Cultivating Care-full Practices and Policies: The Prefigurative Possibilities and Complexities of Urban Community Gardens

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Existing research on community gardens tend to position them as a means of addressing the intersecting needs for health, wellbeing, and sustainability by fostering healthy communally shared foods, green urban environments, and public community spaces, which are three core UK policy areas (Buck 2016; Cumbers et al. 2017; Guerlain et al. 2016; MHCLG 2021). This project proposes, however, that community gardens are a response to embodied experiences of contemporary socio-political and environmental challenges and contain both potentialities and problematics in inscribing new communal social relations that can address such challenges. As "the body is at the heart of most fundamental welfare needs", this project will flesh out how corporeal experiences, rooted in neoliberal social conditions, politics, and policies, produce and shape community gardens - and examines how bodies are engendered through community garden practices and policies (Coffey 2004:83). As such, it asks about the tensions between everyday forms of prefiguration and wider socio-economic and environmental structures to illuminate the possibilities and complexities of cultivating care-full practices and policies (Plender 2021; Ticktin 2011, 2021). This line of questioning is pertinent within the context of the 'triple challenge' of COVID-19, Brexit, and the climate crisis in the UK, which has culminated in widening food insecurities and health and wellbeing inequalities (Charles & Ewbank 2021; Green et al. 2021).