Seed Box guest researcher Beatrice del Monte presents her work.
Self‐managed urban gardening initiatives are a part of a broader range of environmental citizens’ based activities (guerrilla gardening, movements for the right to access to lands, environmentalist in situ protests) that are taking more and more place in public spaces of everyday life in highly industrialised countries (Schlosberg, Cole 2015). These set of practices, behind their plurality, are characterized by being enacted through self‐managed material practices of engagement, exchange and conviviality. They frequently do not rely on a strong ideology that drives their collective action. Nevertheless, their daily practices and engagements can be interpreted as political acts (Certomà 2016). They constitute a new form of politics, an “environmentalism of everyday life” (Schlosberg, Cole 2015: 161‐178). Focusing on self-managed urban gardening initiatives in the city of Rome, I am investigating how these initiatives can transform public spaces and the role of nature in the city (Rudolf, Taverne 2012), trying to improve human and nonhumans’ living beings conditions in urban contexts of crisis.
Certomà, C. 2016, Postenvironmentalism. A material semiotic perspective on living spaces, Springer, New York, pp. 95-112.
Schlosberg, D., Cole, R., (2015) The new environmentalism of everyday life: Sustainability, material flows and movements, in Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 15, n.2, pp. 160-181.
Rudolf, F., Taverne, D., (2012) De la ville-nature à l’urbanité, in: Poirot Delpech, S., Raineau, L., (eds), Pour une socio-anthropologie de l’environnement, Tome 1, Par-delà le local et le global, L’Harmattan, Paris, pp. 189- 205.
