VIRTUAL Barcelona
Abstract
This paper addresses the potential of promoting community participation in urban environments in the context of challenges encountered when navigating environmental care through voluntary management structures. Inspired by feminist care ethics (Fisher and Tronto, 1990), my ethnographic research has observed the management of community gardens through the entanglements of multiple actors with different commitments, competing agendas and the transience of volunteering activities, and the complexities and negotiations intertwined with local and national politics and economies. The growth of discussion on community gardens has been spurred by the threat of extinctions related to climate change, the recognition that cities can be important biodiverse habitats for nonhuman forms and evolving understandings of the health and well-being benefits of nature. The community gardens in the UK have largely been developed by citizen-led initiatives over the last decade. A rise in community participation in Wales prompted the government to publish the UK’s first national strategy for community growing in 2010 (WAG 2010). This strategy identifies community gardens as solutions to problems such as food security, poor diets, and social isolation. Drawing upon an increasingly nuanced discourse of urban gardening as socioecological praxis (Ferris et al., 2001, Holland, 2004; Nettle, 2014), this micro case study investigates the processes of living, managing, and maintaining the community garden in Grange Pavilion, Cardiff, Wales and the challenges that emerge when sustaining nature through the care of urban spaces. This study uses archival research including policy documents, reports, and academic literature; detailed ethnography through participant observation, and go-along walking interviews with the people articulating this community garden project. It aims to contribute to understanding the role of promoting community participation in the design and care of urban landscape settings.
Dilara Yaratgan: I graduated from Dokuz Eylul University Architecture School in 2014. After my graduation, I was employed in different architectural offices in Turkey. In 2020, I completed my master’s degree while working as a fellow research assistant. The following year, I was awarded a full scholarship for PhD studies by the Turkish National Ministry of Education. Then I started my PhD research at the Welsh School of Architecture in 2021. I have been working on different research projects and teaching in the school. My research is about the management and maintenance of urban landscapes in London.
Prof Mhairi McVicar joined WSA in 2006, following architectural practice in the USA and UK. She is a RIBA Affiliate member and sits on the RIBA Research Grants Sub-Committee. She has acted as a juror on the RIBA President’s Medal for Dissertations and the National Eisteddfod Gold Medal for Architecture and is a peer-reviewer for Architectural Research Quarterly, Architecture and Culture, Ardeth, FormAcademisk and Bloomsbury Publishing. She received the Leading Wales’ Leadership in the Public Sector award. She is the Project Lead of Cardiff University’s Community Gateway, a community-university engagement platform. Her research interests include concepts of Value in the built environment; community development and community asset transfers; critiques of processes of architectural practice; critiques of live teaching, co-production and participatory design; the University as a civic anchor; theories of architectural technology and construction; and architectural history and theory, particularly UK and USA 19th-21st century.
Juliet Davis is a Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and Head of School at the Welsh School of Architecture. Her teaching and research span the fields of Architecture, Urban Design and City Planning History/theory. She is the author of two books and numerous other publications across these areas reflecting interests in topics of urban change and post-industrial regeneration, megaevent-led transformation, the role of heritage and memory in urban futures, care, health and wellbeing. Supported by an AHRC doctoral award, She undertook a PhD at the London School of Economics’ Cities Programme between 2007 and 2011 which focussed on critically exploring the role of urban design in charting the trajectories of long-term regeneration in East London connected to the 2012 Olympic Games.
5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Monday 15th July, 2024