Community gardens as public art
From Firenze University Press Journal: Aisthesis
Mateusz Salwa, Faculty of Philosophy, University fo Warsaw
The garden is one of the most influential topoi in Western culture. Rich in edenic connotations (Fagiolo, Giusti Cazzato [1999]; Fenner [2022]), it has been used in various cultural and historical contexts throughout the ages to think of utopic spaces where differ-ent, sometimes even contradictory qualities were supposed to meet. As such, it has been also conceived of as a sort of ideal landscape, be it natural or man-made. Thus, it has also served as a useful metaphor describing the whole world as bountiful and harmonious, a world where people live in peace and enjoy the fruits of their labor, and where at the same time nature is allowed to flourish (Pietrogrande [1996]). As a result, gardening, understood as planning a garden as well as cultivating it, has been recognized as a model of how landscapes should be designed and managed. Since one of the 18th-century landscape architects was said to have leapt the fence and seen that the whole world was a garden (Hunt, Willis [1988]: 313), gardening has been frequently pointed at as a reference for landscape architecture. Even if in its origins the reference was mainly aesthetic, it has nowadays acquired mainly environmental tones. Let’s turn our planet into a garden! — such is an adage that is often offered as an indication how people should approach the environment in the Anthropocene. In fact, it seems that the concept of Anthropocene has reinvigorated the old idea (Di Paola [2017]; Diogo et al. [2019]).
It is then no wonder that the garden metaphor has been used with regard to cities (Spirn [1984]), and city planning has been dis-cussed in terms of gardening (Berleant [1992]).At the same time, however, garden may be interpreted as a topos in a fully material sense, i.e. as a material space that has, in fact, been designed and cultivated in line with the meanings and values associated with the idea of the garden. Gar-dens may be conceived of as effective utopias or heterotopias (Foucault [1986]). This holds equally true for medieval herbal gardens, early modern gardens, as well as for private back yards, allotments or community gardens. The fact that all gardens are inevitably topoi in the metaphorical, as well as literal sense of the term — their design and maintenance require as much theory as down-to-earth practice — is their strength and weakness at the same time, since it makes them desirable on the one hand and threatening the “non-gardenesque” status quo on the other. An illustration of this tension may be found in the words of Rudolf Giuliani, former mayor of New York City. During a debate on the future of urban gardens in the city, he claimed that «if you live in an unrealistic world, then you can say everything should be a community garden» (quoted in: Light [2000]).Even if one may be skeptical about turning cities into community gardens, the beneficial role of urban green spaces is beyond discussion. No matter whether they are historic gardens, pub-lic parks, squares, allotment gardens or community gardens, they have important cultural, social, political and environmental functions.
Even if the idea of a garden-city is nowadays mainly a historical concept, it is hard to imagine a contemporary city — no matter how large — without green spaces of one sort or another, or without urban green programs. It is then understandable why much attention has recently been paid to these issues by the academics who quite unanimously appreciate green spaces, including community gardens, as determinants of city dwellers’ physical and mental well-being.It is noteworthy, however, that it is this perspective precisely that defines how contemporary urban gardens are usually interpreted and appreciated. If gardens of the past — from Renaissance vil-las and Baroque formal gardens to English land-scape gardens and 19th-century city parks — are seen as having various cultural, social and politi-cal functions, as well as aesthetic or artistic values, today’s private yards, gardening allotments and community gardens, playing similar roles, seem largely devoid of aesthetic qualities or lacking any conspicous aesthetic qualities. Even if, philosophically speaking, the idea that gardens are art works is debatable (Leddy [1988]; Miller [1993]; Ross [1998], Salwa [2014]), it is widely acknowledged within garden studies that they are. Nonetheless, this belief is largely limited to grand historic gar-dens and sophisticated contemporary landscape designs.
It is as if it did not make any sense to think of urban gardens, that is, gardens belonging to and cared for by ordinary people, in terms of works of art. In order for a garden to be considered a contemporary artwork it has to be either designed by a professional landscape designer (historically speaking, landscape architecture evolved from the art of gardening), or an element of an artistic agenda realized by a professional artist or an art institution. In fact, it is land art that is mentioned as the offspring of the gardening art (Ross [1998]). One could also here add ecologi-cal art, since many “ecoventions” (Spaid [2002], 2017]) are based on gardening practices. If modest urban gardens are approached as art, they are tentatively analyzed as vernacular artworks, that is, vernacular works whose artistic qualities still have to be recognized and acknowledged. (Hunt [1993]; Sheehy [1998]).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Aisthesis-13658
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/13658
