Retirement and the everyday politics of commoning in urban gardens

Hanmer, Owain 2021. Retirement and the everyday politics of commoning in urban gardens. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Although the commons has emerged as a central aspect of an energetic and nascent post-capitalist imaginary, there are a number of ambiguities and contradictions in theory and practice which require further exploration, especially of the more dynamic aspect of commoning, which itself invites empirical engagement. Urban gardens have been tagged with the politically heavy burden of being examples of actually-existing commons, and while they provide the context for empirical exploration of commoning, their political dynamics are even more contested. This thesis starts from the premise that there is a tendency to over-emphasise the explicitly political aspects of both commoning and urban gardening, while overlooking some of their quiet, ordinary, and prosaic everyday actions and practices. This research involved in-depth ethnographic work across three urban garden sites in Cardiff, where I explored the everyday living and practicing of the commons (commoning) through the lens of retired gardeners. A focus on retirement introduces commoning as a dynamic that emerges as people’s position within capitalist society changes, and a search for alternative meanings, values, and practices in this vacuum becomes realised. To do so, I draw on a range of literature and political traditions which share an appreciation of the everyday dynamics of human interaction that point towards possibilities despite and beyond capitalism and the state, and thus disrupt a capitalocentric narrative. However, through a focus on the everyday dynamics within these urban gardens, it becomes clear how practices of commoning relate with and become entangled with capital and the state in various ways, and I highlight the broader implications of this. I explore this through three inter-related empirical chapters. The first starts from a micro perspective that prioritises the perspectives, practices, and sensibilities of the gardeners themselves by understanding the forms of quiet self-valorisation that emerge in these spaces during retirement. In the second empirical chapter, I highlight the more dynamic and living aspects of these sites through the forms of everyday communism and mutual aid that produce and reproduce the gardens and their social relations in the everyday sense. In the final empirical chapter, I engage more explicitly with the possibilities of self-management, through exploring the relationship between the vernacular and the official (the institutions that own the land). This thesis, therefore, contributes to a relative lack of empirical work on commoning and the commons through in-depth ethnographic work, highlighting the everyday and mundane possibilities and challenges of it.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	commons, commoning, anarchism, Marxist autonomism, pragmatism, community gardens, allotments
Funders:	ESRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	12 January 2022
Last Modified:	06 Jan 2024 02:13
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/146524

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