The Work of Community Gardens: Reclaiming Place for Community in the City

an article by Andrew Cumbers, Deirdre Shaw and Robert McMaster (University of Glasgow, UK) and John Crossan (University of Strathclyde, UK) published in Work, Employment and Society Volume 32 Issue 1 (March 2018)

Abstract

The growth of community gardens has become the source of much academic debate regarding their role in community empowerment in the contemporary city. In this article, we focus upon the work being done in community gardens, using gardening in Glasgow as a case study.

We argue that while community gardening cannot be divorced from more regressive underlying economic and social processes accompanying neoliberal austerity policies, it does provide space for important forms of work that address social needs and advance community empowerment.

In developing this argument we use recent geographical scholarship concerning the generative role of place in bringing together individuals and communities in new collective forms of working.

Community gardens are places that facilitate the recovery of individual agency, construction of new forms of knowledge and participation, and renewal of reflexive and proactive communities that provide broader lessons for building more progressive forms of work in cities.

Full text (PDF 17pp)

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Thinking Sociologically About Kindness: Puncturing the Blasé in the Ordinary City

an article by Julie Brownlie (University of Edinburgh, UK) and Simon Anderson (Simon Anderson Consulting, UK) published in Sociology Volume 51 Issue 6 (December 2017)

Abstract

This article makes the case for a sociological engagement with kindness. Although virtually ignored by sociologists, we tend to know kindness when we see it and to feel its absence keenly.

We suggest there are at least four features of ‘ordinary’ kindness which render it sociologically relevant:

• its infrastructural quality;
• its unobligated character;
• its micro or inter-personal focus and
• its atmospheric potential.

This latter quality is not the ‘maelstrom of affect’ associated with urban living but can subtly alter how we feel and what we do. We illustrate these features through a study of everyday help and support.

In doing so, we argue that – as much as Simmel’s blasé outlook – small acts of kindness are part of how we can understand city living and that, despite the cultural trope of randomness, a sociologically adequate account of kindness needs to recognise the ways in which it is socially embedded and differentiated.

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