Claiming space

It was a stunning spring morning in Durham. The trees were in bud, the grass was lush from recent rain, and sunlight sparkled off the languid waters of the river. It was amidst this scene of calm beauty that we encountered two gardeners, working to retain common access to green space in this English city. We were in Durham for a meeting of this journal’s editorial board: 3 days of discussion, debate, and planning in an old red-brick residential building that houses the local university’s sociology department. During our daily walks between this meeting place and the hotel where we were staying, our colleague—and host—Professor Sarah Banks took us on a walk along a dirt path through a small garden, with a neat lawn and lovely collection of shrubs and small trees. On this particular morning, we encountered a fresh bed of brightly-coloured, newly-planted flowers; and just around the corner, a couple of men industriously planting more. The gardeners greeted us warmly, and were keen to share their story. We had been walking through a community garden, maintained by volunteers against the backdrop of a struggle over land, ownership, and community use. The patch of ground in question was a disused bowling green, which the council had reportedly failed to maintain for many years. Much of the surrounding area was owned by Durham University, including a huge cricket pitch that sat between the garden and the river, as well as nearby housing such as the building we met in. As a major political force and source of income in the city, the university has purchased large amounts of land over the past century. The gardeners told us that they were part of the Hemp Garden Community Association. This is a community interest company comprised of local people who seek to actively use and collectively develop this patch of land, as part of a wider struggle for community ownership in Durham. A key aim of the group is to obtain control of the land through an adverse possession claim (Hemp Garden Community Association CIC, 2024). This is an English common law mechanism sometimes referred to informally as ‘squatter’s rights’, which enables a person or group to claim ownership of property they have controlled over a period of time, typically 10–12 years (Emerich, 2015). The Association thereby aims to prevent this space from also being sold off by the council to, for example, the university. The gardeners talked about their long term aim to open a cafe in a disused building in a corner of the land, while maintaining accessible green space around it. In explaining the rationale for their group, they linked land ownership not only to questions of urban environmentalism and public space, but also to wider issues of concern for community development, including volunteerism, un/employment, disability, and drug use. One of the gardeners described how he and other volunteers had struggled to find work due to disability. England’s neoliberal welfare state had not provided them with support, but instead punished them for ‘failing’ to find employment. The garden provided an alternative mode of social support and participation, offering the dignity of creating and maintaining a pleasant space, and the therapeutic benefits of horticulture, organized through mutual association rather than charity. In Freirian terms, this can be understood as resistance to ‘assistencialism’: service-provision approaches that encourage passivity through offering little in the way of responsibility or decision-making for service users (García-Lamarca, 2017). In addition to providing a peaceful, attractive green space that anyone in Durham can enjoy, the Hemp Garden is used to host events such as 420: a protest, party, and educational event in favour of cannabis decriminalization which takes place annually on 20th April. Recreational cannabis use is illegal in the UK, as are many medicinal uses. The drug’s legal status in the UK, as in many other Western countries, arguably reflects cultural norms and colonial logics more than any significant risk of harm (Seddon and Floodgate, 2020). Its prohibition in the early 20th century, along with subsequent patterns of enforcement, was driven by moral panics targeting drug use by racialized migrants and working class people (Balkissoon, 2021; Wheeldon and Heidt, 2023). The Hemp Garden therefore challenges interconnected colonial and classist norms around land use and drug use, while imagining new ways to support community-based empowerment and enact harm reduction, by and for disabled and unemployed people. In the Hemp Garden we see how community-based responses to enormous social issues are bound up in questions of space: who owns it, who manages it, who gets to enjoy it, and what forms of enjoyment are deemed socially appropriate? These themes were already at the forefront of CDJ editorial board discussions, not least as the day before our encounter in the garden we visited another community space on our lunch break. Prince Bishops is an old shopping centre earmarked for redevelopment, including the creation of a new hotel and student flats. With several major retailers having moved out, a series of inexpensive leases are available to those who wish to use the commercial space whilst the owners await demolition and rebuilding. The availability of affordable space has led to a proliferation of community ventures, including People’s Bookshop—which provides a community hub as well as a radical bookstore—and a large indoor play area for children. We ate our lunch at the Northern Stores and Deli, a space that served simultaneously as an affordable cafe; a shop for local art, crafts, and furniture restoration; and as a location for the Durham Climate Hub. Between work chat and sandwiches, we browsed the shelves for local produce, and learned more about local environmental activism. After lunch we popped into the bookshop to explore their wide selection, including many texts on workers’ and miners’ histories in Durham and the surrounding area. There is something immensely powerful about seeing what kind of community development work can take place if only the space in which to do it is available and accessible. This raises a further question: how can we ensure that space is available and accessible for community-led initiatives? The examples from Durham, of the community garden and the Prince Bishops developments, both involve community use and reclamation of space. However, while the shops are temporary and directly subject to external forms of ownership and control, the garden aims to be a more permanent fixture, by challenging existing power relations within the city, and asserting ‘squatter’s rights’. Squatting involves the occupation of land or property that the squatter does not lawfully own or otherwise have formal permission to use. While many squatters simply seek somewhere to live (e.g. Leeruttanawisut and Yap, 2016), for others, it can be a politicized process in which land is reclaimed for personal or collective use from private ownership or enclosure (García-Lamarca, 2017). Political squats may operate as community centres or commons, actively appropriating space for community work (Lohman, 2017; Noterman, 2021). In jurisdictions that recognize adverse possession or squatter’s rights, such squats may eventually become officially owned by the community that has claimed them, as the Hemp Garden Community Association hopes to achieve in Durham. This creates a problem for landowners who control empty or unused property that may nevertheless be financially lucrative in the future. Consequently, restrictive laws which criminalize forms of squatting have been implemented in countries such as the Netherlands and the UK (Emerich, 2015; Lohman, 2017). This has not, in practice, prevented squatters from making use of empty property. Landowners have therefore come to employ a range of practices to ensure that their spaces remain in use until they are ready to redevelop or sell. One approach is to offer a cheap lease, as in the Prince Bishops shopping centre in Durham. An alternative is to allow a charitable or non-profit organization to arrange low-cost access for others: an example of this can be found the Outer Spaces initiative, which matches artists in need of studios with empty commercial properties in Scotland. Approaches such as these can provide vital venues for community groups, non-profit activities, community art projects, and small businesses: but only on timescale which is beneficial to landowners and developers. Moreover, by ensuring that a space remains in use until it is demolished, redeveloped, or sold, landowners are able to prevent the squatting and reappropriation of the space by community groups who are not beholden to them. All of this is not to say that the Hemp Garden necessarily offers a better or more ‘radical’ approach to claiming space for community than the Prince Bishops initiatives. As Elsa Noterman (2021: 103) observes in her account of community gardens and urban commoning, ‘the legal doctrine of adverse possession rests on liberal justifications of private property and historically functioned as a tool of colonial expropriation’: this can be seen for instance in the ongoing history of settler-colonies such as the United States. Should the Hemp Garden succeed in its aim, the green space will enter private ownership, albeit under the management of the community interest company. In this way, all of the community spaces we visited in Durham represent negotiations within the existing logics of capitalism, colonialism, and the state, reflecting a series of evergreen debates within the pages of this journal. Amidst all our questions, we find hope in both the Hemp Garden and in the Prince Bishops shopping centre. In a previous editorial (Lohman and Pearce, 2024), we drew on Órla O’Donovan’s (2014) essay on the creative commons to explore how identifying ‘cracks’ in enclosure can enable forms of ‘tiny victory’ alongside defeat. In finding ways to create and provide space for diverse forms of community development, creative workers in Durham show how we might take advantage of a cracked enclosure to build something of beauty, meaning, and connection. Issue 60.3 of the Community Development Journal opens with a classic texts essay, ‘A Freirean watershed’, which has been written to commemorate the English-language reprint of the book Pedagogy of Liberation. Dialogues on Transforming Education. Peter Mayo reflects on the context in which the book was written, as a collaboration between US philosopher Ida Shor and the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, following Freire’s return to his home country after years of exile. Mayo emphasizes the importance of this text in bringing Freire’s ideas to a wider audience in North American, while also expanding Freire and Shor’s accounts of critical pedagogy and of ideology as the mystification of reality. We continue on a similar theme with an original article by Kola Adeosun, who examines how the Freierian theoretical framework of critical consciousness can be used to help understand contemporary tensions in Trinidad and Tobago. Adeosun’s article ‘A Freirean understanding of the Venezuelan crisis in Trinidad and Tobago’ seeks to account for growing tensions between Afro-centric Trinbagonians and Venezuelan refugees. He argues that recognizing the growth of critical consciousness among Afro-centric individuals, and building on this with critical dialogue, is necessary to build true cross-border solidarities. Questions of collaboration are also central to the following two articles. In ‘Deployment and development of community wealth building in Canadian mid-sized cities’, Audrey Jamal and Jordan Scholten look at community wealth building as a systems-changing approach to building a more democratic economy. This may be done, for example, through a focus on worker’s rights, local ownership, and the development of social enterprises and land trusts. Looking at four mid-size cities in Ontario, they found various examples of such projects emerging from the ground-up: however, these projects tended to be one-offs, taking place outwith any kind of overarching strategy on the part of the municipality. Jamal and Scholten therefore advocate for more proactive involvement and linking work from local governments and institutions. In ‘What’s (in) a CBO? Analyzing community representation in the Kenyan aid chain’, Maaike Matelski and Lise Woensdregt offer a deep examination of the relationship between national and transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and smaller, more localized community based organizations (CBOs). Their central argument calls for recognition of the diversity of CBOs in Global South contexts, while being attentive to what “counts” as community-based, and to the role of power in their relationship to NGOs. The aid chain is important for such relationships, as the mechanism through which development funding flows from donors to recipients, typically through NGO intermediaries. Through case studies of an organization representing queer sex workers in Nairobi, and numerous organizations countering the interests of mining companies in the Mui Basin, Matelski and Woensdregt observe that while CBOs impart “authenticity” to NGO priorities, they may nevertheless receive funding at the cost of autonomy, or vice-versa. CDJ readers will be familiar with the vast multitude of approaches available to community development workers in conducting, reflecting on, and analysing their work. The authors of our next piece, ‘Implementability: a taxonomy of community development approaches’, map this field. Geoff Higgins, Olav Muurlink, Lisa Caffer, and Wallace Taylor have conducted a deep analysis of academic and grey literature, and present their findings as a systematized taxonomy that emphasizes the three components most useful to workers ‘on the ground’: principles, conditions, and processes. They hope that this will provide a useful starting point for any academic or practitioner in community development. Next, we move to discuss community resilience. In their article, ‘Community resilience through bottom–up participation: when civil society drives urban transformation processes’, Nicolina Kirby, Dorota Stasiak, and Dirk von Schneidemesser analyse the Kiezblock initiatives of Berlin, Germany. Kiezblocks are groups of residential/neighbourhood units where car through-traffic is blocked off, and replaced with community-focused use of outdoor space (benches, children’ s play areas), etc. Through a mixed methods approach, the authors find that these initiatives do correlate with high levels of community resilience, yet that Kiezblocks are not representative of Berlin’s population as a whole. There is therefore a lack of bridging social capital, and a reproduction of social inequalities through the activism and implementation of Kiezblocks. Shahzad Khan and Robyn Eversole delve further into this question of implementation in our Editor’s Choice article for this issue, which analyses power and the reproduction of inequalities through the Rural Support Programmes Network in Northwest Pakistan. The article, titled, ‘Reproducing poverty through participation: examining the constraints of community development strategies in fostering empowerment and social change’, uses qualitative methods to analyse the operation and maintenance of participatory community initiatives. Khan and Eversole found that project activities shaped by the requirements of funding partners and the interests of local elites often failed to meet the actual needs of the local community. Their account provides a salutary lesson for practitioners and funders involved in the creation of multi-level community organizations. These organizations may struggle to meet goals of empowerment and social change in cases where genuine grassroots initiatives are unsupported, and existing local and external power dynamics are not addressed. The next article is ‘The politics of ward committees in enhancing community development through democratic participation in the perspective of structuration’ by Nsizwazonke E Yende, Petunia B Mahlangu, and Andiswa Mkhwanazi. In post-apartheid South Africa, ward committees are governance structures comprised of elected representatives. They are intended to support the relationship between local people and local governments, therefore enhancing community development through democratic participation. Drawing on existing critical accounts of how ward committees function in practice, the authors employed Giddens’ structuration theory, which emphases how individuals are both producers and recipients of social structures. Yende and colleagues use this theory to show how, as elected bodies, ward committees are vulnerable to local political contestation and power dynamics, thereby leading them to maintain existing, dominant social orders. This undermines their ability to promote pluralistic, democratic community development in practice. The authors therefore recommend the professionalization and external monitoring of these bodies. Our final original article for this issue of CDJ is ‘Implementation of community-based rehabilitation in Colombia in mental health: barriers, facilitators, and purposes’. Felipe Agudelo-Hernández, Ana Belén Giraldo-Álvarez, and Eduardo Marulanda-López argue for the central role of good communication between community users and mental health professionals. The piece offers insights on community-based mental health provision in Colombia, adding to a body of literature that often overlooks perspectives from and income They in the importance of community based mental health provision for disability, and the need for to be community-led from the planning Issue 60.3 with two book The written by the of and Community development, social and social a readers might be familiar with this with a critical the that have been at a for the of Community the book to contemporary and the issue is a of another this of Community Development in with about the of and its in the the by Our and the of this which provides wide and deep of the principles, and of They that it offers useful text for academic and practitioners in approaches to community development work. is a in Community Development at the of in Scotland. themes of and political struggle from a as of her work as for on her is an and community practitioner based in Scotland. 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