Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnography of the relocation of Chicago’s 61st St. Community Garden, this paper explores the effectiveness of the gardeners’ tactical and rhetorical strategies in the struggle to articulate their understanding of the “true value” of the garden and lay claim to the contested space.

Paper long abstract:

Community gardens often occupy contested urban spaces that require gardeners to think tactically to make themselves visible. In the early twenty-first century, the 61st Street Community Garden in Chicago lived between the affluent neighbourhood of Hyde Park and the struggling neighbourhood of Woodlawn that had experienced rapid racial turnover and population decline in the mid-twentieth century. The landowner, the University of Chicago, gave notice in 2009 that the garden would need to relocate. This was a significant moment - an opportunity for ethnographers to explore how the gardeners had built tactical and rhetorical strategies in the struggle to articulate their understanding of the "true value" of the garden and lay claim to the contested space. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork following the University's notification, I will explore the value of the garden as "more than just tomatoes" following Gabriel Tarde's notion of value as inter-subjective passionate interests. I will also examine the gardeners' tactics through Latour's call for a kind of democracy that demands the expansive process of taking into account and putting into order all human and non-human actants. This paper argues that the tactics used to make the garden visible and articulate its value did not have the intended effect. They closed off, rather than opened, genuine democratic deliberation about its value. As part of the broader food culture movement, whose aim is to localize abstracted industrial food systems, these tactics ultimately elided actual particularities of local places through an abstracted rhetoric of nature, community and belonging.