Personal UA
People who do things where they are not supposed to.
The Photographs above were exhibited at The University of Brighton with the following text:
The soft edge between utility and productivity: something else is happening here.
Research subject
Urban agriculture (UA): the practice of growing food and non-food within or surrounding the boundaries of cities.
Research Title:
Urban Agriculture: East Croydon as an example of growing food closer to the urban consumer
This exhibition of photographs represents a visual fragment that has emerged from the overall research project into UA.
The core of the UA research is based in Croydon, South London, and is largely framed by the sustainable cities debate. It emerges out from the statement that food growing, processing and distribution is a major contributor to our current environmental dystopia. UA practice, with specific reference to oleri-culture, would re-localise food production, cutting food miles creating economic and ecological interdependence.
While the above definition of UA tries to encapsulate an urban practice that the UNDP has described as “essential to the economic and nutritional security of urban residents, on closer inspection not all UA practices fit neatly into productive discourses once you disaggregated UA into ‘urban’ and ‘agriculture’.
One such example is documented in this display of photographs showing the many small, personal yet public food growing activities that happen around the streets in East London. Clearly the activity shown in the photographs are urban - clinging to the gaps between buildings, however, it is hard to describe them as ‘agriculture’ since they do not actually feed the owner in way that we have come to expect modern agricultural practice to … therefore something else is happening here.
Trying to understand this ‘something else’ requires understanding the interrelationship between institutional planning and regularised practices of everyday life. This would require analysing the practice through interviews with the urban farmers, as a product of culture, knowledge, daily household life, gender difference, economic pressures, notions of play, memory and the reuse (or misuse) of planned public spaces. However, I have found making contact with these urban growers difficult and the only visible farmer is the woman in the blue saree in the image entitled ‘Goodge Place, 2007’.
Once you move away from the simple assumption that the food growing practice can basically be understood as a form of quantifiable ‘agriculture’, towards a socio-cultural analysis, then a great number of contradictions and explanations start to arise. It is these contradictions and answers, explored briefly in this exhibition that the PhD work will explore.