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Community Gardens and Repair Cafés as Political Counter-Movements? Assessing New Urban Practices from the Perspective of New Social Movement Theory

Green Politics
Political Participation
Social Movements
Identity
Michael Deflorian
Vienna University of Economics and Business – WU Wien
Michael Deflorian
Vienna University of Economics and Business – WU Wien

Abstract

Bottom-up initiatives such as community gardens, cloth-swapping parties and repair cafés have received an increasing interest within sustainability debates, most notably as the cultural precursors of a post-growth society. In the Social Sciences, too, these new urban practices have been interpreted with an optimistic outlook on socio-ecological transformation. They are supposed to embody the critique against consumer capitalism and an in-effective political system, but also to prefigure a very different society through new local institutions of economic production, decision-making and environmental relations. Due to this potential, new urban practices have been labelled as “everyday environmentalism”. Surprisingly, these conceptualizations have not drawn on the existing body of knowledge about the emergence of “early” environmentalism: new social movement theory (NSMT). Authors such as Touraine, Melucci or Habermas have characterized post-materialist movements as reactions to structural social change, a feature that can also be attributed to recent forms of food-sharing or cloth-upcycling. The goal of this paper will be to interpret new urban practices on the basis of NSMT and scrutinize whether they can be regarded as political counter-movements. Moreover, I will try to overcome the limitations of NSMT by resituating one of its central claims, the rise of identity politics, within the late-modern society of today. By doing so, I will shed light on the complex character of new urban practices given the high-impact lifestyles of many practitioners. According to NSMT, the goal of new social movements was to defend individual autonomy against the rationalizing logic of the state and the commodification of social life. As a counter-strategy, new social movements turned to the everyday: first, by politicizing issues that used to be part of the private domain and second, by developing alternative social practices in order to subvert the established order of the capitalist state. Especially this last element seems to resurface within food cooperatives and sewing workshops: they take place outside the market system and figure a DIY-culture that is more sustainable and democratic than the existing way of living. At the same time, however, NSMT reaches clear limits when dealing with other aspects of new urban practices. The critical-creative milieus, who are associated with everyday environmentalism, have one of the highest resource and energy use in society, according to empirical studies. This could be interpreted as yet another structural change that has happened in late-modern societies: individuals have become increasingly open (instead of opposed) to consumption as a source of self-realization. At the same time, an overly consumptive lifestyle is at odds with identities that circulate around values of environmental stability or global solidarity. The engagement in new urban practices, in return, could allow individuals to re-construct and experience these precarious identities in a flexible, efficient and effective manner – leaving the potential for political transcendence uncertain, however.