This article argues for a community garden as an “infrastructure of reciprocity.” It takes the place and practice of TOMAT, a community garden project organized by an educational institution, as a starting point and then offers a conceptual analysis of this project. Care and gardens supposedly fall on the pre-political, private side of the public-private divide. This article argues that TOMAT installs a practice of care embedded within a larger institution and thus challenges this divide. TOMAT …
Read moreThis article argues for a community garden as an “infrastructure of reciprocity.” It takes the place and practice of TOMAT, a community garden project organized by an educational institution, as a starting point and then offers a conceptual analysis of this project. Care and gardens supposedly fall on the pre-political, private side of the public-private divide. This article argues that TOMAT installs a practice of care embedded within a larger institution and thus challenges this divide. TOMAT materially and socially instantiates an infrastructure that develops skills for living together with displaced humans and more-than-humans. Translating fieldwork into conceptual work, the article focuses on how TOMAT enacts the (eco)feminist concept of “interdependency” and challenges the dominant relation to land as property, replacing it through a relation of belonging.
