Searching for the plot: narrative self-making and urban agriculture during the economic crisis in Slovenia

Urban Farm DB summary

An ethnographic study in Ljubljana, Slovenia, carried out between summer 2014 and autumn 2015: informal conversations with 57 growers across 13 sites, 25 semi-structured life-history interviews, and participant observation on the researcher's own rented plot. Plot-taking surged during the post-2009 debt crisis (an 8% economic contraction; unemployment rising from 7% to 13% by 2013), and one gardening association had roughly 350 member households by 2015, over 40% of whom joined after 2010. The author argues, however, that this surge did not work as household food or income provisioning. Newcomers who took up plots for economic reasons frequently abandoned them within a year; those who did grow food continued to rely on market produce; and people at the very bottom of the economic scale had neither the skills, tools nor time to feed themselves from a plot. Growers were strongly opposed to selling surpluses and gave them away instead. The paper concludes that urban gardening functioned as a narrative practice repairing biographical rupture after unemployment or retirement, not as an informal economy.