space (Darrier, 1999). For Foucault power and knowledge are
inseparable, and whereas space as a concept is socially constructed it is always
subject to control and contestation through power/knowledge (Murdoch, 2006; 47 - 53).
Landscapes and topologies can then be seen as diverse sets of discourse competing
for meaning.
One important postsructuralist concept important to the field of geography is
heterotopology. In a lecture for architects in 1967 Foucault (2008) delivered a lecture on
what he called “Les Espace D’Autres” (Of Other Spaces). In this lecture he described
an ideal situation where sites are defined by their discursive contestation, which he calls
heterotopias. Heterotopias are places where the real and imagined are mixed. Space
and place exist both in tangible as well as imagined forms. One goes about in the world
constantly interacting and negotiating with material things forming the tangible
landscape we live in. As well one exists in an imagined sort of space were people are
able to act out ideas and ideals, articulate and understand their surroundings, and
dream and conceive of their next steps and actions in the material world.
Sometimes these two types of space can become confused or substituted. One
may switch a real place for an imagined and create a utopia (both “oú” = not a place,
and “εὖ”= good place) (Foucault, 2008). This is the sort of phenomenon that occurs
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where the experience of a place is internalized and coupled with an idealized value
(Soja,1996), similar to the meaning of Walden Pond to the worldviews of independence
and spiritual nature of Henry David Thoreau (1995). The utopia can also be a place that
has never been experienced but can mythologically be associated with a possible site
for a set of idealized values (Foucault, 2008), such as the Island Republic of Utopia in
Thomas More’s Utopia (Gallagher,1964). The possibility of different forms of utopias are
literally as infinitely versatile as the human mind can be, however what remains
important is that they symbolize an idealized set of values (or its perfect opposite:
“dystopia”), but they are fundamentally places that do not exist (Foucault, 2008).
Conversely, the opposite can occur. One can attempt to materialize an imagined
place in the material world. This is the first condition in the construction of what Michel
Foucault (2008) has described as “heterotopia” (“hetero” = other, “topia” = place). Such
places are equally as versatile as utopias because such places are essentially utopias
brought into creation in the material world. They can range from theatres, graveyards,
spas, museums, puritan colonies, prisons and importantly, gardens (Foucault, 2008;
Johnson, 2006; Raschig, 2007;). Edward Soja (1996; 145 - 163) suggests that Foucault
gave vague examples specifically to not limit its possibilities. Foucault describes
heterotopias as idealized places situated in the material world in ways that invert, distort
and reveal the meanings of the ideal place and the space around it. They are
supposedly places that are “perfectly other”, as in they are always outside convention
(Foucault, 2008).
Foucault and many of the authors who have written about and used his concept
of heterotopia have spent much time discussing how gardens are heterotopias, and
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form heterotopologies (Johnson, 2006; Soja,1996). Foucault describes a short history of
this heterotopia originating in the Persian empire both in the forms of groomed sections
of plants as well as intricate carpets (“winter garden”). Such gardens had a very
cosmological meaning; the edges and corners would represent the corners of the
known world and the inside would be an interpretation of how the world is ordered.
Such gardens did not resemble maps or literal representations of things found in space,
but the decorative patterns would indicate the sorts of harmonies and flows that were
an idealized cosmology of nature seen by its creator(s). In many ways it seems that
gardens have kept this quality in modern-Western society in ways that idealize the
politics of nature and society.
Gardens of various purposes are able to hold the wide ranges of presumptions of
the ones who create and interact with them. Gardens involve the culmination of values.
They are both microcosms of the way people see the world and macrocosms of the way
the world ought to be. They are places where people negotiate their relationships with
nature; furthermore they are places where people develop their ideas of what nature is.
Community gardens can alter the space around them and deconstruct the sorts
of normative assertions on the urban landscape. Bromley (2004) describes how public
gardening can liberate city space from rigid neo-liberal rules of access through private
property ownership. In Vancouver, one community demonstrated that they were able to
appropriate private land near their homes as a shared commons area through public
gardening. This community was able to create this form of collective property because
they could defend their use of the space simply by using it, rather than letting it sit as a
grassy plot privately owned by somebody outside the community.
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Another concept important to poststructuralism in geography is social nature
(Braun & Wainwright, 2001). The idea of nature can be a tremendous number of things
making it extremely difficult if not impossible to define. This is possibly because the
natural is subject greatly to perspective. It seems that throughout modern environmental
discourse, the central question of what is natural is best defined by what it is not. For
instance nature is not pollution, sprawl, or industry. Nature, it would seem in modernity
has been created through a dichotomous process, one that has been heavily binary and
based in power. Ideas of what nature is can be traced to traditional, religious and
governmentalized systems of values. Ultimately one has to negotiate what is natural in
order for there to be a nature, which reveals that nature is in fact a very social product.
After all, nothing that humans have described as nature has ever declared itself as
nature.
Nature, existing much by virtue of the language, and the literature that has
produced it, faces places that defy and bend its own definition. Places such as
brownfields, parks, jungles, farms, rubber forests and gardens are greatly liminal places
of overlap between these two realms of definition. Is nature only what is pristine? If this
is the case, how much human interaction is needed for it no longer to be nature? Can
places that are constructed by humans ever be nature? Or perhaps nature exists on a
temporal basis. Maybe some place that was once natural can be shaped and exploited
by humans into the non-natural. Then, after years of neglect it can be transformed back
into nature. Here the problematic of modern binary language is found. Where can we
draw the lines between modernity’s masterful and dominating definitions of things?
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As discussed in Lormier (2008), nature often occurs in hybridity. In this idea
“Relational Geography ... nature-society, urban-rural are fluid, complex and emergent
from situated interactions and connections, rather than fixed as immutable essences.” It
is for this reason that ecosystems exist in the most urban of environments as well as
human-created materials being found in the most pristine of wildernesses. However this
is not to suggest that nature does not exist and the values constructed around it are
absolutely relative. There are certainly natures that experience less human activity
therefore more stable ecological systems, but it has been suggested as in Darrier
(1999), that environmental action that would ground itself in a perfected definition of
pristine nature would actually be very unsustainable. It would also be ignorant of the
histories of the World’s indigenous populations that have inhabited the vast majority of
the planet’s land surface.
It would seem that policies and actions prescribing absolute conservation and
protection could establish a hierarchy of exploitation which would privilege certain
natures over others to the detriment of ecological systems as a whole. It is critical to
recognize the sort of marginalization of humans such assumptions can produce. As
discussed by Beenash Jafri (2009), such natural absolutisms as in the “apocalypse talk”
prevailing widely in environmental movements have produced a sorts of “environmental
racism” that would see certain marginalized peoples exploited and abused for the sake
of saving the world from an impending ecological apocalypse. Murray Bookchin (2005)
has argued that ecological destruction ought to be mitigated for both anthropocentric
and ecocentric reasons, however the social reality must never be ignored in the
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creation of solutions, because such problems are absolutely socially produced. This is
what Beenash Jafri (2009) has described as protecting environmental justice.
It is then for the sake of environmental justice that discourses on the
environment be deconstructed in order to reveal different forms of social privilege and
oppression. It is the assumption of this research that the examination of discussion
surrounding nature can reveal oppressive assumptions implicit to environmental
discourse, propagating marginalization, privilege and hierarchical structures of power.
Quigley (1999) suggests that power creates nature out of ideology, and it is specifically
the powerful that aims to make what is principally cultural into nature. Engaging nature
in a libertarian socialist sense aims to establish a counter-hegemony within
environmental discourse to challenge presuppositions of privilege. Once such
assumptions are found it can then be possible to challenge environmental planning and
policy in order to mitigate its effects towards environmental justice.
Nature in this respect also becomes a place in discourse. Whereas ideas of what
is possible are influenced by the technologies of discipline in normative discourse,
nature by this alternative meaning can act as an “other” space. This space allows for
the construction of a place to subvert norms of gender, race, class, ability, age etc.
Agents and discourses marginalized through the normative assertions of urban
landscapes form what Derrida has called an “hauntology” (1994; 10). Those
systematically othered are allowed to come together at the margins, which constantly
threatens to destabilize the central ontology, in other words they haunt the dominant
paradigm with the fear of being overthrown.
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Bell hooks (2009; Soja, 1996: 83 - 105) wrote that one is able to confront one’s
marginalization when it is centred discursively. For instance when she writes about
growing up as a girl in an African-American community under segregation in Kentucky,
she notes that it was through her literature that she was able to confront her
marginalization. She illustrated the beauty of her home and family and the sentiment
that she attached to them, and was able to centre her home place as the core of the
landscape opposite to what the normative spatial discourse of the political class of the
Southern-States would have dictated. The power of upper-class white people to
privilege their places as the centre and the communities of African American poor as
other was challenged as people read bell hooks work and realized their agency to
determine what parts of landscapes are important and beautiful.
Community gardens act as such places. They are often sites left derelict or
fallow and are othered in the normative discourses of the city and capitalism. They are
places in such discourse that are not acceptable to be in and are associated with
people who do not behave “normally”. If these people were to use such spaces to
produce a counter narrative to the normative prescriptions of urban space they may
also be able to counter the process of their being othered.
Nature is also described as other in the urban narrative. If there are spaces that
grow plant-life that are abandoned and no longer used in the production of financial
wealth they are then called “brownfields”. Nature as a result of binary opposition of
urban discourse, is then wilderness untouched by humans. Community gardens
problematize these narratives because they demonstrate nature as both flourishing in
the city and incompatible to capitalist spatial norms.
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This paper then seeks to investigate assumptions at play in alternative
discourses of nature in urban space. Through the investigation of grassroots initiatives
such as community gardens, it will be possible to see what sorts of discursive natures
hold the capacity to act as inclusive spaces of environmental justice. This research will
reveal that community gardens incorporate assumptions about nature into an urban
spatial discourse of grassroots community organizing therefore creating the sort of
social ecology discussed by Murray Bookchin.
What is possible is to witness how the social ecological dialogue of nature in the
discourse of urban space can help to change the meaning of nature of other spaces
outside of the emplacements of grassroots action. Through the mechanisms of
heterotopia such spaces might hold the potential of forming a meaningful counter-
hegemonic dialogue in urban spatial discourse inviting people to challenge
environmentally unjust presuppositions in their surroundings. Put simply, if people
identify and internalize sites such as community gardens as places where
environmental justice takes place, they may look at other places such as public parks
and green spaces and ask why these spaces are not being used for justice, as opposed
to privilege.
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Methodology
In this research qualitative methods will be used to produce the sorts of detailed
and in-depth descriptions of personal experiences and interpretations necessary to
understand the sorts of meanings and relationships that are produced through
community gardening. Particularly this research will be structured around
poststructuralist and feminist methods of discourse analysis. For this to occur
effectively, it is important that in the description of the methodology I critically reflect on
my position as a researcher. Using this approach I hope to generate an in-depth and
meaningful interpretation of the ways community gardens can produce environmental
justice for its participants and surrounding community.
Methodological Structure
Inspired by the agricultural political ecology research of Melissa Miller on
community supported agriculture in Eastern Ontario (2008), this research aims to
investigate the socio-economic, historical and political factors that shape the community
garden experience in Ottawa. The poststructuralist philosophy of Foucault asserts that
all observation and knowledge is partial to “the truth”, which is ultimately shaped
through the power found in interpersonal relationships (Murdoch, 2006). Therefore what
is needed in addition to diverse and deep accounts of community gardening is an
elevated and critical awareness of power and representation found in the observation of
the researcher.
Feminist research methodologies advocate for a socially and politically active
hands-on research approach opting for the researcher to engage with issues as a part
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of the emancipatory process of the participants and communities they interact with. The
critical assumption of this “conciousness-raising” approach is that the social role of
research has traditionally been given exclusive access to those privileged through
patriarchy, race, class, ability, etc (Sarantakos, 2004). Therefore, this research takes
side with community gardeners in order to use the position of the researcher to provide
a participatory means of bringing alternative voices into the process of knowledge
production. As suggested by (Peet & Watts, 1996), rather than speaking for people by
simply producing a representation of the community garden experience in Ottawa, I
seek to speak with the sentiments of resistance I encounter in my experience with other
community gardeners.
My background in community gardening is fairly limited but very committed. As
both a social and ecological activist as well as a participant in a food service workers’
co-operative in Ottawa my interest in social justice and ecology are essential aspects of
my personal identity. Having a mother who was an avid gardener and a partner who
enjoyed a similar upbringing the influence of gardens in my life have been long-felt. This
coming spring will commence my second season of community gardening. Though the
practice is fairly new to me in the past year I have fully immersed myself in the
community garden world of Ottawa. Therefore I fully support the success of community
gardening in Ottawa, and my engagement in this research aims to elevate the
discourse of fellow community gardeners. The objective of this research is to
normatively produce a counter-hegemonic discourse in order further the cause of
community gardens in Ottawa.
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In this research, interviews were used to obtain the in-depth qualitative data
needed to conduct a discourse analysis. For the study, the use of uniquely quantitative
data would have proven ineffective and the sorts of data returned would have merely
described the nature and composition of the population involved in community gardens
thus reporting little about the experiences of individuals and groups. More efficient
methods of qualitative data collection such as surveys which may, on the other hand
return a greater number of respondents than more in-depth methods, are, on the other
hand restricted to the description of basic phenomenological trends and provide little
information about the social construction of such phenomenon (Kitchin & Tate, 2000).
Although group interviews with different participants of distinct garden projects
would have likely proven beneficial or even preferable by providing an opportunity to
study how they interact (Kitchin & Tate, 2000), efforts to contact gardeners and co-
ordinate discussion groups would have provided a logistical burden too great to
manage with real effectiveness. Such efforts would have undoubtedly been challenged
by the dispersal of gardeners away from garden communities during the winter months
when this research took place. In any case, I estimate that for the additional data that
may have resulted for analysis would only have been marginally better. A better
understanding of the relationships between gardeners may have generated an
understanding of the internal organization of community garden projects, however this
was beyond the means and focus of this research and may be a valuable topic for
further research.
This study may have been effectively conducted through ethnographic or
participatory/activist observation where the researcher is embedded as a group
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member actively participating in the community while documenting their experience and
conducting interviews with other members (Kitchin & Tate, 2000). This would produce
the type of detailed observations pertaining to group member interactions as in group
interviews, however again due to time and resource limitations this method was not
selected.
In-depth personal interviews were chosen for this research because of the
possible compromise between efficiency and effectiveness of producing detailed
accounts of meanings and relationships (Kitchin & Tate, 2000). Personal interviews
allowed me to be more flexible in accommodating the research participant. I was able to
make contact with a participant and have them set a time and location around their
often very busy schedules and discuss their community garden experience for as long
as they wished. The use of semi-structured interviews allowed me to pose a variety of
questions from a predetermined list (Appendix I) and ensured the flexibility to ask
further questions and explore interesting topics in order to tease out information
specifically pertaining to meanings and relationships in their experiences. This method
also offered the opportunity for me to conduct the interview in a more conversational
and informal style, which enabled me to maintain an atmosphere of research
participation and solidarity necessary for this research to act as a platform to elevate
discourse (Sarantakos, 2004). A more constrictive methodology would jeopardize the
role of the researcher as a part of the movement by exacerbating the power dichotomy
and tension of the normative authoritative and masculine gaze, discussed as the
medical gaze by Foucault (1973).
23
Additionally in identifying primarily as part of the movement myself I am able to
alleviate some of the researcher-subject power relationship that would place the
researcher in the role of the creator and holder of impartial truth, and the participant in
the role of the subject who is without agency in the objective realm of knowledge
production. This is not to say that the division of such roles is absent from this research,
there is always a performative narrative inherent to the discourse on research which
informs the roles and behaviours in the researcher-subject power relationship.
Decisions such as topic and direction of conversation as well as analysis and
interpretation of the interviews are given to the researcher through their professional
position of privilege over information (Rose, 1997). The power relationship inherent in
the performativity of the interview situation is bound to influence the responses given by
the participants. For this reason it is important in analysis to take all interviews not as a
depiction of truth but as a contextual interpretation influenced by the participant’s role in
the interview (Valentine, 2001).
Research Area
The geographic scope of this research is limited to community gardens found
within the Ottawa City wards of Somerset (14) and Capital (17) (Appendix II - Fig. 1 &
2). These two wards for the purpose and definition of this study will be referred to as
Ottawa’s Core. These two sections were selected because they held the highest spatial
concentration of community gardens by ward (Appendix II, Fig. 3).
Somerset (14) includes the neighbourhoods of Downtown Ottawa, Centre Town,
Lebreton Flats and Centretown West. Capital (17) includes the neighbourhoods of Old
24
Ottawa East, Old Ottawa South, the Glebe, Heron Park, Carleton University and
Riverside.
A brief analysis of the 2006 Canadian census data by ward reveals a great deal
about the social geography of Ottawa’s population (City of Ottawa - a, 2009). For
instance 2008 permit data indicates that population density is highly concentrated in
Ottawa’s Core (Appendix II, Figure 4). As well 2006 census data on average income per
person suggests that wealth in Ottawa is concentrated in two areas (Appendix II, Figure
5). The first is banded in the outer perimeter of the urban limits of the Ottawa-Carleton
area, especially places such as Kanata and South Nepean. As well, wealth is
concentrated in the Capital ward, one of the places of interest to this study. Places
where wealth is least accumulated is in areas such as Rideau-Vanier as well as wards
across the southern portion of the urbanized Ottawa area. This provides a very
interesting situation to investigate, since the City’s Core, the area with the highest
concentration of community gardens experiences a dramatic spatial disparity of income.
This is likely to be seen along the boundaries of Centertown and The Glebe, or Sandy
Hill and Old Ottawa South.
The spatial distribution of recent immigrants having settled in Canada in the past
five years (Appendix II, Figure 6) indicate that on the whole, settlement seems to occur
in the centre of Ottawa’s urban area in the wards of Somerset, Capital, River and
especially Alta Vista. The distribution seems to fade outwards towards the peripheries of
the region with the exception of one outlier. That is, the Bay ward which holds one of
the highest proportions of recent immigrants despite its location straddling the
Greenbelt in West Ottawa. The spatiality of unemployment (Appendix II, Figure 7)
25
shows people are most likely to be unable to obtain employment who live in the urban
band around the city’s core. These are places such as Rideau-Vanier, Alta Vista, River,
and Bay. Important to note is that within the City’s core all wards report significant levels
of unemployment, but Rideau-Vanier reports the highest. As well neighbouring ward
Kitchissippi reports unemployment rates towards the lower end in the region.
What these figures seem to suggest is that there is a relationship between the
concentration and existence of community gardens, and higher population densities,
unemployment rate, lower incomes (not all cases) and greater presence of recent
immigrants. Of course there no way to extrapolate any sort of causal link between any
of the census data and the phenomenon of community garden. It is very likely that the
motivations for people to start and participate in community gardens is very diverse.
What seems evident out of all of the 2006 census data is that places where community
gardens exist are places that have greater population densities, therefore more
urbanized. This could offer a partial explanation implying that the urban nature of the
environment in which community gardening occurs, or perhaps that community gardens
would be redundant in other less dense parts of the city where growing crops on one’s
private property or on a farm as a means of livelihood is possible.
Research Method
In this research I conducted six semi-structured interviews with participants
holding various roles in the Ottawa community of community gardens. The participants
were selected through a variety of means. Initially it was intended that potential
participants would be approached via e-mail contacts provided corresponding to
26
different community gardens listed on the Community Garden Network website run by
Just Food Ottawa. Upon broadcasting the request for participation only one person
responded, as well as another who was sent the e-mail. After this unexpectedly low
return I then resorted to my secondary option, which was to use a “snowball” method
which entailed asking my participants to identify other potential participants. However
this did not result in any new participants, at which time I turned to various networks
involved in community gardening such as the Ontario Public Interest Research Group
(OPIRG), the Garden Spot food collective, as well as the Sonianda Sofia Workers Co-
operative. Through these networks I was able to contact four other participants.
Due to the in-depth nature of the interviews the ideal number of participants that
could return a sufficient amount of testimony for a meaningful analysis would have been
between five and ten (Kitchin & Tate, 200). The difficulties encountered during recruiting
allowed me to attain six interviews, which, though in the lower end of the range was still
acceptable to conduct an analysis. The number of participants may have been very
small in relation to the number of community gardener there likely are in the city of
Ottawa, which limits this study’s ability to describe the popular experience of the
phenomenon in the city. In this way, this research cannot speak for the experience of
community gardeners in Ottawa as a whole. However given the nature of the
candidates chosen, their experiences valuable through their deep and diverse
involvement with the movement qualifies the number of participants chosen for the in-
depth stories accounted of the community gardening phenomenon in Ottawa. In this
way, this research provides examples of what is possible through community gardening
in Ottawa.
27
The interviews for this research took place within the month of January, and
where conducted in a variety of locations. One interview took place at the office of the
Community Garden Network, one took place in a downtown café, another took place at
the Sonianda Sofia Workers Co-operative, two took place in quiet spaces found at
Carleton University and one took place at my house over supper. They were presented
with an informed consent form to sign describing the objectives of the research as well
as the benefits and risks they may encounter through participation. In the case of
benefits it was described that this research seeks to elevate the discourse of community
gardening and may benefit community gardeners through greater inclusion in academic
literature. For risks the participant was assured that they would face no risk of physical
harm outside of the normal course of their day. They were also assured that their
identity would be kept as confidential as I could provide to the best of my ability. This
means that none of their personal information would be shared and anything that could
directly reveal their personal identity would be destroyed upon the completion of the
research project. As well the form informed them that they were welcome to not answer
any of the questions as well as retract any statements made or even the interview in its
entirety if they wished. Despite all of these measures not one participant expressed any
wishes to remain anonymous or retract or refuse any questions or statements. However
no identities will be revealed in this research.
The six interviews represent the experience of participation with five different
community gardens in Ottawa. For most of the participants their experience was with
one garden, however for one, their experience was with three different gardens. Two of
the gardens discussed in the interviews represent the experiences of two participants.
28
Not all gardens discussed expressed direct community involvement, in the case of two
gardens discussed by one participant they had only participated for a brief period. All
gardens represented in this research fall within the research area parameters discussed
above. Three participants discussed their involvement with gardens outside of the
research area. For the sake of specific experiential details the accounts of these
gardens have been omitted, however where they provide general insight to community
gardening in the Ottawa context information will be used in the analysis.
Of those interviewed four were female and two were male. Though all accounts
discussed the involvement of both men and women in their community gardens,
information of the gender composition of the garden was not given and there is no
information as to the participation of transgendered or transexual peoples. It had initially
been planned to attain gender parity in the selection of participants, however since
sampling of participants was left mostly to chance this was not possible. However the
merit of privileging the female voice in this research will be discussed in the analysis
section.
The interviews themselves took a very organic style suited to the research
participant. If the participant expressed a greater interest in discussing the physical
details, the social aspects, or even spiritual meaning of their garden I would word
questions to address the topics relevant to this research in ways that allowed for
questions to access these realms of significance. For instance one participant was
interested in the details of layout and organization of the garden, in which case I asked
questions about its meaning in relationship to the landscape of Ottawa through
comparison of physical layout. I asked “what relationship does your community garden
29
space have with city space surrounding it?” to which he explained that for him it
diminished the environmentally destructive aspects of the area. However where
conversations strayed off topic, where the conversation fit with the nature of the
questions listed, or where the conversation failed to go any further questions were
asked directly from the interview guide sheet. When there were points or ideas that
needed clarification, or where there were new ideas not imagined during the
construction of the interview guide impromptu questions were asked. For the majority of
time spent interviewing the participants conversations were a very fluid dynamic and
covered all topics naturally.
Initially a list of two pages of questions were drafted for the interviews. In the
interview pilot run certain questions were identified as returning repetitive or redundant
answers and were removed. In the end the list consisted of one page of seventeen
potential questions. In the interviews certain questions were skipped if topics were
covered in conversation through previous questions or if it seemed that there would be
no relevance to what the participant had expressed as part of their community garden
experience. Interview duration expected to be between half-an-hour to fourty-five
minutes, however they ranged between twenty minutes and an hour the majority lasting
about half-an-hour.
For the sake of greater ease of conversation participants were asked if I could
record the conversation, which would be destroyed immediately upon transcription. The
interviews were recorded on a digital audio recorder, which were then downloaded onto
my computer and transcribed. The interviews were transcribed verbatim with certain
simplifications for the comments and questions of the researcher as well as omissions
30
for any parts that went into excessive detail of experiences outside the research area of
interest. Some of the interviews were interrupted unintentionally by people who did not
realize that the interview or recording was taking place. None of those interactions were
transcribed or will be noted in this research.
All participants were interested in the research and therefore very engaged in the
interview conversation. Upon offering their participation in this research all participants
were very enthusiastic about the research and the majority have requested a copy of
the final copy for themselves, which I have consented to. Some participants offered
additional resources in the form of literature, pictures, book suggestions and websites to
visit. The interviews where exceptionally informative and it seemed that both the
participants and myself benefited from new ideas and knowledge as a result. Before
and after the interviews technical aspects of gardening as well as events and plans for
the coming season were discussed. In the end these interviews allowed me to meet
other community gardeners which will benefit the network of community gardeners for
the opportunities to share information and resources that it has created. In the spirit of
solidarity with community gardening this project produces what it aims to discover.
Critical Discourse Analysis
In this research I have conducted a critical discourse analysis of the six
interviews. Critical discourse analysis based on Foucault’s genealogical method
(Naples, 2003) is the identification of discourses that produce, transmit and challenge
power through meaning and relationships. “Critical discourse analysis is ‘critical’ in the
sense that it aims to reveal the role of discursive practice in the maintenance of the
31
social world, including those social relationships that relations that involve unequal
relations of power” (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002). In this research I have identified how
concepts of nature and social justice are framed and linked by the participants in their
experiences of community gardening. It is also very important that in discourse analysis
there be a clear understanding of who is describing their experiences (ibid.). In order to
provide this, participants were given the chance to express their background with
regard to community garden and what brought them to it.
It is important to note the role or the researcher in the analysis of the interviews.
Whereas the researcher ultimately acts as the gate keeper in the production of
knowledge in academic discourse, it would be naive to assume that the social position
of the researcher will not influence the dissemination of the interviews. Because this
research deals so specifically with the concepts of justice it is imperative to understand
how speaking (however indirectly) for people from a position of privilege may propagate
an oppressive power dynamic. For this reason it is important in an analysis that the
research intentionally take side with the movement to allow people to speak for
themselves and to engage any privilege towards the deconstruction of oppression in
solidarity with the struggles of peoples united in their marginalization. Proponents of
objectivity in analysis may suggest that one must report “both sides” of a situation in
order to gain a removed and complete understanding of a phenomenon (Kitchin & Tate,
2000). However adding the discourses of the privileged into this analysis would act to
further marginalize counter-hegemonic discourse and limit the radical objective of this
research.
32
The Gardens
Represented in these interviews are five different community gardens found
within the Ottawa downtown area (Appendix II, Figure 8). Though all gardens shared
similar physical and organizational traits, all gardens were very unique. These
differences in each garden were the result of the diversity of geography and peoples in
Ottawa’s downtown area.
The first garden accounted in the series of interviews was the Sweet Willow
Organic Community Garden. This garden is organized through the social housing
corporation Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation and it is located at 45 Rochester
Street. It has twelve plots located on the roof of an underground heating plant and
involves members of the adjacent social housing unit as well as the surrounding
community.
The next garden is the Garden Spot Food Collective garden. This garden was a
side project of the “G-spot’s” project of providing healthy vegan food at a pay-what-you-
can basis for students of Carleton University. The garden is located in the backyard of
the building where the collective rents a kitchen for the “G-Spot” project. The garden is
located on Bell Street South near Carling and was reclaimed by convertig the parking
lot into a yard. The garden project involves volunteers from the food collective who
organize the garden as one communal plot.
The third garden was the Umi Café Community Garden. This garden is
organized by the Sonianda Sofia Workers Cooperative that also runs the adjacent Café.
It has twenty plots and involves people who identify with the café community as well as
people in the surrounding communities. The garden exists on a previously grassy patch
33
of land between the commercial front of the China Town business district and a row of
low-income housing.
The fourth garden discussed was the Children’s Garden on the corner of Main
and Clegg Street. It is organized primarily by the Lady Evelyn alternative school as both
a play area and learning experience for their students. It is built on a city park that was
approved for the project. The garden is surrounded by upper-middle class housing, the
St. Paul University and various small businesses on Main Street. The garden involves
parents, children and teachers of the alternative school, as well as community workers
of the Sandy Hill Community Centre and a local aboriginal womens’ shelter.
The last garden is the Nanny Goat Hill Community Garden which is located on
the corner of Bronson and Laurier street. Established thirty years ago, it is one of the
oldest community gardens in Ottawa. The garden area is established on the site of a
demolished house. It involves some elderly growers who have been with the garden
since its beginning, as well as some young professionals and recent immigrants who
live in the surrounding neighbourhoods.
34
An Environmental Materialist History of Ottawa
From the beginning of European discovery, Ottawa has been subject to
inextricably connected systems of social marginalization and environmental destruction.
Beginning with the fur trade, followed by the lumber boom and the construction of the
Rideau Canal, and ending with intense urbanization and sprawl, the story of Ottawa fits
well within the environmental materialist narrative of Bookchin’s social ecology. The
creation of grassroots initiatives such as victory gardening during the First and Second
World Wars and community gardens since the early 1980s has demonstrated some
instances were libertarian municipalist and social ecological initiatives can help counter
these oppressive processes.
Early Resource Development
Since the beginning of European recorded history of the Ottawa Valley the region
has been subject to social marginalization and environmental destruction through
interconnected forms of economic and imperialist oppression. With the advent of the
French fur-trading industry based in Montreal, Algonquin peoples enjoyed control of the
Ottawa waterway positioning them as middlemen between the Europeans and the
trapping grounds to the north-west (NCC, 2007). In the early seventeenth century the
French penetrated the area gaining access to trade with Odawa and Huron peoples
taking control of trade from Algonquin peoples. The intensification of trade along with
the establishment of military alliances along the English-French divide intensified
territorial disputes among nations of the region happening since before the period of
contact (Great Canadian Rivers, 2007). The European systematic assertion of resource
35
extraction of the region began the process of dismantling the political and economic
determination of the region’s original nations. As a result many Algonquin people were
driven north off the Ottawa River away from their traditional hunting and fishing
grounds. The region was now open to the Europeans who exploited fur-bearing animals
to the point of commercial collapse in the region pushing European trappers further
north and west (NCC, 2007). The Algonquin already devastated by new diseases where
now vulnerable to Iroquois attacks (Great Canadian Rivers, 2007). It also seems likely
that the collapse of the regions fur economy would have resulted in the collapse of the
region’s subsistance economy.
In the early ninetieth century the first lumber mill opened in Wright’s Town
(present day Hull) caused by the sudden demand of timber in Britain due to Napoleon’s
blockade of supply ports in the Baltic (QAHN, 2004). Though the production of this mill
was low-scale relative to future developments, it demanded exploitative working and
living conditions of already impoverished French Canadian migrant workers (Lee,
2006). After the construction of the Rideau Canal in 1826 the lumber industry and
working settler population along the river exploded (St. Pierre, 2002). Lumber mills were
established by rich Canadian and American lumber barons from Brittania/Westborough
to Gatineau/Hull and Lowertown. This resulted in the exacerbation of working
conditions. French and Irish workers were crammed into a massive shanty town in
Lowertown where families were forbidden from owning property and had to rent poorly
constructed wooden houses from wealthy landowners for thirty-year periods. The
population was heavily concentrated and subject to devastating disease outbreaks with
the arrival of new waves of immigrants or excessive rainfall. Sewage and the bywash
36
from the canal flowed down the centre of King Edward avenue creating a diseased
cesspool surrounding the settlement (ibid.). Despite such terrible conditions the wealthy
political, merchant and military class settled in Uppertown across the canal refused to
construct sufficient hospital facilities, inhabitants were then forced to rely on the help of
nuns at the local convent to treat the ill and control epidemics. Of course many of the
nuns fell ill themselves.
The same process that led to the creation of such atrocious social conditions in
Ottawa was also the exact same process that resulted in the destruction of Ottawa’s
original ecological landscape. The companies that attracted and employed the
population of Lowertown were engaged in the systematic deforestation of the
surrounding Ottawa landscape areas further up-river (ibid.). This destroyed many
Algonquin hunting grounds and resulted in the formation of some of the reservations
found today (Hughson & Bond, 2009).
The imperialist British origin of Bytown (Ottawa) that was part of the military
conquest of the land and peoples of North America produced the destruction of many
wetlands and river-systems along the Rideau River. In 1826 Royal Engineers were sent
to construct a canal from the mouth of the Rideau River on the Ottawa River to
Kingston. It was created as an alternative route to ship weapons and supplies from
Montreal and Quebec to Kingston and the Great Lakes free from American attack
(Watson, 2008). The project employed thousands of French and Irish labourers needed
to drain wetlands, blast through rock formations and clear through kilometres of forest
and brush. As mentioned, work camps were established both along the construction
sites and back in Bytown, where workers and their families lived in rudimentary wooden
37
shacks in tight proximity. These camps were subject to severe cases of malaria where
up to 60% of workers contracted the disease. The malaria prominent in the region at the
time was not known to result in mortality however due to conditions of malnutrition,
injury and exhaustion up to five-hundred workers are estimated to have died from the
frequent outbreaks. Another five-hundred are expected to have died from different
causes relating to other diseases and accidents (ibid.).
The effect of this massive project on the natural landscape of the Rideau Valley
was severe and diverted most of the the flow of the central lake watershed system
draining at Kingston, down the Rideau River to Ottawa. As well the surrounding
landscape was largely deforested to offer land grants to many of the engineers of the
project. Colonel By also commanded land to be cleared with the expectation that it
would alleviate the strength of malaria outbreaks. The project also destroyed many of
the wild rice fields of the local indigenous nations, and the land grants and settlements
challenged the traditional hunting and fishing grounds of several Algonquin bands
(Lovlace, np.).
World War I and II
The lumber boom continued well into the twentieth century, and working and
living conditions became relatively better as families began to own their own land and to
organize as workers. However with the onset of World War I and II, urban areas
throughout Canada were faced with food shortages. With resources being directed to
soldiers fighting in overseas through the state of total war, available food was expensive
and low quality. While men were sent off to war women were employed to work in the
38
factories in their place producing war supplies. In order to supplement the diets of urban
Canadians as well as to provide food stocks to send overseas the government
encouraged the formation of “victory gardens” (Sciarra, 2007). Policy over private land
ownership was relaxed so that the civil societies could grow crops throughout Canadian
cities. Numerous restrictions limited what would be supplied by the government,
however the public embraced the idea of victory gardens and went well out of their way
to develop and maintain them (Buswell, 1980).
“Early in 1917, in view of the world-wide shortage of food stuffs, an active campaign was inaugurated by the City Council to stimulate production by means of cultivation of vacant lots and backyards. Briefly, the campaign was extremely successful; the response of the citizens generally was beyond expectation, and, in addition, many individuals freely gave their time and services in connection with the various committees. The campaign also had a stimulating effect upon production in the country districts adjacent to Victoria.”
“...Much greater necessity exists for increased food production during 1918. All authorities agree that the world supply of food is reduced to famine conditions in many countries, and to within a fraction of the famine line in the most favoured localities. "Every little bit counts," and it is earnestly to be hoped that in response, in Victoria, of the "Back-yard and Vacant Lot Brigade," during 1918, will greatly exceed the excellent record of 1917”. (Buswell, 1980)
This empowerment of civil society over land use and economic self-determination was
critical in avoiding famine during these periods of total war. This acts as an example of
a partial application of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism producing better living
conditions. The success of these victory gardens would become an inspiration for the
growth of the community garden movements in Canada and the United States (Sciarra,
2007: 9).
39
Post-War Urban Growth and The Rise of Community Gardening
The post-war period is recognized historically as a period of increased population
growth around the world as well as the intensification and growth of urban areas.
From the end of the Second World War to the end of the twentieth century Ottawa
experienced a growth of 20.2% (Demographia, 2005), Canada saw 41% growth
(HRSDC, 2010), and the world’s growth is estimated at 41.6% (UN, 2004). During this
period urban sprawl was focusing growth in the suburbs of North American cities. As a
result there was less investment in core urban areas, which produced social unrest
among the lower-income inhabitants of inner-cities (Sciarra, 2007: 10). Though public
gardens existed throughout the United Sates in the late nineteenth century, community
gardening as a movement was established in the early 1970s (Wang, 2006: 5). In the
marginal urban conditions of this period of growth people began appropriating vacant
city lots to garden without any support or opposition of governments or landowners. The
movement resembled this guerrilla garden form up until the late 1970s when places like
New York and Montreal formalized the process by creating permits for public gardens
(Sciarra, 2007: 10).
In Ottawa community gardening was very slow in development. Gardens such as
Nanny Goat Hill, Gloucester Allotment Garden, and Kilbourne Allotment Garden were
started in the 1980s (Shantz, 2009; GAGA, np). However these gardens were
unaffiliated with one another or the city. They had to rely on community groups to
provide funding to run the gardens (Sciarra, 2007: 10). In 1999 university graduate
students attempted to organize a centralized network for community gardening through
community health centres. This project was combined with a pre-existing project begun
40
in 1997 at the Sandy Hill Community Centre with an operating budget of $5,000 (CGN,
2010). The project was successful and by that summer the network was holding regular
meetings and skill-sharing workshops. The network grew into what is known today as
the Community Gardening Network and quickly became a civil society organization to
lobby the municipal government for greater support of community gardening. In 2004
the CGN produced an action plan for the city to conduct an inventory of community
gardens and evaluate the city’s role and potential in developing the program as a part of
the Health, Recreation and Social Services Committee. The City Council approved the
reports call for a staff liaison to investigate access and resources for the development
and maintenance of community gardens in Ottawa. By 2006 there were twenty
community gardens in Ottawa (ibid.).
In 2008 the Ottawa City Council directed $75,000 to the CGN through Just
Foods from the Green Partnership Pilot Program for the purpose of creating new
community gardens (CGN, 2010). The Green Partnership Pilot Program was created in
2006 by the City of Ottawa in order to promote grassroots environmental initiatives.
With a budget of $1 million, 30 programs were selected for funding amounting to
$213,000 (City of Ottawa - c, 2009). The funding first took effect in 2009, but was
dedicated towards retroactive soil testing of already existing community gardens so the
effect of the funding on the start-up of new community gardens has yet to be
experienced (CGN, 2010).
“[W]e’ve had the money for a year but in the proposed 2009 budget, at the end of 2008 they deferred a lot of money from the green partnership program which was the beautification program and they had a lot of money and at the time that they deferred it I think it was a round four-hundred thousand dollars but they still had that in this fund and we said that we want some of that money and so we lobbied and we got rural people involved and urban people involved and
41
demonstrated in Ottawa on both ends, both rural and urban and we ended up winning an annual fund of seventy five-thousand dollars that goes to the community gardening network for starting your garden and expanding and enhancing the existing gardens, which is a really big deal because what happened before is that we only had five thousand and that was meant particularly to start new gardens so there was no benefit to the existing gardens, they had no place to go if they had really. And existing gardens should be self-sustaining but you know when you’ve got a broken water main or if you’ve got you know deer eating everything you know these expenses you don’t foresee because they aren’t foreseeable. And so where can they go and start for their one time infusion of large money to fix up the fence, you know, they didn’t have any access to that sort of thing, and five-thousand dollars does not start one garden. Sometimes it will only buy you water for one so you know you have to really think were we being supported enough by the city? And I think any support is good, but we thought more could be done so had this opportunity and we took it and now we are getting quite a lot of support from the city and I see us being capable of opening community gardens in every community, certainly we have quite a few councillors that are supportive of that and I see that with that continued support or confident support that yeah that’s absolutely doable.”(Interview 3)
Start-up funding is accessible to groups engaged in organizing a community
garden upon the submission of an application to the CGN. The criteria for eligibility is
the permission of the land-owner, agreement to garden organically, and an
organizational structure. Once approved, funding can go towards the cost of soil testing,
instillation of a water system, rain barrels or water cans, lumber for raised beds, rotor
tilling, first year seed purchasing, etc. Once started, gardens can also apply for
supplementary funding for repairs or critical needs from this funding (CGN, 2010).
This program demonstrates a clear example of how municipal governments can
produce environmental justice through social ecology policy. Through policies such as
the Green Partnership Pilot Program resources can be directed at solving social and
environmental problems through an ecosystems approach. Seeing society as a nested
tier of a greater urban and regional ecological system along with granting people
42
agency over land and ensuring economic self-determination is one step towards
producing a social ecology in the city.
43
Social Justice and Nature: Discourses of Social Ecology in Community Gardens
Three major themes were examined through the theory and interviews in this
thesis. The first were questions directed at the of social justice produced by community
gardens, the second was the role of nature and the environment in producing social
justice, and the third was the communication of social nature paradigms that might
dialectically link the two concepts together. The analysis of these interviews are divided
into these three categories respectively in order to disseminate narratives of social
ecology in community gardening found in the interviews. The interviews showed that
there is definitely a social ecology narrative to be found in the discourse of the
community gardens of their participants, however there are also cases where the theory
is problematized which is discussed throughout this section and in the conclusion.
Community Gardens and Social Justice
In the interviews conducted for this thesis certain experiences of social justice
were expressed in the experience of community gardening in Ottawa. Through six
interviews several reoccurring themes have become evident. Specific expressions of
social justice have been the importance of food security and economic self-
determination, inclusion of elderly and differently abled people, empowerment of
gendered and racialized peoples, and space for people coping with addictions.
The most frequently reoccurring theme in the interviews was the importance of
food security. All interviewees expressed that part of their motivation to engage in
community gardening was for ensuring the stability of their ability to obtain safe and
44
nutritious food. Certain factors that were discussed as barriers to this were the proximity
of places to obtain food:
Participant 1: “I live in an area that’s a food desert, so having access to fresh food right next door to where I live right there means that I don’t have to walk for twenty minutes to buy groceries... We have some nearby ethnic grocery stores where you might find certain things, but in terms of looking for your full range of groceries you have to leave the neighbourhood”.
As well, the nature of food costs in limiting peoples’ access to fresh, safe and
nutritious food:
P2: “[Y]ou know by having a community garden in every community more people have access to growing their own fresh food their definitely not spending as much money and if they have those concerns then this helps alleviate that somewhat”.
Another reason was the reliance on precarious food systems such as the
reliance on petroleum for the importation of food from around the world:
P5: “[I was] getting nervous about the idea that everything I eat is shipped in from Latin America or China or New Zealand and just that thought that if something ever were to go wrong we can feed ourselves in the city because the stocks in the grocery stores will only last us three days they say... I guess [food has] just become more politicized for me but also just as like the essentials of life and the idea that you know if anything were to go wrong with transportation or with a natural disaster or something that we wouldn’t starve, I mean there are farms all around us but yeah”.
Finally, there was also a concern over the disappearance of knowledge about
food and food systems among youth:
P5: “I remember going to one of these Ottawa barbecues at the public pools and I had a little booth set up with my volunteers and we were just in the community doing crafts and a little boy was asking me about all of these picture we had posted and I said something about well this is us building a raised garden bed and he actually said, he must have been eleven, “what’s a garden”? So it just floored me that, like you know, or we have green space but its not connected in that way, a place to run across or sit in the grass but we forget that soil, we don’t think about
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that food. Like they were weirded out by carrots with the tops on them, they were used to the little ones in the bags. And also getting familiar with wild foods that just like grow in our sidewalk cracks stuff and yeah that was amazing”.
The participants expressed that they identified community gardening as a part of
a solution to these blocks in strengthening food security. Though the participants
explained that the community gardens in their current size and function were not
adequate in solving this problem fully or providing a viable alternative food system, they
did identify it as an important part of generating awareness of food security issues and
food system alternatives.
P2: “But, I do see how it can for sure, like I think not having such a reliance on the big business for food is important, right? But at the same time too, a ten by ten plot or a ten by fifteen plot will feed one family or three people probably not all summer, so you can’t completely be removed from it”.
Similar to this issue was the importance of economic self-determination. Some
participants expressed that part of their motivation to participate in a community garden
was to challenge conventions of personal economic reliance on paid work to support
their livelihoods. For these participants the motivations for community gardening were
primarily political. They expressed the feelings that they would prefer to be self-reliant
individually or collectively and rather not have to rely on needing a job to earn a living.
Rather they would prefer to have control over the means of production of their food:
P3: “You’re then turning labour into something that is useful as opposed to something that has a monetary value to it... Well first of all you claim that things are property, you socially construct this aspect of land as property and then from there you can privatize it which means that you are excluding some people from it. And what community gardens do is the opposite of that, it does not generate capital from it, it does not add exchange value to its labour, and it is not excluding one from that property... A lot of people are working for organizations that generate a lot of surplus value that the workers don’t see that but their value provides a
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lot of; their work provides a lot of value to it and they can’t see any. When you arrange labour in a community garden sense these people were traditionally, like everybody who was traditionally excluded from, yeah the fruits of their labour”.
Another participant emphasized the importance public land reclamation in
addition to community control over the means of producing food. From this experience it
is possible to see a parallel to Blomley’s (2004) Vancouver example of public gardening
it its ability to alter and problematize the definition of private property. For the participant
it was important that society take land back from developers and the government for the
use of his community:
P4: “It means appropriating what was already ours. You know? Taking back my right to grow food, you know, to feed myself and the teach. You know its taking back something that was taken away from us. Whether it was taken away from the city planners, how they plan a city, the city itself or something like that I feel like it was something that was taken away from me, you know? And I feel that doing this is, I’m taking something back that’s rightfully ours, that’s justifiably ours. I don’t really need to argue it, you know because I already eat vegetables and I need vegetables to eat, so I shouldn’t have to you know depend on somebody else, and I shouldn’t- what goes into my food, and how my food is grown shouldn’t be in the hands of someone else. It should be my choice, and yeah, it should be taking back what is directly ours”.
Another aspect of producing social justice in a more tangible sense was how it
has provided equity for conventionally marginalized groups of people. The most
effective indication of this was the role of community gardens in giving peoples with
different mobility needs access to food production. Most of the community gardens that
were discussed in the six interviews were, to some degree accessible to people with
different needs. In the case of the elderly certain community gardens took certain
considerations of limited abilities to walk up stairs or crouch down low by providing
removable wheelchair ramps and raised-bed gardens. As well, community support
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allowed elderly people to garden despite the inability to perform certain tasks such as
turning soil and compost:
P1: “There is that sort of co-operative sort of spirit in our garden and I know one of the members of our garden is one of the raging grannies. So for her, you know its like its really that. She wants it to be egalitarian and community involved and supportive. You know as a raging granny, she pretty super old and as the years go by she is less and less able to do her own gardening. So for her its an opportunity for her to do what she wants supported by other people. Help her compost, or turn her soil, that type of thing. A lot of the people that are involved in the garden live on lower income and while a lot of community gardens aren’t very accessible to lower income people because they just don’t have access to the tools or money to buy seeds or plants, because we work very co-operatively we can support each other and make it more accessible to different groups of people”.
However in this case the extent of this provision was limited. The plots that had been put aside for people with different accessibility needs were placed in locations that were not favourable for growing certain plants:
P6: “[T]here was talk about connecting with this group home [across the street] and having you know people from the group home come and have a little garden plot that was wheelchair accessible and unfortunately the wheelchair accessible plots were in the back in the shade, like “here you can have these, I don’t know what you can grow but...”, making some greens grow there but not tomatoes. So you know, like the idea was there and it was a little flawed and it wasn’t completely played through but I think that there is a lot of potential for links like that to be made”.
Beyond providing accessibility to the elderly and the differently abled, a
participant had expressed community gardens as important places to reconnect the
elderly with the greater community of the neighbourhood. Whereas elderly people seem
to be excluded from society in the community garden they hold a valuable role:
P5: “[There is a man that] has been with the garden since the beginning and he says he came back from, he’s been like a war vet and worked for the government and the retired and decided to start this garden, he must have been in his eighties when I met him. And he’s been sort of like a grandfather of the garden so he’ll tell anybody the history who wants to listen and helps the other people set up their plots and you know like doing a little bit of sort of community education and he’s actually got this nice
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corner plot and he’s got a big trellis set up has cherries under there so in the summer he said he’ll come in and weed in the morning and sit down and anyone who comes through you know he’ll just get into discussions with them. And just self taught and really intelligent, he knows a lot about gardening and does a lot of preserving and things”.
In the case of how racialized and gendered peoples have found justice in
community gardening involves empowerment through participation in constructing an
alternative food system. One garden acted as a place for an indigenous women’s aid
group to practice and teach certain agricultural practices from their cultural background:
P5: “[The Childrens’ Learning Garden] they were working with a womens’ shelter down the street with primarily Anishinabek women and so they did a workshop on the three sisters and they planned a little pond where they were going to try and grow wild rice... They worked with the kids, so they came in and did a workshop with the kids about the three sisters and sort of like different cultural ideas of plants and I know some of the kids were talking about the idea of an animated spirit within a plant or you know plants as living beings. It was lovely to you know talking to the plants and telling them that its good to talk to the plants they have spirit too and things... I thought that was nice too because bring a different I guess cultural foods, because with Anishnabek being the harvesters of wild rice and then being more like the Iroquois and Huron three sisters sort of food culture I guess... I think most people here know quite a bit about like the three sisters being so widely spread throughout North America and South America but a lot of people don’t realize that wild rice exists or that people have been harvesting it for centuries around this area and yeah that it is like increasingly, these areas are being destroyed for recreational homes and things like that”.
However this kind of involvement was also limited in its empowerment of the
womens’ group:
P5: “I guess one criticism would be, just because visually even to separate the plot where we learn about indigenous foods growing away from the other plots. So I can see the reason behind it is it is sort of like the three sisters plot so you can go there and learn about it. Just seeing it makes me critical of it, just the fact that they are separated but I still think you know the example being there, it being called the three sisters area of the, that they can, it really is a nice little walk through where kids and families can sort of just tour through the garden and see these different plots”.
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In one case a community garden acted as a place for one man coping with
addiction to be engaged with the community and use gardening as a therapeutic activity
empowering them to seek other meaningful social participation:
P5: “[W]e had one man living in the boarding house, I’m sure you’ve seen him he’s got some addictions that, he’s done a lot of gardening before, he grew up on a farm and he built the compost for us and he would come out and weed for us if he was bored. So it became a really nice sort of place to bring our community together for people who normally feel alienated to be with young people, you know just because they have this knowledge to share with us and feeling comfortable to come in and make that connection because you feel great”.
Community Gardens and Nature/Environment
In the interviews conducted for this thesis certain expressions of social nature
were accounted in the reporting of experiences of community gardening in Ottawa.
Important themes surrounding nature and the environment are local food and organic
agriculture, being connected to nature, natural aesthetics, land use and urban sprawl,
environmental health, and biodiversity.
The most frequent theme expressed the importance of locally and organically
produced food. Certain participants identified that these factors were important in their
motivation and value of community gardening because they saw it as having a direct
impact on the environment. These participants explained that having a food system
where the distance between grower and consumer is minimized reduces the
environmental footprint of transportation and storage.
P1: “Well they definitely make the route smaller. You know somebody was telling me that you know how some the big chain grocery stores have started advertising that they sell local produce, but because of the way those stores work they’ll buy the tomatoes locally but then they ship them to the warehouse for storage and then they ship them back. So even if its grown really close its already travelled quite a trip. So eliminating that. The
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difference between anything coming out of a truck and me stepping out the back door, picking some tomatoes is shortens the loop. Then if I take the waste and put it in my compost bin I put it back into the soil its definitely more self-sufficient”.
Participants that identified organic agriculture as an important aspect of their
community garden experience expressed concern over the lack of knowledge of the
effects of genetic modification of plants and animals for consumption. The importance of
organic food is then associated with what one participant has called being a “conscious
consumer”, meaning that they choose the sorts of things they consume based on
environmental and social values, such as in the form of vegetarianism/veganism:
P5: “... [B]eing more aware of the impacts of pesticides and that insidious sort of movement of genetically modified foods into grocery stores without any ability to tell one from another, there is no labelling system, and I’ve always sort of been what I call a conscientious consumer because I have always tried to think of my food and the impact it makes so I’ve been a vegetarian for fourteen years and a vegan for two or three now”.
As part of the local-organic theme the appeal of do-it-yourself production was
also an important factor. Participants expressed this as a critical aspect of the local-
organic food system. It is not enough in this respect that food is produced locally and
within legal organic certification, the informality and transparency of do-it-yourself and
community food practices were more critical. This public inclusion in the food production
process is then also important for connecting with growers and understanding the
environmental footprint of the city.
P1: “[E]nvironmentally it certainly helps out where we are able to grow out own food. I would also say it also gives us a better understanding or sympathy towards farmers and the rural folks, and that’s a huge problem in Ottawa. At least its a step. Other than that you know I think there is this whole wastefulness of society. Instead of going out doing whatever whenever wherever kind of thing, I think having community gardens, and having that kind of access to fresh food it makes you look at things differently. Since I’ve started community gardening, I’ve also started
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canning and preserving a lot of stuff. And I do a lot of scavenging for crab-apples and rose-hips and stuff and I kind of find it, like it makes you look at things differently walking around the urban core like I could tell you where the pear trees and the plum trees are in peoples’ front yard or back yard that aren’t being picked... You know certainly Ottawa has a big agricultural footprint, so in Ottawa’s economy I’m sure that does have a significance but just the little bit of community gardening that happens is not going to make a dent in that”.
The next most prevalent theme in the nature/environmental motivations for
community gardening was the creation and maintenance of one’s connections to
nature. Participants expressed a striving towards a natural authenticity through a direct
connection to weather patterns, soil, processes of decomposition and plant growth.
P1: “Just wanting to have that connection to the land and to have access to fresh food. It would be the community part of the community garden, but I think a lot of the stuff that we do in this city is so robot that this is just a chance to connect more with nature without having to leave the city. [Referring to rebuilding the BUGS garden] At one point when were talking about basically having what would have been a parking garage under it. And so the garden could still be at ground level but we were mentioning to them the benefits of that being located on top of a parking garage means that you would again have a few extra days of growing. And they were actually not having that. They were like ‘No, we want to be in the ground’”.
An aspect of this theme is also the importance of becoming connected to the
natural surroundings that have always existed in one’s area. In an urban neighbourhood
there may have been a bush or tree that one often encounters in their daily life but
never appreciates. Community gardening in the case of one participant, has opened
them up to noticing and valuing the natural elements of place and centring it as an
important part of participation in the urban landscape.
P2: “I notice trees a lot more cause you know, when you’re talking about gardening you know you’ve got the drip line and okay is there enough space to put one in maybe? Ten plots there, outside of those trees? You know I have been around communities, we have approached developers in the past and other communities to see their parts to see if there is any space for any community gardens and stuff like that. So I do, I do notice
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the natural landscape a lot more. I also notice what’s going on in parks a lot, which is something that I - I don’t have children so I - I do go to parks, I know where the dog parks are and that sort of thing but I never really paid attention to parks, but now I know pretty much all the activities that go on in parks all over the city”.
Finally, the importance of connectedness to nature can hold an interpersonal role
in one’s motivation to engage in community gardening. For one participant they were
interested in community gardening for the purpose of educating others about how
humans are connected to nature.
P5: “I want to see people learn about that and connect with that and understand that hard work can create that effect for people who feed us because its backbreaking work and its so challenging in that it is so uncertain and I think we get a lot of respect for the people who grow our food and for the effort that it takes and the connection that you have to, the plants around you, the animals around you, the seasons, the daylight, it just really connects you to the bigger world around us that we forget when we are looking at the skyscrapers and we think that the only world that we will exist in is that human world”.
The third most prevalent theme in natural/environmental motivations for
community gardening was natural aesthetics. Several participants expressed the
importance of the value of a landscape that looked natural and how personally and
socially therapeutic it can be. To one participant the aesthetic of nature in the urban
landscape actually altered his experience of social justice through community gardening
in his neighbourhood.
P4: “I think when people see a garden and they see people you know, walking out with food, and they see children playing out in the garden and they see people working, I think it provides like a simple outlook on life, one of like very much of joy and connectedness, you know? Whereas if I were to look at an alleyway with garbage cans and you know the garbage spilling out of it, and you know graffiti over graffiti, over graffiti, over graffiti and a foul stench from the you know the surroundings I don’t think you feel very connected to that and that’s a very desolate picture and it paints a very desolate picture inside of people and people are directly related to that. So when people see a garden, although it won’t- unless they are
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gardening themselves and they are experiencing it, which can be a very therapeutic process, even just seeing it happen can provide some relief I guess to the congestion that otherwise exists in the city that’s sort of sucks the social welfare of people”.
Another participant placed the aesthetic of the community garden within a
narrative of environmental justice in the urban landscape. This participant identified that
they enjoyed the sense of subversive activity in creating an aesthetic imbalance in the
gray landscape that surrounded the plot. In this the participant locates the garden as a
starting point of resisting environmental encroachment.
P3: “ The garden spot one was a contrast against everything that was a round to the parking lot that was next to it, or behind it actually. There is an apartment parking lot there right behind it, across the fence line. Like there are trees here and there but they are planted in between the concession plots of that area and we were surrounded by buildings and stuff like that. So it was like it created like a visual imbalance, when you have like more concrete in this gray cityscape, we punctured a visible hole in it”.
For a different participant an important advantage to community gardening is
simply the sheer joy and sense of happiness that the image of a community garden in
the landscape brings.
P2: “[T]hey’re beautiful, you know I find them really attractive and lots of people find them aesthetically pleasing for local food growing especially when the tomatoes start to hang and the plants start to fall over and I love that. I love the colours”.
The fourth most prevalent theme for the natural/environmental motivations for
community gardening was land use and urban sprawl. While cities encroach upon the
surrounding landscape with suburban housing reducing the amount of suitable soil for
growing food, there is still land that is not being used in the downtown core of cities. For
one participant community gardening is one means of reversing that process.
P5: “[S]o I feel like a community garden in an urban centre is almost an attempt to reverse suburban sprawl, to sort of turn around what we never
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though of as cultivating that which is cultivable, creating some place that can produce food”.
As a result of this motivation to create community gardens the perception of
urban landscapes have dramatically changed.
P2: “Well my life now exists of looking for vacant spaces to put community gardens in. I see the city in a completely different way than I used to, and I see beauty in community gardens so I always visualize how an empty-vacant-abandoned lot would look like with, you know, hockey sticks with tomatoes growing up them or whatever but certainly that is how my outlook of the city has changed I’ve just mean when I’m walking down the street on my way to work or if I’m grabbing a coffee I’m constantly looking for those abandoned pockets a community garden might fit in”.
P4: “Well every time I see an empty lot I picture a garden, that’s for sure. If you want to picture the possibilities, this garden was really built out of nothing. Built out of an idea and like a willingness to not let go of the idea”.
Though not receiving as much attention the principal of environmental health
was a motivator for one person to participate in a community garden. For this
participant the use of space for a community garden meant that it would not be used as
a parking lot or other kind of site that would be contributing to the release of
environmental toxins as well as local and global climate changing emissions such as
heat and carbon dioxide.
P3: “The garden spot’s was actually the only only green space. It was formerly a parking lot and the parking lot was contributing negatively to the ecological value to its surroundings, so you have the leakaging of gas and oil which actually, we tested the pH and it was safe to grow stuff in there, which was really good. It cuts down on that possibility of carbon dioxide emitted from vehicles and having a black surface of that concrete top contributed to its negative environmental aspects of the city. And it provides a green space, increasing all of the good things environmentally, chemically and so on”.
Finally, the last theme discussed as part of nature/environmental motivations to
participate in community gardening was the promotion of biodiversity and the re-
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introduction of pollinators into urban ecosystems. For one participant the importance of
diversifying the number of species in the urban landscape and the security of pollinators
crucial for the production of food and the survival of plant life was very important in their
participation in community gardens.
P1: “I am more aware of the bees. I’m more worried about the bees now. One thing we; well I have my own dreams but its not going to happen, is keeping bees of a rooftop. But you can’t, we might have tenants who are allergic. So that would be super cool if we could have colonies of bees. People in buildings and bees on roofs and a goat or two up there. More about the interrelationships between things”.
In this section of the analysis the participant indicated that the most important
aspects relating to nature were the acquisition of local food, organic agriculture, being
connected to nature, natural aesthetics, land use and urban sprawl, environmental
health, and biodiversity. These themes were found often juxtaposed or combined with
the discussion of social justice. The connection of these two themes in the interviews
demonstrates the interconnectivity of social issues and nature in the production of
justice through community gardening. These linkages will become more evident in the
following section.
Social Nature and Community Gardens as Heterotopias
In the interviews conducted for this thesis certain accounts were given indicating
what sorts of socially constructed perceptions of nature are engaged in community
gardening. These narratives provide an insight into the discursive processes that drive
the creation of community gardens, perceptions that change as a result of community
gardens and the sorts of relationships they have with the landscapes they are situated
in. In almost all interviews statements were given identifying and problematizing
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conventional dichotomies between society and nature. The interviews also provide an
illustration of where the participants view power relationships in construction of certain
social natures. In light of this, participants have expressed deliberate use of community
garden space to contest the implicit hegemonies of these narratives on nature.
In deconstructing the power relationships of urban space one participant was
able identify through community gardening who they saw had power over the social
definition of nature.
P5: “I think it has changed my impression, I’ve always thought of Ottawa as a green city and I really its green space, but more and more now I see our green space as manicured and artificial and I mean I know that urban landscape is somewhat artificial but I see that there is so much room in this city where we could be growing things like food”.
This person posits the power to control nature in city space to the governing
municipal and cultural institutions. The characteristics identified by the participant
seems to affirm that the society-nature dichotomy narrative is represented in the urban
landscape. Nature is not literally cast away from from the city all together as would
support the literal narrative, however nature is given a specific place in the Ottawa
landscape. In the National Capital Commission website parks and green spaces are
discussed as a part of the “Capital” image. The NCC’s vision for green space and parks
includes:
“A ‘conservation’ function, involving the maintenance and restoration of natural ecosystems in order to preserve the natural environments within Canada’s Capital that are representative of the country as a whole”. (NCC, 2010)
Such discourse puts nature in a place of representation in the Nation’s Capital
landscape as a symbol of Canadian Identity. This demonstrates how nature is
discursively produced in the city’s landscape in part as the process of nation-state
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building. This imperialist project is very evident in the participant’s description. The
“manicured and artificial” nature that is interpreted in these parks by the participant
almost reflects the ways in which the Government of Canada grapples with the task of
catering to a Canadian Nation that is in fact a population composed of diverse in
discontinuous identities. In both cases what results is the meticulous grooming and
inauthentic image of what it seeks to represent.
Some participants attempt to deliberately problematize these notions of the
social-natural dichotomy and the communication of normative discourse found in the
natural landscape. One participant explains their experience with the deconstruction of
these paradigms.
P6: “I think of nature now in terms of sort of a continuum of wildness so you know there is nature that is more wild and nature that is less wild and more controlled by humans. I guess when I say wild I mean nature that is less controlled by humans, and/or has more intact ecosystems so like more natural flows and I don’t know how clear that is. And yeah so for me I think like I do wild-crafting for example so, and for me community gardening or urban gardening is just part of that continuum of connecting with my, just recognizing that I am part of the environment, the environment is part of me like its not just separate things. And so to be able to garden in the city or even help green spaces in the city become a little more wild, I think that’s really valuable and important because that way we are not separating ourselves so much from nature and from wild nature and having this sort of idea that wilderness that is sort of unrealistic and pretty socially unjust because of all of the aboriginal people that have been displaced from this homeland because of our idea of wilderness.
Moving beyond this deconstruction of normative discourse on nature, one
participant began to offer a counter-hegemonic depiction of nature in their lived space.
Similar to bell hooks (2009), this participant illustrated a re-centring of nature from its
position of marginalization to a discursive home-place of celebration. At the same time
the participant was also able to internalize this discourse on nature.
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P4: “I mean one can really like admire the aesthetic of nature and the essence of nature, the whims of perfect sort of harmony of nature and the madness of nature at the same time. You know when you go into thinking about the nutrients in the soil, and what different plants need and want and like and prefer, and how different insect life and little critters can help and how the other animals interact with it. It just paints such a vivid picture of what nature is and how it is here to give us life, you know? Like its unbelievable seeing those things grow day to day and from one day to the next, you know, its like a branch grew another arm and another arm, and another arm and you know a change that you might see in a human being take six months to a year, in the garden it will take place in a matter of days. Definitely, just as more we definitely take more than we give to the earth and that speaks a lot to sort of our place as humanity now days in the world we are just taking, taking and not giving enough. And the thing you is it puts me in the zone of exchange with the earth and respect and just a lot more connected to the life giving forces, and its amazing”.
This discourse on nature presents a direct comparisons between the biology of
the garden plants and humans. This direct correlation indicates resistance to a
hierarchy of humans over non-humans, in effect, it humanizes the plants. Finally in this
excerpt the values found in its discourse are transformed into a normative direction for
humanity based on the experience of the community garden. The participant is able to
translate the idea of participating in nature in a community garden with the way
humanity ought to participate in nature globally. This appears to construct a ecologically
democratized narrative of nature seeing humans as a participant in an ecosystem.
Participants were also able to ground such counter-hegemonic discourses in
space in the construction of community gardens as heterotopias. In most interviews
participants were able to identify their community gardens as discontinuous with the
surrounding landscapes. This was portrayed by one participant in a very dramatic way:
P4: “People who didn’t have any plots would come around and talk to the gardeners, share their experiences and were just sort of in awe. Sort of like, you know you would have thought that we were holding an elephant on that lot and people were just walking by looking at this elephant in the middle of the city. You know it did provide a central point of like, sort of
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inspiration maybe or a centring of the attention of the community so that they had something to talk about, had something to come see, something to come be a part of”.
To this person the community garden experience produced a very radical
difference from the surrounding landscape. The participant also expressed how this
garden has changed the space surrounding it. What was observable by the participant
was that the values inherent to the social nature of community gardens were able to
permeate the surrounding space. The value of community inherent to the community
garden was communicated and internalized by members of the surrounding community
who then used the site itself as a place for such community to take place.
In a different case a community garden contributed to the transformation of one
participants understanding of social nature which influenced their outlook on the entire
city. The participant who initially saw nature through the social-natural dichotomy was
convinced of the lack of a meaningful connection to nature in the city and constantly
sought to escape it. The community garden not only provided a place where the
participant could achieve this but also changed the way they saw nature surrounding it.
P5: “Well I think I see nature more than I did before because I definitely fell into that mindset of nature sort of devoid of humans. So the natural world being whatever existed without human interference, but now I see it much more like this symbiotic relationship, so nature now is like the grass in the sidewalks, the weeds that we, you know what we call weeds in old dusty planters you know. So I think I see now like we are definitely more a part of nature in my mind now. And I think a lot of that must come from like actually digging in the earth and like you know seeing the whether it is behind a cafe or surrounded by apartment buildings, that earth is still the same as it is out you know acres and acres away from human habitation you know. So I think its just, yeah its broadened my idea of what nature is and I no longer feel like I have to necessarily escape because there is always, I have this idea that to be at nature, to be at peace, to be calm is to be connected, but there was always that you have to get away to find that. So now its much more like I feel like I could just stand on my sidewalk and just look up at a tree and I’m connected with nature”.
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It seems evident that nature under this narrative is inclusive of human activity. It
is a nature that is not only co-operative and democratic, but also a place of healing and
resistance.
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Conclusion
In this thesis certain community gardens in Ottawa were examined in order to
understand the intersectionality of social justice and ecology. This social-natural
dialectic explains, to an extent, the marginalization of people through environmental
destruction and development, and it can also stand as an avenue for environmental
justice through the construction of systems of social ecology. This thesis was able to
demonstrate a case of social ecology in action, and how it constructed if not the
accomplishment of environmental justice, then the paradigmatic basis for it.
At the beginning of the thesis the combination of two historically disconnected
spheres of theory was shown to be possible. Traditionally based in environmental
materialism Murray Bookchin’s social ecology has, throughout its history excluded the
inclusion of ontological-based poststructuralist theories and methodologies. In this
thesis it was demonstrated that, as seen in the fields of political economy and political
ecology, an ontological deconstruction of materialist power relations can equally
contribute to the libertarian and socialist projects of materialist Marxism and anarchism.
It can do this because of the success of such poststructuralist theorists as Michel
Foucault who were able to demonstrate the ontological bases for the social construction
of power relationships in capitalist and statist power structures. This paper filled the gap
between the two theoretical spheres. It shows that in practice certain projects such as
community gardens can connect discourses of resistance to the construction of a
libertarian and worker-led political economy.
Also in this thesis a brief history of how natural resource development and
European imperialism have produced marginal working and living conditions amounting
62
to famine and epidemic disease outbreaks in the Ottawa Valley. Though the connection
between the fur-trade and the displacement of Algonquin peoples, deforestation and
oppressive living and working conditions, and finally the construction of the Rideau
Canal and the exacerbation of famine and disease, the history of Ottawa clearly
demonstrates the intersectionality of ecological destruction and the marginalization of
peoples. However victory gardens during war times, and community gardens more
recently in periods of intense urbanization, operates as ecologically driven means
through which people can resist such destructive systems of oppression to empower
themselves and improve their living conditions.
The findings of this thesis conducted through a series of six in-depth semi-
structured interviews shows that social ecology in action is working to a significant
degree. It was discovered that community gardening, though limited in its effects does
act to improve social conditions, empower communities and provide people with some
degree of economic self-determination. Though the experiences accounted for in this
thesis are hardly revolutionary, they do show some very promising results. The
participants have expressed that though community gardening projects they
experienced some tangible ways they were able to better their social welfare and
produce economic self-determination. However, most significantly, these gardens act as
discursive places to challenge and resist oppressive paradigms. They are places where
as in Blomley (2004), the community was able to problematize the concept of private
property ownership effectively producing a commons area.
More traditional theorists in the field of social ecology would discount this as
providing no significant contribution to the construction of the ideal political economy.
63
Yet, I would argue that the accounts given by people using the garden sites to dream of
their ideal political economy is fundamentally important to this project. There is no doubt
that as community gardens continue to grow in size, number and popularity, society will
increasingly challenge the conventional statist-capitalist paradigms of current urban
food systems. Society will insist upon having more self-determination over space and
resources in their cities, either through civil society organization or more revolutionary
means. The ideas of participation in ecology and the freedom to create community and
to determine the collective organization of resources are certainly the first step in
producing an ecological and social system of urban land reform.
Furthermore the space that community gardens provide has been shown to
facilitate the construction of communities. In urban areas where the idea of community
is often absent because of social conventions that privilege individualist participation in
the economic system and individualistic arrangements of life, community gardens, by
many accounts, have permitted many typically disconnected people to participate
together in the garden. They also act as spaces where oppressive racial, gender, ageist
and ableist paradigms are challenged. The uniting of oppressed peoples through such
spaces physically and discursively reveals the importance of nature as a space of
resistance. Community gardens, in this thesis, have shown how nature, however
tampered by humanity in urban space, can create space very similar to the narrative of
wilderness as the space where bell hooks resisted racial prejudice and poverty.
The impact that this research has on the academic study of community gardens
is how it shows such spaces constructed through power and resistance rely upon the
conflict of prevailing discourses in society. The community garden if not just a tangible
64
place that holds plants, it is where people are puncturing holes in the normative
discourses of the liberal urban landscape for a new political economy to emerge.
This research does not necessarily act as a prescription for community gardens
to cure the injustices that are incurred by people and nature in cities by institutionalized
systems of hierarchy through a clear social ecology. Rather, the findings demonstrate
community gardening as a place for the discourses and traditions of a social ecology to
form, necessary in the production of an urban-agrarian land reform that would produce
a libertarian municipalism as envisioned by Murray Bookchin. Community gardens and
community gardening organizations may in the future see success in promoting their
project as encouraging forms of participatory democracy and economy in order to attain
funding or to further build their movement.
The case in which the City of Ottawa provided seventy-five thousand dollars to a
civil society group to organize community gardening through a million dollar community
environmental and beautification pilot fund demonstrates specifically how municipalities
can contribute to the production of a social ecology in their cities. If more resources
were to be directed towards empowering communities to determine their own economic
means of food production it is likely that community activities would continue along the
lines of community gardening. For this reason, it seems the only way to make a city
truly green is to give power to the people to do it for themselves.
65
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Appendix I: Interview Questions
73
Chris BissonCommunity Gardens and Urban Geographies of Environmental Justice
Interview Question Guide
Can you tell me how long have you participated in this community garden and others?
Can you describe your community garden?
Can you describe the area surrounding the community garden?
Can you tell me why you think the community garden is located where it is?
Can you tell me about how you got involved with community gardening?
Can you tell me what community gardening mean to you?
Can you tell me what relationship you feel the community gardens has with its natural surroundings?
Can you tell me what relationship you feel the community garden has with its surrounding communities?
Can you tell me what relationship the community garden has with the social welfare of the surrounding population?
Can you tell me what relationship the community garden has with the greater society of Ottawa?
Can you tell me what relationship the community garden has with food systems in Ottawa?
How would you say your outlook on the city has changed since you started community gardening?
How would you say your perspective on your natural surroundings has changed since you started community gardening?
How would you say that your community garden has changed the local landscape?
Where do you see community gardening going in the future?
What do you think your city’s planners and politicians think about community gardening?
Why do you think people participate in community gardens?
74
Appendix II: Maps
Figure 1 - Ward 14: Somerset
Figure 2 - Ward 17: Capitol
Figure 3 - Registered Community Gardens by Ward
Figure 4 - Population Density by Ward
Figure 5 - Average Income by Ward
Figure 6 - Proportion of Recent Immigration Population By Ward
Figure 7 - Unemployment Rate By Ward
Figure 8 - Community Gardens Discussed in This Thesis
75
SID
NE
Y C
OO
K
Figure 1 - Ward 14: Som
erset. City of Ottawa. Retrieved O
ctober 21, 2009, from
http://ww
w.city.ottaw
a.on.ca/residents/statistics/census/w
ards/index_en.html
76
SIDNEY COOK
Figure 2 - Ward 17: Capitol. City of Ottawa. Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://www.city.ottawa.on.ca/residents/statistics/census/wards/index_en.html
77
Figure 3 - Comm
unity Garden Sites Registered W
ith the City of Ottawa and City W
ard Boundaries. City of O
ttawa, 2009. Retrieved October 21, 2009 from
http://apps104.ottawa.ca/emap/.
78
Figure 4 - Population Density Excluding Greenbelt Area By W
ard, from 2008 City of O
ttawa building permit data,
retrieved October 25, 2009 from
http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/statistics/data_handbook/other/table_51_en.html
79
Figure 5 - Average Individual Income By W
ard, from 2006 Canadian Census, retrieved
October 25, 2009 from
http://city.ottawa.on.ca/residents/statistics/census/wards/index_en.html
80
Figure 6 - Proportion of Recent Imm
igration Population By Ward, from
2006 Canadian Census, retrieved O
ctober 25, 2009 from http://city.ottawa.on.ca/residents/statistics/census/wards/index_en.htm
l
81
Figure 7 - Unemploym
ent Rate By Ward, from
2006 Canadian Census, retrieved October 25,
2009 from http://city.ottawa.on.ca/residents/statistics/census/wards/index_en.htm
l
82
Figure 8 - Comm
unity Gardens Discussed in This
Thesis.
83