Meanwhile, I’ll be gardening: community gardening and ecological practices in temporary urban spaces

This thesis explores community gardening as a situated ecological practice unfolding within the contested politics of urban regeneration and the increasingly institutionalised frameworks of ‘meanwhile use’. In an era marked by ecological crisis, democratic fatigue, and the instrumentalisation of participation, the research asks: how can gardening operate at once as grassroots tactic, critical spatial intervention, and institutional tool? And how do these practices resist co-option, reimagine participation, and cultivate alternative urban imaginaries?

Blending theory, ethnographic fieldwork, autoethnographic writing, visual ethnography, and practice-based experimentation, the study engages four case studies across London and Madrid: Core Landscapes, Global Generation’s gardens, Loughborough Junction Farm, and Madrid Nuevo Norte’s Área de Compromiso Social. At the heart of the methodology is The Octopus Garden: a workshop I co-designed and led at the Architectural Association Summer School which served as a live, performative space to test participatory and pedagogical approaches to gardening in the city.

Theoretically, the research draws on urban political ecology, feminist and queer theory, and agonistic democratic thought. It mobilises Guattari’s Three Ecologies, Mouffe’s theory of agonism, and relational ontologies from Haraway and Muñoz—not simply as conceptual lenses, but as frameworks activated through bodily engagement, sensory fieldwork, and collaborative making. In doing so, the thesis interrogates the disjunction between institutional discourses on temporary use and the situated, affective, and multispecies ecologies that emerge in community gardens.

The original contribution lies in reframing community gardening as both a research method and a transformative spatial practice. Rather than supplementing policy, gardens are positioned as contested infrastructures through which knowledge, value, and subjectivity are co-produced contributing to debates on spatial justice, participatory urbanism, and the aesthetics and ethics of care.