Urban community gardens in Hungary

Abstract

Community gardens have for a long time been present in the Global North, in Hungary they emerged in the last one decade. Currently there are around 30-40 active community gardening sites operating mostly in the capital and in some smaller towns of Hungary. Fruits and vegetables are harvested voluntarily in these gardens by heterogenous groups of urban citizens. Gardeners participate mostly for the sake of leisure, they govern the garden jointly and share resources such as the infrastructure of the garden. The urban community gardening phenomenon often appears in the newest literature of the commons and referred to as manifestation of the new urban commons. In this wave of literature, it is problematised whether the gardens can be interpreted and analysed in the Ostromian framework of common-pool resources. Commons have been lately understood in these pieces of literature not solely as pool of resources, but more as social practices of commoning. This paper aims at introducing the most important and recent theoretical concepts that challenge and refine the traditional theories of the commons. After introducing the context and the narratives of urban community gardening, the results of an empirical research made in the Hungarian field will be linked to the theoretical developments. Date have been gathered mainly through the deliberative method of civil preference forum where members of different community gardens were invited to share their experiences about their gardening activity. The focus of the group discussion was on their experiences concerning the collective governance of the gardens. Data derived from the forum was complemented by preliminary fieldwork conducted in different community gardens from Budapest and Székesfehérvár. The research questions of this study concerns (1) what is perceived as commons by the gardeners, (2) how the gardeners relate to the common resource, (3) if and in what ways do the gardeners practice commoning in their activities.  The study on the one hand aims to give an overview of the social phenomenon and operation of community gardens in Hungary. Another goal of the paper is to reflect on the vivid academic discourse concerning the urban commons. The gardens are considered as obvious manifestations of the new urban commons, though very few studies have been dealt so far with how commoning is taking place in these hybrid urban spaces. The analysis of the exogenous and endogenous relations of the gardens provide us with a good starting point to explore the conceptual problems raised by the urban commons. The data presented in this paper suggest that understanding the commons as pool of resources is not sufficient. Urban commons shall be analysed in relation to their communities and in their own contexts where the common resource itself and its beneficiaries are not constant but fluid categories.  Communities are committed to the practices of commoning to different extents.