Tending Cultural Landscapes and Food Citizenship in Toronto's Community Gardens

TLDR

Toronto’s community gardens are place‑based political sites that reflect the city’s evolving cultural landscape and embody multiple meanings tied to the food‑security movement. The study aims to show how community gardens regenerate the local food system and provide access to healthy, affordable food. The authors conducted three garden case studies to examine the complexities of food citizenship, focusing on gardener roles, cooperative networks, and cultural pluralism. The case studies reveal that food citizenship is essential to food security, that gardeners transform urban spaces, and that collaborative networks and cultural pluralism shape the urban landscape.

Abstract

Scattered throughout the city of Toronto are more than no community gardens, sites of place‐based politics connected to the community food‐security movement. The gardens, spaces where passions for plants and food are shared, reflect the city's shifting cultural landscape and represent an everyday activity that is imbued with multiple meanings. Toronto's community food‐security movement uses gardens as one strategy to regenerate the local food system and provide access to healthy, affordable food. Three garden case studies expand on the complexities of "food citizenship," illustrating the importance of that concept to notions of food security. The gardens reveal the role gardeners play in transforming urban spaces, the complex network of organizations working cooperatively and in partnership to implement these projects, and the way in which social and cultural pluralism are shaping the urban landscape.