Urban Agriculture Growing Care

This art work was commissioned as part of a larger body of research looking at Glasgow’s growing community gardens. The larger research project was carried out by researchers at the University of Glasgow (1) that concluded that these gardens were of immense importance in the development of community empowerment, social inclusion, community cohesion and spaces for informal learning. I was commissioned to create an artists book to explore some of these issues and strategies that considers community gardening as an example of what a more caring city looks like. Caring here should be understood as an everyday urban activity, which, as Joan Tronto suggests, involves “everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (2). This artwork represented a glimpse of another Glasgow, a Glasgow that generates new forms of value in places and people all too often neglected or exploited by purveyors of the ‘profit first’ logic. (1) Project Report, Glasgow’s Community Gardens: Sustainable Communities of Care can be accessed via the University of Glasgow webpage at http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_398225_en.pdf (2)Tronto, J. 2013. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice New York and London, New York Univeristy Press.