Recognising the edible urban commons: Cultivating latent capacities for transformative governance in Singapore

Introduction: What is transforming?

Converging interests are fuelling the search for new modes of food production. Capital seeks new resources and markets in sustainable energy use and production mechanisms, accompanied by a growing global awareness about the necessity of sustainable food systems. The reclaiming of public space (e.g. Ernwein, 2014; Larson et al., 2016), recognition of local knowledge and rebuilding ways of knowing through ecological commons (Menzies, 2014), food justice and sovereignty, food safety and ethics, and social justice concerns (Tornaghi, 2014; Wittman, 2009) have been steps in this direction. As new interests from capital and public culture are articulated in cities, their interdependency grows, and the potential for state priorities to dovetail with practices of urban participation and commoning expands. This article considers how infrastructure and culture can work interdependently towards a localised co-governance model that emphasises urban commoning, learning and agrarian citizenship.

The interdependency of infrastructure and culture highlights an area that has received insufficient attention: how extended urban commoning might occur, despite today’s ‘intermittent physical copresence’ (Urry, 2003). By extended commoning, I mean the maintenance of learning to common in urban space with strangers and strangeness, within a shared context of growing social – but also ecological –difference (Young, 1990). It is within this shared context that this article poses the question: what capacities are needed for urban cultures to learn to care for food-growing space, in ways that fold in social and ecological reproduction? To answer this question, I conceive the order and scale at which ecological change is occurring as happening on a particular ‘register’ of sense (Rancière, 1999), or non-sense. The non-sensibility of change engenders a tilt away from the sensibility of familiar institutions, structures and frameworks. In this article, I focus on the spatiality of this tilt within the sensible encodings of urban infrastructure. Urban infrastructure plays a significant role in maintaining orientations within the intermittence of urban, daily life, and it can comfort and support the social body as it tilts towards others and paradoxes.

Singapore is a city-state where intermittence characterises everyday life, extending from the constant redevelopment imposed on the city’s landscape. The priority the state has given to infrastructure and redevelopment since its independence, and current planning emphases on learning and workforce redevelopment, bring together two streams of change that offer the potential for closer integration. These priorities make Singapore a suitable case study to ask how space can scaffold unintentional learning and behaviour change as a means of enabling socio-technical transitions. Through two separate sets of empirical (anecdotal and interview) material collected during periods of practice and research in Singapore, this article proposes a preliminary set of questions, and suggestions, to direct further research about how the spatiality of edible urban commons influences the transformative governance of food systems.

This article builds upon increasing scholarly attention to how urban agriculture movements engage questions of urban space, reproduction and socioecological health (Tornaghi, 2014). Such movements operate at the multi-scalar level, in that individual capacities for resilience interact with meso-level capacities for collective resilience. By exploring relations of social and ecological difference in such commons, this article conceptualises an edible urban commons’ role in arranging a meeting of multiple registers of sense, creating the opportunity to understand latent capacities for edible commoning.

In part one, I look at a moment of disrupted expectations arising from differing interpretations of space. The anecdote raises questions about how urban ecological commons, as space, act as an active moment in enabling semiotic frictions to emerge. In part two, I examine, through interview material, how individuals perceive and articulate their experience of spatial change in edible urban spaces. Finally, I propose what latent capacities for adaptation or transformation towards alternative food systems might include.

Part I: Noisy urban centres

The public area outside Raffles Place train station in Singapore is a space of transient sensory stimulation: surrounded on four sides by office towers with glassy facades and a strip of cafes, it is the epicentre of movement and transport, lingering and meeting and intense advertising. These spatial features create an environment that shapes user interaction in the space. To walk through Raffles Place at the height of rush hour is to be bombarded from all sides with advertising on the digital screens facing the plaza; people are stopped by the physical bodies of part-time or contracted sales representatives. Four squares of green verges surround a central area, unsheltered meeting area.

In 2016, an architectural festival was held by two local institutes, the Singapore Institute of Architects and the Singapore Institute of Landscape Architects. Responding to the spatial features of the selected site, the festival sought an urban farm built around the notion of ‘rest’, to the theme: ‘Exhale’. An invitation was made to a group I was part of, to propose designs for the space and to build it.

This space matters to the current discussion in two ways. It is first and foremost a space of movement and reproduction. Raffles Place is a train interchange in the Central Business District. Although people find the site minimally recuperative or restful, workers come anyway during lunch or breaks for some fresh air, open sky and sunlight. Grass and some shrubs grow on the green verges, and are maintained by state-contracted landscapers. The space is usually deemed too hot in the day, but as evening falls, swings on the lawn begin to fill up. Furthermore, Raffles Place is the seat of Singapore’s financial district, which ranks fourth on the Global Financial Centres Index (Yeandle and Wardle, 2018). Raffles Place thus hosts the physical bodies that influence and consume the capital flows that power Singapore, and global market shares in Asia and the Asia-Pacific.

Stop, thief!

Along with this mass of fast-moving, colourful, well-heeled bodies, one might view the space of the square as an urban ecological space that acts as an active moment in enabling interactions. How active is it? It is one of few sunny, green spots with seating in the area. It provides an open space for smokers and those who need a reprieve from the stale air conditioning of Singapore office life. It is not an active urban ecological space – not comparable with the national parks and reservoirs – but more social interaction occurs in it than on the grass verges that scatter through public housing neighbourhoods – what architects call dead zones. Set within this context, the urban farm provided a two-week span of time to observe how an ‘activated’ space, or an ‘urban spatial intervention’ as architects and designers termed it, might affect users of the space. Through this anecdote of urban ecological space as an active moment, I refine what latent transformative capacity is being formed and what difference or disruption arises.

As dusk fell in the first week of the festival, after the garden had been built and the plants had had four to five days to settle in, a man and two others with him stepped up the platform to the garden. Matter-of-factly, he yanked a plant out of the soil before I could register what he was doing and made to walk off with it. I was sitting on a bench having a conversation with two new acquaintances, directly in front of where the man was, and I got up as he was beginning to walk off. As I moved forward I felt a rush of adrenaline and, before I could think, said, ‘Stop, you can’t do that!’– which I immediately regretted, not wanting to impose familiar rules in a place that was intentionally made to be open to new ways of being.

What else ought I say? ‘We’ve just planted these, we need them for the next two weeks’, I said with more friendliness. The man had been scrambling to make a getaway while stuffing the plant into a canvas tote bag (he had come prepared), but a combination of disadvantageous site elevation requiring him to be careful in getting back onto the pavement safely, speed (on my side) and other factors I was not privy to made him decide to turn back and walk to me, shadowed by the two others with him. He looked a bit defiant, but also uncertain. ‘We need the plant, so we can’t let you have the whole thing, but you can take some cuttings of it,’ I said. ‘We thought this was all to be thrown away at the end of this event,’ said a woman with him by way of explanation. I looked at the plant he was holding, roots dangling piteously, and said, ‘Could you please put this back into the soil?’

He tossed the plant onto the soil, and as I tried to show him how to do better than that – covering the plant’s roots with the soil – the woman fired three statements at me, all exactly the same sentence: ‘Give me some cuttings.’ I felt harangued. Now the first man and another had started speaking as well: ‘I want that mint.’ Before I knew it I said, ‘Do you know how to say please? And thank you? Thank you.’ I was mortified: I’d just chided them as if they were children! But extraordinarily, their expressions and body language changed: from defiant, demanding customers at the wet market, or even the post office or another administrative space, they were now appreciative, tentative people, saying, ‘Could I have a cutting, please?’ and then, ‘Thank you’.

Public infrastructure and regulatory contexts in Singapore

Stealing has not been widely covered in the burgeoning literature on urban gardens, farms and food in the city. Part of this may stem from the desire from scholars to present only positive examples of functioning food gardens, or from the way urban agriculture is understood as food production, less as social gel. Stealing is, however, an excellent instance of more-than-human politics at work, a disruption of normality enabled by desirable objects in that space. In this event, a form of Rancièrean politics is at work, inserting new registers that, I argue, contribute to building a latent transformative capacity.

A disruption of several expectations of Lefebvrian spatial practice and space-as-planned takes place in this anecdote. The three people were not the typical users one would picture of this space: not the young, trend-setting, early–mid-career professionals brimming with potential. They were older administrative and caretaking staff, charged with the maintenance of their company workplaces. They were here to pick up what they knew would be thrown out, to collect and reroute this value somewhere else. This was the case even though they did not fully recognise or appear to know how to care for the said value: the man initially called the thyme plant he picked ‘mint’.

This little comedy of mistaken identities is evocative of the collateral effects that have formed through Singapore’s rapid urban transition to a city-state – a developmental model that particular Chinese, Indian and Indonesian cities are explicitly emulating. It also provokes recognition of the latent capacities needed for transformation in this regulatory context. Collateral effects such as a person’s relationship to the state, and a person’s range of permissible actions in public, are exemplified in the anecdote: the thief–police relation, customer–staff relation and gift giver–receiver relation. As I examine in the next section, these various manifestations of governmentality are encoded in the spatial practices of ordinary citizens, but they ill-equip the individual to draw benefit from an urban commons when finally faced by one. Modes of citizenship and spatial habits are closely interlinked in Singapore, where early nation-building policy determined good citizenship to be unquestioning, good behaviour within the rules set down by a paternalistic dynamic of governance. Nonetheless, while many aspects of the urban landscape, including community gardens, are tailored to the specifications of nation-building discourse (Gulsrud, 2015; Gulsrud and Ooi, 2014; Kong and Yeoh, 1996), and towards deterring or enabling forms of community and exclusion (Chua, 2015), individuals also find ways to tread new patterns of movement and subjectivity, despite planned infrastructure (Loo and Bunnell, 2018).

Urban political ecology has seldom focused on fledgling edible spaces in the city and their potential role in altering the way social relations play out in the city. Yet, as I show, a study of them is fruitful, allowing us to ask how city residents begin to use common goods or common spaces, and the latent capacities that need cultivating in order to drive transformation – including modes of citizenship and spatial habits. By describing the character of the active moment articulated by the urban farm, the anecdote raises a specific question about spatiality: in bringing reproduction into the urban, how does space’s character change, and how does the individual’s relation to use of or care for it change? In the remainder of this first section, I outline a conceptual frame through which to view urban edible spaces as active moments in shaping a latent transformative capacity for urban living, before examining the significance of the spatial features and relations that edible urban commons introduce.

Conceptually framing urban space: The edible urban commons as an ‘active moment’ in building latent transformative capacity

Urban agriculture has the potential to alter the landscape and experience of city life. I say this because it is oriented towards change in, to name some areas Tornaghi (2014) has already mentioned: land regimes, urban spatial arrangements and food regimes. As a transition motivated by the internal contradictions of a food system that now has to support a primarily urban world, it is not a superficial change of food trends. Rather, it is an ecological and social rejuvenation that replaces the current model of urbanisation, which externalises reproduction damages and costs, with one where reproduction must take place within it. This has implications for the diverse communities, individuals and subcultures of cities, and the new political and social possibilities it points to of a potentially transformative form of urban resilience. Yet, interest in urban agriculture, particularly amongst those funded by venture capitalists and government-corporate partnerships, may reflect an adjustment by capital rather than a transition away from capital. I take the view, with practitioners of regenerative agricultural systems, that urban agriculture is not only a business trend or a new money-making venture for capital to co-opt, as it is ‘forced to adapt to new conceptual ground that is not of its own making’ (Braun, 2015: 6), but can and should involve the development of capacities to transition to a different system of socio-ecological exchange.

Urban agriculture is in a transitory phase of development amidst changing socio-ecological systems (SES). Within changing SES, Chaffin et al. (2016) propose that latent capacities for transformative governance provide means for SES regimes to navigate towards new regimes that are socially and ecologically sustainable, and resemble good governance. The goal of transformative governance is to actively shift an SES to an alternative and inherently more desirable regime by altering the structures and processes that define the system. This suggests that to plan flexibly for urbanisation’s long-term challenges to the food system, latent transformative capacity may be a useful metric by which to factor urban agriculture’s function and relevance. However, it is seldom asked what such latent capacities might be.

To answer that, I first look at what occurs in a transformative moment when people encounter an edible urban commons. I consider such a commons, as part of a larger urban ecological commons, not just as an active participant but ‘an active moment’ (Harvey, 1982) of human and non-human interactions in the space: in which space is contested, negotiated and reconsidered. I extend Harvey’s point to ask how regenerative commons, as a spatial, reproductive form, might enter the fold of the urban. To view urban processes of formation as being in dialogic relations of social and ecological (re)production, I have two conceptual foci.

The first relates to the position of the individual in relation to space. As Hannah Wittman (2009) points out, given discursive regimes of the nation-state today, this position is mediated by governmentality and the state’s discursive power. The alternative relation that Wittman (2009) conceptualises is ‘agrarian citizenship’ in which nature and land are ‘constitutive of the citizenship relation, rather than simply an object of it’ (Wittman, 2009: 807). The second considers how urban ecological spaces function as active moments; that is: 1) actively building latent transformative capacity for socio-ecological transition to urban commoning; 2) becoming centrepieces that ‘world’ (De la Cadena, 2015) this new set of practices. It is the possibility of urban spaces as an always contested, ever-present arena of resistance and social difference that makes them ‘active moments’ (Harvey, 1982; Young, 1990). Spaces shape the identities of individuals in cities. They are thus the physical grammar that broadens the potential range of dialogue and imagination by enabling the disruptions or irruptions of difference which constitute politics (Rancière, 1999).

Bringing reproduction into the urban via edible urban commons: Examining features of space and relations to space as components of allegorical packages

While systemic transitions may stem partly from ecological or biological change, transitions between systems should be expected to generate friction as sensibilities, codes of conduct and regulatory structures resist, oppose or practically conflict with one another. Anna Tsing (2005) has shown how frictions generate fictions, or ‘allegorical packages’, like campaigns and stories that transform the spaces they move through, holding fodder for new movement generation. Similarly, the edible urban commons may be viewed as a space that transmits new allegories or stories. It is both a utopian category and an allegory that is attempted in real life.

Part II: Learning new interpretations of the production of urban space in Singapore

In Part I, I showed how edible urban commons act as part of an allegorical package in bringing reproduction into the urban, arguing that regulatory slippage can be constructive. Part II shows how such space builds latent transformative capacity. I argue that observations of regulatory slippage provide answers about how it builds latent capacities for transformation, and how it constitutes a Rancièrean politics.

Where the earlier section focused on the spatiality of an edible urban commons, this section deals with human interpretations of the production of space, and how they intersect with flourishing, resilience and adaptation. While work on the socio-political aspects of adaptation and resilience exists, the question is how we might bring these into deeper conversation with the bioecological foundation of resiliency theory, building on and extending beyond discussions of social resilience (e.g. Adger, 2000).

I focus on the socio-political side of resilience – one that centralises the role of collective agency and decision-making. Empirical attention to human agency in commons maintenance exists across the literature. For example, Hou’s (2020) work on Taipei’s Garden City programme draws our attention to the way community-led efforts on community gardening in Taiwan blended community practice, political windows of opportunity and strategic efforts to align institutional actors across community and legislative scales. Parthasarathy (forthcoming) calls for re-imaginations of what constitutes the environment and its territorial units through environmental law, going beyond rights-based discourses to ‘normative and practical everyday discourses and contestations around aesthetics, livelihoods, resource shifts, science, aspirations, subsistence, and the ever looming political economy of entrepreneurial urban governance’.

These writers point to the inadequacy of using purely ecological systems models to model emergence in human organisational patterns, which remain resolutely socio-political – determinable by individual and collective agency and desires. To link the socio-political to the ecological, I suggest thinking through Rancièrean politics to view new societal responses to ecological disturbance as disruptive in that they change the potential range of future behaviours.

Reconsidering resilience and adaptation

Transformative governance revisits the concept of transformability proposed as the ‘capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social (including political) conditions make the existing system untenable’ (Walker et al., 2004, cited in Chaffin et al., 2016). The capacity to change cross-scale interactions as a characteristic of panarchic systems comes to the fore, and questions of adaptation and resilience go from describing the ‘resilience of what to what’ to considering ‘for whom and how’. Transformation is said to occur solely through human vision, planning and agency (Chaffin et al., 2016).

Studying transition has, however, come to involve a fair amount of epistemic transition beyond anthropocentricism, as increasing amounts of research demonstrate how non-human actants affect human choices. With a transforming ecological baseline, non-human actants have regained the scene. Work on new materialisms and politics offers ways to conceive of transformation through the socio-political agency of human and non-human assemblages, ³ suggesting for instance that transformative capacities be conceptualised as products of non-human actants composing with human actants (Bennett, 2010). Likewise, the material adaptation of human neural systems to the environment for ‘fit’, even as humans exercise the desire to fit the environment to our internal image of it, leads to the possibility of studying ‘neuro-ecological politics’ (Kwinter, 2017). Understanding what it takes to flourish through SES transition might thus be said to be a study of epistemic transition – to an awareness of multi-layered, multi-nodal interactions between human and non-human assemblages.

This epistemic transition to a multi-scalar frame of reference may mean the use of new interdisciplinary insights. In addition to capacities for short-term adaptation to ecological and human-political change (Oliver-Smith, 2017; Watts, 2015), we may also ask what capacities for the transformation of interlinked individual and societal interactions may be studied, and how individuals, not organisations, learn and act. On an institutional, systemic level, for instance, capacities for transformation are suggested to include building multiple sources of nested leadership, frontrunners and institutional entrepreneurs, self-organisation, and learning and experimentation (Chaffin et al., 2016). Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1977, 1979, 1989) ecological model is an example of well-developed disciplinary insight that contributes towards the understanding of individual psychological resilience and its translation to the level of community and society (Lykes, 2017).

Building latent capacities for edible urban commons

I have approached the Raffles Place temporary farm as an edible urban commons, and conceptualised the role of semiotic ambiguity in generating new spatial practices. In this section, I look at the latent capacities for transformation that allegorical packages such as the edible urban commons bring. To do this, I look at empirical data from a set of research interviews, conducted alongside a set of walks.

From February to April 2017, I conducted five walking tours to community gardens in neighbourhoods in Singapore. The aim of these walks was to explore how guided walks scaffold an identification with the natural environment, through implicated participation in the landscape (Shotter, 2006). These walks were based on earlier walks I had conducted with a food collective. My purpose was to understand what people had gleaned from them. In line with the earlier discussion, my question here was: what capacities did walks encourage, that were relevant to an epistemic transition towards expanded temporal scales or multi-actor frames of reference?

Methodology

The walks were each two hours long, in the morning or afternoon on a weekend. Participants signed up via an online form in response to a publicity poster distributed through a university mailing list. They were asked to draw images of their perceptions of urban nature before attending. Upon meeting, brief self-introductions were made, followed by a short introduction on the nature of the walk. After the walk, participants were asked to draw new images; this was followed by a group discussion where they shared their sketches with the group. The walk aimed to introduce participants to gardeners and to each other, as a way of bringing together like-minded individuals. It also aimed to lead people to reflect on their perceptions of urban nature, and to gain a basic understanding of how space for urban nature in Singapore is created. A total of five walks were conducted, with approximately 70 participants. Individual interviews with participants who agreed to be interviewed (N = 11) after the walk focused on two questions: ‘What brought you to the workshop?’ and ‘What did you get out of it?’ Finally, a thematic analysis of transcripts was conducted, using an inductive approach commonly employed in psychology (Braun and Clarke, 2006), to draw out themes and codes from a qualitative dataset. With a collaborator, data was coded for a variety of questions. I focus on one question: learning gains.

Learning gains

Whether consciously or not, participants gained specific, contextually embedded experiences through their walk in the gardens. These learning gains (see Table 1) illustrated a mixture of concrete learnings that I summarise as content-based capacities, and more generalised metacognitive learnings that inform automatic responses (see Figure 1).

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Table 1.

A list of learning gains from interview transcripts.

Learning gains	Description
Orderliness and disorder	Some respondents found the gardens they saw messy; some respondents wanted to see less order. As nearly all the quotes indicated, this was related to the aesthetic and perception of order that living in Singapore habituates its residents to.
Production of space	Understanding that spaces are designed and that the production process is not an incomprehensible black box acts as a first step towards realising that intervention, and the claiming of citizenship rights to ownership and voice, are possible.
Movement and travel	Movement through space enables a different way of sensing, seeing and experiencing new stimuli. Participants mentioned travelling out to spaces with nature for pleasure and learning.
Governance of andaccess to space	How governance of and access to green public space occur in the city was the subject of much debate at the time the walks were conducted. Discussion on the way gardens were organised and set up, and whom they were managed by, was of interest to participants for its implications for their future. Space influenced people’s emotions – creating senses of uplifting possibility and discouragement. Learning about different ways of managing space opened people’s eyes to the possibility of alternative uses and interventions.
Attentive intimacy	Attentive intimacy may be nurtured and drawn from learned habits already prevalent in everyday life today – from the ‘sightseeing’ behaviours that most urban consumers are used to while travelling. This openness and curiosity can be nurtured into a stronger habit of paying close attention, when individuals get a glimpse of the logic within a larger, seemingly messy and abstract process, and see how they can have a hand in shaping it – for instance, in urban development and planning.
Aesthetics versus function	The contrast of aesthetics and functionality still presumes an anthropocentric view that sees nature as a piece in the larger puzzle of the world that humans manipulate. Working within a strictly utilitarianist perspective, this code helps us examine how people move beyond aesthetic appreciation to make sense of nature for its various functions – benefits to human health, the possibility of multi-functionality and benefits to other animal and plant species, as well as social and community benefits.

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Figure 1.

A preliminary proposal of latent capacities for transformation.

Perhaps one of the most heated debates in environmental governance surrounds the question ‘What is nature for?’ Learning gains about this were often directly influenced by the spatiality of the community garden – as a matter of aesthetics and function. Interview extracts reflect how people moved beyond aesthetic appreciation to make sense of nature for its various functions. Nonetheless, concrete abilities to access such ‘functions’ are needed and, as the learning gains suggest, they include capacities for interpretation and communication. These include sensitivities of understanding before judgment, and awareness of the labour behind the production of such spaces. The ability to derive therapeutic effects from nature, for instance, comes from the capacity to read and respond to it; such as in one participant’s description of his morning walks: ‘stopping occasionally to hear the birds chirping, looking up to see what birds are there, looking at the trees, seeing the shapes of trees, taking that time to be reflecting with nature itself’.

Discussion

I have developed the argument that edible urban commons transmit active moments of spatial practice, which in turn build latent capacities for new forms of social and ecological reproduction. Singapore’s consistent regulatory management of its public infrastructure since independence provided me with a good case study of the shaping of citizenship and governmentality across generations, through space. I argued that within strict regulatory environments which enforce typologies of communal space, absent of communal spatial practices, regulatory slippage creates not a ‘tragedy of the urban commons’, but a comedy of new practices. To close, I discuss how new allegories of spatial practice, about social and ecological difference, matter.

Work in environmental governance has sought to understand how identity and culture act as carriers of socioecological knowledge about the environment, urban biodiversity and forms of stewardship (Colding and Barthel, 2013). However, while work on ecological or environmental stewardship, resilience, human health and attachment to place has expanded in recent years, there is considerable difficulty in pinpointing the scale at which to situate the intersection of psychological wellbeing, political autonomy, social and ecological systems’ resilience and urban planning. The study of spatial practices learnt within edible urban commons allows us to consider what capacities for societal adaptation and latent capacities to collaboratively build new systems for food production might be – where ‘transformative governance’ includes agrarian citizenship embedded within ecological stakes beyond the nation-state, and social reproduction.

Second, the empirical materials demonstrate expanded scales of multi-actor relations: as Svendsen (2009) notes, an individual’s involvement in a garden creates senses of autonomy and relevance to the wider community. I have suggested that an ecological relationship of care with urban nature can be nurtured from exposure to information that propels a sense of one’s ability or competence to create change at the collective level: about the way urban space is developed; a sense of wonder and information about the complexity and diversity of socio-political and ecological relations in a space; an experience and appreciation of underlying order; and a sense of connectedness with like-minded others. Edible urban commons are compact packages that can provide a singular common good – opportunities to spatially build capacities to interpret and communicate social and ecological differences, encourage agency and innovation around disturbance and support new citizenship practices of disruption and reproduction. In tightly regulated environments, their propensity for regulatory slippage becomes a boon rather than a bane.

Future directions and conclusion

Urban environmental education’s ability to foster urban sustainability (Russ and Krasny, 2017) might be determined by how cities create educational and policy infrastructure around the formation of capacities for sustainability. To understand how urban individuals with little to no experience of living outside the city may develop a relationship with nature that also increases active participation in community health, it is crucial to attend to spatial practices in urban ecological spaces, including urban green infrastructure (Tzoulas et al., 2007). Edible urban commons, as spatial allegorical packages, provide the platform for new orientations towards property to emerge through practice. These spaces may be designed in ways that support the development of capacities for co-governance through agrarian citizenship.

I have suggested that allegories of nature force adaptation by capital. Braun (2015) says as much when he suggests a reading of capital’s struggles, contestations and co-optation of nature (and ecological movements) as contingent rather than necessary, as a form of ‘absorption by critique’, with nature leading capital rather than the other way round. If we recognise edible urban commons as sites for prefigurative, informal learning about ecological identity and co-governance, then a study of capacities provides empirical and conceptual material to understand what goods these commons encourage, and transmit.

‘Capacities’, ‘capabilities’ and ‘competencies’ are used in different conceptual frames outside of resilience and governance literatures. Much more can be done to relate these terms from the comfort of their disciplinary homes to emerging concerns in environmental policy studies and governance. A capabilities approach within psychology that focuses on the range of behaviours and roles that a person is free to enact rather than enacted behaviours (Shinn, 2015), Arjun Appadurai’s (2004) seminal work on the ‘capacity to aspire’, as well as critical engagements with aspirational horizons and spatial imaginaries in the globalising South (Bunnell and Goh, 2018; Bunnell et al., 2018; Parthasarathy et al., 2013) and the radical imagination (Haiven and Khasnabish, 2014) point some ways forward.