Reclaiming the city one plot at a time? DIY garden projects, radical democracy, and the politics of spatial appropriation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unsanctioned guerrilla gardens, long a feature of North American cities, are frequently planted as radical challenge to conventional urban land use. Over the past decade, a number of community-led garden projects – projets citoyens – have appeared on sidewalks and in vacant lots, and alleys of Montreal, Quebec’s inner-core neighborhoods under the banner of “appropriating” or “reclaiming” urban space. In this article, we examine the rise of these DIY (do-it-yourself) garden projects and the extent to which they have been institutionalized via municipal agencies and NGOs. We find the distinction between institutionalized and guerrilla projects to be quite blurry, and ask whether such spaces – and the social relations forged within and between them – are able to effectively challenge hegemonic abstract space (as conceived by Lefebvre) and contribute to a radical democratic urban politics (as conceived by Rancière). We conclude that the power of these projects to transform capitalist urban space and challenge the dominant socio-spatial order is limited. We argue, however, that their transformative potential lies instead in their functioning as spaces of political subject formation, where participants collaboratively articulate counter-hegemonic imaginaries and master the skills of collective autogestion – albeit only for a small and relatively homogenous group of Montrealers. Critical attention to absent and silenced voices and self-reflexive awareness of historical and contemporary processes of exclusion and displacement are crucial in order for these projects to become truly radical democratic spaces.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it