Abstract
BACKGROUND:
There are several characteristics of working in an urban environment that challenge the usual forms of work prescription.
OBJECTIVE:
This is a case study on the work of gardeners in an urban setting in the north of Paris. This paper develops the notion of territory, which we define as a system that is locally rooted in an open environment through the situated actions of gardeners’ work. As the employees do their work in an outside environment, interactions in real-life situations are beyond the control of work organization. City gardeners’ work is carried out in a green, living and human environment.
METHODS:
We conducted detailed open observations in a town’s green zones. These were complemented by individual interviews in work situations and by collective interviews within the boundaries of the municipality.
RESULTS:
We use the notion of territory to highlight the particularity of work within organizations where the work environment cannot be limited to the space inside their walls. The gardeners’ work makes it possible to link residents and passers-by (on foot or in vehicles) with the town’s green spaces (micro-ecosystems). Their work consists in connecting the different expectations and needs of the various life forms: the human beings (with a variety of lifestyles), as well as the plants, insects and animals.
CONCLUSION:
The particularities of working in an open environment create complex forms of prescription. The notion of territory, rarely used in ergonomics, proves to be fruitful for considering work in these contexts.
Introduction
The notion of territory is usually mobilized in geo-graphy, urban studies, history, economics and sociology. It is a multidisciplinary object. In Raffestin’s work as a geographer [1], the term territory is linked to a space that presents transformable resources. This definition is interesting from an ergonomic perspective, for the notions of space and resources are combined through acts of transformation by humans. Raffestin, quoted by Paquot [2], defined territory as “a space transformed by human work”.
In French-speaking ergonomics research, the notion of territory has recently aroused particular interest. Most previous ergonomics studies were carried out in industrial companies where work was confined within precise spatial and temporal boundaries, generally within company walls. These walls served as ramparts to protect the production system and the work organization from direct outside interference. The work was carried out in a defined space-time and controlled by the organization of work.
Historically, French-speaking ergonomics as a science of work has examined issues of work activity in industrial companies characterized by this type of closed space. This does not mean that there is no link between outside and inside, but simply that borders can be controlled by work organization and that production takes place within company walls. The work environment is thus controlled. The workstation, the physical atmosphere, the type of tasks to be performed, the work resources and the modalities of coordination are provided by the organization, which designs, adjusts and controls them in line with its objectives.
In this context – a small number of exceptions aside –, the notion of territory has only recently been explored and is starting to become one of ergonomists’ areas of interest.
Yet many work situations can be found in organizations whose boundaries cannot be fully controlled. In these cases, work takes place in an environment where there is interference from the outside, and that presents its own coherence. This is true of agricultural work, for example, which has to deal with the living world when working the land, or of arboriculture when experiments are done in an orchard [3]. It is also true of all people-related professions, including working from home, training, or service activities.
The question of activity analysis can therefore be posed in terms of the coordination of actor networks situated at different scales with intermingled systems of actors, as Le Bail et al. point out [4] in the case of a food relocation project in agriculture. This notion of scale is used in the work of Boudra et al. [5, 6] regarding the connection between territory and waste sorting and its impact on health. It can also be used to reflect upon how bus drivers’ work is organized in a rural environment [7].
Taking into consideration Raffestin’s definition, our article draws on a case study of gardeners’ work in conurbations located on the northern periphery of Paris. The case study took place in 2019 and has been analyzed from an ergonomic perspective, with a specific focus on the work activity.
The article is based on a previous study [8] concerning the activity of janitors in charge of supervision, cleaning and maintenance of social residential buildings. This previous case study, as well the gardener’s study, fall within the category of production that takes place in an outside environment, away from the company. Some of the results are similar, but the present paper shows how municipal gardeners in direct contact with residents and other users of parks and gardens could contribute to developing the notion of territory.
Methods
Our methodology is based on Ergonomic Work Analysis, aiming at understanding work activity in its physical, cognitive, psychological and social dimensions [9–12].
The overall functioning of the work system is first investigated through interviews at different manager levels of the green spaces department of the municipality and the analysis of the daily distribution of tasks and duties.
This analysis of organization and tasks involved in the different work processes leads to identify key characteristic situations to be observed and described in detail. These characteristic work situations are selected for their time impact in the daily activities and their physical, psychological or organizational impact assessed in the interviews of workers and the management.
These characteristic work situations are investigated in detail through observation of the work situations, verbal feed-back during tasks realization, and detailing the activities in their physical, cognitive, mental, and social dimensions.
The analysis of characteristic work situations and their impact on organization is the core of a diagnosis, that is exposed and discussed with all workers and management, as a tool to open the way for organizational or task evolutions in the perspective of improving work conditions. The results presented in this article are elaborated from this diagnosis.
Results
The results are structured in three parts. The first part details the activity of the gardeners in an urban municipality. Two principal points are highlighted. First (section 3.1) the gardeners’ action is a situated activity that consists in maintaining balances such as keeping a mini-ecosystem alive, creating links between the practices of residents and passers-by, meeting the objectives of their superiors, and complying with the political choices imposed by the conurbation. Second (section 3.2), their action is framed by various prescriptions and regulations enforced by the municipality and/or relating to the social uses of green spaces, the local residents, the department manager, the means and rules of the profession, and the urban meshing. The second part of the article deals with the effects of different kinds of prescription on the gardeners’ work and health. The assessment of the work to be done as well as the organizational choices have a direct impact on health and work. The last part opens a discussion on a macroscopic view of sustainability that could become a constraint if it does not take into account the gardeners’ need to build and develop a territory.
We distinguish four terms: space, zone, environment, and territory. A space as a given place such as an urban garden or park. A zone as a sub-element of a space, for example, a green area along a road or flowerbed in front a town hall. An environment as all elements that surround a person or a group of people, insects or animals. A territory as a system that is created through human activity within an open environment. It is a result of human action performed locally through the activity of work. This is a living system.
Gardeners’ work in an urban municipality
In this section, we present the work of municipal gardeners whose job is to look after green spaces in a conurbation in northern Paris. They work in all of the conurbation’s green areas, be they parks, flowerbeds or plants in front of the town’s institutional buildings (town halls, libraries, schools, etc.) or growing alongside roads. The team leader distributes the tasks and decides which teams to send to the various green spaces of the conurbation, depending on the geographical layout and the surface areas to be planted or maintained. The gardeners are divided up by geographical sector. Equipment is also supplied according to the tasks to be performed and their location. For example, the creation or maintenance of flowerbeds in front of a town hall do not require the same tools as the same tasks alongside a busy road.
The gardeners begin and end every workday on the premises of the conurbation’s gardening services unit. They start by going to the changing rooms to put on their work clothes, and after visiting the stockroom and loading their vehicles with equipment and materials, they leave the unit and drive to the conurbation’s green zones. They go back to the unit only at the end of their shift, to return the equipment to the stockrooms and to get changed. They therefore spend the entire day outside in an urban milieu, in green spaces.
A situated activity that consists in maintaining balances
In their work, the gardeners have to deal with heterogeneous forms of prescription and to take care of the needs of different forms of life (plants, insects, birds and human being). They are tasked with producing a system that they must keep in balance, in order to contribute to a living micro-system that constitutes a territory.
3.1.1.1. Keeping a micro-ecosystem alive: The gardeners work with living plants that have their own coherence. The plants and flowers are chosen not only according to the soil type, but also to the orientation of the sun and the winds, and in relation to the configuration of the area to be planted. The gardeners must consider the particularities of each species, to ensure that it grows on a plot of land or in a planter. They need to accommodate both the preferences of each variety when considering possible cohabitation, and the insects that live in them. Within the perimeter of a given surface area, their objective is to help create a mini ecosystem – sometimes as small as a flowerbed – in the middle of an urban built environment.
3.1.1.2 Creating links between the practices of residents and passers-by: The gardeners’ choices concerning plants and their maintenance integrate local residents’ expectations and relationships with their green zones. These are numerous and extremely varied. For example, the elderly generally pay attention to the decorative aspect of a green zone and to the way in which it brings beauty to the district in which they live. Parents and their children are more interested in whether these zones are accessible for playing and resistant to trampling, while pet owners want to be able to use green areas to walk their pets, and are not always aware of the harmful effects of domestic animal excreta on the plants, especially in urban areas where there is a high concentration of cats and dogs.
In making their planting and pruning choices, the gardeners will take into account both the diverse habits of the residents and the needs of the green ecosystems in their flowerbeds and planters. They will seek to achieve a balance between protecting as best they can the lives of the plants, flowers, insects and birds, while at the same time encouraging or preventing the different practices of the residents or passers-by.
The gardeners will also take into consideration the way in which the ecosystem that they wish to create fits into the built environment. For example, they will prune a bush in such a way that it covers a graffiti on a wall that is difficult to maintain. The pruning will therefore not be performed in accordance with a standard gardening practice, but in response to the nature of the built environment of the plants.
The gardeners will also develop relationships with various residents, to better understand them and to discuss plant life and raise awareness about it. Through their work and ability to add value, they thus foster relationships that bring them closer to the residents.
3.1.1.3 Meeting the objectives of one’s superiors: The gardeners work under a team leader who organizes the distribution of tasks throughout all areas of the conurbation. The team leader decides on the number of team members and the resources to allocate to them, according to the sectors to be covered and for the period of time required to carry out the tasks in question (creation or maintenance of green spaces).
The teams are sent into the conurbation by sector and must adapt their work according to the particularities of the urban context. Each sector has its own specific accesses and types of green zone. The gardeners have to take into account the ways in which the sectors are used by residents and passers-by (pedestrians and vehicles).
The gardeners’ ways of accessing the zones, of organizing the equipment and of working do not require the same level of vigilance regarding the risks incurred during their urban immersion. Pedestrian interference in their work differs from that caused by vehicles. Working on flowerbeds in front of the town hall does not involve the same constraints as planting or maintaining a flowerbed alongside a road, especially a high-speed road with safety concerns.
The gardeners thus adjust their practices to suit the urban environment in which they find themselves. Depending on the resulting rhythm of their work, it may sometimes be difficult to complete it within the allotted time. Management qualifies any non-compliance with deadlines as overruns, but given the huge variation in the situations they encounter, for the gardeners it is the only lever that allows them to complete a job.
Weeding.
3.1.1.4 Satisfying the political choices imposed by the conurbation: The gardeners are employed by a conurbation that took the decision to make a strong statement regarding sustainable development. In a highly concentrated urban context, the political decision to meet societal expectations in this respect was taken at the level of this conurbation which is made up of several contiguous towns. To demonstrate its political commitment to implementing sustainable development, the conurbation council made decisions that had a major impact on the gardeners’ work methods, but failed to consult them about these choices or to take the impact on real-life work into consideration. Pesticides were banned and were replaced by manual weeding. Thermal rototillers for working the soil were removed and replaced by manual tools such as the broadfork. These decisions completely changed the way the gardeners work and make it difficult to estimate the time needed to complete tasks. They also affected the gardeners’ health.
Manual weeding has various effects on gardeners, depending on their age and experience. This task requires a posture that older gardeners find hard to keep up over time. It means crouching or kneeling on ground that is very often damp, and the older gardeners have trouble not only maintaining the position, but also leaving it to stand up. The effects on the body and joints therefore remain a concern, and these gardeners try to find painless postures for carrying out their work. The younger gardeners have other difficulties, not with the posture but because they are not familiar with all of the plants. They sometimes find it hard to differentiate between unwanted plant species to be removed, and species to be kept as part of the mini ecosystem that is being promoted. They have doubts and waste time trying to sort the different plants and find out and understand what has to be done in manual weeding tasks. Experienced gardeners, on the other hand, who are more comfortable with the tasks that have to be performed, are faster and more efficient when crouched on the ground.
Working the soil with a broadfork.
The introduction of the broadfork to replace the thermal rototiller has transformed not only the time required to loosen and aerate the soil without turning it, but also the postures that the work requires. This job, previously automated through the use of a rototiller, is once again a manual task and is more tiring; the gardener must push on the handles of the tool, sometimes pushing simultaneously with their foot, so as to wield the fork and thus aerate and loosen the soil. Within the teams, age has become a major issue; especially when management opts to distribute tasks individually without taking into account age and experience. This makes it impossible to use collective regulation of individual workload within the team to deal with fatigue and performance. The work situation has thus been dramatically transformed by the introduction of a tool designed on the basis of a political will which, although legitimate as regards ecological preservation, does not meet the demands of work in real-life situations.
In ergonomics, prescriptions are considered to be task-related. They concern the objectives given to employees, their instructions, and the conditions under which the task must be performed [11].
The relationships between a gardener’s work and the environment within which they must perform their tasks are multiple, take place on different scales, and involve different types of prescription.
As territorial employees, the gardeners follow the prescriptions of the municipality that employs them. Yet these prescriptions, which define the type and duration of the tasks, do not sufficiently describe the job to be done.
Furthermore, the realization and results of their work can be seen by local residents. They are public, and as such are examined and judged from the various points of view of the actors and users of parks and gardens. A gardener’s situated work is thus at the crossroads of several explicit or implicit prescriptions, and the nature and status granted to the prescriptions that affect gardeners’ work are differentiated.
3.1.2.1. The town: The gardeners’ work is part of a pre-existing urban geography, a network of roads and median strips, a variable urban density, and zoned economic activities.
In terms of space, the work is impacted by the physical configuration of the areas that make the job more difficult.
This spatial geographical prescription, imposed by the state of the urban development and of the road network, restricts the spatial extension of the gardeners’ work and defines their working environment. It is the physical framework for their work, over which the gardeners have no control. Unlike companies, where the work is carried out within company walls, this is a space that the employer cannot fully control. The prescription is limited to defining a geographic division, often based on a map of the town. It is composed of widely diverse sectors in terms of surface area, slope, type of soil, sunlight, configuration of the built environment, socio-professional category of the residents, and so on.
3.1.2.2. Social uses of green spaces: The geographical space defined by the town’s expanse and its public roads is one that is inhabited and experienced. It is a space demarcated by the municipality (both the town hall itself and the conurbation) and it provides the physical frame for a superposition of individual and collective activities. The usefulness and relative valorization of the factors of use of these activities may diverge; hence, the use or the potential future use could differ from one group of users to the other. The gardeners try, through their activity, to make a proposal that suits the largest number of users, despite the diversity and sometimes divergence of the different forms of use by residents and passers-by.
The work of creating and maintaining green spaces reaffirms or contradicts the social uses of such spaces.
Through their work, the gardeners create a physical framework or modify the parameters of what already exists. This impacts the factors that determine how a space is used by each category of users, who assign differentiated functions to it, to suit their activities (walking, enjoying the landscape, passing through, using the waste disposal zone, having a walk with a pet, etc.).
From the point of view of the gardeners’ work, these users can be grouped according to their behavior. For example: drivers who sometimes throw their garbage into the flowerbeds, “youths” who damage the plants when they gather together, sometimes in the evening, drug addicts who throw away their syringes, local residents who steal plants, believing it to be their right to do so (they “paid for these plants with their taxes”), parents with children looking for a nice safe spot, and so on. There are many different users, with numerous different practices, and this can lead to interference.
The gardeners cannot work in public spaces and maintain green areas while at the same time ignoring the users and their behavior, either because that behavior directly affects the intensity of their work – in zones regularly covered with trash, for example – or because they will end up adapting the local objective of their work to suit the practices of the users.
We can therefore define a form of indirect social prescription, relating to the gardeners’ perception of practices observed or expected in the green zones to be maintained.
3.1.2.3. The local residents: When working on flowerbed maintenance, gardeners are on view and are exposed to the explicit demands expressed by local residents whose immediate environment they are changing. Even if they are not spoken to directly, they act in response to how they believe the residents, pedestrians or passing motorists might react. Where possible, they maintain an overall aesthetic coherence that includes the residents’ private gardens.
The work is carried out with the residents in mind, and the result is a tangible sustainable space that will be judged by them. We therefore observed direct contact with the residents, who asked the gardeners about their methods, their tools, the duration of their breaks, and the objectives of the ongoing work. In this way the residents exert a form of control over the work – outside the organizational framework and the tasks defined by the employer – which might be in contradiction with the gardeners’ instructions.
Unlike anonymous social groups that are identified through the impact of their behavior, the residents are local and the gardeners know them individually. They can criticize the work done, for example by lodging a complaint with the municipality, or may occasionally show their approval by asking the gardeners to do work in their own gardens. This opportunity for work and undeclared income impacts the organization and distribution of work within the teams. The most senior gardeners try to keep being assigned to jobs in the town center, and to have newer employees relegated to harder and less rewarding maintenance jobs on the median strips on roadways.
The majority of the gardeners live in the towns where they work and can easily contact their mayors, not only as citizens but also as workers asking for support in dealing with the conurbation. The conurbation is a group of five towns and is the gardeners’ employer, but is nevertheless perceived as distant and paying little attention to real life in the local territory.
Here, through the gardeners’ direct interaction with local residents, we find an example of work prescription that we describe as proximate and interactive.
3.1.2.4. Department manager, teams, and the rules of the profession: The gardening teams are led by a department manager who organizes the work schedule, the locations, the order in which tasks must be done, and the time allocated to each job.
The department manager also applies a rationale for the development and transformation of the territory that meets the objectives defined by the conurbation. In a context of increased attention to ecology and sustainable development, this manager is at the head of authoritarian action to transform cultivation practices and tools. Their intervention is out of step with the profession’s established methods and the esthetics of “a job well done” as seen by the majority of gardeners.
The department manager has the authority to direct and control the work.
The gardeners work in teams, within which the most senior pass on and try to show off their experience, their ways of working, and their idea of quality work and of relations with local residents. The information transmitted within the teams, who work autonomously on site, may contradict the prescriptions given by their superiors. This is the case of the gardeners’ resistance to the instructions to stop using thermal rototillers, which reduce the physical effort required and allow the gardeners to work faster by tilling the soil. This method is currently strongly challenged as a gardening practice but does have the advantage of saving time and reducing certain physical strain.
It is at the level of the teams working autonomously on site that there is an opportunity to debate work rules and methods, and to discuss the perceived quality of the work done.
In the context of our research, we noticed a form of resistance to the hierarchical prescription which imposed a change of practices in an authoritarian way. The changes did not take into account the collective discussion needed when developing professional rules and practices, or the introduction of new quality standards required by sustainable development seen from the hierarchical point of view.
The sustainable development project implies a work organization that accepts gardeners’ difficulty in anticipating everything relating to how to work the land in accordance with users’ expectations. In a way, this is similar to the idea of an organization that needs to consider how to achieve a conception of work tools that can be used in sometimes unanticipated ways in real-life situations [12].
3.1.2.5. Scales and urban meshing: The gardeners act in a zone with a functional organization of multiple activities at several scales of the conurbation. The footprint of these activities corresponds to different networks that have varied meshes. The trunk roads that crisscross the cities of the municipality are part of a very wide network. At local level, and in relation to the gardeners’ work, they create a geography of median strips which are associated with pollution and waste. These strips put a major environmental constraint on the plants and make work difficult, in a space that is polluted and potentially dangerous due to exposure to road traffic. The meshing in the residential zones of the conurbation is tight, with differentiated zones, defining other types of green space to maintain, in full view of local residents. These green spaces convey the municipality’s image, for both the residents and the mayor. The work is more varied, less dangerous and more social. This more diversified space offers a wide range of alternatives for landscaping cities. The conurbation’s overall sustainable development strategy is integrated on a scale of five municipalities. The gardening services managers are appointed as part of this integrated framework and their objectives are based on a supra-municipal scale.
There are different scales and each of them highlights a mesh that focuses on one dimension of the environment. The different dimensions are heterogeneous. The larger the scale of the network, the less local are the means for the social regulation of choices and for evolution.
The gardeners’ work organization is subjected to the variety of these physical and organizational networks and their different meshes. In these circumstances, their challenge is to deal with this complexity and the sometimes, incongruent issues of each scale. The sum of the issues of the different scales is not the sum of tasks that have to be performed, but a synthesis of sometimes contradictory issues that have to be dealt with.
Their activity is embedded at local level and regulations come into being through direct intervention by the users. Their work is however organized according to a broader strategy, on which the gardeners have little influence.
The issue of impact on the work
Our analysis of the gardeners’ work shows that the types of prescription that they are given are linked to an interweaving of protagonists located at different scales.
The question of assessment
As municipal employees engaged in a relationship of subordination, the gardeners are assessed by their superiors regarding their ability to complete the tasks they are set: to plant and maintain specific green spaces within the allocated time, using the tools provided. The evaluation criteria are based on a technical and organizational rationality.
The gardeners are also visible to the local residents and other green-space users who can observe them working and can see the results of their work. The latter are in a relationship, not of hierarchical evaluation, but of assessment of the work done, based on criteria that relate to their own experience of the town’s green spaces. Through their practices, they become involved with the gardeners’ production. The gardeners take them into account in the conduct of their on-site work, and the end result is shared. Here the logic is a joint production in a relationship that creates social connections between gardeners, residents and other users, impacting the conduct and output of gardeners’ activity.
These local connections and their on-site impact on work activity elude work organization, because they are designed to serve the whole community in its plurality.
Finally, in addition to taking into account the needs and expectations of human users, the gardeners work the soil and, with plant, insect and animal species, they promote micro-ecosystems which can develop and evolve or else deteriorate. In some ways the sustainability of a micro-ecosystem depends on the quality of the gardeners’ work, which either improves it or harms it. Here gardeners take into account the needs of a complex living system, which means they must have a significant capacity for adjustment and ingenuity to grow plants and ensure that they thrive in a high-density urban environment.
At the crossroads of the prescriptions, the gardeners are thus faced with multiple forms of assessment. Some of these can be contradictory and consequently generate tension between the gardeners’ decision-making criteria for organizing their work. Their work then consists in keeping everything together, despite the impediments.
Organizational choices and their impact on health
The conurbation’s decision to change the work tools without considering how this might impact the work, has been instrumental in destroying the balances that the gardeners had managed to create. Those in charge made their decision as employers who determine ways of working, not unlike an industrial company that controls its production and resources within its walls. Yet gardeners carry out their work not in a confined space but in the open, where they build relations that allow them to cope with the various types of expectation, demand and prescription. They are part of a system that creates unity, and this human, insect, animal and plant system is defined as local situated territory.
This characteristic of working in an open environment has already been examined in a previous study on the work of social housing janitors [13]. Our research demonstrated the gap – a source of tension – between a managerial prescription and the way in which the janitors succeeded in finding the resources with which to cope with the fatigue and professional erosion of their job.
The gardeners’ work is at the interface of several actor logics. This characteristic can also be found in other sectors of activity [14].
To successfully perform their work, gardeners need a margin of autonomy to develop links that will provide them with a local connection to the urban environment in which they operate. There are numerous interlocking prescriptions. If the hierarchical prescription is enforced by denying this complicity with the direct work environment, and is considered unique and superior to the other forms of direct or implicit prescription, the gardeners are deprived of the wherewithal to complete their tasks. Their health is also put at risk by the loss of this margin of adaptation or degree of latitude that makes it possible to adapt to the constraints of the real-life situations encountered.
Discussion and conclusion
The green-space department’s model introduced by the conurbation is based on a mapping approach to the town’s green zones. These are areas to be maintained and given value from a “green-space” standpoint. The conurbation’s action is intended to showcase these spaces within the town’s built environment and to meet its challenges in terms of sustainable development.
The objective of the green-space department is to organize the gardeners’ work, equip them with tools, and divide them between the various sectors, each of which contains a certain number of green spaces. Each section has a number of flowerbeds and hedges demarcating the traffic zones and urban parks.
The conurbation and the green-space department constitute two connected scales. They can both be read as superimposed layers. The conurbation thinks and acts at a macroscopic level, the department at a median level. The sector is therefore the microscopic level. While this reading makes it possible to plan the organization of work, it does not provide access to an understanding of the work done locally by the gardeners. This work is not limited to a range of scales (from the macro, to the meso, to the micro) in the actions taken to create and maintain the green spaces.
As far as the gardeners are concerned, their job is not only to plant and maintain these zones, but also to make their work part of a situated context by developing connections, so as to produce unity. In the sense of Suchman [15], the gardeners anchor their work locally. This unity encompasses both the logic of living plants in connection with insects, birds and other living organisms, and the social and urban practices of local residents and other users of the green spaces (passers-by, people going for a walk, pet owners, children, etc.). The gardeners engage in a relationship with the residents and other green-space users, with a dual objective: To understand their practices in order to better design and organize their work with the flowers and plants (for example, regarding their shape when pruning, and the choice to be made to cope with trampling, ball games, and large quantities of canine excreta and urine). The challenge they face is that of ensuring the conditions that will support a plant and animal ecosystem. To foster relations so that they can encourage users to change certain practices. This is achieved by being present on site, showing their work and talking about how plants develop, or not, in the local urban environment. They share their experience of gardening in an urban setting.
Through these locally woven relationships the gardeners build the conditions for sharing expectations and practices, and hence a way of experiencing green spaces.
Ultimately, their action supports and maintains the links between different networks, connecting heterogeneous dynamics and balances in the course of their work.
The gardeners also connect different expectations and needs: the residents as human beings (and their varying lifestyles in an urban environment), and the plants, insects and animals.
The gardeners’ work is part of a system with several levels on which different actors act at their own scales of perception. The conurbation’s macroscopic vision for the sustainable evolution of the territory cannot become reality if it neglects local relationships. It is these relationships, developed through the gardeners’ work, that build the conditions in which it will be possible to maintain a balance despite the various tensions.
The territory, as a living micro-system where a variety of people and multiple organisms live and interact, emerges in and from the work done by the gardeners. It is the relevant unity in the gardeners’ actions that connects them with the local residents, and with the plants, within the framework of situated micro-ecosystems. And through the gardeners’ work, it is the system that connects the residents and passers-by with the living world in local life.
Through the action of their work, the gardeners manage to hold together this variety and the diversity of living beings in an urban built environment, within a given space determined by their work organization. They bring together living beings in micro eco-systems and create a local territory as a living milieu, in the sense of Cazamian [16] and Canguilhem [17]. The activity, in this acceptation, is a way to make Oikos, a unity as a home, for a human group including other living beings. Oikos is an ancient Greek word. It means a way of living and producing in a specific place, a household.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical approval
Not applicable.
Informed consent
All participants provided informed consent for contributing to the research presented in this article.