Gardens and Politics

Abstract

This chapter sketches a garden-based politics for the Anthropocene. Such politics will have the following characteristics: in terms of scale, it will privilege cities; in terms of inspiration, it will look to environmental pragmatism and civic republicanism; in terms of values it will favor self-determination, justice, and sustainability/resilience. Its agents will be mainly individuals and their non-institutional networks, associations, and organizations. It will be an “operative” democracy, importantly based on material practices and not only on institutional mechanisms of representation. Within such model, the networked and coordinated city-level garden system that I envision in this book will be described as a public good.