Urban Political Ecology of Worth and Value: Enacting Allotments in Media Discourse

Introduction

Allotments in Central and Eastern Europe are often subjected to the pressures of (re)development, an aspect that corresponds to the broader processes of commodification of urban space and housing (Beswick et al., 2016; Fernandez & Aalbers, 2016; Fields & Uffer, 2016; French, Leyshon, & Wainwright, 2011; García-Lamarca & Kaika, 2016; Palomera, 2014). Allotments become part of struggle over the shape and form of urban nature and about what is considered as valuable or wasteful in a city (Blomley, 2017; Gandy, 2013; Gidwani & Reddy, 2011; Goldstein, 2013). In this article, we explore one such long-term struggle, the one over allotments in the Czech Republic (and the former Czechoslovakia), and analyze its discursive elements and properties as they appeared in the media. By doing so, we aim to accentuate the importance of discourse performativity in the production and transformation of urban nature and demonstrate its salience for urban political ecology (UPE). In doing so, we apply a framework inspired by the cultural economy approach (De Goede, 2005), acknowledging the importance of materiality of the city (Gibson, 2003; Gür, 2002) and knowledge-generating devices that bring about particular (urban) reality (Christophers, 2014; MacKenzie, 2006; Weber, 2016) entangled in the process of (de)valuation and (de)legitimization of allotments in discourse.

UPE has become a very productive field, concentrating on the processes of the production of nature and the ways in which capitalism (and commodification as one of its strategies) produces unjust urban environments. With its insistence on understanding nature as socially produced and an emphasis on historical materialist analysis, UPE is successful in unpacking the injustices inherent in capitalist transformations of urban nature (for overviews, see, e.g., Heynen, 2014; Keil, 2005; Rademacher, 2015; Zimmer, 2010). Recently, however, appeals to expand the scope of UPE in a diverse direction have emerged, including suggestions to further incorporate poststructuralist insights as well (Gabriel, 2014). In this respect, this article strives to tentatively respond to these appeals by conjoining the perspective of UPE with poststructuralist views of power as enacted in and naturalized through discourse and cultural representations of urban nature (Millington, 2013). Unfolding the discursive enactment of allotments helps us further understand the complex and contingent process of the urbanization of nature and the links between neoliberal urbanism and the commodification of nature in contemporary cities (Harvey, 1985, 1987). Critically reflecting on the discursive strategies that enable humans to facilitate the extraction of profit from nature and the land is thus crucial for politicization of the issue of who should benefit from the gains and what kinds of values are or should be at stake.

The structure of the article is as follows. We outline the theoretical links between UPE and valuation studies, which enables us to untangle the relations between discourse, materiality, and policies. In the empirical parts of the article, we describe the characteristics of the data and the general features of the Czech and Czechoslovakian media discourse on allotments. We then proceed to analyze the arguments and claims of different speakers as well as the changes that occurred in time (i.e., particularly during the fall of the socialist state in 1989). We argue that the mode of justification as performed by the allotment gardeners has essentially remained until the present day, unchanged since the socialist era. Their justifications have been primarily focused on the value of their work, which materializes in the allotments in terms of both what they produce (e.g., fruit and vegetables) and cultivation of the land and the (urban) environment in general. This “traditional” discourse may be contrasted with the “new” discourse that has emerged during the postsocialist, neoliberal transformation and has been expressed by city officials and local politicians who have pressed for the abolishment of allotments in Czech cities. This new rhetoric justifies the commodification of urban space and its transformation into a financial resource. We demonstrate how within these discourses various actors have employed contrasting strategies of the (de)politicization of allotments.

The Role of Media Discourse in (De)valuating Allotments

Allotments—garden colonies, as they are referred to in the Czech context—represent plots of land divided into small productive gardens cultivated by individual gardeners and their families. In the Czech Republic, they are usually fenced off and accessible only to the members of the garden colony. Allotments started to appear throughout industrializing Europe by the end of the 19th century (Delwiche, 2006; King, 2014; Leppert, 2009), first appearing in the then Czech lands prior to World War I. While they can be found across the continent, allotments in Central and Eastern Europe bear specific cultural representations and understandings, especially with respect to the state socialist period (characterized by the rule of the Communist Party in 1948, 1989 in Czechoslovakia). Building on the prewar history of productive cultivation of urban land, the socialist state encouraged allotments as a means of (self-)provision in the times of post–World War II shortages as well as healthy recreation for the workforce (Gibas et al., 2014; Stenning, Smith, Rochovská, & Świątek, 2011). Allotments were founded on publicly owned land (including the land nationalized after 1948) and rented to gardeners, often on a long-term basis. Gardeners often developed a particular attachment to their gardens and used them for recreation and small-scale production of fruits and vegetables in short supply in the (socialist) market (Gibas et al., 2014). This has changed after 1989, when gardening, including produce production, became predominantly a matter of recreation (Jehlička, Kostelecký, & Smith, 2013).

Because allotments proliferated during socialism, after its fall they have become closely associated with the socialist regime (Gibas & Boumová, 2020; see also Pauknerová & Gibas, 2011). At the same time, allotments have faced a growing pressure for displacement, especially in large cities. The newly established postsocialist order brought about vast changes to the economy owing to restitutions, that is, the return of property, including land, nationalized during the socialist era to its previous owners, and privatization, that is, the sale of publicly owned properties, including housing and publicly owned urban land, which was advocated for as economically preferable by economists, politicians, as well as international bodies (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Union) supervising the transition to liberal democracy and capitalism (Myant & Drahokoupil, 2010). These economic policies together with a symbolical rejection of “communism” and anything related to it, in turn, affected allotments and fueled struggles concerning urban gardening.

The case of Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic, is a salient example, representing a city that gradually attracted local and international capital and investments. It is estimated that between 1989 and 2009 nearly a half of the area covered by allotments had been transformed, giving way mainly to housing construction and public green spaces (parks), often neighboring private development projects (see Gibas et al., 2014; for an analysis of one particular example of transformation, see Pauknerová & Gibas, 2011). In some cases, allotments were simply abolished without an immediate replacement, resulting in the unused spaces being taken over by urban wilderness.

The struggle over allotments concerns the existence, role, and form of nature in the city; at the same time, however, we demonstrate that it often revolves around the subjectivities of those who are seen as having a right to use the spaces in question. The public discussions embody different and often opposing modes of justification while invoking certain moral orders (Fourcade & Healy, 2007), and thus certain hierarchies of worth (Lamont, 2012). It is the rivalling and opposing hierarchies of what is (un)worthy, valuable, and wasteful that is at the center of our interest. We aim to demonstrate how specific diverse modes of justification are mobilized and how the identities and subjectivities of the actors—in our case, gardeners—are enacted, formulated, and contested on the grounds of values and ideas about worth and, in turn, contribute to (de)politicizing certain issues concerning the transformation of urban natures—or, in our case, the abolishment of allotments. Our contribution based on rigorous discourse analysis provides a nuanced understanding of the workings of power behind the processes of the urbanization of nature and its link to the extraction of profit in and from cities. To illustrate our approach, we explore how urban nature, and more specifically allotments, has been enacted in media discourse during the socialist (1948–1989) and postsocialist/contemporary (1989 to present) eras in the former Czechoslovakia and its successor state, the Czech Republic.

We comprehend media discourse as a site where imaginaries regarding allotments are formulated, values expressed, and practical steps justified or contested. In this sense, we understand the (media) discourse not merely as a descriptive representation of reality but as a performative part of reality (Austin, 1975; Clarke, 2012; Morris, 2016; Profant, 2010; Weber, 2016). In other words, we perceive the texts (media articles) as making a difference to the perception of urban nature and allotments, and constituting a cultural framework for further development of urban policies and the management of cities. The articles are performative by (a) setting up and responding to certain moral hierarchies of worth (Bandelj, 2009; Lamont, 2012), (b) promoting certain (urban) imaginaries (Gabriel, 2014; Millington, 2013), (c) enacting particular identities in connection to belonging to a certain place (Benson & Jackson, 2013), (d) providing vocabulary for formulating policy (Hunter & Nixon, 1999; Jacobs & Manzi, 1996), and thus (e) enabling practical actions such as redevelopment of allotments into new housing, which may then be turned into tradable commodities. However, the limitations of an interpretative, discourse-oriented approach mean that it is impossible to make causal links between the arguments used in the media and the development of policies and politics of urban nature and allotments. We, rather, understand the attribution of value to urban nature (allotments) as a contingent process that might be traced in various sites of the discursively performed cultural practices inscribed in the media, art, literature, education, expert documents, and popular culture. ¹

Allotments Through the Prism of Urban Political Ecology

UPE brings together urban studies and contemporary (predominantly Anglo-Saxon) urban geography with political ecology. It is a school of critical thought striving to understand the ways in which urban space and urban nature are produced and how they formulate an understanding of inherent injustices produced in contemporary as well as past urban environments (Heynen, 2014, 2016; Keil, 2005; Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003; Zimmer, 2010). The ultimate objective of UPE is not only to understand the processes of the urbanization of nature but also to further formulate a vision of more just urban environments (Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw, 2006). Various UPE studies have understood the spaces of urban metabolism and circulation (e.g., water infrastructure) as material expressions of power relations, which can be used as a prism to unpack how power operates in an urban context (e.g., Gandy, 2004, 2005; Kaika, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2006, 2015). At the same time, a historical–material perspective allows for elucidating the interconnection between material culture and the social and political discourses underlying the process of the production of urban environments (Gibas, 2013; Gandy, 2003; Kaika & Swyngedouw, 2000).

Recent attempts, however, have been made to move UPE beyond the focus on urban metabolism and to widen its scope and applicability. Lawhon, Ernston, and Silver (2014) argue in favor of “provincializing” UPE by looking beyond the theories and experiences of the Global North (see also Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2015; Rademacher, 2015; Swyngedouw & Kaika, 2014). We second this commitment, along with calls for more empirical groundings of UPE and for enriching it with poststructuralist insights, and concentrate on the socio-natural urban spaces of allotment gardens in the Czech Republic, located on what some have termed the global or European “semi-periphery” (Blagojevic, 2004). We also attempt to broaden the field of UPE by incorporating into the discussion the role of discourse in enacting links between material places, identities/subjectivities, and the perceived worth and value of subjects (i.e., allotment gardeners) and objects (i.e., allotment gardens) that are present in certain urban spaces.

Allotments represent a historically specific, social and physical nature that is infused with socially significant relationships and represents an outcome of a continuous process of social appropriation and transformation of nature. At the same time, the position and status of allotments in the city are an outcome of the continuous (re)negotiation of the politics of urban planning and development, which has been, since the fall of socialism, marked by the rise of a new mode of governance, the “entrepreneurial city” (Eizenberg, Tappert, Thomas, & Zilans, 2016). The entrepreneurial ethos of the new urban management aims to extract the value from the land, attract the upper- and middle-class workers through housing construction, and densify the city’s development (Eizenberg et al., 2016). In this inherently neoliberal mode of governance, the state has come to act as a proxy for financial interests by promoting the idea of the “free market” and creating the appropriate “conditions, laws and institutions necessary for its operation” (Olssen & Peters, 2005, p. 315). Such a development is not exclusive to postsocialism, however; in Central and Eastern Europe, it has become closely interlinked with anticommunism, in which references to the socialist past as something unquestionably wrong, unworthy of any consideration, and inherently dangerous have been used as a powerful discursive device for furthering a neoliberal agenda (Chelcea & Druta, 2016). Allotments, often perceived as remnants of socialism, have thus become deemed obsolete as well as standing in the way of urban development.

In this new reconfiguration of what is (un)worthy, proponents of entrepreneurial governance see allotments as wastelands—as places that prevent “capitalist value production” (Goldstein, 2013, p. 363). The concept of “speculative urbanization,” a process of transforming (seemingly) wasteful spaces into places for generating value (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011, p. 1643), further unfolds the reshaping of cities, in which (urban) nature is reduced to a reservoir for the extraction of value. Paradoxically, in a different hierarchy of worth (Lamont, 2012), allotments could be perceived as the absolute opposite of wastelands—cultivated and nurtured places with a particular ecology and aesthetics that bring up the value of such marginalized places (Bell et al., 2016; Gandy, 2013). These hierarchies may compete or correspond, although the underlining principle is the same: Certain subjects, objects, or their arrangements are more valuable (than others) and hence deserve, for example, a place in the city, public promotion, financial funding, or respect in general.

Discursive practices and strategies are extremely important in establishing the basis of what is being perceived as valuable or wasteful, what arguments might be used in the debate and the symbolic competition between the hierarchies of worth, for they may invoke vivid and urgent imaginaries of the death, decay, or rebirth of the city (Gibson, 2003) or tropes of a decent life and a safe space for living (Polanska, 2010). For example, the ability to enact someone’s private interest (e.g., the extraction of profit from a certain space) as public interest has profound consequences. Therefore, we also wish to showcase the merits of approaching discourse with methodological rigor. While the previous paragraphs outline the general themes present in the examined discourse, we strive to dissect the actual strategies deployed. Such a nuanced discourse analysis not only may enable UPE scholars to understand the complex processes of the production of socio-natures but may also empower them with tools to further the fight for more just urban environments.

Data and Methods of Analysis

Our argument results from an extensive qualitative analysis of 215 media articles (54 from the socialist era and 161 from the postsocialist era). For the discourse from the socialist era, we have analyzed the main daily official newspaper, Rudé právo, issued by the Communist Party. For the postsocialist contemporary era, we have focused on four major newspapers and have examined a tabloid (Blesk), the center-right liberal press (MF Dnes, Hospodářské noviny), and the center-left press (Právo). We developed a set of categories ² applying to the segments of articles that argued for (i.e., justified and legitimized) or against the practice of urban gardening and allotments. Consequently, we focused on the modes of justification, whether enacted by (1) activation of affective language (e.g., performance of nostalgia, appealing to the emotions of readers, etc.); (2) references to certain technological and/or knowledge-producing devices, for example, the urban plan (see Christophers, 2014, 2017; MacKenzie, 2006; Uitermark, Hochstenbach, & Van Gent, 2017; Weber, 2016); or (3) the implicit assumption that the given argument is self-evident among the community of speakers and readers. Moreover, we observed in which contexts and by whom and how these justifications were performed, and we have also taken into consideration who or what is missing in the media accounts.

The articles from the socialist era surprisingly comprise more “letters from readers” and critical commentaries from “ordinary readers” than the contemporary accounts. Such social commentary was often critical of the latest developments in society. However, such a critique had to acknowledge at all times certain limits. For example, it was possible to criticize the distribution of food from allotments, but it was certainly not acceptable to criticize the Communist Party or the political system as such. Criticism was possible only if it was strictly depoliticized (see Hájek, Dlouhá & Samec, 2014, for more on the strategical (de)politicization of public utterances and actions during the socialist period; Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014, for an overview of depoliticization in various contexts). The only long-term struggle featured in the socialist media was over the supposed form of allotments. The “cottage-like” character of certain allotments, with buildings resembling weekend houses rather than allotment sheds, was criticized throughout the 1980s. Unlike allotments, cottages, especially those in and near the city, were denounced as a selfish indulgence, contrary to the collectivist spirit of socialism, and illegal if built on land designated for allotments. Articles from the postsocialist period (1989–2016) were more heterogeneous in terms of the genres and themes covered in relation to allotments. The genres ranged from short informative news, to longer articles containing stories about the struggle between allotment gardeners and (local) politicians, to texts that covered the legislative processes linked to restitution laws and parliamentary proposals for “allotment gardener laws.” Our analysis is national in scope as we analyzed media representations covering the whole country. However, many articles concentrated fully or partially on Prague and Brno, where the struggles over allotments have been more vigorous than elsewhere, because of the developmental pressures and land prices. In the following sections, we explore in detail the speakers’ strategies of justification and valuation of allotments and of their devaluation.

Modes of Justification and Valuation of Allotments

Allotments in the socialist media discourse were almost unequivocally depicted and perceived as morally worthy both by journalists and by readers who wrote letters to the editorial office of Rudé právo. The main critique concerned the contestation of the practice of certain people deliberately taking advantage of the system and building a cottage house on an allotment lot. The only case where allotment gardeners were criticized and devaluated was when their subjectivity was enacted as “cottage people.” Even though allotments and the practice of urban gardening during the socialist era were established as implicitly valuable, the articles used various ways to reinforce the performance of the worth and moral correctness of allotments. We identified four categories of how worth was ascribed to allotments: (1) positive attributes (self-)ascribed to allotment gardeners: diligence, dedication to hard work, activeness, collectivism; (2) positive effects of gardening on allotment gardeners: meaningful use of time, relaxation and recreation (in nature); (3) positive effects on society and the community: distribution of the surplus from gardening (fruits and vegetables), utilizing land that would otherwise be left abandoned; and (4) adherence to official policies and the Communist Party as well as favorable cooperation between local officials and allotment gardeners. In a certain sense, the positive attributes of gardeners (as subjects) and gardening (as a practice) reflected what was understood as worthy in the (official) discourse of the socialist society: hard work, collectivism, loyalty to the community (and implicitly to the Communist Party). Allotments may be understood as serving as a representation of the socialist ideal, and thus, when allotments were approved, implicitly the socialist moral hierarchies and political networks were confirmed as well.

Allotments were thus not valued primarily for their role in urban ecology. Their role as a “green space” was formulated in the context of bringing about positive effects on allotment gardeners or even society as a whole as they were spaces used for the production of surplus vegetables and thus were an effective and productive use of the land. However, the importance of allotments to “the city” or cities in general was not formulated; this is an aspect in direct opposition to the official socialist urban planners’ discourse, where allotments figured as important natural spaces and as an inherent part of urban nature (Gibas, Boumová & Samec, 2016). The link between allotments and the city was thus in the socialist media discourse rather weak and was overshadowed by the critique of “cottages,” which were seen as encumbering the potential of certain (urban) spaces in terms of both excessive construction and disruptive aesthetics.

The shifts during the 1990s from socialism to postsocialism were enormous in terms of how wealth accumulation and the means of ownership of housing and enterprises were transformed—this was primarily due to the process of privatization and expansion of (financial) capitalism. With respect to allotments, this led to a steady drop in their numbers. Allotment gardeners were afforded a rather significant proportion of space in the media after 1989. They were asked by journalists to share their opinions either in articles that dealt with some dispute or affair (e.g., when allotments were about to be demolished) or when allotments were referred to in an apparently noncontroversial context (e.g., reporting on the “allotment lifestyle”). However, the proportion of articles dealing with controversies regarding the struggle over the appearance of the city and the existence of allotments were significantly higher than of those that teased out their “romantic,” nonproblematic version of reality. When allotment gardeners were given a voice, they reiterated the arguments that had been present in the socialist discourse. Allotment gardeners—including also the representatives of the Czech Union of Allotments and Leisure Gardens (Český zahrádkářský svaz)—argued that (1) they invested a lot of effort and work to take care of and cultivate allotments over a long period of time; (2) such effort is favorable (healthy and meaningful) to the allotment gardeners themselves; (3) allotments play an important role in urban ecology by bringing “green spaces” to cities; and (4) they have helped cultivate the soil on estates where allotments are present. The modes of justification have remained practically unchanged since the socialist era, with one main exception: The public good brought about by allotments is newly contextualized as bringing good to the city as opposed to bringing good to the despatialized general common space or community.

Allotment gardeners have attempted to moralize their actions and the particular materiality of space by way of domestic and familial arguments rather than by using the logic of market effectiveness; they have also often attempted (the question is whether intentionally or not) to arouse certain emotions in (potential) readers. References to their long-term efforts, to their emotional attachments to “their” plots of land, and to the result of their hard work materialized in the growth of trees, cultivated land, and harvesting of fruits and vegetables clearly had an affective nature as allotment gardeners employed expressive language and attempted to elicit empathy from readers. Connecting discursive persuasion and justification with the material resembles Judith Butler’s (2010) idea of the performativity of words embedded in practices by reiterating statements and connecting them to a meta-textual reality. In other words, allotment gardeners did not simply justify their actions solely on abstract moral grounds or via “objective” statistical data and other technological devices, but instead, they enclosed their accounts with their practical experiences—their everyday life in the allotments. Gardeners attempted to formulate their identity as that of subjects partaking in an activity valuable both to them and to other inhabitants of the city. The components of this identity were formulated on moral grounds. Gardeners evoked allotments and gardening not as merely a private matter but as a matter of the public good; primarily, this sentiment was evoked when referring to the ecological and educational role allotments play for cities and people, especially, children. They also, rather unsuccessfully, mobilized some economic arguments, especially one emphasizing the economic effectiveness of allotments as a way of maintaining urban nature, as expenses are covered by the gardeners, who have to pay rent for the plot to the city council. We now turn to the discursive strategies that conceived the allotments as wasteful and devaluated their contribution to the city’s development and the public good.

Strategies of Devaluation of Allotments

The groups that contested the version of reality in which allotments (should) proliferate and have a prominent place in the urban landscape were not, as intuition may suggest, developers or new owners of the urban land. Rather, it was officials and municipal clerks together with local politicians who promoted a completely different management, governance, and utilization of urban space. One notable theme within a broader public discourse of planning and development has become envisioning new housing construction intended for “young families,” that is, the promising middle-class workers, voters and taxpayers. ³ The theme has helped the city representatives to further the vision of the “entrepreneurial city,” the city that competes to attract (young) skilled workers (Eizenberg et al., 2016). A vision of new construction has been used also to argue for abolishing allotments; it has been employed as an unquestionably sound, depoliticized argument without the need for further justification. In another type of argument, demolition of allotments was legitimized by referencing their semiprivate character. Allotments were presented as a public space privatized by gardeners—a closed circle of private individuals who benefit from publicly owned land and prevent other people from, for example, crossing the estates or enjoying the “green.” Moreover, officials often referred to the “urban plan,” which expounds specific use of the land and is legally binding, to contest allotments. They used the plan as a means for indisputable justification (e.g., to justify the construction of new housing)—the components of the urban plan are unquestionable because of their legal status.

These strategies of justifying housing construction and the abolishment of allotments rely heavily on the neoliberal approach to urban planning and urban land, which is hardly questioned in the media. Politicians have posited allotments as the result of unjust “privatization” of public space by gardeners. The same politicians, however, advocated for the privatization of land by means of private housing construction. No one in the analyzed media discourse has ever pointed out this paradox. In certain cases, local gardeners were successful in initiating opposition to the redevelopment of land, but no common successful discursive strategy was adapted universally that would challenge the (re)privatization of land as such. The inability to challenge the neoliberal and entrepreneurial mode of governance and land use on a national, rather than just local, level may be explained by the fact that turning the land into a tradable commodity has been perceived as a just way to treat public land in the postsocialist period. Relatedly, the market has been widely depicted as an impartial, proper arbiter accessible to all, provided one tries hard enough to earn money—and this has been the case in the broader public discourse as well. Thus, allotment gardeners have not succeeded in significantly challenging the position of the free market as a superior impartial mechanism.

With the rise of the postsocialist transformation, the understanding of officials and local politicians behind the organization of urban space has clearly shifted to viewing these spaces as a potential economic resource. New actors and interests appear—developers, the construction industry, and/or speculative owners of land—and with them a new media trope: the figure of the developer, who grabs the land and transforms the green into the concrete and thus devaluates it (according to the gardeners). These interests, however, are described rather briefly in the media discourse, and even the figure of the developer appears only in several articles related to the struggles over the fate of individual allotments, where the developer is portrayed in a negative light. Another justification used for demolishing allotments comprised the categories of safety/danger (i.e., labeling allotments as places of criminality and places with a concentration of homeless people) and aesthetic devaluation (i.e., nonuniformity and low quality of the bungalows in the gardens); both categories represent (de)legitimization as a narrative of urban decay associated with specific places (Weszkalnys, 2007). However, the sentiment surrounding the danger related to homeless people and the possibility of criminal activities was also employed as a justification for preserving allotments as places that provide social control over the space, even encompassing the possibility of a social policy with practical solutions (e.g., providing shelter for people without home). Nevertheless, such efforts to label allotments as safe and aesthetic places were less common and most likely were not successful when challenging the rhetoric of economically “rational” urban planning. To summarize, market logic has been presented as unquestionable, both implicitly—by the presumed imaginary of “new housing construction,” which should always be a priority (see Polanska, 2010, p. 425, for the trope of urban “investment”)—and explicitly, by stating that allotments are not appropriate to the character of the (inner) city in general—especially in Prague, which strives to become a European metropolis. Perceived as socialist and thus antithetical to such transformation of the city, allotments have become easily discursively framed as surplus and taking up the space required for new construction, which is well justified by the forces of the free market.

Discussion

Ultimately, the question up for discussion when evaluating the various strategies of allotment gardeners in relation to urban policies, politics, and rivalling imaginaries of the city is whether the residual and “traditional” discourse of allotment gardeners is able to compete with this new discourse of effective, commodified usage of space, a discourse that is often presented as indisputable and as a self-evident benefit for the municipality and for citizens, as well as an unspoken benefit for developers and investors. With the fall of socialism, a change in the moral positioning of the subjects, namely gardeners, appeared. Although the content of their subjectivity did not change much, the discursive settings in which gardeners as subjects and allotments as objects exist, changed profoundly.

During the socialist regime, allotment gardening was politicized because of the connection between the positive values attributed to the activity of gardening and the political framework of the communist Czechoslovakia that it was proclaimed to represent. By means of such a link, allotment gardening was rendered as morally virtuous. Allotments were evoked as places valuable to the socialist city, not so much because of their natural properties but, rather, because of their relation to what was perceived as proper use of urban space for various reasons, including political. After the fall of socialism and the onset of neoliberalism in urban planning and politics, the settings and modes of justification changed profoundly. City officials started to see allotments as wastelands (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011; Gandy, 2013; Goldstein, 2013) as they do not generate profit. The space was framed as being supposed to generate financial value extracted by means of the market, which would bring money to the municipal budget and private companies. This is, in essence, a modernistic idea of land and nature as a resource to be extracted with the particular mechanism of enclosure (Goldstein, 2013). This idea currently encompasses various processes of displacement, from allotments to the evictions of marginalized people (Desmond, 2016; Gidwani & Reddy, 2011), which allows one to “clear” the land and turn it into a commodity traded on the market (see Christophers, 2016, for a thorough discussion on land as a commodity).

Thus, although gardeners continued to formulate their identity on moral grounds, such a strategy proved ineffective in politicizing the issue. In this instance, politicization encompasses the ability to articulate one’s private interest as corresponding to or advancing the public interest (see Gibson, 2003). Contrary to what might actually help the debate on urban nature and allotments, the issue has become depoliticized on the level of media discourse because of the newly emerged modes of justification on the side of the public administration. Representatives of the city succeeded in framing the debate as a partially technical issue of planning for a more economically effective and justified use of urban space. At the same time, it was the political representatives who spoke out against allotments and were in favor of developing urban land and thus helped mask the real actors and interests involved in this process. This effectively helped obscure the very political nature of the debate over allotments in Czech cities as well as the processes reshaping cities after the fall of socialism.

Conclusion

In this article, we adopted the perspective of allotments as historically emergent and contingent socio-natural spaces of urbanization of nature embedded and represented in specific discourses. These discourses and their change over time underlie and have a capacity to shape and form the process of the production of this particular type of urban environment. At the same time, as we have demonstrated, certain discourses normalize particular ideas surrounding value and worth (e.g., the value of new housing construction) and, in this sense, help embed the allotments within a particular understanding of the city where dense housing construction has a priority over nature. Thus, these discourses promote the potentially uneven and unjust politics of urban space in terms of who benefits from certain functions of urban space. The unevenness of the benefits is rarely mentioned in official policy documents or in the political discourse, whereas it is (rather implicitly) present in the media articles that give voice to the perspective of allotment gardeners.

Allotment gardeners in their accounts mobilized arguments and imaginaries that endured across two different historical eras. From the socialist era until the present day, allotment gardeners have valued their hard work of cultivating the land, which results in the following positive outcomes: (1) for them—useful spending of leisure time combined with fruit and vegetable production and (2) for others—the ecological impact of allotments on the city, which provide more green spaces and have an educational function for children by bringing them closer to nature. In contrast, the actors representing the new market logic in discourse (i.e., local politicians and public officials) have developed a completely new set of arguments that bring together the implicit need for economic effectiveness, the imaginary of a successful city achieved by (new) housing construction and the “objective” knowledge device—the urban plan. Although allotment gardeners were capable of using some arguments within the framework of economic effectiveness, the core of each respective group’s argument missed the other’s considerably.

We have presented the socialist and postsocialist modes of justification and contestation of allotment gardens in the media discourse. We have embedded our argument within the framework of UPE in an attempt to show that the discussion of the role of the discourse on urban nature in the city based on a methodologically rigorous analysis might provide insight into the processes of production of an (un)just city in general. In other words, we have outlined the particular case of media discourse on allotments in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic as an example of exploring how the discursive production of nature in the city works in detail. By looking at the attempts of various actors to justify certain usage of urban space, we have identified the ability to politicize and depoliticize the arguments as being crucial to this process; in other words, the capability to present either explicitly or implicitly a certain matter as a political or nonpolitical (i.e., expert or technical) issue is fundamental. These rhetorical techniques of (de)politicization may obscure the ideas surrounding the just and fair use of urban space and may thus contribute to the production of an unjust urban environment. At the same time, we fully acknowledge that stating what exactly is a just (or unjust) city should ideally be a matter of explicit political discussion.

We have argued and exemplified that to look in more detail at the discourse and the ways (techniques and strategies) in which value is constructed may very well be a productive way to extend the scope of UPE. This is so for at least two reasons. First, it can help us understand the ways in which certain issues are politicized or depoliticized, why and with what impacts. Second, if UPE is to help with producing just urban environments, it needs to engage with practice and therefore needs to formulate concrete, particular, localized solutions employing discursive strategies tailored to local specificities. Understanding the minute workings of power through discourses can be a start for going from theory to practice. It can help with formulating practical solutions or strategies challenging the capitalist modes of transformation of nature and move UPE further toward its goal of facilitating the production of more just urban environments.