Informal planning in a transactive governmentality. Re-reading planning practices through Ghent’s community gardens

Abstract

This article addresses a new mode of planning that involves a collaboration between State, private and community actors in the context of growing urban gardening movements. It questions the view of urban gardening as a manifestation of citizens’ dissensus towards administration’s institutional planning, and the expression of urban ‘counterplanning’ whose aim is to resist the consequences of a neoliberal governmentality. Although this interpretation of urban gardening is to a certain extent true, it does not completely explain some current developments in socio-spatial planning practices. In order to fill this gap, the article advances a theoretical analysis of the emerging governmentality generated by an intensified relationship between institutional, private and community actors. The theoretical analysis is complemented by the example of representative urban gardening projects in Ghent, a dynamic and inspiring mid-size city in Belgium, providing an ideal context for exploring the transformation of planning practices and their socio-political underpinnings. The article concludes that urban gardening practices exemplify an emerging informal mode of planning supported by a new transactive governmentality, which may lead to a co-creative transformation of public urban space.

Keywords

counterplanning Ghent governmentality informal planning neoliberal city urban gardening

Introduction: digging deep in urban garden planning

This article questions the broadly accepted understanding of urban gardening as a practice of counterplanning aimed at public space reappropriation by contrasting institutional planning with autonomous citizens-led actions in the ‘right to the city’ tradition. Our argumentation starts with the analysis of the character of neoliberal urban governmentality, followed by considerations on urban gardening as an exemplary countercultural practice in the city.

From the 1970s onwards, urban gardening has been interpreted in the wave of alternative counterplanning culture as a manifestation of the ‘right to the city’ claim (Schmelzkopf, 2002; Staeheli et al., 2002). Together with other creative practices (e.g. city art, eco-communities, alternative cultural networks, …), it is regarded as a gentle political gesture (Crouch, 2011) able to revert the power geometries of neoliberal planning and to empower people in alternative uses, forms and functions of public spaces (Brenner and Theodore, 2005; Hardman and Larkham, 2014; Tornaghi, 2014).

However, we suspect that this perspective, while offering an important interpretative key, does not allow an in-depth appreciation of the phenomenon. Behind the character of spontaneity and self-organization producing cooperative, environment-friendly and inclusive practices, planning modes adopted in urban gardening projects require a more nuanced understanding. This raises the following question: Is it possible to provide a different interpretation of urban gardening by avoiding the stereotype of both counterplanning and the mark of a neoliberalized practice? What kind of socio-cultural context explains this alternative interpretation (i.e. what kind of governmentality does it build upon)?

In order to provide some food for thought, in the second part of this article, we put forward a more nuanced understanding of planning as an informal practice, by considering the example of community gardening projects in Ghent. These offer us some insights for proposing a critical reading on the relationships between top-down and bottom-up processes, and suggest the existence of a more collaborative relationship (though entailing a certain degree of antagonism) between institutional, private and community actors. It is nonetheless important to specify that, in our understanding, informal planning does not represent the climax of the liberatory power of alternative urban culture, neither the consequence of a progressive inclusion of alternative practices in neoliberal, institutional urban planning; rather, it is the expression of an emerging and transactive governmentality.

The current interpretation of urban gardening in neoliberal city planning

The neoliberal city planning and the emergence of urban counterculture

In the past decades, the consequences of public space shrinking have been denounced by authoritative scholars (Lefebvre, 1996[1968]; Relph, 1987) as affecting the very possibility and capability for urban dwellers to collectively and democratically commit with urban space shaping (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Mayer, 2012) by effectively addressing matters of space ownership, distribution and use (Castells, 1997; Harvey, 1989; Soja, 2000). Following social scientists’ denounce of the commodification of public space, more recent contributions in urban studies showed how traditional public spaces are undergoing processes of privatization and commodification (Sennett, 1970; Zukin, 1995), which can be regarded as manifestations of neoliberal governmentality (Barry et al., 1996a; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Harvey, 2005). References to Michel Foucault’s analysis of governmentality are unavoidable, despite the fact that, for the sake of this article’s argumentation, it can only be briefly defined as the result of the interplay of technologies of the self and technologies of domination (Foucault, 1982a; Pløger, 2008). In Foucault’s reading, governmentality entails diffuse structures and procedures of control and disciplining for shaping people’s mentality (Pløger, 2008) ranging from governing the self to governing others (Lemke, 2000) in the way that the State and the individuals co-determine each other’s character (Foucault, 1982b). By enlarging the classic sphere of the government, thus, a governmentality characterizes power as not merely pertaining the State but also emanating from heterogeneous social formations (Lemke, 2000), and it is defined by the relation between the political order and the rationality underpinning it (Foucault, 1991). A neoliberal governmentality, unlike the liberal principles that prescribe to minimize governmental interventions in the market, requires the government to ‘facilitate the infiltration and regulation of society by the market’ (Hofmeyr, 2011: 18). This penetration is first and foremost realized through a social internalization of norms of conducts that make people’s behaviour a constitutive part of the neoliberal governmentality itself so that the ‘individual’s capacity for self-control is integrally linked to forms of political-economic exploitation’ (Hofmeyr, 2011: 19). In practical terms, the neoliberal governmentality is backed up by a particular exercise of power and tasks distribution among different sectors of society (Certomà, 2014; Torres, 2013) that produce an understanding of planning as a technology of control and legitimation of specific rationalities (Flyvbjerg, 1998) – ‘a kind of gospel for technocrats’ in Lefebvre’s words (2014: 204).

Since the 1970s, the critical reaction to the global diffusion of the neoliberal governmentality has been largely inspired by the lefebvrian ‘right to the city’ discourse (Holston, 1989; Lefebvre, 1996[1968]), calling for the realization of spontaneous initiatives performed by citizens to re-appropriate privatized or abandoned spaces (Purcell, 2002, 2013; Staeheli et al., 2002). A large number of these initiatives have been labelled as expressions of urban informality, and include do-it-yourself mechanisms of housing provision and settlement (Becker et al., 2013); everyday urbanism producing accidental city configurations (Powell, 2012); and self-organization of governance processes (Nuissl and Heinrichs, 2011). They are generally described as counterplanning practices contesting a neoliberal institutional planning and extensive urban redevelopment programmes (Shatkin, 2004), by advancing self-restoration projects for public use of abandoned infrastructures, squatting buildings for cultural and social services provision, re-appropriating interstitial spaces or residual brownfields for community enjoyment and similar.

Some of these urban informality practices recently transformed into more organized informal or vernacular planning practices that focused on the re-invention of urban (public) spaces through planning, rather than by avoiding it. While not necessarily advancing brand new forms of autonomous spatial organization, the novelty of this informal way of planning resides in its being conceptualized as collective re-interpretation and re-elaboration of the society and space relationship via grassroots-based planning practices (Roy, 2005). By upgrading the spontaneous spatial configuration emerging from everyday practices (De Certeau, 1984), they re-interpret and re-fashion public or semi-public space in the absence of a legal definition, guidance and funds provided by the public or private sector (Corsín Jiménez, 2013, 2014; Vestbro, 2013). Unlike traditional counterplanning practices pointing out the failure of institutional planning, the emerging informal planning practices establish a rather ambivalent relationship with it, shifting from seeking legitimation (Donovan, 2008) to open contestation (Mitchell, 2003).

This relationship is worth to be explored as it may provide relevant insights on the transformation of the existing planning governmentality in contemporary cities.

A socio-political interpretation of urban gardening

In the varied panorama of informal planning initiatives, urban gardening deserves a special place for its pervasiveness and innovativeness.

Almost everywhere in Europe since the 19th century, historical allotments were characterized by a quasi-missionary objective as they were intended as self-help tools for poor and disadvantaged people (Crouch and Ward, 1997; Seghers and Van Molle, 2007). With the rise of the social justice movement and the urban counterculture in the 1960–1970s, social scholars demonstrated that the production of space impacts social groups and their opportunities (Harvey, 1990; Lefebvre, 1991[1974]; Soja, 1989). Allotments have been then flanked, complemented or in some cases replaced by different forms of urban gardening with a clear socio-political and contestative inspiration (Guerrilla, 2013; Lamborn and Weinberg, 1999), so that the new urban gardening projects were also described as materializations of the ‘right to the city’ (Purcell, 2013).

A classification of the diversified panorama of urban gardening is almost impossible to provide, because different countries, traditions and contexts generate vastly different gardening practices. However, the most common categories include

allotment gardens (i.e. portions of public land provided, planned, designed and regulated by the local authorities);

community gardens (i.e. areas of public or abandoned private land where citizens’ plan and run gardening projects aimed at community building and at advancing socio-environmental values). While in some circumstances agreements with local administrations are reached, they can also be planned in open contrast with institutions and lead to occupation initiatives;

guerrilla gardening, a voluntary activity of cultivating ‘someone else’s land’ (Reynolds, 2008: 16) which is ‘generally portrayed as attempting to beautify neighbourhoods and increase biodiversity in areas which generally suffer from neglect’ (Adams et al., 2015: 2). Guerrilla gardening actions do not envisage a real planning activity, as they are a political gesture intended for bringing public attention on the need for more green and accessible areas.

Urban gardening initiatives are often regarded as positively influencing the environmental and social quality of city space and people’s life (Tornaghi, 2014) as they are intended for education, leisure and socialization (Wekerle et al., 2009), for contrasting food insecurity (McClintock, 2008; Milbourne, 2012; Pinkerton and Hopkins, 2009) and social disadvantages (Agyeman and Erickson, 2012; Emmett, 2011; Schmelzkopf, 1995), for community-building (Beckie and Bogdan, 2010; Been and Voicu, 2006) and health promotion (Barker, 2000; Wakefield et al., 2007), for involving marginalized social groups (Flachs, 2010; Tracey, 2007) and for advancing environmental commitment (Certomà, 2011; Hou et al., 2009; Miller, 2005). Building upon shared ideals, gardeners often establish links with other informal planning initiatives, including alternative economic networks (Kurtz, 2001), transient cities or urban green renovation programmes (Pagano and Bowman, 2000) or projects for accessibility of disadvantaged people (Ferris et al., 2001). In most of the literature, urban gardeners are reported to collectively design, organize, realize and take care of public green spaces (Reynolds, 2008) through a broad array of non-formalized practices; by contrasting the consequences of neoliberal governmentality (e.g. the erasure of public spaces, the decrease of social cohesion and solidarity links, …), these practices transform urban voids and neglected spaces into pleasant, engaging and vibrant places (Hou, 2010). Most of the literature on urban gardening adopts an advocacy approach (Tornaghi, 2014) and it is quite common to find references to urban gardening initiatives as forms of ‘contested spaces’ or ‘right to space’ (Schmelzkopf, 2002), ‘actually existing commons’ (Eizenberg, 2012), resistance initiatives contrasting rigid social doctrines (McKay, 2011) or even means for addressing social injustices (Reynolds, 2014).

It needs, however, to be mentioned that an opposite perspective on urban gardening describes it as a neoliberal manifestation of individual and quasi-autarkic citizens’ action (Pudup, 2008; Weisman, 2009), able to determine controversies and injustices including new forms of enclosures or gentrification (Tornaghi, 2014). In some cases, urban gardening initiatives in the global North¹ are promoted by administrations themselves for stimulating dispossessed people to engage in the restoration of derelict urban spaces that are of no interest for private investors (Smith and Kurtz, 2003), or they are promoted by corporations as a greenwashing strategy. However, while it is true that in some circumstances the social-egalitarian aims of gardening have been initially advanced by educated and wealthy people (Schmelzkopf, 1995), the interpretation of urban gardening as a neoliberal practice has been criticized for broadening the distance between subsistence gardening for poor people and leisure gardening for wealthy people (Johnston, 2007; Quastel, 2009) as it flatters deprived people’s interests as only consume-increasing strategies, and denies their socio-environmental commitment (Flachs, 2010). In general, while dissonant voices exist and there is an increasing interest for the relationship between urban gardening (particularly community gardens) and neoliberal planning (McMichael, 2012; Rosol, 2010), it is equally evident that they are broadly understood as an expression of citizens’ willingness to take the lead or at least add their voice to decisions on urban space destination and planning.

From a planning perspective, urban gardening practice is nevertheless often understood essentially as a spontaneous and grassroots phenomenon anchored in urban counterculture. This is in spite of the fact that in most cases the establishment of new urban gardens has been mediated with the city council and private owners in order to come to an agreement for citizens to garden green areas. From one side, the social engineering model of allotments (Figure 1, Model A) was historically characterized by institutional, top-down planning processes (despite the complexities that often emerged in their practical realization), and this is still largely adopted today.² From the other side, the 1970s political turn in urban gardening (McKay, 2011) determined the emergence of the community garden model (Figure 1, Model B).

Figure 1.

Two models of urban garden planning. The square boxes include agents involved in garden planning and planting; the circular boxes specify the kind of gardens produced. Arrows indicate the temporal sequence for different elements involved in the process.

While the first model envisaged local administrations (often suggested by existing associations) to take the initiative in designing allotments sites and assigning plots on a redistributive policy-basis, the second describes formal or extemporaneous citizens’ associations appropriating abandoned public or private (uncultivated) green areas for the common design of new gardens – with a possible later support by the administration. Model B is generally understood in the counterplanning tradition as a bottom-up approach reversing the traditional understanding of planning, and marking the increasing power of alternative urban culture against the neoliberal governmentality and the technicalization of planning (Schmelzkopf, 1995).

Nevertheless, inspired by the considerations on governmentality, this article claims that the reality of informal planning is probably so not black or white, A or B; rather it is more nuanced.

Gardening (and) governmentality

The emergence of a new governmentality in Ghent

The example of Ghent’s community gardens, we think, may offer interesting insights to venture beyond the stereotype of urban gardening as a traditional counterplanning practice and to unveil the relationship between urban gardening, an emerging governmentality and informal modes of planning. Ghent is large enough to provide a breeding ground for several allotment and community garden initiatives to take place; at the same time, it is small enough to easily detect the agency of networks of policy makers, private organizations, associations and citizens based on proximity and informality, and on a particular political constellation. This can help in advancing our theory-building process (Flyvbjerg, 2006) by showing how contrasting meanings and visions on urban gardening are associated with the transformation of public space planning and its rationality. Moreover, despite presenting context-specific features, Ghent’s community gardens conveniently unveil some general trends in planning and governance.

The emergence of a new governmentality in Ghent has been supported by two specific aspects as a result of a historical process that is going on for over a century and generated a specific planning rationality: first, an urban renewal policy that reinforced the identity of Ghent as a mid-size city, and second, the accommodation of the city for the middle class (Dehane et al., 2012; Notteboom, 2012).

Since the early 20th century, Ghent consciously adopted a self-image of a mid-size city characterized by a ‘tempered’ experience of the modern metropolis (Capiteyn, 1988). In today’s urban renewal projects and city marketing, this image is further confirmed. The expression ‘pocket size metropolis’ used by city advisor Charles Landry (2011) perfectly describes the ambition of all kinds of urban renewal projects in Ghent. Historically, the profiling of Ghent as a provincial town was paired with the rise of the middle class and the attempts to attract it to the city and to create an urban space where every social class would find its place (Notteboom, 2012). Today’s middle class consists largely of what Landry calls ‘the creative class’ (in the above-mentioned report, he describes Ghent both as ‘non-cosmopolitan’ and as ‘open and creative’; Landry, 2011). An increasing number of young and highly educated people, often nicknamed bobos (bourgeois-bohemian), leftist individuals or families that profit from a high cultural level (and mostly a double income), but at the same time are interested in a sustainable lifestyle in contact with nature (Brooks, 2000), is populating Ghent. Often grown up in a non-urban environment, these new city dwellers like to live in the city for the array of possibilities it provides on the level of work and recreation, but they also bring with them rural or suburban expectations, among which is the desire for a garden (Borret and Notteboom, 2000).

This specific rationality produced by a new type of urban dwellers (concerned with economical as well as social and ecological issues) is reflected in the city’s political order and underpins a new governmentality. Differently from what happened in other Flemish cities, Ghent government since the late 1980s saw the socialist party to firmly keep the power in a coalition with the liberal party (i.e. economically liberal), and since the elections of 2012 a large fraction of the green party entered the coalition (Boone and Deneckere, 2010). The result was that economic policies at city level (such as the commercial transformation of the city centre) were paired with concerns for social issues (e.g. gentrification, housing policy, the run-down 19th-century belt around the city, etc.) and ecological issues (e.g. the reinforcement of urban green infrastructures; Koopmans et al., 2013: 13; SP.A-Groen-OpenVLD, 2012; Stad-Gent, 2012). This socio-political context creates a specific type of transactive governmentality that is referred to as ‘green-socialist-liberal’. Such a peculiar condition can be, nonetheless, read as a sign of our time in which somehow unexpected coalitions share political responsibilities on the base of purpose-oriented agenda and negotiate common priorities regardless of their different ideologies.³ Ghent represents a forefront example of a change in global political rationality and governmentality generation processes, in which institutions are informed by a network of multiple actors (including citizens, private organizations, associations, etc.), which constitute a new source of decision-making out of the traditional State–citizens dialectic. On the issue of gardening in the city, for example, the Urban Agriculture Platform and Ghent in Transition are two platforms that assemble all the actors who work on urban agriculture initiatives from below and civic society, working as a mouthpiece with Ghent’s administrations and policy makers.⁴ Interestingly, many of the participants have multiple roles in city life (e.g. they work in the city administration and take part in a community garden project).

Ghent’s urban gardens

Just like other cities in Belgium, Ghent counts different types of urban gardens (see par. 1.2) whose planning and realization are characterized by different rationalities and organizational models. The history of urban gardening in Belgium starts in 1899 with catholic and socialist associations insisting with the local government on the establishment of allotment gardens (Seghers and Van Molle, 2007). The allotments functioned as socio-economic correction instruments till after World War II, when they acquired social integration and recreational function (Goethals et al., 2007).⁵ Since the 1990s, the demand for new gardens coincided with the growth of vacant areas in the 19th-century industrial belt and in the periphery, due to the migration of manufacturing industries (Boone and Deneckere, 2010). Local administrations and private investors defined redevelopment plans for these sites. At the same time, inspired by the socio-political ideal of urban gardening, young citizens striving for a healthy and sustainable lifestyle in contact with nature (i.e. the ‘bobos’) aggregated around the projects of participatively planned, organic and self-managed community gardens. The community gardens have different aims and a different organizational structure than the allotment gardens, focusing more on social and ecological goals and originating in local neighbourhood groups. Gardeners increasingly demand public authorities for new land or directly negotiated with private owners about the access to abandoned areas, or with private companies and economic actors in the city for getting material and financial support. These requests are often expressed in a quite practical form through the performance of guerrilla gardening actions or temporary gardens that occur in spaces where a renovation plan is envisaged. In most of the cases, given the character of the Ghent administration, these temporary actions are approved by the city and/or the owner of the land (e.g. a temporary urban garden on the vacant terrains of Dok-Noord, a former industrial area waiting to be redeveloped). Although the city has not got an official urban agriculture strategy, the long tradition of allotment gardens certainly played a role in the willingness of the local administration to support new gardening initiatives. Even today the municipality, together with the Flemish government, sponsors many allotment garden complexes by means of subsidies, by making grounds available and by providing the support of social workers.⁶ Knowledge-exchange, resources provision and collective production of governance processes are recognized as a distinctive character of the city (De Rynck and Voets, 2003) and as the very terrain for the green-socialist-liberal governmentality to deploy its power.

In what follows, we will take a closer look at the interaction dynamics and negotiation (including tensions and conflicts) between different actors, and the interplay of institutional programmes and informal processes with specific focus on community gardens in Ghent. This may lead us to appreciate the complexity of the counterplanning model of garden planning (i.e. the ‘model B’ in Figure 1) in the light of the emerging transactive governmentality.

A closer look at Ghent’s community gardens

Among other community gardening projects in Ghent, De Boerse Poort, De Site and ‘t Landhuis rely on distinctive socio-political rationalities that easily turned them, in a relatively small city, into catalysts for different networks and generators of different narratives. The three selected projects share some common traits: they all include at least some vegetable plots, common areas and facilities, and foresee participatory decision processes; they are all located on peripheral (Figure 2) and formerly industrial (in some cases also polluted) areas, with the aim of facilitating ecological restoration; local people are engaged (including cultural minorities and economic disadvantaged people). Moreover, it is interesting to note that housing pressure in the city is quite high and the administration engaged private companies in the redevelopment of a number of brownfields. As a consequence, despite being formerly industrial or polluted, the areas where community gardens emerged in Ghent were nonetheless object of important reconversion programmes for housing and recreation. Gardening initiatives have been officially admitted in Ghent despite the fact that they emerged in areas of the city that have an immediate interest for the real estate market for their recognized capability to restore derelict areas and increase their market value (Voicu and Been, 2008).

Figure 2.

Location of the investigated urban gardens in Ghent (annotated Google map).

Information and data provided in the description of Ghent’s community gardens results from a 6 month-long desk-based research and fieldwork, in which we analyzed the urban context and the relevant scientific and grey literature.⁷ In order to complement our desk analysis, we interviewed some key members of urban gardening projects (founders, group leaders, responsibles of key sectors). In particular, we chose to interview at least one of the promoters per project (i.e. someone who inspired or actively took part in the project since the beginning and is still daily involved in management activities) and – where appropriate – one or two further members responsible for key sectors (e.g. the bee-keeping project leader in De Boerse Poort) or committed in bringing about innovative operations (e.g. the food transformation process leader in De Site; see Annex I). We used semi-structured interviews (about 20 h in total) inspired by the rapid appraisal approach with open questions on a list of pre-defined topics including the birth and development of the project; the social, environmental and political conditions where the project took place; and the relationship with the city at large. Transect walks provided the occasion for multimedia material collection.

Selected cases diverge, however, in terms of generation process, planning modes, management and work organization, networking and political inspiration. They range from initiatives run by middle-class people, to socially oriented gardens for unemployed, ethnic minorities and marginalized individuals, up to squatted gardens to introduce alternative social life in the suburbs.

De Boerse Poort

De Boerse Poort (Fig.3) is located at the intersection of two working class neighbourhoods, mainly inhabited by migrant people, Malem and Brugse Poort,⁸ and the nature reserve Bourgoyen. While walking in the garden, Sophie, one of the promoters of the De Boerse Poort, pointed out that in the past, the area was used as a waste disposal area and that it is close to a Roma camp. When the newly constituted Boerse Poort association suggested the city administration to use it for promoting an ecological lifestyle, the administration committed to provide the logistic, financial and manpower support for restoration works (I1). Today it is a community garden of about 2 hectares, including common spaces scattered across the area (kitchen and toilets, waste disposal and seeds exchange location, working and meeting places, a rain water irrigation system, a green energy production system, a bee hives area), about 90 individual plots and 13 collective plots run by local associations (school teachers and pupils, permaculture, disabled people, music association, etc.). All ecologically oriented infrastructure has been designed and autonomously built up by the members of the Boerse Poort association, who also committed the administration to replace the top layer of the earth partly by sound ground and a geo-textile creating a buffer for the historically grown pollution. The area is now property of the administration which rents it out to the Boerse Poort association on a life loan for 33 years for a very low amount of money.

Figure 3.

An overview of De Boerse Poort community garden

The gardening works started in 2012 with a call for associations willing to engage in managing collective plots, and 1 year later for individual plot distribution (Table 1). A high number of candidates applied and the parcels were assigned on the first-arrived first-served base, taking into account a ‘90% local inhabitants’ rule.

Table 1.

Interviews in Ghent’s community gardens.

Community garden project	Interview number	Name	Role	Date
De Boerse Poort	I1	Sophie	promoter	27 Jul 2013
	I2	Maarten	promoter	15 Jul 2013
	I3	Tom	leader of bee-keepers	3 Sept 2013
De Site	I4	Jannes	promoter	24 Sept 2013
	I5	Dimitri	responsible of key sector	24 Sept 2013
	I6	Karolien	representative at Samenlevingsopbouw	20 Jul 2013
’t Landhuis	I7	John	promoter	3 Oct 2013

Maarten, a university researcher with a passion for gardening, explained that many of the promoters and most active members of De Boerse Poort associations have actually good connections with the political, entrepreneurial and creative class in Ghent (including being part of this very class themselves). This resulted in a great advantage for the popularity of the project and its capability to attract further support,⁹ and to establish relationships with other alternative urban culture groups in the city (e.g. the Ecoplan Ghent, etc.)¹⁰ whose work fits in the context of a new governmentality in Ghent (I2).

Tom, leading the bee-keepers group, explained how all the rules¹¹ have been defined in meetings open to all the gardeners in the perspective of producing a non-commodified laboratory for local food production out of the conventional market-based production and consumption chain (I3). He added, ‘Facing others’ viewpoint is the most difficult thing, but also the very important for the creation of a solidary and environmentally-responsible project’ (I3). Speaking passionately about the radical environmentalist ideal of the project, Tom confirms that the planning rationale is not so much generating means of survival, but rather materializing the idea of Ghent as a progressist and green city: ‘This way of producing is so important for establishing a connection with what you eat, however it is not only a matter of eating but rather of being in contact with the rest of the world’ (I3). He explains that De Boerse Poort project has a double-impact; at an individual level, ‘people start thinking why they are acting this way and why they don’t try to make things in a different way (e.g. getting my food from the land rather than from the supermarket, n.d.r.)’ and at a collective level ‘it seems that everything becomes possible (…) by bringing people together for doing things’ (I3).

De Site

De Site (The site) project covers a one-hectare brownfield surface in the North-West of Ghent, in the Rabot–Blaisantvest neighbourhood. The area was a former industrial site definitely closed in 2006 and partially demolished (Figure 4), but the soil is severely contaminated by industrial wastes.

Figure 4.

A view of the industrial site from De Site community garden

While showing us the neighbourhood streets, Dimitri, one of the promoters of the De Site project, explains that the former industry owners have built up the neighbourhood at the beginning of the 20th century for providing basic housing facilities for blue-collars and their families. Rabot–Blaisantvest is now considered a poor area and it is mainly inhabited by low-income people and migrant families (especially Turkish), most of which having no knowledge of Dutch at all (I4). When the industrial plant was closed, the entire area became property of the administration and important works of recovery from heavy metals contamination started (RabotSite, 2014). At that time, the city council committed the Tondelier Development building company to design a sustainable middle-class residential housing plan. As the preparation of the masterplan and the preparatory work for the renovation process was expected to take more than 10 years, the community development association called Samenlevingsopbouw (Community Building) asked local residents to indicate priorities for the area. A garden turned out to be the most common choice. Jannes, one of the organizers of community activities, explained to us that this temporary gardening initiative started with door-to-door involvement of local people in open discussion, visits to the site, collective design and focus groups; ‘they have no gardens, no living spaces. This is a major issue in the area’ (I5). As a second step, Samenlevingsopbouw requested the city council for the permission to start a temporary planning process in the area with the support of the Stadsontwikkelingbedrijf Gent (The Ghent Public Development Company), a public–private partnership involving construction companies and the administration of Ghent (I4). The city council positively answered the request and negotiated with Tondelier Development some temporary restoration works to secure the area from soil contamination and to provide a basic water irrigation system. The community garden project started in 2007 and aggregated in time a number of public and private local supporters (such as local retailers, social and cultural associations, gardening and farming companies) (I6). It gained a large popularity among different ethnic communities in the area and today it includes a common area for assemblies and courses, 160 family plots (about 4 square metres each), recreation and barbecue areas, an oven for baking bread (mainly used by Turkish community), some sporting areas (bmx, football and skating areas), food transformation facilities and a greenhouse, playground and small barns. Compared to De Boerse Poort, De Site is more decisively inspired by social justice values and advances restributive measures for disadvantaged and low-income people. As Jannes notes, ‘the philosophy of the project is to develop a sense of community in this poor area to avoid potentially dangerous behaviour and social marginalization’ (I7). He also adds that the overall idea is to contribute to making the Rabot greener as people are encouraged to shift towards renewable energy supply sources, plant and care street flower beds and to use public transport (I5). This is realized in partnership with a neighbourhood currency initiative envisaging the possibility for people volunteering in De Site or taking care of the neighbourhood to gain credit in local currency, the Toreken.¹² It can be used in many shops, restaurants, cinemas and in De Site itself for buying extra vegetables, and it allows unemployed or low-income people to take part in community life and improve their quality of life.

Moreover, the success of the initiative induced the city council and the Tondelier Development to reconsider the development plan by asking the Samenlevingsopbouw to take part in the participation trajectory of the planning process. This means that the temporary community garden experiment will probably turn into a permanent project integrated in the building plan. While it is not sure whether this participation trajectory will be able to mitigate the gentrification process that the Tondelier project will probably induce, it will lead to an interaction between the new project and the existing neighbourhood.¹³

‘t Landhuis

‘t Landhuis [The country house] is a one-hectare squatted eco-anarchist community garden on a large private estate (formerly used as herring smokehouse) located in Ledeberg, the densest residential area of Ghent, close to the highway entrance. Since 2000, it has been run as an organic farm by the non-profit organization Ateljee, which in 2010 moved to a different location. The estate owner was happy with the continuation of the farming activities, and accepted to have a small group of young people from all over the city to move there. They started a radical, socio-ecological-oriented gardening project called Autonome ecologische volxtuin (Autonomous ecological allotment garden). Differently from De Boerse Poort and De Site, the ‘t Landhuis gardeners wanted to be completely independent of the local administration. So, while the first two gardens exemplify a community garden planning process characterized by a proactive commitment of the public authority since the very beginning of the project – and thus partially overlap with Model A (Figure 1); ’t Landhuis more clearly exemplifies Model B (Figure 1). Nevertheless, the counterplanning vocation of ’t Landhuis was in time mitigated by the search for recognition by the local community (both the administration and the neighbourhood people). This especially happened after 2011, when the City of Ghent – pressured by some liberal politicians – expropriated the estate and organized anti-squat initiatives, destining the area to new sport facilities for the football society Koninklijke Atletiek Associatie Gent. This first open conflict made explicit a tension which is unavoidable, even in informal planning processes in open contexts such as Ghent. John, one of the promoters of the project, claimed:

We are not against football but as the project will take a long time to be realized, we can just stay here in the meanwhile […] I just said to the city council members: ‘Come and see what we are doing’, but nobody came – except the police!

The point is that they want us to leave in order to start a gentrification process in the area (I7). In response to administration pressures, the ’t Landhuis gardeners presented a petition signed by 800 citizens for the preservation of the green area (about 50% of the one-hectare garden is maintained in a wild State). They organized (strictly organic) gardening works by creating individual plots and common spaces (Fig. 5) for the local inhabitants and included a collective vegetable garden with a greenhouse, while the existing building was used for cultural events and the roof served as a shelter for homeless people. The aim was to make explicit the socio-cultural value of the project for the entire neighbourhood. In fact, John explained:

We think theory comes after practice (…) so squatting houses means using empty spaces for something useful, taking care and producing food from the land means contrasting the economy-based society, and keeping people together to create a more autonomous collectivity. (I7)

Figure 5.

Common space in ‘tlandhuis

In fact, ’t Landhuis also serves as an open venue for socio-cultural initiatives and activities, including workshops, information evenings, concerts, open markets, popular kitchen, seeds exchange events, a recycle store and a bike repairing centre.

In 2012, thanks to the change in the composition of Ghent city council (and, particularly, the support of the green Council Member for the Environment), the ’t Landhuis squatters and gardeners came to an agreement with the administration. The community garden project was framed in a broader renovation project including the realization of a single football camp, the transformation of the existing buildings into an organic restaurant, and the restoration of the natural areas and the watercourse with permaculture techniques. On the one hand, the proposal raised some critiques (see ‘t Landhuis, 2014) as it has been clearly perceived as an attempt to expand the green-socialist-liberal governmentality, by uprooting the most radical energies from the city. On the other hand, however, this also fuelled the community gardening project with new means (as the restaurant will use, for instance, products from the garden). The agreement, finally, was defined on the ’t Landhuis blog as an ‘obvious’ decision for a red-green-liberal administration and commented as ‘a perfect example that citizens’ action and cracking can indeed contribute to the whole society’ (‘t Landhuis, 2014).

A new transactive governance supporting informal modes of planning

The example of Ghent’s community gardens suggests that a new mode of planning, out of the dichotomy between official planning and counterplanning, is actually taking place. However, this is not an isolated case as research on citizen-led participatory planning processes testifies.¹⁴ Informal planning activates role-mixing between different social actors (people, administration, associations, business, individuals, …), all requiring listening to others’ positions and negotiating their own. For instance, despite owing a lot to the alternative urban culture, urban gardening initiatives often became an integral part of the institutional planning strategy, not because they are flattered by it, but because they transform it through continuous, non-linear and networked relationships (including cooperation, antagonism, opposition, …).

As a consequence, the concept of informal planning leads us to reconsider the post-lefebvrian critique of planning as a tool of domination and it suggests that planning per se can be a co-creative process, empowering citizens in self-producing public space. In order for this to happen, planning processes need to be supported by a governmentality characterized by a distinctive rationality able to gather a network of heterogeneous actors. For example, the planning rationality in the De Boerse Poort garden is a product of the bobos’ image of Ghent as a modern, inclusive, progressist, grassroot and environmentally friendly city. It is a well-situated garden run by a majority of gardeners looking for healthy food and a lifestyle out of the conventional market-based solution and maintaining good relationships with the political, entrepreneurial and creative class in the city. In De Site, the Samenlevensopbouw organization promotes community gardening as a form of welfare provision involving marginalized communities, deprived and ethnic groups coming from rural areas and complementing their modest income with self-cultivated food. ’t Landhuis, in its turn, gathered people from the extreme left-anarchist urban counterculture for an autonomous reappropriation of city space, inspired by the desire of operating autonomously from the local administration, and it evolved today to part of a broader renovation project.

Our analysis suggests that instead of simply opposing the power of public and private lobbies in urban space, actual planning occurs in a more nuanced form, turning power into something to be negotiated with citizens. Advanced innovative solutions for spatial transformation seem able to compete with institutional urban redevelopment plans.

Foucauldian studies on neoliberalism (Barry et al., 1996b) already pointed out that governmentality is a nuanced effect of social interaction. Lemke (2000), for instance, stated that resistance towards a neoliberal governmentality does not take place in the interval between government programmes (i.e. rationalities) and their realization (i.e. technologies), but that they are already part of the programme itself. This kind of ‘planned distortion’ contributes to reaching compromises and fixing incoherences by moving from formal to informal techniques of government (Lemke, 2000). This point resounds with some of the literature on informal planning, demonstrating that insurgency acts are often entangled with the formal system (Holston, 1998; Miraftab, 2009), rather than directly challenging the hegemonic power. Most neoliberal governmentality itself imbues these acts in systems of meanings and practices (deploying the language of citizenship, civil society and democracy) that obscures real differences and conflicts and produces a ‘perverse confluence’ between participation and neoliberal projects (Dagnino, 2007). Particularly, it has been already suggested that urban gardening practices may represent the intersection between informality and government support (Hou, 2014) in the North American context; however, in the European one, the phenomenon assumes its own character at the light of recent regional policy-makers’ efforts to incentivate public–private partnership in the management of common goods, including public space (Sutherland, 2011).¹⁵ Neoliberal governmentality studies addressed the bipolar State–citizens dialectic; the role of private organizations (including business companies, but also associations) is often described only in terms of lobbying on institutional decision-making processes. While it is in fact true that neoliberal governmentality itself encourages an active intervention in the social fabric by stressing autonomous interventions, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that actors can activate independent connections to take mutual advantage of unexpected partnerships. By reversing the arrow of traditional participatory processes, they are changing neoliberal planning itself. As a result, the new transactive governmentality (which in Ghent has been defined as ‘green-socialist-liberal’) generated by such a dynamic, fluid and temporary purpose-oriented network is able to generate a variety of informal modes of planning.

Conclusion

In the light of our theoretical reflection and the example of Ghent’s community gardens, we suggest that the commonly accepted interpretation of urban gardening as an essential counterplanning, contestative phenomenon pointing out that the failure of institutional planning needs to be carefully reconsidered. While the opposition between planned and non-planned urban space has been probably an appropriate framework for describing the emergence and the first diffusion of urban gardening in the 1970s, it is nowadays evident that a mere oppositional interpretation is no more adequate.

In order to fully appreciate the pervasiveness and evolution of urban gardening, it is necessary to consider the diversification and complexification of the phenomenon. The example of Ghent’s community gardens shows how the very planning of urban gardens emerges as an effect of social networking involving both institutional and informal planners. This informal mode of planning does not necessarily require the contestation of institutional planning (despite the fact that in some cases this may occur); it rather complements, transforms and contaminates it with alternative solutions, by also involving private organizations.

The results and future research suggestions of this article can be listed in the following points:

urban gardening is a forefront initiative for defining, equipping and establishing a new informal mode of planning;

there is a close relationship between this informal mode of planning (exemplified by urban gardening practices) and the emergence of new governmentalities;

the informal mode of planning can in general be regarded as a collaborative approach endorsing the creative, participative and politically relevant potentialities of planning practice.

The introduction of the concept of informal planning as a dialogue-seeking alternative represents a novelty in the panorama of space-claiming initiatives. It is not an attempt at legitimizing the public sector planning, nor at supporting the progressive fall of public space in the hand of real estate companies. Rather, it claims that an alternative mode of understanding and practice planning is possible (and actual). This can suspend the conventional geometries of power and thus reconfer its role and meaning to planning in the public debate, and re-establish the relationship with collective agency.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank professor Dirk De Meyer and his colleagues at Ghent Urban Studies Team for their support. Some insightful conversations with professor Michiel Dehaene on the concept of informal planning provided us with food for thought, as well as the enthusiasm and commitment of all the gardeners we met in the field. We would like to thank the journal editor professor Michael Gunder and the three anonymous referees for the supportive and useful comments they provided us to improve the article.

Funding

The research for this article has been realized thanks to the Special Research Fund for Visiting Foreign Researcher 2012 granted by Ghent University.

Notes

Author biographies

Chiara Certomà is Research Fellow at the Dirpolis Institute – CDG Lab, and the Institute of Management – SUM Lab, and external professor in Cultural Geography at the University of Pisa, Science for Peace Dep.She holds a degree in Philosophy of Science from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (2003); a Master in Environmental Communication from the University of Pisa – Human and Environmental Sciences Department (2004); and a PhD in Political Sciences from the Sant’Anna School (2009). She has been visiting researcher at The Open University – Geography Department, UK (2007); the Universitè Paris “La Sorbonne” – SciencePo, France (2011); the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU, Germany (2012); and the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, Belgium (2013).

Bruno Notteboom is Tenure Track Docent at the University of Antwerp, Fac. of Design Sciences. He worked in several urban planners’ offices in Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as at the universities of Ghent, Leuven and Tel Aviv. He obtained his doctoral degree in urban and regional planning at Ghent University in 2009 with the dissertation ‘Ouvrons les yeux’. Stedenbouw en beeldvorming van het landschap in België 1890-1940 [‘Ouvrons les yeux’. Urban planning and landscape iconography in Belgium 1890-1940]. Within the framework of his PhD research, he was co-founder of the research project Recollecting Landscapes. He was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning at Ghent University.

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