Gardening the City. Shared Urban Gardens as a Practice of Reappropriation of the Public Space in the Roman Context

Abstract

Starting from the reflections arisen from an ethnographic research conduced in the period 2014-2015, this paper explores the role of two self-managed shared urban gardens in the city of Rome in re-defining the relationship between citizens and public space and in challenging the dominant model of food production and consumption. These gardens emerge as attempts of grassroots re-appropriation and informal planning of urban spaces, claiming an idea of the city  opposed to modes of planning that are not rooted in local territories knowledge. These practices of activism are generating new collective modes of inhabiting the urban context, responding to the crisis of the public space. Moreover, through grassroots participative models, these initiatives are starting processes that do not conceive food and natural resources ad simple economically valuable objects, but as a common and collective heritage.