Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T19:37:59.806Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aroma-Home’s edible stories: An urban community garden performs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2017

Susan Haedicke
Susan Haedicke*
Affiliation:
Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
*
*Corresponding author: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Aroma-Home, an artist-initiated community garden in Villetaneuse, just outside Paris, France, originated as a way to poeticize damaged urban locations by creating small communally-created pockets of unexpected natural beauty. In 2013, Sarah Harper of Friches Théâtre Urbain joined forces with local inhabitants to reclaim public spaces marred by construction and neglect. Together, they began to alter the urban landscape with whimsical plant-based interventions that sprouted up behind construction fences. This guerrilla gardening soon led to the sowing of a community garden that wove together food-growing, story-telling and place-making and fashioned its particular identity through cultural practices around growing, preparing and sharing food of the multi-ethnic participants. The horticultural-culinary conversations became inextricably connected to gardening activities: edible stories involving food memories and horticultural skills that nourished those who prepared and consumed them. This ‘From the Field’ paper looks at how the community garden/art-making processes of Aroma-Home transformed a bleak construction site into a mini-urban agricultural ‘commons’ where imagining, planting and harvesting the garden and its edible stories were all shared.

Keywords

Aroma-HomeFriches Théâtre Urbaincommunity gardenedible storiesagricultural commons
Type
Research Paper
Information
Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems , Volume 33 , Special Issue 6: Themed Content: Critical Foodscapes , December 2018 , pp. 542 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, D., Hardman, M., and Larkham, P. 2015. Exploring guerrilla gardening: Gauging public views on the grassroots activity. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 20(10):1231–1246.Google Scholar
ASAP Journal 1.1. 2016. Special Issue: Art and the Commons. ASAP Journal 1.1: 1–168Google Scholar
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, Durham and London.Google Scholar
Crouch, D. 2003. The Art of Allotments. Five Leaves, Nottingham.Google Scholar
DeLind, L.B. 2003. Considerably more than vegetable, a lot less than community: The dilemma of community-supported agriculture. In Adams, J. (ed.) Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
Ginn, F. 2014. Sticky lives: Slugs, detachment and more-than-human ethics in the garden. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39(4):532–544.Google Scholar
Glass, M.R. and Rose-Redwood, R. 2015. Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space. Routledge, London and New York.Google Scholar
Guthman, J. 2008. Thinking inside the neoliberal box: The micro-politics of agro-food philanthropy. Geoforum 39:1241–1253.Google Scholar
Hardman, M. and Larkham, P.J. 2014. Informal Urban Agriculture: The Secret Lives of Guerrilla Gardeners. Springer, Cham.Google Scholar
Hayes-Conroy, J. and Hayes-Conroy, A. 2013. Veggies and visceralities: A political ecology of food and feeling. Emotion, Space and Society 6:81–90.Google Scholar
Holland, L. 2004. Diversity and connections in community gardens: A contribution to local sustainability. Local Environment 9(3):285–305.Google Scholar
Hou, J. (ed.) 2010. Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. Routledge, New York and Abingdon, Oxon.Google Scholar
Hou, J., Johnson, J.M., and Lawson, L.J. 2009. Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle's Urban Community Gardens. University of Washington Press, Seattle.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. 2000. Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, New York and London.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. Routledge, London and New York.Google Scholar
Latour, B. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London.Google Scholar
Massey, D. 2005. For Space. Sage, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
McCay, G. 2011. Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden. Francis Lincoln Ltd, London.Google Scholar
Mikadze, V. 2015. Ephemeral urban landscapes of guerrilla gardeners: A phenomenological approach. Landscape Research 40(5):519–529.Google Scholar
Milbourne, P. 2009. Growing places: Community gardening, ordinary creativities and place-based regeneration in a northern English city. In Edensor, T., Leslie, D., Millington, S., and Rantisi, S. (eds). Spaces of Vernacular Creativity. Routledge, London. p. 141–154.Google Scholar
Milbourne, P. 2012. Everyday (In)justices and ordinary environmentalisms: Community gardening in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. Local Environment 17(9):943–957.Google Scholar
Ostrum, E. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Collective Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge UP, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Pitt, H. 2017. Questioning care cultivated through connecting with more-than-human communities. Social and Cultural Geography 18:1–22.Google Scholar
Pudup, M.B. 2008. It takes a garden: Cultivating citizen-subjects in organized garden projects. Geoforum 39(3):1228–1240.Google Scholar
Reynolds, R. 2008. On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Borders. Bloomsbury, London.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, E.K. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, Durham and London.Google Scholar
Szerszynski, B., Heim, W. and Waterton, C. 2003. Introduction. In Szerszynski, B., Heim, W., and Waterton, C. (eds). Nature Performed: Environment, Culture, Performance. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK and Malden, MA. p. 1–14.Google Scholar
Thompson, M. 2015. Between boundaries: From commoning and guerrilla gardening to community land trust development in Liverpool. Antipode 47(4):1021–1042.Google Scholar
Tracey, D. 2007. Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC.Google Scholar