Horticulture features widely in research about urban agriculture. Interest is motivated by eco-technical challenges, such as improving household nutrition in expanding mega-cities, closing urban waste cycles through agricultural processes, and examining “SMART” potentials for the low-carbon production of fruits and vegetables. Studies also link participation in urban growing with political expressions of citizenship. These illuminations largely neglect socio-cultural insights, despite the important traditional contribution horticulture has played in shaping urban cultural landscapes and frequently culture appears as a faint backdrop to urban regeneration, or a proxy for consumption. To help illuminate the role of culture and its actor constellations within urban horticulture, the cases of two UNESCO World Heritage cities, Bath (UK) and Bamberg (Germany), are compared.

Drawing on Luhmann’s social systems theory and its derivatives, notably Nassehi’s concept of cultural contingency, the article examines cultural dimensions of urban horticulture in the two cities and identifies four types of culturalization, or empirically observable and complex bundles of practices that explain how urban horticulture is governed and executed. This indicates the local historical embeddedness of rivalry/competition and cooperation among urban gardeners, and the relevance of culture as a potential for innovation in urban horticulture.

园艺在有关都市农业的研究中具有广泛的特征。生态技术挑战激发了人们的兴趣，这些挑战包括：在扩大大城市中改善家庭营养，通过农业过程结束城市废物循环以及研究“ SMART”水果和蔬菜低碳生产的潜力。研究还把参与城市发展与公民的政治表达联系起来。尽管园艺在塑造城市文化景观方面发挥了重要的传统作用，而且文化常常作为城市更新的微弱背景或作为消费的替代，但这些照明在很大程度上忽略了社会文化的见解。为了帮助阐明文化及其演员群在城市园艺中的作用，以两个联合国教科文组织世界遗产城市为例，

本文利用卢曼的社会系统理论及其派生理论，特别是纳西的文化偶发性概念，考察了两个城市中城市园艺的文化维度，并确定了四种类型的文化化，或从经验上可以观察到的，复杂的实践组合，它们解释了城市园艺的方式。统治和执行。这表明了城市园丁之间竞争/竞争与合作在当地的历史嵌入，以及文化作为城市园艺创新潜力的相关性。