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Short abstract:

This paper traces the emergence of city farms in London as a socially and ecologically innovative process of place-making, and focuses specially on the knowledge practices of the participants who were involved in this process, including the co-agency of non-human farmed animals.

Long abstract:

Since the 1970s, London, and subsequently also other UK cities, witnessed the emergence of so-called ‘city farms’. The term refers to community-based projects, which seek to bring urban dwellers into contact with agricultural practices and animals, and which thereby make creative use of, hitherto neglected, patches of urban space. The focus on life-stock and other farm animals sets these projects apart from recent efforts to promote sustainable food growing in community gardens. Unlike commercial farms, they have offered farming as a service to the 'community', for example, by providing a space for weekend outings, children's play, volunteering, or therapeutic and educational activities. This paper traces the emergence of London’s city farms as a socially and ecologically innovative process of place-making, and focuses specially on the knowledge practices of the participants who were involved in this process. It asks (1) how participating actors came to share their understanding of city farms and animal-keeping as a service for the city and urban dwellers, and (2) how they engaged in the active shaping and appropriation of the agricultural skills needed to make animal keeping work in line with these aspirational ideas. It will be shown that this was a historically situated and conflict-ridden process of relational tinkering and negotiation that participants referred to as ‘experiments’, and which involved the political agency of activists and councils, as much as the non-human agency of farmed animals. The paper thereby seeks to complement recent scholarship on sustainability-related alternative urban knowledge arrangements with a wider historical-sociological perspective.