In Worlds of Food, Kevin Morgan, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch present a compelling compilation of recent contributions to our knowledge of the rapidly changing and contested food systems tha...

Worlds of Food: Place, Power and Provenance in the Food Chain

This paper provides a theoretical and political critique of how the concept of resilience has been applied to places. It is based upon three main points. First, the ecological concept of resilience is conservative when applied to social relations. Second, resilience is externally-defined by state agencies and expert knowledge. Third, a concern with the resilience of places is misplaced in terms of spatial scale, since the processes which shape resilience operate primary at the scale of capitalist social relations. In place of resilience, we offer the concept of resourcefulness as an alternative approach for community groups to foster.

From Resilience to Resourcefulness: A Critique of Resilience Policy and Activism

For more than a decade, co-working spaces have proliferated in cities worldwide. The paper discusses co-working as a critical urban practice because these spaces give support to the rising number o...

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‘Freelance isn’t free.’ Co-working as a critical urban practice to cope with informality in creative labour markets:

States of just transition: Realising climate justice through and against the state

By 2050, the world will need 70 per cent more food to feed an additional two billion people (FAO 2009). The main challenges here are not can we do it? but can we do it sustainably? Merely feeding well and sustaining the current situation is not enough. We should not only sustain but improve our food and environment. ‘Regenerative Food Systems’ is one crucial step to move beyond sustainability. As per California State University (2017) regenerative agriculture is: ‘a holistic land management practice that leverages the power of photosynthesis in plants to close the carbon cycle, and build soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density.’

Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems

In this journal, it has been suggested that citizens practising community gardening “can become complicit in the construction of neoliberal hegemony”. Such hegemony is maintained, it is argued, through the day-to-day work of neoliberal citizen-subjects, which “alleviates the state from service provision”. In this paper we acknowledge that community gardens are vulnerable to neoliberal cooptation. But, even where neoliberal practices are evidenced, such practices do not define or foreclose other socio-political subjectivities at work in the gardens. We contend that community gardens in Glasgow cultivate collective practices that offer us a glimpse of what a progressively transformative polity can achieve. Enabled by an interlocking process of community and spatial production, this form of citizen participation encourages us to reconsider our relationships with one another, our environment and what constitutes effective political practice. Inspired by a range of writings on citizenship formation we term this “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) Citizenship.

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Contesting neoliberal urbanism in Glasgow's community gardens: The practice of DIY citizenship

The growth of community gardens has become the source of much academic debate regarding their role in community empowerment in the contemporary city. In this article, we focus upon the work being done in community gardens, using gardening in Glasgow as a case study. We argue that while community gardening cannot be divorced from more regressive underlying economic and social processes accompanying neoliberal austerity policies, it does provide space for important forms of work that address social needs and advance community empowerment. In developing this argument we use recent geographical scholarship concerning the generative role of place in bringing together individuals and communities in new collective forms of working. Community gardens are places that facilitate the recovery of individual agency, construction of new forms of knowledge and participation, and renewal of reflexive and proactive communities that provide broader lessons for building more progressive forms of work in cities.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0950017017695042

The work of community gardens: reclaiming place for community in the city

Tackling climate change requires a set of deeply intertwined geographical responsibilities whereby actors at and across different geographical scales are intimately connected. Creating effective strategies requires far more than an invocation for individual behavioural change in thinking globally and acting locally, but attention to the multi‐scalar conflicts, tensions and also opportunities to develop the most appropriate collective responses. In this paper, we use the example of community gardening initiatives in a large UK city to critically interrogate the problems facing groups at the local neighbourhood level in pursuing sustainability agendas. We focus on the organizational imperative to create a multi‐scalar food policy partnership at the city level as a way of confronting dominant global neoliberal urban competitiveness agendas. Our results emphasize the critical importance of scalar politics in enabling effective climate change strategies.

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Scaling Up Community Action for Tackling Climate Change

This paper draws on a project ‘Banner Tales of Glasgow’, which is the result of an ongoing collaboration between geographers, museum staff and trade unionists. The paper draws on testimonies from workers involved in two labour disputes in the mid 1980s. We use these testimonies to think about the use of banners in the construction of working-class solidarities. This discussion is used to illuminate the relations between the formation of a working-class presence and the role of discourses of a moral economy in shaping particular community-making practices. Through doing so, we use a focus on banners to illuminate different aspects of the spatial practices of labour organising and argue that the construction of a working-class presence and articulations of a moral economy can be mutually reinforcing.

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Trade union banners and the construction of a working-class presence: notes from two labour disputes in 1980s Glasgow and North Lanarkshire

This paper critically analyses the post-political thesis, highlighting its universalising and agency-grabbing tendencies. Drawing on my own family life, anarchist theory and long-standing traditions of ‘properly’ political placemaking by past and present grassroots actors, the paper unsettles two interrelated claims on which the post-political thesis sits. First, that the political (le politique) is in retreat. Second, that ‘proper’ politics constitutes a confrontational set of relations. Informed by empirical observations I present an existing form of rigorous political encounter enacted in anarchist-influenced social centres. The politics on offer here has a supportive pedagogical quality to it and, crucially, there are semblances of this pedagogical politics found in multiple sites. Focusing on the ‘micro-physics of power’ at work in social centres, I show how such organisational practices counter the predetermined finalities of the post-political condition by enacting what I call ‘equality-as-tactic’. Community here is not an empty vessel that can be easily filled with ‘empty signifiers’. On the contrary, post-political practices tend to crack under the scrutiny of a pedagogical politics aimed at equalising participation in the decisionmaking process.

John Crossan

Papers

Contesting neoliberal urbanism in Glasgow's community gardens: The practice of DIY citizenship

The work of community gardens: reclaiming place for community in the city

Scaling Up Community Action for Tackling Climate Change

Trade union banners and the construction of a working-class presence: notes from two labour disputes in 1980s Glasgow and North Lanarkshire

Re-appropriating the political through enacting a pedagogical politics of place