Fences,seeds and bees: The more-than-human politics of community gardening in Rotterdam

Abstract

Chinese

This paper explores the more-than-human politics of a community garden in Rotterdam, as an expression of sustainable and resilient city making. Challenging the anthropocentrism underlying most research on the politics of urban sustainability/resilience and urban gardening, the paper proposes a more-than-human assemblage approach to urban gardening politics. I argue that urban gardens can be understood as more-than-human configurations and conceptualised as urban garden assemblages. Such assemblages are processes with different temporalities and types of agencies (insects, plants, soil and fences) and can be analytically understood as more-than-human: (1) relations and performances; (2) power hierarchies/resistances; and (3) ethical co-becomings. Building on participatory ethnography, interviews and (online) documents, the paper then presents an empirical account of the Gandhi-garden, a community garden in Rotterdam, embedded in the global Transition Towns movement. The empirical case shows how mundane acts of pulling weeds and using permacultural planting methods are more-than-human place-making practices. It also highlights how, for example, human–soil, human–seed and human–bee entanglements challenge urban neoliberalism while gardeners experiment with sustainable food and a non-violent economy. The paper illustrates the ethico-political expressions of more-than-human community gardening through solidarity bonds with Palestine via olive trees and non-violence thinking, as well as some human/non-human ambivalences when dealing with dog waste and potentially harvest-stealing birds. Finally, the paper presents some reflections and contributions regarding scholarship in the fields of urban gardening, and sustainable/resilient city making.

Keywords

more-than-human ethics resilience sustainability urban assemblage urban gardening

The question of ‘more-than-human’ politics in urban gardening

One day, I was standing near a small apple tree with one of the gardeners. We plucked an apple, it was small but already ripe. I expected it to be a little sour … but it was unexpectedly sweet and juicy. I felt a connection with the apple, with the taste, a sense of purity and joy this self-planted tree gave us. This sensation was quite surreal to experience in this city (Rotterdam), between a highway, a gas station and a residential area. Tasting the apple seems to be a means to (re)connect to the urban soil, just like how we planted vegetables, pulling weeds and ate produce together. Working and gardening happened with all the residents, vegetation, creatures and insects. It represented a new mode of urban existence with – and in the midst of – all kinds of human and non-human lives. (Fieldnote, July 2013)

This paper explores the more-than-human politics of urban gardening, as an expression of sustainable and resilient city-making. It does so by focusing in on the empirical case of the Gandhi-garden, located in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The idea of the Gandhi-garden began in the spring of 2009, when a number of people got together and talked about the global Transition Towns grassroot movement, which seeks to create sustainable and resilient communities in the wake of socio-ecological crises. As one of them put it: ‘Transition Town Rotterdam started with some beer on a balcony’ (Interview, 9 July 2013). They discussed the socio-economic and environmental challenges of Rotterdam. Since 2009, a few gardens have been created, including the Gandhi-garden. The Gandhi-garden website clearly articulates its socio-political goal: ‘we provide extra space for people that need the land, and working on the land and its fruits, the most. In the future, parts of the garden should provide space for reintegration projects, educational projects and the food bank’.¹ This social ambition is inspired by the non-violent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, as indicated on the garden’s website: ‘Only in an economy of exclusion, greed and overconsumption is there scarcity, poverty, extraction of natural resources and climate change’.² Farming on and with an urban ecosystem for such ambitions is not only a human effort, but a complex process that involves many actors and agencies (see the opening fieldnote).

The more-than-human in urban gardening

Urban gardening as a movement and research object has blossomed in recent years. Scholars have highlighted how urban agriculture and gardening express a broad social movement that rejects neoliberal urbanisation in the Global North (McClintock, 2014). As such, actors engaging in gardening enact new forms of ‘DIY citizenship’ (Crossan et al., 2016), and re-articulate spatiality and urban publicness (Ernwein, 2014; Milbourne, 2021). Though urban agriculture projects carry political ambivalences and tensions between public and private (Milbourne, 2021), radical and pragmatic (McClintock, 2014) and neoliberal and community-driven (Jhagroe, 2019), they can be considered as specific reconfigurations of urban spaces, infrastructures and ecologies.

Urban community gardens, like the Gandhi-garden in Rotterdam, are great settings to empirically study more-than-human politics because they expresses specific embodied politics of human–food relations (Artmann et al., 2021), and agro-biological practices and public concerns since ‘every plant is political’ (Tracey, 2007). More-than-human associations are made and remade through urban gardening (Certomà, 2011) in relation to broader environmental, climate and economic concerns (Certomà and Tornaghi, 2015; Tornaghi and Certomà, 2019). However, expressing a broader human-centric bias within the social sciences, most of urban gardening research tends to rely on methodological anthropocentrism. Although urban gardening processes and practices greatly depend on how animals, objects, plants, herbs, institutions and people are enmeshed and interact, scholarly attention often presumes human-centric (and liberal) institutions, agencies and stakeholder enactments (Certomà, 2016; Jhagroe, 2016).

Recent scholarship on more-than-human urbanism (and to some on extent urban agriculture) turns our attention to posthuman and multi-species realities (e.g. Müüripeal et al., 2023). The more-than-human turn in urban studies sheds light on such human–nature entanglements and the processual nature of urban space-making and subjectivity (Holmberg, 2015; Maller, 2018). Importantly, human-centric reductionism downplays more-than-human agencies in cities, while urban environments – like urban gardens – actually have ‘numerous non-human species and ecosystems that share, make and occupy urban habitats’ (Maller, 2021: 3). Instead of zooming in on particular more-than-human gardening aspects, like ‘designing’ (Poikolainen Rosén et al., 2022) or ‘plant/vegetal geographies and politics’ (Del Monte, 2022; Lawrence, 2022), this paper discusses more-than-human gardening vis-à-vis sustainable and resilient urbanism.

Such a broad engagement allows us to situate the more-than-human politics of urban gardening in wider policy and academic debates on human/non-human politics in urban socio-environmental sustainability and resilient city making (Langemeyer et al., 2021; Maller, 2021). To be sure, in the age of ecological crises, urban political research should perhaps even centre-stage fundamental human–nature relations (Oliver, 2023). As Maller (2021: 3) argues:

[t]o address global challenges such as climate change, pandemics, mass extinctions and the dramatic loss of biodiversity, it is becoming increasingly and urgently clear that urban policy, planning, and other means by which humans govern and design cities … can no longer continue based on a human-centric (i.e. human-focused) platform that problematically prioritises some humans or human communities over others.

Understanding the wider more-than-human politics involved in urban gardening also enables us to better understand the micropolitics of non-humans and multi-species agencies beyond human-centric conceptions (Poikolainen Rosén et al., 2022). This relates to, for instance, the agency of electric cars in neoliberal urbanism, green zones in gentrification processes, smart grids and buildings, the role of dogs in urban life and squatting practices as part of urban insurgence and resistance strategies (Anguelovski et al., 2019; Bogado et al., 2019; Phillips and Petrova, 2021).

This contribution explores the more-than-human politics of the Gandhi-garden by considering non-human actors in terms of their agential and vitalist capacities – or ‘thing power’ (Bennett, 2010) – instead of understanding non-humans as ‘separate stakeholders’ or as ‘objects’ that need to gain political significance through ‘human will’ (Rutherford, 2014: 1452). Recent research in New Materialism, Posthumanism and Science and Technology Studies has highlighted that non-humans and ecologies in the city are vital forces and are (therefore) deeply political (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2016; Jon, 2020). Such a perspective suggests that urban assemblages include ‘vibrant matter’ and that more-than-human entanglements are politically significant (Braidotti, 2016; Pløger, 2006: 387). This pushes us to understand the politics of green urbanism and adaptive urban planning differently, taking into account multi-species entanglements and ethics beyond the exceptionalism of human communities (Houston et al., 2018).

The paper first discusses the human-centric bias in prevailing urban sustainability and resilience discourses, including urban agriculture/gardening research. Anthropocentricism has important implications for how complex urban life is (not) conceived, including questions about urbanisation politics and ethics. It then explores insights from what Maller (2021) calls ‘more-than-human thinking’, in particular urban assemblage theory (Kinkaid, 2020; McFarlane, 2011). The paper then presents a conceptual frame to understand urban garden assemblages in terms of socio-material entanglements, power asymmetries and an ethics of becoming. Such assemblages are processes with different temporalities and types of agencies (insects, plants, soil and fences), and are presented as: (1) more-than-human relations and performances; (2) power hierarchies/resistances; and (3) ethical co-becomings. Building on participatory ethnography, interviews and (online) documents (from the early to mid-2010s), the paper then presents an empirical account of the Gandhi-garden, a community garden in Rotterdam, embedded in the global Transition Towns movement. The empirical case shows how mundane acts of pulling weeds and using permacultural planting methods are more-than-human place-making practices. It also highlights how, for example, human–soil, human–seed and human–bee entanglements challenge urban neoliberalism (i.e. urban development guided by market logics and individualism) while gardeners experiment with sustainable food and a non-violent economy. The paper illustrates the ethico-political expressions of more-than-human community gardening through solidarity bonds with Palestine via olive trees and non-violence thinking, as well as some human/non-human ambivalences when dealing with dog waste and potentially harvest-stealing birds. Finally, the paper presents some reflections and contributions for scholarship in the fields of urban gardening, and sustainable/resilient city making.

Methodology

The account of the Gandhi-garden in Rotterdam is discussed on the basis of different methods and empirical materials, in particular participatory ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and document analysis. Most of the empirical research took place between 2013 and 2015. In line with the urban garden assemblage concept, I argue that a more-than-human epistemology requires an embedded and situated understanding of spaces, creatures, objects and people associated with gardening as more-than-human city making (Blok, 2014). Mapping such situated posthuman knowledges requires in situ sensing, embodiment and having conversations, but also mapping more-than-human translations and representations in institutional frameworks and digital realities that intersect with the garden (cf. Braidotti, 2019).

The first main method was participatory fieldwork, which allowed me to have a deep sense of human/non-human engagements in the garden, with the soil and the gardeners. To some extent, my ethnographic fieldwork resonates with more-than-human or multi-species ethnography (Moore and Kosut, 2013). This type of ethnographic work is critical, as it moves away from universal or ‘outside observational’ knowledge and centre-stages human/nature experiences and embodied knowledge (Lien and Pálsson, 2021). As such, it allowed me to sense, see, notice and understand the micropolitical practices expressed by plants, trees, the soil, insects and their relation with human gardeners and urban policy. I joined the Gandhi-garden in 2013 and 2014 and participated for about six months (on average, twice a week). I was welcomed as an interested researcher and joined the gardening activities, including pulling weeds, composting, planting seeds, harvesting produce, and participated in small talk and discussions about social issues during tea breaks. This allowed me to follow and partake in daily interactions, conversations and bodily-material engagements with the many garden activities. Second, I conducted over 20 interviews with different people, mostly Gandhi-gardeners, but also policy makers and a few related organisations connected to the garden (e.g. a bakery, and an alternative currency initiative). The semi-structured interviews and more open conversations varied in duration, some were relatively short and informal (under 15 minutes), while others were well over one hour. These interviews took place near the garden, but also in other spaces, such as cafes or in the city hall. Third, I consulted key policy documents of the city of Rotterdam published in the 2010s on the city’s Urban Planning Strategy or Sustainability Policy. In addition to these formal policy documents, I drew from online sources that represent Gandhi-garden ideas and activities, either on their own (or related) websites, or Gandhi-garden related social media accounts and messages. The combination of these methods and materials safeguards triangulation (Carter et al., 2014) and allowed me to have an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of the more-than-human entanglements of the Gandhi-garden.

Analytically, the empirical material has been categorised and clustered along the lines of the three guiding conceptual dimensions and their respective questions: (1) relations of becoming; (2) hierarchy-resistance; and (3) ethics of co-becoming. Since these dimensions are often intertwined in complex empirical realities, specific urban gardening issue and themes are foregrounded and highlighted with the help of some of these questions (sometimes one, sometimes all three). So, in the case analysis sections, particular themes will focus more on, for example, more-than-human resistances against neoliberalism, while others focus also (or more) on ethical and community becomings.

Challenging ‘the human’ in urban sustainability, resilience and gardening

Before we discuss more-than-human politics in the city more conceptually, it is instructive to briefly discuss the anthropocentric bias in prevailing discourses on urban sustainability and resilience research, as well as urban agriculture/gardening. In recent decades, cities have been increasingly understood as an adequate scale to address concerns around environment, economy and social relations. Cities seem to be in a stage of constant crisis, and in need of adequate strategic responses. As Evans puts it:

From Bangkok to Mexico City, levels of air and water pollution are rising. Getting to work takes longer and longer. Affordable housing is an endangered species and green space is shrinking. The large cities of the Third World are becoming ‘world cities,’ increasingly important nodes in the financial and productive networks of the global economy, but they are not providing livelihoods and healthy habitats for ordinary people. They are also degrading environmental resources inside and outside the urbanized area itself at a rate that cannot be maintained. Without new political strategies aimed at increasing liveability, the future is bleak. (Evans, 2002: 1)

Two influential and quite human-centric responses are urban sustainability and resilience. First, the notion of sustainability emerged as a discursive label in the 1990s to account for a variety of modern urban concerns. Cities are crucial nodal points of modern human civilisation as ‘world-wide cities are responsible for almost 75% of the global resource consumption’ (Nevens et al., 2013: 111). A well-known ‘fact’ in this regard is that 2008 was the year that ‘humanity crossed a milestone when the global urban population exceeded the rural population for the first time in history … since then more than half of the world’s population lives in cities’ (Nevens et al., 2013: 111). The implicit anthropocentrism associated with ‘human populations’ tells a story about the ways urban sustainability discourse and policies are often framed. Even though urban regions across the globe have adopted sustainable and environmental policies, human hegemony seems to be prevalent in many cases (Yigitcanlar et al., 2019). Sustainable city-making, then, often relies on a biopolitical strategy of human survival in the wake of ecological catastrophe, such as air pollution and floods (e.g. Swyngedouw, 2017). Other critics have raised questions about political power and social inequities associated with sustainable urban space-making. For instance, sustainable projects could repress and ‘depoliticise’ urban struggles (Swyngedouw, 2011) and actually reproduce selective ideological frames of ‘urban nature’ (Wachsmuth and Angelo, 2018). Even though urban sustainability projects are mostly about deep relations between human, nature, animals, green technologies and the built environment, their politics and research are often focussed on human stakeholders, institutions and struggles, downplaying non-human agencies and vitalities (Jhagroe, 2016; Maller, 2021).

Second, the discourse on urban resilience carries a similar anthropocentrism. As resilient cities increase social, institutional and material capacities to endure and absorb shocks and crisis, it seems that ‘urban resilience’ is often deployed for human survival (see Coaffee and Clarke, 2017). Or, as Wakefield et al. (2022) argue, resilience renders non-human elements for adaptive management and governmental use ‘disposable’. More generally speaking, the notion of ‘urban resilience’ has been criticised for relying on neoliberal public–private strategies (Tierney, 2015), techno-financial risk assessments downplaying issues of rights and justice (Ziervogel et al., 2017), or being tied to uneven socio-environmental risks (Allen et al., 2017). Such political concerns often centre-stage human stakeholders in view of ‘external’ ecological crises, thereby considering non-human objects and actors (e.g. architecture, urban nature) as instrumental for human survival and struggles (Wakefield et al., 2022).

Finally, a human-centric understanding of politics in urban sustainability and resilience discourses can also be traced in much of the scholarship on urban agriculture and gardening in the Global North (Maller, 2021). As suggested earlier, critical analyses on urban gardening are mushrooming, yet seem to focus on the extent to which gardening practices fit neoliberal hegemony schemes (Jhagroe, 2019; McClintock, 2014), have emancipatory potential for specific groups (Crossan et al., 2016) and express more fundamental urban ecological politics Milbourne (2021). Though significant and insightful, such contributions often downplay the vital and agential power of animals, plants and objects, even though the latter is crucial to make and remake urban habitats, including community gardens (Maller, 2021). Foregrounding the more-than-human political is key as it discloses how non-human actors articulate political agency. This refers to more-than-human agencies vis-à-vis neoliberal power, but it is also ‘extremely relevant and urgent to make visible micropolitics of mutual care enacted through situated relationalities’ (Del Monte, 2022: 64).

All of this raises important questions about the role and capacity of urban non-humans – animal, natural environments and technologies – and the political agencies and potentials they have. Even though some recent papers foreground a more-than-human approach to understand sustainable and green urbanism (Del Monte, 2022; Maller, 2021; Wakefield et al., 2022), modernist human-centrism remains a general academic and political concern, as Plumwood reminds us:

Western knowledge relies on ‘hyper-separated’ categories based in stratified modes of dualistic thinking (mind–body; nature–culture; feminine–masculine), which conceive the human as not only superior to but as different in kind from the nonhuman. (Plumwood, 2009, in Houston et al., 2018: 194)

Human-centric fixations have severe implications for which political and ethical questions can and cannot be asked about city-making. Anthropocentric urban politics relies on a humanist and liberal tradition of western political thought and culture where virtually every political institution and form of political life is understood as human-centric politics in terms of its main goals, procedures and frameworks (Braidotti, 2019; Jhagroe, 2016). The underlying assumption here is that human beings are fundamentally different (qua capacities and self-understanding) from – and therefore superior to – animals, plants, or even buildings and infrastructures. This ‘human supremacy’ is sustained by violent boundaries between nature and culture, between social systems and physical systems. The specific problem of anthropocentric urban politics refers to the more-than-human embeddedness and fundamental dependency of human life (Lawhon and Murphy, 2012). So, what does it mean to reframe our sense and understanding of the city such that it involves a wide range of more-than-human actors? How can ‘the non-human’ be reconceived in urban sustainability/resilience and gardening contexts, not only ontologically, but also politically and ethically?

Conceptualising the urban garden assemblage

Scholarly work in the fields of Posthumanism, Science and Technology Studies, New Materialism and Political Ecology (to mention a few) has developed conceptual and methodological tools to rethink social and material realities. Importantly, these scholars often focus on contemporary concerns, including pollution, algorithmic surveillance and climate change (Braidotti, 2016; Fox and Alldred, 2020). Such issues challenge the centrality of human agency and show deep human–technology–nature entanglements with regard to problems and political interventions. Cities, in particular, are spaces where these more-than-human relations and their politics unfold. As Heynen and colleagues (2006: 2) explain: ‘To the extent that cities are produced through socio-ecological processes, attention has to be paid to the political processes through which particular socio-environmental urban conditions are made and remade’. Similarly, Coole and Frost suggest that challenging the sacred status of humans in political affairs, is to ‘situate citizens, ideas and values within the fields of material forces and power relations that reproduce and circumscribe their existence and coexistence’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 28). Significantly, a ‘more-than-human’ approach to social and political life is not ‘new’, Indigenous knowledge and ways of living have expressed this deep relationality centuries before western scholars ‘discovered’ it (Clary-Lemon and Grant, 2022; Porter et al., 2020). It has entered western academia and culture in recent years as a reaction to modernist human/nature segmentation and its expressions in for example, cheap labour markets and resource extraction.

Research on more-than-human entanglements has gained traction in a growing number of academic disciplines (cf. Maller, 2021; Rutherford, 2014), for instance in human and cultural geography (Steele et al., 2019), environmental humanities (van Dooren et al., 2016), (techno-) feminist studies (Haraway, 2008), Science and Technology Studies (Latour, 2012), but also fields like urban planning (Houston et al., 2018), urban political ecology (Kaika, 2006), and political science (Ferguson, 2015). Generally speaking, a more-than-human approach changes the sensibility of ‘separate spheres’ and breaks down ontological boundaries of ‘social’ versus ‘non-social’ realities. Countering modernist hyper-segmentation, I follow Karen Barad when she argues that:

surely it is the case – even when the focus is restricted to the materiality of ‘human’ bodies (and how can we stop there?) – that there are ‘natural’, not mere ‘social,’ forces that matter. Indeed, there is a host of material-discursive forces – including ones that get labelled ‘social,’‘cultural,’‘psychic,’‘economic,’‘natural,’‘physical,’‘biological,’‘geopolitical,’ and ‘geological’– that may be important to particular (entangled) processes of materialization. (Barad, 2007: 66)

This is particularly relevant for cities, as urbanisation is often considered to be a socio-material process that transcends human organisations and activities (Kaika, 2006). For the purpose of this paper, I discuss the concept of the urban garden assemblage, building on and specifying urban assemblage scholarship of McFarlane (2011) and others. This concept is productive to centre-stage more-than-human relationalities and their politics as it is both specific and flexible. That is to say, it allows us to engage with very garden-specific more-than-human political concerns, while at the same time addressing broader human/non-human political significances around urban sustainability and resilience.

Urban gardens as more-than-human assemblages

An assemblage can be understood as a ‘constellation of singularities’ (McFarlane, 2011; Tampio, 2009). As Farías and Bender (2010) argue, an ontology of urban assemblages applies a more generic ontology of agential socio-technical networks to heterogeneous urban spaces and practices. Cities are socio-material becomings imbued with uneven developmental directions and velocities (Durose et al., 2022; Kamalipour and Peimani, 2015; Prigogine and Stengers, 1997; Whitehead, 2013). In this sense, urban assemblages and other academic disciplines related to complexity science share an ontology of social and material worlds as fundamentally related and as processes of becoming (Farías and Bender 2010; Farías, 2011; Latham and McCormack, 2004). An important focus of assemblage urbanism is that it considers changes and shifts as immanent. Cities are understood as contingent forms of ‘emergence’ at various levels, replacing the static image of the city with a more vitalist image of multi-directional space-flows that can be conservative and subversive (Jacobs, 2012: 415). The work of Bender et al. (2010), for example, portrays the city as follows:

The notion of urban assemblages in the plural form offers a powerful foundation to grasp the city anew, as an object which is relentlessly being assembled at concrete sites of urban practice or, to put it differently, as a multiplicity of processes of becoming, affixing sociotechnical networks, hybrid collectives and alternative topologies. (Farías and Bender, 2010: 2)

I argue that urban gardens are particular more-than-human configurations or assemblages. Urban agriculture and gardens are indeed processes, becomings with different temporalities (Blok, 2014), and different types of agencies (humans, insects, animals, plants, soil, fences, etc.). As such, Farías and Bender’s (2010) account of an urban assemblage resonates with the specificities of an urban garden (Maller, 2021). The concept of urban garden assemblages sensitises gardens as processes with networked and nested hierarchies as well as sites of resistance (Brenner, 2014; Swyngedouw, 1996). This could refer to more-than-human struggles for air, sunlight, nutrients, territory, but also human strategies that order and border urban gardens.

This ontology thus approaches the vitalist politics of urban gardens in terms of struggles and negotiations associated with the lives of human and more-than-human populations. Questions about the so-called ‘right to metabolism’ or the ‘right to the city’ signify that ‘environmental transformations are not independent of class, gender, ethnicity, or other power struggles’ (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000: 126). The notion of ‘more-than-human right to the city’ (Shingne, 2021) is particularly instructive as it extends human-centric with human/non-human entanglements and struggles over particular rights, access and decision-making power. These insights suggest that urban garden assemblages designate fundamental tensions and deep-seated conflicts about how and for whom cities are actually reconfigured. Assemblage (garden) urbanism presents a particular understanding about which (non-)human forms of life are privileged and enhanced. It unequivocally moves away from a Laswellian understanding of politics as ‘who gets what, when and how?’ to a more micropolitical framing of institutional and everyday realities. Politics, then, is not conceived as parliamentary politics or institutional policies, but as everyday practices of socio-material difference making and forces that either reinforce social organisation, or resist it (Widder, 2012).

Importantly, I conceive the urban garden assemblage in relation to an ethical programme. A relational and process oriented ontology is not isolated from vitalist ethics, explicated by Kinkaid (2020) in terms of ‘assemblage-as-ethos’. Vitalist ethics here imply that relations between human city dwellers and more-than-human actors are contingent, and can expand and remake the communities through ‘emergent ethico-political possibilities’ (Blok, 2014: 271). In line with Bennett’s vital materialism, for instance, it could be argued that even inorganic materials (e.g. minerals, litter) exhibit ‘powers of life, resistance and even a kind of will’ (Bennett, 2004: 360). Furthermore, following Plumwood’s (2002, 2009) suggestion to ‘ecologise humans’, Rose argues the task here is ‘to resituate the human in ecological terms’ and [at the same time] to ‘resituate the nonhuman in ethical terms’ (Rose, 2015: 3). In urban garden settings, a relational ethics of becoming can inform policy and planning as well, namely ‘as “co-becoming” in and for diverse multispecies communities, where humans, plants, soils, microbes, birds, fungi, insects, native and non-native animals shape urban landscapes and interactions’ (Houston et al., 2018: 194). This includes ‘noticing’ and ‘listening to’ plants and other non-human creatures, cultivating multi-species practices and ethics (Del Monte, 2022; Lawrence, 2022). I suggest that this ethical horizon is immanent to an assemblage garden urbanism (Kinkaid, 2020; McFarlane’s, 2011).

To summarise, the concept of the urban garden assemblage accentuates more-than-human relationalities and processes of urbanisation, as well as immanent power struggles and an ethics of co-becoming (Braidotti, 2016; Houston et al., 2018; Magnusson, 2014; Maller, 2021; McFarlane, 2011). The following interrelated questions address the more-than-human politics of urban garden formations for empirical analysis and specification:

Relational becoming | How does this urban garden express a spatial category or formation? What human/non-human doings, performances and events characterise it? What are its specific situated discursive-material processes and becomings, that stretch across multiple localities and scales?

Hierarchy-resistance | How is this urban garden structured hierarchically? What are specific uneven more-than-human relations of power, knowledge and legitimacy? How are boundaries drawn between forms of life that deserve protection and flourishing, versus others that do not?

Ethics of co-becoming | In what way does this urban garden express an ethics of co-becoming? What are new modes of knowing and multi-species co-existence? How does becoming serve as a ground for collective liberation and solidarity?

These guiding questions structure the empirical analysis in this paper, but can also be used as an analytical framing for researchers interested in more-than-human urban gardening and agriculture.

Seeds and bees in Rotterdam: The Gandhi-garden’s multi-species vitalism

This section discusses the more-than-human politics of the Gandhi-garden in the city of Rotterdam. Rotterdam is of particular interest here as it has a rich culture of urban governance experimentation and citizens/community engagement in which socio-ecological relations are expected to be reconfigured (Frantzeskaki et al., 2018; Frantzeskaki and Tilie, 2014; Jhagroe, 2016). Rotterdam has also adopted sustainability and resilience discourses and strategies for many years (Lu and Stead, 2013; Jhagroe, 2016). Furthermore, as one of the largest and densest modern cities in the Netherlands, it is fruitful to examine how vital more-than-human relations emerge – through urban community gardening – in the face of neoliberal hegemony and ecological catastrophe.

The Gandhi-garden’s human-land-plant becomings

The garden can be considered as a series of material and symbolic doings in which human gardening intersects with non-human lives, soil, herbs and plants (Blok, 2014). One of the core principles that shapes the sustainable and resilient gardening practices of the Gandhi-garden is permaculture. Some participants took a permaculture course, which gave them ‘gardening expertise and authority’ for many other gardeners (Interviews, 16 October 2013 and 15 January 2014). As one participant explained to me: ‘Permaculture is just a design system which you can apply on all kinds of things, ranging from a peanut butter sandwich to a society’ (Interview, 15 January 2014). Instead of aiming for the ‘maximal output’ based on monoculture which is used by modern agriculture (‘one area, one vegetable’), permaculture argues that diversity and circulation are key. One ‘needs’, for example, trees, bees, hedgehogs and other animals as part of holistic permaculture approach. Trees are important for animal habitat, but also for compost creation and to prevent erosion. Bees are considered key in the garden for pollination, which is why the garden has its own beekeeper. Hedgehogs are also considered important as they eat snails, which can impact the planted vegetables and produce. A crucial related gardening practice is the ‘cultivation planning’ according to permaculture principles, in which two types of crop cultivation are combined: swapping and combination. These permaculture planning principles suggest that particular crops should be planted ‘in tandem’ or ‘mixed’ in the same soil in order to maximise organic and sustainable nutrition (Interview, 16 October 2013). Diversity of crops and plants creates a more resilient and crisis proof agro-system.

One of my most inspirational and embodied experiences was ‘simply working’ in the garden. Whoever was present during fixed moments in the week joined this (volunteer) labour. Often times, the more experienced gardeners provided instructions and tips on what to prioritise that day. I noticed that many aspects of gardening were relatively simple embodied activities: planting seeds, pulling weeds, chatting and drinking ‘home-grown’ tea, cooking and eating together. Physical labour and ‘becoming’ a sweating body are part and parcel of gardening, especially when it is sunny. Sometimes, gardening happened in silence, other times small talk occurred.

Many of garden activities are not isolated, but stretch across multiple localities and scales. The Gandhi-garden is a urban community project (of 2000 m²) cooperating with other initiatives in Rotterdam and the broader urban environment, such as other organic farmers (called Boeren in Zicht), an artisanal bakery and environmental organisations. The garden, then, is part of a thick network of organisations and partners that cooperate through knowledge and ideas. What is more, the Gandhi-garden is situated in the global Transition Towns (TT) movement, which has over 1000 initiatives worldwide. As such, the garden is embedded in transnational relations (Aiken, 2012; Alexander and Rutherford, 2018), and even though each city or village has its own specific concerns and strategies, there are general tips to start ‘your own TT’ and even obtain an ‘official TT status’.¹

More-than-human hierarchies/resistances in the Gandhi-garden

Some more-than-human performances and relations in and around the Gandhi-garden are explicitly politicised and concern urban sustainability struggles (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000; Shingne, 2021). Most garden activities are couched in social critique against alienating and extractive economic systems. During my fieldwork, I noticed that industrial food was often regarded as a great concern. I was involved in conversations about how nutritious, healthy and tasteful homegrown food is, comparted to processed food sold by profit-driven food companies. An interesting remark someone mentioned in this context was that ‘one should not give people sugar, but love, especially children’. This idea illustrates how resisting industrial sugar dependency is countered with healthier nutritional choices and caring social relations. Gandhi-gardeners often consider a healthy body to be deeply connected to a healthy social community, expressing Barad’s (2007) material-discursive process of entanglement. Gardening for many is considered a symbolic form of resistance that improves one’s health at the same time, indicated by someone’s comical remark that ‘gardeners are not fat, only their bosses are’. The gardeners share such sentiments against capitalist relations, and the garden itself seems to serve as a space where they find like-minded people and further cultivate their views.

The social engagement of Gandhi-gardeners addresses the suffering of people, animals and eco-systems. One of the telling examples is expressing solidarity with marginalised people by donating produce to food banks. Rotterdam, and the Netherlands more broadly, have residents experiencing food poverty.³ During weeks of harvesting, a certain amount of produce was reserved for food banks in Rotterdam. This way, at least a few families that are confronted with food poverty could benefit from the labour and fruits of the Gandhi-garden. Other modes of resistance were performed through the body, as ‘gardening bodies’ sometimes transformed into ‘activist bodies’ on the street when they/we, for example, joined a public demonstration for seed sovereignty (March Against Monsanto) or via guerrilla gardening in the city by throwing ‘seed bombs’ on unused land (resulting in small flower beds).

Such political human–seed entanglements are particularly interesting, since many Gandhi-gardeners considered seeds in terms of ‘purity and life’ that connect urban residents to their food, but also to plants and the land. This became clear when I participated in the globally orchestrated March Against Monsanto 2013 (MAM),⁴ which also took place near Rotterdam. This was an exciting experience, as people from all kinds of organisations joined the march (including environmental and political organisations). The protest was directed against Monsanto (merged with the German company Bayer since 2018), a big multinational that sells patented and modified seeds and plants (Naylor, 2017). Social outrage flares up whenever Monsanto, for example, sues farmers who have ‘Monsanto’s seeds’ on their land as a result of wind or moving cattle. The struggle for food sovereignty, for many Gandhi-gardeners, is a struggle for life and against private property and marketisation.

Some scholars have pointed out that urban garden projects express contrasting and contradictory political practices (e.g. Jhagroe, 2019; McClintock, 2014). Regarding the more-than-human micropolitics in the Gandhi-garden, I observed how some human/non-human relations were cultivated, while others clearly were not. A clear example is dealing with dog waste. On the one hand, dogs are considered part of the holistic human–animal community, and many gardeners love dogs, but dog poop disturbs growing food in the garden (mostly other gardens without fences), so dog owners were asked to clean it up, often via social media posts. Eventually, an extra facility was installed so that dog waste could be removed. In fact, numerous physical and symbolic boundaries and fences emerged in and around the garden. Community gardening depends on healthy soil and the pulling of ‘weeds’ as undesired vegetation, as well as preventing birds and snails from eating fruits and produce by using fish nets. Actual fences also prevented ‘human outsiders’ from stealing produce. Such micropolitical practices cultivate and sustain specific more-than-human relations, while controlling or preventing others.

The Gandhi-garden’s ethical co-becomings

The Gandhi-garden expresses its ethical multi-species co-becomings in different ways (Kinkaid, 2020). As indicated above, the body is a site for ethical concern and action. This does not only relate to human bodies, but also animal and plant bodies. Employing principles of veganism and permaculture, the body and mind are ‘cleansed and revitalised’. In some instances, gardeners would consider health and medicine in radically non-modernist terms, for instance, by avoiding pills and pharmaceutical medicine (as much as possible) and relying mostly on sustainable eating and living. Similarly, shunning seed patenting practices seeks to safeguard the ‘purity’ of seed–plant–body–community relations foregrounding specific ethical human/nature assemblages. This suggest a more-than-human right to the city (Shingne, 2021), which for many Gandhi-gardeners (ideally) is about connecting human health and well-being with the lives of bees, hedgehogs, plants and trees.

Such a holistic worldview in which human–community–nature–land relations are intertwined, often times relies on a socio-spiritual approach to health. For instance, when I joined the routine of physically pulling weeds or planting seeds together, carried out in a specific rhythm, I experienced this embodied practice as somewhat spiritual. It creates a specific temporality and tranquillity, a flow of situated togetherness with fertile ground, knowing you care for the soil, the garden landscape, people visiting the food bank, as well as your own body. One is part of a complex multi-species ecosystem. I was not alone in this experience, as someone else put it: ‘One can say 100,000 times “allow me to provide service with love”, but one can also actually do this in a garden’ (Interview, 27 August 2013).

An ethical engagement with non-human life became very evident during a break, while we drank tea together in the garden. There was a bee flying near us which then landed on the table. One of us tried to direct the bee somewhere else with hand gestures. This moment, the garden’s beekeeper told us to stop chasing the bee away and simply watch the bee in awe. Together, we all carefully observed the bee in silence, as it flew away after a brief moment. We then talked about how bees are crucial organisms for pollination that enable plants, fruits and vegetables to breed and provide us with food (Moore and Kosut, 2013). I very vividly experienced that bee-relation symbolise the cultivation of environmental sustainability and holistic care relations (especially by the beekeeper), resonating with the Gandhian non-violence philosophy the garden is committed to. In a way, this created a relational and somewhat egalitarian sense as ‘we human animals’ seem to be related to the bee in a quite similar way, that is, as being deeply dependent on bee populations.

During another gardening day, I noticed a group of school kids (approximately 12–15 year old) from Gaza joining the garden. It turned out to be an exchange event co-organised with the garden and other organisation in Rotterdam. The kids were given a tour and explanation about the setup and the garden itself. I joined the walk. One of the Gandhi-gardeners explained how the garden tries to cultivate non-violent relations through gardening, and community building. I myself felt a sense of solidarity with the kids from Gaza when we were talking about olive trees, olive oil and land relations. When I briefly talked to one of the kids, he mentioned that he was from a place ‘that was occupied’. This clearly referred to Gaza as Palestinian territory occupied by Israel. Trees and self-grown products in the Gandhi-garden created transnational solidarity relations with these children, as an ethics of co-becoming with geopolitical entanglements.

A final significant instance of ethical co-becoming involves a digital local currency, called DAM.⁵ The DAM emerged after the financial crisis of 2008 when a few people started to reconsider the complex socio-economic interdependencies connected to dominant currencies such as the dollar and the euro. A more ethical currency was to be designed that centre-staged material services and community activities, resonating with economic sustainability. The digital currency started with the ratio of one DAM being equal to one euro. Significantly, an app was developed to pay with DAM (a so-called ‘DAM app’), using one’s personal DAM account. One of the DAM initiators was involved in the Gandhi-garden, and it was to be connected to local Rotterdam initiatives like the garden. The idea is that when one buys and uses for example, 100 DAM for a good or service in the Rotterdam region, someone else receives these 100 DAM. As one of the designers put it: ‘Everyone has a potential to do something, not based on money but on capacities. A DAM-system accommodates this’ (Interview, 3 January 2014). As the DAM currency is directly linked to goods and services, there are no virtual added values and rent. DAM, as a flow of socio-financial relations, captures new relations of trust among Rotterdam residents and small shop owners. As the website states it: ‘DAM is the money of Rotterdam’ with ‘the aim to address social problems’ in the city.⁶ The digital DAM currency and app shape new social and material economic relations – as a more stable counter-currency – moving away from dominant yet volatile currencies like the euro. As such, the DAM contributes to more a sustainable economic system and creates socio-economic resilience by introducing ‘currency diversity’, which is part of the global TT movement as well (Aiken, 2012; Alexander and Rutherford, 2018; Hallsmith and Lietaer, 2011). Interestingly, the development of the DAM was not a priority for many Gandhi-gardeners, but the garden was a nodal point in a thicker and new techno-digital–socio-economic assemblage in which labour and services were to be valued more ethically. To be sure, this more materially grounded and relational ethical view resonates with the holistic multi-species worldview as expressed by the human–soil–animal relations in the garden.

Conclusion and discussion

This study explored the more-than-human politics of the Gandhi-garden, as an expression of sustainable and resilient urbanism. The concept of the urban garden assemblage was instructive in foregrounding the rich more-than-human entanglements and micropolitics of the Gandhi-garden. The paper contributes to research in the field of urban gardening/agriculture and urban sustainability and resilience in different ways.

Firstly, it provides a micropolitical sensibility for specific human-nature-animal-technology entanglements in the field of urban sustainable and resilient research. The specific political work done by, for instance, fish nets (to keep out birds), hedgehogs (to eat snails), bees (for pollination) and the digital DAM app (to create fair socio-economic transactions) cannot be underestimated. The socio-material, ecological and digital entanglements with garden life are key. Such more-than-human micropolitical performances challenges and extend our understanding of the everyday yet ambivalent workings of non-human power in sustainability and resilience city making (Blok, 2014; Wakefield et al., 2022). The notion of (garden) assemblage urbanism as employed in this paper proposes specific analytical sensibilities and questions to investigate different more-than-human political practices vis-à-vis green urban projects (cf. Fox and Alldred, 2017; Müüripeal et al., 2023). The three dimensions (more-than-human performances, hierarchy/resistance and ethical co-becomings) that guided the empirical study, are interlinked. For instance, seed plantings as a mundane more-than-human doing is connected to the struggle for seed sovereignty and the March Against Monstanto, which in turn resonates with the food sovereignty and olive tree politics related to the visiting children from Gaza. The three methodological foci were fruitful, as they shed light on specific more-than-human garden aspects. These urban assemblage dimensions, however, can be extended, further specified and put to work in different geographies (also for comparative accounts see Amoako and Frimpong Boamah, 2020).

Secondly, it is clear that more-than-human politics in the city nuances the vitalist and biopolitical narrative of life affirming potentialities. The predominant approaches in urban sustainability and resilience research is committed to understanding and creating conditions for ‘human survival’ (Swyngedouw, 2017). However, following Braidotti’s (2016) argument on biopolitics/necropolitics, grasping more-than-human politics shifts the boundaries between life and death, it does not solve it. It deals not only with governing the living (i.e. of humans, animals, plants), but also with management and practice of expulsing and even letting die. Referring to the examples of the more-than-human relations with bees, pulling weeds, birds and snails, we could argue that more-than-human urbanism allows us to see new ways in which more-than-human lives are governed, regulated and let die (Margulies, 2019). Such a necropolitical frame to more-than-human urbanism raises new questions about the ‘dark side’ of practices associated with community gardening, and urban sustainable/resilient policies (Certomà, 2015).

Thirdly, methodologically, more-than-human empirical research is an important way to reframe anthropocentric ontologies and epistemologies that still characterise urban studies scholarship (cf. Oliver, 2023). More-than-human and multi-species ethnographic methods (e.g. Lien and Pálsson, 2021; Locke and Munster, 2015) are means to radically de-centre and ‘de-humanise’ (or rather ‘more-than-humanise’) academic knowledge production about urban agriculture, as well as green and climate adaptive city formations. During my own research in Gandhi-garden, I experienced the value and richness of doing ‘multi-sensory’ field work, in which the body becomes a method for ‘empirical experience’ and ‘data collection’ (Pink, 2008). Such an ‘embedded and embodied’ epistemology of the urban allows for the further cultivation of more-than-human methodologies in urban studies scholarship (Franklin, 2017; Springgay and Truman, 2017).

Fourthly, the ethical dimension of more-than-human assemblage thinking raises important questions about urban scholarly praxis. In what way are urban researchers ready to not just consider more-than-human vitalism as a ‘process ontology’, but also as a critical-ethical gesture to sensitise their own more-than-human relations methodologically and ethically (Kinkaid, 2020)? That is to say, if our conception of more-than-human politics of urban gardening is one of relational and processual unfoldings – of both human and non-human life – what agential and affective role do scholars play in rendering this vitalism and its politics visible? Should scholars not also believe the vitalist agency their thinking, writing and empirical work has in an ethics of co-becoming? This is especially pertinent in the context of ecological and resilience urban formations in the Global North (e.g. regarding food poverty), and the techno-managerial and neoliberal discourses they predominantly draw on (cf. Camponeschi, 2023; Swyngedouw, 2011; Vale, 2014). The notion of ‘assemblage as ethos’ (Kinkaid, 2020) can be ethically and methodologically inspiring for urban sustainability and resilience researchers.

Circling back to the broader question of more-than-human politics in sustainable and resilient urbanism, this paper showed how we can reject human-centric legacies and biases. It enables us to ask new and fascinating questions about the more-than-human worlds and politics around climate adaptions, green technologies and biodiversity in the city (Maller, 2018; Phillips and Atchison, 2020). Paraphrasing Michel Foucault, we need to cut out ‘the human’ in our ways of thinking and living (Foucault, 2019). Not because of some misanthropic morality, but because it allows ‘us’ to reconnect to ecological, biological and material realities that we have always been entangled with (Haraway, 2013). Getting rid of the category ‘human’, is perhaps the most ethical thing to do in the face of environmental crises and the unfolding climate catastrophe.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all gardeners for their openness, dedication and inspiration. Furthermore, I thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Shivant Jhagroe

Notes

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