Thesis
Banal Utopia: urban gardening as a practice for materialising utopic city spaces
- Abstract:
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This thesis explores urban gardening as a banal practice that underpins the manifestation of utopian spaces within cities. Growing in Oxford on allotments and guerrilla gardening sites has increased both in practice and significance. This is due to the convergence of food provenance issues, environmental concerns, and the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. This thesis combines the concepts of banal nationalism (a term proposed by Michael Billig (1995) which speaks to everyday practices through which humans build a shared sense of national identity) and utopia to propose the idea ‘banal utopia’ revealing the manner in which materialising a utopia is both quotidian and continual. Utopia is not a destination at which to arrive but is in a constant state of production and renewal that carries echoes of the gardening calendar.
The link between places where gardening is performed and utopia is not new. What this study illuminates are the ways in which urban gardeners, through their practices, complicate traditional Euro-American imaginings of utopia. These complications are routinely paradoxical, beginning with the materiality of the gardening places that challenge the ‘no place’ meaning of the word ‘Utopia’ as coined by Thomas More (2012[1516]). Furthermore, this thesis brings into conversation two urban gardening practices – namely allotmenteering and guerrilla gardening that are usually considered separately in the literature. What has emerged is the identification of a politics of boundary recognition and negotiation as urban gardeners carry out their self-regulated practices, alone, together. Urban gardening places are sites of super diversity (Vertovec 2007) where gardeners imagine, invent, and produce a better future within a city. In this way urban gardening spaces are places of hope. This thesis also analyses the difficulties inherent in creating utopic worlds. Research for this study builds on 36 months of fieldwork from October 2018 – October 2021 on various allotment sites and guerrilla gardened streets across the city of Oxford. The ethnographic research is grounded in participant observation on four sites where I cultivated allotment plots. Data was collected using a wide range of qualitative methods. This included carrying out in-depth interviews with fellow urban gardeners and research in the archives of one of the allotment sites. Archaeological and archival ethnography were also used. This thesis illuminates the strategies urban gardeners deploy to save and maintain their growing places, in the context of the agency of citizens to co-create the cities in which they live.
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(Preview, Dissemination version, pdf, 17.1MB, Terms of use)
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Authors
Contributors
- Institution:
- University of Oxford
- Division:
- SSD
- Department:
- SAME
- Sub department:
- Social & Cultural Anthropology
- Role:
- Supervisor
- DOI:
- Type of award:
- DPhil
- Level of award:
- Doctoral
- Awarding institution:
- University of Oxford
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Subjects:
- Pubs id:
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1993432
- Local pid:
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pubs:1993432
- Deposit date:
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2024-04-27
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Niala, JC
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2022 JC Niala. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
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