Paper short abstract:

Community gardens are part of planning resilient cities of the future. In Poland, they fall outside of the well-known scenarios of modernization. We will present how the new rules of approaching work/leisure, property and environment are negotiated by working the land in community gardens.

Paper long abstract:

Community gardens have started emerging in many Polish cities as a part of a wider Europe-wide trend towards more sustainable and resilient societies. Community gardens are the new sites of urban gardening run and imagined differently than allotment gardens, which have long been a familiar feature of Central and Eastern Europe urban socio-economic and natural landscape. Community gardens are novel and future-oriented, and the new ideas of work/leisure, property and environment are a part of their design. The trend towards creating cities of the future stems from the notion of a green city as well as from the vision of the commons as an alternative to private and public property. The economy of sharing and tuning to environmental needs are both inscribed in the hopeful scenarios of the urban future.

In the proposed paper, we rely on the ethnographic study conducted in over a dozen community gardens in large Polish cities in 2019. We aim to investigate how the rules of working the land and sharing the fruits of this work are negotiated in newly developed community gardens. We will describe which rules are adhered to and which rules are broken by actual gardeners and managers of the gardens, and offer interpretations as to why this is the case. The second aim is to look at community gardens in the broader context of Poland’s socialist past and capitalist present, and to discuss the possibility of breaking-up with well-established scenarios of modernization in search of new solutions to contemporary environmental problems.