Paper short abstract:

In recent years, peri-urban allotment gardens in Hungary have become an important space for informal economic activities complementing households’ reproductive needs. We investigate allotments’ role in households’ portfolios, together with the values/imaginaries associated with them.

Paper long abstract:

After the regime change in 1989, and especially since the 2008 financial crisis, peri-urban allotment gardens in Hungary have become an important space for informal economic activities complementing households’ reproductive needs. Originally, allotments were institutionalized by the socialist state to provide agricultural and recreational spaces for workers living in urban flats. As housing and utility costs boomed after the regime change, allotments became a target for housing mobility. This tendency has been exacerbated both by the 2008 crisis and by climate-related anxieties. Besides systemic push factors, allotments also attracted households as potential spaces to develop self-sufficiency: detach from urban infrastructures (and related cost pressures), increase dwelling autonomy through self-building (often under conditions of informality), and develop informal economic activities tied to allotments, including gardening.

Our presentation investigates allotments’ role in households’ reproductive portfolios, through the example of an allotment in the Southern periphery of Budapest. Relying on ethnographic research, we discuss food production, self-building, and other informal economic activities performed in the gardens, and assess the significance of these practices in household types characteristic to this allotment’s social constitution. Next to the material significance of informal reproductive practices tied to the gardens, we also trace habitual and ideological aspects of practices associated with self-sufficiency. We look at structural pressures that shape these practices together with the values and imaginaries that household members associate with them.