Urban oases and spatial injustices: Community gardens in the Cape Flats through a Lefebvrian lens

Urban Farm DB summary

This study examines how community gardens in Cape Town's marginalised Cape Flats area enact spatial justice through everyday practices, drawing on Henri Lefebvre's social production of space and its spatial triad -- perceived, conceived and lived space. Based on semi-structured interviews with representatives of 34 community gardens and state actors, supplemented by documentary analysis of planning and policy frameworks, it finds that gardeners physically transform neglected land into perceived spaces of cultivation despite insecure tenure and limited infrastructure (water access, soil quality), negotiate and subvert top-down planning by repurposing school grounds and municipal reserves as conceived space, and sustain memory and identity as lived space through crops, seed exchanges and collective action -- while persistent challenges of tenure precarity, resource scarcity and competing land-use pressures threaten each garden's longevity.