Creating Local “Citizen’s Governance Spaces” in Austerity Contexts
Food Recuperation and Urban Gardening in Montréal (Canada) as Ways to Pragmatically Invent Alternatives
Laurence Bherer, Pascale Dufour, & Françoise Montambeault
Université de Montréal
Along with two of his neighbors, Oscar has installed gardening containers on the sidewalk of his street to grow flowers and edible plants. This trio’s goal, and that of their neighbors, is to beautify the street, which has been neglected by the city administration for years. Oscar is also working towards the larger goal of being able to feed everyone who needs it with fresh food. For him, given the amount of food available on the planet, it is unthinkable that people go hungry. He attaches great importance to free food and has turned to dumpster diving, which he naturally associates with gardening in public spaces. For Oscar, both the collection of food from garbage cans and the access to open gardens in public spaces enable people to eat for free. He produces more than 1,000 seedlings between February and May, thanks to the seeds he systematically recovers from one year to the next. Oscar also builds planters with recycled wood. The culture of gratuity and exchange is at the core of his actions. His goal is to create what he calls an “edible street.”
Joannie opened a community fridge three years ago. She initially discovered the potential of sharing unsold food through dumpster-diving groups on social media. However, she is not physically fit enough to get into the dumpsters herself. She then thought of working with local merchants to collect food that is still good but close to the expiration date and would otherwise be discarded. Joannie’s home now has five refrigerators and she announces food arrivals on a Facebook page. She also created a space in her basement for clothing and book donations. Friends or beneficiaries of her services help her from time to time. She also benefits from an informal network of people who respond to requests from merchants and redistribute food from community fridges or small neighborhood food banks. Joannie has experienced hunger and poverty firsthand and is therefore very happy to be able to give back.
Oscar and Joannie’s stories of engagement in Montreal might seem exceptional, but they are not. In many cities, and particularly in a context of neoliberal austerity and governmental withdrawal from public action, citizens act upon their urban environment. If these initiatives could be presented as spaces of resistance to neoliberalism, or as political acts of reclaiming the city, these emergent practices are neither a manifestation of state retrenchment nor its outright rejection. In fact, neoliberal policies have created opportunities for the emergence of citizen initiatives and strongly colored the institutionalization processes that followed. Individuals and loosely organized collectives involved in such initiatives develop and are embedded in complex and multidimensional relationships with local institutions and third sector organizations. In turn, these institutions and organizations structure their practices and its consequences. Montreal is a particularly interesting case to observe these practices. Bringing citizens’ initiatives and so-called social innovations to the core of public action have been among the neoliberal policy orientations pursued by some of Montreal’s boroughs and third sector organizations, increasingly relying on volunteers and private citizens to intervene in the public sphere, especially in the areas of urban gardening and food recuperation.
Initially, citizens engaged in urban gardening or dumpster diving practices do it on an individual basis, or with very small groups of loosely organized individuals. Greening, cultivating, and food recuperation activities are progressive experimentations, trial-and-error processes that involve various types of encounters with others. They gradually allow citizens to make connections between personal motivations and larger societal issues such as food waste, food security, access to public green spaces, and so on. By repeating their actions over time, individuals also better define their practice by identifying its boundaries, defining norms of action, and formulating their own rules to regulate the practice. From a spontaneous activity that is performed once, gardening and dumpster diving become activities that become meaningful for the people who engage in it repeatedly. It also at this level that citizen agency can be observed, where strategies of cooperation, representation, and resistance to institutional pressures are developed and imagined.
At the meso-level, urban gardening and dumpster diving practices are progressively organized in a loose network. To disseminate their initiatives, practitioners meet with others in offline or online spaces that share the same interests and seek out information to collectivize learning. Their actions can be encouraged by individuals and organizations they interact with or it can be challenged by others, all of which influence the practice. For example, dumpster diving has evolved in parallel with many other food recuperation initiatives, such as community fridges, social solidarity associations, and associations or cooperatives recuperating unsold food from grocery stores that transform and sell them at a low price to prevent waste. Community fridge organizers pushed the divers’ logic of experimentation further and sought an alternative solution to distribute food among people in need.
The state is not totally absent from the equation. Through policy-making, public authorities coexist with the practice. The boundaries between formal and informal practices evolve over time, both from within and from without, through state- and self-regulation. Thus, what usually begin as spontaneous, informal practices led by citizens without state support often become an integral part of the mixed urban and social fabric of the city. This relational process between citizen governing practices and institutions leads to the gradual institutionalization of the social practice.
Overall, civic responses to neoliberalization processes, such as urban gardening or dumpster diving, are neither “good” nor “bad,” but they do reveal the tensions surrounding the local administration’s capacity to deliver and sustain certain services. One of the main challenges these autonomous but partially institutionalized practices confront is the question of sustainability: how can these citizens-led initiatives survive? It is probably in this part of the story that the effects of neoliberal austerity are the most tangible, because the practices implemented to cope with neoliberal austerity are often short term.
Laurence Bherer is professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal and director of the Centre de recherche sur les politiques et le développement social (CPDS). Her research focuses on participatory democracy and political engagement.
Pascale Dufour is professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal, and director of the Collectif de recherche action politique et démocratie (CAPED). Her research focuses on collective action and social movements in representative democracies and in comparative perspectives.
Françoise Montambeault is professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal, and Chairholder of the Canada Research Chair in Participation and Citizenship(s). Her research focuses on participatory democracy, citizen engagement, and the construction of citizenship.