Community gardens as learning spaces for sustainable food practices

Abstract

Urban agriculture is an emerging topic and it is widely argued that it has considerable potential for sustainable consumption and production. Community gardening is a promising type of urban agriculture and questions have been raised like whether it has additional benefits for sustainable lifestyles and behavior, and we can understand community gardens from a social practices perspective. This paper aims to provide first insights to these questions by looking at community gardens in the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, when aiming at more sustainable urban food provisioning practices. Two cases are analyzed using Shove’s image-, skills-stuff model, while also looking at learning processes, expectations and enrolment of involved actors. Data have been collected, through participatory observation and semi-structured interviews. There are both similarities as well as major differences between these two gardens that influence the food provisioning practice of participants as a whole. This study also shows that there are not only innovative developments pointing towards sustainability as well shared elements with less sustainable mainstream food provisioning practices. The former can be seen as opportunities that are not yet taken, whereas the latter are barriers that withhold the practice from changing. These insights improve our understanding how urban agriculture can play a role in a transition to more sustainable food provisioning practices.?In addition, the role of the participants has found to be essential in the evolution, reproduction, changing and sustaining of urban food provisioning practices.