Same, Same but Different? The ‘Right’ Kind of Gardening and the Negotiation of Neoliberal Urban Governance in the Post-socialist City

This chapter analyses the ways in which different urban gardening forms relate to neoliberalisation processes in the post-socialist city. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2020 including on-site observation and in-depth interviews with gardeners, activists and city officials in several Estonian cities, it seeks to understand the unequal treatment of community gardens and dacha allotment gardens. Despite equally fostering urban sustainability, dacha gardens are often negatively associated with a (post)socialist ‘survival strategy of the poor’ while community gardens are embraced for their transformative potential with regard to health, active citizenship, social cohesion, and environmental learning. Taking a critical approach to neoliberal urban governance, the study explores the adherence and/or resistance of both gardening forms to post-socialist urban neoliberalisation dynamics on three analytical levels: socio-spatial discourses, spatial materialities and cultivated subjectivities. As a result, the chapter conveys that dacha gardens rather ‘quietly’ maintain the system, while community gardens contribute to its thriving process, by being visible, actively engaging with, and being supported by, the neoliberal urban governance. This preferential treatment, however, comes at a price of higher vulnerability to co-optation attempts and neoliberal control of space, to which dacha gardens have hitherto resisted.