Creating Local “Citizen's Governance Spaces” in Austerity Contexts : Food Recuperation and Urban Gardening in Montréal (Canada) as Ways to Pragmatically Invent Alternatives

Abstract

While there is a growing interest in citizen-led initiatives, there is still no consensus on how to situate them, especially in relation to state institutions. On the one hand, citizen-led initiatives are seen as being co-opted by formal institutions in a context of austerity. On the other hand, these initiatives are often presented as “spaces of resistance” to neoliberalism, or as political acts of reclaiming the city. Mapping and tracing urban gardening and dumpster diving from their grassroots emergence to their inclusion in the institutional world through a two-level analysis, we show that individuals and loosely organized collectives involved in such initiatives are embedded in complex relationships with local institutions and third sector organizations that do, in turn, structure their practice and its consequences. The two-level analysis we propose follows this process: it is through interactions and relationships with other “practitioners” and with their social and institutional environment that these urban social practices gradually institutionalize.

Introduction

Along with two of his neighbors, Oscar has installed gardening containers on the sidewalk of his street to grow flowers and edible plants. This trio's goal, and that of their neighbors, who have gradually been added to the project, is to beautify the street, which has been neglected by the city administration for years. Oscar is also working towards the larger goal of being able to feed everyone who need it with fresh food. For him, given the amount of food available on the planet, it is unthinkable that people go hungry. He attaches great importance to free food and has turned to dumpster diving, which he naturally associates with gardening in public spaces: for Oscar, both the collection of food from garbage cans and the access to open gardens in public spaces enable people to eat for free . He produces more than 1000 seedings between February and May, thanks to the seeds he systematically recovers from one year to the next. Oscar also builds planters with recycled wood. The culture of gratuity and exchange is at the core of his actions. His goal is to create what he calls an “edible street.”

Joannie opened a community fridge three years ago. She initially discovered the potential of sharing unsold food through dumpster-diving groups on social media. However, she is not physically fit enough to get into the dumpsters herself. She then thought of working with local merchants to collect food that is still good but close to expiration date and would otherwise be discarded. Joannie's home now has 5 fridges and she announces food arrivals on a Facebook page. She also created a space in her basement for clothing and books donations. Friends or beneficiaries of her service help her from time to time, and she also benefits from an informal network of people who respond to requests from merchants and redistribute food from community fridges or small neighborhood food banks. Joannie has experienced hunger and poverty firsthand and is therefore very happy to be able to give back.

Oscar and Joannie's stories of engagement in Montreal might seem exceptional, but they are not. In many cities of the world, and particularly in a context of neoliberal austerity and governmental or public withdrawal from public action, citizens are increasingly involved outside of the institutional realm, and directly act upon their urban environment. While there is a growing interest for such citizen-led initiatives in urban studies, geography or sociology (Bherer, Dufour and Montambeault 2023), there is still no consensus as to their nature and meaning (Joassart-Marcelli and Bosco 2014), and to their relationship to state institutions.

In the 2010s, early studies on urban gardening, and related citizen-led initiatives, have been either preoccupied with their appropriation or even co-optation/absorption by formal institutions and, by extension, their contribution to the phenomenon of eco-gentrification, ¹ or offered a somewhat romanticized portrait of these initiatives, presenting them as pre-figurative spaces that reinvent relationships among residents and propose alternative forms of food production and distribution (Baker 2004; Levkoe 2006; McKay 2011; Reynolds 2008; Tornaghi and Certomà 2019). However, more recent accounts of such initiatives have shown the complexity of people's experiences and of the ways in which they relate (or not) to local institutions. In particular, the institutionalization of some citizen's practices in the context of state retrenchment and austerity has allowed to show that institutional appropriation might deepen the neoliberal marketization of the city and of public spaces by delegating and/or privatizing state's responsibilities toward individual citizens (Pudup 2008). However, it can also re-politicize urban food policies, even in cases where the institutionalization processes of these initiatives create a tension between states’ social control functions and the greening of life styles (Granchamp and Glatron 2021). If these initiatives could be presented as “spaces of resistance” to neoliberalism, or as political acts of reclaiming the city (Bach and McClintock 2021; Tornaghi and Certomà 2019), such emerging practices are neither a manifestation of state retrenchment nor its outright rejection. Individuals and loosely organized collectives involved in such initiatives develop and are embedded in complex and multidimensional relationships to local institutions and third sector organizations that do, in turn, structure their practice and its consequences (McClintock, Miewald and McCann 2021).

In this article, our aim is to contribute to this discussion by answering seemingly simple but important and overlooked question: How are citizens-based innovative practices transformed through their institutionalization process in the neoliberal cityThe Montreal case is particularly interesting to look at for this question. While Montreal did not experience severe or drastic austerity measures, the city followed a long path of policy neoliberalization since the eighties, as a result of cuts imposed by its main budget source: the government of the province of Quebec. It is therefore possible to observe how neoliberal policies, as a general context, have created opportunities for the emergence of citizen initiatives and how this context strongly colored the institutionalization processes that followed.

Based on extensive fieldwork with urban gardening ² and dumpster diving actors and groups in Montreal, we show how these a priori individual actions are in fact social practices observable at two levels. As initially isolated actions transform over time and through repeated and evolving interactions, they become what Hendriks and Dzur called “citizen's governance spaces” (2022) organized at the micro-level, which are progressively embedded into the macro-level “social world” of the practice. Developing a two-levels practice-tracing analysis, we find that these social practices tend to become somewhat institutionalized over time. In both cases, while articulated differently, their meaning changes over time: from micro-level strategies performed to find pragmatic answers to (basic) needs (feed oneself or live in an embellished environment), they become a social practice that developed tense relationships with local institutions but still looked for alternatives.

In the first section of this article, we describe the process by which these agency/institutional control tensions are structured by existing neoliberal trends in Montreal. This happens at three different moments of their institutionalization trajectory, as is presented in the second and third sections of the paper. These moments are characterized as (1) the emergence stage, as individuals set out to fill in the gaps left by the local administration in public spaces but face tensions over the question of their practices’ conformity with existing municipal rules; (2) the recognition stage, during which social urban actors interact among themselves to negotiate the rules and norms governing the practice, while interacting with public authorities, asking for some recognition, creating tensions over accessibility; and (3) the accommodation stage, where the local state authorities transform the way they intervene to facilitate, or accommodate citizen practices, generating tensions around the practices’ level of autonomy in this process.

Neoliberal Austerity, State Withdrawal and the Emergence of Citizen-Led Public Action: The Case of Montréal

While one could postulate that austerity policies mean unilateral cuts to public services, the reality is more complex at the local level. In fact, the early literature points to a distinction between “roll-back” neoliberalization and “roll-out” neoliberalization to assess its impact on public services (Peck and Tickell 2002). As Guthman explains, “roll-back” neoliberalization refers to “the gradual evisceration of the Keynesian welfare/regulatory state, which created gaps and inequalities in its wake,” while “roll-out” neoliberalization refers to “new public–private institutional forms and an increasingly intrusive state, both of which have evolved as various actors attempt to redress these inequalities and regulatory gaps and/ or penalize those unable or unwilling to adjust to the fall-out” (2008, 1174). This distinction is particularly important as it unveils the double effect of state (budgetary) retrenchment; not only does it mean “less” public services administered and delivered by the state, but it also means “more” of a different form of public service delivery, in which there is more room for residents/citizens-led initiatives. This distinction is of particular interest in Montreal, where residents’ civic involvement plays an important role in a context of local services restructuring and downsizing.

In Quebec, neoliberalization arrived in the 2000s, later than in other countries of the Global North and at a slower pace than in the rest of Canada due to the province's lasting heritage of high state intervention in a liberal welfare regime. ³ In 2003, with the election of Jean Charest's Quebec Liberal Party, sweeping neoliberal reforms were introduced (especially in the social services and health sectors). With the so-called re-engineering of the state, the historical social pact with many sectors of the organized civil society was broken and some governance reforms were introduced. ⁴ Moreover, austerity and neoliberal economic reforms not only impacted many public policy sectors, but also service provision and governance structure at all levels of government, including at the city-level.

In Montreal, the largest city in the province of Québec, this impact took a specific form, due (in large part) to the weak financial resources and responsibilities of the municipality. On the one hand, austerity measures redefined first-line services at the neighborhood and/or municipal levels, in which well implemented third-sector organizations historically played an important role. New local third-sector organizations emerged, willing to collaborate with local governments, with the already existing third-sector organizations, but also with citizens to co-produce local public policies. In the food sector, for example, community kitchens and solidarity-based markets emerged all over the island of Montreal. On the other hand, budget cuts also had an impact on municipal service provision, though unevenly so throughout the city. Montreal is a very decentralized city, composed of the central city and its 19 borough administrations, which enjoy significant room to maneuver in policy making and implementation (Meloche 2014). While boroughs have their own taxation capacity, they very rarely use this prerogative, remaining primarily dependent upon the city's budget transfers. Between 2005 and 2012, municipal budget cuts particularly affected borough budgets, limiting their public action capacity in different domains. Each borough administration reacted differently to the cuts (Meloche and Vaillancourt 2012), but some have been especially creative in finding ways to implement local policies despite a context of austerity and roll-back neoliberalization. This is especially true in opposition-led boroughs, whose elected officials wanted to politically distinguish themselves from the central administration.

Bringing citizens’ initiatives and so-called social innovations to the core of public action has been among the roll-out neoliberal policy orientations taken by some Montreal's boroughs, increasingly relying on volunteers and private citizens to intervene in the public sphere. A good example of creativity is the promotion of tactical urbanism principles which, in the words of a local mayor, translated into taking “action where we can and with the instruments that we have […] one street-corner at a time” (Cournoyer-Gendron 2015). For local politicians and administrators, this meant adopting a baby-step process, testing the limits of the zoning rules, experimenting with small place-making processes and pilot-projects to make the city walkable and user-friendly, thereby fostering new understandings of and relationships to public spaces among civil servants, citizens and civil society organizations. ⁵ This also meant tolerating, and even encouraging citizen-led tactical urbanism initiatives in public spaces, including artistic installations and murals, urban furniture on the borders of the large city sidewalks or in the city's many back alleys, etc. In other terms, contrasting with other big cities, in times of austerity, Montreal has known processes of delegation of public policies toward individuals and third-sector organizations, more than budget cuts (Bach and McClintock 2021).

As we will show, food and urban agriculture are two domains of local public action that have not escaped these global trends of austerity and service delegation and co-production, and this is true in Montreal. As austerity reduces or severely limits public investments in third-sector food distribution networks and constrains urban agriculture planning, some citizens also see some empty institutional spaces and initiate actions to adjust for the effects of neoliberal policies. In this context, how do we make sense of such emerging forms of day-to-day urban practices?

Characterizing and Assessing Citizen Initiatives in the Public Space: A Two-levels Practice-Tracing Approach to Urban Social Practices

While they have become a growing point of focus in urban studies, critical geography, sociology and, to a lesser extent, political science in the past decade, there is still no real consensus as to how to characterize emerging forms of citizen engagement in the urban public sphere, especially in relation to neoliberal policies and institutions (Bherer, Dufour and Montambeault 2023). The purpose of this paper is not to observe if and how these practices reproduce the system they are allegedly struggling against as most of the literature does. Our objective is rather to unpack those day-to-day urban practices through a two-levels practice-tracing approach (Pouliot 2014), allowing us to understand them in relation to their environment (organizational and institutional) and to see how such practices emerge and are transformed by these interactions over time. In this story, institutions are not seen as the co-optation force which citizens attempt to resist, but as actors in a relationship where all actors have some form of agency deployed in a mix of collaboration, institutionalization and resistance.

Citizens Initiatives: Inventing Pragmatic Alternatives to Answer Needs

The early literature – mostly oriented toward tactical urbanism, placemaking and urban gardening – tends to see such urban practices in a dichotomous way, as either forms of transformative postneoliberal activism or as initiatives that are ultimately coopted by institutions to reproduce neoliberal politics. The first group of authors characterize them as new forms of citizen involvement, located outside the realm of institutions, seeing them as potentially innovative, transformative and, to a certain extent, as a post-neoliberal and radical critique of the capitalist mode of production and distribution of food (McKay 2011; Reynolds 2008; Tornaghi and Certomà 2019). Social scientists from a variety of disciplines have contributed to the depiction of urban agriculture as an attempt to “re-embed the agri-food system with the social relations (between producers and consumers) that the industrial system has eroded or stripped away for the last 60 years” (McClintock 2014, 152). Another group of scholars, however, maintain that in spite of their good intentions, urban agriculture (and food recuperation) projects rather contribute to reproducing and bolstering neoliberal logics, relationships and spaces “by providing food to those hit hardest by the roll-back of the welfare state” (Allen and Guthman 2006, quoted in McClintock 2014, 155; Guthman 2008; Pudup 2008). In times of neoliberalism and austerity policies, citizen-led direct interventions in the public space are encouraged by the state as they contribute to legitimating its retreat from public services delivery. The state essentially delegates its responsibility toward individual citizens and groups, encouraging self-sufficiency and promoting privatization (Jessop 2002; Pudup 2008).

In line with the most recent literature that moved beyond this early dichotomy to account for the complex, diverse and transforming realities of day-to-day urban practices (Ernwein 2017; Ghose and Pettygrove 2014; McClintock 2014, McClintock, Miewald and McCann 2021), we argue that such practices should be understood in a more nuanced fashion with regards to neoliberalism. First, as Bach and McClintock's findings in Montreal urban agriculture and greening projects show, they do not necessarily contribute to fostering a radical democratic urban political transformation. They could be considered political, in the sense that they are spaces for subject formation, but they are generally spaces occupied by a particular and quite homogenous type of population whose motivations are diverse (Bach and McClintock 2021). They include postneoliberal claims and ideals of radical democracy, but also emotion-based, needs-based or even leisure-based motivations that are not framed as collective or claim-making by gardeners or dumpster divers themselves. ⁶

Second, and while they are somewhat anchored in the culture of individual responsibility inherent to the neoliberalization of the city, day-to-day urban social practices do not merely legitimate or reproduce exclusionary neoliberal principles. Moreover, and while they do fill a gap in the context of austerity policy, such practices are not isolated from institutions. In fact, if the retreat of the state opens up new spaces to be filled by residents, state institutions somehow come to support DIY initiatives, bringing forward the discourse of citizen responsibility for service production and delivery and creating a certain level of “state control.” In Montréal, in a context of neoliberal austerity, local institutions and political actors are interested in those greening and food recuperation citizen-led initiatives, as they see it as an opportunity to engage citizens in the urban development of the city. ⁷ At the same time, while residents invest time, resources and energy in these urban/political spaces and claim their autonomy doing so, they sometimes need some institutional support as they face obstacles, and lack resources to perennate their initiatives. Thus, citizens need the state while resisting institutional controls. Thus, this relationship is not about mere co-optation or state control over citizens’ autonomous action: it is a constant [and evolving] relationship between the state, citizens, and other social groups, in which both residents and institutional actors have agency.

Thus, if these urban practices are closely related to the turn to neoliberalization, they share both neoliberal and counter-neoliberal characteristics (Ernwein 2017; Rutt 2020). Municipal and third-sector involvement does not have a unidirectional effect but rather sometimes contradictory effects on the neoliberalization of the city (McClintock 2014). In fact, day-to-day urban practices of dumpster diving and urban gardening are not fixed, nor institutionalized a priori: they often initially start as spontaneous actions, but they do transform over time and in relation to the complex institutional environment within which they are embedded. The two-levels practice-tracing approach we develop allows to follow this process. Citizen initiatives are social and relational: it is through interactions and relationships with other “practitioners” and with their social and institutional environment that these urban social practices gradually institutionalize as urban spaces for public action.

A Two-levels Practice-Tracing Approach to Complex Institutionalization Trajectories

Reconstructing the institutionalization trajectories of both urban gardening and dumpster diving as urban social practices, we borrow from Pouliot's “practice-tracing” approach, where he looks at practices as “the way things are done” from the practitioners’ perspective (Pouliot 2014). In this sense, practices are both “contextually embedded actions” and inscribed in patterns of actions that transform and reproduce themselves over time. The process through which such practices develop is key, but context also matters. At the conjunctural level, context shapes the types of interactions and actors that are involved in the process. Context also shapes the outcomes of path-dependent trajectories (Fine 2010). Based on three years of field research with practitioners of dumpster diving and urban gardening in Montreal, this paper develops a two-level approach to practice-tracing analysis.

The first level of analysis is located at the micro-level and looks at the complex and changing realities of day-to-day urban practices themselves, through the lens of individual motivations, of the materiality of the practice and, in some cases, of the construction of a sense of collective action. While this first level of analysis allows us to capture the specificities of the practices we are looking at, it hardly accounts for the inherently relational nature of such social practices, which are located within complex social and institutional environments. Located at the meso-level, the second level of analysis captures the ways in which such a priori autonomous and isolated social practices multiply, interact with one another, as well as with social organizations and state institutions. In fact, if the practice can transform its environment as the first level of analysis highlights, this relational process also contributes to transforming the practice itself and its practitioners over time. It is through this relational trajectory, marked by interactions and tensions between agency and institutional control permeated by neoliberal thinking that such practices institutionalize.

Following the logic of practice tracing, we adopted a method allowing us to reconstruct the practice from the individuals’ perspective to the larger urban environment within which they are embedded. We started by meeting people involved in both domains on an individual basis. However, this strategy was not without challenges, as these people tend to act individually and remain invisible, as they are not associated with a given organization. A two-year long online ethnography of 13 Facebook dumpster diving groups was therefore realized in 2016–2017, allowing us to identify active divers within these groups, as well as to better grasp the experiences they shared through online discussions, their challenges and the structure of the practice in Montreal. From there, and following the snowball method, we accompanied divers in their practice, and conducted 29 semi-structured interviews with dumpster divers from different socioeconomic backgrounds. For urban gardening, a practice that is not present on social media, we chose instead to walk around and map initiatives located in two specific boroughs of Montreal: Rosemont-la-Petite-Patrie and Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Speaking with local organizations involved in formal urban agriculture, we were able to identify informal urban gardeners. We made observations in a few gardens, but mostly conducted semi-structured interviews with 36 gardeners. As further explained below, the greening activities we selected were not located in community gardens, which are organized and fenced-in gardens, often initiated and managed by the municipality or a community-based organization. For our research, we focused on informal urban gardening, located in open spaces, vacant lots and tree squares which can be understood as small squatted places (Kato, Andrews and Irvin 2018). Montreal's public spaces are characterized by an abundance of small, non-mineralized spaces, which has proven to be a real opportunity for urban gardeners.

We soon realized that divers and gardeners were not isolated but rather part of a complex environment and thus, we adapted our data collection strategy to better capture that reality. We therefore included interviews with civil servants, borough mayors, and leaders of community organizations, which helped us to complete the meso-level analysis. In total, we conducted 79 interviews between 2016 and 2019 and attended several community events (for example, city hall meetings, opening or closing of gardens and squatted land, neighborhood events, etc.). This approach, we argue, allows us to capture both the individual/collective dimensions of the social practice, but also its relational dimension.

The Micro-Foundations of an Emerging Social Practice

Initially, citizens engaged in urban gardening or dumpster diving practices do it on an individual basis, or in very small groups of loosely organized individuals. Greening, cultivating and food recuperation activities are made of progressive experimentation, trial-and-error processes and encounters with others, gradually allowing citizens to make connections between personal motivations and larger societal issues such as food waste, food security, access to public green spaces, and so on. By repeating their actions over time, individuals also better define their practice, identifying its boundaries, defining norms of action and formulating their own rules to regulate the practice. From a spontaneous, sporadic activity that is performed once, gardening and dumpster diving become repeated, reproduced and meaningful for the people who engage in it. It also is at this level that citizen agency can be observed, where strategies of cooperation, representation and resistance to institutional pressures are developed and imagined. In fact, through direct action, individuals are creating a space of action where they use their agency to act meaningfully. Following Hendriks and Dzur, we call these online or offline sites a citizen's governance space (CGS), “a term that captures practically focused initiatives, projects and groups that are formed and led by citizens working together to address a specific collective problem” (Hendriks and Dzur 2022, 2).

Three characteristics of Hendriks and Dzur's definition of CGS are particularly relevant for us. First, such practices are led and driven by citizens, ⁸ generally start as small-scale initiatives and are – at least initially – autonomous from state institutions or market support. Second, they are pragmatically oriented, in the sense that they fill in for “functional public work” (Hendriks and Dzur 2022, 6) that is not otherwise taken up by competent authorities, but that is perceived as important for citizens who get involved. This means that citizens active in such practices do not see themselves as activists in the traditional sense, as they do not overtly protest against institutions or public policies, nor do they see themselves as representative claim-makers. As shown by others (Rutt 2020), the people who were engaged we met were looking for pragmatic solutions which translated into direct actions, like gardening or practicing food recovery in commercial dumpsites. As we will demonstrate below, the context of neoliberalization and austerity both participated in creating the needs identified by residents (feeding and embellishment) and valued the solutions they implemented to the extent that they were consistent with the notion of individual responsibility, typically neoliberal (Allen and Guthman 2006). They are not participants in formal participatory processes designed by local institutions, either. They act upon concrete problems they identified “without being invited” to do so by organizations or public authorities. However, by making certain problems visible, their actions can, in certain cases, attract the attention and eventual involvement of local authorities. Third, because citizens do not know the answers to the perceived problem prior to acting upon it, and because they have to adapt and adjust their actions over time to respond to pragmatic issues that arise throughout the process, the objective of these practices is open-ended by nature. Practices such as urban gardening or dumpster diving are not necessarily “prefigurative” of new ways for citizens to engage in society (Nettle 2011). On the contrary, they are problem-driven, and evolve over time as citizens face new challenges to the perennation or replicability of their practice.

Dumpster Diving as a “Online” CGS

Because digging in a garbage is a stigmatized activity, dumpster diving is often a hidden practice, which appears to be performed by isolated individuals. However, our research through the online dumpster diver networks reveals a completely different picture of the practice. Diving into dumpsters is generally practiced alone or in very small groups, but it is part of a citizen governance space – in this case an online one – that progressively reduces the uncertainty of the “treasure hunt” to save food from the garbage. By bringing together individuals and sharing information, including routes and destinations, and best practices, CGS make hunting for food, if not coordinated, at least possible. Moreover, using social media, dumpster divers have created several online venues where they can offer an alternative to the recuperation of otherwise discarded foods, a collective problem poorly addressed by public authorities or the marketplace. These online groups are helpful in several ways.

I post stuff on Facebook. Because at some point, all the stuff I collect doesn’t make sense, I mean I collected I don’t know how many pieces of organic meat at some point, I posted it on Facebook, all the meat we ate and then I still have some left over, it's crazy how much food you can find, I look at the amount of food that, how much money that's thrown away, it's beautiful food, I mean, I feed my family, I can feed my family 100 percent of it. ⁹

First, as explained by Nathalie, they provide and share information about the best way to recuperate food, including details on the best places to find dumpsters filled with good quality yet discarded food, the best days and times to go pick up the food, etc. For example, on one of the Facebook groups, a member made an interactive map of grocery stores with open dumpsters available to the community. Grocery stores’ openness and their relationship with divers is also discussed in these online spaces, allowing to identify business owners who are friendlier than others, or even those who facilitate the practice. Several interviewees testified as to how this information was crucial in their decision to start dumpster diving. Pauline and Stéphanie both followed social media groups for several months before starting dumpster diving and eventually directly soliciting certain merchants. Online groups also provide a space for long-time dumpster divers like Raida to meet people newer to the practice or who would like to be initiated to it:

Three years ago, four years ago, people often asked on Facebook or word of mouth if there were people who could initiate or help them … I introduced a lot of people like that to dumpster diving, people I did not know at all before, that were referred to me or that contacted me directly. I showed them the how to, where to go. ¹⁰

Thus, while dumpster diving is mostly (loosely) organized through Facebook groups and works as an online citizen governance space, it also allows for in-person knowledge sharing activities, or face-to-face relationships among its participants, as we exemplify below.

Second, social media is also used to organize food redistribution through a practice called “food drops.” When dumpster divers find a particularly full dumpster but cannot consume everything themselves, many prefer to take the food anyway to avoid wasting it, because of the risk that it gets picked up by a garbage truck. Surplus bread, yogurt or vegetables are then placed in a specific location in public spaces – a park bench, a church square, a street corner – and an announcement is then posted on Facebook groups to inform other dumpster divers where they can find the food. There is more to this action than just sharing extra food, however. As Francis explains,

I kind of started going into those groups there … and then I saw that people were dropping in parks. For a good five, six months, the only thing I was doing was going to the park to get free food. Then at some point, I just decided to go [dumpster diving] myself. There was a map that was available in those groups. I made a route for myself, I rode my bike, I targeted maybe ten businesses in a block, and the first business I went to I collected two full bags of groceries. I had to go back to our house because I was full. ¹¹

Thus, if the main objective of announcing food-drops online is to avoid food waste and share among the community, the public posts also make the benefits of dumpster diving and CGS members’ actions visible.

Third, posts on social media are also conducive to informal and loosely organized food exchanges and sharing among members of the CGS. Informal groups, who, in many cases got to know each other through online spaces, eventually meet in person and organize among themselves to trade their weekly finds. This is an important element defining the outcomes of action within the CGS; even if organized online, they allow for individual practitioners to develop a number of chains of sharing and giving, involving face-to-face interactions, discussions and informal organizing among small and horizontally-organized groups of people.

The distributions that I did involve people going through my home, it was often during suppertime, during bedtime. I also did a lot of what we call open houses where I would fill my kitchen because a certain shop had given me its inventory, I would invite people to come and take what they wanted. ¹²

Some of them also meet up to help clean the food found in dumpsters and collectively cook and then share the food that may otherwise go to waste. As many of our interviewees emphasized, sharing is an important value of their community, propelled by their action within the CGS. Most of them even prefer not to meet again with those more individually-driven dumpster divers who refuse to split a drop or want to appropriate a dumpster because they were the first to arrive there.

Overall, what we see is that online Facebook groups work as citizen governance spaces to organize the practice of dumpster diving in Montreal. We found 13 groups who were active during our two-year ethnography. Not only do they help to demystify the practice for individuals who are at first reluctant to start dumpster diving, but they also contribute to progressively and collectively define the norms of a practice that was rapidly spreading in a variety of otherwise disconnected milieus when we started our field observations. In fact, dumpster diving is often presented as a form of individual resistance against the food distribution capitalist system (Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen 2021). For example, using food surplus that would otherwise be discarded to feed people is a core principle of freeganism, a movement that promotes minimal resource consumption and limited participation in the conventional economy (Cooks 2017). However, dumpster divers are moved by different types of motivations, many of which are driven by practical concerns and problems for which one ought to find a solution. In fact, only a marginal number of people we met clearly identified themselves with freeganism or anarchist movements. Our sample of dumpster divers shows that people from very different socioeconomic backgrounds, ages and ideological profiles are found in the CGS: from a member of an affluent family to activists exploring a wide range of alternative actions in their private life and in the public space, to more vulnerable people mostly driven by need. Most importantly, a great majority of our interviewees were involved in the practice as an everyday, do-it-yourself engagement, where experimentation and trial-and-error are the mode of operation. These loosely organized horizontal networks of dumpster divers, over time and through interactions and through a quiet process of institutionalization, have become citizen governance spaces in Montreal.

In this story, neoliberalism acts as a context that creates the need for some people to find ways of feeding themselves at low cost, but that also opens the space to develop such practices. General food policies do not exist or are not organized in a top-down manner by the state (at different scales) in Montrealor in the province of Quebec, leaving - and probably pushing - people to find creative ways to salvage food for themselves or for people in need, food that would otherwise simply disappear from the capitalist distribution chain.

Urban Gardening as a CGS

Informal urban gardening is practiced by individuals, families and neighbors in the public space but at a very small scale, in front of buildings and houses, or in homemade wooden planters installed on sidewalks or in public parks. Some gardeners use spaces where gardening is tolerated by public authorities, while others occupy entire streets or make use of vacant or abandoned land (public or private). Urban gardeners thus plant and take care of seeds, bulbs and flowers, and sometimes cultivate vegetables, herbs and fruits in public spaces. Those plots are not meant for food production and/or for sale, but are rather intended for personal consumption and collective sharing. Such initiatives are nonetheless to be distinguished from community gardens, which are closed and dedicated areas provided by municipal governments and divided into small pieces of cultivable land then distributed among individual citizens who apply to get them. While there is a long tradition of community gardening in Montreal, such projects are managed at the city level, operate under quite coercive rules and are considered private spaces once allocated.

By contrast, informal urban gardening is better understood as citizen governance spaces, in that they are run by loosely organized citizens in public spaces but outside of formal institutions. Even when driven by individuals rather than small groups of citizens, the practice is located in public areas, and thereby implies some relations and interactions with other people, within a small-scale CGS. We have observed two types of urban gardens in Montreal: (1) what we call “street gardens,” which can be privately or collectively managed, and that are located directly on the sidewalk (in wooden boxes constructed by the gardeners, or directly under the city's trees squares filled with soil), and (2) open gardens located on occupied public or private (but abandoned) spaces collectively managed by loosely organized groups of individuals. These gardens are usually small, because they are located in unpaved spaces in a very mineralized urban context. The practice described by the 23 gardeners we met with is either performed individually, or collectively in loosely organized groups made up of variously motivated individuals. Some spaces are mostly embellishment projects, where people want to make their otherwise concrete-dominant environment greener. Others involve growing edible plants for private consumption (especially in private street gardens) or, in most cases, for the purpose of sharing with the community, be it among gardeners or with everyone passing by. In both cases, we have spaces in which citizen action is direct where urban gardeners, mostly guided by practical concerns, prioritize putting hands in the soil and planting flowers.

Some urban gardens are led by individual citizens working alone. A good example of this is Justin, who created a small garden in front of the building where he lived, and eventually invited his neighbors to join him. He was motivated to change his neighbor's (lack of) vision of this trash-filled space. By transforming the private but unattended space into an open garden, Justin created a space to meet his neighbors. Some gardeners we met also acted individually within public areas, greening small spaces around trees on their respective streets at first and eventually, on the surrounding streets with direct or indirect support from neighbors. Luc explains:

It's across the street from our house and for maybe a year and a half I’ve been thinking: it's a shame. A great big space and then a big patch of trees, there was nothing, the grass was almost dead and I thought it would be nice to grow. It would be like a way to have food security and then have something super local. And then between two grocery shops I thought it was really cool, that on the way people could have access to something free you know quality and local and organic seeds there too. ¹³

Pierre has been embellishing about thirty tree squares with plants and flowers for many years. At first, more than twenty years ago, he focused on the three tree squares located right in front of his residence. Gradually, he expanded his reach to the entire street as well as the surrounding streets. François started gardening six years ago, taking care of a few small private spaces located close to his house. Like Pierre, the spaces he was embellishing were private but open to the public space, between the sidewalks and private residences. Tree squares on his stretch of a very busy street were not planted, encouraging him to ask the immediate residents, most of them tenants, for permission to beautify these spaces that everyone could enjoy along the way. Like Pierre, Nicolas has maintained several tree squares since arriving in the neighborhood three years ago. While all three gardeners mostly act alone, other citizens contribute to their action in different ways: people donate equipment, others give a few dollars to buy plants and soil, others commit to watering or weeding, and some contribute to the CGS community by sharing knowledge and best practices or by participating in Pierre's annual informal seed sharing activity in a nearby park.

Many urban gardeners we met nonetheless practice their activity with others, progressively building small, open and horizontal group whose day-to-day organization remains relatively free of rigid rules and constraints. They take over small, abandoned spaces or build wooden planters on the sidewalks. This is the case of the Jardin pour tous (A garden for all) located in a public park and which involves around 10 core members, along with many more occasional participants. Julia particularly appreciates that sharing is at the heart of this open space.

It's a more social project, Jardin pour tous, it's really about meetings, exchanges, entertainment, you share the food; it's like being in your own garden but public. Sometimes people come by and say: ah, it's beautiful, thank you. ¹⁴

The members of the garden share their knowledge and resources about gardening, the organization of events, the communication and advertising of the venue, etc. As she emphasizes: “We learn every day. That's what I like about this project, it's a project of exchanges of know-how.” ¹⁵ Gardeners also take advantage of the space to organize events that bring people together, such as the Restaurant Day or the harvest festival. In the summer, happy hours are also organized on Thursdays, with everyone sharing food and drinks. The principle of sharing also comes from the openness of the place: it is a space without a fence, which means everyone can use the crops and enjoy the place. Julia feels very free to try new things and develop her talents as she specializes in medicinal plants. For her, the singularity of the Jardin pour tous is inherent to its everyday modus operandi: everyone is free to participate as he or she wants. There is no hierarchy or strict division of labor. It creates very pleasant reciprocal relationships.

Thus, as we have illustrated with those few examples, urban gardens are spaces of autonomy where gardeners experiment with soil culture and discover urban biodiversity. For urban gardening, in particular, the expression “the patience of the gardener” takes on a very special meaning due to the fact that gardeners choose to plant in public spaces that are open and without formal institutional recognition, which brings inherent uncertainty about the perennity of their action. Public spaces are regulated by municipal authorities and are also characterized by the multiple uses people make of them, some that are not always suitable for gardening. Gardeners need to be creative in dealing with such constraints and uncertainties. For example, urban gardeners have to find solutions to bring water into spaces where it is not accessible, to protect plants and soil from bikes or snow removers or to inform the public about the plant growth to avoid early picking of vegetables and fruits. Gardening also brings benefits, as Anne explains:

For me, beyond the rather informal garden, we have created a very small public place, very particular in a somewhat ugly area, but which has the advantages and disadvantages of being out of the way, the fact that in the evening it is poetic with the sun setting and that there are people who can use it. For me to have created a public space is like a super pride in fact; that's what I found most interesting because I expect, maybe it's something unexpected too. ¹⁶

However, the intentions initially attached to urban gardening are often very pragmatic, and not necessarily clear for gardeners at the beginning: they often discover the meaning of their action in the process, through interactions and encounters involved in gardening the public space. It is this process that allow urban gardens to become spaces of autonomy. In this story, neoliberalism also acts as a favorable political context in which the practice is deployed, as the city does not take care of sidewalks (and do not have the resources to do so). Urban gardening is a way to answer resident's desire for embellishment, but they are also a way to recreate micro-social relationships in the neighborhood (social ties which are also undermined by the organization of capitalist cities).

As for dumpster-diving, citizens initiatives are not driven by an intention of resistance at the beginning (or very rarely). This dimension rather appears when the practice reaches another level of deployment, as we show in the next section. The second-level analysis that follows allows to replace urban gardens and dumpster divers within their social worlds, and to see how it interferes with their CGS and structures their practice. It is at this level that we can see autonomy in tension with the institutional control of practices.

From Isolated to Relational Social Practices: Situating CGS in their “Social Worlds”

If both dumpster diving and urban gardening can be qualified as citizen governance spaces, such practices are not fixed and do not operate in isolation from their environment. To fully understand them, we need to look at them as also operating at the meso level. We argue that the process by which they are constituted and defined is marked by their interactions and relations with their social and institutional environment over time. CGS are indeed part of what we call the “social world” of the practice, understood as the “amorphous, diffuse constellation of actors, organizations, events, and practices which have coalesced into spheres of interest and involvement for participants (and in which) it is likely that a powerful centralized authority structure does not exist” (Unruh 1980, quoted in Fine 2012).

Two constitutive elements of social worlds are particularly relevant for our analysis. First, this concept emphasizes the way multiple similar social practices are organized in a loosely tight network. This corresponds to the way seemingly isolated citizen initiatives are related, through direct or indirect interactions. Information and experiences can be shared through offline or online spaces, and progressively influence others in their practices thanks to a series of mutual learning processes and adjustments. To perennate their initiatives, practitioners meet with others sharing the same interests, seek out information, communalize learning. Their action can be encouraged, and sometimes even facilitated, by individuals and organizations with whom they interact, or it can be challenged by others, all of which influences the practice. Second, the state is not totally absent from the equation. Through politics or policy making, public authorities coexist with the practice, and the boundaries between formal and informal practices evolve over time, both from within and from without, through state and self-regulation. Thus, what usually begin as spontaneous, informal practices led by citizens without any support from the state often become an integral part of the mixed urban and social fabric of the city (El Ouardi and Montambeault 2023; Baudry 2014). At the same time, in interacting with institutions, CGS often formalize their governance model (sometimes in response to formal incentives provided by the government), their motus operandi, etc. This relational process between CGS and with institutions leads to the gradual institutionalization of the social practice (Fine 2012).

The Social World of Dumpster Diving and its Trajectory of Gradual Institutionalization

Our first level analysis has illustrated the eclectic character of Montreal's community of dumpster divers. At the meso-level, we see that dumpster diving has been evolving in parallel and in complementarity with many other food recuperation initiatives: community fridges, social solidarity associations; associations or cooperatives recuperating unsold food from grocery stores, transforming them and selling them at a low price to prevent waste, for example. Montreal has developed an “ecosystem” of food recuperation, fighting both for greater social justice and against food waste. The story of community fridges reveals how dumpster diving CGS interact directly or indirectly with a constellation of actors. Community fridge organizers pushed the divers’ logic of experimentation further, looking for an alternative solution to distribute food among people in need (Bherer and Lelièvre 2023).

Our online ethnography revealed the large number of people using these networks asking for help to access food, and asking divers to drop food near their home. Dumpster diving is not necessarily accessible to everyone, and it can prove particularly difficult for vulnerable categories of CGS members, including people with physical limitations, or facing survival issues on an everyday basis. In fact, dumpster diving is a very intense activity: you need to be physically fit to collect food from a garbage bin. This is especially true as sometimes, divers go into the dumpster and do not find anything or find very surprising foods that cannot easily be converted into a meal (for example, 20 kilos of flour). Some people thus rely on drops to access food. Over time, online CGS saw a significant increase in these requests, constituting a turning point in group structuration and community organization. Attending these demands created tensions and divisions within the online spaces. Some dumpster divers were offended by these requests, considering them against the spirit of a practice they understand as based on everyone's participation to recuperating and exchanging food exchange following the principles of giving/counter-giving. Others found the debate too intense and chose to exit and create new spaces, establishing clearly that they were not food charity groups.

However, the increasing demand for food in the online groups and the tensions it generated also pushed some divers to organize and institutionalize food surplus distribution through the opening of a few service points: in the form of community fridges. In fact, in a context of growing needs and demands for fresh and nutritious food that could not be met by the existing food banks and community grocery initiatives for a variety of reasons, ¹⁷ some individuals initiated community fridges in their home, in public spaces (back alleys, parking lots, church fronts) or in spaces provided by community organizations. In order to publicize food arrivals and to share information about community fridge rules of operation, organizers created Facebook pages, thereby creating new CGS:

The first idea was to open a fridge outside, on a public square or in front of a shop, where people would bring food and others would take it. Always fighting against waste and letting people feed themselves at the same time (…), [the project] was based on a phenomenon that was happening in certain cities, in fact it came mainly from Berlin: they put a fridge in a public square or in front of a shop and it was open to everyone. At first the promoters asked the City to have it outside in the park, so that it would be available 24/7, but the City didn’t want to because it's in a park and there could be vandalism. This has disadvantages in the sense that it limits accessibility, for example it can be closed. On the other hand, as it's indoors, it's supervised by volunteers and this has advantages: you can leave apples, potatoes, bread on the counter. ¹⁸

As Alice explained, the creation of community fridges is thus also bound to their interactions with two other types of actors involved in the food distribution and recuperation chain in Montreal: the local grocery stores and the food banks system (Bherer and Lelièvre 2023).

First, when community fridges emerged, many small local businesses were facing a major surplus disposal issue. In fact, they had not been included in the unsold food collection program launched in 2017 by Moisson Montréal, the umbrella organization redistributing food to local food banks and community organizations. This program targeted only the large grocery stores and chains, leaving local stores with no other option but to dispose of their unsold surplus in the dumpsters. A window for informal networks of food recuperation and redistribution to operate was opened, and online dumpster diving spaces became a focal point for sharing information about potential informal partnerships with local businesses and to arrange periodical and eventually regular unsold food collection directly from the stores. Progressively, community fridges stabilized their own informal networks of unsold food suppliers outside of the existing food recuperation system, with bakeries or small fruits and vegetables shops. This made their operational activities more systematic, as they were no longer dependent upon irregular and quite uncertain individual dumpster diving initiatives.

Second, community fridges also appear in a context where there is not a global national/federal policy to guarantee the right to food, a field mostly occupied by food banks, which are the extension of public policies that fail to adequately address poverty (Tarasuk, Fafard St-Germain and Loopstra 2020). Since 2008, the use of food banks has risen by 25 percent in Canada. ¹⁹ Food banks in Canada really fit the definition of “flanking mechanisms” (Jessop 2002): a visible neoliberal roll-out mechanism that accompanies the increased dependence on non-profit, voluntary, faith-based, or community-based alternatives in the wake of the roll-back of the Keynesian welfare state (Allen and Guthman 2006; Guthman 2008). The patchwork of organizations forms a “shadow state” that is inherently uneven in its ability to provide services (Lake and Newman 2002; Trudeau 2008). The structure of this sector has positioned community fridges in the ecosystem and led them to propose or negotiate an alternative set of rules for food redistribution and recuperation. In Montreal, community fridges simultaneously defined their actions and purpose as CGS against the food bank system and informally supported low-capacity local food banks distributing the food donated by Moisson Montréal. In doing so, community fridges institutionalized their activities.

Overall, tracing the practice of unsold food recuperation in Montreal reveals a path toward a relative level of institutionalization. The process unfolded over three moments: first, individual dumpsters divers, facing challenges and opportunities within online CGS, implemented very informal community fridges and built communities around them. The initial community fridges were installed to restore dignity among people in need by offering a place where they could access food while avoiding food banks’ rules and limitations. However, as it became more organized and systematized through interactions with the local food recuperation system, the practice developed within larger networks including individuals of various backgrounds, who were also involved in the collection and distribution of otherwise discarded food. The tension between saving food and the right to food became apparent again in this second moment, but community fridge initiators learned ways to reconcile them through their interactions. The third moment is characterized by the progressive consolidation of informal networks of community fridges and dumpster divers operating at the fringes of the food system distribution in Montreal. They are thus part of a larger movement seeking to restore people's autonomy through the creation of self-managed spaces where they have access to food, like community gardens, social supermarkets, etc. (Roy 2014).

The Social World of Urban Gardening and Its Trajectory of Gradual Institutionalization

Informal urban gardens are autonomous CGS, but they do not evolve in an institutional and social vacuum. On the opposite, Montreal's local public authorities and associations specializing in place-making and tactical urbanism were often indirectly involved in supporting citizen initiatives, at least in principle. In fact, since the early 2010s, urban gardening has become embedded in a larger institutional environment composed of multiple actors and organizations performing different types of facilitation activities, and by the gradual institutionalization of citizens’ initiatives. The RPP borough, arguably one of the most active in urban gardening, provides an interesting example of this process.

In RPP, the local administration of Project Montreal, a left-leaning municipal political party elected in 2009, has been quite open to urban gardening initiatives. While they did not formally regulate the practice, public officials have been clear that this was not only tolerated but also encouraged, ²⁰ if not directly supported or facilitated. In particular, they mandated a local organization, the Société de development environmental de Rosemont (SODER), to coordinate and financially support citizens’ initiatives like community gardens and green alleys. They were not directly involved with sidewalks or open gardens initiatives in public spaces but informally facilitated them. For example, SODER organized the distribution of compost and plants to the public, offered training on permaculture and helped urban gardeners to create networks. As Lucie explains:

They were there to bring us tents, tables for our events, set up the project at the beginning. Afterwards, we managed to get by, so much the better, you see, it's not the purpose of being under the umbrella of the SODER. ²¹

Urban gardeners are usually appreciative of this kind of help, which supports the practice while keeping it autonomously driven by citizens. Urban gardening is resource- and time-consuming for individuals and any help is welcome.

The desire to make these project “permanent” nonetheless pushed many garden initiators to seek out support that goes beyond free compost and plants. As they occupy public space that was not initially intended for gardening, they sometimes need municipal council resolutions to modify land use definition. In some cases, they even ask the local administration to buy the private land they currently occupy and cultivate. This search for support brought in a number of new questions, but also a new set of public actors who were mandated by the borough's administration to manage public funds and bring together a loosely organized groups of citizens. These citizens continued their daily practice of urban gardening, while institutionalizing their relationship to the local administration though a variety of intermediaries like SODER.

Overall, whereas gardeners wanted to remain autonomous and organize their own informal support networks, they were keen to take advantage of this institutional support for their projects to thrive. However, this relationship also comes with ambiguities with regards to the borough's expectations. First, municipal institutions do not support the perennity of the practice per se. Their help is limited, and needs to be continuously renegotiated. In a way, it can be seen as a form of indirect public service delivery delegation, but without concrete and appropriate resources for citizens to do so. This places citizens in a position where they need to demand material support to sustain their greening initiative. Violaine, a gardener involved in a project located in another Montreal borough (Mercier-Hochelaga Maisonneuve) explains her relationship with the local Ecoquartier, the organization mandated by the borough to attend to citizen initiative-related needs:

We were given a little bit of guidance, we were told this is what Préfontaine Verte [another street in the neighborhood that have been embellished by its residents] has done, this is who you should contact at the borough. But to be honest, our Ecoquartier is absolutely overwhelmed. They try but they can’t, it's difficult, it's really difficult. And at the same time, given my training, I said to myself, well, I’m going to take charge of it and that's it. So it's me who takes the lead when I need them, I call them, I tell them … “can you sign this?”, and they sign it. The Ecoquartier gives us plants at the beginning of the year. They help us. They are the ones, for example, who are responsible for signing the requests for temporary occupation of public spaces. They submit this request to the borough, so they act [as] our intermediaries with the borough. They also act as an intermediary for the budget in the sense that, for example, the grant we received this year, the CRE Montréal will never give it to citizens. So, we go through the Ecoquartier. But in concrete terms, what happens is that the Ecoquartier signed the papers, gave us the money, we got a first instalment, then they just gave us the second instalment and that's it. And I know that we have to report to them, we do it at the end of the year to justify how we spend the money with the invoices, but it's us who manage. So, it serves as a guarantor, a relay, mainly, and they gave us a hand for projects. There was someone to help remove bricks on the space last year, and this year to plant fruit trees. Over time we developed a kind of complicity with other groups around the fact that it's so difficult to approach the borough, it's in our interest to help each other in a parallel way. ²²

Second, urban gardeners do not always understand why institutions are interested in encouraging their initiatives. What is the logic behind the public official's desire to support their actions? One RPP borough officer clearly explained that the role of the municipal administration was best described as “steering rather than rowing.”

You know, we will be better in our basic mandate and our public services to citizens, and citizens will feel more concerned and will be more careful, too. Because there is this, too, when the citizen feels more involved because she participated into creating his urban landscape, she treats the public space better, she cares. If she sees her neighbor do something that doesn’t make sense, she will tell him. When you are not in charge, you don’t care. You just need to go walk where there are citizen projects to realize it is much cleaner, much better maintained than where there are no citizen projects. ²³

Moreover, and for the same reason, the municipality encounters much less resistance to urban gardening and greening when it is done by the citizens themselves, without the intervention of public authorities:

For the borough, it's much simpler when it's done by the citizens, there is much less resistance. Citizens talk among themselves, they trust their neighbors much more than they trust politicians. ²⁴

However, residents engaged in rather personal processes do not necessarily want to assume the collective responsibility that comes with the recognition granted through aid policies. Some wonder if by accepting help from the city or organizations, they become indefinitely responsible for the lot in which they have decided to invest.

Third, as local authorities and organizations help these initiatives and, to a certain extent, regulate them, urban gardens may have to compete with one another for institutional support, even though they were first initiated outside of the institutional realm. For example, in RPP, the administration launched a formal mechanism called the Participatory projects program, and aimed at federating demands from existing and emerging citizens initiatives. With this program, the borough divided the territory into smaller territories composed of a few streets and in which committees composed with citizens from different horizons were to be elected to discuss and vote for urbanization projects in their sector. This program, managed by a mandated non-profit organization, once again formalizes the practice of urban gardening as it creates a “guichet” (Dubois 2010) for citizens to access facilitation services that brings together the existing projects, foments new ones, and creates a new structure to institutionalize citizen engagement in urban gardening. All types of citizen initiatives and collectives can participate in these “participatory project” meetings, but this also introduces competition for scarce resources between the different projects and creates new challenges for those attached to them, who now have a multiplicity of institutional interlocutors with whom they need to develop a more or less formal relationship in order to access resources.

In other words, as is the case with dumpster diving, urban gardening practices emerged and developed as autonomous and quite individual or small and loosely connected collective initiatives. This first moment was followed by a process of confrontation and negotiation with existing institutional norms and rules. With this development came the need to maintain control over their projects while having access to some more institutional help (like material resources or expertise). To ensure the longevity of their actions, urban gardening practitioners need help. They need access to seeds, water, soil and space, something which third-sector partners can help to provide. This second moment happened in a context where local governments in RPP and Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve did not have the means to fully co-opt these citizen initiatives, but could more easily encourage them with one-off grants, while somehow regulating the practice (notably through funded calls for projects). These complex interactions led to the third moment in which the gardeners and civil society groups (intermediating the relationship with local institutions) developed citizen-led public initiatives.

As we have seen, the context of neoliberalism and austerity appears at the forefront of the institutionalization processes we presented for both cases. Our two-levels analysis allows us to analytically capture how the austerity logics drove the institutionalization process. At the first-level, that is the emergence of citizens governed spaces (CGS), urban gardening and dumpster diving were pragmatic practices deployed to fulfill institutional cracks, which then progressively became spaces of autonomy. At the second-level, which we called the “social world” of the practice, gardeners and divers meet others people doing the same thing as they are, reinforcing their desire to engage in the practice and sustaining collective learning about their informal practices. They also meet institutional actors who are moved by their interest to regulate neighborhood embellishment and food consumption at the lower cost possible in a context of austerity and neoliberalism. It is at this level that tensions between the push for an institutional control of the practice and the necessary autonomy of its actors appears, producing resistance attitudes among gardeners and divers, who benefit from the loosely tight networks created around their respective practices. By finely unpacking and comparing the institutionalization processes of two distinct practices (urban gardening and dumpster diving) in Montreal through our two-levels analysis, our findings speak to and expand McClintock, Miewald and McCann (2021)'s findings, who suggested that urban gardening is involved in complex everyday governance relationships that need to be unpacked.

Conclusion: The Complex Effects of Local Austerity Implementation

Following dumpster diving and informal urban gardening practices in Montreal from 2016 to 2019, we found that these were best understood through a two-level analysis: first as CSGs, and then as embedded in their complex “social worlds.” Our comparative findings reveal that both social practices, initially associated with individuals or loosely organized groups, have become somewhat institutionalized over time. However, the urban gardening and dumpster diving social worlds are structured in different ways, something that has direct repercussions on the way the practices unfold and on how interests, identities, tensions and resistance against state control are expressed in both sectors.

In the emergence phase, dumpster diving was rooted in individual initiatives and inter-individual relations via social media or in-person (informal) meeting. But these practices were deployed in a space where institutions were not intervening (and did not intervene in the past), the regulation of wastes was (and is) mainly coming from food markets and business. But it is also important to recognize that the Montreal practice spread among residents in a context of “actually existing neo-liberalism” (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2009). Meaning, the circuit of food production and consumption, food regulations and food help, in times of relative urban austerity, is offloaded onto the individual (through work and wages), with local public institutions acting as secondary backup as needed. Dumpster practices are facilitated by community groups, shops and food banks, all of them playing a role in the struggle against poverty while national and local institutions action is limited. These actors are not those who give the impulse to the practices, as is the case with urban gardening, but there are those who allow for its institutionalization by way of food pick-ups, conservation and distribution. This help is always twofold: by putting some frameworks for individual actions, it can also limit who is able to access dumpsters and how it is done.

To reconstruct the history of interventions in the maintenance of public (and green) spaces is outside the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, plantings in front of buildings are a response to a lack of green spaces in the city. Initiatives to change this reality first came from individual residents, before eventually finding a place on the local administration's agenda. Our research has identified greening initiatives in the streets or on vacant lots. At first glance, these initiatives seem rather informal and appear to have emerged from the bottom up. In interviewing the people involved in those projects, we have discovered that local institutions and organizations were always part of the picture. But these were not top-down projects either, conceived of by local institutions. The engaged residents were filling an empty space by doing urban gardening (not done by institutions) but they were also benefitting from periodic (financial) support. In the process, these residents were also developing conflictual relationships with local institutions, as the latter were not providing sustained support or recognizing their initiatives. In those cases, the transformation of local actions translates into unreliable relationships with the municipality, from the point of view of engaged residents.

The perception that the local administration is unable to help may also provoke a public backlash or a greater sense of defiance toward institutions. In other words, as Flinders and Wood put it: “when co-production fails institutionally, citizens react by resisting the reversion to other institutional arrangements” (2019, 281) and turn back to their own (small) initiatives. Dumpster-diving, community fridges and greening actions in public spaces have in fact flourished in a context of self-responsibility promoted by explicit public policy or by specific institutional actors in a constrained context of state retrenchment. Nevertheless, we are not looking at a narrative of strong institutionalization. This is more a matter of social practices that are redefining the relationship between residents and local institutional actors and local community groups. As Bialski et al. have stated, “these practices tend to organize differently, apparently striving to create an urban environment that relies on more self-organized, local, autonomous, and resource efficient forms of organization, which in turn somehow changes the political, economic, and social setting in cities” (Bialski et al. 2015, 2). In the same vein, civic response to neoliberalization processes are neither “good” nor “bad” but they do reveal the tensions surrounding the local administration's capacity to deliver (and sustain the delivery) of some services. One of the main challenges these autonomous but partially institutionalized practices confront is the question of sustainability: how can these citizens-led initiatives survive? It is probably in this part of the story that the effects of neoliberal austerity are the most tangible: because the practices implemented to cope with neoliberal austerity are often short term.