Grow Your Own: Space, planning, practice and everyday futures of domestic food production
Enrico Marcore and Nicola Spurling
The essay explores the relationship between space, planning and everyday practices, focussing on futures of domestic food growing spaces and practices in Italy and the UK. The first case looks at the recent inclusion of the ‘community garden’ in the eco urban housing model in L’Aquila, Italy, and traces the relationships between planning, space and practices as this model is imported into a rural community. The second case explores a longer national trajectory of allotments (plots of land rented for growing vegetables) in the UK. Over time, the allotment becomes endowed with different social and cultural meanings, as its position within policy, systems of provision, urban infrastructure and everyday practices changes. Through considering these examples from past and present, we reflect on anticipated food growing futures in different times and places, and ask how these various ‘experiments’ of policy, planning and practice, are best conceptualised. Download full PDF