Under-mining urban gardens

Drawing on several years of community-based research, this talk traces from people’s experiential knowledge of attempting to use gardens for social, environmental and educational purposes– into local policies that shape garden possibilities in urban contexts. Starting in the actual material sites where gardening takes place (a university campus, schools, community organizations, greenspaces, local neighbourhoods, and so on), my findings on the educational, environmental, historical, geographic and political-economic relations suggest that while gardens and garden programming have the potential for community-based learning, increased wellbeing, and ecological awareness, their employment needs to be highly contextualized within critical discussions related to settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, the history and politics of land and water use, and (green) gentrification.

About the speaker:

Mitchell McLarnon is a member of the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre and Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Concordia, where his current research focuses on environmental and climate education, community development, gentrification, food security, institutional ethnography, urban political ecology, and participatory visual methods.