ABSTRACT

In this paper, we aim to explore how community gardening can embed and foment grassroots resistance to the privatization of urban space in the current configuration of a prolonged socio-economic and ecological crisis in European cities. We focus on the emblematic case of the Hellinikon self-organized garden; a case of guerrilla gardening that emerged as part of a social movement against the real estate development of the former International Airport of Athens. Community gardening in Hellinikon emerged as a resistance struggle against a controversial urban regeneration plan that combined green gentrification with unsustainable development and as a prefigurative politics of radically different sociospatial and socionatural relationships. We argue that community gardening initiatives that are part of broader urban struggles and grassroots activism denote a radical practice that has the potential to challenge crisis-driven dispossessions and claim the right to the city through spatial autogestion. This theorization of community gardening can shed light on the emergence of a new era of urban politics where demands for the re-appropriation of urban space by its inhabitants coalesce with demands for radically different urban socionatures in crisis-ridden megacities linking struggles for the right to the city to struggles for the right to urban nature.

摘要

在本文中，我们旨在探索社区园艺如何在欧洲城市长期社会经济和生态危机的当前配置中嵌入和煽动基层对城市空间私有化的抵制。我们专注于 Hellinikon 自组织花园的标志性案例；作为反对前雅典国际机场房地产开发的社会运动的一部分而出现的游击园艺案例。Hellinikon 的社区园艺作为对有争议的城市更新计划的抵抗斗争而出现，该计划将绿色高档化与不可持续的发展相结合，并作为完全不同的社会空间和社会自然关系的象征性政治。我们认为，作为更广泛的城市斗争和基层激进主义的一部分的社区园艺倡议表明了一种激进的做法，它有可能挑战危机驱动的剥夺，并通过空间自我消化获得城市的权利。这种社区园艺理论可以揭示城市政治新时代的出现，在这个时代，居民重新占用城市空间的需求与危机缠身的特大城市对完全不同的城市社会性质的需求相结合，将争取权利的斗争联系起来。城市为城市自然的权利而斗争。