Cultivation Builds Community

This book develops methods to analyse how urban planning texts narrate urban practices. It sets out to answer the question why community gardening projects can become exclusive and disadvantageous to urban communities and how such processes are entwined with narrative structure. The book applies this narrative analysis to texts from the cities of Portland (OR) and Essen (Germany). Cultivation Builds Community therefore uses an interdisciplinary approach to urban planning texts for municipal community gardening programmes, focusing on implied exclusions, inclusions, and the ubiquitous promise of community building. Through its persuasive nature and its benign appearance, this promise simultaneously obscures a lack of clarity as to how the community can be built, and who might be excluded in the process. In consequence, plans for gardens can go unquestioned and their impacts left unmonitored. Formal community gardening programmes are increasingly used in municipalities’ approaches to tackling social inequality as well as environmental issues. While these programmes are generally well-researched, a closer look at how this form of planning for gardening in an ‘inclusive green city’ works on a narrative level is overdue. This monograph is the first book-length study to address the narrative structure of community gardening texts in urban planning, and the first book to address this narrative topic in a transatlantic context, considering the respective situations of community gardening in the US and Germany. CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 1.1 “From Green to Grey to Green”: Transatlantic City Scripts 3 1.2 Dissertation Structure 7 2 Context: Cities and Community Gardening 9 2.1 Cities: Portland and Essen 9 2.2 Introduction of Community Gardening 22 2.3 Community Gardening in the US and Portland 25 2.4 Urban Planning and Community Gardening 34 2.5 Community Gardening in Germany and Essen 38 2.6 Federal and Regional Community Garden Planning in Germany 40 2.7 The “‘Gardens as Good’-Dilemma” 48 3 City Scripts: Sustainability, Inclusivity, and Utopian Models 51 3.1 The Sustainability Script 51 3.2 The Inclusivity Script 55 3.3 Utopian Models and Urban Planning 62 4 Method: The Analysis of Emplotment in Urban Planning 68 4.1 Emplotment: A Narrative Scaffold 69 4.2 Practical Research Methods 75 5 Clearing & Enclosure: Creating a Garden 79 5.1 Introduction 79 5.2 Clearing the Urban Forest: Of Weeding and Other Horticultural Activities 84 5.3 Enclosure: Fencing the Garden 102 5.4 Conclusion 128 6 “Cultivation Builds Community” (CBC): Tracing a Minimal Narrative 129 6.1 Introduction 129 6.2 Cultivation and Community Building 137 6.3 Prefiguration: Precursors of “Cultivation Builds Community” 152 6.4 Configuration: “Cultivation Builds Community” in Planning Documents 163 6.5 Refiguration: Echoes of “Cultivation Builds Community” 183 6.6 Conclusion 205 7 The Fruits of Community Gardening: A Conclusion 207 8 Works Cited 214