Cultivating Relationships. The Common and the “Communitarian” Through the Experience of Two Urban Gardens in Madrid

Abstract

This ethnographic research on urban community gardens analyses what means and how it expresses the “communitarian” dimension of these projects. The article deals with these questions from a socio-spatial approach, exploring how community is produced through the organizational mechanisms, relationships, practices and discourses. It also addresses the group relationships and the appropriation of the urban space, producing a place as a means to create community. The resulting community group presents some distinctive traits, such as the revaluation of the category of proximity with a simultaneous development of translocal links, or the diversification of the forms of participating, which includes in-person and virtual formats. The text is a double case study and a comparison exercise in two urban community gardens in Madrid.