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where close relations (strong ties) can develop and prejudices may be re-considered. These sites of frequent and sometimes close exchange between a collective’s members may change individual’s opinions of each other and provide opportunities to discuss matters of concern with citizens who are neither close friends nor relatives.

The next and final micro-study is a pilot study of a community garden in Paris – Agrocité – a place I would describe as a less articulated, stronger collective space. Socially, the collective is primarily defined by strong ties amongst its members. I assessed Agrocité as more private than public, and thus rejected it as one of my main study sites. However, it showed inter-esting aspects on collective life and organisation, qualifying its inclusion in this thesis.

that support social interaction and the formation of collectives. Additional nonhuman actors are, however, noted and accounted for as embodying important aspects of social formation processes such as collectivisation and commoning.

The projects are located in Colombes, a suburban town northwest of Paris with about 84 000 inhabitants (2011). The town suffers from a fairly high unemployment rate (17% in 2012) but is also characterised by an active civic life and the housing of numerous local organisations (Petcou

& Petrescu 2014:258-259). The R-Urban project comprises three ‘pilot facilities’ in Colombes: Agrocité, Recyclab and Ecohab.. Together the three facilities form parts of an envisioned (closed circuit) system of ecological urbanism that includes the re-use of products, local organic food produc-tion, social enterprises, the recycling of waste, etc. aaa describe the R-Ur-ban project as “Strategies and tactics for participative utopias and resilient practices” (Petcou & Petrescu 2014:258), a project aiming for ecological sustainability parallel with increased social cohesion and inclusion. The projects can thus be depicted as an example of hands-on research – concur-rently trying to develop, analyse and assess socio-ecological strategies for a more resilient urban life.

The pilot facility Agrocité was launched in 2011 and is situated on a residual piece of land and is intended for participative urban farming, or ‘civic gardening’ as it is also termed by aaa (Petcou & Petrescu 2014).

The project organises local residents for its long-term development as well as for its daily maintenance. All members are offered a small allotment – a ‘parcelle’ – to farm according to their individual needs and desires.

All other resources at the site are shared collectively. However, everyday management of the project was recently delegated to a couple of funded supervisors from outside of Colombes; according to Doina Petrescu, this was a model that did not work out very well. She explained the failure with the supervisors’ lack of motivation due to shortage of local attachment (Petrescu, Doina. Personal conversation. Agrocité, 13 September 2014).

Due to political shifts in Colombes’ central administration, the project is under the threat of being closed down to make space for mixed retail and

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housing developments (Querrien, Anne. Personal conversation. Agrocité, 13 September 2014). The former mayor, Philippe Sarre, had supported the project and was an important proponent of the initial establishment of the R-Urban projects. The new political leadership has declared less interest in the R-Urban projects and the ideals it represents (Querrien, Anne. Person-al conversation, 2014).

Urban Farming as C ollectivisation

Agrocité works as an association of local inhabitants with varying am-bitions, interests and affections regarding the site and the project. Some members are deeply involved in the central management and the planning of common activities, while others just attend to their individual ‘parcelles’.

Since the site is not publicly accessible it can be considered a collective-ly-run community space. The space comprises different material elements and practice-oriented activities related to urban ecological agriculture. Do-ina Petrescu refers to Agrocité as a complex mixture of “an experimental micro-farm, community gardens, pedagogical and cultural spaces, and a series of experimental devices for compost heating, rainwater collection, solar energy production, aquaponic gardening, and phyto-remediation”

(Petcou & Petrescu 2014:259). Additionally, the project includes social enterprises, such as market days, lectures, a café and various workshops.

Accessibility and Territorialisations

The site is enclosed by the walls of adjacent buildings and where there are no walls a metal fence creates the borders. The space can be entered in two ways: through the community building and through gates in the fence (Photographs 28, 29) . All entrances face the street (rue Jules Michelet) and all of them require keys to open. A limited number of keys are dis-tributed among the members. According to the initiators and members, the reason for not making the space entirely public (i.e. restricting accessi-bility) is the fear of drug abuse and vandalism on the premises. Hence the

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space is visually present in the neighbourhood, but accessible only to those engaged in the association.

The Agrocité association forms a strong collective that is produced and upheld by local residents and various materialities, such as the gardens, the community building and other supporting facilities at the site. Fur-ther, and less apparent materialities, such as registers, protocols and other clerical details also help stabilise the collective. The socio-material ties are multiplied and reinforced through non-material actants such as everyday practices and organised social events. A smaller group of people constitutes a central cluster that organises and administers the space. Various temporal collectives are produced through daily activities that are linked to mainte-nance and farming or related to events like meetings, lectures, lunches and dinners, market days, workshops, etc.

Agrocité is subject to territorial controversies; the association currently appropriating the land is struggling against political opponents who are attempting to shut down the facility for ideological, political and financial reasons. As mentioned above, the area can be used for profit through hous-ing and retail developments. Territorial claims are expressed in different ways; the politicians claim the space through rhetoric and politics while the Agrocité association expresses its claims mainly through everyday prac-tices and the maintenance of its boundaries – composing a collective that is socially, materially and spatially defined. The tending of gardens and the administration of activities are forms of situated territorial productions, which together maintain the Agrocité association as a heterogeneous col-lective.

The space is to a large extent programmed in detail for various activ-ities and uses. The territorial productions are tightly linked to material figures and sustained through the distribution of agency. The water basins, parcelles, wooden walkways, the greenhouse tent, etc. are all dedicated to stipulated functions. Other materialities, such as the steps in front of the building, the garden porch and the spaces inside the building, are more open for varied activities and uses. Due to the relative privacy of the space, territorial intersections tend to occur inside the space rather than at the

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boundaries, where the territorial complexity is low. This state of territorial complexity might be different on market days or on other occasions when Agrocité is open for public access.

Parcelle-Care: Gardening as a Social Mediator

Families or individual citizens at Agrocité tend to a parcelle, a rectangular allotment of about 2-3m2, where they grow flowers, herbs, berries, vegeta-bles, etc. The tending of parcelles and of the common gardens is the pre-dominant everyday activity at the site. The farming generates opportuni-ties for social exchange, largely mediated by the material objects needed to care for the fragile plants and also, of course, by the very outcomes of the farming. Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu refer to this as ‘gardening agency’ (Petrescu 2013:265). Gardening, according to Petrescu, “started as a simple leisure activity and became a complex agency, involving other activities and networks: a ‘gardening agency’.” (Petrescu 2013:265).

Besides cultivating in their own parcelle, members of the community help each other to water and remove weeds when someone is away or tem-porarily unable to care for their allotment for some reason. The members I met at the site reported that they had made many new friends through the project and that they had gotten to know people they had never met before.

They share their individual knowledge about plants and methods on how to grow them. Social interactions and the successive formation of friendships seem to be facilitated by gardening and the activities connected to it. So-cial exchange is mediated by physical proximity, the sharing of knowledge, helping hands and by the sharing of flowers, herbs, berries and vegetables harvested in the gardens. These practices confirm a socio-material network

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that acknowledges all enrolled human actors as interdependent subjects of a collective.

A porch-like construction is situated centrally on the premises. Accord-ing to observations, furnishAccord-ing and traces of use, the platform frequently situates meetings, social exchange and spontaneous gatherings. The wooden structure divides the garden space and separates different uses and activities.

It also adds a supplementary spatial type to the site, thus including addition-al practices and increasing the potentiaddition-al for territoriaddition-al complexity.

An invited expert runs a workshop in how to manage effective compost-ing (Photographs 34, 35). Most of the Agrocité members that are present at the time follow the workshop with great interest. A film crew is in place to make a report for a French TV show. A freelance journalist is also present on this day, gathering material for a book on urban gardening and urban agri-culture. This signifies an important mission for Agrocité and the R-Urban projects – to create a network that stretches beyond the local neighbourhood.

Collective Space and Community

The community building (Photographs 36-39) occupies the northern end of the site and separates the garden from the street (rue Jules Michelet).

The building contains spaces that support various aspects of the farming and other community practices, such as meeting spaces, a kitchen, an ex-hibition room and walls displaying internal information. The spaces are used for everyday activities and various events such as lectures, lunches, a café, local political meetings, workshops, etc. The Agrocité building is also a symbolic artefact, forming a representative backdrop to the garden space and contributing an emblematic ambiance. Spatially and materially the building signals a raw, organic architecture – temporal and resilient at the same time. Some members of the collective say that they perceive the

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building as signifying key notions of ecology, openness and community (Personal conversations with Agrocité members at the site, 13 September 2014).

Agrocité is a collective space that is constantly negotiated amongst its members, initiators and by political representatives (and probably by cit-izens from the local community). The negotiations also involve various materialities which mediate exchanges and act as unifying strongholds for individuals or groups. The Agrocité space offers multiple materialities that afford the gathering of humans and composition of collectives, such as the individual parcelles, the community building, the greenhouse, the shared gardens, the porch and all the tools required to care for the plants and animals (bees and chickens).

‘Common’ – or collective space as I would label it, – indicates a shared resource as well as a shared responsibility, which separates it from clear-cut public space. These kinds of collectives are thus based more on use than on ownership. aaa regards Agrocité as a common in the sense that it is a

“common pool of resources […] that no one [can] own but everyone [can]

use” (Petrescu 2013:272). But using my terminology, I would prefer to label Agrocité a ‘collective space’; although it is a shared pool of resources, it is also owned by the municipality, governed by aaa (and the community association), and it is not open for everyone to use on the same terms. The stability of stronger collectives such as Agrocité is also dependent on local political decisions as well as the endurance of the organising cluster of initiators and members. Since the municipality owns the property in this case, the Agrocité association has no legal right to stay if the politicians decide in favour of other uses for the real estate. Accordingly, the survival of the Agrocité project is ultimately reliant on political decisions and mu-nicipal policies.

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Agrocité (as well as the boules space in Barcelona) signifies the latent instability of strong collectives characterised by ‘network stabilisation’

(Law 2002); the composition of key actors and activities is typically sen-sitive to changes. Agency is distributed among a few and specific actors (relative to weaker collectives) that are organised in rather fixed relations.

The dominance of strong ties between the member actors who constitute the collective allows for comprehensive social exchange and internal ne-gotiations – qualities that Amin (2002:959) indicates as characteristic for

‘micropublics’ and ‘cultural destabilization’. However, the need for a sta-ble set of actors, activities and material arrangements makes the collective sensitive to modifications. If key actors (or activities) disappear or break, the whole collective formation risks disintegration and, ultimately, decom-position. Since the two strong collectives (Agrocité and Barcelona boules) are closed for alternative uses and non-member visitors, they are less open for territorial complexity than more fluid spaces, such as Place Trocadero and the market spaces in Paris and Venice’s Burano, depicted above. The potentials for more effective interpersonal relations could be said to come with a price – less possibilities for strangers to meet, interact and possibly engage in temporary clusterings on common grounds. Agrocité and other strong collectives, such as the boules collective in Barcelona, can become socially preserving and effectively a hindrance for public social exchange and the empowerment of citizens, particularly in local situations. Mem-bers of strong collectives may become protective and focused on internal matters while citizens outside are kept outside, with no admittance to the

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collective space. Hence, there are obvious risks for controversies and con-flicts between public and collective concerns.

A worrying aspect of seemingly non-hierarchical and self-governed col-lective projects like Agrocité (and the boules court in Barcelona) is the risk of gradual colonisation and that influential individuals or groups ‘hijack’

the project. Theoretically, Agrocité is imagined and planned as a collec-tively-managed project (Petcou & Petrescu 2014) and is open for changes initiated by the collective members. The project site is closed off from the adjacent public space, and accessibility is restricted. Access is reserved for members with keys. Even if the intention was to establish a democratic space with a collective leadership, the outcome is rather ambiguous re-garding this aspect. The project site is supervised by individuals or selected groups, some of them recruited from outside of Colombes. In the case of Agrocité, this policy didn’t work out very well. According to Doina Petres-cu, this unsuccessful leadership was due to a lack of emotional connection to the area (conversation with Doina Petrescu at the site). The challenge of establishing a self-managed organisation that evolves organically and is based on solidarities and collective decision-making (Petcou & Petrescu 2014:267) seems to be a complicated mission.

Petcou and Petrescu argue that “R-Urban proposes new collective prac-tices” aimed at “reinventing proximity relationships based on solidarities”

(Petcou & Petrescu 2014:267). It is an ideal and partly utopian project that challenges general notions of privacy and individuality. The radical ideo-logical note may sift out a selection of people, who are driven by specific political objectives, such as the “right to produce sustainability” (Petcou

& Petrescu 2014:269) and exclude those who don’t fit that template. The initiators argue that Agrocité defies a community of sameness. They see the R-Urban projects as sites where multiplicity is welcomed and created anew with each event. There are, however, reasons to question this statement be-cause of the intrinsic ideological bias affecting the recruitment of members mentioned above. The question of management can also be problematised since the absence of democratic institutions leaves no guarantee for an uncompromised leadership and no given chain of responsibility.

Hills, Gates, Keys and Guards

Inspired by experiences and notions from Agrocité and the other mi-cro-studies, the following section aims to conceptualise observed phenom-ena from a power perspective. I will use four features that could be labelled actants in their principal capacity to represent different place-related forces and affect the nature of social and socio-material power relations in a de-fined spatial setting. These for features are hills, gates, keys and guards.

A hill is a strategic territorial actant and a metaphor for a place, an activity or an object from which control can be exercised and power over the collective space can be executed. The saying ‘to take a hill’ can mean capturing an important actant, for example with regard to practices that are permitted in a defined space (or in a collective). Spaces with a singular hill are particularly sensitive to being occupied or territorially controlled by an individual or a group. Spaces with several hills are open for multiple territorial productions and thus, theoretically, more dynamic with regard to territorial complexity. A typical example can be a public space that offers only one artefact for sitting; such a space easily becomes dominated by an individual or a group that takes control over this artefact. The hill becomes active in the power discussion when it is taken or when there is controver-sy concerning who rules the hill. The hill is nothing exceptional in itself;

un-taken, it is simply a hill like any other: a bench, a sound system, a flight of steps, a platform, etc.

A gate denotes a material or virtual entrance to a space. Control of the gate may entail the power to select human (and sometimes material) actors to be included in, or excluded from, the collective. The gate can be seen as a territorial borderland, a filter through which some actors pass and some don’t. Some collectives even have a gatekeeper, a human or a technology that controls who enters and leaves the collective space.

A key can clearly be an item that opens or locks a gate, but it may also may depict a symbolic device, a virtual key that unlocks the collective space in other ways; a personal artefact or feature necessary for becoming a fully accepted member of the collective and user of the space. An example of such a key could be a certain piece of sporting equipment, like a skate-board or kick-bike that is needed to enter a skate facility. The key can also be signified by a skill, a behaviour, a dress code, an ethnicity, etc.

The individual or group that controls a collective space can distribute regulatory power to guards that protect the space and prevent trespassing, keep out unwanted visitors, etc. Guarding activities can also be delegated to nonhumans and passive forms of surveillance, such as (surveillance) cameras, signs, public eyes, neighbouring windows, fences and walls, rules and regulations, etc. Guarding activity can also be delegated to architectur-al (materiarchitectur-al) design that excludes specific citizens and uses through form.

Everyday examples of excluding design can be benches designed to make laying down impossible, different manipulations of urban artefacts that prevent skateboarding, fragments of glass and metal pins on copings and ledgers to prevent climbing or sitting, etc.; i.e. a form of design for nega-tive affordances. Additional measures are taken to prevent non-consumers from loitering in urban commercial districts, such as a shortage of places

to rest except for at cafés and restaurants, where sitting down requires pay-ment.

These four actants are tentative and directly related to an analysis of the collective spaces in the micro-studies above. Although I don’t make any further use of these actants, I have chosen to include this section as a preface to the concepts framed later in the thesis. The conceptualisations developed from the main field study sites in the thesis will focus predom-inantly on the composition of clusters and weaker collectives in public domains

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METHODOLOGIES