Paper short abstract:

This paper is a case study of urban gardening in Berlin. It draws on a heuristic of social practice to investigate the role of the materiality of the urban site - specifically the so-called “tree pit”- in the constitution and enactment of urban environmental citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

European cities have witnessed an increasing popularity of gardening as a form of civic engagement. Such activities include the illicit sawing of flowers on public lawns or abandoned plots - often dubbed "guerilla gardening"- , and the establishment and maintenance of formally acknowledged community gardens. As diverse as these activities are, they share a common preoccupation with gardening as a pathway to a more livable, sustainable, and at the same time, more close-to-nature urban order. This paper draws on a heuristic of social practice to investigate the role of the materiality of the urban site in the constitution and enactment of urban environmental citizenship. It focuses on Berlin, notably on the greening of so-called "tree pits", as the patches around the bottom of street trees are called. The paper uses semi-structured interviews with citizen-gardeners, passers-by, and municipal officials to unravel how these tree-pits became transformed into mini-gardens, and how these sites where contested among different urban publics. As the paper argues, environmental citizenship cannot be reduced to a set of virtues that motivate people to engage in gardening. The tree-pits and their materialities and biologies are seen as "affiliative objects" (Suchman) that, through their associative practices (e.g. digging, watering, story-telling), position residents as "responsible" citizens. As the paper concludes, the politics of citizenship that is implied in these practices of gardening can be neither reduced to a subversion of the neoliberal city, nor does it simply instantiate an overarching governmentality.