Community gardening, creativity and everyday culture: food growing and embedded researchers in community transformation and connections

This pilot demonstrator project aimed to show the potential and challenges of shared creative activities involving members of communities and researchers, and their capacity for developing community identities and transformative experiences. The findings would later be taken forward by Professor Andrew Church who was a Co-I on the £2.2 million ESRC/AHRC Connected Communities Engagement project, 'The social, historical, cultural and democratic context of civic engagement: imagining different communities and making them happen' (project ES/K002686) (Imagine).

The outcomes would include creative acts and objects as well as written material which demonstrated in a highly innovative manner to both community and research stakeholders that a creative process involving communities and embedded researchers can produce new knowledge and connect communities.

The project worked with three communities involved in communal food growing in Sussex, Manchester and inner London who differed in terms of class, ethnicity and sexuality and who used creative acts to develop on-going connections.

The community collaborators involved a community farm, a city farm and a lesbian and bi-sexual youth work project. The project documented and analysed the process of communities sharing creative acts and the spaces in which this occurs in order to reveal how creativity influences community identity and connectivity.

There were number of reasons for the focus on communities involved in communal food growing. Communal and individual food growing had shown itself to be a rapidly growing phenomenon whose significance for communities is not fully understood. The number of community gardens in England in 2010 was four times greater than in 2005 and a number of public bodies have funded new communal food growing projects. For example, the Capital Growth project in London supported by the Mayor of London and the Big Lottery Fund aim to create 2,012 growing spaces. Food growing has become increasingly popular in western Europe in the last decade with the fastest national rates of growth found in the UK, where the proportion of the population involved has risen from 4% to 14% in the short period between 2003 and 2007.

The project built on four current Connected Communities Programme (CCP) projects:
> Connecting Communities through Food: The History of Community Supported Agriculture in the UK;
> Connecting health, health-behaviours and place through the work of community gardening;
> Community Music: History and Current Practice, its constructions of 'Community', Digital Turns and Future Soundings;
> A Communities of Practice model to contribute to community cohesion and self-reliance.

Two of these CCP projects had involved the establishment of embedded researchers within food growing communities, analysing their experience to demonstrate how an inclusive arts-based research approach involving such researchers can stimulate creative acts that facilitate transformative moments for individuals and communities.

The techniques used in the project were wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary designed to encourage joint working between community and university collaborators:
- Community priority identification meetings to establish the community goals for the project;
- Skill building where community members and researchers jointly improve their research and creative
skills;
- Community creative exchanges where communities share creative outputs with similar communities;
- Films and interviews documenting the creative exchanges;
- Workshops involving all partners to consider the role of embedded researchers;
- Community led presentations of creative outputs to similar communities;

The findings of this project were developed in collaboration with community partners and focus on three issues:
> The role of creativity and gift exchange in developing relationships between different shared interest communities
> The boundaries of public and private spaces and how these are reconfigured in collective community spaces
> The implications of involving embedded researchers who are members of communities in researching those communities, facilitating community capacity and developing connectivity through creative activity;

The Young Women's Group in Manchester who were one of the community partners on the project is a 'young women's peer health project, run by and for young lesbian and bisexual women', and runs an organic allotment as one of its activities. The research into the boundaries of public and private spaces explored what it means to contribute to a lesbian and bisexual women's allotment. The findings revealed how the allotment project might be understood to be intensely engaged in 'growing intimate publics', or what we term 'privatepublics'. These are paradoxical intimacies, privatepublic spaces which are not necessarily made possible in the usual private sphere of domestic homes, but which materialise on an apparently public allotment site in Manchester. These intimate private-publics might be understood to offer a resourceful counter to tendencies towards privatising that which was previously public (e.g. in processes of urban development and regeneration, often relying on rather different public/private partnerships), whilst at the same time bringing into the public domain that which has been seen to be private and domestic.

The research shows how these growing private-publics emerge in ways which create intimate private spaces in the apparently public domain, necessarily reconfiguring the boundaries of public and private. By exploring how young lesbian and bisexual women may be marginalised in both public and private realms we show how the process of making an allotment run by young lesbian and bisexual women appears as an 'everyday utopia'.

The research creativity and gift exchange in developing relationships between different shared interest communities involved developing creative activities with three food growing communities. As part of these activities the communities decided to hold a gift exchange day at a coimmunity farm. One gift that was exchanged was a scarecrow made to express the identity of each community.

These activities provided insights that contribute to understandings of both scarecrows and gift relationships, and allowed the researchers to address the enduring lack of a comprehensive theory of the gift. The research also allowed an exploration of the meanings of community and identity linked to food growing projects and spaces.

The 'gift' scarecrow was shown to be a complexly meaningful artefact, both in terms of the community that it represents, but also more broadly in expressing the continuing struggle for dominion over land and nature. In contrast to the highly commodified and trivial scarecrows made specifically for village festivals, therefore, the vision of the scarecrow that emerges from this work is more analogous to J.G. Frazer's notion of the 'totem': a material object that has an intimate and special relationship with each member of a community.

Conceptualised in this way, the scarecrow/totem enjoys what Frazer terms a 'mutually beneficence' with each individual, whereby the scarecrow/totem protects the individual and the individual shows respect for the scarecrow/totem. Respect, we argue, comes about through the annual cycle of rematerialisation and the deliberate placing of the scarecrow on the land.

It also arises as a result of others respecting the rights claims associated with the scarecrow - that the scarecrow/totem reflects the custodianship of one or more people over the land upon which it is placed. The research found little evidence of the scarecrow as danger. Indeed, at no point in the work did anyone suggest that scarecrows are sinister in the ways constructed by popular culture. Rather, the communities made the scarecrows 'one of them', in terms of production, form and style. It is therefore clear that we need a (more) nuanced understanding of the scarecrow. A shift in the relative value of the scarecrow is discernible, from production to consumption, from natural ecologies to new rural economies.

The contribution of the research into gift exchange is about the more practical concerns about how people can be brought into contact with what they grow; the spaces they work; their relations; the animals they mind; the communities in which they dwell. The gift exchange revealed the community made scarecrows to not static objects of agricultural management, rural symbolism, landscape aesthetics, but as a productive and material entities with social and political potential.

Publications

Church A (2017) Tourism in sub-global assessments of ecosystem services in Journal of Sustainable Tourism

Church A (2015) 'Growing your own': A multi-level modelling approach to understanding personal food growing trends and motivations in Europe in Ecological Economics