Urban Agriculture and the Publicness of Public Space

Melissa Murphy (Norwegian University of Life Sciences)
Inger Lise Saglie (Norwegian University of Life Sciences)
Beata Sirowy (Norwegian University of Life Sciences)

This paper investigates how urban agriculture (UA) interventions affect the public character of urban spaces. We begin with a theoretical reflection on the role of public spaces in contemporary Western cities and how publicness is conceptualized in different perspectives, including the right to the city, capabilities, and democracy, along with the notion of the “commons”. We then empirically examine UA initiatives in Northern Europe empirically to ask, “is urban agriculture a way to execute or limit the right to the city and the publicness of urban spaces?” In order to answer this question, we employ the star model for public space assessment (Varna and Tiesdell 2010). By comparing thepublicness dimensions from the model across different examples of collective urban food gardening, we illuminate the potential contributions and barriers UA poses to the publicness of urban spaces.

Beyond illuminating several ways that urban agriculture can contribute to and detract from publicness, the article finds a methodological gap in how scholars deal normatively with publicness to date. Beyond the public and the private, there is a dimension of community whose contributions to publicness are overlooked. The results of the star model analyses show that many of the benefits to publicness from UA initiatives stem from their communal, club good natures. The risks that UA initiatives can pose to publicness in urban space are dually connected to this nature. These results, along with the theoretical reflection, propose the need to adapt the model and concept of publicness. The article suggests adaptions to the framework that would allow scholars to comparatively consider how the activities and presence of potentially exclusive groups in urban spaces can contribute to publicness by offering something back to the city and to the general public.