‘Forced cultivation?’: Faces of acceleration in Polish community gardens

Abstract

Community gardens are often projected as alternatives to individualism, neoliberalism and social acceleration. We interrogate these imaginaries through the practicalities of gardening, particularly gardeners’ relationships with soil, by focusing on the disjunctive temporalities of community gardens in Poland. Specifically, we explore how these gardens promote ‘forced cultivation’, understood as culturally and politically motivated interferences with ecological temporalities. Through this agricultural metaphor, we explore three faces of acceleration in community gardens: catching up with the West, out-of-sync institutional temporality and sped-up soil cultivation. The findings show that in most gardens, a linear historicity of modernisation is perpetuated; project temporalities often clash with the rhythms of vegetation, and soil is invisibilised and imported from elsewhere in order to deliver some of the promises gardens make. Our analysis of community gardens’ timescape reveals the paradoxical mechanisms whereby productivist anthropocentric logics colonise the very processes that were meant to counteract them.