Building bridges between urban food activism and quiet Food Self-Provisioning practices: lessons from transdisciplinary participatory action research interventions in Eastern Estonia

This empirical contribution examines the potential of building bridges between urban community gardening and food activists (UFA) and the rather overlooked Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) practitioners at Eastern Estonian dachas – a Russian term for a plot of land with a seasonal allotment house used primarily for food production. The invisibility of FSP practices, and the lack of communication between UFA and FSP practitioners, has been identified as an important gap by recent literature on urban gardens’ sustainability potential. Using a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, we organised a series of transdisciplinary events (Gardeners’ Day 2022, 2023) at the Sputnik dacha garden association in Eastern Estonia. We conceptualized these events as PAR interventions with a four-fold objective: countering polarization, cultivating ‘unlikely alliances’, re-powering local knowledge and enhancing mutual exchange. This contribution summarizes lessons drawn from the events and PAR process, completed with follow-up interviews, feedback surveys, and critical collaborative analysis. Our results demonstrate the challenges and limitations but also the formative potential of such interventions to counter societal polarization and build collaborative capacity for sustainability. We conclude that ‘neutral’ common denominators such as FSP have a specific potential for building ‘shared politics of space’ in a politically sensitive context like that of Eastern Estonia.